No Free Speech in English Schools?

New, dangerously anti-free-speech regulations have come into force in English schools on the 29th September 2014. They are contained in the new Independent School Standards regulations, which change the legal framework for academies, free schools and private schools. Ofsted has been asked to enforce the same minimum standards for all other schools.

Among them are the requirements that schools actively promote:

(v) further tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions by enabling pupils to acquire an appreciation of and respect for their own and other cultures;

(vi) encourage respect for other people, paying particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010.

The former is very good in theory, if we didn't know that the "tolerance" and "respect" are not mutual but one-directional, at the expense of British culture.

As for the latter, the new standards will only be met if a school in England "actively promotes" the rights enshrined in the Equality Act.

Colin Hart, Campaign Director of the Coalition for Marriage, explains what this innocent-sounding regulation means in practice:

As a result, schools will undoubtedly be put under pressure to promote same-sex marriage. Advice from a senior QC confirms this.

Indeed, the Government Consultation Documents are specific about what these "protected characteristics" are. A clue: think of words that are often used in conjunction with the suffix "phobia".

a. Para 3.2.2
b. “The new requirement for schools to actively promote principles which encourage respect for persons with protected characteristic (as set out in the Equality Act 2010) is intended to allow the Secretary of State to take regulatory action in various situations: for example… failure to address homophobia; or where prejudice against those of other faiths is encouraged or not adequately challenged by the school”.

The protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010 are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation (s4 Equality Act 2010).

Hart elaborates:

This all conflicts directly with previous good guidance issued by the Government. But earlier reassurances can’t disguise the fact that schools will now have to comply with the new minimum standards...

If schools were required to promote respect for people as people there would be no problem. But the additional requirement of “paying particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010” transforms the duty in an alarming way.

One of the ‘protected characteristics’ in the Equality Act is sexual orientation. It could easily be alleged that a teacher who says “I believe same-sex marriage is not real marriage” has shown a lack of respect for people of a same-sex sexual orientation.

Schools will come under immense pressure to endorse same-sex marriage in order to comply with these regulations. Since the equality rights must be “actively promoted”, they will undoubtedly change what is taught in schools.

Under existing equality law, schools cannot discriminate against pupils but governments have carefully excluded the school curriculum from the Equality Act. The regulations break the seal around the curriculum for the first time. Now activists could launch a discrimination claim over the content of lessons.

This is why the Association of School and College Leaders has warned about the harmful implications for freedom of expression in schools.

The Government keeps talking about “British values” but seems to think this means promoting political correctness.

In its alarming consultation document, the Government lets slip some of its thinking.

3.2.2
PART 2 – Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of students

… Schools will be expected to focus on, and be able to show how their work with pupils is effective in embedding fundamental British values. ‘Actively promote’ also means challenging pupils, staff or parents expressing opinions contrary to fundamental British values.

It’s astonishing that the Government thinks schools should challenge the personal beliefs of parents for being contrary to political correctness. This could lead a head teacher to reprimand a parent who tells their child that marriage is for a man and a woman.

The new requirement for schools to actively promote principles which encourage respect for persons with protected characteristics (as set out in the Equality Act 2010) is intended to allow the Secretary of State to take regulatory action in various situations: for example where girls are disadvantaged on the grounds of their gender; failure to address homophobia; or where prejudice against those of other faiths is encouraged or not adequately challenged by the school.

As we know from recent history, reasonable opposition to same-sex marriage is routinely described as ‘homophobia’. Does the new equality requirement mean a school must discipline or dismiss a teacher who voices support for traditional marriage? Will parents of prospective pupils be interrogated about their beliefs before their child is granted a place at school?

The plans also slip in another attack on parents by demanding that in future private schools must conform to ‘national norms’ rather than the expectations of parents.

Any school with a religious ethos which upholds traditional marriage will now have to defend itself against the new rules. Schools could be harassed by inspectors or even have their governors removed by the Secretary of State.

The regulations are a fundamental change of approach in our education system, which have been slipped out under the radar. It is vital that these dangerous plans are opposed and exposed. [All emphases added]

In short, the new regulations are written in such ambiguous terms that any opinion about an institution - like same-sex marriage - may be taken as a lack of respect for some people - homosexuals.

As John Bowers Q.C. explains:

The Regulations are not framed as a duty to promote the protected characteristics but instead as a duty to promote respect of people, having particular regard to those protected characteristics. It adopts much of its language from the human rights case law (tolerance, respect etc). It is however a small step as a matter of interpretation to elide the respect for a person to respecting the beliefs and practices of the group to which that person belongs and this is especially so given the reference to active promotion, a concept to which I refer below in more detail. It may also be said that the words “paying particular regard” shift the duty beyond that of merely respecting people since otherwise it could have been framed simply as a duty to respect persons. [Emphasis added]

Mr Bowers also remarks that the curriculum is in danger of becoming politicised,

because respect for some protected characteristics (or more correctly respect of those with different protected characteristics including faiths and beliefs) may be highly contentious. The law has thus far stayed steadfastly outside the classroom door (and indeed from promoting respect in the classroom) and this has been the policy of governments of each political colour. [Emphasis added]

It's been an article of faith of successive governments that the curriculum should not be a political football and that teachers should not even potentially be the subject of litigation. But all this could be an unintended consequence of the amendments.

Mr Bowers provides examples of situations in which teachers may fall foul of the standards because what they say may be perceived as a lack of respect for people who hold the corresponding beliefs: portraying jihad negatively, dismissing the concept of man-made climate change, making jokes about veganism. He concludes:

The danger of litigation is exacerbated by the vagueness in the proposals arising from the concept of active promotion.

41. The inevitable result is to open teachers up to increased scrutiny, pressures and complaints. There is a real risk of major litigation over what happens in the classroom. Further the contents may undermine their academic freedom.

I find the concept of "protected characteristics" entitling the persons who possess them to "particular respect" a bit politically-correctly sinister, implying that some groups of people are more equal than others. We already know that Muslims are more equal than non-Muslims and homosexuals are more equal than Christians - we've seen it repeatedly demonstrated -, but now it could be enshrined in government's school regulations.

In the end, all this means one thing: much more power to the government and less freedom of expression to people. We are on a slippery slope to totalitarianism, and plenty of progress on that route has already been made.

First USA-Developed Ebola Case, UK Has Third Highest Risk Globally

Bushmeat eaten in West Africa can be a source of Ebola

This news is from America, but the threat is present in Britain too.

There has been a first case of Ebola diagnosed within the United States, and it's a man from Liberia who should not have been in the US, named Thomas Eric Duncan. He is now being treated in a Dallas hospital, in Texas, isolated and in critical conditions.

His is the first case of someone developing Ebola outside the tropics. Mr Duncan was infected in Liberia and became ill after flying to Dallas.

The UK magazine New Scientist claims:

Epidemiologists have been warning that this could happen since early in the Ebola outbreak, which is concentrated in three countries in western Africa, and say the risk will only increase as cases start to skyrocket.

Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in the USA explains why the man's visa should have never been issued:

Duncan is a 40-something, single, unemployed Liberian who applied sometime in the last year for a visa to visit his sister in the United States.

That is five strikes against his application:

1.Single
2.Unemployed
3.Liberian (5th highest overstay rate of any country in the world)
4.Has recently resided outside of his country of citizenship, displaying weak ties there
5.Sister living in the United States.

Together, all these factors should have weighed very heavily against the issuance of a visitor's visa to Duncan. He clearly appears unqualified.

In 2013, more than 3,500 non-immigrant visas were issued to Liberians. This number has grown steadily since 2009, when just over 1,300 were issued. Most are issued to tourists and business travelers. A relatively high percentage do not return, but settle here illegally to join a well-established Liberian community (many of whom have won green cards in the visa lottery). [Emphasis added]

In addition to the high risk that Mr Duncan presented of overstaying his visa due to his weak ties outside the USA, his coming from Liberia, one of the countries most afflicted by the current Ebola outbreak - the worst in history -, should have dictated extra precaution.

Reportedly, travelers to the United States are simply being questioned about their contact with infected people and are checked for a fever. In contrast, three African countries (Namibia, Kenya, and Zambia) have banned travelers from the countries that are experiencing the outbreak (Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea).

But, despite a letter from congressman Alan Grayson suggesting that for the duration of the outbreak the US should bar from entry citizens of the Ebola-stricken countries and any foreign national who visited one of them within 90 days before seeking entry to the United States, Obama doesn't seem interested in controlling immigration in the face of any danger to homeland security, be it terrorism, foreign criminal cartels, or a deadly epidemic.

A comment to the article on the CIS site quoted above showed no hope in the Obama administration:

Our government is failing us. Nothing new though. It has been going on for 6 years now.

The UK is in an even worse situation:

Alessandro Vespignani of Northeastern University in Boston and his colleagues have rated the risk of different countries around the world importing cases of Ebola. After Ghana and Gambia, the UK has the third highest risk globally because of the large number of people and flights from the epidemic region to London.

In September, the risk for importing a case to the UK was around 25 per cent, and slightly less for the US.

On the lookout

Doctors and hospitals in the UK have been told to be on the lookout for possible cases, says Peter Piot of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. [Emphasis added]

But so far, efforts in Britain seem to be focused on helping the countries of West Africa and discussing what the global community can do to provide an effective international response, and not on barring from entry to the UK people from the Ebola-stricken countries.

Black Gangs: Memphis Police Giving Up on Public Safety

What's happening in America? A race war fought only on one side seems to erupt in its cities every so often, maybe more frequently than we hear about.

"Another Teenage Mob Terrorizes Southern Town: ‘Memphis Is Going to Burn if They Don’t Control These Children’" headlines The Blaze, echoing a similar episode of a few weeks ago.

As in the UK when paedophiles are Muslim and their victims white, so in the US the mainstream media try to underplay the fact that the gangs and the attackers are black and the victims they choose for their knock-out game, in a city like Memphis whose population is 62.6% African American, are predominantly white.

Hence WREG-TV reported:

Three people were attacked by a large group of teenagers Saturday night.

Can we be more specific?

“Hold on, they got a white dude,” exclaims the woman capturing the cellphone video.

Memphis' black youth gangs are so terrifying and crime levels are so high that last year the Memphis Police Association installed billboards saying “Danger: Enter At Your Own Risk – This City Does NOT Support PUBLIC SAFETY.”

What Islam Is and What To Do about It

The following only reflects my position and not necessarily that of my party Liberty GB.

Islam has been distorted by Western politicians and media to such an extreme point that this doctrine is almost completely the opposite of what is being described as.

It is not a “religion of peace”: it is a non-religion of war.

It is not a religion in the sense that we in the West understand, through the experience of our own religion: Christianity. It doesn’t make human beings better, but worse.

Whereas Christianity establishes a separation of powers between church and state, Islam is a political ideology. Men’s laws are imperfect and should be rejected. Only God-given law, Sharia, should rule the state. Notice that “law” here doesn’t mean “moral law”, but the country’s legislation. Sharia has to be enforced with all available means, peaceful or violent, democratic or totalitarian.

Islam’s holy scriptures say - and real Muslims believe - that the world will be a much better place for human beings to live in if Islam and its law govern the whole planet. Under Islam’s domination, there will be justice, equality and all the good things that communists have also promised humanity. And in both cases (Islam and communism), followers are prepared to cause mayhem and slaughter to attain this utopian “paradise on earth”.

Peace will be achieved when Islam reigns supreme, having fought many bloody wars and conquered the world: there will be peace only when there are no more enemies of Islam. Hence the profound misnomer “religion of peace”. This is what Muslims actually mean when they use that description for their religion, knowing fully well that the overwhelming majority of Westerners will understand it in a very different sense. Islam's "peace" is similar to the pax romana, the peace existing in the Roman Empire when all populations had been conquered.

That this is the reality of Islam is confirmed by the Quran, the various reports of Islam’s prophet Muhammad’s teachings, deeds and sayings called “hadith”, and Islamic jurisprudence - the interpretation (ijtihad) of the Quran and sunna by Islamic jurists (Ulema) and implemented by the rulings (Fatwa) of jurists on questions presented to them.

It is also confirmed by the exceptionally violent history of Islam in its 1,400 years of existence, as well as today’s breaking news both in Britain and worldwide.

In these circumstances, it is suicidal for Western countries, including Britain, to ignore what Islam is and to do nothing about its spread.

The British political class is (or pretends to be) ignorant of Islam and has no idea of (or is too afraid of losing votes to put into practice) what needs to be done.

A good approach would be a strategy based on the “zero tolerance” policy of Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in New York, which in a few years achieved such an astonishing reduction in crime in delinquency-ridden New York as to be called “one of the most remarkable stories in the history of urban crime” by University of California law professor Franklin Zimring.

No offence, however insignificant, was tolerated any more, starting from graffiti and broken windows, as doing so would give the offenders the wrong signal - a weak reaction from the authorities - and therefore encourage them to go on to more serious offences.

The “zero tolerance” policy, in addition to its effectiveness, has also the advantage of allowing graduality, by starting from small infractions against current British laws and thus giving us the possibility of warning Muslims that further and more serious offences will not be tolerated. At the moment, Muslims are allowed to break the British law in innumerable ways. All we need to do, at the beginning, is just to enforce the established law.

We should combine severity with graduality. At first we have to introduce measures that simply require the application of laws already existing.

Examples of these are the law prohibiting polygamy, at present widely disregarded, with the UK authorities turning a blind eye to its violations among the Muslim population. More than that: polygamy is now de facto part of British legislation due to a change in the inheritance law which lets multiple wives inherit from their husband.

Another way of creating a parallel legal world for the benefit of Muslims-only was a loophole introduced by the previous Labour government to allow Muslims to take out a sharia-compliant property mortgage without paying interest or stamp duty, which makes it cheaper for them and has been exploited by non-Muslims who discovered it, causing a minor uproar.

Again, female genital mutilation is an Islamic practice against British jurisprudence that only very recently has started being prosecuted.

A further good example is halal meat. This is meat from animals slaughtered according to the Islamic ritual which, like the Jewish one, does not permit the proper stunning of animals before slaughter. British legislation imposes pre-stunning to make animals unconscious and prevent (or at least minimise) their suffering.

But both Muslims and Jews are exempt from legal requirements to stun animals prior to slaughter.

In this case too we should send a clear signal that existing British laws must be respected and no exceptions will be admitted. We should close those loopholes.

Just upholding present regulations will go a long way to contain the Islamic problem.

The measures that only demand the application of current laws should be chronologically followed by more advanced measures, requiring the introduction of new legislation to deal with any issues specifically caused by the vast immigration of Muslims, as they increase in number, vociferousness and intolerance.

An Islamic Symbol on the Australian Flag?

I've found the above picture on Facebook, posted by an Australian FB page called "Preserving Islamic Rights on the Gold Coast - PIRGC", self-described as "the righteous and proud voice of the Islamic community within the Gold Coast [a coastal city in southeastern Queensland on the east coast of Australia] and surrounding areas".

The message in the graphic is so preposterous that it's hard to judge if it's genuine or fake. The least credible part is:

We do not ask that Christmas be cancelled as we are not one to ruin peoples fun, however the word "Christ" must be removed from all shopping centres and Christmas icons, we hereby declare that from this day the Christmas tree shall be known as the Wintertree.

A website claims that PIRGC is a hoax, which has posted other outrageous demands:

[PIRGC] has demanded that the Gold Coast mayor incorporate Islamic prayers into the Anzac Day Dawn service to 'honour fallen Islamic diggers'. It also proposes that an Islamic symbol be included on a newly designed Australian flag. It even suggests that an entire Islamic suburb to be called 'New Palestine' and complete with a 'Refugee Ferry Port and Processing Facility is to be built in the area.

According to the Gold Coast Bulletin, the PIRGC page may be part of a campaign to stop the building of a local mosque at Currumbin Waters, on the southern Gold Coast.

This is the real good news of the story: the Gold Coast City Council has received about 2,200 objections to the plans for the mosque, a record number. Over 4,000 people have also signed a petition ­opposing the mosque. Opponents have campaigned against it on social media and built a fighting fund.

Area city councillor Chris Robbins said that the PIRGC page is bogus and not set up by the Islamic community, adding that she contacted Facebook to have remarks ­attributed to her removed from it, which was done.

The truth, though, is that we can't be sure one way or the other. Reading the posts on the Preserving Islamic Rights on the Gold Coast Facebook page, it does have all the appearance of a fake, a creation by non-Muslims to ridicule Islamic demands on Western societies.

But, at the same time, similarly ludicrous requests have been made by Muslim groups and individuals living in the West. So, it's really difficult to make one's mind up. It could be the case of art imitating reality - a politically-motivated joke - or reality imitating art - Western Muslims reaching surreal and unbelievable levels of arrogance encouraged by the appeasingly weak response of the indigenous infidels.

For instance, the Hoax-Slayer site that claims to have "debunked" this page gives reasons that are far from conclusive, as they could as well apply to an authentic page established by Muslims.

For example: "The claims in the Page's posts are nonsense.", "Its ridiculous claims clearly indicate that it is a troll page", "The false and inflammatory material published by the page". All these are activities that real Muslims are perfectly capable of.

This site clearly doesn't know if we are in the presence of a troll page. It may be the case, but it may not. Hoax-Slayer just tries to protect the followers of Muhammad from "anti-Muslim hysteria" and to prevent "inciting hatred and bigotry and damaging relationships between Muslim groups and the wider Gold Coast community".

Is calling Christmas tree "Wintertree" absurd? Yes, it is, but eerily similar things have already been done. When we can't tell fact from fiction to this extent, it says a lot about the degree of multicultural drivel and Islamisation we have reached.

Hard Left Tries to Assault Farage

They don't assault - unless prevented by the police - only the English Defence League (EDL) now. The extreme Leftists have been attacking even the moderate UKIP, showing that nothing short of Leninism satisfies them.

Two days ago, UKIP leader Nigel Farage was in Rochester, Kent, with the new candidate for UKIP in the upcoming by-election in the constituency of Rochester and Strood, Mark Reckless - who defected from the Conservatives to Farage's party on the last day of UKIP's conference - for a day of campaigning in the constituency.

Reckless will resign his Rochester seat as a Tory MP and fight the by-election as UKIP candidate rather than imposing his choice of party on constituents.

Breitbart London reports that UKIP members gathered outside Rochester Castle and made their way to a local pub called The Crown.

“There was an organised protest by the Conservative Party,” Mr Farage said, “including Craig Mackinlay who lives in Rochester and who was beaten to the Conservative nomination by Mark Reckless.”

“Part of the extreme left who have been busy on social media after they were notified that I was in Rochester today decided to turn up.”

“Because of that I had to be removed quickly from the situation,” Mr Farage said, adding, “Kent Police were excellent”. He explained that the situation would not be taken any further.

There has been an anti-Farage group set up in South Thanet where the UKIP leader has been selected as the UKIP candidate.

At its core are members of the Socialist Worker Party and other left wing extremists who were involved in violent scenes earlier in the year which resulted in a magistrate finding Andrew Scott guilty of common assault.

Mr Farage and his security team have made it clear that they will continue to hold public events despite the threats of violence.

One of the Leftist protesters ran into the front of the pub and tried to attack Mr Farage but was halted by his security team:

Socialism is dying, so it’s no wonder the foot soldiers are starting to appear on the streets, now. Everything will be done to prevent its demise, including much worse than what we see now.

Blogger Ian Thorpe comments:

It is notable that as is the case with EDL and Britain First demonstrations, it is always the left that start the fighting. Are these people so insane they can't control their anger when anyone disagrees with their fascistic world view ... or are they just a bunch of rent-a-mob thugs who are trying to suppress free speech.

This is not the first time. In January, Farage was attacked by Stalin's heirs in Kent, and even physically assaulted with a placard:

The "Nasty Little Nigel" protest was organised by Bunny La Roche who recently resigned from a full time rent-a-mob job with the Socialist Workers Party where it appears she was thoroughly detested by her comrades to form a militant group called Kent International Socialists. Comrade La Roche is the Kent branch of the fascist UAF and has links to other extreme left wing groups. Her Facebook profile lists her "inspirational people" including the mass murderers Lenin, Trotsky and Marx. She attracted criticism even from her own comrades when she shouted "when are you going to die" at a 75 year old BNP councillor.

Comrade La Roche was helped in organising yesterday's violent protest by communist Green Party councillor Ian Driver, perhaps inspired by his party's MP, Caroline Lucas, who was arrested for her involvement with a violent protest against a fracking company last year by left wing extremists. The violent protest also attracted support from the fascist UAF, SWP and Labour activists.

Nigel was left shaken but unhurt after being hit on the head with a placard - an attack that could have had serious consequences as he is still recovering from an operation on his back for injuries sustained from his plane crash in 2010.

Giambattista Vico's Importance for the Anti-Establishment Movement

Saturday 27th September I attended a meeting of the London Forum, which organises conferences with various international authors and thinkers of the New Right or - in the words of one of Saturday's speakers, Mark Weber - the "anti-Establishment" movement. The latter is actually my favourite name, as it does away with the anachronistic distinction between Left and Right. Our opponents he calls the "Establishment".

Four speeches were delivered.

The first was by Mark Weber, historian, lecturer, current affairs analyst, writer, and director of the Institute for Historical Review. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he was educated in the US and Europe. The IHR has been attacked as a "hate group" and a "Holocaust denial" organisation, but we know that this kind of accusations mean nothing in our politically correct world.

I want to find out for myself. The organisation's website explains:

In fact, the IHR steadfastly opposes bigotry of all kinds. We are proud of the support we have earned from people of the most diverse political views, and racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

The IHR does not “deny” the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such has no “position” on any specific event or chapter of history, except to promote greater awareness and understanding, and to encourage more objective investigation...

One prominent American journalist and author who has looked into the critical claims made about the IHR is John Sack, who is Jewish. He reported on a three-day IHR conference in an article published in the Feb. 2001 issue of Esquire magazine. He rejected as unfounded the often-repeated lie that the IHR and its supporters are "haters" or bigots. He described those who spoke at and attended the IHR conference as "affable, open-minded, intelligent [and] intellectual."

The London Forum says that Weber "has appeared countless times as a guest on US and overseas television and radio. He has produced many podcasts, and his many writings have appeared in newspapers, periodicals and websites around the world, and in a range of languages."

Weber's speech was "The End of the American Century: The Accelerating Crisis of the West, and Prospects for the Future". He talked about the impending extinction of Europeans as an ethnic group in both Europe and North America, and the end of the hegemony imposed at the end of the Second World War.

He introduced a 2010 book available only in German: Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany Is Eliminating Itself"), by Thilo Sarrazin, a German Social Democratic Party politician, former member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank and former senator of finance for the State of Berlin.

In short, the book's author is as much Establishment as you can get. The book itself is described by Wikipedia as

the most popular book on politics by a German-language author in a decade, [and in it] he denounces the failure of Germany's post-war immigration policy, sparking a nation-wide controversy about the costs and benefits of the idea of multiculturalism.

Pretty good for a social democrat.

The second speaker was Bain Dewitt, described as "a rising star" and the young blogger of The Identity Forum . His speech, "The God of the Whites", was an examination of religion as an expression of racial unity. Bain attempted to see if religion can be the spiritual dimension of nationalist and traditionalist movements.

He was followed by another American writer, Greg Johnson, editor of the website Counter-Currents Publishing. His was a particularly interesting speech for me, partly because I'm Italian and partly for its philosophical nature: "Giambattista Vico and Modern Anti-Liberalism".

Vico is a 17th-18th century philosopher from Naples. Most Italians know of him and his theory of the "corsi e ricorsi storici", or the cyclical nature of history. But he's little known in the Anglo-Saxon world, despite having had some influence, especially on James Joyce's books. Vico's Scienza nuova ("New Science") is the basis for Finnegans Wake.

The idea of history going through the same stages over and over again is very far from the contemporary view of history as progress. Vico, according to Johnson, was exceptional, in that he was the first anti-Enlightenment thinker and the only one of his time, despite being himself an Enlightenment thinker in some ways.

Vico postulated a fundamental law of historical development, that follows the same pattern by evolving through three phases: the age of gods, "during which gentile [meaning "pagan"] men believed that they were living under divine rule"; the age of heroes, when aristocratic republics were established; and the age of men, or what we may call "democracy", "when all were recognised as equal in human nature". Here Vico is a son of his "Enlightened" times, when he talks of the necessity to respect "natural reason" and of "the human rights dictated by human reason when fully explored".

At that point man’s increased powers of reasoning result in a state of anarchy, when everybody considers himself his own ruler and only looks after his own pleasure and short-term interest. Sounds familiar? It must do, because it's a fairly accurate description of what we are going through now, a description which will become even more faithful as decades, nay years, nay months go by.

Then men get tired of that anarchy and “turn again to the primitive simplicity of the early world of peoples”, and to religion. Thus the cycle starts again.

The beauty of it all, said Johnson, is that Vico's view of history enables us to stop trying to mend the present state of affairs, which is beyond repair, and instead look forward to - even accelerate - its end, which will usher a new era.

Or I would put it as "the darkest hour is just before the dawn".

Johnson concluded his speech by saying that, whereas Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the Right-wing Italian party Movemento Sociale Italiano, said, "Julius Evola is our Marcuse, only better", we can say that Vico is our Karl Marx, only better.

Finally, barrister and contributor to Heritage & Destiny magazine Adrian Davies concluded the conference with his speech "Two World Wars and One World Cup: Myths and Realities of the Anglo-German Relationship in the Twentieth Century".

In this year, which marks the hundredth anniversary of what historians have called the first "Western civil war" and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the second, Davies narrated German history until 1914, arguing that the Great War not not caused uniquely by Germany, as the myth goes, but also that Germany was not a perpetual victim either.

It's early days yet. I consider my newly-found London Forum very stimulating. I'd like to see more of it, and in particular what the role of Christianity is in the various ideas represented.

Socialist Destruction Starts with Littering

Today I drove past a small demonstration in front of the University College London in Gower Street.

I didn't know what it was about, but I saw socialist posters.

The pavement, where no more than a few dozens people were standing, was littered all over with paper.

I was reminded of what Liberty GB leader Paul Weston told me at the English Defence League demonstration of a week ago. He noticed how all the litter from the food and drinks of the 400-500 attendees had been neatly piled up in a corner, in contrast to what happens at events organised by the Left.

In Gower Street I saw a confirmation of that.

It doesn't surprise me. In fact, this behaviour is very much in accordance with the spirit of Leftists. What moves them is fundamentally destructive.

History has repeatedly shown that whenever socialists and communists have imposed their rule and made societies in their own image, what resulted was destruction, chaos, starvation and mass murder.

Only people motivated by destructive impulses can not be repelled by the ideology that led to it.

Paradox of the Left

We don’t know any more what is Left and what is Right in politics.

Look at the UK parties: Liberal Democrats are sometimes (for example during New Labour) more Left-wing than the traditionally socialist Labour, which in Blair's times was more Right-leaning than it used to be historically, and which some people (critics? cynics?) used to say was more Right-wing in its policies than the Conservatives.

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the Left, whose very nature was to be anti-Establishment, is now The Establishment, having been effectively in power throughout the West since the end of the the Second World War, whether or not they are in government: they have the ideological power and influence, effectively controlling media, universities, cinema, and other powerful means to influence public opinion through the so-called “popular culture”.



There will be no more Stormings of the Winter Palace, no more revolutions, in the modern world or, at least, in that part of the world that has indeed become modern.

There will be no need for that, because whoever controls the media will be in power. And I could add: not only the old media, but also the new ones, although they tend to be freer and less exposed to censorship.

Two Ways to Look at Reality

There are two basic ways to look at reality: scientific and non-scientific.

The scientific approach, or frame of mind, says: I’ll follow the investigation of reality wherever it takes me, even if I don’t like the results of this investigation; I’ll accept them nonetheless.

The non-scientific approach , or frame of mind, says: I have certain ideas, or convictions, which are dear to me (for whatever reason), and to me they are more important than the investigation of reality and its results; therefore, I will deny those results if they don’t fit in with my convictions.

Non-scientific people are, in politics, utopians, and in all fields are those who believe in superstitions, New Age types of theories, things like astrology, tarot reading, spiritualism and so on.

One thing needs to be added here. People allow themselves to believe all sorts of irrationalities (I don’t think that there exists any idea, however absurd, that has no believer), but only when these irrational notions do not touch something which has a direct connection with that person’s interests. There are exceptions, as usual, but this is the general rule.

Examples: people who say that they don’t believe in science still make use of all science’s applications like technology; people who say that they believe in out-of-body experiences take the car to go from point A to point B, they don’t use those out-of-body powers; people who believe in telepathy use the phone, rather than relying on their ESP powers: I could go on, but you got the idea.

In politics, we can see the non-scientific approach at work constantly. The Left and utopians in general are particularly prone to have it.

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The problem of this kind of people is that they mix and confuse two processes which should be kept separate and performed at different times, never together.

The two processes are: understanding reality (or trying to), and acting on reality.

If we want to act on reality, change it, we must first understand reality for what it is, not for what we would like it to be.

“Wishful thinking” is something generally condemned, but nonetheless indulged in continuously.

It is the way of thinking more typical of a child than an adult (magic and similar), and yet many adults have not really overgrown it.

The reason why those two processes should be kept well separate is obvious: if we let our desires, or our mental image of what reality should be, have an effect and interfere while we are still in the process of understanding what is, the resulting understanding of reality will be compromised, and cannot serve its purpose of guiding us in action later on, when we need it.

An example of this is the current attitude of the Left towards the questions of race and IQ. Many leftists wish to deny that there are genetic differences in IQ among human races, despite the overwhelming evidence in support of this; in fact, many leftists even try to deny the concept of race altogether.

And the funny thing about this is that these are the people who generally believe in the evolution theory and Neo-Darwinism, so they are in clear contradiction with themselves.

You can’t have it both ways: either there is a great scheme of things behind nature (a teleology), or there is none, and living beings are products of random processes. If you believe in the latter, you must accept that this randomness, this nature is not politically correct and may have produced human beings not in accordance with your pet theories.

I have even heard defences of that theory of genetic equality among races (that, in itself, is a contradiction in terms) that ran like: “Why should blacks have an average lower IQ than whites?”, bringing back teleology and grand design in the scientific discourse when it serves their purposes. There is no why.

Other people who should know better say: there is no connection between intelligence and skin colour.

There is no conceptual connection, but we are not talking about conceptual connection here. We are talking about genetic connection.

For example, taller humans have on average higher IQs than short humans. It is another case when, conceptually, one sees no association.

But the way genes act is by having chracteristics determined by the same gene (allele) which have no conceptual, or even functional, correlation with each other.

Here again: do you want the blind watchmaker or you don’t?

Atrocities Are One of Our Imports

Technology in the West has enormously advanced, but the human mind, although flexible, is not adaptable to the point of making the rapid changes that may be the consequence or the accompaniment of this technology.

Aeroplanes can now cover distances to the other side of the earth, the opposite hemisphere and remote latitudes in a minuscule fraction of the time it was taking even one or two centuries ago.

But the people transported by the aircraft through huge geographical ranges don't go even near covering the same distance so rapidly and easily in cultural terms.

We have found ways to move people physically far and fast, but not means to make them change and adapt from one religious, cultural, ideological and social milieu to another at comparable speed.

When a man moves from an Asian or African country to Britain he doesn't magically become a different person.

This has resulted in the strange phenomenon, probably to such large extent peculiar to our age, of people in the same street belonging not only to different parts of the world but to different ages in the history of the world. They are living next door to each other, but at the same time they are not only geographically but also historically light years away from one another.

Mass migration from the Third World to the West has produced the paradox that what was portrayed as a humanitarian gesture – the welcoming of destitute people from poor nations to wealthier countries - has had the effect of spreading some of the globe's worst atrocities far beyond their place of origin.

Shocking examples are the Muslim persecution of Christians now imported to Western asylum centres, and the analogous importation of the Islamic practices of paedophilia and sex slavery - in one third of all marriages celebrated in Pakistan the bride is underage - to Rotherham, Oxford and Rochdale.

When Progressives Consider Child-Rape Defensible

Published on FrontPage Magazine

By Enza Ferreri


The umpteenth case of child sex abuse in Britain perpetrated by Muslims, the Rotherham abuse, has understandably left the self-proclaimed “progressives” and multiculturalists in disarray. The Leftist media outlets are on the defensive but still trying to maintain their ground.

Their best weapons are to distract public attention by diverting it to whatever has not been committed by Muslims, and the use of double standards, of which the most shocking example is the differential treatment of Muslims versus the Catholic Church.

The same people, assorted Leftists and secularists, who immediately jumped to the conclusion that all Catholic clergymen are either directly involved in paedophile abuse or in its cover-up are now bending over backwards to deny any connection between the Muslim grooming and sex-slavery gangs and Islam.

An article in The Guardian by Slovenian Marxist psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, included by Foreign Policy in its 2012 list of Top 100 Global Thinkers (no less), seems to condemn but in fact displays this behaviour. Deceitfully entitled “Rotherham child sex abuse: it is our duty to ask difficult questions”, it covers just about everything but Rotherham – and generally Muslim - child sex abuse.

The word “Muslim” appears twice, “Islam” once, “Islamophobic” once, “Catholic” three times (the same number as “priests” and “racism”), plus assorted “Christian” and “Christianity”.

It doesn’t talk about Islam at all, except to briefly mention women’s second place within it, but immediately preventing the reader from dwelling on the subject too much: “Without blaming Islam as such (which is in itself no more misogynistic than Christianity)…”.

The most ironic part of the piece is where Žižek blames his comrades for doing the same he does:

The left exhibited the worst of political correctness, mostly via generalisations: perpetrators were vaguely designated as “Asians”, claims were made that it was not about ethnicity and religion but about the domination of men over women, plus who are we – with our church paedophilia and Jimmy Savile – to adopt a high moral ground against a victimised minority.

The double standard in this kind of coverage and comment is so gigantic that it’s better described as a total reversal of the truth.

We have on one hand Muslim paedophile and sex-slave gangs who act in total accordance with Islam on many levels. To begin with, Muhammad, the model man for all Muslims worthy of the name, gave the good example by marrying a 6-year-old, Aisha, and consummating their marriage when she was 9. He also owned sex slaves. Both sex with underage, even pre-menstruating, girls and sex slavery – both relevant to the Rotherham case - are permissible in Islamic Scriptures and law. Even today, child marriage is commonly practised in the Muslim world.

In fact, in Pakistan – the country of origin of most of the UK child groomers or their families –,

according to UNICEF, child marriages accounted for 32 per cent of all marriages in the country from 1987 to 2005…

Around 100 million girls are expected to enter into child marriage in the next decade. [Emphasis added]

Pakistan has or has had the world record for paedophilia-related internet searches, such as "child sex video". Child molestation in Punjab, a region of Pakistan where 97.21% of the population is Muslim, has reached alarming levels, and “68 percent [of] girls and 32 percent [of] boys have been the victims of paedophilia.”

Add to all this the contempt which Muslims have for white women, considered as “easy meat” due to the way they dress and their drinking habits, and you can easily see that the disproportionate representation of Muslims among those convicted for child rape, grooming of girls for sex, and child prostitution in the UK – 91%, while Muslims are 4-5% of the total population – is not coincidental.

The arguments for linking the epidemic of paedophile rings in Britain with its Muslim immigrant population are strong, solidly founded and well-reasoned. The bias and distortion of the facts are on the part of those who deny them, contrary to all evidence.

We then have on the other hand an extensive media treatment, that lasted for a very long time, of the Catholic Church as a hotbed of paedophilia, vigorously connecting it to its preaching, including chastity, whereas in fact the overwhelming majority of sex offenders have wives or girlfriends.

In reality, research on the subject shows exactly the opposite. These are the main findings in the USA: Catholic priests who ever abused minors are less than 2%, the same figure for Protestant clergy is 2-3%, and most of the abusers are not clergy or staff, but Church volunteers; the figure for rabbis within organised Judaism is 2-3%.

In secular institutions the abuse is even more widespread.

The most reasonable conclusion is that the Catholic Church, far from being especially connected to paedophilia – which it condemns -, has itself partly succumbed to the ethos of our age, although greatly less than other institutions dealing with children.

While the Left was caught unaware, the British political Right and its warnings about the dangers of Islam have been vindicated by the Rotherham outrage. The UK public, in the middle, may be – ever so slightly – waking up to the reality of the “religion of peace”.

The BBC says:

Islamic State extremism and the Rotherham abuse scandal are fuelling a far-right backlash in the UK, one of the Home Office's most senior advisers on right-wing extremism has said…

But the Institute for Strategic Dialogue claims the government must engage more with the far right.

After what former Rotherham MP Denis MacShane admitted:

Perhaps yes, as a true Guardian reader, and liberal leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard…

[I] should have done more to investigate child abuse…

maybe “liberal leftie”, “Guardian reader” and “multiculturalist” should finally become dirty words, insults of the same grade as “fascist”?

Saturday 20th September the English Defence League (EDL) held a demonstration in Downing Street in front of the Prime Minister’s residence over this scandal, which I attended.

I had never been to an EDL demo before. Yes, they are working class, heavily tattooed, and - with their flag waving, slogan chanting and raucous singing - closely resembling beer-drinking football fans in appearance and behaviour. But they are decent folks doing their bit in a legal and peaceful way for their own country and all ours, for the survival of Western civilisation. Their courage and commitment are unfortunately not widely matched in the general population.

The EDL's bad reputation in the public perception is largely due to the kind of media reporting we are well used to. In the same way as Christians being slaughtered all over the Islamic world is for the media equally-balanced "sectarian violence", and Israel's reaction to Hamas rockets is "indiscriminate bombing of civilians", so the throwing of stones and bottles at EDL crowds by the Leftist thugs of UAF (Unite Against Fascism, an offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party) becomes for the BBC and mainstream press "clashes between the UAF and the English Defence League".

Just witness this ABC News report in which the “hate next door” in the title incongruously doesn’t refer to radical Islam, but to the EDL that tries to protect us from it.

The leader of my party Liberty GB, Paul Weston, looking at some litter from the food and drinks consumed by the 400-500 people attending the demonstration, tidily kept in a corner, pointed out to me how you never see that at events organised by the “liberals”, where garbage is left all over the place.

Liberty GB is considering fielding as a candidate in Rotherham at the 2015 British Parliament elections a former Muslim who converted to Christianity.

Paul Weston gave a brilliant, passionate speech in front of the Prime Minister’s residence, culminating in “Cameron, you're a liar and you're a traitor!”

From the pen (a cage would have been better) in which the police wisely kept them, the only contribution to the subject of the Rotherham child-grooming gangs coming from the “counterdemonstration” of the UAF was "Nazi scum!", which is more or less their only "argument" against the critics of Islam.

Media Are Vectors of Atheist Propaganda

The atheism that is currently prevailing in Western Europe has not been a naturally occurring development in the mind of large numbers of people.

It's not, as individuals like Richard Dawkins and the 19th-century French positivist sociologist Auguste Comte would have you believe, an effect of the progress of science. In fact, scientific progress points exactly in the opposite direction. The more we know about the universe, life and consciousness, the more we realise that the calculus of probabilities shows that all these extremely complex natural intricacies and perfectly accurate mechanisms have no chance of having happened by chance.

No, present common atheism is the result of a multidecadal, aggressive, strenuous and embattled campaign by various Leftist and subversive forces and movements, such as cultural Marxism, to destroy Christianity, which they correctly see as their enemy and obstacle in their effort to destroy the West. In fact, the two - Christianity and Western civilisation - are in many ways and senses synonymous, which is why the enemies of one, from Islam to communism, are invariably the enemies of the other.

Then, useful idiots à la Dawkins come along and continue the Leftist subversives' fight for the destruction of Christianity without really knowing what they are doing.

It’s disputed that Lenin actually used the expression “useful idiots” in his works, but whether he did or not is irrelevant. He certainly understood the concept very well and what he did use, if not the words, were the naïve people in Western countries who believed that communism (and its corollary, atheism) were a force for good and helped him in his propaganda.

And Islam can thank all of them, who have made its task of penetration into and domination of the West infinitely easier.

How interconnected and interdependent socio-communism, atheism and media propaganda and brainwashing are can be seen, for example, from the fact that the BBC employs more atheists and non-believers than Christians.

A 2011 internal BBC survey found that just 22.5 per cent of all staff professed to be Christians, while atheists and those of no faith were 23.5 per cent.

The relative numbers of the two groups in the BBC are greatly disproportionate compared to the UK's general population.

In the 2011 Census, Christians were 59% of the population of England and Wales, equivalent to 33.2 million people. Those without a religion were 25%, or 14.1 million.

BBC veteran Roger Bolton, who presented BBC Radio 4’s religious current affairs programme Sunday, said to The Daily Mail:

There is an inbuilt but unconscious bias against religion, fuelled by the fact staff are not representative of the public. It is not a conspiracy but it needs a correction.

This was the first time that the religious beliefs of BBC staff had been disclosed.

Viewers have also claimed the BBC portrays Christians in soap operas or dramas as ‘weak’ or ‘bigoted’.

That's how subtle propaganda works.

BBC's former political editor Andrew Marr spoke in 2007 of the BBC's “innate liberal bias”, and described the Corporation as “a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people compared with the population at large”.

The website Christian Voice related:

In October 2008, the conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra spoke of an ‘ignorant’ secular liberal minority in the media seeking to drive religion from the public sphere.

In January 2009, the Christian BBC presenter Jeremy Vine told Reform Magazine that it has become “almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God” on the BBC. He did not think he would be allowed to say that Christ is who he said he was on air.

In July 2006, a veteran BBC executive told a meeting called to address the problem of anti-Christian bias: ‘There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness. Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture, that it is very hard to change it.’

Stephen Green, National Director of the organisation Christian Voice, commented:

The real problem is not the lack of Christian programming, but the fact that no world-view other than a tedious atheist outlook informs normal programming content. The BBC really should have the decency to acknowledge there are valid points of view other than the grindingly politically-correct anti-Christ atheism held by the majority of its staff.

And we all know - from the way it keeps the public unaware of the dangers of Islam, multiculturalism and mass immigration - how powerful media indoctrination is.

Calls for Ending Unfairness to the English

Before the referendum on Scottish independence and in order to keep the United Kingdom from disintegrating, the leaders of the three main British parties - David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband - made generous promises in return for the Scottish people to vote No to breaking away from the Union.

They promised more powers and money for Scotland. Some say that these promises have come dangerously close to Maximum devolution (Devo Max for short), which means that, except in defence and foreign affairs, the Scottish Parliament gets power over everything.

A source of concern is that these promises - which looked like a sign of desperation when in the last few days of the campaign the Yes camp seemed to stand a good chance of winning - were made without a clear mandate from the electorate and without consulting the English, who may resent being just exploited for their money.

In particular, the Westminster politicians pledged to maintain the notorious Barnett formula, which for over 30 years has been used to allocate British taxpayers’ cash between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland and has been widely blamed for the large public spending gap that exists between England and the three devolved territories.

Even Lord Barnett, the former minister who devised it, called the formula a “terrible mistake” and a “national embarrassment”.

In 2012-13, public spending per head in each of the home nations was:

•£10,876 in Northern Ireland
•£10,152 in Scotland
•£9,709 in Wales
•£8,529 in England

So, public expenditure in Scotland per head is 20% higher than in England, although English MPs have no real say in the governance of Scotland.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) has called for the abolition of the Barnett Formula entirely. It asserts:

In an era of devolved government, such spending gaps have become increasingly difficult to justify. Should higher public spending in some home nations be subsidised from taxpayers elsewhere? Why shouldn’t those areas pay for their own promises through higher local taxes?

The Barnett Formula cannot possibly survive. Little more than a crude back-of-the-envelope rule for splitting annual increases in public spending, back in 1978 it was a short-term expedient. It was never designed to last for thirty years and to bear the public scrutiny and resentment it now engenders.

Jonathan Isaby, Chief Executive of the TPA, added:

English taxpayers want an end to subsidising Scotland and the Scottish Government wants financial control devolved to Holyrood...

Furthermore, as even more power is set to be handed to the Scottish Parliament, the time has come to end the anomaly of Scottish MPs voting on policy for other parts of the UK where Westminster MPs have no such say North of the border. English votes for English laws is the only fair way to proceed.

A revolt has progressively grown inside the Conservative Party against David Cameron’s promises to Scotland, as Tory MPs with English constituencies are not prepared to make their constituents foot the bill.

Rail Minister Claire Perry criticised the “whole raft of goodies on offer for Scotland that will be paid for by us south of the border to appease the Yes voters”. She wrote in her local paper, the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald:

If there is a proposal to allow devolution of local taxation, as well as maintaining the current level of funding as a dollop from the UK Parliament, then that can hardly be equitable for those of us in the Devizes constituency and all other area areas in the non-Scottish union.

Tory backbenchers have demanded an English Parliament. They say that their constituents find the differential treatment between English and Scottish subjects of the Queen unjust and claim that they will not vote in support of the Devo Max.

Michael Fabricant, a former Tory vice-chairman, said before the referendum: “Even if Scotland votes No, serious questions will be asked about the complacent mishandling of the vote by No10 and the incompetence by Miliband.”

Paradoxically, it is English nationalism that may be fuelled by all this.

The English are not amused. Their mood is reflected in this comment to a Spectator blog post:

Why does Westminster think it has a mandate to offer Devomax? Whatever Scotland gets, we want for England too.

£50,000 Wind Turbine Taking 7 Centuries to Pay for Itself

Subtitle: the umpteenth confirmation that governments shouldn't be entrusted with our money.

This was reported last July, but I've only learned about it now.

It's got to be covered, it's too absurd to miss.

On 10 July 2014, the Daily Mail reported the planned axing of a wind turbine built with taxpayers' money - almost £50,000 - and generating only an average of £5 of electricity a month.

It was calculated that it would have required 757 years before its cost was offset.

I'm tempted to say that this must be the most absurd wind turbine ever but, given the huge cost ineffectiveness of these contraptions, I'm not so sure.

This one is a 60ft turbine in Wales, built at the Aberystwyth offices of the Labour-controlled Welsh government in 2009 "with the aim of reducing its carbon footprint".

In November 2013,

[T]he Welsh government said the turbine was part of its ‘ambitious’ green programme which also featured a biomass heating system and solar panels at its Aberystwyth offices.

‘As a result, we have seen a 17 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions over the past two years and are well on course to meet the overarching target of a 30 per cent reduction by 2020.’

Yes, you can expect that from Labour. Another sign of idiocy was its erection in a sheltered valley, away from the windy coast.

The company which supplied it, Quiet Revolution, said it had warned the Welsh government in advance that there was no wind in the area of the site, but the civil servants paid no attention. I don't think that reality mattered to them as much as making an ideolgical statement. And the money wasn't theirs, anyway.

Well, at least this monster of inefficiency is now going to be removed, I hear you say. The Welsh government has seen the light. No. The turbine is to be scrapped only because it broke down in January and then the manufacturer went into liquidation.

Otherwise, it would have stood for another few centuries, provided it survived the catastrophes caused by global warming, of course.

Incidentally, British people pay for wind turbines like this twice: first, as taxpayers, to construct them, and second, as utility customers and given their inefficiency, to subsidise them through higher electricity and gas bills.

The Aberystwyth turbine is not an isolated case:

Earlier this year Rushcliffe Borough Council in Nottingham was criticised after it emerged it spent £30,000 on two turbines which generated only £95 of electricity in 12 months.

Even Crime Writers Do Their Bit for Atheism and Multiculturalism

It isn't just the whole education establishment from kindergarten to PhD studies, the mainstrean media industry in its entirety, Hollywood, and the various scientists, journalists and assorted others who, acting as pseudophilosophers, write books on how God doesn't exist. These are only the big players in the campaign to persuade the general public that atheism and anti-Christianity are the way forward, the "right side of history".

Then there are those minor or intermediate opinion-makers, a group of whom comprises writers from the second, third or fourth rank down, myriads of them. Like, for example, the author of a book I read during my just-finished holidays. I wanted fiction, something escapist to get a bit away from reality and I borrowed from a local library Find Me a Villain by Margaret Yorke.

As the title suggests, it's a crime novel. It's a genre I love. But this story was mediocre, and its author didn't shine as brilliant or clever, with original ideas.

Possibly she just wanted to appear intelligent (I'm guessing here), and these day, she thought, that means Godless.

For whatever reason, anyway, her main characters - due to no requirement of plot or character construction, but purely arbitrarily, or maybe just to represent them as women of their (our) times - make a handful of inconsequential comments to the effect that God doesn't exist and, even if he did, he would have given up on us a long time ago. Which is just as well since, as one of them says, it would be creepy to have someone watching you all the time.

Perhaps Yorke had read atheist authors, or maybe she imitated another, more famous, writer of whodunits like herself, Ruth Rendell, who has created a world - or maybe has just tried to reflect the one she sees and frequents - with plenty of Muslims (her settings are mostly in London) but hardly ever a Christian in sight. Maybe because her native English characters are "not religious people".

Rendell's multicultural London and politically correct writing have tired me and, although her stories are sometimes good, I've stopped reading her.

True, she simply represents today's reality of her city, but I don't want to be reminded of our Islamisation when I engage in the game of discovering the culprit of a fictional murder, especially by someone totally unaware and uncritical of our progressive enslavement.

Novelists like Rendell, Yorke and numerous others influence the way their readers view issues, possibly in a subtle manner. They contribute to the general attitude that takes for granted mass immigration, Muslim invasion and the disappearance of Christianity.

They hammer another, inconspicuous nail in the coffin of Jesus and His message.

A further example of people who influence and form public opinion in a secondary and probably indirect way are "celebrities". And, since we are talking about atheism, the rock world has had (and still has) a huge and deleterious impact, particularly on the young.

The role of rock music in the development of the Leftist ethos has not been sufficiently explored.

But this is another story, to be told another time.

Same-sex Adoption: Not as Harmless as Portrayed

Published on American Thinker

By Enza Ferreri


You may often see articles in the media claiming that "research has shown" that children of same-sex couples are thriving, in fact are physically and psychologically doing just as well as, or even better than, children of couples who are - let me use this currently underused word - normal.

Are these works reliable?

In July such a study, carried out in Australia, was much trumpeted by that pillar of "progressive" thinking, The Washington Post, under the headline "Children of same-sex couples are happier and healthier than peers, research shows".

Researcher Simon Crouch and his team at the University of Melbourne surveyed 315 homosexual parents with a total of 500 children across Australia.

Crouch writes:

We found that children from same-sex families scored, on average, 6% better on two key measures, general health and family cohesion, even when controlling for a number sociodemographic factors such as parent education and household income. But on most health measures, including emotional behaviour and physical functioning, there was no difference when compared with children from the general population.

So far so good. Unfortunately, there is a drawback:

In spite of doing well, many children did experience stigma, which was linked to lower scores on a number of scales...

Interestingly, there is growing evidence to suggest that the structure of same-sex parent families, particularly in relation to work and home duties, plays an important part in how well families get along. Same-sex parents, for instance, are more likely to share child care and work responsibilities more equitably than heterosexual-parent families. [Emphasis added]

In short, when children perform well it's due to same-sex parenting. When they perform not so well, it's due to stigma against same-sex parenting. A win-win situation for homosexual agitators.

But this apparent bias in the interpretation of the results is not the only, or even the main, problem with this study.

The method used in the Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families (ACHESS) is the biggest obstacle to taking its outcome seriously.

Mark Regnerus, associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, research associate at its Population Research Center, and a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture, has analysed the ACHESS's methodology both when an interim report appeared in 2012 and now, after the completion of the research.

He is concerned by this part of the study's methodology section:

The convenience sample was recruited using online and traditional recruitment techniques, accessing same-sex attracted parents through news media, community events and community groups. Three hundred and ninety eligible parents contacted the researchers…

And by the sampling approach of the interim report:

Initial recruitment will . . . include advertisements and media releases in gay and lesbian press, flyers at gay and lesbian social and support groups, and investigator attendance at gay and lesbian community events . . . Primarily recruitment will be through emails posted on gay and lesbian community email lists aimed at same-sex parenting. This will include, but not be limited to, Gay Dads Australia and the Rainbow Families Council of Victoria.

This is not a random sample, but a self-selected sample. Randomisation is one the most crucial parts of scientific research. The sample here is not representative of average same-sex households with children:

To compare the results from such an unusual sample with that of a population-based sample of everyone else [which is random] is just suspect science. And I may be putting that too mildly.

The ACHESS admits to employing "snowball recruitment techniques", where existing study subjects recruit future subjects from among their acquaintances.

The study includes a disproportionate number of children born in new ways: 80% of those with female parent(s) were born through home insemination or assisted reproductive technology (ART), and 82% of those with male parent(s) were born via surrogacy. How common ART and surrogacy are today in the average same-sex household remains unknown.

Most families who can afford the espense of ART and surrogacy are likely to belong to the homosexual socio-economic elite, the only kind of people this study's sample was likely to be comprising. And, also significantly when compared to a random sample of all other families, there were few unplanned pregnancies among the ACHESS parents.

In addition, "this non-random sample reflects those who actively pursued participating in the study, personal and political motivations included"; those who selected themselves for the study knew in advance its intentions, subject and political significance (so much for "blinding", another requirement of research methodology); and - wait for this - the actual children were not asked to report about themselves, only their parents reported about them, with all the obvious high risks involved in trusting parents self-reporting on their parental skills as shown by their children's outcome - also known as risks of “social desirability bias,” the tendency to portray oneself as better than one actually is -, without an attempt to independently verify the facts.

Taking into account all these circumstances, professor Regnerus declared himself surprised that the differences (3%-6%) between the ACHESS parents and the rest of the population were so small.

Which confirms once more that trusting the mainstream media on the complex and regrettably fashionable subject of homosexual marriage and its corollary, adoption, is not a good idea.

A Pew Research study showed how disconnected the media are from public opinion on this topic. In the news media, stories sympathetic to same-sex marriage in the 2-month period covered outnumbered those unsympathetic to it by a margin of more than 5-to-1: the former constitued 47% of all treatment of the subject, the latter 9%. For Huffington Post the gap was much higher, almost as high as that found in LGBT outlets.

In public opinion, by contrast, the percentage of respondents in favour of legalisation of homosexual marriage was 51%, while against 42%.

This media bias is consistent with the their highly critical coverage of the New Family Structures Study (NFSS), a work overseen by professor Mark Regnerus in which he examines nearly 3,000 adult children from 8 different family structures and evaluates them within 40 social and emotional categories.

The NFSS, he describes,

elected to talk to the children after they had grown up, to skip the parents entirely to ensure a more independent assessment, not to broadcast our key research questions in the title or initial screener questionnaire, and to locate participants randomly in a large population-based sample. If you’ve been paying attention, however, you’ll know that my NFSS studies—which mapped 248 respondents who told us their mother or father had been in a same-sex relationship—came to rather different conclusions than the ACHESS study has.

In his study, published in Social Science Research in 2012, Regnerus writes:

[T]he empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go. While it is certainly accurate to affirm that sexual orientation or parental sexual behavior need have nothing to do with the ability to be a good, effective parent, the data evaluated herein using population-based estimates drawn from a large, nationally-representative sample of young Americans suggest that it may affect the reality of family experiences among a significant number.

The NFSS's results showed that children who remain with their intact biological families were better educated, were in greater mental and physical health, reported overall higher levels of happiness, displayed less drug use and less criminal behaviour.

The greatest negative outcomes were found among children of lesbian mothers, contrary to faulty studies popularised by the media. The NFSS found negative outcomes for lesbians' adult children in 25 of 40 categories, including far higher rates of sexual assault (23% of lesbians' children were touched sexually by a parent or adult, compared to 2% raised by normal married parents), higher levels of depression, worse physical health, more marijuana use and greater unemployment (69% of lesbians' children were on welfare, compared to 17% of those with normal married parents).

Regnerus’ research disproved an often-cited 2005 brief by the American Psychological Association (APA) that concluded: "Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents." This sentence has now been removed from the APA' website.

And the confidence behind that assertion will be invalidated again and again, as more research unearths the problems associated with homosexual parenting and/or adoption.

One such investigation is that by associate professor at Louisiana State University Loren Marks, published in Social Science Research.

His work reviews the 59 published studies cited by the APA to support its above-quoted claim.

Marks found them wanting in various areas, including lack of homogeneous sampling, absence of comparison groups, presence of contradictory data and paucity of long-term outcome data. The scope of the children’s outcomes studied was too limited: they focused on "gender roles" and "sexual identities", while neglecting to examine the children’s education outcomes, employment, risk of substance abuse, criminal behavior or suicide.

The conclusion is that strong assertions, including those made by the APA, were not empirically warranted.

This debunking is particularly significant, in view of the fact that the APA-endorsed studies have been used in attempts to influence legal decisions in European and American courts, with claims like "no objective scientific evidence exists to justify different treatment of same sex couples who wish to adopt", "all reputable scientific studies have shown that the children of lesbian and gay parents are no more likely to suffer from emotional or other problems than the children of heterosexual parents.", and "a considerable body of professional literature provides evidence that children with parents who are homosexual can have the same advantages and the same expectations for health, adjustment, and development as can children whose parents are heterosexual.".

There's still work to do, but we are on the right track.

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

Demography Is Not Destiny: the Internet Will Change the Outcome of Our Struggle for Freedom

[T]he advent of alternative media has reduced the Non-Fox Media’s ability to stir up urban riots. Today, it’s possible to get information that never would have seen the light of day in the 1980s.

What Ann Coulter says here (the first sentence refers to the Ferguson riots in the USA but the second is general), about the alternative media telling a truth that in the 1980s would have never seen the light of day because the old media were the only sources available, is true.

We keep making gloomy, nay catastrophic, predictions based on demographics (I suspect that some of us actually want the future to be as bad as they depict it). But that presumes the clause of coeteris paribus, or all other things being equal. New, unforeseen or - as in this case of the new media and internet use - simply not-considered-in-the-calculus-by-which-we-arrived-at-the-prediction developments may lead to different results.

People have been passive so far, but for many decades they've just been feed mainstream-media fairy tales.

Only recently have the internet new media started providing an alternative, disclosing facts that previously no widely-accessible source ever let people even suspect, explaining and exposing, informing and educating, expanding the range of opinions, releasing from the cage ideas that had remained until that moment taboo, giving expression to censored opinions, immensely widening the scope of what could be known, understood, debated, said and thought.

This digital cultural revolution no doubt will have consequences.

Once people will be less constrained by the blinkers created by the likes of the BBC and The New York Times, things may appear a bit clearer to them.

We probably still have to see the effects of that.

Add the social media, the internet forums and the comments section at the end of articles, which encourage people - albeit in a rough-and-ready sort of way - to form and articulate opinions, and something new may come out of all this.

Incidentally and interestingly, what socialists and communists have falsely believed they could forcefully impose with bloody revolutions and/or gigantic social engineering programs has instead been achieved by free capitalist enterprise and ingenuity. The internet has made highly affordable to everyone who wants it - at least in the developed countries - a first-class education with easy access to world libraries, academic journals, historic accounts, scientific reports. The best writers, the most skilled journalists, the most analytical thinkers, the most entertaining columnists and commentators.

1 in 6 French People View ISIS Favourably

An ICM poll on behalf of the Russian state news agency Rossiya Segodnya tested the public attitude towards the group ISIS (formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant or ISIL, and now calling itself Islamic State or IS) in 3 European countries: Great Britain, France and Germany.

The news agency commissioning the poll may be Putin-friendly, but the polling firm ICM is as reputable as any.

The survey asked people whether they had a favourable or unfavourable view of ISIS.

In France, 16% say they have a favourable view.

In the UK, 7% say they have a favourable view.

In Germany, 2% say they have a favourable view.

The astonishing result concerns France. Considering that the official figures for France's Muslims are from 5 to 10% of the population, these data are difficult to explain. Either - as it's possible - "French" Muslims are more numerous than we are told, or French non-Muslims are displaying an odd sympathy for the Islamic State.

Not only that. If we break down the results by age group, we find even more worrisome outcomes, as shown below.

Almost 1 in 3 people aged 18-24 in France view ISIS positively.

Also significant are the percentages of respondents who say they have an unfavourable view of ISIS: 62% in France, 64% in Britan, and 82% in Germany.

Except in Germany, they are very low percentages indeed. Considering that the Islamic State is ethnically cleansing Iraq and Syria of Christians - or rather continuing the ethnic cleansing started before it -, and the brutality with which they treat Christians, one has to ask what the barbaric jihadists of the IS should do to get a 90% of "unfavourable views" (impossible in Islamised France anyway) from these apathetic populations feeding on Kim Kardashian (whoever that is), bad TV and Emmy Awards (whatever they are).

H/t Vox and Hot Air

Egalitarianism Is Not What Leftist Politicians Make You Think

"Egalitarianism" sounds so good, progressive, enlightened and compassionate. And above all, of course, caring.

But in reality the opposite of all those adjectives is closer to the truth of egalitarianism. For the only way to make all the individuals of a society equal is to reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator.

Recently it was the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Three years later, in 1917, the Russian Revolution took place.

This should remind us that in the past almost 100 years during which attempts at equalisation were repeatedly made, everybody - except the "equalisers", those ordering and doing the equalising - became equally poor, hungry, wretched, oppressed and slave. And these were the lucky ones who hadn't been killed in the process.

There is no way to equalise at the top or in the middle. It's only possible to equalise at the bottom.

The egalitarians of today, who obviously have not (or appear to have not) learnt the lesson of history, are either naive to the point of stupidity or know exactly the consequences of what they are promoting and don't find them morally reprehensible enough to desist.

Either way, they shouldn't be given power or heed.

Like the Biblical wolf in sheep's clothing, they appear like the contrary of what they are. Choosing a charitable-sounding label for yourself is in this case the verbal equivalent of dressing yourself up. Declaiming on social justice is a rhetorical mask hiding a dangerous predator's face.

Destroying an economy makes everybody in a society equally suffer. If this is the price of equality, only the fools or the evil may want it.

Italians Are Getting Tired of Muslim Invasion

A small but significant story comes from Italy.

Adel Smith, born in Alexandria, Egypt, son of an Italian father and Egyptian mother and living in Ofena, a little town in the central Italian region of Abruzzi, has just died at 54 from a serious illness.

The reason why he is remembered is his constant attacks against Christianity, which this Muslim man probably believed to be an easy target in the current secularist climate.

In 2003, his intolerance for Christian objects in public buildings prompted him to request the removal of all Christian symbols, including crosses, from the primary school in Ofena attended by his children, request granted by L'Aquila Court judge Mario Montanaro.

In 2005, Smith succeded in his request to have even Christmas plays and Nativity scenes banned from the same school.

But eventually he met his comeuppance in 2006, when he was sentenced to 8 months in jail for contempt for religion for his gesture of 3 years before: at the height of his anti-Christian delirium, he had hurled a crucifix out of the window of the hospital where his mother was a patient.

There is only so much that Italians can take.

I found this story on the Facebook page of the aptly-named group "Italians are not racist, they're just tired of this invasion".