Nottingham University Puts Trigger Warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – Because They Contain “Expressions of Christian Faith”

The greatest narrative poem in the English language. On a par with Homer or Virgil. It's actually a very irreverent poem

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the 14th Century masterpiece which tell the stories of a host of characters on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, has been given a trigger warning by Nottingham University because they contained “expressions of Christian faith”. The Mail has more.

Nottingham University has now been accused of “demeaning education” for warning students about the religious elements of Chaucer’s stories – saying that anyone studying one of the most famous works in English literature would hardly have to have the Christian references pointed out.

The Mail on Sunday has obtained details of the notice issued to students studying a module called ‘Chaucer and His Contemporaries’ under Freedom of Information laws. It alerts them to incidences of violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith in the works of Chaucer and fellow medieval writers William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve.

The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400, is a collection of stories about characters on a pilgrimage from London to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.

They include the promiscuous Wife of Bath, the drunken miller and the thieving reeve, who delight and shock each other with stories containing explicit references to rape, lust and even anti-Semitism.

However, the university’s ­ warning makes no reference to the anti-Semitism or sexually explicit themes.

Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, said: “Warning students of Chaucer about Christian expressions of faith is weird. Since all characters in the stories are immersed in a Christian experience there is bound to be a lot of expressions of faith. The problem is not would-be student readers of Chaucer but virtue-signalling, ignorant academics.”

Historian Jeremy Black added: “Presumably, this Nottingham nonsense is a product of the need to validate courses in accordance with tick-box criteria. It is simultaneously sad, funny and a demeaning of education.”

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/13/nottingham-university-puts-trigger-warning-on-geoffrey-chaucers-canterbury-tales-because-they-contain-expressions-of-christian-faith/

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Billionaires back a new ‘anti-woke’ university

Billionaires frustrated with elite colleges are banding behind a fledgling school in Texas that boasts 92 students.

Trader Jeff Yass, real-estate developer Harlan Crow and investor Len Blavatnik are among the high-profile people donating to the University of Austin, or UATX. The new school has raised roughly (AU$297 million) $200 million so far -- including (AU$52 million) $35 million from Yass -- a huge sum for a tiny school without any alumni to tap.

Crow, a major GOP donor, was an early backer. “Much of higher ed today seems to want to reject Western accomplishments and the accomplishments of Western civilizations in their entirety,” he said. “Many people think that’s a bad idea.” Crow said he expects UATX to encourage ideological diversity.

Crow and his wife, Kathy, have hosted several events for the school at their Dallas home and let the school use space in an office park he owns for its summer program, provocatively called Forbidden Courses. Crow has been a controversial benefactor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He has said he has never discussed pending cases with Thomas.

Frustration with the state of debate and levels of unrest at prestigious universities has spurred some of the richest Americans to flex their financial muscle.

Billionaires like Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman led campaigns to oust Ivy League presidents they viewed as being too soft on antisemitism on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza. Many wealthy donors believe elite colleges are overwhelmingly progressive -- and are attracted to the idea of an alternative school that says it encourages meritocratic achievement and myriad viewpoints.

Enter UATX, which welcomed its initial class of first-years last month in a former department store near the Texas Capitol. The school says it is nonpartisan and refers to its mission as the “fearless pursuit of truth.” Its foundational curriculum marries classical texts -- students were given a copy of Homer’s Odyssey upon enrollment -- with an emphasis on entrepreneurship.

A video posted to the school’s YouTube page contrasts scenes of pro-Palestinian protests and encampments at other schools with a civil UATX seminar. The video ends with the message, “They burn, we build.” Officials talk about UATX in lofty terms. Some cite the University of Chicago as an aspirational role model.

President Pano Kanelos called students and faculty “pioneers” and “heroes” in his convocation address. “What is truly historic is that which sends the trajectory of history, and lives lived within the stream of history, shooting in a direction other than that towards which they were tending,” Kanelos said.

The effort to launch the school was announced in fall 2021. Founders include venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a conservative who is donating to Donald Trump, and journalist Bari Weiss, who has described her news startup, the Free Press, as a check to mainstream media’s liberal orthodoxy.

Yass, who has long pushed for school choice and is UATX’s biggest donor, said in a statement, “Higher education needs competition. It is time for philanthropists to start new colleges in keeping with the way American learning institutions were founded.” PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has long known Lonsdale and has separately been paying students to skip college, made a small gift. Former energy trader John Arnold and his wife, Laura, who are advocates of criminal-justice reform and open debate on campus, are major donors. Alex Magaro, co-president of investment firm Meritage Group, gave $10 million last month.

The campus turmoil over the war in Gaza accelerated fundraising, school administrators said, including from those who felt universities selectively applied free-speech principles. Blavatnik, who is Jewish, gave $1 million through his family foundation in the days after Hamas attacked Israel. He later paused his giving to Harvard University, his alma mater.

Daniel Lubetzky, founder of snack-bar maker Kind Snacks and a son of a Holocaust survivor, donated early on and continued to give after the attacks. He became increasingly alarmed at the rise of ” us vs. them” thinking on campuses. Active discussions are ongoing with others, including Ackman, who was harshly critical of elite colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and their handling of antisemitism on campus.

“It took what happened in the wake of Oct. 7 on the major campuses to convince Wall Street, to convince people in Silicon Valley, that there really was a problem” with higher education, said historian Niall Ferguson, another school founder.

A larger fundraising campaign is expected to start in January. Whether prospective students find UATX as attractive as donors remains to be seen. UATX currently lacks accreditation and can receive it only after its first class graduates. As a way to offset the risk students are taking, the first class of students is receiving full-tuition scholarships worth about $130,000. More than 40% of the students in the class hail from Texas and a third are female.

Executives from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Boring Company are helping to develop the school’s engineering curriculum. Lonsdale, the school’s board chair, is gifting a few acres of land outside Austin, adjacent to SpaceX and Boring, for a science and technology center. UATX is also searching for a main campus.

While UATX says it isn’t an explicitly political school, some of its most prominent backers are big donors to Republican candidates and causes, including Yass and Crow. Yass co-founded trading giant Susquehanna International Group, which has a big stake in TikTok.

Kanelos, the University of Austin’s president, said the school’s top 10 donors vary in political ideology but that, “Everyone who gives to us is a critic of higher education.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/billionaires-back-a-new-antiwoke-university/news-story/4f4ed3d4fd7a85b8773f628c916504a0

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The British Left drifts Right

In the once vibrant landscape of British politics, the Labour Party stood as a defiant force of opposition – loud, principled, and occasionally even radical. Enter Keir Starmer, the man who promised to rescue Labour from the clutches of ‘Corbynceps’ (the ideological fungus that some believed had infected the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership). With impeccable suits and measured tones, Starmer vowed to restore order and respectability. A harmless reformer, right?

But like any good parasite, the danger lay in his quiet persistence.

First, Starmer neutralised the ideological immune system by purging the most vocal members of Labour’s left wing. It wasn’t long before the party started behaving differently. The infection took root when he announced that Labour was backing away from nationalising public utilities – policies once central to its DNA. Electricity, railways, water? Nah, too ‘1990s’. Like an infected insect abandoning its instincts, Labour now began parroting lines that wouldn’t be out of place at a Conservative Party conference: ‘We have to make tough decisions…’ (Because, apparently, billionaires are on the verge of poverty if we tax them fairly.)

Next came the retreat on welfare spending. Universal Credit? Reforms to benefit the poorest? Starmer’s Labour would ‘look at’ these things but won’t make any promises. The host, still clutching onto the hope that this is all for the greater good, began climbing higher and higher under the influence of its new master, ready to eject policies that are more palatable to the center-right media than the voters who once believed in radical change.

Starmer’s crowning infection is a U-turn on climate pledges. The party that once promised to spearhead a Green New Deal is now backing away from Net Zero targets and clean energy investment. Labour is scaling back plans for a greener economy, all while the planet burns. In true Cordyceps fashion, Starmer’s party is marching toward its doom, happily parroting platitudes about ‘balancing priorities’ while the environment takes a back seat. We wouldn’t want to upset the fossil fuel lobby, now would we?

And in perhaps the boldest betrayal, Starmer announced tougher immigration controls, further infecting the very soul of Labour with rhetoric once reserved for the likes of Nigel Farage. ‘Tough on crime, tough on immigration, and tougher on anyone who thought socialism was still in the room!’ Labour, by this point, is no longer recognisable, now fully under the control of the Starmer Fungus, nodding along as if austerity cuts and limited housing plans were exactly what the people had asked for.

Then there’s Brexit, or rather, the absence of any meaningful stance on it. You’d think the party that once championed Europe might say something about reversing the damage. But no, Starmer has convinced the host to forget its pro-European roots entirely. Like an insect zombified by Cordyceps, Labour now stumbles along, muttering, ‘We need to move on…’ while blindly avoiding any discussion of rejoining the EU or repairing our international standing.

Just when you thought Starmer’s parasitic takeover was complete, another curious incident emerged: the Chagos Islands controversy. In a move that even some of his own supporters might find bewildering, Starmer quietly backed the decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a questionable choice amid uncertain geopolitical times. The islands, once a strategic military base for the UK and the US, are being surrendered like a trinket in a pawn shop, with little regard for their significance in the Indian Ocean as a key point of influence between East and West. Starmer’s Labour, keen to avoid any friction, accepted this development with a shrug, sacrificing national security for the sake of international optics.

As if to distract from this grand misstep, Starmer dangled his ambitious vision for the nation: The Five Missions. Labour, now thoroughly hollowed out by its fungal overlord, eagerly embraced these as if they were bold new ideas. Starmer announced missions to grow the economy, fix the NHS, improve education, tackle crime, and address climate change. But in true parasitic style, these are empty promises – vague enough to sound inspiring but lacking any commitment to the radical reforms needed. ‘Grow the economy,’ Labour mumbles as it stumbles forward, protecting the wealthy instead of taxing them. ‘Fix the NHS,’ it chants, even as Starmer avoids discussing how it will be funded.

Public polling reflects this internal turmoil. Voters, once loyal to Labour’s cause, are increasingly disillusioned, with many expressing that they feel betrayed by Starmer’s shifts away from core party values. Some polls suggest that a growing number of traditional Labour supporters are contemplating alternatives, revealing just how far the party has drifted from its roots.

Tensions within Labour only add to the chaos. Discontent is brewing among the party’s left faction, who see Starmer as the embodiment of a hollowed-out, centrist machine. The voices of grassroots activists and former Corbyn supporters are growing louder, questioning whether the party can ever regain its revolutionary spirit or if it’s simply become a pale imitation of its former self.

And while the public stirs with frustration, the spectre of history looms large. Once, Labour was synonymous with the fight against injustice and colonialism, yet now, under Starmer’s rule, it seems more concerned with political survival than moral integrity. The ghosts of Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ and Margaret Thatcher’s reshaping of the Conservative Party haunt the current leadership, hinting at the perils of sacrificing principles for power.

But just when you thought the infection was complete, the final punchline arrives. In this madcap world of Labour under Starmer, one can only wonder: what’s next? Perhaps a radical pivot toward embracing the monarchy or a manifesto to build a luxury housing estate on the remnants of the NHS?

Labour, once the champion of public ownership, social justice, and geopolitical awareness, has now climbed to a platform indistinguishable from that of its once sworn enemies. The spores of center-right policy drift out into the world, infecting the broader political discourse, with Starmer as the grim puppet master smiling quietly in the background, promising a new dawn.

But when the dust settles, one must ask – what happens to the host when it has served its purpose? Does Starmer move on to infect the broader electorate next, convincing them that voting for Labour is a vote for change when, in fact, they’re simply climbing higher to a precipice of political sameness? The answer, like any parasitic infection, remains to be seen.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/keir-starmer-labours-cordyceps-fungus/

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Try a Little Honesty About Israel

Victor Davis Hanson

Both the Harris-Walz presidential ticket and now lame-duck President Joe Biden keep insisting that they are Israel’s best friend.

A snarly Biden recently bragged at a contentious press conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] should remember that.”

Yet the thin-skinned and triggered Biden’s prickliness poorly hid—or perhaps revealed—the truth: This current administration knows that it is responsible for the current explosion of the Middle East and the particular dilemmas of Israel.

Biden further revealed his blame-gaming of the Israeli government when asked another loaded question about purported Netanyahu election interference, saying, “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know.”

Election interference?

Biden apparently forgot who just flew Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into swing-state Pennsylvania, just as early and mail-in voting there began, to lobby for more aid even as he trashed candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance to a left-wing magazine.

Recently, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris refused to say whether the Netanyahu administration is even an ally of the United States.

Her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, could not state whether the Democratic ticket would approve of an Israeli response—by either targeting the Iranian nuclear bomb program or its oil fields and exporting facilities—to some 500 Iranian missiles and rockets that hit the Jewish state.

Another Bob Woodward racy and gossipy tell-all book just appeared. It alleges that Biden despised Netanyahu and has reportedly smeared him to aides: “That son of a b—-, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f–king guy!”

What are we to make of this Biden-Harris-Walz mess?

It is an election year and one of the closest races in modern memory. Biden and his would-be successors, Harris-Walz, know that support for Israel is a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and critical for Democratic unity.

Yet they feel they must also pander to anti-Israel, Muslim-American voters who may determine the Electoral College votes of critical swing-state Michigan.

Democratic politicos square that circle by claiming they support Israel—despite damning the conservative Netanyahu. That way they seek to blame Netanyahu for alienating Arab and Muslim-American voters, while they do not alienate left-wing Jewish and pro-Israeli Democrats.

For all the invective, a demonized Netanyahu is now regaining public support in Israel. The Israeli public approves of his near-destruction of Hamas, the ongoing brilliant Israeli emasculation of Hezbollah, and Israel’s revelations that the once widely feared terrorist regime in Iran may in fact well prove to be a paper tiger.

Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan admitted just eight days before the Oct. 7 massacres that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

His boast was an admission that Biden and Harris had inherited from the prior Trump administration a stable Middle East.

So, what blew up Sullivan’s quietude?

Certainly not Netanyahu or Israel in general.

It was the terrorists of Hamas who surprise-attacked and killed 1,200 Israeli civilians during peace and a Jewish holiday.

Their slaughtering, torturing, raping, and hostage-taking revealed a level of precivilization barbarism rarely seen in the modern era.

Israel was simultaneously targeted by rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah that would eventually number more than 20,000.

It did not respond to the bloodbath with a full-scale invasion of Gaza until Oct. 27, some three weeks after the slaughtering.

During that interim, for most of the Muslim world and both U.S. Muslim communities and on American campuses, there was rejoicing at the news of slaughtered Jews.

For over three years, the Biden administration had signaled Israel’s enemies that it no longer acted like a close ally of the past.

After it all, Biden-Harris lifted sanctions on a hostile Iran, giving it $100 billion in oil windfalls. It begged Iran to reenter the disastrous Iran deal. It abandoned the Abraham Accords. It lifted the terrorist designation from the terrorist Houthis. It restored fungible aid to the Hamas tunnel builders. It gave new aid to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.

Israel’s enemies got the Biden message: Attack the Jewish state, and perhaps Americans for the first time in a half-century may not really mind that much.

And so they did, in unison.

Rather than admitting their own role in igniting the Middle East, Biden and Harris now blame the victims of their own incendiary foreign policy.

The final irony?

Israel has concluded that Biden-Harris foolhardiness can be toxic and endanger its very survival—and so, will not agree to its own suicide.

Instead, Israel seeks to finish a multifaceted war it did not seek. And one of whose beneficiaries from Israeli blood and treasure will be the U.S. itself, given Israel is now systematically weakening America’s own existential enemies.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/11/try-little-honesty-about-israel-2/

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My main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

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

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

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

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

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Has Britain really entered its ‘first atheist age’?

Some sociology academics have, after a three-year research project called ‘Exploring Atheism’, unveiled a startling discovery: there are a lot of people in Britain who don’t believe in God. I know, it’s quite a gut-punch.

They do not quite claim to have found that most Britons are atheists. But they do claim that there are now more atheists than religious believers. By collating various social attitudes surveys from 2008 to 2018 they found a strong upward trend in those saying that they did not believe in God, from 35 per cent to 43 per cent. During this time, believers in God dropped from 42 per cent to 37 per cent. This has led the academics to claim that Britain has now entered its ‘first atheist age’.

Many of us are complacent, assuming that religion will always be there in our culture as an option

It’s an inflated claim. For one thing, the Census of England and Wales of 2021 found that 37 per cent said that they have no religion, which suggests that the majority have some sort of religious allegiance. Presenting their findings on 2 October, the authors of the report said this includes allegiance that is more cultural than sincere.

It is doubtless true-ish that believers in God are now a minority. I say ‘true-ish’ because these things are so vague. My hunch is that there is a large sector, maybe even about half of the population, who are hard to pin down. If pressed, they probably say that they don’t believe in God, and are not religious, but they have respect for religion, and sometimes participate, and are wary of the sort of atheism that is hostile to it.

As these academics are doubtless privately aware, it’s pretty meaningless to say that Britain has embarked upon an ‘atheist age’, for the meaning of ‘atheism’ is unclear. The strong atheism of Richard Dawkins and co. is a particular modern ideology, a belief that rational humanism can save us. And, rather paradoxically, its hostility to religion is shaped by Protestant reformist zeal: it is a secular version of it. This creed is obviously a minority thing: it had a sort of comeback twenty years ago, in response to 9/11, but it lacks mass appeal.

As well as totting up the numbers, the Exploring Atheism research project attempts to tackle the question of why some of us believe, and others don’t. With impressive honesty, it admits that it is largely impossible to say. It discounts certain received ideas, for example that believers are less intelligent, less well off, less emotionally stable, more fearful of death. What it does say is that the only sure factor is parental influence. Seeing your parents participating in religion makes it more likely that you will go in that direction. And hearing your parents mock or disparage religion makes it likely that you’ll follow suit. Obvious enough, but still worth reflecting on.

It’s a healthy reminder to those of us who are religious, or semi-religious. If one doesn’t bother exposing one’s children to religion, they are unlikely ever to know of its dark depths and difficult delights. Letting them decide for themselves means trusting them to the shallow drift of the culture. Too many of us are complacent, assuming that religion will always be there in our culture as an option. We should take responsibility for its continued existence, which takes real cultural effort. In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, in his novel Here I Am: ‘You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.’

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/has-britain-really-entered-its-first-atheist-age/

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Canada’s DEI doctors

Canada, like other countries, has had a long-standing problem with doctor shortages. Rural and northern communities struggle to find doctors who want to stay in remote regions after their mandatory medical placements have ended. Finding a family doctor or paediatrician has become a massive struggle, too. ‘Fewer medical students [are] choosing to specialise in family medicine,’ the Canadian Medical Association noted in March, with ‘younger physicians not wanting to take over traditional clinical practices.’

‘It is expected that 25 per cent of students will be admitted through the General Admissions Stream and 75 per cent collectively through the Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving admissions pathways’

That’s why there was a great deal of excitement when Toronto Metropolitan University was recently granted preliminary accreditation for a four-year MD programme. With this important approval from the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools, TMU’s September announcement stated, ‘the School of Medicine can now begin recruiting prospective students for its first cohort in September 2025.’ It will become Canada’s 18th accredited medical school.

The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, of the Progressive Conservative party, posted on Twitter on 27 September: ‘I’m thrilled to see that TMU’s medical school has officially been accredited.’ ‘This final hurdle paves the way for the first new medical school in the Greater Toronto Area in over 175 years, with new doctors set to graduate by spring 2026 to help connect more people to care in Ontario.’

Ford’s initial reaction was understandable. But I wonder if his enthusiasm became more tempered when it was revealed that Canada’s newest medical school will be a sanctuary for left-wing, backward-thinking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.

Looking more closely at TMU’s announcement, some red flags appear immediately.

‘The four-year MD curriculum is rooted in community-driven care and cultural respect and safety, with equity, diversity and inclusion, decolonisation and Reconciliation woven throughout,’ one paragraph outlined. ‘Through active, inquiry-based learning, the school will help train innovative, well-rounded physicians who are responsive to societal and community needs.’

What do things like ‘decolonisation and Reconciliation’ have to do with becoming a doctor, you might reasonably ask?

Things get worse though when it comes to the admissions criteria for the new school. According to TMU, ‘the admissions process will also purposefully admit equity-deserving students and identify applicants interested in primary care practice, particularly in medically underserved areas.’

Hold on. A medical school is actually acknowledging that it is putting in place a discriminatory acceptance policy – and not even being coy about it? Yes, indeed. The announcement notes there will be ‘three dedicated admissions pathways in addition to the General Admissions Stream.’ The pathways will be for ‘Indigenous Admissions,’ ‘Black Admissions’ and ‘Equity-Deserving Admissions.’

If this wasn’t bad enough, here comes the clincher.

TMU’s School of Medicine has revealed its selection process for the MD programme on its website. ‘For the 2025 admissions cycle, a total of 94 seats are available,’ the university notes. ‘It is expected that 25 per cent of students will be admitted through the General Admissions Stream and 75 per cent collectively through the Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving admissions pathways.’

That’s right. Three-quarters of the places in Canada’s newest medical school will be determined by TMU’s strict DEI standards. Grades, extracurricular activities, volunteering, work experience, and other assessments won’t be the main criteria for deciding who becomes a practising doctor. TMU even make clear that they are willing to relax academic standards for DEI candidates, saying that:

‘In exceptional circumstances, applicants in the three admissions pathways (Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving) with a GPA below the minimum requirement of 3.3 may have their application considered for admission by the relevant pathway subcommittee.’

This is a perfect example of reverse discrimination – the kind which was struck down in the US by the Supreme Court last year. TMU’s administration have clearly chosen against accepting the best and brightest medical school applicants from all walks of life. They probably didn’t even think about the discriminatory nature of their selection process and DEI policies.

They should have, however. While it’s not illegal in Canada to do something like this, it’s definitely unwise. TMU’s decision reeks of the racism we’ve seen in the past – and is the kind of policy that repels most ordinary people.

What can be done? For starters, Canadians and political leaders like Ford should speak out against TMU’s intolerant selection policy. It would also be wise for the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools to pull back its preliminary accreditation for TMU’s School of Medicine until it ensures that all student applicants will be treated in a fair, equal and merit-based fashion. If it doesn’t, it’s inevitable that confidence in the medical profession will be shaken.

There’s an old joke which highlights society’s concerns about academic standards and medicine: ‘What do you call someone who finishes last in medical school? Doctor.’ I fear that joke will become very relevant again if TMU moves ahead with this irresponsible strategy for its new medical school.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/canadas-dei-doctors/

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Navigating disastrous DEI

So impressed with the Samoans’ numerous canoes and their great skills in handling them, French Admiral Louis de Bougainville named their homeland in 1768 the Navigator Islands.

256 years later, on a Saturday afternoon earlier this month, my Samoan friends were on the south coast beach having a dress rehearsal barbecue for the imminent visit by King Charles, Queen Camilla, and all the heads of the Commonwealth for the CHOGM meeting.

Like most Samoans, my friends have more than a passing knowledge of things maritime and they observed this high-sided ship, very close to the ‘lee’ shore with a strong breeze, slowly moving as is required for hydrographic duties. A ‘lee’ shore is where the wind is blowing the ship towards the shore. Experienced sailors, from small yachts to big ships, know that you stay well clear of a lee shore. Boating 1.0.1!

In my four years training at sea, navigation and seamanship were two key elements of ship safety and the particular ship that I was on, a passenger-cargo ship trading between Australia and the South Pacific, we had to keep two miles off the land, rocks, or small outcrops. If it was a ‘lee shore’, the captain would make it three miles. In case there was a power failure, this would give the engineers time to restart the engine as we had backup fuel pumps, air starts, cooling systems etc.

Avalanched with calls from friends and media to give commentary on this New Zealand ship grounding, I kept my opinion to myself until I found out the facts. Brace yourselves readers.

Did it run aground because of a female skipper? My answer is no, and being from a merchant navy background I can tell you that as far back as the 60s, the Russians had the first female officers and female captains on many of their cargo and passenger ships. Mind you, they were more Georgian than gorgeous, but they were highly competent and were, appointed on merit, as are all merchant navy captains, male or female. My friend Inger Thorhauge, who is Captain of Cunard’s latest liner Queen Anne, started her seagoing career at 16, as I did, and she achieved this prestigious position purely on merit, experience, and current Certificates of Competence.

In just over seven years at sea, off watch, I could sleep well knowing that other watchkeepers were experienced and capable of navigating in busy waterways, reduced visibility or close quarters. The Master would mostly be on the bridge during these times.

My experience with Naval ships was winning the National Service lottery where I could get shot at in Vietnam or go on board Royal Australian Navy (RAN) ships as I was already a qualified navigator with five years of sea experience. I chose the RAN because it would get me the sea time necessary to sit my Masters foreign going certificate. The RAN was an eye opener and due to budget constraints and crew shortages, subsequently the ships actually seldom went to sea and crew experience and competence at that time was, in my opinion, very limited. Junior officers were not allowed any decision-making even on watch and I didn’t sleep well in the broom cupboard cabin I was sharing with three other guys down in the bowels of the HMAS Melbourne and the HMAS Supply when we were at sea. I recorded my experiences in Baird Maritime columns at the time, mostly to the disbelief of my merchant navy colleagues.

All of this leads me to ask, why was the New Zealand vessel skirting so close to an island with a lee shore under the watch of Captain Yvonne Grey? Boating 1.0.1, remember?

Was the ship suitable for the task? Having been involved in the design of hydrographic ships, to choose a second-hand ship with a 26m air draft (height of windage above the waterline) for slow steaming operations in windy conditions was not an optimal choice for the task, but typical of the defence procurement bungling bureaucratic process as highlighted frequently by Greg Sheridan of The Australian.

Would the combination of, in my opinion, an inexperienced Captain and a sub-optimal vessel be a recipe for a disaster? Yes! Now you have a clearer picture.

Another New Zealand commander crashed another Navy vessel earlier this year in Auckland to the tune of $220,000 in repairs.

Setting aside the cause of these accidents, which remain under investigation, the discussion of DEI within the Navy is a proud feature of their website which is why it is being discussed. It is a legacy possibly left over from former Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern who not only stuffed the New Zealand economy but was foisting such DEI policies into unsuspecting government bureaucracies such as the Navy. DEI policies for onshore establishments may be unpleasant but are workable, however, bosses there won’t put your life at risk. At sea, it is an entirely different matter, and such policies should be unacceptable and certainly not boasted about.

DEI policies, proudly printed on recruitment sites, would be a deterrent to any potential navy applicant, even female ones, who know full well this imbalanced system could see an individual treated differently due to their gender, sexuality, or race.

Was the evacuation and sinking of a very expensive ship a ‘triumph’ as described by New Zealand’s Defence Minister and Navy Chief Judith Collins? What puerile nonsense from Collins in her weak response to a shameful incident!

On a happier note, a previous CEO of a South Pacific Island Ferry informed me several years ago he had been instructed by his government to take at least 50 per cent female trainees, in-line with DEI suggestions from matriarchal New Zealand.

‘Was it a success?’ I asked him.

‘It was a 100 per cent success,’ he responded.

‘How do you mean?’

‘All of them were pregnant within six months,’ he happily replied, ‘so we are back to normal, taking applicants on merit, male or female.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/navigating-disastrous-dei/

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Australia: The Christian vote swings against Labor

When planning for the next federal election, due by September 2025 with some pundits suggesting as early as March, Prime Minister Albanese (aka one-term Albo) cannot ignore the Christian vote, the majority of which is Catholic.

Approximately 44 per cent of Australians identify as Christian and, proven by the 2019 election when Scott Morrison was unexpectedly re-elected as Prime Minister, a significant number of such voters appear to be swayed by their religious beliefs.

Such was the impact of the Christian vote that the review commissioned by the ALP after its electoral defeat recommends the party do more to ensure its polices gain the support of faith-based voters, instead of alienating what is a key constituency.

The report concludes that in outer urban and regional electorates, especially in Queensland, ‘When all other variables are controlled for, it is estimated that identifying as Christian was associated with a swing against Labor.’

While inner-city electorates, now dominated by the Teals and Greens, champion Woke causes including Indigenous reconciliation, multiculturalism, gender diversity, and climate change – there are millions of voters who are more conservatively minded.

One only needs to look at the 60/40 vote against the Voice to Parliament to realise, as argued by the cultural critic Roger Scruton, that most people, unlike the cosmopolitan, inner-city elites, centre their lives on family, local community, and the need for social cohesion and stability.

It’s obvious that if Albanese and the Labor government are keen to attract the millions of Christian voters who will decide the electoral outcome in marginal seats across Australia, they are going about it the wrong way.

Based on existing policies, and what the government plans to do if re-elected, it’s clear the ALP government has turned its back on Christian and Catholic voters when it comes to issues like religious freedom and freedom of conscience as well as school funding.

The Albanese government’s failure to introduce its Religious Discrimination Bill to Parliament, even though the draft bill was made public in 2021, represents a serious threat to the millions of voters identifying as Christian.

Whereas current anti-discrimination legislation makes it illegal to unfairly discriminate against someone on the basis of age, sex, gender identity, race, and disability the same protection is not afforded to people of religious beliefs and faith.

While those of Jewish faith are facing a rising flood of antisemitism in Australia where they are vilified and attacked on a daily basis by those seeking Israel’s destruction, it’s also true, though less violent and less extreme, that Christians face hostility and prejudice in Australia.

Examples include Victoria’s legislation to fine and imprison priests and Christian parents for daring to counsel children about the dangers of gender transitioning. Tasmania’s Archbishop Porteous has also been punished for advocating church teachings. To this we add the ACT government’s compulsory acquisition of the Catholic-owned Calvary Hospital, public figures like Israel Folau and Margaret Court being attacked for their religious beliefs, and the head of Brisbane’s Citipointe Christian College being pressured to resign over the school’s enrolment policies.

In an increasingly extreme secular world where human rights activists and elected representatives of various left-wing political parties argue Christians must be banished from the public square, it’s obvious more must be done to protect religious freedom.

Currently, faith-based schools are exempt from anti-discrimination legislation regarding who they employ and who they enrol. Religious schools, given their primary purpose is to remain true to their faith, must have control over staffing and enrolments.

The Albanese government’s failure to ensure such rights are protected represents another reason why parents who send their children to religious schools have every reason to fear what happens next year if the ALP government is re-elected. Especially if the Greens hold the balance of power.

Education Minister Jason Clare has stated a number of times that government schools deserve greater funding while one of the ALP’s long-term supporters, the Australian Education Union, opposes funding Catholic and Independent schools.

To financially penalise parents by reducing Commonwealth funding to non-government schools threatens parental choice as well as being financially counter-productive. Catholic schools enrol 19.7 per cent of students while Independent schools, the majority of which have a religious affiliation, enrol 16.3 per cent.

The cost to government, and taxpayers, of educating students in religious schools is significantly less than the cost of educating students in government schools as non-government school parents contribute billions of dollars annually to educate their children.

Catholic school parents contribute approximately 23.6 per cent of their children’s school income while Independent school parents contribute 46.9 per cent. If such students were enrolled in government schools the cost to government and taxpayers would increase dramatically.

There’s no doubt cost of living will be the main issue at the next election but, at the same time and proven by Scott Morrison’s win in 2019, the Christian vote will also be a deciding factor.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/the-christian-vote-swings-against-labor/

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My main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

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

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

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

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

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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IT HAPPENED: Norway just REJECTED cashless agenda: Shops are now required by law to accept cash as a form of payment

They have now rejected the cashless agenda. From the 1st of October, all shops are required by law to accept real physical cash as a form of payment.

As long as payments are under NOK 20.000 ($1871), shops cannot refuse cash payments. Those that do so will risk being fined.

The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection even recommends people to have some amounts of cash at all times in case digital forms of payment stop working.

Just recently that was the case, after a software update caused computers all over the world to crash, affecting banks, airports, supermarkets and more.

As many as 600.000 Norwegians are not digital, especially many elderly people.

With the World Economic Forum having pushed a cashless agenda, Norway is going the opposite way.

It is important to have cash. Because in a cashless society, it would be very easy for a tyrannical government to control who can buy and sell, monitoring every transaction.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-149888588

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Spare us the cringeworthy back story

Judith Sloan

I’m in charge of streaming in our household – someone must be. Luckily, there is a joint preference for contemporary crime dramas, even if they involve solving cold cases. It’s one thing the BBC still does well, by and large. We also love a bit of Nordic noir.

Almost without exception, however, the makers of these series can’t resist the temptation to include some cringeworthy back story about one or more of the detectives solving the case. Do we really care that they are having marital difficulties? Do we really care that one of the kids has gone off the rails? Get on with solving the crime, I say. It just looks like unnecessary padding.

Sadly, far too many politicians have entered the field of recounting their tragic/uplifting/moving back story. Mind you, Kamala Harris, current US presidential candidate, moves her back story around depending on her audience. Some days she is just a middle-class kid; the next, she is a working-class kid. (Her mother was a medical research scientist, her father an economics professor – sounds solidly middle-class.)

She also has some bizarre story about the woman who looked after her and her sister while her mother went to work. Evidently, this woman also ran a small business – I’m not sure when she had the time – which means that Kamala understands small business. Sure.

The back story has become a part of the kitbag of too many politicians here. How many times have we heard about Albo living in public housing as his single mother struggled to make ends meet?

The messages are twofold: with grit, determination, a loving mother and a supportive state, even a boy like Albo can make good. Secondly, public housing is a plus rather than a minus, notwithstanding the evidence that public housing estates are far too often hubs for crime and drug-dealing and the employment rate among tenants is very low.

Of course, everyone has a right to bang on about their background if they want to. But the real problem for politicians is that they too often use their very narrow, individual circumstances to inform themselves about policy, ignoring wide consultation, research and the consideration of all options.

One of the most egregious examples of the tedious and irksome back story is from federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, who comes from western Sydney. He is very proud of the fact that he is the first member of his family to attend university. He undertook a double degree at the University of New South Wales in arts and law before he became an advisor to Bob Carr, Labor premier of NSW. So, well done, Jase. But what he doesn’t seem to appreciate is that university is not for everyone. Many young people, including those who live in his electorate in western Sydney, would be much better served by pursuing a trade, particularly one in the construction industry. Jase is also very big on equity of access, irrespective of the record of the applicants or their capacity to pass the required subjects.

Jase commissioned the Australian Universities Accord which unsurprisingly recommended, in view of the minister’s circumstances, that the participation of those aged 25 to 34 years of age in university education be lifted from the current rate of 45 per cent – which seems extremely high – to 55 per cent by the middle of the century. In addition, those groups currently most under-represented in higher education should increase ‘to achieve parity across the Australian population’. So much for universities being centres of excellence.

It doesn’t seem to occur to our hero from western Sydney that the country will not be well served by having more graduates in Sociology, Cultural Studies or Chinese Medicine. Give us more plumbers, electricians, carpenters and brickies any day.

It’s worth observing here that many jobs that now require a university degree were once done by school-leavers. This is the case, for example, in accounting and bookkeeping. There was generally a lot of training given on the job and the holders of these positions often progressed quickly. Interestingly, the accounting profession is currently considering reverting to this model, at least partially, much to the chagrin of university accounting departments.

The real message that Jase should be giving young people is that university is not for everyone and that there are great futures in a range of occupations, particularly in the trades. But this just doesn’t fit with his back story.

If that anecdote doesn’t make you recoil, let me recount another aspect of Jason Clare’s back story. Evidently, his son Jack was thrilled to learn that his parents were presenting him with a new brother named Atticus. Now, Jack is a childcare centre attendee and his response to the news was that he must tell his favourite childcare worker, Kellie, about the new arrival.

The reaction of Jase was quite heart-warming. This incident had made him appreciate the sense of community that childcare imparts as well as clearly demonstrating the benefits of childcare on children. (Sample size = 1).

Now I don’t know about you, but this is not my experience of childcare. In many inner-city childcare centres, most of the staff don’t really speak English. No doubt they would have nodded politely when hearing Jack’s news, but that’s about it. There is also a rapid turnover of staff such that, half the time, the children never get to know any of the carers.

But this is not in keeping with Jase’s (or Labor’s) political position on the topic. Parents must be highly subsidised to dump their children in childcare centres, the more hours each week the better. This is so the women can work and help the economy. But it’s also good for the children – or so the ‘experts’ tell us who refuse to accept the fact correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

The fact that the best studies around tell a completely different story is ignored. There has been close to free universal childcare in Quebec, Canada for many years. The quality of the care does vary, and all the best options are snaffled by high-income earners. (You probably get the drift of the key problem with many studies: the children of high-income earners do better in life, the children go to high-quality childcare centres. It’s just a pity about the others.)

It’s clear that long day care is statistically associated with a range of social problems for many of the children attending and that these problems persist into the teenage years. They include anxiety, hyperactivity and aggression. Jase might want to talk to Kellie about these findings.

Politicians really shouldn’t use their (mostly uninteresting) back stories as a prime determinant of policy positions, particularly as these positions generally include spending great dollops of taxpayer dollars. File the stories in the bottom drawer and get on with using best practice means of settling on policies, including the option of leaving well enough alone.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/spare-us-the-cringeworthy-back-story/

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Gavin Newsom Does Something Conservatives May Like

The California governor signs a bill banning legacy preferences at private colleges and universities.

The Supreme Court began a new term this week, but its landmark 2023 decision on racial preferences in college admissions continues to reverberate.

Last week Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that bans private universities in California from favoring “legacy” applicants, those whose parents are alumni or whose families have donated to the school. It was California’s response to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the ruling that outlawed preferences based on race and ethnicity. Conservatives often want progressive policies that emanate from the Golden State to stay there. This may be an exception.

The left’s rebuttal to the Harvard decision has been to push against legacy preferences at selective schools on the grounds that they amount to affirmative action for affluent white people. That’s not an unreasonable argument on its face. Granting favorable treatment to the offspring of Stanford and University of Southern California graduates would tend to benefit white applicants more than their nonwhite counterparts. And if these schools are aiming to admit the most deserving students, as they claim, why should lineage but not race give certain applicants who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for admission a bump in the selection process?

Legacy admissions to the public University of California system were banned in the 1990s, and some elite private schools, including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Amherst College in Massachusetts and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, voluntarily ended the practice. Virginia, Illinois and Colorado have proscribed it at public colleges and universities. But California now becomes only the second state after Maryland to pass a law that forbids consideration of legacy and donor status at private institutions.

Such bans at public schools are an easier call. It’s hard to justify why state taxpayers should subsidize a university that chooses its students based on factors that have nothing to do with merit. Still, some might argue that legacy prohibitions at private schools are another matter, and court challenges are a possibility. Even critics acknowledge that however unfair legacy considerations may be, they don’t violate the Constitution. Just as sororities, country clubs and other private groups can legally select some members and reject others—so long as they don’t discriminate on unlawful grounds—the right of association protected by the First Amendment arguably allows private-school administrators to give relatives of alumni and donors a leg up.

In an opinion that accompanied an earlier Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Justice Clarence Thomas, who is no fan of legacy preferences, nevertheless warned about comparing them to racial preferences. “The Equal Protection Clause does not . . . prohibit the use of unseemly legacy preferences or many other kinds of arbitrary admissions procedures,” Justice Thomas wrote. “What the Equal Protection Clause does prohibit are classifications made on the basis of race. So while legacy preferences can stand under the Constitution, racial discrimination cannot.”

The economist Richard Vedder, who also frowns on special treatment for the offspring of alumni and donors, has written that so much federal funding now flows to private institutions—either directly through research grants or indirectly through student loans and in other ways—that the public-private distinction no longer makes sense.

“The Ivy League, for example, gets more government support per student than most so-called state universities,” according to Mr. Vedder. “The notion that public monies should be used to subsidize preferential treatment to less qualified [legacy] students, most of whom come from wealthy white families, is abhorrent to the American belief that anyone, regardless of wealth, race, gender or other group attribute, can with hard work rise to the top in our society.”

Supporters of legacy admissions insist that schools depend on them for fundraising and recruitment, and that may be true at institutions that don’t have large endowments, including historically black colleges. But most donations from alumni are for smaller amounts and out of loyalty and appreciation, not because the donor wants or expects a relative to receive special consideration. An empirical analysis of alumni philanthropy at the nation’s top 100 colleges over a nine-year stretch found “no evidence that legacy-preference policies themselves exert an influence on giving behavior.”

Many of the nation’s most selective schools, including all eight Ivy League institutions, still consider the legacy status of applicants. But since 2015, more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted legacy-blind policies, according to the Institute for Higher Education Policy. And in a nationwide Washington Post-Schar School survey from 2022, 75% of respondents said it was wrong for children of alumni to receive preferential treatment. Americans want public and private institutions to retire legacy admissions, and rightly so. Ideally, schools would act on their own, as some already have. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of time before others fall in line.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gavin-newsom-does-something-conservatives-may-like-f3ac60dd

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Soviet-style justice in the USA

Once the cops get a bee in their bonnets about you, you are in real strife

In 2019, several Hollywood notables and dozens of others were swept up in so-called Operation Varsity Blues. The FBI accused parents, college employees and their go-betweens in a bribery scheme to get nominally unqualified students admitted to top colleges.

What you might not have heard is John Wilson’s story. He’s the parent who drew the most charges, but fought them. And – after a grueling and expensive court battle – he finally came out on top.

Wilson: What the government did to me is something that's never happened to anyone in America. And what the prosecutors did to me once they put me in their crosshairs was so outrageous that if I hadn't experienced it firsthand, I wouldn't believe it in a million years.

If Wilson was known for anything, it was as a self-made rags-to-riches success story and president of Staples, International. But his story changed drastically in March of 2019 when he returned to the U.S. from a business trip.

Wilson: I got off the plane. I'm going through the normal customs and immigration security checks. They pulled me aside, say there's something wrong with my passport. I go into a back room. And then, two FBI agents pushed me against the wall, handcuffed me, shackled me and told me I'm under arrest. I was shocked. I had no warning. This came out of the blue like a lightning bolt.

Sharyl: You ever been arrested before?

Wilson: No, I'd never been arrested in my life. I'd never even been accused of a crime in my life. I've never been in a courthouse in my entire life.

Sharyl: What'd they tell you was wrong?

Wilson: They told me I was under arrest. I said, “You must have the wrong John Wilson.” I said, “There's 15,000 John Wilsons. I didn't do anything wrong.”

Sharyl: And you had no idea this was related to college or anything at the time?

Wilson: I had no idea what it was at all. Neither did they. They couldn't tell me what it was related to. They said “It's an unusual fraud charge we've never heard of. And that's all we know.”

The FBI took him to a federal prison in Houston.

Sharyl: And what'd they do with you from there?

Wilson: They stripped me down, put me in this big, I dunno, common area shower room. And the guards took a couple big hoses and started hosing me down like an animal in this large public shower. And still thinking to myself, "What did I do? How could this be happening? This can't be real." And the guard says to me, "You better watch your back in here. You know, you're the only old white guy,” he says, “and they're gonna assume you're a pedophile and they hate pedophiles here and one of 'em is likely to try to shiv you and stab you.” I was in shock. I said, “What? How can that be?” I asked, “Can you lock me in my cell so I don't get stabbed?” He says, “No, no. If they lock you in your cell, they're gonna think you're a p**** and they're really gonna f*** you up.” That's what he said, pardon my French, that’s what he said to me. I said, “Oh my god.”

The next morning he learned from his brother, an attorney, why he’d been locked up.

Wilson: I remember being handcuffed and shackled my feet and my hands shuffling down the hallway to this interview room where my brother was behind a plexiglass wall with another lawyer. I said, “What, what is this? What’s, what's going on?” And “They said something to do with Singer.” “I said, Singer?” He said, “Yeah, you bribed coaches and you did some fraud.” I said, “What? I didn't do that!” Again. I said, “They must have the wrong John Wilson.”

“Singer” was Rick Singer, considered the “mastermind” in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, nicknamed after the 1999 film about small town high schoolers looking for a way out – some through football scholarships.

Among the parents arrested were actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. They were accused of paying people to get their kids into top universities by bribing coaches, creating fake athletic photos, and cheating on tests. Both pleaded guilty in the case, in which 33 wealthy parents were charged.

Prosecutors claimed Wilson paid $220,000 to have his son, Johnny Wilson, recruited as a water polo athlete at the University of Southern California. And they said he spent $1 million to unfairly get his twin daughters into Harvard and Stanford.

Wilson admits he hired Singer and donated to colleges – like millions of parents have done – to increase odds their kids will get accepted in a fiercely competitive landscape.

But he says they were well qualified in their own right and there was no cheating, lying, or bribery. It was Wilson’s financial adviser at Goldman Sachs who introduced him to Singer as a consultant who could maximize a student’s chances.

Sharyl: I didn't even know that industry existed. So there are people you can hire to help your kid get in a good college?

Wilson: Yes. I didn't know it existed either until the Goldman Sachs person called me up. So whenever you asked Singer a question, he knew everything about every school, every high school, every college. So he was very knowledgeable. He was doing real charity work and he was doing real tutoring work. So I trusted him.

Sharyl: And your goal was ultimately what?

Wilson: To find the right fit for my son for school. To get him as prepared as he could for his tests, to help build his profile, to be as strong as it could and to get a school that'd be a good fit for him.

Wilson says Johnny legitimately won a spot on USC’s water polo team. He had impressive swim times, and a world record at age 9 as the youngest person to swim the frigid, choppy waters from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco.

The younger Wilson said on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2006: "See that island over there, that is Alcatraz and I am going to swim from there all the way to shore there. It is 1.4 miles and I’m a little nervous."

Wilson broke the world record, the youngest ever to make this swim.

His dad was convinced he could prove, at trial, that his children’s admissions to prestigious colleges weren’t due to bribery.

Prosecutors wanted him to plead guilty.

Wilson: And then they proceeded to literally every three months add on more charges. And each time they did, they said, “We want you to plead guilty. If you don't, we're gonna add on more charges.” And they did that again and again, four additional times. They ended up charging me with nine felonies and 180 years of prison time, all for the same act. And they said, “We'll go for more.” And I said, “I'm not gonna plead guilty no matter how many charges you put on me. I didn't do anything wrong.”

Sharyl: But the jury convicted you?

Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. They ran an unfair trial that was just outrageous.

He argues he faced a prosecutor-friendly judge who stacked the deck.

Wilson: I’ll give you a couple of examples of things they blocked. My daughters’ perfect ACT score, and near perfect scores were inadmissible.

Sharyl: In other words, that would've shown that they deserved to get in college. Not that they were given a favor?

Wilson: Right. They earned their admissions. They were qualified on their own merits for admission, even at Harvard and Stanford. My son's certified swim times and his world record, the certified swim times proved he's one of the fastest on USC’s team. They wouldn't allow his own high school coach, who's his water polo coach, who testified, to bring in his swim time.

Sharyl: When you heard what the jury found, did you think to yourself, “Well, I can't blame 'em with what they heard?”

Wilson: Absolutely.

Sharyl: Or were you surprised?

Wilson: No, no. We were sunk. We knew we were sunk when they blocked our evidence. I remember my lawyers even talking about this is something they've never seen before. It was so extreme. They said, “The good news is you'll have a great appeals record,” but now I have to spend another two years fighting for the appeal.

Sharyl: What happened on appeal?

Wilson: On appeal, we got everything overturned except for this minor tax issue. So all the court convictions were overturned and the judges said, you know, “This is totally unfair.”

Wilson paid a fine for the tax charge: improperly deducting USC donations. All the charges related to getting his kids into college were thrown out. The official Justice Department statement is that in May 2023, an appellate court affirmed the tax conviction and vacated and remanded the remaining counts of conviction.

But the fight isn’t completely over. Today, Wilson is suing Netflix over a documentary that he says smeared him and poisoned the jury pool.

He says he sent Netflix a real photo of his son playing water polo. Yet the documentary depicted him pasting the head of his son, shown in the film as a scrawny boy, onto the body of an athlete, for a college application.

Wilson: And so he was really a water polo player at the national level. He was being recruited by other division one schools. And so we sent them pictures of that at a practice. And what Netflix used, was a kid standing in a pool in LA in the shallow end up to his waist with a water polo ball in his hand. And then they show a photographer taking a picture and then photoshopping that onto a body of a kid in the pool. They knew that was totally false and yet they used it anyway.

Wilson successfully fought back criminal charges that he’d bribed to get his kids into college. But in the end, he says he lost five years of his peak career earnings potential, and spent his life’s savings – more than $10 million – on legal bills.

Wilson: I think for me the scariest part of this, if the government puts you in his crosshairs for whatever reason, the power and the resource they have can be devastating. They've been able to weaponize the justice system against innocent people. And they can do that with impunity. And it's frightening. And I think of all those people who have less resources than I had and how they're forced to plead guilty and how they're railroaded through an unfair process. And it's outrageous and it should never happen again. And I'm gonna do what I can to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

Netflix says its documentary never implied Wilson photoshopped his son’s photo … it depicted a different parent and son – and was wholly accurate. A Massachusetts judge recently denied Netflix' motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist and managing editor of "Full Measure." Her most recent book is "Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails."

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/parent-who-survived-feds-operation-varsity-blues-college-admission-recalls

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Australia: Landlords giving up in the face of government hostility: Victoria sees record fall in rental stock as investors leave the state

Victoria is experiencing the sharpest fall in rental stock since record keeping began in 1999, suggesting an investor sell-off is gaining pace.

The number of active rental bonds (a proxy for the number of rental properties in a market) fell from a little over 676,400 in June last year to 654,700 this year – suggesting there were 21,700 fewer rentals in the market.

The state has only ever recorded two quarters of rental bond falls, and both occurred in 2024.

The speed of rental stock loss also appeared to be increasing, with the total number of rental bonds dropping 1.3 per cent in the three months to May, and 3.2 per cent in the three months to June.

The new data, released by the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, supports a trend identified in the recently-released Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) 2024 Annual Investor Sentiment Survey.

The survey described a "sell-off of investment properties around the nation" that was "continuing unabated" and "fuelling fears of an even tighter rental market".

The outlook may be grim for investors, but home owners appeared to be benefiting, snapping up 65 per cent of the properties investors sold, according to PIPA.

First homebuyers in Melbourne have also enjoyed months of falling prices, while most of the rest of the country has experienced continued increases.

However, the survey's 1288 respondents declared Victoria to be the "least accommodating state or territory for property investors", and Victoria and Melbourne were found to have some of the highest proportions of investors selling up.

In Melbourne, roughly 22 per cent of investors surveyed had sold at least one rental in the past year, the second highest after Brisbane.

When it came to investors selling in regional areas, Victoria also had the second highest rate, with just over 9 per cent of investors selling, just below NSW, where the figure sat at just over 10 per cent.

PIPA Victoria board director Cate Bakos said legislative changes around minimum rental standards and increased land taxes were driving investors from the state.

She said real estate agents were also reporting a higher percentage of sellers being investors.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-12/victoria-sharp-fall-in-rental-stock/104464504

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My main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

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

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

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

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

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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America’s Cutting-Edge Weaponry Is Dependent on Chinese Tech, Experts Warn

American defense startups are far too reliant on Chinese parts—and that poses a serious risk of exploitation by Beijing, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Business is booming as hundreds of defense startups have joined the growing U.S. military-industrial complex since 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal. But defense contractors are heavily dependent on China for parts for weapons systems, including motors, chips, and rare-earth minerals, which poses potential avenues for Beijing to exploit or hamper American technologies, experts said.

“This is a serious problem for two reasons,” said John Lee, senior defense expert at the Hudson Institute. “First, as we saw during the pandemic, overreliance on Chinese supply chains for components and inputs leaves countries and economies vulnerable to politically or policy-motivated restrictions being imposed by Beijing.”

“Second, components can have elements inserted into them without the knowledge of the end user. This could be spying equipment, channels for China to disable or damage the component from a distance, or even materials that can weaponize the component,” Lee said.

New defense contractors particularly rely on these parts because they don’t enjoy the same cash reserve that the industry giants do, and China makes and sells the parts for a cheaper price.

But these startups don’t want to be so reliant on China, given that the country is actively trying to undermine the U.S. and would likely be an adversary in a global war scenario, industry executives told The Wall Street Journal.

Decoupling from China-based entities proves difficult and expensive, defense startups told the Journal, though it’s the only option in the long term.

“There’s a lot of lip-flapping about national security resilience manufacturing. But there’s no money for us to do this,” Scott Colosimo, CEO of defense startup LAND Energy, told the newspaper. LAND has some funding grants from the Pentagon, but needs more support to thrive, Colosimo explained.

The rare-earth minerals that China provides U.S. defense contractors—including neodymium, yttrium, and samarium—are of particular value, given that they are essential for most high-tech military equipment, including laser and missile systems, jet engines, communications devices, and even nuclear propulsion systems.

“Critical minerals are the building blocks for many of the most sensitive products in our defense industry,” said Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Initiative. “China can abuse its dominant position in other critical mineral supply chains at any time.”

“The only long-term solution to this is to enact comprehensive permitting reform to approve domestic mining projects, and work with allied nations to develop new production when the U.S. lacks the relevant natural resources,” he said.

Savit’s warning that China can upset the supply chain of rare-earth minerals also invokes a broader problem: China can cut the supply line for any of the parts needed by U.S. defense contractors, for any time or reason it chooses.

“If your supply chain runs dry, you have nothing to sell,” Ryan Beall, founder of drone manufacturer TILT Autonomy, told the Journal.

The Hudson Institute’s Lee warned that the problem exposes the U.S.’ and West’s gaps in domestic supply chain capabilities for their respective defense industrial bases, which creates a vacuum that other actors such as China find ways to exploit.

China supplies more than 90% of the magnets used in motors for ships, missiles, satellites, and drones, according to the Journal. Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Rob Wittman of Virginia sent a letter to an Air Force official Sept. 25 and called the reliance on China “a serious national security threat,” pointing to an example in a report last year that found the Air Force increased its dependence on China for parts by 69%.

The idea to stop relying on China for resources became more popular after the COVID-19 pandemic, which created massive supply chain shortages in various sectors, including health care products. But in the defense capacity, it will take years to produce parts domestically, according to the Journal.

“There has been a hollowing out of manufacturing and industrial capabilities in the West, which provides China with an enormous advantage,” Lee told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “In the event of a crisis against a country such as China, this will become very dangerous for the U.S. and its allies.”

Unable to wait for domestic capabilities to improve and increasingly wary of buying from China, new defense contractors are turning to other alternatives for parts, according to the Journal. Sourcing components from Mexico and Southeast Asia, utilizing 3D printing, and buying parts in bulk have been some of the creative ways contractors are solving the problem.

Industry experts also expect that the U.S. government is likely to restrict some Chinese parts used by contractors in a bid to move toward domestic capabilities, according to the newspaper. Some restrictions on items used to produce cameras and radios already exist.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/09/americas-cutting-edge-weaponry-is-dependent-chinese-tech-experts-warn/

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Christian Mom Says She Was Blocked From Substitute Teaching Because of Her Faith

A conservative Christian mother of five who narrowly lost a contentious school board election in Virginia that involved transgender issues nonetheless decided she would apply to be a substitute teacher. After the school district ran a background check, approved her, and assigned her to a class, the school board denied her employment, and she suspects it did so for ideological and religious reasons.

“I was absolutely shocked when the school board violated its own policy by taking action in closed session to strike my name from the personnel list before coming out in open session to vote,” Lindsay Rich, the former candidate, told The Daily Signal on Monday.

Rich, 40, has three daughters currently in southwestern Virginia’s Montgomery County Public Schools in the area around Blacksburg, the city where Virginia Polytechnic and State University (commonly known as Virginia Tech) is located. Last November, she lost the Montgomery County School Board race to represent District E by a narrow margin. Derek Rountree, her former opponent, now sits on the school board.

“I believe the school board members removed me [as a substitute teacher] for the same reason many attacked me during my campaign,” Rich said.

During Rich’s campaign, a Virginia Tech official responsible for DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—attacked her and a fellow school board candidate for supporting “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students” championed by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican.

These policies require parental involvement in any school encouragement of a child’s transgender identity and designate bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams by biological sex rather than claimed gender identity. Montgomery County’s school board previously adopted pro-transgender standards developed under Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, Gov. Ralph Northam.

“I support Governor Youngkin’s commonsense policies that base bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports on biological sex—not gender identity—which is also tied to my religious beliefs that God created male and female,” Rich told The Daily Signal.

“I have sat at the last two [school board] meetings until close to midnight waiting on an explanation and will continue to do so until I get answers,” Rich added in a text. “I won’t be pushed out of my children’s schools; they say there is room for ALL in MCPS, which includes conservative Christians like me.”

Lindsay Rich’s Approval

Rich said she took a training course Sept. 11 and received an assignment to teach Sept. 19. She forwarded emails to The Daily Signal showing that Montgomery County Public Schools had given her access to the online portal and had put her on the schedule to teach.

On Sept. 11, after Rich had taken the substitute teacher training, Dawn LaPuasa, MCPS supervisor of personnel, sent an email to Superintendent Bernard Bragen with a list of substitute teachers for the school board to approve. The list, intended for a Sept. 17 board meeting, gave Rich and the other substitutes an “effective date” that coincided with their training.

Yet on Sept. 17, the school board approved a list of substitute teachers that did not include Rich’s name.

09.17.2024. Personnel Report – Total – 5 pagesDownload
Rich and her supporters say that the school board altered the list during a closed session to discuss personnel, part of the board meeting that is not public.

Daniel Rich, the would-be substitute teacher’s husband, filed a request for information under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act and obtained an email that shows Bragen, the superintendent of schools, took a personal interest in Rich’s employment.

On Sunday, Sept. 15, two days before the meeting, Bragen reached out to Amanda Weidner, director of human resources at MCPS.

“Is the Lindsay Rich on the personnel agenda for a substitute the same person who ran for the school board?” Bragen asked. Weidner confirmed that it was indeed her.

“Let’s review it tomorrow,” Bragen responded. “That is presenting a problem that we may need the attorney to discuss.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/09/transgender-cancel-culture-christian-mom-says-she-was-blocked-substitute-teaching-because-her-faith/

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Postponing This Partisan Lecture Isn’t Enough

Radical political historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat was scheduled to speak at the U.S. Naval Academy on Oct. 10 as part of the Bancroft Lecture series, but according to a recent article from The Federalist, this lecture has been “postponed.”

In September, Ben-Ghiat announced that she would be speaking at the Naval Academy in a Substack post, yet in the same announcement she connected her topic of lecture, that of “militaries under authoritarian rule,” with former President Donald Trump and what she proclaims to be “his authoritarian character.”

Ben-Ghiat, in the same post, also suggested a voting preference, stating that several people, notable to the military audience she intended to reach, will be “voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in November.”

It is troubling that the Naval Academy invited an explicit partisan to lecture future military officers at an authorized event on federal property, especially since Ben-Ghiat has deliberately denounced a current presidential nominee as an authoritarian akin to “Fascist Italy, Pinochet’s Chile, and the Russian military during the war on Ukraine.”

It is even more troubling that the only reason this lecture is publicly known is through Ben-Ghiat’s Substack post announcing her partisan intent. The Naval Academy never publicized this event, despite having recently publicized a Forrestal Lecture in which the speaker talked about the far more appropriate topic of command leadership.

The concern over this Bancroft Lecture was publicized in a recent Daily Signal article. Since then, the Naval Academy has apparently postponed Ben-Ghiat’s lecture. Nonetheless, concerns still remain. There has been no official statement from Naval Academy leadership disclosing the status of the lecture, nothing to explain the logic for hosting an event of this political nature in the first place, and no remorse over the apparent politicization of the institution.

The Defense Department’s Directive 1344.10 explicitly states that service members shall “not engage in partisan political activity.” With such proximity to an important election, it appears that the Naval Academy, by inviting a radical anti-Trump speaker, has been acting in a political fashion. It calls into question whether academy leadership violated the Defense Department’s directive.

The Naval Academy ought to publicly explain itself, or else it will have missed the point entirely. The point is not that the lecturer is an extreme partisan, or that due to optics the lecture ought not to occur. The point is also not that leadership should simply postpone a lecture as soon as it receives heat from the public eye.

The point is that this is one instance of what could be a very dangerous broader trend.

The Naval Academy should take note of the articles publicizing exactly what is wrong, the letters from members of Congress urging leadership to take a look, and Ben-Ghiat’s expressly political language in describing a nominee for the next commander in chief. These should all serve as warning signs calling for more institutional vigilance, procedural compliance, and integrity.

The lack of remorse, the denial of responsibility, and the absence of any acknowledgment of an internal review show a lack of accountability. They show a dangerous sense of complacency and a complete misunderstanding of what the Naval Academy ought to be—an apolitical, nonpartisan military institution.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/09/postponing-partisan-lecture-isnt-enough/

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Secret to long and healthy life more down to genes than diet – research

It is widely believed that eating fewer calories can lengthen life, with some studies suggesting cutting intake by as much as 25% can slow down ageing by up to 3%.

But new research on mice suggests genes may play a greater role in living longer than simply reducing food intake.

Scientists say this may be because these genes, which are yet to be identified, can make bodies more robust and stay resilient in the face of adversity.

The team found that mice that lived the longest were also the ones that lost the least weight while consuming less food, suggesting fasting helps some live longer but not others.

The team said further research is needed to explore whether restrictive diets such as intermittent fasting – an eating plan that alternates between periods of eating and fasting – and calorie restriction, which involves reducing the amount of calories consumed while still getting enough nutrients, can extend lifespan in humans.

They also added the findings could have implications on how diet studies are conducted on humans.

Gary Churchill, a professor at The Jackson Laboratory in the US, said: “Our study really points to the importance of resilience.

“The most robust animals keep their weight on even in the face of stress and caloric restriction, and they are the ones that live the longest.

“It also suggests that a more moderate level of calorie restriction might be the way to balance long-term health and lifespan.”

For the study, the researchers investigated the effects of intermittent fasting and calorie restriction on nearly 1,000 female mice.

The scientists said each mouse was selected to be genetically distinct, which “allowed the team to better represent the genetic diversity of the human population” and made the study “one of the most significant investigations into ageing and lifespan to date”.

The mice were randomly assigned to one of five different diets.

The first group was allowed to freely eat any food at any time, while in the second and third groups, the animals were provided with only 60% or 80% of their baseline calories each day.

In the final two groups, the mice were not given any food for either one or two consecutive days each week but could eat as much as they wanted on the other days.

The creatures were studied for the rest of their lives with regular blood tests looking at health markers such as body weight, body fat percentages, blood sugar levels and body temperature.

The team found that mice on unrestricted diets lived for an average of 25 months, those on the intermittent fasting diets lived for an average of 28 months, those eating 80% of baseline lived for an average of 30 months, and those eating 60% of baseline lived for 34 months.

They found animals that lost the most weight were likely to have low energy, compromised immune and reproductive systems, and shorter lives.

And mice that naturally maintained their body weight, body fat percentage and immune cell health during low food intake were found to survive the longest.

But the researchers said that within each group, they found the range of lifespans varied widely.

The team said that in the group where mice ate the fewest calories, the creatures had lifespans ranging from a few months to four and a half years.

Analysing data to try to explain this wide range, the researchers said they found genetic factors had a far greater impact on lifespan than diets.

They said this highlights how genes play “a major role in how these diets would affect an individual person’s health trajectory”.

Prof Churchill said: “If you want to live a long time, there are things you can control within your lifetime such as diet, but really what you want is a very old grandmother.”

He added: “While caloric restriction is generally good for lifespan, our data show that losing weight on caloric restriction is actually bad for lifespan.

“So when we look at human trials of longevity drugs and see that people are losing weight and have better metabolic profiles, it turns out that might not be a good marker of their future lifespan at all.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/churchill-b2626567.html

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My main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

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

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

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

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

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

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Throw the term ‘gender’ in the dustbin of history

People of a certain age will remember a time when the word sex meant men and women and ipso facto their generalised sexed behaviour. This was the norm. A man or woman could simply look around and the truth of the term sex, both biologically and in relation to personality, was evident through observation. Sex-based personality manifested itself, from leisure to work, across the spectrum of human behaviour. For example, the heavy, dirty, dangerous jobs were done by men, while women, in contrast, were over-represented in the teaching, nursing, librarian, and secretarial professions. It was considered a given that the fashion and beauty industries, for example, were overwhelmingly patronised by women, or that men liked messing around with motorbikes and cars. Women, to point to another obvious truth, were better at looking after children. Even little boys, (those entitled patriarchs in waiting, according to feminists), if given a choice, ran to their mothers instead of their fathers for comfort. (None of this has changed.)

Then suddenly and mysteriously the word ‘gender’ became synonymous with sex. Sex and gender, on this view, were words that described the same phenomenon – the biological sex and the sex-based behaviour of women and men. A few years later, the term gender had entirely supplanted the term sex, except, by now, the biological basis for sex-based behaviour was removed and gender was defined by feminists, either negatively, as a socially constructed imposition, or positively, as a choice or as an identity. Biology, in other words, was entirely expunged from the equation and the genetic underpinnings of personality were forgotten.

Why is this important, gender identity adherents say, they’re just words? It matters because within the liberal-democratic West, ideologues are introducing ‘hate speech’ legislation that will curtail speech, and impel people, under the threat of losing their livelihoods, their reputations, and their freedom, to affirm ideas with which they disagree. And the entire virtue-signalling, follow-the-leader, yes-we-are-all-individuals-midwit circus is based on a chimera at best and a lie at worst. Gender does not exist. There is biological sex and there is sex-based behaviour, and that’s the complete alpha and omega of how men and women behave. Determining how many angels dance on the head of a pin is a fatuous question. And so is any attempt to count the number of genders conjured into pseudo-reality by Woke fools.

How did we arrive at the strange situation where gender nonsense became normalised? There are many strands to the story, but the ultimate cause rests with philosophers – in this case, the existentialists.

Existentialism is a philosophical school that is difficult to define, because most of the thinkers grouped under the umbrella term existentialism never heard of the name and disavowed membership of any philosophical tradition. The two most influential and original of the ‘existentialists’, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, believed that the core of being human is primarily determined by choice. Nietzsche said ‘become who you are’, while Heidegger claimed we are ‘thrown’ into a world and we have to stand against ‘the man’ or ‘the they’ to become, echoing Nietzsche, our ‘authentic’ selves. Both believed that only a small percentage of the population were capable of this endeavour.

Into this mix stepped two second-rate philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose main work Heidegger described as ‘dreck’ – dirt, to be exact – and his lover, the even-more second-rate Simone de Beauvoir. It was the latter who, after putting a feminist spin on Sartre’s bad reading of Heidegger, said ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman’. This was the moment when the idea, which had been known for millennia, that men and women are different – physically, psychologically, and biologically – was overthrown in a feminist attempt to reject material survival and biology as the primary reasons why sex roles have existed. Gender as an idea was reified from an intellectual concept into a concrete reality.

In other words, gender was created, sex was negated, and biology, that bête noir of feminists, was rejected as harmful. Ideology, through this lens, determined reality rather than the other way around. This was the beginning of a new world, the world we still inhabit, the feminist wonderland, where material reality can be negated by cancelling the sin of ‘essentialism’, in other words, logic, or, more likely, as can be gleaned by reading a newspaper or watching a movie, the unrelenting sweep of feminist propaganda.

Unfortunately for gender ideologues, though, their most hated enemy, biology, is proving what those of us not blinded by ideology already know, that men and women are different, not equal or unequal, but complementary.

Every human characteristic can be accurately depicted on a bell curve. Whether it’s intelligence, sporting prowess, physical strength, musical ability, beauty, cooking skills, Morris dancing, or even which demographic is most likely to love Taylor Swift.

In the middle of the bell curve are people who are average – nondescript dancers or guitar players, for example, or people who are neither beautiful nor ugly, tall or short, intelligent or stupid, etc. At the extremes, to the right and left of the curve, though, are those who are outside the norm in some way. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.

It’s the same in relation to sex-based behaviour. People outside the mainstream, on the tails of the bell curve, are not a different gender, they’re just unusual in their personalities, tendencies, and proclivities. But they are still definitively men and women. Long may they celebrate, but not impose, their difference on society. People, consequently, who live in a liberal democracy, shouldn’t be either punished or indulged because of their innate sex-based biological characteristics, eccentricities or personalities.

It’s time to put the term gender in the lexicon of discredited ideologies. Refuse to use the word gender. Form a movement which only uses the word sex to describe the realities of being male and female.

This simple move will make the world a better place, especially for women, who will, once again, have rights based on biological sex. Children, too, will not be mutilated in the cause of an anti-human cult.

Throw the term gender, like every nonsensical ideological term, in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/throw-the-term-gender-in-the-dustbin-of-history/

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British schools are ideologically CAPTURED

Last week, I was contacted by a grandfather of a child at Cranbrook School in Devon. While his grandchild attends secondary school, Cranbrook also has a primary school, as well as nursery and pre-school.

He told me that he was deeply concerned that children at Cranbrook were being poisoned with toxic gender ideology.

I took a look.

Immediately, red flags appeared.

The Head of Year 7 —for children as young as 11 years old—is Oliver Russell.

Far from focussing on educating his students in Maths or English, Russell appears keen to educate them in the world of radical gender ideology.

For you see, Russell identifies as “non-binary” and wants his students to know all about it. Sporting his full beard, he wears dresses and high heels in the classroom.

In official school communications, he signs off as “Mx (mux) Russell” and expects students to address him as such.

Whether Russell is playing out some sort of fetish or whether he is suffering from a mental health condition, the outcome is the exact same – forcing young, impressionable children to affirm his delusions.

Particularly concerning is the fact that, every Tuesday, during lunchbreak, Russell runs a “Rainbow Club” for “LGBTQIA+” students.

There appears to be no transparency whatsoever for parents regarding what is taking place during in these sessions. This is a form of ideological grooming.

Maybe these are just the actions of one rogue teacher? Think again.

The school itself has applied for a ‘Rainbow Flag Award’ to demonstrate its commitment to the “LGBT community”.

The school curriculum teaches children about “gender identity” and “transphobia”, including getting kids to draw “a big queer map of Devon”.

I’m told that teachers have gender pronouns on the outside of their office doors. And the school even disregards sex-based school uniforms altogether, allowing male pupils to wear female uniforms and vice versa.

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The consequences of such ideological indoctrination are plain to see.

It is well documented that young people, particularly girls, can fall prey to forms of ‘social contagion’ as regards mental ill-health. Historically, this has been witnessed in relation to self-harm and eating disorders. In more recent years, we have seen this take place with regard to children suddenly believing themselves to be ‘trans’.

I often hear stories from parents in which multiple students —particularly girls— within a single class are coming out as ‘trans’ within weeks of one another.

In one study, over 66% of young people questioning their gender belonged to a friendship group in which one or more of their friends had recently come out as ‘trans’.

Is this any wonder, when the adults who we are supposed to trust with our children’s wellbeing and education are shoving this ideology down their throats on a daily basis?

I wish I could say that Cranbrook are the only perpetrators. But they are not.

Here are just a few of the most egregious examples of ideological indoctrination that I have come across:

St Jude’s, a Church of England primary school in Southwark, has what it calls its “wider curriculum”, which involves forcing “inclusion”, “liberation” and “pride” into other subjects. For example, in History, children will be taught about “the history and meaning of the rainbow flag”.

In computing, children are instructed on “the spread of fake news and stereotypes relating to LGBT+ people”. In art, children are even expected to “study LGBT+ performance art and fashion, including drag queens and kings”. This can only be described as sneaking nefarious ideologies in through the back door.

Daubney Primary School in Hackney instructs their very young students to pose with pride flags and posters, before posting the photographs online. In one recent photograph, a young boy can even be seen holding a sign that reads “I can’t even think straight” (which is something you might expect to see on a stag or hen party but not in a classroom for primary school children).

This can only be described as sexualising children. When I called them out over social media, their Headmaster blocked me, before subsequently deleting their entire account. So much for transparency.

At Daubney’s sister school, Lauriston Primary School, children as young as five years old are asked by teachers to draw “asexual”, “polysexual” and “non binary” flags, before displaying them proudly on the walls. On what planet is it acceptable for such young children to be sexualised in this manner? Seriously?

Or take Westmeads Community Infant School in Kent. During Pride Month, their students —who are as young as four years old— were expected to spend their days surrounded by the Pride Flags plastered all over the railings to their playground.

Schools, remember, have a duty to be ideologically neutral. This is anything but. The only flag that should be flying from schools is the Union Jack. Once again, when I dared to call the school out and demand an explanation, I was blocked by them.

Dame Elizabeth Cadbury School in Birmingham teaches its students that “some people don’t feel that they are themselves in their own bodies and feel that they can’t be happy as they are. These people can have a sex change”. Is it any wonder that children have gone down pathways of irreversible medical harm when they have been promised a silver bullet in the form of ‘sex-reassignment’ to make them feel ‘happy’ again?

I’m afraid to say this only scratches the surface.

Where does the blame lie? Predominantly with the schools themselves, as they are choosing to inflict this upon their pupils.

Whether they do it because they genuinely think it’s the right thing to do, or to virtue signal, or because they are fearful of pushback if they don’t, I couldn’t care less, because the outcome is exactly the same – the emotional abuse and indoctrination of vulnerable children.

And all this has been allowed to happen under the watch of successive governments.

In the last Conservative government, we had, as our Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, who I dubbed the “Minister for Indoctrination”.

The fact she did nothing to stop this is perhaps unsurprising, given that she previously unequivocally declared that “transwomen are women”.

What’s worse, when she was grilled by the Department for Education Select Committee on this very issue, she was extremely dismissive.

And now, clearly, we little hope of things improving under the Labour government.

In fact, things will likely get worse.

Our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has worse knowledge of human biology than GCSE students, having previously claimed that 1 in 1000 women have a penis.

As I’ve previously written, Labour simply cannot be trusted on sex and gender, with many of their Cabinet posts now held by fervent ideologues.

Parents should be able to entrust their children to a school, safe in the knowledge that their sons and daughters will not be subject to political or ideological indoctrination.

Any schools that sexualise or indoctrinate children in the manners described above should be shut down altogether.

To parents out there - you have every right to interrogate your child’s school on what your children are being taught and exposed to and also what external agencies or companies are being brought in to promote some of these ideas.

It’s not common, for example, for schools to bring in very radical campaign groups who push radical gender ideology as though it is established fact when, in reality, it is a highly contested academic theory that, as the recent Cass Review underlined, lacks sufficient evidence and data in the scientific literature.

If you come across material that concerns you, consider complaining. There are many organisations out there that will help you to do this, including the Safe Schools Alliance, Sex Matters and Protect and Teach. In short, you are not alone.

To everyone else – we must continue to hold the government’s feet to the fire on this issue, as well as the schools that are often losing sight of the law, if not breaking it.

And I know that I for one will keep pushing and exposing this issue until everybody in Westminster and the country wake up to the reality of what is now taking place in schools and being imposed on our children before it’s too late.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/our-schools-are-ideologically-captured

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Transparency at State Universities

As state universities are partially financed with taxpayer money, one would hope that they have higher requirements for transparency than corporations. However, that is not the case at all.

Could corporations get away with having policies that require employees to hide any wrongdoing from their customers? I think not, but it seems that state universities can and do so when they want to. Could corporations get away with allowing their managers to tell employees that they cannot complain to senior management about manager misbehavior or inform other employees about such misbehavior? I hope not, but state universities do. Sometimes, universities are not even afraid to do this in writing, which provides clear evidence of such behavior.

Problems at state universities are common and are becoming worse, as the Prussian education system—the current education system in the United States—rewards bad behavior. (For a more detailed description of this education system, see my other articles: “Why Are American Taxpayers Forced to Subsidize and Support the Prussian Education System?”, “The Inherent Flaws of the Prussian Education System”, and “What Has Happened to Our Great Universities?”)

Some transparency problems at Illinois State University (ISU)—where I am a tenured professor—are especially easy to see. Thus, they provide good examples to help understand these issues.

First, a few years ago, I got an e-mail from our new department head saying that I should not e-mail the dean. This was a response to my polite e-mail to the dean—copying the department head—asking if he could help mitigate the consequences of poor class scheduling, considering our department head had very little administrative experience at the time. One of my classes was scheduled in such a way as to maximize the probability of it being cancelled. (For more details about this experience, see my earlier article: “Is American Education a Fraud?”)

I viewed the e-mail from the department head to be just as inappropriate as his scheduling of classes, and forwarded the e-mail to the dean. Given the clear evidence of inappropriate behavior, I expected such behavior to stop, but I was wrong. Forwarding any complaints to the provost’s office also did not lead to any positive results.

Later, as the problems in our department continued, I e-mailed the whole department about them. I wanted to inform the people working in the department and to give them a chance to respond in case I missed something important before I published articles about these problems at ISU. In addition to “Is American Education a Fraud?”, I also published “How Some Universities Are Destroying Education: Increasing Opportunities for Students to Take Classes in Any Order” and “Incentives for Choosing Faculty in State Universities: How Some State Universities Are Destroying Themselves,” which discussed problems at ISU.

The response to emailing the department was in my annual evaluations. The department head described informing faculty as not being collegial behavior. He claimed that I should discuss this with the Ombudsperson Council of Illinois State University instead. Before this suggestion, I had already talked with members of this council and found the conversation useful. However, they also explained to me that they had no power to implement or require any changes in the department. Thus, the department head wanted me to discuss these problems only with people who could not do anything about them.

One semester, I e-mailed the link to my article “Is American Education a Fraud?” to my students to help them understand that they needed to study if they wanted to pass my class. Simply telling students that they need to study does not work with a large percent of students. I did not expect the article to convince all students but, if it would convince a few, I thought it was worth trying. Moreover, I taught finance classes, and the article provided a good example of what happens when institutions (e.g., state universities) are not subject to the discipline of free financial markets.

I was told by the ISU administration—starting with the department head—that I violated university rules by e-mailing the link to students and that I could not do that again. The university has a rule that professors should not criticize their colleagues in front of students.

I think this is a strange rule. Science often advances by criticizing one’s colleagues. However, universities can write their own rules and adopt them by having the whole faculty or faculty committees “under the guidance” of administrators vote for those rules. My repeated requests for clarification about what exactly they did not like about my article were not answered.

As I recently learned, administrators have significant power to cause problems for faculty, and they use that power when they want to. There were problems with scheduling my classes every semester since the semester described in “Is American Education a Fraud?” Thus, when it comes to committee voting, “under the guidance” sometimes means under pressure from administrators. Moreover, the administration has significant control over hiring and retaining the faculty—thus, to some extent, they choose who votes. Given such freedom for abuse, it is not surprising that state universities adopt rules that reduce transparency and create even more opportunities for abuse.

At first, I was surprised that such things could happen in the United States. However, if I would have known the history of the current education system, which I learned only recently, I would not have been surprised. The current education system in the United States is not the same as the system from the country’s founding. The old system was much closer to the free-market system.

Unfortunately, the United States (like other countries) adopted the Prussian education system and created legal restrictions for the older U.S. system. Most communists, fascists, and other intellectual descendants of the new Prussians who created this education system were never punished for the crimes they committed, and many of them immigrated to the United States. Some of them came as university professors and administrators. As university degrees could be granted only by those who already had those degrees, the United States imported professors from abroad, giving them control over education here.

Transparency and other problems in state universities are not just problems for those who work or study there. These problems affect everybody, as universities prepare teachers and government experts who keep increasing their interference in our lives. Moreover, even so-called private universities currently have similar problems, as they are not fully private institutions. Rather, they are a part of the same Prussian education system, receive direct or indirect financing from government, and function in the same legal and regulatory system that distorts incentives.

It should not be surprising that spending more taxpayer money on education is not working. That money is just entrenching the Prussian system and making it harder for the private sector to develop and compete. Neither transparency nor other problems with the Prussian education system can be solved by government support of this system. Government does not need to get more involved with education. It needs to leave this industry to the truly private sector and the full discipline of free markets.

https://heartland.org/opinion/transparency-at-state-universities/

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‘Professional protester’: NSW Premier hits out at Marxist serial activist

Police could soon have the power to reject protests that stretch over months, as a clearly frustrated NSW Premier Chris Minns decried the more than $5m spent on controlling pro-Palestine rallies and attacked the leader of the protest movement as a “professional demonstrator”.

The move came after hundreds of police were deployed at rallies and vigils in Sydney on Sunday and Monday on the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel.

The protests were largely peaceful after police issued strong warnings not to bring the flag of the Hezbollah terrorist group, but two men were arrested for displaying swastikas superimposed on the Israeli flag.

“The cost is huge … so I’m going to have a review into the resourcing that police put into these marches, and it’s my view that police should be able to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing,” he said.

Police were burnt out and tired, he added, and other important work had had to be sidelined.

“I think taxpayers should be in a position to say we would prefer that money spent on roadside breath testing, domestic violence investigations, knife crimes, rather than the huge resources that’s going into the city and the community.”

“Our resources are being stretched; it costs millions of dollars to police and marshal these protests and it’s completely reasonable for the police to take that into consideration when Form 1 applications are lodged with the courts,” Mr Minns said.

“Ultimately, this is a huge drain on the public purse”.

The Premier hit out at Josh Lees, a leading member of the Palestine Action Group who has lodged weekly applications for the past year to march in Sydney since the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel, agreeing with the description of the activist as a “professional protester”.

Mr Lees writes for Red Flag, the outlet of Socialist Alternative, which declares itself “Australia’s largest Marxist group”, and regularly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.

He was also a leader of the Lockdown to Zero movement, demanding that the then- Berejiklian government maintain strict Covid-19 lockdowns and branding the loosening of restrictions as “an offensive against the working class” by “the rich and powerful”.

Mr Lees has also been spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition, organising protests at the 2011 ALP National Conference against then-prime minister Julia Gillard’s asylum-seeker policies.

The former University of Sydney tutor was arrested during the “Occupy Sydney” movement that camped outside the Reserve Bank in Martin Place in 2011, clashing with police during a Hyde Park rally and at the Martin Place encampment.

After police broke up the protest, Mr Lees claimed police brutality. “I woke to see about 200 riot police surrounding our protest camp … physically removing people, using painful wrist-locks, and occasionally throwing punches, one of which left a protester in front of me bleeding”, he said. Charges against Mr Lees and other protesters were later dropped.

Mr Minns emphasised he was not seeking changes that would affect union protests or industrial disputes, but police should be in a position to deny repeat applications for marches through Sydney if they didn’t have the resources to deal with it.

“If you were putting on a rock concert on the weekend, you would have to pay NSW police to keep the public safe – this all comes from NSW taxpayers’ back pockets.”

NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman called on Mr Minns to immediately implement a user-pays system for serial protesters, with a general rule against authorisation if organisers of repeat protests failed to meet the costs.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/professional-protester-chris-minns-hits-out-at-serial-activist-as-costs-pass-5m/news-story/0988faa286c60a3e8e03184ba9958a3b

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