Thursday, September 04, 2014



Men smoke shisha pipe in middle of busy London street



A group of nonchalant young men attracted a lot of attention by smoking a shisha pipe in the middle of Knightsbridge's busiest street.

The relaxed smokers angered motorists after setting up two foldable wooden chairs in between two lanes of traffic on Sunday evening.

They were spotted casually drinking and smoking as motorists watched on.

Police responded to reports of four men obstructing traffic outside Harrods on Brompton Road, west London, but the group had already left when officers arrived.

Social media users have criticised the men after pictures of the incident were posted online.

“To me this is unacceptable in my area and I hope the police dealt with them,” said one commenter.

Another added: “That’s pretty dangerous… It would just take one Russian in an armoured plated Mercedes G Wagon to squash them.”

The Steeple Times suggests the men are from the Middle East and in the capital for the ‘Ramadan rush’.

London fashion blogger Ashley Agedah posted a picture of a gold and black Bugatti parked near to where men were smoking.

SOURCE





Institutional political correctness' probe ordered by Theresa May into Rotherham child abuse scandal

The Government is set to launch a probe into “institutionalised political correctness” in the wake of the Rotherham child abuse scandal, Theresa May has said.

The Home Secretary was responding to a report last week by Professor Alexis Jay which found that at least 1,400 children had been victims of sex abuse in Rotherham over a period of more than a decade.

The announcement came as local police said that 12 new victims had come forward in the five days since the publication of the Jay report.

The Jay Report last week detailed harrowing examples of girls from Rotherham - many of them in local authority care - who were raped, trafficked and threatened with extreme violence, and found that senior council officers, elected members and police officers were aware of the problem for years but failed to tackle it.

Mrs May said that “a number” of police investigations were now underway, encompassing the allegations of hundreds of the victims.

She said that Communities Secretary Eric Pickles was likely to launch an inquiry into Rotherham Council’s handling of criminal allegations, amid concerns that officials were unwilling to pursue the cases because of fear of offending cultural sensitivities.

“The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government shares my concerns over the failings by Rotherham Council that have been identified,” Mrs May told MPs in the House of Commons.

“This includes the inadequate scrutiny by councillors, institutionalised political correctness, the covering up of information and the failure to take action against gross misconduct.”

Mrs May denounced the “complete dereliction of duty” of Rotherham Council and the local police over their treatment of the 1,400 children and young people in the town.

She said that “the fear of being seen as racist” over tackling the perpetators, many of whom were Asian.

Labour's shadow Home secretary Yvette Cooper had been granted an Urgent Question on the issue after her party suspended four members in response to the scandal.

Miss Cooper challenged Mrs May to bring in a new mandatory reporting law to force teachers and other professionals to report child abuse suspicions or face prosecution.

Mrs May confirmed that the Government was looking at changing the law to force a legal duty on institutions like hospitals, children's homes and boarding schools to report abuse.

But she said she was concerned the change could mean fewer children are protected because authorities were overwhelmed with reports of false claims of child abuse.

It was important “that we properly look at the evidence at whether this actually is effective in terms of protection of children”.

Mrs May said: “The question that has been raised in other countries is that what happens in other countries with mandatory reporting is that the number of reports goes up significantly but many of those reports are actually not justified.

“What you do is you diminish the ability to deal with the serious reports and to actually protect children. So it is a very complex issue.

“It is a serious question that needs to be looked at but I think we need to look at it very carefully and look at the evidence from countries like Australia and the United States where the evidence to its effectiveness in improving the ability to deal with these issues is mixed.”

Three current and one former councillor have been suspended pending an investigation, while under-fire South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Shaun Wright will need to receive permission if he wishes to rejoin the party.

Both Mr Wright and South Yorkshire Police chief David Crompton are being called to give evidence on the scandal to the Home Affairs select committee.

In evidence to the same committee on Tuesday, Mr Crompton said his officers had opened 12 new cases since the Jay report was published last week.

Promising that police will “go wherever the evidence takes us”, he said: “We have had 12 new cases brought forward since Alexis Jay's report was published.”

There had been “clear failures” in how the force had dealt with abuse allegations, he said. “We are acting, but nobody is complacent. This is a huge wake-up call,” he said.

SOURCE






Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives

by Mallory Millett

Mallory Millett resides in New York City with her husband of over twenty years. She is CFO for several corporations.  Famous feminist Kate Millett is her sister

“When women go wrong men go right after them.” – Mae West

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”  Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago.

During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment.  I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!”

What a giggle we girls had over that. “How ridiculously unsophisticated these nuns are,” we thought. Then I went to the university and four years later walked out a communist and an atheist, just as my sister Katie had six years before me.

Sometime later, I was a young divorcee with a small child. At the urging of my sister, I relocated to NYC after spending years married to an American executive stationed in Southeast Asia. The marriage over, I was making a new life for my daughter and me.  Katie said, “Come to New York.  We’re making revolution! Some of us are starting the National Organization of Women and you can be part of it.”

I hadn’t seen her for years.  Although she had tormented me when we were youngsters, those memories were faint after my Asian traumas and the break-up of my marriage.  I foolishly mistook her for sanctuary in a storm. With so much time and distance between us, I had forgotten her emotional instability.

And so began my period as an unwitting witness to history. I stayed with Kate and her lovable Japanese husband, Fumio, in a dilapidated loft on The Bowery as she finished her first book, a PhD thesis for Columbia University, “Sexual Politics.”

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China.  We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears.  Was I on planet earth?  Who were these people?

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.

They proceeded with a long discussion on how to advance these goals by establishing The National Organization of Women.  It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society. The upshot was that the only way to do this was “to invade every American institution.  Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution’”: The media, the educational system, universities, high schools, K-12, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system.

It fell on my ears as a ludicrous scheme, as if they were a band of highly imaginative children planning a Brinks robbery; a lark trumped up on a snowy night amongst a group of spoiled brats over booze and hashish.

To me, this sounded silly.  I was enduring culture shock after having been cut-off from my homeland, living in Third-World countries for years with not one trip back to the United States. I was one of those people who, upon returning to American soil, fell out of the plane blubbering with ecstasy at being home in the USA. I knelt on the ground covering it with kisses.  I had learned just exactly how delicious was the land of my birth and didn’t care what anyone thought because they just hadn’t seen what I had or been where I had been.  I had seen factory workers and sex-slaves chained to walls.

How could they know?  Asia is beyond our ken and, as they say, utterly inscrutable, and a kind of hell I never intended to revisit.  I lived there, not junketed, not visited like sweet little tourists — I’d conducted households and tried to raise a child. I had outgrown the communism of my university days and was clumsily groping my way back to God.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable — clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt — plot such a thing?  Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity?  And why?

I dismissed it as academic-lounge air-castle-building.  I continued with my new life in New York while my sister became famous publishing her books, featured on the cover of “Time Magazine.” “Time” called her “the Karl Marx of the Women’s Movement.”  This was because her book laid out a course in Marxism 101 for women.  Her thesis: The family is a den of slavery with the man as the Bourgeoisie and the woman and children as the Proletariat.  The only hope for women’s “liberation” (communism’s favorite word for leading minions into inextricable slavery; “liberation,” and much like “collective” – please run from it, run for your life) was this new “Women’s Movement.”  Her books captivated the academic classes and soon “Women’s Studies” courses were installed in colleges in a steady wave across the nation with Kate Millett books as required reading.

Imagine this: a girl of seventeen or eighteen at the kitchen table with Mom studying the syllabus for her first year of college and there’s a class called “Women’s Studies.” “Hmmm, this could be interesting,” says Mom. “Maybe you could get something out of this.”

Seems innocuous to her.  How could she suspect this is a class in which her innocent daughter will be taught that her father is a villain?  Her mother is a fool who allowed a man to enslave her into barbaric practices like monogamy and family life and motherhood, which is a waste of her talents.  She mustn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps. That would be submitting to life as a mindless drone for some domineering man, the oppressor, who has mesmerized her with tricks like romantic love.  Never be lured into this chicanery, she will be taught.  Although men are no damned good, she should use them for her own orgasmic gratification; sleep with as many men as possible in order to keep herself unattached and free. There’s hardly a seventeen-year-old girl without a grudge from high school against a Jimmy or Jason who broke her heart.  Boys are learning, too, and they can be careless during high school, that torment of courting dances for both sexes.

By the time Women’s Studies professors finish with your daughter, she will be a shell of the innocent girl you knew, who’s soon convinced that although she should be flopping down with every boy she fancies, she should not, by any means, get pregnant.  And so, as a practitioner of promiscuity, she becomes a wizard of prevention techniques, especially abortion.

The goal of Women’s Liberation is to wear each female down to losing all empathy for boys, men or babies. The tenderest aspects of her soul are roughened into a rock pile of cynicism, where she will think nothing of murdering her baby in the warm protective nest of her little-girl womb.  She will be taught that she, in order to free herself, must become an outlaw. This is only reasonable because all Western law, since Magna Carta and even before, is a concoction of the evil white man whose true purpose is to press her into slavery.

Be an outlaw! Rebel! Be defiant!  (Think Madonna, Lady Gaga, Lois Lerner, Elizabeth Warren.) “All women are prostitutes,” she will be told.  You’re either really smart and use sex by being promiscuous for your own pleasures and development as a full free human being “just like men” or you can be a professional prostitute, a viable business for women, which is “empowering” or you can be duped like your mother and prostitute yourself to one man exclusively whereby you fall under the heavy thumb of “the oppressor.”  All wives are just “one-man whores.”

She is to be heartless in this.  No sentimental stuff about courting. No empathy for either boy or baby.  She has a life to live and no one is to get in her way.  And if the boy or man doesn’t “get it” then no sex for him; “making love” becomes “having sex.” “I’m not ‘having sex’ with any jerk who doesn’t believe I can kill his son or daughter at my whim.  He has no say in it because it’s my body!” (Strange logic as who has ever heard of a body with two heads, two hearts, four arms, four feet?)

There’s no end to the absurdities your young girl will be convinced to swallow.  “I plan to leap from guy to guy as much as I please and no one can stop me because I’m liberated!”  In other words, these people will turn your daughter into a slut with my sister’s books as instruction manuals. (“Slut is a good word. Be proud of it!”)  She’ll be telling you, “I’m probably never getting married and if I do it will be after I’ve established my career,” which nowadays often means never. “I’ll keep my own name and I don’t really want kids.  They’re such a bother and only get in the way.”  They’ll tell her, “Don’t let any guy degrade you by allowing him to open doors for you. To be called ‘a lady’ is an insult. Chivalry is a means of ownership.”

Thus, the females, who are fundamentally the arbiters of society go on to harden their young men with such pillow-talk in the same way they’ve been hardened because, “Wow, man, I’ve gotta get laid and she won’t do it if I don’t agree to let her kill the kid if she gets knocked-up!” Oppressed? Woman has always had power. Consider the eternal paradigm: only after Eve convinced Adam to eat the fruit did mankind fall. I.e., man does anything to make woman happy, even if it’s in defiance of God. There’s power for ya! Without a decent womankind, mankind is lost. As Mae West said, “When women go wrong men go right after them!”

I’ve known women who fell for this creed in their youth who now, in their fifties and sixties, cry themselves to sleep decades of countless nights grieving for the children they’ll never have and the ones they coldly murdered because they were protecting the empty loveless futures they now live with no way of going back.  “Where are my children?  Where are my grandchildren?” they cry to me.

“Your sister’s books destroyed my sister’s life!”  I’ve heard numerous times. “She was happily married with four kids and after she read those books, walked out on a bewildered man and didn’t look back.”  The man fell into despairing rack and ruin. The children were stunted, set off their tracks, deeply harmed; the family profoundly dislocated and there was “no putting Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

Throughout the same time these women were “invading” our institutions, the character of the American woman transformed drastically from models portrayed for us by Rosalind Russell, Bette Davis, Deborah Kerr, Eve Arden, Donna Reed, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunn, Greer Garson.  These were outstanding women needing no empowerment lessons and whose own personalities, as well as the characters they interpreted, were strong, resilient and clearly carved.  Their voices were so different you could pick them out by that alone.  We all knew Rita Hayworth’s voice.  We all knew Katherine Hepburn’s voice.

I dare you to identify the voices of the cookie-cutter post-women’s-liberation types from Hollywood today. How did these “liberated” women fall into such an indistinguishable pile of mush? They all look exactly the same with few individuating characteristics and their voices sound identical, these Julies and Jessicas!  My friend, Father George Rutler, calls them “the chirping fledglings of the new Dark Ages.”  The character of the American woman has been distorted by this pernicious movement. From where did this foul mouthed, tattooed, outlaw creature, who murders her baby without blinking an eye and goes partying without conscience or remorse come?  And, in such a short little phase in history?

Never before have we heard of so many women murdering their children: Casey Anthony killing her little Caylee and partying-hearty for weeks; Susan Smith driving her beautiful little boys into a lake, leaving them strapped in the water to die torturous deaths; that woman who drowned her five children in the bathtub?  “Hey, if I can kill my baby at six months of gestation why not six months post-birth, just call it late late-term abortion.”

I insist that woman always has been the arbiter of society and when those women at Lila Karp’s table in Greenwich Village set their minds to destroying the American Family by talking young women into being outlaws, perpetrators of infanticide, and haters of Western law, men and marriage, they accomplished just what they intended.  Their desire — and I witnessed it at subsequent meetings till I got pretty sick of their unbridled hate — was to tear American society apart along with the family and the “Patriarchal Slave-Master,” the American husband.

We’re all so busy congratulating each other because Ronald Reagan “won the Cold War without firing a shot” entirely missing the bare truth which is that Mao, with his Little Red Book and the Soviets, won the Cold War without firing a shot by taking over our women, our young and the minds of everyone tutored by Noam Chomsky and the textbooks of Howard Zinn. Post-graduate Junior is Peter Pan trapped in the Never Neverland of Mom’s (she’s divorced now) basement. Christina Hoff Sommers says, “Moms and dads, be afraid for your sons. There’s a ‘war on men’ that started a long time ago in gender studies classes and in women’s advocacy groups eager to believe that men are toxic… Many ‘educated women’ in the U.S. have drunk from the gender feminist Kool Aid.  Girls at Yale, Haverford and Swarthmore see themselves as oppressed.  This is madness.”

If you see something traitorous in this, a betrayal of my sister, I have come to identify with such people as Svetlana Stalin or Juanita Castro; coming out to speak plainly about a particularly harmful member of my family.  Loyalty can be highly destructive.  What about Muslims who refuse to speak out right now?  I was one of the silent but at last I’m “spilling the beans.” The girls have been up to something for years and it’s really not good. It’s evil. We should be sick to our souls over it.  I know I am. And so, mass destruction, the inevitable outcome of all socialist/communist experiments, leaves behind its signature trail of wreckage.

So much grace, femininity and beauty lost.

So many ruined lives.

SOURCE





Arresting Parents for Letting Kids Play

Unaccompanied minors have become a major problem in this country. But we’re not talking about the tens of thousands of illegal minors pouring across our southern border and then being released to sponsor families around the nation. We mean children left playing on neighborhood playgrounds – gasp – unattended by adults.

In recent weeks, there have been numerous stories of parents being arrested for leaving their children to play without supervision. Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids,” writes, “In another era, it not only would have been normal for a child to say, ‘Goodbye, mom!’ and go off to spend a summer’s day there [at the playground], it would have been odd to consider that child ‘unsupervised.’ After all, she was surrounded by other kids, parents, and park personnel. Apparently now only a private security detail is considered safe enough.”

This is not an argument for abandoning one’s children for hours on end with no available supervision. One mother was arrested for leaving her nine-year-old at a park in order to work a shift at McDonald’s. But while the merits of her babysitting strategy are dubious, we’re not convinced it was worthy of 17 days behind bars, much less the potential 10-year prison sentence.

Yet a Reason/Rupe poll revealed that 68% of Americans think there ought to be a law prohibiting kids nine and under from unsupervised play. For 12-year-olds, some 43% still think a law is needed, and even letting a 10-year-old play alone in their own front yard is frowned upon. Who knew helicopter parenting was this popular?

Common knowledge (62% of those polled) says the world is more dangerous than a generation or two ago, but the truth is that crime is at its lowest levels since World War II. Child abduction is no more common now than 40 years ago, and today’s kidnappings are often committed by estranged spouses. And as the Christian Science Monitor noted in 2012, “[T]he last time the crime rate for serious crime – murder, rape, robbery, assault – fell to these levels, gasoline cost 29 cents a gallon and the average income for a working American was $5,807.”

Crime is still serious, even at a lower rate. And appropriate precautions with children are always in order. But why the overabundance of fear? Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, blames the 24-hour news cycle. Turn on the news, he says, “and all you have to do is watch how they take a handful of terrible crimes against children and repeat that same handful over and over. And then they repeat the trial over and over, and so we’re conditioned to live in a state of fear.” After all, who wants to become the subject of one of those stories? According to the Reason poll, more than two-thirds think news coverage is either accurate or underestimated.

Other factors could be at play, including the prevailing culture of lawsuits for every real and perceived injury – that’s why playgrounds themselves are so different today. Also, the breakdown of the family and communities has left many mothers parenting alone and turning to the government. Or maybe we’ve gotten so overprotective simply because kids are so expensive. According to the USDA, raising a child in a middle-class home can cost $245,000.

There are important implications of this shift in thought, and they’re not limited to children or parenting. Take ObamaCare for example. Democrats are correct that, while the law as a whole and as implemented is not looked upon favorably, some of its individual provisions – like keeping “children” on parents' insurance until age 26 – are popular. In fact, most government programs that “take care of people” enjoy wide public support, which is why responsible fiscal management of those programs is nearly impossible.

Children may well be marginally safer in this tightly controlled environment, but they also may not be learning critical life skills such as responsibility, problem-solving and independence. Hence, when they grow up, they want government to do things for them.

And sometimes, children never actually do grow up, which is why statists are so successful at fomenting envy among various constituent groups. Petty jealousy is a prevalent trait among five-year-olds, and leftists know just how to cultivate it into adulthood.

One key to breaking this cycle of dependence is for parents to raise their children with a bit more independence and responsibility. Start small but keep growing. America was birthed with the Declaration of Independence, and in order to recapture its greatness, our children must learn autonomy. Maybe even by going to the playground on their own

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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