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21 October, 2005

BAREFACED FEMINIST HYPOCRISY

It is a mark of the rapid decline of our security services that they no longer keep a file on Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary. Once upon a time she was under surveillance by MI5, but our secret agents have diverted their attentions to angry young Muslims and Hewitt has been left to pursue her mischief-making unwatched. This is a mistake. If MI5 won't do it, then it should devolve to the police or, failing that, the voluntary sector. In a spirit of civic duty I'll start the ball rolling.

Her former ministry, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), finally conceded last week that Hewitt had broken the Sex Discrimination Act by personally appointing a woman to the board of the South West Regional Development Agency when a man was the better candidate for the job. The people who interviewed Malcolm Hanney for the post insisted that he was "much the strongest candidate" and a "clear favourite". But Hewitt overruled their decision and appointed Christine Channon, a local councillor, instead. The interviewers had placed Channon third on their list.

Hanney sued, citing sexual discrimination, and won. The DTI now concedes that Hewitt broke the law - but its squirming in the face of this reverse has been a wonder to behold. Its spokesmen said that neither they, collectively, nor Hewitt had realised that they were in breach of the law - which is odd because the DTI is responsible for the Sex Discrimination Act.

Further, if there is a politician in the country who understands the Sex Discrimination Act, then it is Hewitt: it has been one of the many things she has agitated for almost since her emergence from the womb in a Canberra hospital 56 years ago.

Hewitt has spent her entire life agitating. When she left university she immediately started agitating on behalf of elderly people at Age Concern and then spread her wings and took on an unlimited agenda of agitation as general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties. Since then she has agitated at the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Commission on Social Justice. In her spare time she ran Neil Kinnock's press office, having previously been a hardline Bennite who denounced her fellow MPs for not voting for the swivel-eyed, pipe-smoking high priest of leftie agitation when he failed in his attempt to become Labour's deputy leader in 1981. Had they voted as Hewitt insisted, it is possible that we would not have a viable Labour party. Pat often gets it badly wrong. I voted for him too. I am also frequently wrong.

But has she apologised to Hanney? Has she hell. The permanent secretary at the DTI has apologised - but he didn't make the decision. My suspicion is that Hewitt didn't apologise because she isn't remotely sorry. Further, can this business about not understanding the Sex Discrimination Act be true? I suspect she would never concede that its introduction was intended to defend the corner of maltreated job applicants if they were foolish enough to be born with a penis. It was intended to be of benefit only to women. Remember, the National Council for Civil Liberties never defended the civil liberties of workers sacked for refusing to join trade unions. No way.

For Hewitt is a proponent of something with which you will all by now be familiar, that oxymoron "positive discrimination". Her commitment to this crude and often cruel instrument of nanny state social engineering has been steadfast and complete - and it still continues to this day. She has been agitating recently to extend all-women shortlists to candidates in council elections (the main opposition within the Labour party will come from black activists and agitators who fear that all-women shortlists disfavour candidates from an ethnic minority background). She recently exulted that "soon" less than a third of the British workforce would be white males under 45. She was especially delighted at the growing number of workers who were "transgendered". I haven't a clue what this means, but I suppose we should rejoice, too. If you work with transgendered colleagues, give them a pat on the back from me, please.

In fact her entire career seems to have been built on the notion that social change must be enforced on a country that is too stupid or prejudiced to embrace her ideology voluntarily - regardless of the injustice to the individual. Women refuse to enter politics not because they have better things to do but because of male oppression: "Women find the formal political environments very off-putting and I think that's understandable." Discrimination always works in one way: against the woman or against the ethnic minorities. It is not part of Hewitt's make-up to accept that there can often be another side to the argument.

The world is divided into two great hostile camps: the oppressor and the oppressed. So even when she breaks the law and with insufferable arrogance decides that one man's legitimate right to a job should be taken away from him, she is incapable of saying sorry. Because it's the law that's wrong, not Hewitt.

Source



THE INFANTILIZATION OF OUR CULTURE

Twenty years ago we used to laugh at children who were the product of experimental "progressive" schools or nurseries, or indeed the product of progressive, experimental parenting - no rules, no homework, no supervised diet, no chores, no bedtime, no potty training, no hairbrush, no pleases, no thank-yous. These children - everyone knew one, but probably not two - were in the minority. Now they have become the norm.

This is partly to do with the disastrous fact that many parents today are so insecure that they strive to be their small children's "best friend", rather than their parent, failing to grasp that you can have friends coming out of your ears, but you have only one mother and father, and that the two are not interchangeable. Such parents' reluctance to lay down the law has reached epidemic proportions. They cannot say "no", because then they risk unpopularity, a fate in their eyes worse than death.

This has the direst and most tiresome consequences: you go to dinner at someone's house and their children are rampaging about until 2am, making conversation impossible (for which privilege you are paying your babysitter œ7 an hour); you take a child a present and, if you're lucky, get a grunt instead of a thank you (thank-you notes seem to have died out altogether); you have people over for Sunday lunch and have to watch their children eating with their mouths wide open, if they deign to eat at all.

I was recently interrogated by a six-year-old about the specific ingredients, and their quantities, of a lamb stew. I was apparently the only person present that day who thought this was insane.

I know someone who cooks three different suppers for her three children every night, because they all fancy different things. Try pointing out that she's a working mother, not a short-order chef, and you get a lecture about how the little darlings' happiness is paramount.

This, like so much dubious parenting, has a great deal to do with working women's guilt. I do wish someone would explain that all the good that's done by going out to work, being intellectually stimulated and earning a living is completely undone if you're going to come home and behave like a particularly weedy throwback. An imaginary throwback, at that: women in the 1950s didn't cook three separate meals, or have no set bedtime, or no rules.

But what about the rest of us? Why do adults need to be told how to behave? "Don't indulge in nude stretches or contortions in gym changing rooms", Good Housekeeping's guide helpfully tells us. "Don't kiss anyone on the lips other than your partner", or indeed "ogle other men" in front of him. The magazine has a stolid middle-class middle-aged readership: I find the idea of it needing to be told not to bend over naked in public a bit alarming. If even the nice ladies who subscribe to Good Housekeeping need this information, what on earth does that say about the rest of us? That we are a nation of tragic oiks.

Forget not knowing which fork to use: we probably need to be reminded to use cutlery in the first place. In fact when it comes to manners the rude children have won us over: we're all toddlers now, throwing tantrums in public for all we're worth. We are tired and beginning to show off, as my sisters' horrible nanny used to say before briskly dispatching them to bed.

More here



20 October, 2005

FEMINIST CORRECTNESS HURTS MILITARY FATHERS

While our country focuses on the war abroad, many of our soldiers fight personal battles here at home—or more accurately, can’t fight. They are losing their families and getting little help from an administration that claims to “support the troops” while doing nothing to protect the parental rights of the fathers it sent into combat.

All the services are facing a severe drop in recruitment, and additional recruiters, stepped-up advertising, and bigger bonuses have not reversed the trend. The media points to the war itself, but the shortfall also coincides with a dramatic rise in military divorces, which the Army reports have nearly doubled since 2001. “We’ve seen nothing like this before,” says Col. Glen Bloomstrom, a chaplain who oversees family-support programs. “It indicates the amount of stress on couples, on families, as the Army conducts the global war on terrorism.” It indicates much more than stress. “There most certainly is a relationship between current recruiting problems and an increase in military divorces,” says Capt. Gene Thomas Gomulka, a retired Navy chaplain and writer on military marriage.

Muffled by feminist orthodoxy, the Army and media are not disclosing the facts behind these divorces or publicizing the threat they pose to preparedness. The important points are these: the divorces are almost all initiated by wives, the servicemen usually lose their children—which for many is their main incentive for serving their country—and finally, they often become liable to criminal prosecution for child support that is impossible for them to pay.

Laws protecting active-duty servicemen against legal actions are ignored by family courts. Deployed servicemen have virtually no protection against unilaterally initiated divorce proceedings that permanently separate them from their children without any show of wrongdoing. Child kidnapping laws likewise do not protect them from having their children relocated, even to foreign countries, while they cannot be present to defend their parental rights. When they return, they have no necessary right to see their children—and can be arrested for trying to do so—who often join the ranks of the permanently fatherless.

The Lansing State Journal recently reported on Joe McNeilly, a National Guardsman who “would still have his son if he hadn’t been deployed,” according to Maj. Dawn Dancer, public-affairs officer for the Michigan National Guard. Invoking the correct legal buzzwords, the mother and her lawyer claimed he lost custody not because of his deployment but because of his “parenting skills.” Yet his parenting skills were clearly defined in terms of his deployment. The court attested that it stripped him of custody because his wife was the “day-to-day caretaker and decision maker in the child’s life” while McNeilly was deployed. His alleged parental deficiencies also proceeded apparently from his duties as a soldier. “My client is making sure to turn off the TV when the news reports deaths in Iraq,” the mother’s lawyer said, “and (McNeilly) was engaging in behaviors that brought fear.” In other words, he was fighting a war

Even more astounding, vicariously divorced servicemen can be criminally prosecuted for child-support arrearages that are almost impossible not to accrue while they are on duty. Reservists are hit particularly hard because their child-support burdens are based on their civilian pay and do not decrease when their income decreases. Because reservists are often mobilized with little notice, few get modifications before they leave, and modifications are almost never granted anyway. They cannot get relief when they return because federal law prohibits retroactive reductions for any reason. Once arrearages reach $5,000, the soldier becomes a felon and subject to imprisonment.

More here



WORKING CLASS BRITISH MALES WORSE THAN MUSLIMS?

The Leftist British elite hate their own working class while they jealously protect Muslims

What do you reckon the reaction would be if spy aircraft tracked the movement of suspicious-looking Muslim youths, just in case these "potential terrorists" do something illegal?

Strangely, I have not heard anybody complain about the German authorities' plan to use a squadron of Awacs, Nato's military spy planes, "to follow football fans around Germany" and spot potential hooligans during next summer's World Cup. This is the latest in an extraordinary battery of measures that governments have deployed against the minor problem of fat men misbehaving at football matches. When it comes to football hooliganism, fashionable concerns about human rights fly out of the window.

Judges and opposition politicians object loudly to the Government's draconian proposal to detain terrorism suspects for weeks without charge. Nobody seems to mind when police ask the courts to issue a football banning order taking away a British citizen's passport without charge or trial. There are more than 3,000 FBOs in force, and will be many more before next summer as a joint Home Office/police chiefs body enforces a new "zero tolerance" policy on minor offences.

When two men objected that their six-year football banning orders infringed human rights laws, the courts ruled that such "very firm measures were justified to confront the various sickening ills of football violence". It seems strange that these "very firm measures" are deemed more legitimate than draconian anti-terror laws. After all, the "various sickening ills of football violence" do not include suicide bombings.

The difference is that "potential football hooligans" tend to be white working-class men. And most judges, human rights lawyers, liberal journalists and MPs tend to despise those whom they see as white trash every bit as much as the Government does. "Chav scum" are the one minority it is legitimate to give a good kicking to.

The authorities' target is not just a few violent boneheads but the whole "drinking culture" of proletarian excess that accompanies big tournaments. A "football hooliganism expert" from the Netherlands, where they put suspected hooligans under house arrest during matches, this week told BBC radio of his fears about England fans, having watched them at the World Cup qualifier against Wales in Cardiff. "They were drinking without shirts on, they don 't integrate with the local supporters, they hate some people from other countries and refer to the war, and it doesn't make a nice relaxing atmosphere." How long before shirtless drinking is made a banning offence? Although anybody who thinks that the World Cup should be played in "a nice relaxing atmosphere" does seem like a candidate for house arrest for the duration of the tournament.

The other people who seem to believe that the white working class are all braindead lager-soaked soccer hooligans who deserve all that they get are, of course, Muslim extremists. Where do they get their ideas from?

Source



A SATIRICAL LOOK AT HOW TO DEFEAT "OBESITY"

Nobody wants to be fat. Nobody wants anybody else to be fat. Politicians and medical professionals would like to see everybody un-fat. And still we get fatter. On my Marxist days, I like to think of this as a groundswell of subversive collective action - a playfully ironic protest in which we destroy consumerism by consuming so much that we cost more to keep alive than we'll ever make. The coolest thing is that even children are involved. Who said you could be too young for politics? But on other days, I have to concede that it's probably just because we eat too much by accident.

Deirdre Hutton, chairwoman of Britain's Food Standards Agency, has delineated how these accidents happen. We eat too much processed food - most at risk are teenage girls, male city workers, "people in poorer communities" (when did it become inappropriate to say "poor people"?) and the over-50s. Her first hurdle is to harry packaged-food manufacturers into making food healthier, or at least flagging up in big red letters how unhealthy it is.

Burger King told her where to stick it. (They want their customers to "take responsibility for their own health" - how sweet. It makes me feel like they really respect me. Now I fancy a Whopper Junior.) Others will be more co-operative, I feel sure, but this is a pointless battle. Processed food is sugar, salt and fat-loaded because it doesn't taste nice otherwise; it's been sitting around too long. Anyone who's tried to have some fun with a two-day-old roast potato can vouch for this. Healthy processed food will always taste like self-denial; to get people eating well without feeling hard done by, they need fresh food.

How do you achieve this? Well, "male city workers" are time-poor - to get them eating nutritious hotpots nightly, you need to supply them with some help: a wife, for instance, or - not wishing to gender-bias this - a good friend to stay at home and stew while they work. In other words, you'd need to reverse a trend of the past 50 years and bring back the doubly occupied single-income unit. That would be tricky, no?

"People in poor communities" are more straightforward - they would eat better if they had more money, thereby a) having more time for home-cooking, since they don't have to work so hard; and b) not having to shop exclusively in Iceland. How do you make the poor less poor? With redistributive taxation. How amazingly unfashionable; I feel I've just offered you a spam sandwich.

To return to teenagers, they tend to be either undereating or overeating, largely for psychological reasons. You could reverse this by outlawing cultural images in which an unattainable body shape is presented as the norm, and strengthening their sense of self so that it extended beyond sexual objectification. That sounds hard as well.

It is so far unclear why the over-50s should be eating badly, but let's imagine that the erosion of the family unit has left people isolated, and home-cooking is an activity people rarely undertake alone (one famous British TV chef once wrote a book called One is Fun!; you'd be amazed how offended people are to receive it as a gift). The answer would be to repeal all divorce laws so that people had to stay together, and somehow to reverse the trend wherein youth is idolised and older people, feeling disfranchised, eat more biscuits. It's an idea, but I don't fancy your chances.

Obesity, in the end, is a function of social progress. To blame fat-loaded food is like blaming Bill Gates for the people who email you when you'd rather they stopped in for a coffee. To try to reverse it with well-meant advice is like telling a Viking warrior to chill out about his masculinity. I say we bring back rationing. It might sound extreme, but given the alternatives, it also sounds surprisingly manageable.

Source



19 October, 2005

BRITISH FOOD FASCISTS TO JAIL PEOPLE OVER INCORRECT FOOD

Governors of schools that continue to serve junk food to children after it has been banned could be prosecuted and receive a criminal record, the Education Secretary suggested yesterday. Ruth Kelly said that when laws to ban poor-quality burgers and sausages come into force, those who do not take their duty seriously will be "open to the same sanctions as anyone else who breaks the law". Ms Kelly said she did not believe that there would be prosecutions because she was sure that schools and local authorities would want to provide healthy meals. But she said that governors would be held responsible for food standards and any breaches would be picked up by Ofsted inspectors. Ms Kelly said: "Governors will have a new duty and will be responsible for the food that is served in their schools. Ofsted is going to inspect to make sure that schools are taking this duty seriously. There will be a law in place that says they have to make these standards."

The approach was criticised as heavy handed by the Conservatives. David Cameron, the shadow education secretary, said: "It seems that Ruth Kelly is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. We support the ban on junk food and put this policy forward before the election, but this seems to go too far."

It also emerged yesterday that a new qualification for dinner ladies announced by Ms Kelly to bolster "crucial skills" does not involve any cooking or work in the kitchen. The course will take only six hours to complete and has no practical content. Drawn up by City and Guilds, the Award in Providing a Healthier School Meals Service teaches the elements that make up a balanced diet for children and the nutrient composition of different foods. It also teaches how to persuade children to choose healthier options though "marketing and merchandising". At the end of the course, dinner ladies will answer multiple choice questions to test their knowledge of nutritional guidelines. The country's 80,000 dinner ladies will be expected to go through the training. School caterers say, however, that the qualification will do little to address the problem of how to provide a healthy diet for 50p a meal or less.

In a survey by Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine, completed by a quarter of the Local Authority Caterers Association, representing about 10,000 schools, staff described the course as "college-based, vague and absent of kitchen craft". Neil Porter, the former chairman of the association, said: "It needs to be more hands-on and teach caterers how to make food more nutritious. There is too much emphasis on marketing." One respondent said: "People want knife skills, menu planning and standardised recipes across the authority." Another said: "We need to know how to prepare and cook vegetables properly, basic pastry work, vegetarian cookery and how to present food appealingly." The qualification, part of a œ280 million programme to improve school meals, was branded a gimmick by the Conservatives when it was announced.

In her speech to the Labour conference in Brighton, Ms Kelly pledged to ban junk food from school canteens and to bring in minimum nutritional standards for all school meals, including breakfast and after-school clubs, by next September. Crisps, chocolate and sugary drinks will also be banned from tuck shops and vending machines. The proposals, which will not come into force for another 12 months, follow the television chef Jamie Oliver's campaign to improve school meals.

A list of foods to be banned from school kitchens will be published this week when the School Meals Review Panel reports back. It is expected to include junk food with high levels of salt, sugar and fat. Some border-line products, such as chips, fresh cakes and baked doughnuts, are likely to escape the purge. But they may be limited to once or twice a week. Mary Creagh, the Labour MP for Wakefield who has been campaigning on school food, said she was delighted. "This is great news," she said. "At last we will have a national curriculum for children's bodies as well as a national curriculum for their minds."

Ms Creagh's Food Bill, which will be debated in Parliament next month, calls for compulsory nutrition classes for all children and for a ban on marketing and advertising junk food to children.

Source



WALKING NOW INCORRECT IN BRITAIN

But cycling is OK, of course

With her year-round tan, long blonde hair and designer clothes, Sally Cameron does not look like a threat to national security. But the 34-year-old property developer has joined the ranks of Britain's most unlikely terrorist suspects after being held for hours for trespassing on a cycle path.

Ms Cameron was being hailed yesterday as Scotland's answer to Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old heckler manhandled out of the Labour Party conference last month. She was arrested under the Terrorism Act for walking along a cycle path in the harbour area of Dundee.

Yesterday, after receiving a letter from the Tayside procurator fiscal's office informing her that she would not be prosecuted, Ms Cameron said: "It is utterly ridiculous that such an inoffensive person as myself should be subject to such heavy-handed treatment."

She was walking from her office in Dundee to her home in the suburb of Broughty Ferry when she was arrested under new anti-terrorist legislation and held for four hours. She said: "I've been walking to work every morning for months and months to keep fit. One day, I was told by a guard on the gate that I couldn't use the route any more because it was solely a cycle path and he said, if I was caught doing it again, I'd be arrested. "The next thing I knew, the harbour master had driven up behind me with a megaphone, saying, `You're trespassing, please turn back'. It was totally ridiculous. I started laughing and kept on walking. Cyclists going past were also laughing. "But then two police cars roared up beside me and cut me off, like a scene from Starsky and Hutch, and officers told me I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act. The harbour master was waffling on and (saying that), because of September 11, I would be arrested and charged."

Ms Cameron, who said that at one stage one of the officers asked her to stop laughing, described the incident as "like a scene from the movie Erin Brockovich, with all the dock workers cheering me and telling me to give them hell". She said: "I was told that the cycle path was for cyclists only, as if walkers and not cyclists were the only ones likely to plant bombs. There are no signs anywhere saying there are to be no pedestrians. "They took me to the police station and held me for several hours before charging me and releasing me."

She said that she was particularly galled by the letter from the procurator fiscal's office, which said that she would not be prosecuted even though "the evidence is sufficient to justify bringing you before the court on this criminal charge".

Keith Berry, the harbour master at Forth Ports Dundee, said yesterday that Ms Cameron had been seen as a "security risk". Speaking about the incident, which took place in May, he said: "We contacted the police in regards to this matter because the woman was in a secure area which forbids people walking. It was seen as a security risk. We were following guidelines in requirement with the port security plan set up by the Government."

Source



THE INCORRECTNESS OF MARYAM NAMAZIE

A week ago, at a reception in one of London's dowdier hotels, Maryam Namazie received a cheque and a certificate stating that she was Secularist of the Year 2005. The audience from the National Secular Society cheered, but no one else noticed. At first glance, the wider indifference wasn't surprising. Everyone is presenting everyone else with prizes these days - even journalists get them. If coverage was given to all award winners, there would be no space left in the papers for news. On top of that, secularism is still an eccentric cause. Despite the privileges of the established churches, this is one of the most irreligious countries on Earth. The bishops have power but no influence, and the notion that you need a tough-minded movement to combat religious influence still feels quaint. Like republicanism, secularism is an ideal which can enthuse the few while leaving the many cold.

The rise of the Christian right in the United States and the Islamic right everywhere, of faith schools and religious censorship is breaking down complacency. The 7 July bombings should have blown it to pieces. But the Ealing comedy caricature of a kind vicar, who may be a bit silly but remains intrinsically decent, is still most people's picture of the religious in England, not least because there is truth in it. (It's a different matter in Northern Ireland and on the west coast of Scotland, for obvious reasons.)

For all that, Maryam Namazie's obscurity remains baffling. She ought to be a liberal poster girl. Her life has been that of a feminist militant who fights the oppression of women wherever she finds it. She was born in Tehran, but had to flee with her family when the Iranian revolution brought the mullahs to power. After graduating in America, she went to work with the poor in the Sudan. When the Islamists seized control, she established an underground human rights network. Her cover was blown and she had to run once again. She's been a full-time campaigner for the rights of the Iranian diaspora, helping refugees across the world and banging on to anyone who will listen about the vileness of its treatment of women.

When an Iranian judge hanged a 16-year-old girl for having sex outside marriage - I mean literally hanged her; he put the noose round her neck himself - Namazie organised global protests. Her best rhetorical weapon is her description of the obsessiveness of theocracy. The law in Iran not only allows women to be stoned, she says, but it specifies the size of the stones to be used; they mustn't be too small in case it takes too long to kill her and the mob gets bored; but mustn't be too big either, in case she is dispatched immediately and the mob is denied the sado-sexual pleasure of seeing her suffer.

She's media-friendly and literate, not least because she runs the London-based International TV English whose programmes have a large following in the Middle East. Yet one of the most important feminists from the developing world has never been on Woman's Hour. I searched our huge cuttings database and could find only one mention of her in the national press over the past 10 years. Right-thinking, left-leaning people have backed away from Maryam Namazie because she is just as willing to tackle their tolerance of oppression as the oppressors themselves.

It was the decision of broad-minded politicians in Ottawa to allow Sharia courts in Canada which did it for her. They said if they were not established, the Muslim minority would be marginalised and to say otherwise was racism pure and simple. After years of hearing this postmodern twaddle, Namazie flipped. Why was it, she asked, that supposed liberals always give 'precedence to cultural and religious norms, however reactionary, over the human being and her rights'? Why was it that they always pretended that other cultures were sealed boxes without conflicts of their own and took 'the most reactionary segment of that community' as representative of the belief and culture of the whole.

In a ringing passage, which should be pinned to the noticeboards of every cultural studies faculty and Whitehall ministry, she declared that the problem with cultural relativism was that it endorsed the racism of low expectations. 'It promotes tolerance and respect for so-called minority opinions and beliefs, rather than respect for human beings. Human beings are worthy of the highest respect, but not all opinions and beliefs are worthy of respect and tolerance. There are some who believe in fascism, white supremacy, the inferiority of women. Must they be respected?'

Richard J Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, pointed out in Defence of History that if you take the relativist position to its conclusion and believe there's no such thing as truth and all cultures are equally valid, you have no weapons to fight the Holocaust denier or Ku Klux Klansmen.

Namazie is on the right side of the great intellectual struggle of our time between incompatible versions of liberalism. One follows the fine and necessary principle of tolerance, but ends up having to tolerate the oppression of women, say, or gays in foreign cultures while opposing misogyny and homophobia in its own. (Or 'liberalism for the liberals and cannibalism for the cannibals!' as philosopher Martin Hollis elegantly described the hypocrisy of the manoeuvre.) The alternative is to support universal human rights and believe that if the oppression of women is wrong, it is wrong everywhere.

The gulf between the two is unbridgeable. Although the argument is rarely put as baldly as I made it above, you can see it breaking out everywhere across the liberal-left. Trade union leaders stormed out of the anti-war movement when they discovered its leadership had nothing to say about the trade unionists who were demanding workers' rights in Iraq and being tortured and murdered by the 'insurgents' for their presumption.

Former supporters of Ken Livingstone reacted first with bewilderment and then steady contempt when he betrayed Arab liberals and embraced the Islamic religious right. The government's plans to ban the incitement of religious hatred have created an opposition which spans left and right and whose members have found they have more in common with each other than with people on 'their side'. As Namazie knows, the dispute can't stay in the background for much longer. There's an almighty smash-up coming and not before time.

Source



18 October, 2005

EVEN "UNCONSCIOUS" DISCRIMINATION IS ILLEGAL IN AUSTRALIA

But, as in Britain, it is the anti-discrimination bodies themselves that discriminate most. The comment below refers to a recent Australian court case where a group of older women failed to get jobs as stewardesses (Whoops! "Flight Attendants") with an Australian airline and sued the airline for discrimination -- successfully

Odd times, when Virgin Blue must hand a woman $5000 because its staff "unconsciously" liked someone else more. Don't daydream in Queensland, folks. Those thoughts could cost you. It was Queensland's anti-discrimination tribunal that this week ruled Virgin discriminated against eight women, aged 36 to 56, refusing to hire them as flight attendants because they thought them too old. It's not that Virgin consciously avoided hiring older hosties. Even the tribunal said that. In fact, these women were interviewed despite giving their age. But they then had to audition to show they had "Virgin flair".

Personally, I find "Virgin flair" as welcome as a drunk in the aisle seat. Those jokes and ecstatic welcomes are on the needy side of pleasing. But Virgin knows better than me -- or a tribunal -- how to run an airline. And so it made applicants do routines with Mickey Mouse ears and a feather boa. Not surprisingly, it seemed younger applicants had more Virgin Flair than did the older women, not one of whom got the job. I suspect a 50-year-old has too much self-respect to happily caper around cattle class singing goofy songs.

But this was bad. Tribunal member Douglas Savage, QC, decided the young Virgin staff running the auditions had, without thinking, identified with applicants who looked like them. Young. Fresh. As he snapped: "A fun person." Actually, hadn't they simply figured parties swing better with younger hosts? But perhaps that's not a smart argument to put in a tribunal whose sombre members aren't all in the first riot of youth.

Indeed, Savage ruled the older applicants were kept out by nothing more than unconscious prejudice, and ordered compensation. And the evidence that clinched it -- the Virgin Blue Clue -- was that only one of 750 attendants hired by Virgin at the time was over 36. But let's check out this analysis in other fields. Let's try it, for instance, on the anti-discrimination bodies. Gosh, the head and deputy head of Queensland's Anti-Discrimination Commission, and its tribunal chief, are all women. In Victoria, four of the five Equal Opportunity Commission members are women, too, and the lone male is gay. What odds, when most top lawyers are straight men?

The Virgin Blue Clue would have us think this proves discrimination. But, of course, that's false, because anti-discrimination commissars are chosen not for their gender, but expertise. And to accuse anyone of getting a job through even "unconscious discrimination" would be dangerous. The thoughts of some people, at least, are still private. And thank heavens.

(From Andrew Bolt)



CALIFORNIAN FOOD CORRECTNESS CATCHING UP WITH BRITAIN

Nobody ever considers that what you eat might be your own business. The Orwellian future is creeping up on us.

Rosemont High's lunchtime scene is typical of many California schools, and one that will have to change radically to conform to new state laws that restrict sales of so-called "competitive" foods and beverages - a category that takes in all the snack foods and vending machine items sold at schools outside the federally approved breakfast and lunch programs. Although the state already has in place some food sale restrictions for elementary and junior high schools, the new laws tighten the guidelines and extend them into high schools, where junk food sales are rampant.

The laws take effect incrementally, starting in 2007. One bans sales of sodas and other high-sugar drinks during school hours. The other imposes strict limits on the sugar, fat and caloric content of all foods not sold as part of a full and balanced meal. While parents can continue to send their kids to school with treats, health advocates hope the new restrictions will go a long way toward dismantling the snack food culture ingrained in public schools: PTA bake sales, Funyuns-filled vending machines, cafeteria Eskimo Pies - they all could be things of the past.

With obesity now the nation's No. 1 health concern, many schools in the region have tried to ratchet down sales of high-fat and high-calorie snacks. But given the popularity of the less nutritious fare at schools such as Rosemont - and the hefty profits the student store generates - the transition will be a hard one. California is at the forefront of a national movement to reclaim school food service programs from PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, Nabisco and other snack food brands that are popular but not necessarily nutritious. Indeed, the new laws, signed with fanfare in September by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been hailed as the nation's most sweeping. But California's experience until now, and concerns expressed by those responsible for implementing the changes, offer clues to the rocky path ahead:

* Many extracurricular programs are funded through the sales of snack food and sodas.

* As it is, schools routinely ignore or misinterpret existing state and federal regulations regarding food sales.

* State education officials have few resources to help administer and enforce food regulations.

* Students have grown accustomed to eating junk food at lunch and many dislike the cafeteria alternatives.

Rosemont's experience offers a good example of the challenges. The Rosemont student store, which opens promptly at the lunch hour, earns up to $500 per day. About 30 percent of the proceeds are funneled to various student activities, including Spirit Week and the printing of the school newspaper. The store also provides work experience for members of student government. Although the store offers some healthier snacks, such as Nutri-Grain bars, the most popular items are the least nutritious. The Ramen noodle soup, for example, has 290 calories and contains 1,190 milligrams of sodium and 12 grams of fat. The Flamin' Hot Cheetos, at 170 calories per serving, have 11 grams of fat and 250 milligrams of sodium....

Cindy Currier, Rosemont's student activities adviser and a former physical education teacher, oversees the student store. She acknowledged that many of her customers consume junk food for lunch. "It bothers me that they are not eating healthy," she said. Still, like many school officials, Currier is convinced that when the student store stops selling such items, kids will just buy them off campus, depriving the school of revenue. Currier said students will conduct research to find out what items their peers will buy and then adjust the store's offerings to comply with the new laws. But she's in no hurry to institute changes. "I don't want to see that, because our sales will go down," she said.

Rosemont Principal Rob Jones echoed the concerns. "If we don't replace that funding, all of those activities will have to be looked at: drama, speech, debate and sports clubs." .....

Phyllis Bramson-Paul, director of the Nutrition Services Division at the state Department of Education, acknowledged the compliance problems. While the department supports the new food laws, she said, the laws don't come with additional money or resources to help with implementation and enforcement. Nevertheless, she said, she is meeting with a nutrition committee appointed by the state Board of Education to address the problems.

Back at Rosemont, Deanna Mitchell, food service site supervisor, said she is torn about the upcoming changes. While she appreciates the financial boost the student store provides, she thinks restricting sales of chips and candy could improve revenue for her meal program - not to mention student health. "Maybe the kids would be hungry and look at what is available, and realize, 'Wow, that's not so bad after all,' " she said.

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GRAVE DANGER TO FREE SPEECH IN BRITAIN

The tension between free speech and the safety of the population is a genuine one. Charles Clarke, the home secretary, has just modified part of the Terrorism Bill which dealt with "glorifying" terrorism. Imams and others will now be prosecuted only if their remarks are seen as as inducements to further terrorist acts. Most people will have little problem with such a law. The fact that certain people, mainly radical Muslims, have abused our tolerance to incite acts of terror has rightly provoked anger.

Where there is a problem, however, is with another government assault on free speech that has no direct connection with terrorism - the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. If it becomes law, anybody who publishes or says anything "likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom it is likely to stir up racial or religious hatred" will be committing an offence that could make them liable to a seven-year prison term.

This bill has so far attracted most attention because of the efforts of comedians such as Rowan Atkinson. They have argued that it would prevent them poking even gentle fun at any religion. It also featured during the election campaign when Mr Clarke - billing himself as "Labour's home secretary" - wrote to every mosque in the country highlighting Conservative and Liberal Democrat opposition to the proposals. There was a clear implication that the government was trying to secure the Muslim vote.

However, the issue goes beyond the freedom of comedians to tell jokes and it should concern us all. This misguided and unnecessary bill has already passed through the House of Commons, winning a third reading in July by 301 votes to 229. Not for the first time, the task of preserving our ancient freedoms falls to the House of Lords.

The bill, according to one lord, "is the most illiberal measure that has been brought before your lordships in the 18 years I have been privileged to serve here . . . It is also irrational in that it is neither directed at, nor will it solve, the problems that gave rise to it. What it does is reduce freedom of expression - there is no doubt about that at all". The author of those comments was Lord Peston of Mile End, one of Labour's peers.

If that does not make the government pause for thought, other objections should. Lord Lester of Herne Hill, the Liberal Democrat peer and a noted expert on free speech and human rights, points out that the powers in the bill are "sweepingly broad", they apply to words spoken in private as well as in public, and unlike most other serious offences they require no specific criminal intent. Lord Hunt of Wirral points out that similar proposals were rejected by parliament in 1936, 1965 and 1981 and that "no generation of politicians has the right to play fast and loose with our fundamental freedoms".

Most devastatingly of all, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, the former lord chancellor, notes that the bill carries with it the worst of unintended consequences. It could, he argues, mean that anybody criticising radical imams for poisoning the minds of impressionable young men could find themselves subject to prosecution. The Terrorism Bill and the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill are pulling in opposite directions.

Overseeing all this in the House of Lords is Lord Falconer, Tony Blair's former flatmate. As lord chancellor he has shown a sloppy disregard for ancient traditions and freedoms. This bill will achieve nothing that cannot be done under existing laws while representing a dangerous attack on free speech. It is opposed by most religious leaders. It must be stopped

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17 October, 2005

THE INCORRECT NORMAN JOHNSON

"The Guardian", Britain's major paper of the Left, has recently hired a guy with a most amusing shtick. I gather that he is an ex-Marxist and he still manages to sound like a raging Leftist while at the same time saying things that in Leftist circles can only be called "courageous". He could be seen as a conservative camouflaged as a Leftist. It is a most amusing act. The excerpt below, for instance, is actually a defence of the invasion of Iraq and an attack on censorship by the Left!. He has also recently written another article in which he says the most abusive things possible about Margaret Thatcher but which ends up concluding that she got it right on all the major issues! He sort of lulls the Left to sleep with Leftist-sounding rhetoric and then hits them when they are not looking. Certainly good for a laugh anyway. I also reproduce below the "punch" paragraph from his article about Margaret Thatcher:

"And do commentators whose default column is a reflexive squeal about Charles Clarke's attempt to set some limits to the misuse of history by terrorist apologists still fail to grasp that, in reality, it is they and their colleagues on the middle-class left who have evolved into this country's most implacably efficient censors, trampling on dissent with a ruthlessness that makes the most ossified enforcers of Sharia law look like the blithe young hippies of my uninhibited, pre-chlamydian youth? The really brilliant thing about this conspiracy of silence in the creeping caliphate of the left is: there is no conspiracy! Like Mao's supine masses, most of the media droolocracy are now so vacantly subservient that gags are redundant. They've read the Guardian letters page. They know a pro-war position won't just see you perjured by Islamofascist performers on late-night current affairs shows, but issued with one of the New Statesman's own-brand fatwas and victimised by sneering guests at private dinners.

No less than Mao, the appeaser-dominated media has abused its position to distort the minds of a whole generation. Last week I noticed that our recyling bin had, once again, been left in the street. Civilly, I asked the young binman to return it to its proper place, a service he is contractually obliged to provide. "Put it back yourself you lazy slug," he replied. To anyone who, like me, had followed the Hitchens-Galloway confrontation, his allusion was unmistakable. "This is about the war, isn't it?" I said, adding, as the door closed on his protestations: "You're a disgrace to your profession."

On that other historic disputation, it was striking that when two Britishers wanted to debate the war, they had to cross the pond. You think I exaggerate? Get real. When did you last come across a play, poem or novel which, if its message wasn't crassly anti-war, didn't ignore the subject entirely? Is it possible that no creative person, anywhere, believes there is in fact a case for a degree of indefinite chaos in Iraq, plus a heightened terrorist threat in this country, if that is the price of overthrowing its foul and degenerate dictator? If not, the emergence of a British samizdat is but a matter of time. For the lonely few prepared to speak out against the totalitarian excesses of Saddam, contemporary British experience can offer surreal echoes of his very abuses. But I'm happy if you're happy. Bring it on.

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The Thatcher comment:

But you'd have to be stupid, or perverse, to deny the evil old bag got a couple of things right. Anyone would, given 11 years. So, yes, the unions were sorted on her watch. And I say that as someone whose big toe has never been the same since Wapping. Ditto the cold war. There was respect for the transatlantic alliance. Caution on Europe. The economy, stupid. Council houses for sale. Shaking up the teachers. A national curriculum. League tables. Rail privatisation. De-fetishisation of the green belt. The foundations for PFI. Concern for the daytime-TV-watching classes. Full prisons. Contracting out. Rupert Murdoch.

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WINEMAKING INCORRECT -- IN CALIFORNIA, OF ALL PLACES

Because it produces alcohol (ethanol) believe it or not! Note the insanity I have highlighted in red. And note -- surprise, surprise -- that is only big businesses that are being targeted

That glass of garnet-colored California merlot may caress the palate and delight the nose, but state officials say wineries also create a less agreeable byproduct: smog. Now air-quality managers in California's San Joaquin Valley, where nearly two-thirds of domestic wine is produced, are cracking down. By year's end, local officials will propose the nation's first restrictions targeting pollution from winemaking. "We have regulated virtually all other significant (non-vehicle) sources, some a lot smaller than wineries," says San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District planning director Scott Nester. Winemaking pollution "is significant, and it is completely uncontrolled."

Whether the end result is jammy, tannic or crisp, the fermentation of grapes to make wine creates pure alcohol, also known as ethanol, that is vented to the air. Ethanol vapors belong to a family of so-called organic chemicals that mix with others to form smog. That might not be a problem if the valley's topography didn't trap organic chemicals and others, allowing them to fester. That leads to some of the nation's dirtiest air: Smog levels exceeded federal health limits on 109 days in 2004. "We've got to do what we can to control emissions," Nester says. That means regulating wineries, even though they create only 0.3% of the valley's emission of smog-forming organic chemicals. Cars and trucks account for 37%.

Oenophiles - wine lovers - shouldn't fear for their favorite $50 California chardonnays. For starters, other winemaking regions in the state and across the country are unlikely to follow the valley's lead, because none of them have nearly as much smog. And the new rule would exempt white wines, which yield less pollution during production than reds.

Although the valley boasts more than 100 winemaking facilities, the rule will apply only to those that churn out the equivalent of 25 million bottles or more per year. That's 18 wineries, owned by giants such as E. & J. Gallo. They make mostly bargain-priced stuff, not the type of drink that inspires high-flown prose from wine critics. "These are major production facilities ... not boutique wineries," says Wendell Lee, general counsel of the Wine Institute, a trade group for California wineries.

Some scientists say the valley is looking in the wrong place to cut smog. Ken Fugelsang, an oenologist at California State University, Fresno, said he and others found in the 1980s that winery emissions are an insignificant threat compared with auto emissions. University of California, Davis, oenologist Roger Boulton says there's no evidence that ethanol turns into smog.

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16 October, 2005

The immorality of 'hate crimes' legislation

"Let's be clear about one thing. When it comes to crime in America, far too many lawmakers believe not all of us were created equal. In fact, thanks to the multicultural cultists in government and the federal judiciary, some Americans, it seems, are so threatened they deserve special "victim" status and treatment.

This utterly fallible line of thought was again brought to the forefront last month in the form of yet another piece of "hate crimes" legislation - only this time it actually made some progress, thanks to the support of a Congress dominated by Republicans once morally strong enough to withstand such blatant attacks on American principles of equality.

On Sept. 14, the House voted 223-199 in favor of a bill that would give the federal government more authority to prosecute crimes committed against individuals ostensibly on the basis of race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The bill's future in the Senate is uncertain, but that this issue got so much Republican support after enduring years of GOP-bashing is remarkably disappointing.

For one, Sen. George Allen, R-Va., who said he likes this bill and will vote for it, has been reduced to back-peddling from a pledge he made five years ago to pro-family groups while running for office that he would not support these kinds of proposals.....

The fact is, most hate crimes are really just "thought crimes" anyway. And as such, how can a person ever be judged fairly based on someone else's perception of his or her thoughts?"

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THE ENGLISH FARMER'S TRADITIONAL FLAT HAT IS NOW INCORRECT

A pub that banned drinkers from wearing hooded tops has now put a block on farmers wearing their flat caps - in case it offends the hoodies. The White Hart in Uttoxeter, Staffs, a favourite with farmers, recently introduced CCTV and banned hooded tops so that troublemakers might be more easily identified. Rob Woodward, the landlord, said it was only fair to widen the ban to include all types of headgear.

About 20 farmers, who always used to visit after going to the local market, are now boycotting the pub. David Brookes, 46, who runs a dairy farm at Lower Loxley, near Uttoxeter, has been a regular for nearly 20 years and said the rule had made farmers feel like criminals. He added: "The worst that farmers do is have a few drinks and fall asleep in the corner."

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Americans Prepare to Celebrate Genocidal Racist Slaver Day: Columbus' Legacy of Mindless Cruelty and Ignorance Lives On

Although UNH neatly dodges the issue by calling the holiday "Fall Break," the rest of the nation celebrates Columbus Day with no small enthusiasm. The holiday has been celebrated on various dates throughout the world, but here it will be observed on Monday.

In one second-grade classroom in Springfield, Penn., for example, Judith Bloomfield teaches one of her favorite lessons, the story of Columbus' discovery of the New World.

"Did you know Columbus is personally responsible for the oppression and misery of thousands of natives of the Caribbean?" asked the teacher. The students, all energetic young children roughly seven or eight years old, ooh and ahh in amazement. The class was similarly impressed and delighted to learn that, in addition to "Sailing the Ocean Blue" in 1492, Columbus also "Murdered By the Score" in Fourteen-Hundred Ninety-Four.

"I want to be an explorer when I grow up! Maybe there are Martians I could put into forced-labor settlements and cow with my superior technology and ruthlessness?" one student said while discussing Columbus' many merits. They made small construction-paper Taino natives and then the teacher taught them how the enterprising Columbus ordered their hands cut off if they failed to produce a certain quantity of gold on a regular basis. Giggles and laughter ensued as the students cut off the paper hands of their figures and colored the stumps with red markers. "I'm using a white crayon to draw the bone sticking out!" one innovative student said triumphantly. "I want to start a forced-labor farm someday!" said another.

In a less-American sector of the U.S., Berkeley, Calif., Columbus Day has been renamed to the unpatriotic Indigenous People's Day. These subversives, heedless of the long American tradition of honoring the explorers who committed the first pioneering acts of genocide in the New World, have been heavily criticized for their revisionism. They claim, highly erroneously, that Columbus never realized he had reached the New World.

(Just a bit of student satire, of course -- I hope so, anyway)



15 October, 2005

POTATOES NOW INCORRECT IN CALIFORNIA!

How nutty can you get?

Proposition 65 deserves to be renamed "the law of mythological food fears." It's the California act of 1986 which "requires businesses to provide clear and reasonable warning if their products expose any individual to a chemical known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity." Couched by many as the "right to know law," it has increased the number of carcinogens and reproductive toxicants subject to government regulations -- with resultant warning labels on everything -- to 367 and 179, respectively. But it's done so at the expense of regulatory relevance and sound science. Instead, it's become the vehicle used by activists to terrify us about our food -- namely "unnatural" or processed "junk" food -- by not giving consumers the full story.

This has been exemplified in California attorney general Bill Lockyer's recent lawsuit against nine manufacturers of potato chips and french fries because of the presence of the chemical, acrylamide. "All consumers should have the information we need to make informed decisions about the food we eat," said Lockyer. "Proposition 65 requires companies to tell us when we're exposed to potentially dangerous toxins in our food; the law benefits us all."

Of course, we all have the right to know what we're eating. We also have the right to balanced, sensible information based on scientific facts.

Traces of acrylamide were first detected in foods three years ago by researchers at the Swedish National Food Administration and Stockholm University. But acrylamide is not a new or growing food contaminant due to modern cooking techniques, as was recently claimed by Alise Cappel, with the Environmental Law Foundation, the California environmental group which has led the use of lawsuits against violators of Proposition 65. Researchers at the Second Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Acrylamide Workshop held in Chicago in April 2004 stated that acrylamide is formed naturally during the Maillard browning reaction, a series of reactions between proteins and carbohydrates during cooking which give golden brown, crispy crusts on breads, baked goods and fried foods, and those rich aromas and flavors to roasted foods. According to Harvard University anthropologist, Richard Wrangham, humans have been cooking for nearly two million years and it's been essential for man's survival as it makes meats and starches softer and digestible, not to mention tastier. In other words, humans have been consuming acrylamide, and the thousands of other Maillard molecules identified thus far, since the age of hunters and gatherers.

While acrylamide increases with high temperature cooking and canning, it also forms in uncooked foods and at room temperature during storage. In fact, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Total Diet Study survey has found acrylamide in forty percent of the foods we eat, with significant variations even among samples of the same foods. Clearly, labeling every food containing acrylamide would be nonsensical. The highest concentrations found thus far are in black olives, graham crackers, smoked almonds, cocoa powder, coffee, onion soup, chips, wholegrain cereals and breads, stoneground sesame and rye crackers, sweet potatoes, peanut butter, baked goods, mixed vegetables, chili, sunflower seeds and even prune juice -- all foods that can be part of a healthful diet. In fact, Barbara J. Petersen, a former FDA principal investigator and World Health Organization advisor, reported at the American Chemical Society symposium, March 28, 2004 in Anaheim, that "virtually all of the foods associated with acrylamide contribute important nutrients (calories, vitamins, minerals, proteins) to the diet." She argued that attempts to "control" acrylamide exposure will result in a negative impact on overall nutrition.

Ignoring these facts, Attorney General Lockyer and the Center for Science in the Public Interest want warning labels only on fries and chips. They cite acrylamide as "another reason to eat less greasy French fries and snack chips." But people eat more bread than fries, and thus are exposed to more acrylamide in breads. Looking at other foods common in most homes, graham crackers, for example, contain about 25% more acrylamide than potato chips and toasted wheat cereal 77% more! Singling out any food is unsound. According to David Acheson, PhD, scientist at the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), there is no food that contributes the majority of exposure. "We are talking about a fairly large spectrum of food, but no single food [is] a primary culprit," he said. "The overall mean acrylamide exposure (in U.S. and international populations) is generally in the range of 0.3 to 0.5 micrograms per kilogram per day."

This brings us to two other absurdities with California's Proposition 65 that defy good science. "Any detectable amount" is considered a "significant chemical exposure," and chemicals are deemed possible human carcinogens based on studies in special cancer-prone rats. But, according to Joseph A. Levitt, director of CFSAN, existing guidelines calling acrylamide a "probable human carcinogen" are based solely on animal studies in which cancer risk was observed in rats fed the "maximum tolerated dose" of acrylamide -- an amount just below the level the rats would be poisoned to death -- at a daily dose for their entire lives starting at 500 micrograms per kilogram of body weight.

Let's translate that. According to current National Health and Nutrition Education Survey (NHANES) data, the average U.S. adult weighs more than 75 kilograms (men and women average 180.7 and 152.3 pounds, respectively), which equates to a lifetime acrylamide daily dose of 37,500 micrograms. A person would have to consume about 195 pounds of french fries, 142 pounds of graham crackers, or 5,350 one-ounce servings (333 pounds) of cheerios every day, for life, in order to approach the lowest level of risk observed in laboratory rats.

But really you could probably eat even more than that, because what Lockyer, ELF and CSPI also aren't disclosing is that there is no evidence that acrylamide actually causes cancer in humans. In fact, for years scientists have been finding a number of Maillard molecules are not only not human carcinogens, but appear to have antioxidant properties. Last year, the National Toxicology Program Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction convened an Expert Panel which reviewed nearly 125 research papers on acrylamide's reproductive and developmental effects on humans. Its report concluded: "Considering the low level of estimated human exposure to acrylamides derived from a variety of sources, the Expert Panel expressed negligible concern for adverse reproductive and developmental effects for exposures in the general population."

Since the 2002 discovery of acrylamide in fried foods, multiple international researchers have attempted unsuccessfully to find a link to human cancer. An Italian study published in the International Journal of Cancer found absolutely no correlation between consumption of fried potatoes (fries or chips) and several human cancers. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Karolinska Institute in Sweden conducted the first prospective study to evaluate the association of acrylamide and cancer. They compared the diets of 987 cancer patients and 538 healthy adults over a five-year period. Their results, published in a 2003 issue of the British Journal of Cancer found that people who ate the most acrylamide, foods containing up to 1200 micrograms, were at no greater risk for kidney, bladder and large bowel cancer than those who ate less. In fact, the risk of bowel cancer was actually 40 percent lower for the group exposed to the most acrylamide.

After three case-control studies on humans failed to find an association between dietary acrylamide and cancer risk, these same Harvard researchers led by Lorelei Mucci, ScD, went on to evaluate acrylamide intake of more than 43,000 women and tracked their health status via national health registers from 1991 to 2002. The results, reported in the March 2005 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association found no association between acrylamide consumed in foods and risk of breast cancer. Additionally, the researchers did not find any increased risk of breast cancer among participants who had greater intakes of foods known to contain acrylamide.

The fact is, there is no peer-reviewed, sound science to prove the claims made by Michael F. Jacobson, CSPI executive director, that "acrylamide is a powerful carcinogen [which] probably causes on the order of a thousand new cases of cancer per year in the United States, perhaps as many as several thousand." As Dr. Acheson said: "Human data indicating that the level of exposure poses a significant health risk I believe is currently lacking. There is a lot of work ongoing to try to fill that gap but, as far as we can determine, that direct link is not there."

Source



UNFORTUNATE SWEDE RUNS OUT OF APPEALS

Any future Swedish sperm donors will need to be a brave lot

A Swedish man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple must pay child support for the three children he fathered, Sweden's Supreme Court ruled today. The man, now 39, donated his sperm to the couple in the early 1990s. Three sons were born during the years 1992-1996, according to Swedish news agency TT which reported the ruling.

The man told the court that he and the women had agreed that he would play no role in the boys' child rearing and that the two women would be their parents. Nonetheless, the man signed a document confirming that he was the biological father of the children. Shortly after he signed the document, the two women separated and the biological mother demanded that the man pay child support.

The man took the case to court, but lost in the district and appeals courts. The Supreme Court upheld those rulings today, saying that as the biological father he is required to pay for the children's upbringing.

Source



14 October, 2005

CHARLES MURRAY CONTINUES HIS BATTLE TO OVERCOME PC WITH FACTS AND REASON

The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media's fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public's misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.

Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders' assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.

One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.

When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.

Hence this essay. Most of the following discussion describes reasons for believing that some group differences are intractable. I shift from "innate" to "intractable" to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. "Intractable" means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins.

I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites. Here are three crucial points to keep in mind as we go along:

1. The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.

2. Covering both sex differences and race differences in a single nontechnical article, I have had to leave out much. I urge that readers with questions consult the fully annotated version of this essay, which includes extensive supplementary material; it is available here at Commentary's Web site.

3. The concepts of "inferiority" and "superiority" are inappropriate to group comparisons. On most specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from "low" to "high," but the results cannot be combined into a score running from "bad" to "good." What is the best score on a continuum measuring aggressiveness? What is the relative importance of verbal skills versus, say, compassion? Of spatial skills versus industriousness? The aggregate excellences and shortcomings of human groups do not lend themselves to simple comparisons. That is why the members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God's chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group's strengths.....

Since we live in an age when students are likely to hear more about Marie Curie than about Albert Einstein, it is worth beginning with a statement of historical fact: Women have played a proportionally tiny part in the history of the arts and sciences. Others have found similar proportions. Even in the 20th century, women got only 2% of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences--a proportion constant for both halves of the century--and 10% of the prizes in literature. The Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, has been given to 44 people since it originated in 1936. All have been men.

The historical reality of male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is not open to argument. The question is whether the social and legal exclusion of women is a sufficient explanation for this situation, or whether sex-specific characteristics are also at work.

Mathematics offers an entry point for thinking about the answer. Through high school, girls earn better grades in math than boys, but boys usually do better on standardized tests. The difference in means is modest, but the male advantage increases as the focus shifts from means to extremes. In a large sample of mathematically gifted youths, for example, seven times as many males as females scored in the top percentile of the SAT mathematics test. We do not have good test data on the male-female ratio at the top one-hundredth or top one-thousandth of a percentile, where first-rate mathematicians are most likely to be found, but collateral evidence suggests that the male advantage there continues to increase, perhaps exponentially.

Evolutionary biologists have some theories that feed into an explanation for the disparity. In primitive societies, men did the hunting, which often took them far from home. Males with the ability to recognize landscapes from different orientations and thereby find their way back had a survival advantage. Men who could process trajectories in three dimensions--the trajectory, say, of a spear thrown at an edible mammal--also had a survival advantage. Women did the gathering. Those who could distinguish among complex arrays of vegetation, remembering which were the poisonous plants and which the nourishing ones, also had a survival advantage. Thus the logic for explaining why men should have developed elevated three-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locations--differences that show up in specialized tests today.

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SOUTHERNERS MAKE INCORRECTNESS A WINNER

In the lyrics of some of today's most popular country songs, the party boats are strung together like a floating trailer park, barefoot women carry babies on their hips, and country boys and redneck girls celebrate the weekend by hitting the mud hole in their 4 x 4s.

The latest people to trade in such images aren't found at snide cocktail parties on the Upper East Side. It's Nashville songwriters who are embracing these stereotypes about rural white Southerners and pushing cultural boundaries in lyrical leaps - from Gretchen Wilson's female anthem "Redneck Woman" to Jason Aldean's paean to small town life, "Hicktown." This bevy of new anthems about "Picassos with a pool stick," as John Michael Montgomery sings in "Paint the Town Redneck," pick up on a spirit of rebellion, brashness, and humor - crossing musical divides, pleasing country fans, and winning new converts as they climb the charts.

Some critics say the lyrics only serve to polarize a deeply divided culture. Songwriters and fans, however, see the lyrics as an empowering image and a longing, in difficult times, of simpler days. In some ways, these good-humored songs, flying in the face of the political correctness of the 1990s, are simply part of a trend in a country that seems to take more of its cultural and political heft from south of the Mason-Dixon line. "Like ["I Fall to Pieces" songwriter] Harlan Howard said, 'Country music is three chords and the truth.' It's just that some country music today tells the truth a little harder," says Ben Bowling, a Nashville songwriter.

As with David Allan Coe's trailblazing 1976 album, "Longhaired Redneck," today's hits combine wit, sleight of phrase, and a romanticization of crooked front porches - all tied to a word that is a reference to the sunburned necks of Southern farmers and which has come to mean, as comedian Jeff Foxworthy has said, "a glorious absence of sophistication."

But while embracing the idea of "down home" in uncertain times, and playing off a strong working-class identity, this sudden redneck relevance is also part of what author Michael Graham argued in his 2003 book, "Redneck Nation": While often looking down its nose at country brethren, urban elites are in many ways mimicking their antics. Graham writes that the most cosmopolitan show on TV, "Sex and the City," is really all about low-class adventures in high-rent neighborhoods, a kind of skyscraper trailer park.

"It's partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it's good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it's a performance," says Charles Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at University of Mississippi in Oxford.

Nashville singer Craig Morgan, whose "Redneck Yacht Club" is No. 3 on the charts, says his fans see themselves in his songs, and that the lyrics touch on a common experience among Americans, many of whom have country roots. "You don't have to be a redneck to be a member of a redneck yacht club," says Mr. Morgan. "It's a term that in the past has been a stigma or a stereotype, but songs like this and other various songs, even though they talk about the very things that people imagine rednecks doing or being, they're realizing that a redneck is more of a lifestyle than a person or a people."

Yet the stereotypes, no matter who's dishing them out, can be hurtful, says University of Virginia senior Maggie Bowden, a big country music fan. "My family's from [the South]. That's hilarious to people, and they ask me when me and my brother are going to start dating," says Ms. Bowden, who sees her own teenage life in a small Virginia town reflected in Aldean's "Hicktown." "But I think it's when the Southern stereotypes leak into hurtful things, like in classes when we talk about what's going on in New Orleans and people say ... 'What else do you expect from the South, everybody down here is racist.' That's when it makes me wary to have anybody promote a certain image of an entire region."

The new attitude may seem popular - but for the wrong reasons, some critics say. "It runs the risk of being sort of a redneck minstrel show, taking the stereotypes, same as African-American artists used to have to do shuffling and tap dancing, to please audiences paying money," says native Alabamian Steve Persall, a film critic at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. "Part of the appeal may be, especially in urban markets, it sort of justifies what they've thought about the South."

But in this newest Nashville permutation, Southerners, as they often do, may have the last laugh. "Dolly Parton may be the ultimate example of this," says Mr. Wilson at Ole Miss. "It's an aesthetic that's in your face: big hair, short dresses, an emphasis on her physique, and she's making lots of money in the process. Like her, [today's singers] take demeaning images in Southern culture, turn it all on its head, and say, 'I'm really outsmarting you.' "

Source



13 October, 2005

BARBARIC CRUELTY TO CHILDREN CORRECT IN BRITAIN

If what I'm about to say sounds racist - then tough. I'm saying it anyway. When Britain first opened its doors to people from other creeds and countries, we welcomed their diversity, we respected their religions and we valued their customs. However, when we promised to respect other religions we didn't mean religions which advocate the ritual sacrifice and torture of children. We didn't mean religions which think it's OK to beat up, burn and slash children they claim are witches. We didn't agree to parading these children in so-called Christian churches and then having some sadist preacher (who charges 50 quid a time) beating kids with sticks until they pass out in order to "exorcise" them.

And what we certainly didn't expect is this barbarism to be tolerated by our own Metropolitan Police force, which kept secret a report claiming that countless children are being trafficked here from Africa and being used as domestic sex slaves or offered up as ritual sacrifices. This report - which still hasn't been published but was leaked to the BBC - was kept hidden because it was considered racially sensitive.

RACIALLY BLOODY SENSITIVE! This report has zilch to do with racism or religion - it's about the barbaric murder and torture of children by savages. And in a civilised society there's no place for that kind of "religion" or the people who practise it. However, it would seem that in politically-correct Britain, the police top brass would rather stand by and let children be murdered than offend religious sensitivities. How dare the Met Police and their boss, that politically-correct cretin Ian Blair, keep this report secret so as not to tarnish the reputation of "multi-cultural Britain". How dare he put the fear of offending African communities above the lives of defenceless children.

Because - forget African communities - this kind of behaviour offends every decent human being in this country because we don't sacrifice kids here. We don't blame them for every ill that befalls us. We don't slit their throats or cut off their arms and legs as happened last year to a little boy known only as "Adam" whose torso was found floating in the Thames and who was believed to have been a human sacrifice.

This kind of pagan savagery has no place here. As for those so-called Christian churchgoers who hoot, holler and cheer while children are tortured in front of them in the name of God - what evil is it that possesses them? And as videos of these kids being abused in church are being sold on the street, why are they still operating? Why haven't these megalomaniac preachers been slung in jail or out of this country and why haven't the congregations whose secrecy allows this horror to continue been charged with aiding and abetting child abuse?

Earlier this month an African woman called Sita Kisanga and the 38-year-old aunt of an eight-year-old girl who was tortured were both convicted at the Old Bailey. They'd branded this little girl a witch and as punishment she was cut 43 times with knives, beaten with a shoe and blinded with chilli peppers.

This cannot be allowed to continue, and if it means putting a bomb under our so-called multi-faith society then so be it. Because kids in this country are sacrosanct, and that's non-negotiable - no matter which God you worship. And no matter how tolerant we have been in the past it must be made crystal clear to those who follow these loony religions that while we Brits are a soft touch on most things - we're not soft on child killers or abusers. There's no room here for religions which preach that a cup of human blood boosts vitality and a concoction made from brain fragments leads to power and riches. Nor will we tolerate any god which believes that blind, deaf and handicapped children are witches and must be punished.

And Africans living in this country who know about these barbaric practices have a responsibility to inform on the heathens who practise them, otherwise they're every bit as guilty. As for our police chiefs and social workers - it's time they forgot about political correctness and accusations of racism (not to mention saving their own backsides) and concentrated a bit more on the slaughter of innocents in so-called civilised, multi-cultural Britain.

(From Carole Malone)



IN BRITAIN ONLY THE STATE CAN DISCRIMINATE

As Brian Micklethwait explains:

The ASBO – Anti-Social Behaviour Order – is a desperately depressing feature of modern British life, for many reasons. It is depressing because, in a sense, it is so necessary. Faced with the choice of, on the one hand, having ASBOs, or on the other hand not having them, with all other related policies remaining unchanged, many would choose to have them. I might even choose that myself. I agree that something needs to be done about the bad behaviour of children these days, and am prepared to risk sounding like an irascible old geezer for saying it.

Britain's ever-fretful government certainly thinks that something should be done, and a whole new raft of government controls and restrictions to be used against problem families and their problem children are now apparently being concocted. ASBOs for children under ten are to be introduced. New powers to allow problem families to be moved to secure gated communities – a combination of housing estates and prisons by the sound of them – are to be introduced. Binge drinkers are to be "named and shamed". (Can't law courts do that? I merely ask.) And so on.

Being quite old, I can remember how "problem families" used to be dealt with. Landlords used to refuse to rent accommodation to them.

And I can remember that one of the most constantly repeated arguments in favour of publicly provided, publicly paid-for housing was that, unlike with the hideous hovels supplied by the hated old private landlords, public housing wouldn't involve people being discriminated against merely because some landlord took a dislike to them.

Now, the government is the landlord, and the government is facing the same old problem, of people who are a problem.

But the biggest problem here is that discrimination, by anybody except the government, is regarded as bad. But if discrimination means the tendency of others to judge you by your behaviour – and to be eager to sell you goods and services, to employ you, to work with you, to trade with you, to supply you with medical services, and so on – if you behave well towards them, but to shun you if you behave like a barbarian, then discrimination is good. It is, in fact, essential if civilization is to continue at all.

Britain is now ruled by people who have spent the last half a century or more busily abolishing discrimination, that is, busily disconnecting bad behaviour from what would in the natural course of things be its natural consequences. And now, they are pathetically trying to reconstruct discrimination, in a nationalized form.

And nationalized discrimination works about as well as nationalized anything else.

I too have argued that discrimination belongs only in the private sphere. See here



12 October, 2005

A COMMENT ON THE PROPOSED BRITISH LAW AGAINST "GLORIFYING TERRORISM"

The notion that you can make the world a better place by making it illegal to say nasty and dangerous things has the intellectual sloppiness, the headline-seeking shallowness, the philosophical carelessness and the creepy mix of the sinister with the sanctimonious, that marks it out as absolutely characteristic of our Prime Minister's mind.

When I was about 7, urged to say my prayers before bed, I came up with what seemed a succinct and catch-all formula. "Please God," I would whisper, "make everybody be as they ought to be and do as they ought to do." By the age of 10 it had occurred to me that my prayer did not do justice to the complexities of life, and I moved on. I rather think that Tony Blair is still stuck at this stage.

But enough of Mr Blair's mind. What of his idea? This is worth discussing, even though the likelihood is that the relevant section of any terrorism Bill will be shredded by the Lords and abandoned. Then Mr Clarke can tell No 10 that he did his best but the old fuddy-duddies threw it out. The old fuddy-duddies will be right, but the fact that rationalists shelter behind a wall of ermine to defend Enlightenment values is a commentary on our times. The rules of what Mr Blair calls "the game" have not, as he suggests, changed, but muscles are being flexed in that purpose.

The easy way to fight the idea of speech-crime is to show why it will not work. No watertight legal definition will be found for the kind of terrorism whose glorification a Home Secretary might seek to criminalise. I would not myself praise Archbishop Makarios, the Stern Gang, Jomo Kenyatta or even the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party, but who seriously suggests that it should be a crime to glorify their struggles? Researchers more ingenious than I will find youthful speeches by the likes of Charles Clarke, Jack Straw, Peter Hain and probably Tony Blair too, glorifying terrorists. So the proposed law will include powers for government to "certify" past terrorist movements who may, or may not, be "glorified".

What madness is this? Are ministers and civil servants to work through history books, ticking boxes? Are we to have (retrospectively) approved terrorists? Truly, as Paul Flynn MP has said, under new Labour "only the future is certain; the past is always changing".

Nelson Mandela, the Free French Resistance, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Abdul Nasser, the Easter Rising . . . oh, what's the point? No wonder Mr Clarke is talking about a 20-year "cut-off" point before which we should be able to praise terrorists. That takes us conveniently back to a time after he and Mr Blair left university. But what is he saying? That we should be able to praise Mandela now, but it should have been illegal to praise him them? There are a hundred struggles, a hundred leaders, some good, some bad, in which terrorism has arguably played a part. Arguably. We have to be able to have the argument. People have to be able to make the case for terrorism as an agent for change, and (arguably) change for the better in history.

A year or so ago I argued, on this page, that in a world where a giant superpower was ready to use either crushing conventional military force or the threat of nuclear annihilation against small countries, the rest of the world might as well give up tanks and fighter-planes and take refuge in combination of the greatest and the least: independent nuclear capability at the top, and a capability for bloodthirsty insurrection on the streets. Around the same time Jenny Tonge, then the Liberal Democrat spokesman, declared that if she were an impoverished Palestinian she might have reacted as Palestinian terrorists have. Either or both of these statements could plausibly be represented as "glorifying" terrorism; they were intended to invite sympathy for this method of resistance.

Because I am a Times columnist and Dr Tonge was a parliamentarian, we should have been unlikely to be prosecuted. But if less mainstream voices are to be threatened with imprisonment for saying similar things, their counsel will not be short of evidence for their defence. Were Mr Blair's idea to become law, only minutes would elapse before George Galloway tested that law by glorifying terrorism in Commons debate. If parliamentary privilege were to cover such speeches, Mr Galloway would repeat his on the streets of Bow. The effect would be wholly counter-productive. Such thoughts must haunt the Director of Public Prosecutions.

So it will not do to say, as poor Vera Baird, Mr Clarke's parliamentary private secretary (her boss being unaccountably unavailable) tried to on Newsnight on Thursday, that "surely we all know what we mean" by the type of speech being targeted. Some legal nets have to be bigger than their intended catch, and goodwill and common sense may remedy the imprecision. But here goodwill will be absent. People will be actively seeking prosecutions. This law will never work. So it will not pass. But I said above that the easy way to resist it was on practical grounds like these. Where, however, one's real objection is in principle rather than in practice, the easy way is not the most honest.

So now for the hard way. I object to creating speech-crimes even if the legislation could be tightly drafted and made to work. I object to the banning of ideas, theories or arguments. I object to the prohibition of sentiments. Difficult as the boundary is to mark or police, I see the line between thought and action as absolutely central to the rule of law in a liberal society. Good law ties hands; it does not stop mouths or minds. It is for what we do, not what we think or say, that we should expect the policeman's knock.

Of course words may lead to actions. Of course thoughts can be incendiary. Of course shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre is behaviour with direct consequences. But somewhere a line must be drawn between willing things and doing things, and how we draw that line is what defines us as believers - or not - in freedom of conscience. The Prime Minister's disregard for this most important of distinctions is deeply troubling.

In my Britain a man or woman is free to say they admire a terrorist and support his aims, but not to offer any practical support to him in his work. The difference is fuzzy and we are doomed to agonies of indecision about the marshy ground which lies between taking stands and taking part, but how we negotiate that marsh, and whether we think it matters, is what marks us out as caring about individual liberty.

I don't think Tony Blair cares. I doubt he even recognises the problem. For this he should not be forgiven, and never be trusted.

More here



FEAR IS VERY CORRECT

Fear is fast becoming a caricature of itself. It is no longer simply an emotion or a response to the perception of threat. It has become a cultural idiom through which we signal a sense of unease about our place in the world.

Popular culture encourages an expansive, alarmist imagination through providing the public with a steady diet of fearful programmes about impending calamities - man-made and natural. Now even so-called high culture cannot resist the temptation of promoting fear: a new exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York has the theme of 'The perils of modern living'. Fear is also the theme that dominates the Eighth Contemporary Art Biennial of Lyon. Natasha Edwards writes about the 'art of fear' that haunts this important exhibition of contemporary European art.

But the more we cultivate a twenty-first century sensibility of anxiety, the more we can lose sight of the fact that fear today is very different to the experience of the past.

Throughout history human beings have had to deal with the emotion of fear. But the way we fear and what we fear changes all the time. During the past 2,000 years we mainly feared supernatural forces. In medieval times volcanic eruptions and solar eclipses were a special focus of fear since they were interpreted as symptoms of divine retribution. In Victorian times many people's fears were focused on unemployment.

Today, however, we appear to fear just about everything. One reason why we fear so much is because life is dominated by competing groups of fear entrepreneurs who promote their cause, stake their claims, or sell their products through fear. Politicians, the media, businesses, environmental organisations, public health officials and advocacy groups are continually warning us about something new to fear.

The activities of these fear entrepreneurs serves to transform our anxieties about life into tangible fears. Every major event becomes the focus for competing claims about what you need to fear.... The fierce competition between alarmist fear entrepreneurs helps consolidate a climate of intense mistrust. Is it any surprise that many African Americans believe that the Bush administration sought to save New Orleans' white districts by flooding black neighbourhoods, through deliberately engineering the levee breaks?....

It is not simply the big events like Katrina that are subjected to competing claims on the fear market. Imagine that you are a parent. For years you have been told that sunshine represents a mortal danger to your child, and that you must protect them from skin cancer by minimising their exposure to the sun. Then, this summer, a report is published that raises concerns about the rise of vitamin E deficiency among children who have been far too protected from the sun. So what do you do? The fact is that a growing range of human experience - from natural disasters to children's lives in the outdoors - is now interpreted through competing claims about fear.

More here



11 October, 2005

LEFTIST "TOLERANCE" AT WORK

Ken Potts calls himself a patriot. That's what his front yard tells you too. Metal American flags are staked in the ivy beside the driveway. A red, white, and blue pinwheel spins near the front sidewalk. One flagpole flies the American flag. A second flagpole carries the banner of the Army's 101st Airborne. Even his mailbox on North 185th Street in Shoreline sports the image of the Airborne's screaming eagle.

But he says that in the last year the mailbox has been blown up twice with fireworks. The house has been egged. Paint has been thrown on the house too. The flags have been torn down and ripped up more than once. And the 101st Airborne flag has had the word "murder" and a swastika written on it with a permanent marker. "It's really difficult for me to see something like this and not feel sad," Potts told us of the vandalism that started around election day last year. Especially, he says, since the 101st led the charge in World War II to defeat Nazi Germany.

But the biggest insult to this house with a permanent Bush-Cheney placard attached to the second story and a collection of mostly Republican election signs in the side yard, is the spray paint someone left on his vinyl siding this past weekend. In two-foot tall letters on the side of his house facing Meridian someone painted "Bush Nazis." "Where do they get off calling the President of the United States a Nazi," he said.

This former soldier with three tours of Vietnam says he feels like his own freedom of speech is under attack. "When you have someone or a group of people who want to take that away from you, who probably didn't do a thing to defend them in the first place, it's really sad."

But to fight back he always puts new flags back on those front yard flagpoles. He installed a security camera that keeps watch over his front yard. And for his own political jab he put an electronic readerboard in a front window. 24 hours a day it says: "Liberalism - is a mental disorder." "I want to make sure that they know I can't be pushed around."

And he says he'll leave the spray painted "Bush Nazis" on the side of his house for a while to show people on this busy corner what tolerance "doesn't" look like. He also says he's turned the other cheek and doesn't want prosecution or revenge. He says he'd like to meet the vandal or vandals and have a friendly American debate instead. "If we want to have disagreements in this country there's ways to have disagreements and there's ways to have a dialogue. If you've got a problem with me come up and talk about it. We may not even agree but we can agree to disagree."

Source



BURGER KING STANDS UP TO BRITAIN'S FOOD FASCISTS

Burger King, Britain’s second-biggest fast food chain, has snubbed the government’s attempts to reduce levels of salt, fat and sugar in food to make it healthier. It has pulled out of a joint initiative between the food industry and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to reformulate fast foods to make them less unhealthy. The chain will instead concentrate on making its burgers and other products as “tasty” as it can — a decision that will mean no further cuts in salt, fat or sugar. Rather than promoting healthy foods, the company is considering selling the “Enormous Omelette Sandwich”, a product recently launched in America. It offers 740 calories and 4.9 grams of salt comprising two slices of cheese, two eggs, three strips of bacon and a sausage patty on a bun.

The decision is a serious threat to the consensus that has emerged after two years of talks between the food industry, the FSA and the Department of Health. Those talks recently led to 50 retailers and manufacturers, excluding Burger King, agreeing to phased cuts in the amounts of salt added to a range of processed foods including bread, ready meals, breakfast cereals and cured meats. The talks on salt were intended to pave the way towards similar voluntary reductions in levels of fat and sugar. From this weekend, however, that consensus could break down because Burger King’s competitors will fear the 700-restaurant chain could gain a competitive advantage if its products get a reputation for being tastier. Such a rift has long been predicted by groups campaigning for healthier food who say that legislation is required because the food industry will never voluntarily do anything that puts sales and profits at risk.

More than 20 of Britain’s top chefs and food writers, including Gary Rhodes and Sophie Grigson, are to send an open letter to Tony Blair this week demanding ministers do more to prevent advertising of junk food to children. Rosemary Hignett, the FSA’s head of nutrition, said: “We are aware of and very disappointed by Burger King’s decision to abandon work on salt reduction. Any U-turn on such an important measure will have a negative impact on people’s diets. ”

When the FSA began talks with the food industry in 2003, Burger King signed up to them. Since then, however, Diageo, the British owner, has sold it to a consortium of American venture capitalists. The firm is now controlled from Miami. News of Burger King’s decision coincides with the launch of a £6m media campaign by the FSA to make people aware of the need to cut salt intake. It will warn that the average daily intake of 10-12 grams of salt per person is far too high and recommend they consume no more than 6 grams a day. This level is far in excess of the 0.5 grams most people actually need but the FSA wants to set “achievable” targets. High salt intake is a concern because it causes raised blood pressure.

Burger King maintains it is up to customers to take responsibility for their food choices. Its menu includes the XL Double Whopper with cheese which provides 921 calories, nearly half the 2,000 daily calories needed by a typical woman. Burger King’s restaurants do not offer customers information on the nutritional values of its foods, but these are available on its website. This shows the same burger contains 56 grams of fat and 3.5 grams of salt. The company has recently suggested its new range of “fresh-baked baguettes” offers a healthier choice. It includes the Monterey Melt which contains 2.3 grams of salt and nearly 600 calories.

Edna Johnson, a senior executive at Burger King in Miami, said the firm had made concessions to the healthy food lobby in recent years. “In the UK we reduced the salt in our chicken bites by 50%,” she said. The company has also offered a range of salads, plus fruit options for children. However, the impact of the sales of healthier foods is slight compared with Burger King’s staple fare. Johnson confirmed that there were no plans for further cuts in salt, fat or sugar and said: “Our commitment to our guests is to provide them with choice.”

The signatories to the open letter to Blair call on him to back the Children’s Food Bill, a private member’s bill supported by more than 200 MPs. Its sponsor, Mary Creagh, Labour MP for Wakefield, said: “Parents are tired of being pestered to buy unhealthy foods because their children recognise Bart Simpson or Shrek on the packet

Source



10 October, 2005

It had to happen: Now thongs are a health hazard

(The footwear type, also called Flip-flops in Britain, Plakkies in South Africa and Jandals in New Zealand). The following item appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on Oct., 9th, 2005

Australia's footwear icon, the thong, has been slammed as a health hazard. The summer fashion must-haves can cause long-term damage to the feet of chronic wearers, experts have warned. Thongs are so potentially damaging that the The Australian Podiatry Association has advised against constant wear.

Earlier this year, the Sunday Mail reported that thongs had became a celebrity cult item costing up to $200 a pair. But Queensland APA president Barry Matthews said the health costs associated with wearing thongs too much were a lot higher. "The concern is these people are more likely to have foot pain and more likely to develop bunions and sore toes, he said. "Thongs might also give them arch pain, pain in the ball of their foot, ankle pain, leg pain and knee pain."

Mr Matthews said he treated thong wearers every day. Much of the damage was caused because thongs were difficult to keep on. "There isn't much holding the thong on your foot so you tend to claw your toes more trying to hang on," he said. Another failing was that thongs failed give any foot support. "A shoe should bend only at the ball of the foot . . and it should have a firm heel counter which helps control where the heel and foot sit on the ground, Mr Mattthews said.

But, he said, thongs aiso had positive aspects and infrequent wearing was fine. They were good for use near swimming pools and in public showers to prevent the spread of tinea and warts.

Queensland University of Technology podiatry lecturer Alan Crawford said while thongs might be appropriate for the beach, they should not be worn around town. "There's no protection and equally no support, and the foot tends to flatten out and can become tired and strained," he said.



PC GOBBLEGOOK MYSTIFIES COUNCIL LEADER IN BRITAIN

A new 55,000 pound post for a Corporate Social Inclusion Manager at Oxfordshire County Council has been rubbished as an exercise to "tick a Government inspector's box" by Keith Mitchell. The county council leader has admitted he does not actually know what the point of the post is and says the money could be better spent wiping out a huge predicted deficit in the council's overspending youth service -- part of the authority's community learning directorate. He added that the money on offer could be better spent employing extra youth workers.

The aim of Oxfordshire's youth service, which was rated 'very good' by Ofsted inspectors last year, is to get youngsters involved in various projects and groups. It also includes a counselling and mentoring service for troubled youngsters. However, it is forecast to overspend by more than 100,000 pounds by the end of next March and a recent report to councillors said "further staffing reductions are planned in the medium term in order to enable the serviced to balance its budget in 2005/06 and 2006/07".

An advertisement for the position in the national press read: "This is an outstanding opportunity for a highly motivated and articulate individual. You will be working at a corporate level across the whole spectrum of the council's activities, making a major contribution to policy implementation, performance monitoring and service improvement. "You will be able to maintain an effective balance between support, challenge and influence and be persuasive with senior managers, whilst maintaining their confidence. "With well-developed interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate effectively, you will be adaptable and able to work independently and as part of a team." The closing date for applications is October 14, with interviews being held the following month.

All local authorities are obliged to perform certain functions and attain performance targets set by the Government. The county council is currently ranked a 'good' authority having previously been a 'fair' council. Mr Mitchell has vowed to look into whether this particular post is a necessary function. He said: "I fear this might be a job to satisfy a Government inspector and, given that we have issues in the youth service, we could have wiped out half the deficit with this money. "Social inclusion is very important, but we could do it just as effectively with youth workers -- so I'm yet to be convinced about this position."

Source



A REFRESHING BURST OF INCORRECTNESS

Just when you thought drinking had become politically correct - the sexually equalizing rise of the Cosmopolitan, female bartenders, restaurantlike lounges with bar chefs, and cocktail menus among mixed company - along comes Frank Kelly Rich to remind you that drinking is drinking after all. Mr. Rich, the editor of Modern Drunkard, a monthly magazine, puts the boozing back in booze. From Denver, a city he claims to live in because he was driving through and found a bar he liked so much he stayed (the Lions Lair), Mr. Rich and his publication, which started as a zine in 1996 and has a circulation of roughly 50,000, acknowledge the inescapable facts of drinking: excess, ecstasy, epiphany, serious lapses and imaginative leaps in accepted behavior and the moral conundrum of how something that feels so good can be so bad.

Now, at 41, Mr. Rich has put the total of his knowledge and experience into a book. "The Modern Drunkard," being published in November by Riverhead, is not a memoir but an instructional guide. It covers subjects like planning a lost weekend, circumventing an intervention and, in an extensive chapter, drinking on the job. Mr. Rich isn't kidding. Keeping his tongue in his cheek would impede the flow of alcohol. Mr. Rich is out drinking every night, or has a party at his house. On rare nights off, he has two drinks and goes to bed. "I'm trying to drink different drinks every day," he said in a telephone conversation on Tuesday. Mr. Rich's fallback is a gin and tonic with bitters, what he calls a Hemingway Code Hero because Papa drank it, as do several protagonists, whom lit-crit classes call his "code heroes." You possess honor and a death wish.

Born and raised in Las Vegas, then Reno, one of seven children, a son of a cocktail waitress and a cabdriver "with a gambling problem," as he put it, Mr. Rich joined the Army at 17, left after four years and traveled the world and its bars. "Bars are the great schools of thought," he said. Confident that he won't remember a word, Mr. Rich now carries a digital tape recorder when he goes out drinking to capture what he believes is the wisdom of the unwound tongue.

"Oh, yeah, like, every week," he said, asked if he regrets anything he has said or done, which includes fistfights (which are covered in the book). But in an age of political correctness, when "a person is more likely to be judged by what he refrained from doing than what he actually did," as Mr. Rich writes in "The Modern Drunkard," his own sense of achievement sounded reasonably secure.

Source



9 October, 2005

THE BRITISH FOOD DICTATORSHIP

British school dinners are a scandal. And no, I'm not talking about the composition of a turkey twizzler, or the tiny amount of money spent on each meal, or the frequency with which chips appear on the menu, or any of the other nuggets of information that have been listed in mind-boggling detail by the government and the media. I am talking about the scandal of a government that thinks it should turn education into one long lecture about healthy living, and assumes the authority to dictate how parents should feed their children.

The publication of the final report of the School Meals Review Panel (SMRP), set up in May 2005 by the government following a TV series by Islington's favourite semi-literate entrepreneur Jamie Oliver, should come as no surprise. The panel, chaired by Suzi Leather (who also chairs the authority responsible for regulating fertility treatment), has concluded that school dinners are every bit as bad as Jamie said, and that Something Must Be Done to sort it out.

To that end, its 59-page document demands that unhealthy vending machines be banned, along with salt-cellars on tables, and foods made from 'meat slurry'; that deep-fried foods should only be served twice a week; and that children spend more lesson times learning how to cook and visiting local farms to find out 'where some of their food is produced'. There's more, of course - the panel has even seen fit to provide an age-appropriate weekly menu, fitting for a government that is rapidly moving from politics into catering management. But the devil is not in the detail of this document. It is in the assumption underpinning it: that parents cannot be trusted when it comes to feeding their children.

For many parents, the government's sudden declaration of war on school dinners must have seemed like a welcome release. The government has spent a good few years scaring us about our children becoming caught up in the epidemic of childhood obesity that is apparently sweeping the nation. We have been issued with a rule book demanding that our families eat 'five a day' of carefully measured portions of fruit and vegetables, witnessed calls to ban advertising of so-called 'junk food' to help us stop from caving in to children pestering us to put the wrong things in our shopping trolley, and been the focus of mad-cap traffic-light schemes to 'help' those of us who don't know that crisps are high in fat to avoid them.

In the government's ill-advised war on unhealthy living, parents have been treated both as idiot victims of the food industry and careless child abusers who put our own convenience before our children's health. So when celebrity chef Jamie Oliver turned the spotlight on to school dinners, the one aspect of our children's diets for which we surely can't be blamed, we could scramble back on to the moral high ground, at least for a short while. How dare they make us feel guilty for serving fish fingers again when they're giving our children those twizzlers! It's not our fault the kids are podgy - look at what they're having to eat in school! No wonder young Jamie became too popular for his own good - he got a nation of parents out of the firing line, and put politicians and local authorities there instead.

But just as Jamie's crusade was obsessed with school dinners because of his conviction that the canteen was the only place that kids could expect some decent food, the government's School Meals Review Panel situates improvement in school dinners firmly within a context of making every member of society behave in a healthier fashion. 'What children receive at home will always be more important than what they eat at school', states the report early on. 'But the school is crucial for modelling healthier choices and schools are a vital setting.'

In other words, get the kids out of that feckless home environment where they are allowed to eat and drink anything they like, and into an institution where they can have their choices 'constructively controlled'. 'We concluded that it is by constructively controlling choice that we will widen children's food experiences', stated the panel - or as the Department for Education and Skills' (DfES) press release more succinctly put it, 'controlling children's choices to ensure that they cannot opt out of healthy food'.

This is the politics of behaviour. It has nothing to do with nutrition: as Rob Lyons has argued elsewhere on spiked, the wild assertions made by officials about the problem of child obesity and the nutritional characteristics of 'junk food' are based on very dubious science. Nor is this reform of school dinners about a humane desire to make eating at school that little bit more pleasant. It is about pushing children to think about food in a particular way, bringing about a 'healthier food culture, in which young people and adults enjoy the experience of eating healthy, nutritious food together'.

Unless anybody thinks that this business of 'controlled choice' will be limited to the canteen, the School Meals Review Panel is keen to stress that its standards should be 'applied to other food outlets within the school and reflected in school policies for food brought into school' - through 'consideration of the impact of packed lunches' and a 'review' of 'the nature of breaktime snacks brought from home'. So those naughty parents will no longer be able to 'opt out of healthy food' by squirreling a packet of crisps in their child's lunchbox. And to avoid the (obvious) consequence of banning food that children like - that they go and buy food elsewhere - schools may simply stop them from leaving the premises at lunchtime.

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"NOBLE SAVAGE" ROMANTICISM DESTROYS THE WELLBEING OF AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

Leftist romanticism about the primitive and the non-judgmentalism of multiculturalism are mutually contradictory but that has not stopped them from reinforcing one-another in the drive to have Australian blacks return to something like tribal living on remote areas of land specially set aside from them -- usually former "missions" or cattle stations (ranches). The result of such unrealistic thinking is described below

More than 200,000 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have become integrated into mainstream Australian life, but during the past six months the media have exposed the extreme deprivation of another 200,000 living on welfare in remote communities, fringe settlements and urban ghettos.

Following Noel Pearson's courageous calls to end welfare dependence, increasing numbers of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in remote Australia are now demanding equal economic opportunities.

Shocking Third World conditions clearly do not stem from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ethnicity, but are the result of the set of separatist federal, state and territory policies. These separatist policies have condemned many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to living in isolated, uneconomic communities that deny them private land ownership and other private property rights, notably in housing, that destroy their health and that fail to provide decent education.

The ensuing welfare dependence destroys families and communities - as it does elsewhere in Australia and throughout the world. But other Australians on welfare are not isolated in apartheid-like settlements. The absence of policing and law in remote communities permits high levels of child abuse and domestic violence. Alcoholism and other substance abuse are rampant.

Small elites of "big men" monopolise the layers of separate governance created for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. They have strong vested interests against reform. The politicians who have created the remote living museums are supported by academics, state, territory and federal public servants who run the system and the non-indigenous administrators, teachers, accountants, lawyers and other consultants. They all make their living out of these conditions. Sorcery and payback thrive. The ultimate results are murders and suicides.

The commonwealth Government has taken a first step towards reforming the separate governance structures by dismantling the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. It has introduced shared responsibility agreements to mitigate communal welfare. But individual pensions cannot be reformed until girls stop being married off while they are still children and, together with boys, get a decent education so that they can get jobs. Children are almost half of the population of the remote settlements and their proportion is growing.

The West Australian, Queensland and Northern Territory education departments have demonstrably failed a generation of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who have poorer English literacy and numeracy than their parents. The emphasis on the vernacular with postmodern failure to teach phonetics and arithmetic has resulted in gobbledygook; children are so bored they drop out of school. Remote communities need independent schools with mainstream curriculums and good teachers if the educational disasters of the past 30 years are to be corrected. At the secondary level all youngsters should be in integrated schools and the brightest should be in first-class boarding schools. The dumbing down of post-secondary education in remote areas could then cease so that they can get skilled and professional jobs.

Communal land ownership has failed. Large flows of royalties and other land rents have been stolen and wasted, leaving even well-located communities in the vicinities of tourist resorts and mines in dire poverty. Productive land development has been negligible. Whereas most Australian families have benefited from rising land values, native title legislation has denied such gains to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders....

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NOTE:

I am putting up a few posts on Tongue-Tied this the weekend that have some amusing bits in them



8 October, 2005

SEX OFFENDERS POLITICALLY CORRECT IN CALIFORNIA

Did you know that in California, child molesters and rapists are a protected class? It's true. Not only are California landlords banned from using the state's Megan's La