Debunking Debunkers: Global Disinformation Index (GDI)

A useful exercise is to debunk the debunkers. I've done it before with the UK's fact-checker Full Fact .

It's particularly important in this coronavirus climate of frantic "fact-checking" and "information-correcting".

An article recently published on the website of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) is about a physicist, Danny Rogers, who has co-founded and is Chief Technical Officer of the Global Disinformation Index, with the noble purpose of saving the internet from lies, errors, fake news and what have you.

The first disinformation service he should perform is against some of his own claims during the interview, for example: "QAnon has led to people’s deaths."

This is a wide and sweeping generalisation with no basis in reality. If it refers, as the only tenuous link, to the murder of alleged mob boss Frank Cali by Anthony Comello in March 2019, it is highly flimsy.

Apparently on the advice of his lawyer Robert Gottlieb, Comello pleaded not guilty, since Gottlieb is trying to defend his client as not guilty due to mental defect.

According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Comello wanted to perform a citizen’s arrest on Cali to help Trump, as he believed the Gambino crime family's presumed boss was part of the deep state and that he "was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself" to place Cali under citizen's arrest. When Cali didn’t comply, the documents say, Comello killed him out of fear that Cali would kill him.

What is unclear, among many things, is why Comello thought Cali belonged to the deep state.

The connection of this murder with QAnon, what Leftists call a "conspiracy theory" that Trump and his presidency have been under attack by the deep state, is at the very least dubious.

On the same grounds we could blame any political movement, in most cases with better reason, of "leading to people’s deaths". Many examples come to mind, for instance the 14 June 2017 shooting At Alexandria, Virginia, Congressional Republican Baseball Practice which only for the presence of a security detail by a miracle didn't kill anyone but could have been a massacre,

James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on GOP lawmakers and staffers with a rifle as they prepared for the annual summer baseball game between Republicans and Democrats, wounding several people.

Hodgkinson’s social media profile revealed he was a Left-wing Bernie Sanders supporter who believed President Trump was a “traitor.” In one Facebook post of 3 months before Hodgkinson wrote: “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

The AAAS article goes on to say:

GDI’s [the above-mentioned Global Disinformation Index] system analyzes content and context flags which can help assess any domain’s risk of disinformation. It rates the disinformation risk for websites based upon variables that include overall credibility, whether they push sensationalism, whether they contain hate speech, and whether the company embraces sound policies regarding content.

Now, since the article is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the "debunking" website with a high-sounding name it analyses is co-founded and headed by a physicist, we would expect some more precision in its chosen criteria than this. What objective characteristics does "overall credibility" entail?

And, even more importantly, how do you define "hate speech"? What does this concept mean? What role can it have in a science-led effort of exposing disinformation?

It's an impossible task to give "hate speech" a role in refuting falsehoods, for many reasons. First of all, hate is a sentiment, an emotion, a passion. As such, it's in the realm of the subjective, not the objective. What you consider hate another may consider simply justice, or telling the truth. There's no objective yardstick for definition, let alone measurement.

Furthermore, "hate" has been overused ad nauseam by the political and cultural Left to stigmatise, place beyond the pale and therefore silence (or at least the Left hopes) its adversaries.

So, this other "fact-checking" enterprise on the face of it seems to be, like so many of the same kind, Leftist propaganda masquerading as a quest for the truth.



PHOTO CREDIT
Pixabay

Covid-19 Fake News Is Real: a Direct Personal Experience

Fake news is real, especially in the mainstream media.

The tabloids may be the worst offenders, but are not the only ones.

And, in these times of coronavirus pandemic and great confusion about something new and not well understood, we need to be particularly careful about what the big newspapers and magazines, on which many rely for their news, information and opinions, publish.

This life experience reported by writer Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review well illustrates it.

After writing an article in which he advanced a few hypotheses, making it clear that they were only his layman's (not a doctor's) conjectures, on why California a month ago had not experienced the same level of Covid-19 cases as New York, he was "hit" by media as well as private enquiries about his ongoing “coronavirus antibody testing studies.”

Despite the fact that he never claimed to be a medical expert in his article or in any enquiry following it, and that he explained he never conducted a coronavirus study, he was repeatedly pursued for medical advice, even by Chinese media who were in search of "lab" confirmation that the virus spread started in the US (some Chinese go as far as saying that the origin of the disease was in Italy).

Hanson adds that the more he was denying any expert knowledge the more the media, including American ones, ignored his correction and continued asking him the same questions regardless.

He concludes that fake news is real, and it's interesting to hear it from someone who has experienced personally how easily and quickly it spreads.

A book could be written on how efficiently, without difficulty and terrifyingly the mass media can manipulate consciences.

Milan and New York, AD 2014

These two astonishing pictures were not taken in Cairo, Islamabad or Riyadh. They are horrendous depictions of our Islamisation.

The first photo was shot in New York City, on Madison Avenue. The second in the place that is the heart and soul of Milan: Piazza del Duomo, Cathedral Square.

No comment is necessary.

H/t Alessandra Nucci

USA White Cop versus Black Thug Is Always Guilty until Proven Innocent

A lot of racism exists in the United States, but not what you think: it's anti-white racism among a great number of blacks, and among Leftist media and politicians of every colour.

What on 9 August happened in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, where black delinquent Michael Brown was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson, is like a rerun of the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman case of 2012. What the Left, the media and the race industry - the people that author Tammy Bruce calls "Misery Merchants", as they have made a career out of perpetuating in blacks a never-ending sense of victimhood and desire for retribution - say is the opposite of the truth. They portray the black man involved in either case as totally innocent, whereas he is guilty. They claim that the non-black, respectively, neighborhood watch volunteer or policeman is guilty of murder, whereas he is not.

But blacks in the US, a bit like Muslims in the UK, are more equal than others.

The media have constantly described Brown as a “gentle giant” and an “unarmed black teen.”

The two photos are stills from a surveillance video of a store, Ferguson Market and Liquors, where 18-year-old Michael Brown, who is 6-foot-4 and 292 pounds, shortly before being shot stole a handful of cigars. The photo at the top of the article shows him pushing a store clerk about half his bulk, and the one just above grabbing him by the collar. He then lets him go but comes back to threaten him.

See with what casual indifference Leftist The New York Times reports this:

The sequence of events provided by law enforcement officials places Mr. Brown and [accomplice] Mr. Johnson at Ferguson Market and Liquors, a store several blocks away on West Florissant Ave., at about 11:50 a.m. After leaving the store with the cigarillos, the two walked north on West Florissant, a busy commercial thoroughfare, toward Canfield Drive, a clerk reported to the police.

Those who had already decided on the verdict of guilt of the officer and therefore didn't want confusing new evidence to make things more difficult for their case tried to stop the store's video from being made public. In that camp are the Democrat Governor of Missouri Jay Nixon; "Misery Merchant", anti-racist careerist Al Sharpton, the perpetrator of the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax in which, due to lack of real white-on-black rape cases, one was staged; and US (black) Attorney General Eric Holder, who, as Matthew Vadum in FrontPage Magazine puts it, "has single-mindedly focused on converting the Department of Justice into a racial grievance incubator".

The excuse, sorry reason given was that the video is irrelevant, since the fatal shooting occurred in another circumstance.

The "irrelevant" robbery was perpetrated minutes before Darren Wilson, a decorated policeman, came across Brown and Dorian Johnson jaywalking in the middle of the road in Canfield Avenue.

Wilson told them to stop jaywalking, but they ignored him and the officer began to get out of his car. At that point Brown leaned into the police vehicle and began beating Wilson. He tried to grab the policeman's gun, and the two struggled over it.

The Gateway Pundit confirmed

from two local St. Louis sources that police Officer Darren Wilson suffered facial fractures during his confrontation with deceased 18 year-old Michael Brown. Officer Wilson clearly feared for his life during the incident that led to the shooting death of Brown. This was after Michael Brown and his accomplice Dorian Johnson robbed a local Ferguson convenience store.

Local St. Louis sources said Wilson suffered an “orbital blowout fracture to the eye socket.” This comes from a source within the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and confirmed by the St. Louis County Police...

The St. Louis County Police told reporters after the shooting that the police officer involved suffered facial injuries. He “was hit” and the “side of his face was swollen.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Christine Byers tweeted: "Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop's version of events in shooting".

More and more witnesses identify Brown as the aggressor in a vicious attack which inflicted head injuries so severe that officer Wilson may lose an eye. Wilson was clearly in fear for his life when he was assaulted by the oversized thug.

The relevance of the robbery committed shortly before the encounter with the policeman is well explained by Chief Ed Delmore, a former St. Louis Metro Area police chief, in his open letter to Ferguson Police Captain Ronald S. Johnson, who was among those objecting to the release of the Brown robbery video and claimed that it was irrelevant:

Well Captain, this veteran police officer feels the need to respond. What you said is, in common police vernacular—bullshit. The fact that Brown knew he had just committed a robbery before he was stopped by Officer Wilson speaks to Brown’s mindset. And Captain, the mindset of a person being stopped by a police officer means everything, and you know it.

Let’s consider a few examples:
On February 15, 1978 Pensacola Police Officer David Lee conducted a vehicle check. He didn’t know what the sole occupant of the vehicle had recently done, but the occupant did. Who was he? Serial killer Ted Bundy. Bundy attempted to disarm Lee. Lee was able to retain his firearm and eventually took Bundy into custody.

On April 19, 1995 Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hangar stopped a vehicle for minor traffic violations. He didn’t know that 90 minutes earlier the traffic violator, Timothy McVeigh, killed 168 people with a truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building. But McVeigh sure knew it, didn’t he? Fortunately, given his training and experience Hangar was able to take McVeigh into custody for carrying a concealed firearm. It was days later before it was determined that McVeigh was responsible for the bombing.

On May 31, 2003 then-rookie North Carolina police officer, Jeff Postell, arrested a man digging in a trash bin on a grocery store parking lot—an infraction that would rise to about the level of jaywalking. Postell didn’t know that he had just captured Eric Rudolph, the man whom years earlier had killed and injured numerous people with bombs and was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

So now, let’s consider Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson’s stop of Michael Brown. Apparently Wilson didn’t know that Brown had just committed a strong-arm robbery. But Brown did! And that Captain, is huge.

Allegedly, Brown pushed Wilson and attempted to take Wilson’s gun. We’re also being told that Officer Wilson has facial injuries suffered during the attempt by Brown to disarm him. Let’s assume for a moment those alleged acts by Brown actually occurred. Would Brown have responded violently to an officer confronting him about jaywalking? Maybe, but probably not.

Is it more likely that he would attack an officer believing that he was about to be taken into custody for a felony strong-arm robbery? Absolutely.

Officer Wilson survived the encounter with Brown as did Lee, Hangar, and Postell. Michael Brown didn’t survive and it’s too soon to say if Officer Wilson’s use of deadly force was justified and legal. You and I both know that not all officers survive such confrontations. Officers die in incidents like this Captain Johnson, including a couple that I remember from your own organization:

On April 15, 1985 Missouri Trooper Jimmie Linegar was shot and killed by a white supremacist he and his partner stopped at a checkpoint; neither Trooper Linegar nor his partner were aware that the man they had stopped had just been indicted by a federal grand jury for involvement in a neo-Nazi group accused of murder. The suspect immediately exited the vehicle and opened fire on him with an automatic weapon.

Just a month before, Missouri Trooper James M. Froemsdorf was shot and killed—with his own gun—after making a traffic stop. When the Trooper made that stop he didn’t know that the driver was wanted on four warrants out of Texas—But again the suspect knew it.

So Captain Johnson, I guess the mindset and recently committed crimes of the suspects that murdered those Missouri Troopers didn’t mean anything. The stops by the Troopers, as you have said, are entirely different events right?

Bullshit.

ObamaCare: A Word of Warning from Britain

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


In light of the ongoing ObamaCare debacle, it can be interesting to see how a state-run national health system free for all, like Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) – Obama’s favourite model -, has failed to deliver.

The UK is one of the few countries in the world – mostly concentrated in Europe - to have completely free universal health provision. It sounds cuddly and comfy, but, like in all utopias and fairy tales, reality is a different matter.

The NHS is Britain's sacred cow. No party, if it wants to be elected, can scrap it or reform it in any real sense. All parties have to recite the mantra: "The NHS is safe with us. We are ring-fencing the NHS".

In 2009, British Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, interviewed on Fox News (see above video) about the impending Obamacare, warned Americans that the NHS is a “60-year-old relic” and claimed he “would not wish it on anyone”. Hannan was then condemned back home as “evil”, “unpatriotric” and “a traitor”.

Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson said that the NHS is “the closest thing that the British have to a religion”. And Labour politicians managed to create a climate in which this institution was considered sacrosanct, untouchable by criticism.

But it’s becoming increasingly impossible now to keep that pretence.

The NHS, born on 5 July 1948, is the first system of free universal medical care ever established. The 1942 Beveridge Report, influential in founding the UK’s modern welfare state of which the NHS is part, was conceived and implemented during a special time, when the population was not only ethnically and culturally homogenous, but also feeling like a great family, bound together by the heroic struggle of WW2.

The fundamental principles of the NHS, then as now, have been: 1) services provided free at the point of use; 2) services financed from central taxation; 3) everyone eligible for care (even people temporarily resident or visiting the country).

According to Treasury figures, NHS spending almost doubled in real terms from £57 billion in 2002/03 to £109 billion in 2012/13, and is forecast for £129 billion in 2014.

Britain spends 18.5% of its annual budget on health, the second highest expenditure.

The NHS has always been beleaguered by problems and cash crises, and needing reform.

All “reforms” attempted through the years have only amounted to internal changes and restructurings - giving similar bodies different names. The current “reform” is no exception. Crisis has always been the NHS’s permanent condition.

Its original ideal is too expensive even in the best conditions and, with health care becoming more costly and population ageing, the conditions are going to worsen.

But more money doesn’t mean better care. Department of Health reports admit that, despite significant and consistent increases in funding, hospital productivity has fallen.

A study in the prestigious Lancet of health data over 20 years in 19 countries shows Britain lagging behind in 12th place.

The BBC reported on the research:

Many deaths happen because the NHS is not good enough at preventing people getting sick or because treatment does not rival that seen elsewhere in Europe, says Mr Hunt who is responsible for health policy in England.

By cancer survival rate comparisons, the NHS is one of the worst health systems in the Western world, even overtaken by former European communist countries.

The remedies are worse than the ills. After having created problems and produced terrible results, governments, to save their face and not risk losing votes, try to find band-aid solutions that make things even worse.

One instance of that is setting targets, which has led to patients being neglected to meet them:

Another example occurred at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, where over three years from 2005 between 400 and 1,200 patients died needlessly as managers ruthlessly cut costs — particularly nursing numbers — to meet targets the Labour government laid down to win ‘foundation’ hospital status.

Doctors were diverted from critically-ill patients in order to deal with less serious cases to meet the target of discharging all patients from Accident & Emergency units within four hours of admission.

Vulnerable patients were left starving, in soiled bedsheets or screaming in pain. Some became so dehydrated they drank from flower vases…

Apparently, the [Francis] report will damn not just the Mid-Staffordshire management but a ‘culture of fear’ from Whitehall down to the wards, as managers became fixated on meeting targets and protecting ministers from political criticism.

Countless families in Mid-Staffordshire have been left grieving for loved ones who were, in effect, killed by the National Health Service.

This is by no means an exceptional case. Inquiries follow scandals and are followed by new horror stories.

Top public health officials, from the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt down to Medical Director of NHS England Sir Bruce Keogh, have acknowledged that in many cases patients were abused, neglected and bullied, and have expressed serious concerns about the service at some NHS trusts.

In July of this year, 14 trusts were found to have unusually high mortality rates. In August, up to 42,000 deaths a year due to kidney failure were linked to dehydration in patients who were not given water by NHS staff. In September, it was discovered that 13,000 every year die of sepsis because of delays in diagnosis and treatment – negligence which also costs the NHS more money. In October, we had: the previous Labour government was accused of a pre-election cover-up about hospitals with higher-than-normal death rates, “with inspectors finding blood stains on floors and curtains and badly soiled mattresses”; NHS doctors were discovered to have been routinely giving performance-enhancing drugs to patients to “enhance their recovery rates”; and NHS managers getting hundreds of thousands of pounds in redundancy just before being given other NHS jobs – this was due to the latest NHS “reform”, which is simply a reshuffling. In November, it was found that NHS dementia patients were left hungry for hours and not given medication at the right time; a £200 million NHS fraud scandal was uncovered, with patients illegally claiming free services, and dentists, agencies and firms working for the NHS committing fraud and sending false invoices; 19 more hospitals were investigated over their links to allegations of sexual abuse by late TV celebrity Jimmy Savile, making a total of 32; it was discovered that the NHS spent nearly a fifth of its budget for maternity services on clinical negligence insurance in England in 2012, nearly £500m; there was news that Colchester hospital has been fiddling with patient records to improve its waiting times for cancer treatment, with potentially life-threatening consequences. In December, it’s been disclosed that up to 170 operations are cancelled at the last minute each day by NHS hospitals for bed shortages, faulty equipment and lack of staff.

This is just a sample, in no way a complete record. Not bad for less than a half year’s work.

A former London correspondent for Time sounds very reassuring:

Health care was more psychically seamless in the U.K. Nobody worried about going bankrupt if they got sick.

Nobody goes bankrupt individually, but everybody will go bankrupt with the rest of the country because the NHS and the whole welfare state are taking Britain to the verge of economic collapse, with an unsustainable and growing national debt.

Tim Kelsey, a director at NHS England, the central body in charge of the health service, warned in July:

We are about to run out of cash in a very serious fashion... our analysis will disclose that by 2020 there will be a £30bn funding gap in the healthcare system. [Emphasis added]

Senior NHS doctors and managers said that up to 20 hospitals across the country may have to close to save the NHS from financial ruin.

Although the American system of employer-provided medical care is different from the British system, comparisons of the latter with Medicare, Medicaid and Obama’s “vision” for public healthcare can be made. When healthcare is mostly paid by a third party, there’s little incentive to economize on it, and as a consequence expenditures rise dramatically. Late US economist Milton Friedman would call the NHS a plan for the “socialisation of medicine”, flawed like all government programmes to control social fields.

Two weeks ago, during a visit to Vladimir Bukovsky, I asked him if he thought that looking after the health of a whole country is a task a government can be efficient at. He replied: "There are very few things that governments are efficient at".

Interestingly, the US has always been used as a bogeyman to scare Europeans into believing that they need universal healthcare. Look at what happens in America, where there is no state-run health system, Leftists and media say.

However, that the question "Are you insured?" asked in US hospitals is caused by lack of free healthcare for all, European-style, is far from the truth. It was free medical care provided by employers during the war - to attract workers at a time of price and wage controls - that led to the current situation in the US. Most Europeans have never heard of the existence of Medicare and Medicaid, and believe that Americans who can’t afford insurance are practically left to die.

O'Neill Got It Wrong: Gay Activists Want More than Liberation, not Less

Brendan O'Neill totally missed the point.

He compares the gay radicals of the past who did not want marriage because they saw it as a form of oppression to the LGBT movement of today who demand same-sex wedlock, and concludes that the latter have become bourgeois and integrated, renouncing the radical ideology of the beginning, when Stonewall was young and fighting for liberation from matrimony, not enslavement by it.

The point he misses is that the homosexual activists have become more radical, not less.

What they demand from society now is a total redefinition of marriage, something that goes to the core of this institution and pierces it through the heart. They want to shape society in their own image, not just more or less politely ask society to leave them alone.

What was a negative request, "Do not interfere with our personal lives", has become a much stronger, positive demand, "Change the meaning of marriage to fit our bill".

This can be seen especially clearly when you consider the LGBT movement's request for same-sex marriage in church, when it is obvious that the people who intend to take advantage of this "right" do not believe in the precepts of the Churches whom they would require to celebrate their wedding.

It is transparent that church gay marriage is a travesty of Christian marriage, as I have written elsewhere:

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the [British] TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception [bar abolishing the minimum age of consent]?

California: the Islamic Supremacists Next Door

This is the plight of an American family living in a California apartment complex. The father has written to me asking for his difficult situation to be made known, adding that they had a rousing support from Australia and the UK and less from USA, hence the wish for more exposure of their case.

The family's Muslim neighbours have made their life very difficult, with invasions of privacy, bullying of their children by the Muslim kids and several rows.

Eventually the family has contacted the apartment complex's Management, which has responded by accusing them of being “racist” and committing “hate crimes”. The father wrote that the Management even went as far as "pursuing a case of defamation and malicious prosecution of our family in spite of significant evidence to deny the validity of their claim".

This is an excerpt from the letter the father had sent to Jihad Watch, which posted it under the headline "The Islamic supremacists next door". The excerpt gives you a flavour of the situation this family found themselves in:

We took the opportunity to communicate the bullying behavior of her oldest daughter Soumaya (8 years old) toward our daughter Emma (5 years old), exposing Emma to the horrors of Hell as described in the Koran. We witnessed the children talking in the playground and Emma coming in running and crying, explaining that Soumaya (quoting passages from the Koran) had told her that she was "going to burn in boiling oil in Hell, having layers of her skin peeling off while being burnt alive for not being Muslim, and Santa Claus is not real and your parents lie." At this point we confronted Aisha with the bullying situation and she smiled in reply to the story saying, "That's because Soumaya has started studying the Koran."

Mental Illness and Violence

Reading Ann Coulter's article Guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do I felt a lot of sympathy for her position.

I attended University in Italy in the late '70s, and I studied psychiatry as part of my Philosophy course.

The anti-psychiatry movement started by British psychiatrist Ronald Laing, which denied the existence of mentall illness, claiming that the whole family of the patient is ill and the psychiatric patient is only the scapegoat of the family's disease, was then very influential.

Italy's democratic psychiatry school of Franco Basaglia of Gorizia's Psychiatric Hospital was very popular. The political slant in Basaglia's approach was that the mentally ill is simply someone who chooses not to conform and integrate, a victim of society or, more specifically, of the political powers who need to emarginate dissenters (and he wasn't talking just about the Soviet Union but of Western democracies too).

I remember even attending, with other university students, a meeting with the patients of Arezzo Psychiatric Hospital, run by another psychiatrist of Basaglia's school, Pirella. Meetings between the hospital patients and the general public were regularly organized. And in these hospitals, the patients were free to go in and out.

The whole idea then was that psychiatric patients had been oppressed and terribly mistreated, that they should not be locked up and that the chance of their being dangerous was risible.

What these movements achieved, as well as influencing the way people look at mental illness, was a profound reform of psychiatric institutions, with the release into "the territory" (the Italian term) or "the community" (the English jargon) of many people previously admitted into mental hospitals.

We are all now familiar with many cases in which some people with psychosis have become a very difficult burden for their families, who can't cope with them and repeatedly asked for them to be re-admitted to a hospital and treated. In some cases such mentally ill people have committed suicide or murders.

This could be the reason why a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, in which respondents were asked to apportion responsibility for the shootings that have taken place in Tucson, Ariz.; Aurora, Colo.; and Newtown, Conn. to various posssible choices of causes, reveals that

The second choice, selected by 82 percent as “a great deal” or “a good amount,” was “the lack of effective treatment for mental illness.”

The first choice was “parents not paying enough attention to what is going on in their children’s lives”, of which 83 percent said that was “a great deal” or a “good amount” responsible. Only 4 percent said “none at all.”

Guns only came in fifth, somehow vindicating Coulter's position, although the percentages were still high:

Tied for fifth place at 59 percent each was “assault and military-style firearms being legal to purchase,” and “the availability of high capacity ammunition clips.”

But the point is: is this scientifically founded?

Here I believe that, as much as the new psychiatric policies may have been failures, to find the right balance is extremely difficult.

There is a statistical fallacy which commonly confounds the issue here. The proportion of prison inmates who are mentally ill is rather high - some sources say almost 1 in 5 in the United States -, and according to a systematic review people with schizophrenia are about twice more likely to be violent than other people, but the proportion of psychotic people who commit violent crimes is extremely low: an Oxford Journals meta-analysis of 7 studies in different countries resulted in an estimate of 1 murder of a person unknown to the mentally ill individual per 14.3 million people per year.

The report concludes:

Stranger homicide in psychosis is extremely rare and is even rarer for a patient who has received treatment with antipsychotic medication. A lack of distinguishing characteristics of stranger homicide offenders and an extremely low base rate of stranger-homicide suggests that risk assessment of patients known to have a psychotic illness will be of little assistance in the prevention of stranger homicides.

We know that hindsight is easy, but prediction is a much harder business.

Psychotic killing of strangers is extremely rare, and rare events are difficult to handle statistically. Ben Goldacre explains it in his book Bad Science:

Let's think about violence. The best predictive tool for psychiatric violence has a ‘sensitivity' [accuracy in predicting correctly] of 0.75, and a ‘specificity' [accuracy in not over-predicting] of 0.75. It's tougher to be accurate when predicting an event in humans, with human minds and changing human lives. Let's say 5 per cent of patients seen by a community mental health team will be involved in a violent event in a year. Using the same maths as we did for the HIV tests, your ‘0.75' predictive tool would be wrong eighty-six times out of a hundred. For serious violence, occurring at 1 per cent a year, with our best ‘0.75' tool, you inaccurately finger your potential perpetrator ninety-seven times out of a hundred. Will you preventively detain ninety-seven people to prevent three violent events? And will you apply that rule to alcoholics and assorted nasty antisocial types as well?

For murder, the extremely rare crime in question in this report, for which more action was demanded, occurring at one in 10,000 a year among patients with psychosis, the false positive rate is so high that the best predictive test is entirely useless.

This is not a counsel of despair. There are things that can be done, and you can always try to reduce the number of actual stark cock-ups, although it's difficult to know what proportion of the ‘one murder a week' represents a clear failure of a system, since when you look back in history, through the retrospecto-scope, anything that happens will look as if it was inexorably leading up to your one bad event. I'm just giving you the maths on rare events. What you do with it is a matter for you.

Associated Press Bans the Use of "Islamophobia", "Homophobia" and Other Words

The major news agency Associated Press (AP) has recently decided to put an end to the use of "Islamophobia", "homophobia", "ethnic cleansing" and other politically charged words in its highly influential The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, generally called the AP Stylebook.

The book, annually updated, is a guide for style, usage, grammar, punctuation and reporting principles and practices used by reporters, editors and others in the US newspapers, news industry, magazines, broadcasters, public relations firms and so on.

Although not all publications use it, the AP Stylebook is regarded as a newspaper industry standard.

Therefore, the decision of making these changes, which will appear in the next printed edition that usually comes out in June, has particular importance.

The online Style Book now says that "-phobia," "an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness" should not be used "in political or social contexts," including "homophobia" and "Islamophobia." It also calls "ethnic cleansing" a "euphemism," and says the AP "does not use 'ethnic cleansing' on its own. It must be enclosed in quotes, attributed and explained."

"Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a psychiatric or medical term for a severe mental disorder. Those terms have been used quite a bit in the past, and we don't feel that's quite accurate," AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told POLITICO.

"When you break down 'ethnic cleansing,' it's a cover for terrible violent activities. It's a term we certainly don't want to propgate," Minthorn continued. "Homophobia especially -- it's just off the mark. It's ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don't have. It seems inaccurate. Instead, we would use something more neutral: anti-gay, or some such, if we had reason to believe that was the case."

"We want to be precise and accurate and neutral in our phrasing," he said.

This is an obvious improvement, since"homophobia" and "Islamophobia" are terms coined with the sole purpose of denigrating an opponent in a debate, as ad hominem attacks, and are devoid of any real meaning: they say more about the people who use them than about those they refer to.

Regarding "Islamophobia", David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have written a pamphlet on the word's origins that can be ordered or read for free online, entitled "Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future":

The U.S. is slowly but certainly accommodating the view that free speech, when it comes to religious (i.e. Muslim) matters, is suspect. We have come to this point, in large part, because of the growing success of the idea that any criticism of Islam is actually a pathology, rather than a legitimate exercise of free speech. It is, in other words, “Islamophobia.”

In their pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, David Horowitz and Robert Spencer document how the origin of the word “Islamophobia” is a coinage of the Muslim Brotherhood. They show how the Brotherhood launched a campaign, by ginning up “Islamophobia” as a hate crime, to stigmatize mention of such issues as radical Islam’s violence against women and murder of homosexuals, and the constant incitement of many imams to terrorism. The authors make the case that “Islamophobia” is a dagger aimed at the heart of free speech and also at the heart of our national security.

Regarding the political use of the suffix -phobia generally, it is interesting to note, as Peter LaBarbera does, how unequally and uni-directionally it is employed; *-phobes never belong to the dominant orthodoxy, but always to the class of those who dissent from it:

We at Americans For Truth, like our peers in the pro-family, conservative movement who stand in principled and faith-based opposition to the LGBT political and cultural agenda, do not “fear” homosexuals. We simply disagree profoundly with the normalization of homosexual behavior and the elevation of homosexuality and “gay” identity to “civil rights” status.

Of course, there are people who do fear homosexuals, but there are also people who fear conservative Christians. So isn’t it odd that “homophobia” (and “Islamophobia”) became mainstreamed in America’s media-driven lexicon, while “Christian-phobia” did not? (And now transgender activists, piggybacking off the semantic success of their homosexual allies, are pushing the equally dubious “transphobia” to advance their agenda.)

You could easily fill ten large books with examples of abuses of the tendentious term “homophobia” and its derivative, “homophobe,” in the same-sex debate. Advocates of homosexuality and foes of biblical sexual morality would never allow themselves to be categorized and caricatured as “phobes” — our friend John Biver posits the Secular Left as “morality-phobia” HERE — yet they pretend that somehow “homophobia” objectively describes opposition to homosexuality. That’s because to far too many homosexual advocates, the end justifies the means, and the “gay” cause advances when its critics are cynically and falsely cast as hateful and fearful creeps.

We will have more on this story. For now, it is gratifying to see AP make a move toward neutrality, objectivity and fairness in its coverage of homosexuality.

It's extremely telling that Associated Press decided to drop both "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" simultaneously, because their origin and usage as denigratory terms, free-speech attacks and thought-policing instruments are remarkably similar.

It is really good news that someone in a position of influence in the media has started taking notice. And it is not the first time:

First the Associated Press announced that it would continue using “Illegal Alien” instead of “Undocumented American”, “Accidental Border Crosser” or “Beautiful Dreamer” on the grounds that it was well… technically accurate.

...The Associated Press is not taking a conservative position here, but we have reached such a point of cultural decay that fact-based positions that derive their grounds from reason and proof are already innately conservative. Or as George Orwell put it, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

The left’s counterattack on behalf of homophobia is already irrational, even from the standpoint of their own interests, because it communicates mental problems when the goal is to communicate bigotry.

Slate argues that homophobia is just like arachnophobia. The argument is wrong on a number of levels. The most simple level where it’s wrong is that the subject under discussion is not even fear. It’s dislike. The Guardian and several other media outlets have churned out pieces arguing that dislike of homosexuality is primarily motivated by fear. But that’s an opinion and the very argument testifies to a news media that is hardly able to distinguish fact-based reporting from opinion-mongering.

Finally there is something Orwellian about describing political or religious views in terms usually employed for mental illness. It skips past discussing what people believe or do to claiming intimate knowledge of their motives and passing judgement on their sanity. It’s reasonable for the AP to opt out of such heavily politicized and inaccurate language that claims to report on the state of mental health, rather than the state of events.

Grandma Scares Away Store Robber with a Gun

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What happened in a convenience store in Milwaukee confirms the view of those who want the Second Amendment upheld, that guns, yes, can be used to commit crimes but they can also be essential to prevent and stop them.

I'm on the fence on this, I can see the merits of both positions. And I can see that to let the state (and the criminals) be the only ones in possession of weapons requires an enormous amount of trust in that state.

Ernestine Aldana, a 48-year-old grandmother working in the shop, being threatened with a knife by a robber, responded by pulling out a gun and pointing it at him. He got scared and ran away.

TV and Hollywood Subtle Hidden Persuaders: The Killing, The Final Destination

Both the television and Hollywood subtly manipulate - in a way reminiscent of the advertising industry with its "hidden persuaders" - what people think to establish a form of cultural Marxism ("political correctness" is nothing other than that) as the dominant ideology, the current orthodoxy.

Subtle, hidden persuasion used in fictional, visual stories is much more effective than direct attempts to persuade through argument. If you see the argument openly, you can also spot its faults by using reason, logic and evidence. But if you are not allowed to see the argument, you are more vulnerable to it via the power of imagery and emotionally-charged human tales.

So viewers are influenced by professional persuaders into buying an ideology or a world view as they would an advertised product or service.

These days we can watch so many shows, films and telefilms for free and in the comfort of our homes. We are lucky, yes, but just as we have to somewhat pay for all this luxury through enduring commercial breaks, similarly we also have to pay for it by being subjected to ideological and political brainwashing, more often than not without even realizing it.

I'll give two recent examples of British TV broadcasts, one of which involves a Hollywood film.

Since I mentioned "orthodoxy", a term often used in relation to religion and whose opposite is "heresy", and remembering that heretics were sometimes burnt at stakes, I'll start with the American movie, for reasons that will become clear.

The film in question is The Final Destination, the fourth in the series, made in 2009. I didn't watch the whole film, but I saw a scene in which a drunken guy, an obvious villain of the piece, calls a black man "nigger". At that point I knew, for having seen a similar thing umpteen times in Hollywood productions, that this chap was doomed. He couldn't say that word in a US film and survive unscathed: he had to die.

Sure enough, he did die. And how is also interesting. The character, Carter, caught fire in an accident involving his truck. The vehicle started moving while he was trying to burn a cross on a front lawn, and as he chased after it, his foot got caught in the chain, dragging him along the road with the truck and starting a fire through friction. So he was burnt alive, just as the heretic that he was, for having used a wrong word according to the Hollywood orthodoxy's diktats.

The important thing to consider here is that the term "racism" has become so broad and all-encompassing in its meaning, and is misapplied to so many irrelevant, inappropriate situations, that it now creates a real confusion in its usage.

Real, serious acts or demonstrations of racism - very rare, now, except those directed against whites - are put by this prevailing liberal (in both senses of abundant and leftist) use of the word in the same category as trivialities, like calling people names in a moment of irritation, so whoever commits the second kind of "offence" is treated with almost the same severity as who is a real racist.

A good instance of that is the case of former England football team's captain John Terry.

My second example from UK TV programs is the Danish detective drama The Killing, Series 3. Here a huge corporation, the biggest in Denmark, shipping and oil giant Zeeland, is the villain. Its owner Robert Zeuthen is a man who has destroyed his family for being too absorbed in his multinational empire. His young daughter is kidnapped and her life is at risk, all because Zeuthen's personal assistant and Zeeland's top executive Niels Reinhardt, a real corporate man who worked all his life for the company and in the drama personifies it, is a paedophile who raped and killed a child whose father is exacting revenge.

In the end Zeuthen, after his daughter is rescued and safe, decides to retire from running the business in order to spend all his time with his now reunited family. The corporation is seen throughout the story as an enormous predator, swallowing the life of the owner's family and then almost eating up the flesh of his daughter, run by men who are corrupt at best and murderous paedophiles at worst.

In the final episode the company seems to be abandoned, like a sinking ship, by its owner who had already squandered lots of its resources in a vain pursuit of his daughter's kidnapper, signifying the unimportance of money and wealth.

His wife is a heroine of the drama, who is against the big multinational from start to finish.

Occupy Wall Street couldn't have got the message across better.

The moral of the story is, among other things, that the corporation ruined the family, and its dereliction restored it.

How many families, in real life, are actually helped, kept together and survive thanks to businesses like Zeeland is naturally conveniently omitted from the yarn, which could have made the hardest-core Marxist proud.

Church Gay Marriage Is a Travesty of Christian Marriage

Today, during a conversation I was just about to use the word "family", when I realized that I don't know what "family" means anymore.

This is a semantic, and therefore logic, problem.

In logic, the 19th-20th century German philosopher Gottlob Frege distinguished between the two characteristics, the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning or significance and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by it. You could see it as its extension.

The sense or connotation are the concept's descriptive qualities, the information it conveys.

If you say "cat", the meaning of the concept is all cats; its sense is a domestic, feline, carnivorous creature who hunts, purrs, has whiskers and ears of a certain shape etc. The concept expresses both.

There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa.

A concept like "universe", just because it has a vast meaning of an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.

Defining a word means exactly that, giving it borders that restrict it.

If you say "everything", the meaning is infinite and therefore the sense is tiny. If you ask someone what he did today, and he answers "everything", he conveys little or no information.

So, about "family".

In this case, the reason why we don't know what it means any more is obvious. A couple of homosexuals, married or not, with or without children, is now considered a family. Even 3 people of either or any sex who had a ménage à trois and lived together would be considered a family. An unmarried (heterosexual, because we have to specify these days) couple each of whose members was married to someone else with whom they had children (living with either parent) is considered a family. The list is endless.

And again, by extending the meaning of "marriage" to the point of making it burst, we have enormously shrunk its sense, which has become very vague now. Hence, I could not use the word today when I needed it.

Many things have caused this unwelcome development. I want to focus here on the homosexuals' ever extending demands for their "rights".

It's OK for them to do what they want, as for everybody else, as long as it does not harm others.

Here we have got to the point when the gays' demands are harming others.

First, the direct victims are the children, either adopted or born through some artificial or concocted means (IVF or sex of one of the couple with a third person), that a homosexual couple can now legally call their own.

Freud was probably the first to say that a mother and a father have, among other things, the crucial task of being a model through example, showing their children what the different sexual roles are. Many things that Freud thought were wrong, but this is still considered true, this is what most psychologists think today.

Nobody denies - yet - that there are two sexes, and that they have important differences.

The children of these homosexual couples, having two mothers and no father or two fathers and no mother, will very likely grow up confused about sexual roles and differences, and this is not going to bring happiness and psychological balance but the opposite. They will probably become homosexuals in a disproportionate number of cases, compared to the others.

When in the next few years or decades the consequences on these children will become apparent (and in particular when it will be clear that they are not happy people), that may signal the start of a backlash against all this giving homosexuals whatever they ask for.

The other victim is indirect, and is society. It's all of us. The family is a vital part and foundation of society, and diluting its sense and value - obviously not just through "gay marriage" and all that, but also through many other unsavoury developments among heterosexuals - has already produced terrible outcomes (the underclass, with rise in: crime, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and others) and is going to continue doing so.

Homosexuals are not discriminated against any more. Like blacks, they are not victims anymore.

Wake up. The people discriminated against have changed, the oppressors have become oppressed.

Now, when there is a civil dispute between gay activists and people who have different views, the former will always trump the latter, as Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife owners of a B&B in Cornwall who were successfully sued by a male homosexual couple for offering them two rooms rather than one, experienced first hand.

The excuse most commonly given for this perversion of the law is to say: the B&B is a public business. There's a lot to answer to that. First of all, the couple did not send the homosexuals away, they just offered them two separate rooms. No law can oblige a hotel or B&B to offer one particular room instead of another; even reserved rooms can sometimes be replaced by others.

Second, pub landlords are entitled to throw out or refuse entry to whomever they like, they don't even need to justify that with motives. It's often said that the reason for this is because they have to maintain order in the pub, but in reality they have the power to use that right at their discretion, they may simply throw out whomever they dislike. So, why should people who run a hospitality business not have the same right? Night clubs refuse admission to people for simply wearing the wrong clothes and nobody talks about human rights violations, which would be ridiculous.

Third, I think that the law of contract should enable everybody to freely enter the contract or not. A business, public or not, should have the right to refuse to serve whomever they like. In fact, they do. Banks, for instance, may refuse to open an account without any valid reason.

I believe that the "public business" motivation is just an excuse, and the real reason is just that the gay agenda must take precedence over everything else.

If anybody has any doubt, just look at the new law about to be introduced in the UK that allows gay marriages to be celebrated in church, which Prime Minister David Cameron has yesterday backed.

Gays say that they just want to be like everybody else, but the fact is that they are not like everybody else. If you, either by choice or not (I don't think that anybody knows really) live a homosexual life, go the full length, accept your diversity and live according to it.

What's the sense of living as a gay but at the same time imitating heterosexuals and doing things which are definitely not gay, are the essence of not being gay, like having children?

In the case of the church gay marriage law, the Church of England rightly protested that clergy should not be forced to perform ceremonies that go against their beliefs and doctrines. The government's reply that they will not be forced was ridiculous, because, as the Church answered, they will be forced not by the law itself, not by democratically elected representatives of the people, but by unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic judges of European or international courts in the hands of whom the certain legal actions initiated by homosexuals will eventually end.

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception?

Actually no, there is an exception, at least until now: the demand to lower or even abolish the minimum age of consent to sexual intercourse for homosexuals. This demand comes from associations like the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) founded in 1978 before the pederasty issue became vastly exposed, and is an activist homosexual and paedophilia coalition group whose primary stated aim is to overturn US statutory rape laws.

In short, it asks for pederasty to be made legal. Among NAMBLA advocates are well-known homosexual activist figures, like David Thorstad and the leader of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) rights movement Harry Hay, and was part of the American gay rights movement for a long time, participating in marches and gay pride parades. It is not just an American phenomenon, though. Our own Peter Thatchell, Britain's leading gay activist, also supports underage sex.

What Is Happening Today 4-12-2012

News in pills. The latest events worth knowing

That Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is newly pregnant and in hospital with a rare and acute morning sickness you already know, but it's just a starter.

The Pope has his new personal Twitter account, @pontifex (Latin word for "pontiff"), in 8 languages, starting tweeting in just over a week. The description: "Welcome to the official Twitter page of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Vatican City · news.va". No tweet yet in his account, but already over 300,000 followers in the first 24 hours, which are at this moment approaching 400,000, and still counting.

Today thousands of Egyptians marched on the presidential palace in Cairo to protest the assumption by Islamist president Morsi of almost unrestricted powers for himself as well as a draft constitution, hurriedly adopted by his allies, that will establish Egypt as a Sharia state, burying any vestige of democracy. Is this "the Death of the ‘Arab Spring’", as Robert Spencer describes it, nearly 2 years after it started?

Obama held a reception party for Led Zeppelin, David Letterman and Dustin Hoffman while discussions to avoid the fiscal cliff continue. Many commentators observed that he could have waited until the fiscal cliff talks were done and a deal had been reached. This is not the first time that Obama puts being a celebrity and hanging out with celebrities (or playing golf) ahead of doing his job. If America goes over the fiscal cliff, millions of Americans will suffer. But the president doesn’t seem to care.

In Sudan, Christians living in the Nuba Mountains continue to be the target of bombers as the government continues to fight a rebel group in the region. Will the world speak up to protect the Christians in the Nuba Mountains? Don't hold your breath.

A mortar slammed into a school in the Damascus suburbs today, killing 29 students and a teacher, according to Syria's state media. Obama and other world leaders warn Syria against using chemical weapons. Nato has now given the go ahead for Patriot surface-to-air missiles to be deployed along Turkey's border with Syria.

In the meantime, in another "Arab Spring" country, Yemen, an Amnesty International report released today details ‘horrific’ abuses. It documents that in its 16-month rule between February 2011 and June 2012, during which it took over parts of southern Yemen, Al Qaida beheaded an alleged sorcerer, crucified a man accused of spying and amputated a man’s hand for stealing, in a “human rights catastrophe”. The report also accuses Yemen’s government of abuses.

In the US, Iraqi refugee were arrested for bombing Arizona Social Security office with IED. The mainstream media are silent about it.

Still in America, Speaker John A. Boehner initiated yesterday a small purge of rebellious (mostly conservative) Republicans from prominent economy committees, sending a harsh message before the approaching vote on a fiscal cliff deal.

Christians in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh continue to face persecution at the hands of Hindu radicals. Police remain complicit to the violence perpetrated against Christians.

The highest US military court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, yesterday ousted the judge in the Fort Hood shooting case for “bias”. It ruled that Col. Gregory Gross didn't appear impartial while presiding over the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who faces the death penalty if convicted in the 2009 shootings on the Texas Army post that killed 13 people and wounded more than two dozen others. The "bias" consisted in the judge's order to have the suspect's beard forcibly shaved before his court-martial, which the court threw out.

In the US, a newly-released colour photo showing George Zimmerman with bloody injuries, allegedly taken on the night of his altercation with Trayvon Martin which ended up with Zimmerman shooting the 17-year-old dead, could prove that the killing was an act of self-defense and that "media coverage of the story was an exercise in manufactured race-baiting".

In Mali, Jihad gang boss Oumar Ould Hamaha declares war on all music everywhere. He says: "We are in a struggle [Jihad] against all the musicians of the world".

Prohibition to Use the Word "Christmas" Is Unconstitutional

With the Christmas Festivities approaching, we'll see many more cases of this nonsense, and not just in the US but all over Western countries.

College Wants Club to Change 'Christmas' to 'Holiday' for Tree Sale Fundraiser:

School officials at a community college in western North Carolina replaced the word "Christmas" with "holiday" in a student club's announcement of a Christmas tree sale aimed at raising funds for charity, says a religious freedom law group. "We cannot market your trees in association solely with a Christian event," a college official told the club, according to Alliance Defending Freedom.

Lawyers from ADF responded by sending a letter to Western Piedmont Community College pointing out that it had violated the constitutional rights of the club.

"It's ridiculous that anyone would have to think twice about using the word 'Christmas' as part of a Christmas tree sale," said Legal Counsel Matt Sharp. "Not only is it perfectly constitutional to use the word 'Christmas,' it is unconstitutional to prohibit use of it. This is another perfect example of the immense misunderstanding that far too many college officials have about what the First Amendment truly requires."

The student-led BEST Society is sponsoring the sale, which ends on Dec. 6. The club completed the necessary paperwork to have the event announced through numerous means on campus. The text they requested, "The BEST Society will be selling Christmas Trees," appeared correctly initially in late October, but after a few days, the text was changed to "The BEST Society will be selling Holiday Trees," according to ADF.

"As a result of this forced changed to their advertisements," the ADF letter explains, "the BEST Society has received complaints from community members, several of whom have indicated that they will not purchase trees from the group because of the change in wording. This has resulted in direct harm to the club's fundraising activity, the proceeds of which are being used to support Angel Tree, an organization that provides Christmas gifts to children."

The letter goes on to say that "the censorship of the BEST Society's message, and the requirement that its advertisements use the phrase 'holiday tree' rather than Christmas tree, is a violation of the constitutional rights of the club members."

ADF is asking that the college, located in Morgantown, return the club's original wording to the announcements wherever they appear so that no legal action will be necessary.

Incidents such as the college's removal of "Christmas" have been tagged over the last several years as part of the "war on Christmas," a type of cultural debate in the U.S. where displays of the Christian holiday in the public square have been met with disapproval by primarily atheist groups. Although the activists often cite a "separation of church and state" clause in the Constitution as a defense for their reasoning, many legal experts say that their interpretation is a misnomer. The clause was meant to prevent government enforcement of a particular religion and not meant to exclude public expressions of faith.

Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund) is an alliance-building legal ministry that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.

Best and Worst US States for Small Business

The US magazine Entrepreneur has published a map (see below) grading American states from A to F according to how small-business friendly they are.

The map is based on a survey of over 6,000 small-business owners all over the country.

It is interesting - although hardly surprising - to note that the best states for small businesses are the Republican-majority ones (Texas, Utah, Oklahoma) and the worst are Democrat-majority (California, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts).

The only states that have Ds and Fs are Democrat ones.

This is, for whoever still needs it, the umpteenth confirmation that socialism makes countries and people poor.

It's not surprising that rich Texas, that "maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world", and other over 30 states have submitted a petition to withdraw from the union, to protect their citizens' standards of living and not force them to pay for the squandering socialist states.

And remember, we're talking small businesses here, often sole traders or family-run, managed by people who instead of sitting on their butts waiting for the government to solve all their problems go out, start a business and create jobs for the local community, and not the "demonic, greedy" big (God forbid!) corporations (which in fact create even more jobs).

GOP Trilemma: Compromise, Stand Firm, Go to the Right

This interesting video sums up, better than many words and in-depth analyses, why Obama won. This has truly become a client state. I like the following definition of client state, applied to Scotland:

Keep spending more and more money on more and more voters, and you've built a client state. Those in receipt of the largesse will want it to continue. One day the money will no longer be there to spend (see technical note from Liam Byrne for details), but by that point you will have engineered a situation where any modulation of public spending will cause pain to such a large proportion of the electorate that the chances of the Conservatives winning a straight fight will be much reduced.

Although I am not American, I am very, very sad that Romney did not win the election.

I had got to like him, a Christian, obviously good, warm and gentle person. I liked the way he spoke during the presidential debates, firm but always polite, compared to the impersonal and arrogant Obama.

I can easily believe what popular radio talk show host and political commentator Rush Limbaugh said of him, that “Mitt Romney is one of the best people, human beings I’ve ever met.”

Limbaugh also said:

None of it makes any sense! Mitt Romney and his wife and his family are the essence of decency. He's the essence of achievement. Mitt Romney's life is a testament to what's possible in this country. Mitt Romney is the nicest guy anybody would ever run into. Mitt Romney is charitable. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He doesn't hate. He's not discriminatory in any way, shape, manner, or form.

This is about Romney as a person. But the reasons why I would have voted for him, if I had been American, are obviously political and I've blogged extensively about them before the election, from the economy to abortion, from Marxism to the presidential debates, from totalitarianism to the Benghazi attack.

Romney's policies were not perfect, but infinitely better than Obama's. Barack Hussein is also someone who has been very shady about his life as well as mendacious about his politics, which makes it unwise to trust him as President of the world's most powerful country.

Exactly because I am European, I've considered the US as something to look to for upholding the western and Christian values that are being eroded so rapidly in my continent.

I'm seriously saddened now to see that the US is going the European way too. But I am still hopeful: this is not the last election, and things may happen before the next that might change America's current political and economical course towards socialism, big government, welfare state, poverty and loss of moral compass.

Looking at the election results, there has clearly been a shift much more pronouncedly to the political left in US voting patterns, strongly determined by minority votes like blacks and Latinos, groups that probably made the difference about who of the two candidates got elected.

Some commentators, on the BBC for instance, said that the Republicans must acknowledge the democraphic change produced by the much higher percentage of Latinos in several states and, if they want to woo these voters, should make changes to their policies, prominently on immigration.

We have to remember this: "As Doug Ross has pointed out, Obama is – among many other things – the lawless president: the first one to sue states for enforcing laws Congress had passed".

The state in question is Arizona, and the law is the immigration law:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that one key part of the Arizona immigration law, known as Senate Bill 1070, is constitutional, paving the way for it to go into effect. Three other portions were deemed unconstitutional in a 5-3 opinion.

The part ruled constitutional is among the most controversial of the law's provisions. It requires an officer to make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a person stopped, detained or arrested if there's reasonable suspicion that person is in the country illegally.

The three parts ruled unconstitutional make it a state crime for an immigrant not to be carrying papers, allow for warrant-less arrest in some situations and forbid an illegal immigrant from working in Arizona.

The long-awaited decision was a partial victory for Gov. Jan Brewer and for President Barack Obama, who sued the state of Arizona to keep the law from taking effect. By striking down the portions they did, justices said states could not overstep the federal government's immigration-enforcement authority. But by upholding the portion it did, the court said it was proper for states to partner with the federal government in immigration enforcement.

This may help explain why Latinos tend to vote for Obama. But should the Republican Party make concessions of this sort and risk going against the Constitution? Is this just a small compromise, or is it damaging what America, since its foundation, really is and stands for?

On immigration, Obama was accused by Bush administration counsel John Yoo of executive overreach:

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the president has the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision was included to make sure that the president could not simply choose, as the British King had, to cancel legislation simply because he disagreed with it. President Obama cannot refuse to carry out a congressional statute simply because he thinks it advances the wrong policy. To do so violates the very core of his constitutional duties.

There are two exceptions, neither of which applies here. The first is that “the Laws” includes the Constitution. The president can and should refuse to execute congressional statutes that violate the Constitution, because the Constitution is the highest form of law. We in the Bush administration argued that the president could refuse to execute laws that infringed on the executive’s constitutional powers, particularly when it came to national security — otherwise, a Congress that had a different view of foreign policy could order the military to refuse to carry out the president’s orders as Commander-in-Chief, for example. When presidents such as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR said that they would not enforce a law, they did so when the law violated their executive powers under the Constitution or the individual rights of citizens.

The president’s right to refuse to enforce unconstitutional legislation, of course, does not apply here. No one can claim with a straight face that the immigration laws here violate the Constitution.

The second exception is prosecutorial discretion, which is the idea that because of limited resources the executive cannot pursue every violation of federal law. The Justice Department must choose priorities and prosecute cases that are the most important, have the greatest impact, deter the most, and so on. But prosecutorial discretion is not being used in good faith here: A president cannot claim discretion honestly to say that he will not enforce an entire law - especially where, as here, the executive branch is enforcing the rest of immigration law.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support.

On the other side of the debate, there are those who say that Romney was not conservative enough. Romney was chosen as Republican candidate because he covered a kind of moderate middle ground in the GOP, in the hope that this would appeal to middle America's voters come Election Day.

Some commentators now say that a more consistent conservative approach would have been the way forward.

British political journalist Melanie Phillips is one of them:

Britain and the Europeans love Obama because they think he will end American exceptionalism and turn the US into a pale shadow of themselves. What they don’t realise is that, all but lobotomised by consumerist rights, state dependency, victim culture, sentimentality, post-religion, post-nationalism and post-Holocaust and Empire guilt, Britain and Europe are themselves fast going down the civilisational tubes.

Romney lost because he refused to provide an alternative to any of this for fear of being labelled a warmonger, flint-heart or social reactionary. He refused to engage with any of the issues that made this Presidential election so truly momentous. Up against the bullying of the totalitarian left, he ran for cover. He played safe, and as a result only advertised his own weakness and dishonesty. Well, voters can smell inconsistency from a mile away; they call it untrustworthiness, and they are right.

Rush Limbaugh is another:

“If there’s one option that hasn’t been tried in a long time, it’s called conservatism with a capital C,” he said. “This was not a conservative campaign.”

This is the trilemma facing the GOP: compromise, stand firm, or go the full length and be more consistent in its conservative principles.

Obama Endorses "Gay" Anti-Christian Bigot

The video shows Dan Savage, a homosexual activist who created It Gets Better Project to help homosexual teens survive bullying during their teenage years.

It sounds good and nice, until you realize that Savage is himself full of the hatred he accuses others of nurturing.

He utters anti-Christian bigotry every time he opens his mouth. He praises violence against people who disagree with him.

He tells kids to f..k their teachers, preachers, parents.

All this is vile but maybe, with all the important events going on, not worth getting out of our way to draw attention to, since he will be one of the many homosexualist militants who do similar things.

But this bigoted, hateful, inciting to violence individual is endorsed by Barack Hussein Obama, Vice President Biden, and White House staff on the White House's own website, with links to Savage's website.

The anti-bully is a bully himself. Yet another, the umpteenth reason to vote for Romney against the bully-in-chief Obama on November 6th election day.

AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda

Jihad Watch has published my article AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda:

Pamela Geller’s subway ads have achieved the very important objective of making anti-jihad reach the headlines in the UK.

Even though the coverage was, as was to be expected, mostly unsympathetic to the ads, it’s not often that an ordinary person in Britain turns the TV on and hears the word “jihad” and even less “anti-jihad”, unless in connection with terrorist activities. Counterjihad posters in US main cities’ subways are a revolutionary novelty.

So I think that even if the media reports can distort and give the wrong impression about the campaign, the very fact that the general public learns about it has the positive effect of letting people know that there is a resistance to Islamic violence and arrogance, and a response to anti-Israel ads.

There are many in Britain who don’t believe the propaganda by the political classes and the media. The idea that the BBC, for example, is strongly politically biased is becoming increasingly popular, so we can expect that lots of people will take what it says with a pinch of salt.

The BBC covered the judge ruling in favour of the ads in the New York subway with “Pro-Israel 'Defeat Jihad' ads to hit New York subway”, clearly and predictably sympathetic with the MTA and CAIR point of view:

"Pro-Israel adverts that equate jihad with savagery are to appear in 10 of New York's subway stations next week, after officials failed to block them.
…Aaron Donovan, spokesman for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), told the BBC they had no choice but to run the ad.

"'Our hands are tied,' he said. 'The MTA is subject to a court-ordered injunction that prohibits application of the MTA's existing no-demeaning ad standard.

"'That standard restricted publication of ads that demean people on the basis of their race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification. The judge recognised our intention but found our attempt to be constitutionally deficient.'"

What “race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification” is jihad? It is linked to a particular religion, yes, which is why we should be free to criticize Islam. But the ads don’t demean people for being Muslim, but just for embracing arms and killing other people. Who could object to “demeaning” murderers and terrorists?

Paradoxically, it is those like the MTA spokesman and the others who keep telling us how the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, who in practice, when they hear “jihad”, have the knee-jerk reaction of thinking “Muslims”.

Sky News similarly headlined: “Anti-Jihad Adverts To Run In New York Subway”:

"The controversial leader of the group behind the adverts says she believes that America is at risk from some Muslims.

"The head of a group that has won its fight to run controversial adverts in New York subway stations referring to some Muslims as 'savage' has told Sky News that she will fight 'to the death' for the right to offend people.

"Ms Geller told Sky News that she was unconcerned the adverts might make the subway network a target for violence.

"She said: 'Were there similar ads on the London buses and trains on 7/7? You know
there weren't.

"'I will not abridge my freedoms so as not to offend savages.

"'I won't take responsibility for other people being violent.

"'I live in America and in America we have the first amendment.'

"Ms Geller, who is a prominent supporter of Israel, stressed that she was not referring to all Muslims as savages, only those who engaged in what she characterises as ‘Jihad’.

"She believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country, and her group has launched similar campaigns before."


She believes that. And so believes everybody who has taken the time to look at the evidence as objectively as possible. That reference to “some Muslims” is ambiguous because it seems to imply, again, that Pamela Geller targets Muslims, although, for some unknown reason, not all of them.

Reporting on this without any attempt to explain the reasons behind someone’s actions is in itself deceiving. Telling that Geller “believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country” to an audience that has never been informed about what Islam preaches, how its history unfolded, what its effects globally today are, and what Sharia law involves, is implicitly portraying her as a conspiracy theorist.

Russia Today, another news channel that broadcasts in Britain, reported on the Washington court ruling:

"Judge Collyer openly described the posters as ‘hate speech’, but said the message was protected under the First Amendment as ‘core political speech’ and did not accept the Metro’s argument that it incited violence and constitutes ‘a gamble with public safety’.
AFDI, whose poster has been condemned by over 200 public organizations, had to fight a similar legal battle in New York, again winning the right to place the ads."


The word “hate” is another of those over-used and abused words, like “racism”. The politically correct and those protected by them never hate, they are just righteously angry (against injustice, presumably). Anti-jihadists who write ads hate, but Muslims violently rioting are just angry (even rightly so, because someone provoked them with – how dared they! - a film). The English Defence League staging a peaceful demonstration in Walthamstow is hate, but the far-left extremists and Muslims who pelted them with bottles and bricks only showed their anger against these “bigots”.

Hate has obviously come to mean the thought crime of not thinking politically correctly.

In the press, both The Daily Mail and The Guardian have run several articles on the subject.

They both reported, among other things, on the Mona Eltahawy incident. The MailOnline had an interview with Pamela Hall in which she talked about her plans to sue Eltahawy for the damages she caused to her clothing and equipment during her 'defense of free speech'.

The Guardian, in Comment in Free, asked its readers, “Mona Eltahawy and the anti-Muslim subway ads: is hers the right approach?”. The comments to the post are mostly answering no, drawing a distinction between exercising the freedom of speech and vandalism, and concluding that Eltahawy’s action was damaging public property and therefore illegal. This is one of the ever increasing number of cases in which the people who comment on liberal media’s articles reveal themselves to be much less on the left than the paper itself.

A commenter noticed the “anti-Muslim” in the headline, and wrote: “Strictly speaking, these ads are anti-violent-Jihad rather than anti-Muslim. That is, unless you believe that all Muslims automatically support violent Jihad. But, as we are told here so often, only a tiny, tiny minority of Muslims -- who misunderstand their Religion of Peace -- support violent Jihad. It is these people who are described in the ads as savages.”