Thursday, October 01, 2015



Sleepy multicultural nurse in Britain gets off lightly



A nurse who regularly took two hour naps while on duty was caught out because of her loud snoring. Perpetua Cull, 49, originally from Gweru, Zimbabwe, fell asleep nine times whilst working the night shift at the North Merchiston Care Home in Edinburgh, in July last year. 

Mrs Cull would collect a sheet and a blanket from the linen cupboard and sleep on a recliner chair 'for between one to two and a half hours at a time'.

She was reported by a colleague who heard her snoring, and now she has been given a two-year caution order by the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

The nurse attended a hearing in Edinburgh, where she is now living, earlier this month, to face a total of nine charges.

They included 'acting unprofessionally in that she slept whilst on duty on one or more of the night shifts' between July 9 and July 24, 2014.  The nine charges were found proven - despite Mrs Cull strongly denying that she ever fell asleep on duty.

A decision notice posted online shows that evidence was heard from another nurse who used to work the same 10pm to 8am shifts.

The nurse, who remained anonymous, stated that Mrs Cull 'would enter the residents' lounge area having collected a sheet and a blanket from the linen cupboard and sleep in a recliner chair'.

He added that 'she was sleeping not only because he saw her but because he heard her snoring'.

He told the panel that 'although he did not wake her up, he found the night shifts where he was working with her much harder because the volume of work increased'.

Despite not minding initially because the 'shift went more quickly' for him, he 'later became annoyed that this behaviour was becoming a regular pattern'.

At the hearing, which lasted three days, Mrs Cull denied that she had ever fallen asleep on duty.

Mrs Cull, originally from Gweru, Zimbabwe, was given a two-year caution order by the Nursing and Midwifery Council

She also told the panel that her colleague's version of events were 'untrue' and that she believed his motivation for making the allegations was that she had 'raised concerns about the length of his smoking breaks'.

In their decision, the panel stated that they found parts of Mrs Cull's evidence 'implausible', and it was 'more likely than not' that she had slept whilst on duty.

However, they accepted that there was 'no evidence of actual harm to the residents' as she was always on the unit, and 'by taking her breaks in the residents' lounge rather than the staff room she was more accessible should an emergency had risen'.

The panel ruled that her fitness to practice was impaired, and imposed a caution order for a period of two years.

Mrs Cull was fired from the care home following the allegations, and now works for another nursing agency in Edinburgh.

The decision notice states that she 'has made adjustments to her working practice by only working day shifts with her current employer to avoid repetition'.

Mrs Cull's husband, Robert, has slammed the decision to impose a caution order, which does not stop her from practising but is recorded on the register and published on the NMC's website.

He said: 'It's totally barbarian what they have done. She should have just received a warning at the time.  'It's not like she shot or killed anybody, she probably just closed her eyes on her dinner break.

'I used to work night shifts and I know that at two o'clock in the morning your eyes can get a bit tired - she didn't set out to fall asleep."

SOURCE






Academic ridiculed after she likens cereal protest to Mandela and the Suffragettes hours after claiming she wasn't middle class

Evil cornflakes?? A protest over breakfast cereal?  How pathetic can you get?

Protestor Lisa McKenzie is pretty middle class herself.  She has  enjoyed trips to the likes of Las Vegas, Ibiza, Jamaica and Barbados. She has also visited the likes of the Italian fashion capital Milan, Paris, Barcelona, Nice, New York, Rome, Naples, Athens New York, California and Chicago, and has posted photos with a pricey Apple computer and expensive SLR-type camera



The charmer herself

An academic involved in anti-gentrification protests was ridiculed last night for comparing the violent action to the struggles of Nelson Mandela and the suffragettes.

Dr Lisa McKenzie, 47, came under fire after claiming last weekend’s attack by hundreds of masked protesters on a trendy east London cereal café was akin to the battle against apartheid.

She also accused the owners of the Cereal Killer Café of taking advantage of the publicity and insisted she ‘doesn’t care’ about the plight of the small business.

On Newsnight, tattooed Dr McKenzie – who denied she was middle class and described herself as ‘an economic migrant to the South East’ – was forced to defend her comments comparing the ugly protests to the struggle for female emancipation.

She had written: ‘Suffragettes were accused of terrorism, so was Mandela. Direct actions from those most affected. Get off your high horses.’

Journalist and broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer accused her of exaggerating so-called social cleansing in east London.

One social media user, Dannie Horowitz, wrote: ‘Comparing the battle against apartheid with an intellectually incoherent protest about a novelty café. Hilarious.’

London School of Economics research fellow Dr McKenzie said last night: ‘What I was trying to do with that is say direct action has been used by many, many different groups.’

She flatly denied being directly involved in the altercation, which saw paint and smoke bombs thrown at the café, terrifying customers, but defended the notion of revolutionary insurrection.

‘I think the people who have been winning the class war are the elites, the 1 per cent,’ she said. ‘I think what we have got now is working class people getting angry and frustrated at that 1 per cent.'

Earlier in the day, Dr McKenzie said the Belfast-born business owners had little to complain about after red paint was daubed across their building and smoke bombs tossed inside.

Dr McKenzie has claimed the owners have enjoyed the publicity Saturday's attack has given them.  ‘I really don’t care about the café – I have no feelings on it. I would never pay to have a bowl of cereal at four o’clock in the afternoon. I think the people who have run it have had far too much publicity. It was about gentrification in east London, not about a café.’

Hundreds of people descended on Shoreditch on Saturday night to protest against the increasing gentrification of the once working class neighbourhood.

Riot police were called in as masked thugs targeted the café, which has courted controversy for selling bowls of cereal for as much as £4.40.

Dr McKenzie was seen at the head of the protest holding a banner reading: ‘Class War – we have found new homes for the rich’ amid a skull-and-crossbones logo and a makeshift cemetery.

She also held another which read: ‘We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.’

SOURCE






Hitler sometimes takes a nap and other insights from the New York Times

In 1939, with the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht matters of public record, the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps in operation, and German Jews disenfranchised and dispossessed of their properties, The New York Times Magazine published a detailed piece about Adolf Hitler.

"Hitler sometimes takes a nap," it explained.

But rest assured, the newspaper dug deeper: "Hitler can be a good listener." "Hitler is able to talk well as host." "Hitler likes an after-breakfast stroll on his mountain." "Hitler frequently has tea up here." "The Fuehrer does not always take his meals in company." "He likes well-cooked dishes," he "makes no secret of being fond of chocolate," he "walks little, but vigorously," and he "is fond of his climb above the clouds."

The article's focus on Hitler's "very green" grass, "friendly-looking" mountain home, and "excellent" tomatoes humanized the despot – which is exactly what Hitler's propagandists intended when they designed his homes and invited journalists to share his space, according an upcoming book by architectural historian Despina Stratigakos. The aim, the book explains, was "to foster the myth of the Führer as a morally upstanding and refined man."

The New York Times, then, did not only "bury" news of the Holocaust, as has been documented in recent years, but in this article was a willing, even if unknowing, participant in Hitler's propaganda.

This puff piece on Hitler evokes a much more recent New York Times article about Muqdad Salah, a Palestinian prisoner released by Israel as part of a deal meant to restart peace talks.

Salah is no Hitler. He only murdered a single Jew, albeit an elderly Holocaust survivor, and albeit in a brutal manner – 72-year-old Israel Tenenbaum was napping when Salah bludgeoned him to death with a metal rod. And the newspaper's story on Saleh did mention his misdeeds, something its feature on Hitler's house largely avoided. But the paper's empathic, back-to-nature descriptions of the two killers overlap strikingly.

About the German, the newspaper noted that he "has a habit of climbing straight up behind the house … between fir trees with heavy branches" for a vista that allows him to "look over into what used to be Austria." About the Palestinian, current Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren wrote, "Mr. Salah had run past the house to smell a favored carob tree, and then he climbed atop a sheep shed to survey the changed village."

Outside Hitler's house, crowds "are apt to congregate outside the lodge gate patiently waiting to catch a glimpse of him." Salah was described as being "welcomed before dawn by a cacophonous crowd." Hitler "decided to rebuild" his home in the mountains. Salah "remodeled and refurnished his mother's home." Hitler "likes an after-breakfast stroll on his mountain." Salah explains, "I want to breathe the air, I want to walk." (Alas, the Palestinian is described as being stymied by Israel's parole-like restrictions, just as the piece's less-flattering descriptions of Salah are often linked to his life having been "disrupted" by the Israelis who jailed him after the murder.)

Similar currents can be found in the newspapers treatment of other anti-Jewish violence. A recent piece in the New York Times Magazine was roundly criticized for romanticizing Palestinian stone-throwers. It painted a picture of heroic activists who do little but "irritate" the Israelis while overlooking the reality that stones kill Jewish civilians. (Even the piece's anti-Israel supporters delightfully agreed that the piece "featured heroic portraits" of the rioters.) A news article by Rudoren published a few months later likewise cast stone-throwing in a gentle light.

And the title of the story "Helping Hand of Hezbollah Emerging in South Lebanon," about a terrorist group that has carried out massive, bloody attacks targeting Jews across the world, speaks for itself.

The New York Times, in short, hasn't stopped putting a friendly face on violent anti-Semites.

Make no mistake: the contexts are dramatically different. No amount of contemporary terror can begin to approach the horror of the Nazi's systematic genocide. But some of the lessons are the same.

About articles on Hitler's home life, which appeared not only in The New York Times but also other mainstream media, Despina Stratigakos, the historian and author, emphasized that "stories considered 'harmless fluff' can serve as powerful propaganda." And speaking about Hitler, though she could have been referring to The Times and its treatment of the murderer Salah, she added that "we can be lulled into changing our ideas of someone through a slick presentation of their private lives."

Americans reading about the bucolic Hitler might conclude that "maybe this person was not as bad as all of the news coming out of Europe seemed to suggest," Stratigakos said. It would quickly emerge that those swayed by the pieces were wrong. And in present just as in the past, the public attitudes of American citizens, shaped by their media, matter. The whitewashing of anti-Jewish extremism and downplaying of dangerous attitudes has consequences for public understanding of the Middle East, and perhaps also for the security of Jews.

SOURCE






Australia: Man bashing feminists answered over domestic violence

Miranda Devine replies to the hate-filled sisters

It is a marvellous irony that the domestic violence activists who have spent the week abusing and misrepresenting me claim to be champions of “respect” for women.

My sin was to point out the incontrovertible truth about domestic violence, that it is overwhelmingly concentrated in dysfunctional remote indigenous communities and public housing estates.

The response from femi-fascists was to try to get me sacked, silenced and banned from twitter.

They called for my “sterilisation”, branded me a “murder apologist”, a “troll”, a “sicko”, an ”idiot”, “a bimbo”, “a vile creature dangerous to kids”, “nasty and vicious”, “stupid”, “a disgrace”, “rabid old hatemonger”, “a typical Australian”.

“Your victim blaming has done almost as much harm to victims of Domestic Violence as the abusers,” read one email.

Yes, the faux-rage meter was at full tilt.

But I value these intemperate expressions, because they provide evidence of a concerted attempt to cover up the truth.

Domestic violence is the last frontier of feminism. You might think women had already achieved equality in the traditional markers of status in our society, most obviously in higher education, where 60 per cent of university graduates last year were female.

But for feminism to remain relevant, it needs to extend victim status even to the most affluent, pampered women of the chattering classes.

Thus the feminist dogma about domestic violence is that all women are equally at risk and all men potential perpetrators.

In the words of Natasha Stott Despoja, Australia’s Ambassador for Women and Girls, and the Chair of domestic violence lobbying organisation Our Watch: “Violence against women does not discriminate, regardless of ethnicity, social status and geography.”

Only, actually, it does.

This is what I pointed out in the column that has enraged the sisterhood, that domestic violence is concentrated in communities where the underclass lives, where welfare dependency has emasculated men, where drug and alcohol abuse is rife, and intergenerational social disadvantage is entrenched.

I cited the latest data from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, showing the rate of domestic violence in Bourke, with its large indigenous population 60 times higher than in affluent north shore Sydney suburbs. The housing estate welfare traps concentrated in Campbelltown and Penrith are similar hotspots.

The evidence is everywhere if you care to look, that poverty, intergenerational dysfunction, mental illness and substance abuse are preconditions for a domestic violence hotspot, with chronic underreporting in indigenous communities hiding the level of distress.

Take the NSW Coroner’s Court’s annual reports of the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team which invariably involve welfare dependent couples in and out of jail, with “cumulative social issues in both cases”.

The cases are marked by “serious social disadvantage including in many cases poverty, substance abuse issues, violent coping mechanisms, intergenerational violence”.

Or take the 2011 BOSCAR report Personal stress, financial stress and violence against women which shows “risk of violence increases progressively with the level of financial stress (and) personal stress”.

For pointing out these inconvenient truths, I was accused of “blaming victims”.

Fake quotes attributed to me, such as: “Rich men don’t hit women.”

The classic modus operandi of feminist outrage sites such as MamaMia is to make up a line, pretend I said it and then attack me for (not) saying it.

This is the intolerance of the femi-fascist. They ignore BOSCAR statistics but trumpet every half-baked internet survey which makes a ludicrous claims such as that a quarter of young Australian men don’t think there’s anything wrong with beating women.

When the Our Watch group, which receives $8 million of federal funding each year to “change attitudes”, wrote a rebuttal to my column this week, it airily claimed that “the latest international evidence shows that factors such as low socio-economic status or harmful use of alcohol do not have a constant or predictable impact on levels of violence against women”.

Yet, when challenged to provide this evidence, Our Watch cited a UN report on domestic violence in other Asia-Pacific countries such as Indonesia, PNG and Bangladesh. When further challenged to provide research from comparable countries to Australia, Our Watch cited a European study which contains Australian criticism of “the lack of attention to social class and to working class community norms and pressures” in domestic violence cases; it also cited a study which found that lower socioeconomic status was more frequent among men enrolled in “batterers’ programs”.

Campaigns such as Destroy the Joint’s Counting Women project insist on making domestic violence a gender issue. It claims 66 women are victims this year, with the implication these are all “intimate partner” homicides, perpetrated by males.

In fact, only about half of the homicides cited could be classified as having a male partner or ex-partner identified as the killer.

Some of the 66 victims were killed by women, by sisters, daughters, a female neighbour or, in one case, a female ex-lover of the victim’s husband, as well as by brothers, fathers, and sons.

Domestic violence is a serious enough without exaggerating.

The activists cherrypick facts to support their dogma, rather than using statistics to better target scarce resources to help the most vulnerable victims, and to address the root causes of domestic violence.

To break the intergenerational cycle of violence, I wrote that we need to “end the welfare incentive for unsuitable women to keep having children to a string of feckless men”. This was twisted to claim that I had called victims of domestic violence “unsuitable women”.

The dishonesty is clear. The aim is to avoid the obvious, that boys brought up in an environment of chaos, dysfunction and violence, who are neglected and abused, are more likely to become abusive, violent men with poor impulse control.

But these are not facts the man-bashing femi-fascists who control the domestic violence industry want to hear.

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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