Make a Difference

Category: Current Affairs (Page 18 of 76)

Of Course, I would Have …

Not waited? Called the police? Done something to help? Rescued the girls? Saved the planet?

The need to believe ourselves morally superior to others has impacts on our understanding of history, the way we respond to calls for social or environmental action, and the way we interpret current events. The story of the story of Kitty Genovese is instructive. Thirty-eight neighbours watched the assault and did nothing? No. Thirty-eight neighbours were interviewed by police. Most of them heard and saw nothing, because they were inside with their families.

The rape and murder of Kitty Genovese was sad, horrific. There are lessons to be learned. But the story of Kitty Genovese does not say anything about the willingness of “other people” to stand by idly or curiously and watch a neighbour being stabbed and raped. That is not what happened.

“At 3:15 on the morning of March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old bar manager named Kitty Genovese drove her red Fiat into the parking lot of the LIRR station by her Kew Gardens home.

As she walked home — she was only about “a hundred paces away” from the apartment she shared with her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko — she heard a man’s footsteps close behind her. She ran, but the man, Winston Moseley, was too quick. He caught her, slammed her to the ground and stabbed her twice in the back. She screamed twice, once yelling, “Oh, God! I’ve been stabbed!”

Across the street, a man named Robert Mozer heard Genovese from his apartment. Looking out his seventh-floor window, he saw a man and a woman, sensed an ­altercation — he couldn’t see exactly what was happening — and yelled out his window, “Leave that girl alone!”

Moseley later testified that Mozer’s action “frightened” him, sending him back to his car. At this point, Genovese was still alive, her wounds nonfatal.

Fourteen-year-old Michael Hoffman, who lived in the same building as Mozer, also heard the commotion. He looked out his window and told his father, Samuel, what he saw. Samuel called the police, and after three or four minutes on hold, he reached a police dispatcher. He related that a woman “got beat up and was staggering around,” and gave them the location.

Other neighbors heard something as well, but it wasn’t always clear what. Some looked out the window to see Moseley scurrying away, or Genovese, having stood up, now walking slowly down the block, leaning against a building. From their vantage point, it wasn’t obvious that she was wounded. Others who looked didn’t see her at all, as Genovese walked around a corner, trying to make her way home at 82-70 Austin St.

But the police did not respond to Samuel Hoffman’s call …

Word of the attack spread though the building. A woman named Sophie Farrar, all of 4-foot-11, rushed to the vestibule, risking her life in the process. For all she knew, the attacker might have still been there. As luck would have it, he was not, and Farrar hugged and cradled the bloodied Genovese, who was struggling for breath.

Despite the attempts of various neighbors to help, Moseley’s final stab wounds proved fatal, and Farrar did her best to comfort Genovese in the nightmarish ­final minutes of her life.

..  Instead of a narrative of apathy, the media could have told instead of the people who tried to help, and of the complex circumstances — many boiling down to a lack not of compassion, but of information — that prevented some ­others from calling for aid.”

Yes, but telling the truth, the whole truth,  is not what the lamestream media does.

“Safe Schools” Has Nothing to do with Making Schools Safe

“How different then is that gentle, tentative sexuality between parent and child from the love of a paedophile and his/her lover?”

“Love, warmth, support and nurture is an important part of the paedophilic relationship.”

The author of these tributes to the beauty of ‘intergenerational love’ is Gary Dowsett, a professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He wrote those words, and many more in the same vein, in an article on ‘gay men and kids’ in a 1982 edition of a publication called Gay Information. Dowsett is a former schoolteacher now employed in La Trobe’s department of Sex, Health and Society, the nest of thinkers who gave us the Safe Schools Coalition.

Lest anyone think that Safe Schools is just the latest whim of an LGBTI establishment wanting to push its entitlements to the limit in a society which has lost its hitherto defining moral principles, Dowsett’s Gay Information article shows that initiatives of this sort are part a carefully thought out strategy, planned over the decades. Long before many of today’s advocates of gay ‘marriage’ and such novelties were born, the future professor was stating that:

…a new political position is needed for there are significant political struggles at stake. First, we have three legal/social questions to win: custody rights for gay men and lesbians; the legal right of paedophiles and their young lovers; and finally the sexual rights of children as a whole…

As with manifestos such as Mein Kampf, what ‘we’ intended to do could not have been spelled out more clearly for anyone who could be bothered to read it. This, of course, was back in the days when the ABC in its hippie mode was endorsing paedophilia as a ‘lifestyle choice’ and the fashionable LGBTI demand, the gay marriage of the day, was for the age of consent to be lowered to eleven.

Excerpted and edited from an article by Christopher Akehurst in The Spectator.

Life in Australian Aboriginal Communities

For, women, it was nasty, brutish and short.  An excerpt from an article by Tony Thomas on the Quadrant Magazine website.

Newly-arrived British and French were shocked at the local misogyny they encountered. First Fleeter Watkin Tench noticed a young woman’s head “covered by contusions, and mangled by scars”. She also had a spear wound above the left knee caused by a man who dragged her from her home to rape her. Tench wrote,

They  (Aboriginal women) are in all respects treated with savage barbarity; condemned not only to carry the children, but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality.

He also wrote,

When an Indian [sic] is provoked by a woman, he either spears her, or knocks her down on the spot; on this occasion he always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club, or any other weapon, which may chance to be in his hand.

Marine Lt. William Collins wrote, “We have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted.”

Governor Phillip’s confidant, Bennelong, in 1790 had taken a woman to Port Jackson to kill her because her relatives were his enemies. He gave her two severe wounds on the head and one on the shoulder, saying this was his rightful vengeance.

Phillip was appalled that an Eora mother within a few days of delivery had fresh wounds on her head, where her husband had beaten her with wood.

In 1802 an explorer in the Blue Mountains wrote how, for a trivial reason, an Aboriginal called Gogy “took his club and struck his wife’s head such a blow that she fell to the ground unconscious. After dinner…he got infuriated and again struck his wife on the head with his club, and left her on the ground nearly dying.”

In 1825, French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville wrote “young girls are brutally kidnapped from their families, violently dragged to isolated spots and are ravished after being subjected to a good deal of cruelty.”

George Robinson in Tasmania said in the 1830s that men courted their women by stabbing them with sharp sticks and cutting them with knives prior to rape. The men bartered their women to brutal sealers for dogs and food; in one case, such a woman voluntarily went back to the sealers rather than face further tribal violence.

Also in the 1830s, ex-convict Lingard wrote: “I scarcely ever saw a married woman, but she had got six or seven cuts in her head, given by her husband with a tomahawk, several inches in length and very deep.”

Explorer Edward John Eyre, who was very sympathetic towards Aborigines, nevertheless recorded:

Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands and friends…they are frequently beaten about the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences…

…few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks of spear wounds about the body. I have seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear wounds.

Louis Nowra visited outback communities and found them astonishingly brutal: “Some of the women’s faces ended up looking as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw. The fear in the women’s eyes reminded me of dogs whipped into cringing submission.”

Bashing of women’s heads appears to have been the custom for millennia. Paleopathologist Stephen Webb in 1995 published his analysis of 4500 individuals’ bones from mainland Australia going back 50,000 years. (Priceless bone collections at the time were being officially handed over to Aboriginal communities for re-burial, which stopped follow-up studies). Webb found highly disproportionate rates of injuries and fractures to women’s skulls, with the injuries suggesting deliberate attack and often attacks from behind, perhaps in domestic squabbles. In the tropics, for example, female head-injury frequency was about 20-33%, versus 6.5-26% for males. The most extreme results were on the south coast, from Swanport and Adelaide, with female cranial trauma rates as high as 40-44% — two to four times the rate of male cranial trauma. In desert and South Coast areas, 5-6% of female skulls had three separate head injuries, and 11-12% had two injuries.

… serious armed assaults were common in Australia over thousands of years prior to conquest. Settlers reported that sexual violence, including pack rapes and horrific genital wounding, was inflicted in many groups on girls barely out of the toddler stage.

Solicitor/historian Joan Kimm wrote: “The sexual use of young girls by older men, indeed often much older men, was an intrinsic part of Aboriginal culture, a heritage that cannot easily be denied.”

No More Children in Refugee Detention in Australia

8,000 refugee/asylum seeker children were placed in detention during the Labor/Green alliance governments of Gillard and Rudd. Some 1200 men, women and children lost at sea.

Now, for the first time in a decade, there is not a single child in detention on the Australian mainland. The last few, a baby, a toddler and a seventeen year old, left the Wickham Point detention centre in Darwin on Friday.

That is something worth celebrating!

Disagreeing With Us is Mean. You Will Be Stopped.

Anyone who has ever expressed an opinion other than the currently approved opinions will find him or herself nodding in agreement throughout this video.

For some people, free speech, the exchange of ideas, discussion of evidence, is so threatening that it must be stopped, even with violence.

The left, much as they pretend to be motivated by compassion and inclusiveness, in fact responds to any divergence with rage. Those who see things differently, or even ask difficult questions, are the enemy. And therefore you only have yourself to blame for the hate, lies and violence directed at you.

No Future for Truck Owner Drivers in Australia

The end of the road for truck owner-drivers in Australia.

How is this even possible?

“Some 35,000 people, mostly men, drive their own long-haul trucks. They have borrowed around $15 billion from Australian banks and other financiers to fund their vehicles. Most of the loans are also secured on the family home. A government body called the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal has made decisions that are set to not only destroy the livelihood of most of them but to force them to sell the family home.

Around Australia there are many tens of thousands of farmers who rely on these efficient and safe road operators to get their farm produce to market and supply them with farming needs. These farmers are going to be forced to pay between two and four times the current rate for their transport as a result of arbitrary decisions by the same government body. It will wreck many farmers.”

“This elimination of owner-drivers will be fairly quick. And as they are forced to sell their trucks the prices of vehicles will slump so they will be bankrupted. The actual capital of many owner-driver businesses is domestic homes so they will be sold to cover the debt to the banks because of the fall in value of trucks. As the large operators begin to control the business not only will owner-drivers be sent to the wall but the small transport companies that co-ordinate them will go. Many of those are in South Australia.”

Denmark – The Happiest Country in the World??

So Denmark is the happiest country in the world, right? With free education, free childcare, free health care, early retirement …

Except, of course, none of those services really is free. Doctors don’t work for nothing, hospitals aren’t built for nothing, teachers expect to be paid.

Free means either someone else is paying for it – lucky for you, not so lucky for the person who is paying but not getting the service. Or you are paying for it in ways that are hidden, usually through taxation.

danish-750-1

In Denmark, the happiest nation in the world, 11% of the adult population regularly take anti-depressants. The suicide rate has averaged 20.8 per 100,000 people for the last five decades – one of the highest rates in the developed world, more than twice that of Australia or the US.

Between income tax, sales tax and other duties, Danes pay to the government an average of 80c out of every dollar they earn. They pay the highest prices in the developed world for electricity. Because of this, businesses in Denmark cannot compete. They either go bankrupt or move. Most Danes will never own their own home.

Happiest country in the world? Not quite.

H/T The federalist Papers.

The Great Climate Con

A dazzling speech by James Delingpole to the meeting of the World Taxpayers’ Associations in Berlin.

This is a sample. Read the whole thing.

Last year Climate Change Business Journal – calculated that the total annual spend on the climate change industry is $1.5 trillion a year.

All those carbon traders, climate researchers, renewables and biofuels experts, environment correspondents, professors of climate science at the University of East Anglia and the Potsdam Institute, sustainability officers on local councils, and so on, add up the cost of their grants and salaries – and $1.5 trillion per year is the ballpark figure you reach.

So what does $1.5 trillion look like in a global economic context?

Well, it’s roughly the amount we spend every year on the online shopping industry.

$1.5 trillion on the global warming industry; $1.5 trillion on the online shopping industry.

But there’s a key difference between these two industries.

One exists to provide buyers and sellers what they want – to their mutual benefit; the other is a sham.

Buying stuff on the internet: it’s really useful, isn’t it? It has had a dramatically transforming effect on our quality of life, the way you can order a book at 11 o’clock on a Sunday night and have it appear on your doorstep the very next day.

But how did this marvellous industry spring up? Was it because of all the special incentives and tax breaks granted by wise governments? Nope of course not. They weren’t necessary. The online shopping industry sprung up and grew and grew because it was what people wanted, where they chose – of their own volition – to spend their money.

Now compare and contrast the global warming industry – which I call a Potemkin industry – because that’s what it is: a fraud; a sham; a conspiracy against the taxpayer.

Do you want to have a guess how much that industry would be worth if it weren’t for all the money funnelled into it via government grants and taxpayer levies and subsidies and regulatory capture?

Pretty close to zero, I’d say. Take wind farms – my hobby horse. The cost of intermittent, unreliable wind energy is roughly twice the market rate for onshore wind; three times the market rate for onshore. Nobody’s going to pay that kind ofmoney in the open market. The only way it’s going to happen if people are mandated by the government to do so: which is what of course has happened across Europe and in the US.

Warren Buffett has said it: “wind farms don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

They’re inefficient; they kill birds and bats; they spoil views; they’re environmentally unfriendly – rare earth minerals from China; they’re hazardous; they’re expensive; they’re ugly (well I think they are….)

And in few countries is the damage these monstrosities have done more obvious than in Germany, home of the hateful Energiewende.

Energiewende means Energy Transition. It has been a disaster.

Dances With Commies

First we had Dances with Wolves – a character played by Kevin Costner in the movie of the same name.

Then we had Dances with Smurfs – a character played by Sam Worthington in the movie of a different name.

Now we have Dances with Commies – a character played by a well-known community organiser.

Avatar-Sucks

tango

Taliban Murders Christians in Pakistan

“The death toll from a massive suicide bombing targeting Christians gathered on Easter in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore rose to 70 on Monday as the country started observing a three-day mourning period following the attack.

Meanwhile, in the capital of Islamabad, riots erupted for a second day when extremists who have been staging a protest since Sunday surged toward the Parliament and other key buildings in the city center. The demonstrators set cars on fire, demanding that the authorities impose Islamic law or Sharia. The army was again deployed to subdue the rioters.

The Lahore bombing, which was claimed by a breakaway Taliban faction that has publicly supported the Islamic State group, took place in a park, crowded with many families with children celebrating the holiday on Sunday. Many women and children were killed and at least 300 people were wounded.”

Pakistan is in trouble. It cannot protect its minorities, and has little will to do so. Its government is unstable. It has nuclear weapons.

Not good.

SJWs Are Not So Tough

In fact, they are bunch of sissies.

If you need a safe space anytime someone disagrees with you, you belong in either a kindergarten or a psych ward. You don’t belong at university or in a job or in politics.

Fortunately for those of us who take reality seriously, SJWs, despite their fearsome arsenal of shaming and name-calling and bursting into tears because you are so mean, with all your, you know, facts and stuff, are wimps. Stand up to them and they will go and sulk in the corner and leave you alone.

Since Brussels

Just in the few days since the Brussels attacks:

A march against fear in Brussels is cancelled because people are afraid.

A Muslim shopkeeper who gave thanks for “my precious Christian country” and wished locals a happy Easter, is stabbed to death – stabbed thirty times – by a fellow Muslim. The Guardian omits to mention this fact, leaving it open to readers to assume it was another one of those pesky Bendigo protesters.

ISIS releases a video of the Eiffel Tower exploding, saying “We will come to you and terrify you everywhere, we will come after you from where you don’t expect and fill your streets with blood.”

And that does not begin to cover the continuing attacks around the world:

25 killed in Yemen on Friday.

And 41 killed and 105 injured in Iraq.

In total 136 attacks against civilians by people shouting “Allah is greater” in the last month. 1030 killed, and 2972 injured.

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