April 15, 2019
In yet more proof that nobody values something they don't pay for themselves, students at Georgetown voted to pay reparations to blacks even though it will raise tuition.
Why not; they aren't paying it anyway - or at least not now.
From the article:
He said, "This moment raises complex issues that we are prepared to grapple with and embrace. Our students are bringing attention to deeply held convictions that we take very seriously."
He also said that "with this strong indication from our students, I will engage key leaders in our Georgetown, Descendant, and Jesuit communities and our faculty, board, and student leadership to chart a path forward."
Students from the advocacy group behind Thursday's vote, however, said the university's response is an example of the institution's ongoing "hollow promises."
"So I think the atmosphere on campus is 'what next,'" said Nitya Biyani, a junior at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Biyani believes a reconciliation fund should be created, although she ultimately voted "no" in the referendum.
"My issue with this is that I felt like the university was sort of tossing the buck on to students," she said." I don't believe that students are the ones that need to be paying."
Biyani said Georgetown, which has a $1.5 billion endowment and raises tuition costs just about every year, should pay the reparations. She believes it's "obvious the university has the capacity to do something about this," but that it is unwilling to.
"And with issues like this, it's like, where do you draw the line? What else is the university going to pass on to the students and make it the students' responsibility?" she said.
I want to see how this shakes out when it actually dawns on these dopes that they are going to have to pay this back.
Liberalism is the easy choice. You don't have to think about how or why.
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Netflix has recently premiered their new eight-part series titled Our Planet, with narration from the inveterate David Attenborough. One particularly grisly scene of walruses falling to their death from a high cliff in northern Russia has caused shock and revulsion among many viewers. It has also raised serious questions about the truth of a number of claims made in the documentary, in particular the claim that "climate change†is responsible for the deaths.
Other questionable claims include that a huge walrus herd ended up on a beach because there was not enough ice for them in the sea, and that they fell from a cliff due to poor eyesight. However, this was not the first year that large herds of walruses used beaches for hauling out during the early Fall.
There are extensive historical records of walruses hauling out in huge herds, up to 60,000, all across the Arctic. These observations date back to the 1930s and the 1970s, when there was extensive ice cover throughout the region. This behavior is clearly natural and seems strongly correlated to peaks in overall population size, which decline again as food resources are depleted.
Netflix seems unwilling to precisely identify the site, or sites, that were included for the walrus herd in their film or to specify exactly when the cliff incident occurred. The circumstances of the event are eerily similar to a mass death involving walruses falling from a cliff in northeastern Russia, reported in The Siberian Times on October 19, 2017.
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Yep, I have to agree with him. Of course, any one of the chuckleheads running for president on the left would disagree, and blame it on (of course) Trump.Forget the college cheating scam. The biggest scam in America is the Democratic Party. Its platform is based on legalizing cheating. I have no idea why anyone in America should obey the law anymore. Just ignore any law you think is unfair -- just like Democrats do.
Just days ago, 13 parents, including famous Hollywood actress Felicity Huffman, agreed to plead guilty in the college admissions cheating scandal. Now, don't get me wrong. I hate arrogant, rich, entitled jerks as much as the next guy -- maybe more.
I went to Columbia University with hundreds of these liberals. It was clear from my first day at Columbia that many of my spoiled-brat classmates -- all of whom announced proudly how much they hated America -- got in because their rich parents greased the wheels. Nothing ever changes. I couldn't stand these kids.
Nonetheless, if I were among those 13 cheating parents, I'd have pleaded innocent. Their lawyers should have argued they're innocent thanks to the standards set by today's Democratic Party. According to Democrats, laws no longer matter and cheating is legal -- as long as you think the law you're breaking is unfair.
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See full image here.
Timothy Birdnow
They're doing it again!
Yes, with a spring snow moving across the nation the media is yet again calling it a sign of global warming.
Funny; I thought snow came when water vapor struck cold air. Silly me!
From CBS News:
The intensity of the storm is being powered by a sharp 60-degree temperature contrast — 80s in the Southeast and 20s in the Dakotas. Strong contrasts are typical for spring as warm and moist air surges north from the Gulf of Mexico and winter cold remains stubborn. But there's an added feature heightening the contrast called "Arctic amplification."
This anomaly map is off the charts. Temperatures range from 30 degrees below normal to 20 degrees above normal on either side of the system. pic.twitter.com/2i0c0x3cPC
— Meteorologists United on Climate Change (@MetsUnite) April 11, 2019
Over the past couple of decades, the Arctic has warmed much faster than of the mid-latitudes, especially in winter. Warming of the globe is being caused by heat trapping greenhouse gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels. In the Arctic this warming effect is enhanced by melting sea ice. Ice typically reflects sunlight, keeping the Arctic cool. But since 1970 Arctic sea ice volume has decreased by 50%. Right now, Arctic sea ice extent is at record low levels.
Now, big spring snows are hardly unique, and in fact the claim has been debunked on any number of occasions, including by yours truly several years ago. See also this from 2-17.
In fact, polar sea ice has remained stable over the last twelve years despite the "emergency" of global warming. And while this last winter saw the seventh worst year for Arctic ice (tied, in fact, for seventh) that is only over the last forty years, so it is hardly an emergency.
As you can see below, the problems lie in the Barents Sea, A shallow body of water, which is influenced by warming ultimately from the Gulf Coast Current, and in the Bering Sea, which itself is influenced by Pacific currents. This has nothing to do with atmospheric temperatures, but rather ocean movements, a natural cycle.
more...
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Daren Jonescu has some fun with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Southern drawl and her pretensions.
Here's the money quote
from The View from Limbo:
As Mrs. Limbo said to me yesterday, AOC is doing politics as a reality TV show, "playing†the innocent young congresswoman for fame and glamor. Think of her "meteoric rise†as Miss Kardashian Goes to Washington — which makes her a perfect match for Trump’s White House Apprentice schtick, and an apt sign of these politically deflated times.
Daren certainly has a way with words!
In fact, AOC is a sham. Raised in wealthy Westchester, she attended Boston university, not a community college or New York City College, even. Her father was not some poor immigrant who worked in the fields; he was an architect. She interned in the immigration office of Ted Kennedy. She graduated from BU Cum laud, something I have a whale of a time believing given her idiotic comments and juvenile reasoning process. She moved to the Bronx to work as an "educational director". What is that? Sounds rather like Obama's "community organizer" which means she inserted herself into the maw of the radical movement. She did work as a bartender, but only for a few years after her father died without a will. That was literally her only brush with hardship in life.
She's been milking that ever since.
Daren is right; a guy cutting grass is doing something of value, unlike a Congressman who is simply a parasitic organism. AOC is the worst sort of parasite; unlike the usual Congressional vermin, she is not satisfied with her take but demands much, much more. Most politicians are content to be scabies; she has to be malaria.
We need more people actually doing productive work and fewer people manipulating the labor of others.
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April 14, 2019
Dog-GONE! Once in a great while I have to say that Horndog Bill had a good idea, once and then. Unfortunately, this one wasn't put into effect.Anyone remember the Mariel Boatlift in 1980? That’s when Fidel Castro declared that anyone who wanted to emigrate to the United States was free to do so within a narrow window of time. Within days, 125,000 Cubans were en route to the U.S. Just where did that rickety fleet come from on such short notice? No one seemed to be curious about that, though even slow learners eventually figured out that Castro used this "humanitarian†gesture to offload a lot of criminals, mentally ill persons, and other Cubans he wanted very much to be rid of. Which means the Cuban government was organized in advance for this "spontaneous†moment. As Harold Rood liked to say,†Nothing happens for no good reason.â€
But that’s not the real fun part. Jimmy Carter sent a large number of the Mariel refugees to camps in Arkansas, where public unhappiness contributed to the defeat of Gov. Bill Clinton in November that year. The Washington Post recalled this a few years ago:
The Forgotten Story of How Refugees Almost Ended Bill Clinton’s Career
The scene would later remind one witness of the Vietnam War.
"Plumes of smoke billowed high into the illuminated night sky from barracks that had been set afire,†David Maraniss wrote in The Washington Post. "Flames still flickered from a charred guardhouse. Whoops and fierce cries of defiance echoed across the camp. Shotgun-toting civilians in pickup trucks loomed a mile or so beyond the gate. The mood was tense and chaotic.â€
But this wasn’t Vietnam — or Iraq in the wake of an Islamic State attack. This was Fort Chaffee, a military installation in Arkansas, on June 1, 1980, when refugees from Fidel Castro’s Cuba rioted. The refugees had been sent there at the behest of President Jimmy Carter over the vociferous objections of an Arkansas governor with quite a political future: Bill Clinton. . .
"The Fort Chaffee story is largely forgotten by the general public, but it’s a good bet that some governors haven’t forgotten its political lessons,†David A. Graham wrote at the Atlantic. . .
This part of the story may be my favorite detail:
First, Clinton suggested the refugees be screened on an aircraft carrier off of the Florida coast. Eidenburg said that didn’t make sense, because there was no place to put those refugees the United States wouldn’t accept.
"Sure there is,†Clinton replied, as recounted in his memoir "My Life.†"We still have a base at Guantanamo, don’t we? And there must be a gate in the fence that divides it from Cuba. Take them to Guantanamo, open the door, and march them back into Cuba.â€
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An atheism gene? Some people think so. Or, rather, atheism is a genetic defect.
From Discover:
The article goes on in a desperate attempt to refute the paper in question.
The writer, who calls him or herself Neuroskeptic, is clearly an atheist himself and tries very hard to disavow this. Also, he/she promotes a rather silly notion that atheists are more intelligent than people who believe in God (tell that to Isaac newton, for example..) That there are studies "proving" this is dubious; these are studies run by atheists to promote an idea they have been using to sell their belief system for decades. In the end it isn't worth the paper it is printed on.
What I find interesting is the connection between autism and atheism; is Belief a sense, like our sense of smell or vision? if so, are autistic people less sensitive? Imagine explaining the ocean to a blind person who has never seen it, or music to someone born deaf; you could never get the concept across adequately. Perhaps atheism is a comparable failing?
What of volition in all this? Belief is ultimately an act of will, a choice made. One can come to Faith by an intellectual route and then develop the sense of it afterward. That happens frquently to Christians; they become convinced that the materialism and atheism that innundates our modern culture is flawed and that there has to be a higher reality, a Creator, an unmoved mover. It is not a feeling, but an intellectual decision. The feeliing comes later.
It's rather like exercising a muscle. Until you use it you don't have much of one. While there may be some genetic influence, that doesn't mean you can't be a Believer. It takes a leap of faith.
Frankly, I believe most atheists choose to be that way to avoid having to alter their behavior. It's easier to be an atheist; you don't have so much to answer for, at least not to yourself. You get to do whatever you want (within reason) and you don't have to feel guilty about anything. It's the coward's way out. It always has been.
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I don't doubt for a second that this is true - especially in the modern era of social media and Candy Crush and Jon Stewart...
The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age
From the Discover article:
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Here is an essay about America's new civil war, one that I find myself quibbling with in no small part. Author Richard Fernandez is, in my humble estimation, trying too hard to be fair and balanced and seems to miss the crux of the issue, the divide that is tearing America apart.
He states:
What Fernandez fails to realize is people have always been that way. The problem now is that Progressive pacifism, the promotion of the last half century that says there is never justification for violence, no matter the provocation, has led to the exact opposite of what it was intended. People are now more rude, more aggressive, more vicious precisely because they no longer fear getting punched out by the offended party. There was a time when behavior was moderated lest you take a beating at the hands of a man who found his honor insulted. Nobody used to question the idea and, indeed, it was expected "you had it coming". The civil authorities generally ignored fisticuffs unless someone was hurt or there were weapons involved. But the Left - then well in the minority - moved to pacify the nation, so that they could insult and malign with impunity. The end result was a society where everyone is always in everyone's business and in their faces.
Don't doubt me on this. Just look at the Old West days. Frank Dalton, Wyatt Earp, James "Wild Bill" Hichok, none of these men put up with a whole lot. Everyone knew better than to pick a fight with them, too, after a while. Now, I'm not advocating for a return tot he Old West, but there are lessons to be learned; people in that era - indeed all former eras _ were much more polite to each-other than now, and that primarily because there was a real danger in rudeness. And crime was less than now because there was a real danger in robbing someone who might shoot you. In those days nobody was charged with a crime for shooting a burglar. That is a strictly modern idea, that property crimes "do not deserve the death penalty". It used to be believed that anyone engaging in a crime was taking a huge risk, and had it coming. No longer; that is a modern, Progressive idea. And it has done nothing but exascerbate crime. more...
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‘Liz Was a Diehard Conservative’
Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like to talk about it, but for years she was a registered Republican. Why she left the GOP—and what it means for her campaign.
SECTION OMITTED
But records from the time Warren spent living in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts make clear that she was a registered Republican for at least several years of her midcareer adult life. It was not until 1996—when Warren was 47 years old and a newly minted Harvard law professor—that she changed her registration from Republican to Democrat.
SECTION OMITTED
Some on the left have already pointed out the less-than-progressive stances in her 2003 book, The Two Income Trap, including the rejection of a "quasi-socialist safety net to rival the European model.â€
END OF QUOTE
The article goes into some sophistry and intellectual gymnastics, but I am left with one conclusion. Liz Warren is an opportunist that, like Hillary Clinton, says a lot of pious things but is largely looking to use any movement to advance her career. Remember, this is the "liberal" who bought and flipped foreclosed homes of poor people in Oklahoma.
Despite the generally evenhanded tone of this article about Warren, Politico has clearly given hardcore leftists a number of arrows to shoot into Liz Warren's war canoe. The article even includes a photo image of a Liz Warren voter registration as a Republican. She is taking on water fast in the shark infested river of high stakes (Democrat) Presidential politics.
Well, Warren can always go back to flipping foreclosed houses of elderly poor people. I'm sure she can find such properties in small town Massachusetts.
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April 13, 2019
Do you want to know why Progressives are so enamored of multiculturalism? What purpose does it serve? Well, here is a British convert to Islam explaining the matter for us.
From First Things:
Anomie was one thing; the ferocious renunciation of tradition I encountered at university was quite another. I had hoped that the spiritual emptiness of wider society was a result of ignorance, and that the Âacademy—especially the ancient, venerable, Gothic academy of Oxford—had preserved what I vaguely imagined was my country’s noble heritage. Studying philosophy did provide some engagement with an intellectual inheritance, but for anyone moderately interested in public life, the campus movements for "social justice†were impossible to ignore. All of these—whether their goal was the liberation of women, of LGBT persons, or of ethnic minorities—seemed to have the same vision of man: a deracinated, protean aggregate of desires. These movements gained in strength every year. ÂFormerly apolitical spaces were distorted by the need to appease one demand after another. The culture of the university, once imbued with the brash boyishness of the English public schools, now accommodated the sterile, strenuous inclusivity of progressive zealots.
After three years of this, I was frustrated and alienated. I needed a purpose. Philosophy classes had sharpened my inquiries, but they didn’t rectify the meaninglessness all around me. My utopian peers found their purpose in crusades against racism and homophobia, but their contempt for England revolted me. I chose a different course and embarked on a search for God.
Where could a lost soul go? Nowhere in college or country offered an answer. What the campus Conservative Party outlined was absurd: We can pick up the fragments of our culture by putting on three-piece suits, getting riotously drunk, and reviving the divine right of kings. I had plenty of opportunities to engage with orthodox Christians, and I sincerely wanted Christianity to be true. It was clear to me that what the authorities in my world celebrated—the collapse of family life, the slaughter of the unborn, the deterioration of high culture—were, in truth, social evils that followed from the decline of the Church. Christianity seemed the natural alternative to secularity.
But when I entered the chapels and listened to the ministers, the regeneration I sought didn’t happen. Christian voices sounded all too agreeable and compromising. I wanted something stronger, something that didn’t Âbargain with secularism. I found it in Islam.
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Illinois, the national equivalent of a urinary tract infection, has booted Trump off the ballot in the next election unless he releases his tax returns.
According to Bonchie at Redstate,. the Illinois Senate voted 3619 to send the measure to the Democratic House, which will then send it to no-necked Democrat J.B. Pritzker.
Question; if Trump loses the popular vote again will the Donkeys complain? This was a massive act of voter-suppression, was it not? How does this jibe with the scheme which Illinois signed on with for a National Popular Vote/ It certainly fails to make the case for NPV. OH, and refusing to put a sitting President on the ballot is likely unconstitutional.
It won't matter to the Presidential election; no Republican has won Illinois since George H.W. Bush in 1988. But it can and will matter at the Congressional and local levels, as the "coattail effect" will be gone. THAT is, no doubt, the idea the state Democrats have.
I think this shows exactly how authoritarian the Left truly is, and how willing they are to force others to obey.
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St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner is a real piece of work. A Black Lives Matter radical, she was funded in part by George Soros, the marxist billionaire who funds so many of the bad things in our society. Gardner made it her personal crusade to take out Missouri's Republican Governor Eric Greitens; she violated numerous ethical and legal prohibitions to hound Greitens into resigning from office, including meeting with the "victim" in a motel in Illinois and demanding she press charges. The ethics violations were astonishing in the Greitens affair; Gardner hired a private investigator instead of using the police detectives, as she was supposed to do. The PI manufactured evidence and failed to show up in court when the judge demanded he explain himself. Gardner herself ignored court orders and refused to turn over evidence, leading to an appeal by Greiten's lawyers since Gardner was unwilling to comply with Discovery laws. She tampered with evidence, tampered with witnesses, lied to defense attorneys, lied to the judge. If she were not a black woman she would have been thrown in prison by now.
As it stands, she has been indicted by a Grand Jury and a special prosecutor has been appointed. But she's still up to her old tricks.
According to KPLR news:
ST. LOUIS – Questions about the legal defense team St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner hired to defend against a grand jury probe and the special prosecutor appointed to pursue the case.
The grand jury is looking into whether a man hired by Gardner to investigator former governor Eric Greitens perjured himself.
The special prosecutors have been after computer records in Gardner's office. Gardner has hired three out-of-town law firms to help with her defense.
So, Gardner is using taxpayer funds to pay for her defense, and has hired not one but three high-powered law firms from out-of-state to aid her defense. Typical; she was never a local girl in the first place, but rather a weaponized grievance monger bought and paid for by Leftist political activists from out of state.
The article continues:
The city counselor responded to Oldenburg, telling him that the contracts were supposed to be filed with the city register but that hasn't been done as of yet.
Fox 2/KPLR 11 caught up with the city attorney, who said me (sic) the city may not be obligated to pay the legal bill for Gardner.
Meanwhile, Gardner's spokeswoman said they administer contracts the same as previous administrations.
Anybody believe that? Anybody?
Gardner refused to comply with a search warrant, and has been fighting it in court ever since. She has previously paid a number of fines for violating campaign finance law.
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Global Warming? Russian Arctic National Park’s Director Alexander Kirilov doesn't seem to think so.
Clearly this fellow doesn't expect it to warm up much in the forseable future.
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A long-time television news reporter in St. Louis was fired for telling a guest - who herself was a long-time news anchor in St. Louis - that she "looked good" on his radio program.
According to the Belleville news Democrat Don Marsh, the eighty year old iconic St. Louis news guy, was sacked from his job on KWMU radio for complimenting Karen Foss on her appearance. In a vile comment he actually told her she "looked good".
The victim was so upset she failed to take umbrage, with Marsh:
"Reportedly Marsh was reprimanded for greeting me with a ‘you look good.’ The assertion being that Don was making a sexist comment,†Foss, 75, said in a Facebook post. "I am appalled. As a woman who has long argued for the equitable treatment of women, I am highly alert to sexism and discrimination and I sensed absolutely none of that in his greeting.â€
The general manager of the station tried to deny that this was the basis of Marsh being fired. The article continues:
Oh, the humanity! An eighty year old man uses phrases like "get a room" or says beauty takes precedent - as if this is a secret to anyone.
The #meetoo movement has truly jumped the shark, and now the most innocent of comments are being used to destroy people who do not deserve it. This is a very dangerous affair. Free speech is being abridged on a regular basis, and there are those - most especially older white men - who are being hounded out of their jobs and out of public life.
Natural human intercourse is now being treated as a thought crime.
Marsh added:
Well, he WAS working for NPR, so he shouldn't be surprised at this. If you lie down with dogs you ggt fleas...
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Global Warming has been blamed for everything from athlete's foot to halitosis to gang violence. Well, now we are being told it causes walruses to commit suicide by jumping off cliffs. See, it's too warm for them so they are going to leave this cold, er, hot cruel world!
You can't make this stuff up.
According to the Livescience story:
David Attenborough, the series' narrator, blames the incident on changes to the Arctic ecosystem that walruses inhabit. With sea ice receding year after year, he says, the walruses are forced to rest on crowded, tiny beaches. Those beaches are so overcrowded, he says, that some of the walruses scale cliffs for a bit of peace. But when the lumbering animals, unaccustomed to climbing or to heights, decide to return to the water, they wander right off the edge of the cliffs to their horrible deaths.
Except sea levels have risen just about two and a half inches since 1990 - about what it has done since the end of the Little Ice Age and not at all unusual for the last ten thousand years.
more...
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April 12, 2019
Mitch McConnell Just Brought Scott Pruitt Protégé Patrick Wyrick One Big Step Closer to a Seat on the Supreme Court
McConnell isn’t just envisioning a federal bench firmly on the right to steer the country for generations to come; he’s racing to seat its judges.
The end of the filibuster is already having consequences, and the Democrats can weep, wail, and gnash their teeth -- and ultimately blame retired Sen. Harry Reid for it.What Mitch McConnell lacks in charisma, he more than makes up for with steely discipline. With little fanfare, he pushed through a change in Senate rules last week to reduce the time for debate on certain judicial nominees and executive branch appointees from 30 hours to just 2 hours.
The poster child for why McConnell orchestrated the rules change is Patrick Wyrick, 38, a District Court nominee from Oklahoma who was on one of the lists President Trump circulated to conservatives of potential Supreme Court nominees, and who is Scott Pruitt’s protégé. Wyrick was confirmed under the new rules Tuesday on a party-line vote, 53 to 47.
Remember Scott Pruitt? He was Trump’s EPA administrator, one of the swampiest denizens. He was forced to resign amidst allegations of conflicts of interest with the oil and gas industry in his home state of Oklahoma, where he was attorney general before Trump tapped him for the EPA.
Wyrick was Pruitt’s number two, serving as solicitor general and doing most of the heavy lifting in oral arguments in court as the attorney general worked to undermine environmental protections in the state and challenge the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
He has only been on the Oklahoma Supreme Court for two years, and now he’s on his way to a lifetime federal appointment. No wonder McConnell didn’t want anybody talking about Wyrick for 30 hours. The New York Times brought to light in 2014 emails between Pruitt and Devon Energy Corporation as it pressed for relief from an EPA rule on methane emissions, with Wyrick acting as the go-between. The Times story—Energy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General—was not focused on Wyrick, but his name showed up in at least 11 email chains.
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April 11, 2019
A professor at the University of Louisville says he lost his job for advising parents to help their children embrace their birth sex
Dear readers, this world is deteriorating before our eyes! Please read the rest of this article to see the damage: https://world.wng.org/2019/04/transgender_tideA little over two years ago, I [the author of this article] wrote an article about the growing push to affirm transgenderism in children and teenagers. National Geographic had just published an issue praising the movement, and featured a cover photo of a 9-year-old boy dressed like a girl.
Ken Zucker, a secular psychologist in Canada, had recently lost his longtime position at a mental health center in Toronto for suggesting parents should try to help confused children become secure with their birth sex.
During that time, I spoke with Allan Josephson, a professor and psychiatrist at the University of Louisville, who offers similar counsel. He told me Zucker’s firing had been "an incredibly sobering experience for many professionals to see.†Many realized: "If that could happen to him, perhaps it could happen to me.â€
Two years later, Josephson says it’s no longer a hypothetical scenario.
On March 28, attorneys for the legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a federal lawsuit against the University of Louisville on behalf of Josephson. They say the school effectively fired the professor over his once-mainstream views.
The turmoil began in November 2017, when Josephson spoke on a panel at the Heritage Foundation about gender dysphoria and children. By then, Josephson had been chairing the university’s division of child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology for nearly 15 years.
During the Heritage panel, Josephson said the notion that gender identity should trump biological reality when classifying individuals is "counter to medical science.†He said parents should listen to their children with empathy and then "use their collective wisdom in guiding their child to align with his or her biological sex.â€
The ADF lawsuit says a few of Josephson’s colleagues complained to the university and demanded the school take disciplinary action. The lawsuit says the school demoted Josephson to the role of a junior faculty member. (A spokesman for the University of Louisville declined to comment on the case.)
In February 2019, school officials told Josephson they wouldn’t be renewing his contract. ADF attorneys say Josephson had received perfect marks on his performance reviews in the three years leading up to his visit to Heritage.
The ADF lawsuit challenges the University of Louisville’s actions as violations of Josephson’s free speech. The group’s website says school officials acted against the professor "with an eye to ensuring that neither he nor anyone else dares to express viewpoints they find objectionable on medical and psychiatric issues.â€
Expect that pattern to continue.
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Austin (I think it's spelled "Austan") Goolsbee -- have you seen and heard him on Fox News? He's the guy who's wrong about EVERYTHING! And he certainly seems to be here too. I have to say I kind of feel sorry for the guy. With a name like that, he probably had neighborhood kids stealing the newspapers he'd just delivered off the porches he'd thrown them on. Do you think HE'D use this program?As reform legislation Opens a New Window. advances through Congress Opens a New Window. that may eliminate a future IRS-created free filing software for taxpayers, New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested most Americans shouldn’t be preparing their own taxes.
In a speech on the House floor, the freshman lawmaker refereced (SIC) a Vox article which deemed it a "huge scandal†that lawmakers have not yet required the IRS to automatically prepare taxes for most Americans.
"Long-term, we should be looking at a solution where everyday people do not necessarily have to spend hours every year preparing tax returns, when the majority of Americans have relatively simple and straight-forward returns," she added.
Bipartisan reform legislation advancing through Congress – The Taxpayers First Act – contains a provision that would prevent the IRS from creating free tax preparation software to compete with private sector offerings from companies like TurboTax.
[...]
Currently, the IRS offers a service called Free File for certain qualifying, lower-income taxpayers. It offers this service through authorized third-party providers,including companies like H&R Block.
Ocasio-Cortez’s idea is not necessarily a new one.
Austin Goolsbee, a former economist in the Obama administration, proposed the idea of a "simple return†more than a decade ago. Since the IRS is asking the majority of people to copy information it already has onto forms and then submit it, the "simple return†would have the IRS send the taxpayer the documents with pre-filled information. It was a voluntary program designed to save taxpayers who opted into the program both time and money.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
07:57 PM
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