Utopia, you are standing in it!

This case concerns the criminal conviction of an Austrian national because of a number of comments she made about Muhammad during some seminars she held under the title “Basic Information on Islam”. In one of those seminars she referred to Muhammad’s marriage with Aisha, one of his wives, implying that the fact that the marriage was conducted when Aisha was six years old and consummated when she was nine, whilst Muhammad was fifty-six and fifty-nine years old respectively, could be considered as paedophilia. An undercover journalist attended the seminar and notified the national authorities, which brought criminal charges against the applicant. The latter was subsequently convicted for “disparaging religious doctrines”.

The Court’s ruling

There are three main themes that Austrian courts used in their reasoning and which the ECtHR endorsed: first, regarding the accuracy of the allegation; second, regarding whether E.S.’s intention was to promote debate on the matter; and…

This new ruling by a Michigan judge is appalling, though it may hearten some Muslims, even in Western countries, who approve of and even practice female genital mutilation (FGM). As Heather Hastie has written, FGM is practiced widely by Muslims, and has been approved by several sects of Islam. It’s even practiced in the U.K. and U.S. The most notorious case here, and the first prosecution under federal law, was that of Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, who was arrested with several others last year on charges that she practiced or conspired to practice FGM on several girls in a Detroit-area clinic. As CNN reports,

In my view, the only good thing that the Trump administration has done is to revise the standards American colleges should use to judge sexual misconduct of students. These changes are, I think, fairer to both accused and accuser than were the previous standards proposed by the Obama administration under its Title IX “Dear colleague” letter, which denied reasonable rights to those accused of misconduct.  In view of many court challenges to college punishments resulting from the Obama standards, and their palpable unfairness, the changes proposed by Betsy DeVos seem, on balance, good. (Note: this is NOT an endorsement of Betsy DeVos!) I’ve written previously about the mess that Obama’s Title IX guidelines have created in colleges.

The changes proposed by DeVos, which will become final after a two-month period of comment, were reported a week ago in the New York Times.  Here’s how they change the picture.

Back in early August, Katy Grimes wrote in the Sacramento Citizen “Last year, as all Hell was breaking loose in California as residents were burned out of their homes, neighborhoods and businesses, Gov. Jerry Brown was jetting around the world spouting climate change propaganda. He’s been calling this California’s ‘new normal.’ Gov. Brown was in Paris to commiserate with other true believers about President Trump’s leaving the Paris Climate Accords.”

Grimes and Megan Barth reported that:

Supporting Obama-era regulations have resulted in the new normal: an endless and devastating fire season. Obama-era regulations introduced excessive layers of bureaucracy that blocked proper forest management and increased environmentalist litigation and costs– a result of far too many radical environmentalists, bureaucrats, Leftist politicians and judicial activists who would rather let forests burn, than let anyone thin out overgrown trees or let professional loggers harvest usable timber left from beetle infestation, or selectively…

A regular feature of this site are reports of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish men refusing to sit next to women, often involving kerfuffles and lawsuits.  The lawsuits have been successful, and this is one example of how religious customs that interfere with secular regulations should be put aside, especially during airline flights.

Now, however, according to the Times of Israel (click on screenshot below), there’s another version of the Flying Jew Tsouris:

Two El Al airliners took off from New York last Thursday, bound for Israel. Both, however, were late because of dire weather conditions, which got the Haredim very anxious, for Jewish law dictates that you can’t travel in cars and airplanes on the Sabbath, which happens to start at sundown on Friday.  The Haredim got aggressive, either yelling at or even hitting flight attendants, accusing the airlines of lying to them, and demanding to disembark after the plane was…

If you’re going to indict a country in the Middle East for being an “apartheid State”, the last one you’d say would be Israel. Palestine is far more apartheidish, though I don’t like to use a word specific for a period of South African history.  Jews can’t live in Palestine, although Muslims can live in Israel as citizens, there are of course no Jews governing Palestine, though there are Muslim Arabs in the Israeli Knesset, and the national media of Palestine constantly spews the most virulent hatred toward Jews and Israel. It’s not just criticism of the Israeli government, either, but demands for the extirpation of the country and its engulfment by Palestine.

What’s even worse is the propagandizing of Palestinian children in schools and on state media: making them from a very young age hate Israel and Jews, and turning them into potential “martyrs”. To quote the song…

Apparently desperate not to upset anyone, the Prime Minister announced on Sunday at the APEC summit that, along with Australia, the United States, and Japan, New Zealand would contribute to a grand electrification scheme in Papua New Guinea.   Presumably she thought not even the bullies in Beijing might object to that –  so deals and donations might be safe (the only “values” evident in her foreign policy) – and she could throw a (pretty modest) bone to the countries we used to be allied with.

But it disconcerts me on two fronts.  The first is the way that, looking across the Pacific, New Zealand and Australia (and perhaps Japan and even the US) seem to be wanting to play the game Beijing’s way.    Beijing flings cash around in a somewhat cavalier way, in some mix of decent and poor quality projects, some mix of the transparently obvious and…

Carrington Power Station near Manchester
H/T The GWPF

The sooner Britain gets the interfering EU off its regulatory back the better. With already questionable policies on power generation due to climate obsessions, this aggravation is the last thing needed.

Electricity prices could double after the government suspended the UK’s system for ensuring there is a back-up power supply, experts have warned.

The wholesale power price could hit £121 per megawatt hour (MWh) by next winter unless the so-called capacity market is reinstated, according to a report — risking higher energy bills for millions, reports The Sunday Times.

h/t AB

When the BBC News website reported the November 11^th incident east of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip in which an Israeli Special Forces officer was killed and another wounded in an exchange of fire that also left six Hamas members and one PRC operative dead, it correctly noted that following the incident, seventeen rockets had been launched from the Gaza Strip at Israeli civilian communities.

However, several other BBC reports have erased those rocket attacks and/or the fact that all the Palestinians killed in the incident were members of terror groups.

Listeners to the BBC World Service radio programme ‘World Update’ on November 12^th were informed in a news bulletin (from 24:47 here) that: [emphasis in bold added]

“Israeli Special Forces have carried out a raid on the Gaza Strip. An Israeli officer, a Hamas military commander and another six Palestinians were killed during…

This updates a series of posts that have addressed gender in academic sociology, starting in 2011 and updated in 2015, along with various tweets (to see random fact tweets from me on Twitter, Google familyunequal “now you know”).

Gender in academic sociology is complicated because the profession is running pretty female these days, with more than half the U.S. PhDs going to women since 1994, and more than 60% overall since 1999. So although there are various kinds of exclusion, it’s not as simple as excluding women from the discipline, and the representation of women’s representation depends on the choice of denominators. For example, a recent report found that, in the top 100 U.S. sociology departments in 2012, women were 60% of the assistant professors, 54% of the associate professors, and 34% of the full professors. This probably reflects a combination of age and tenure, with this year’s…

In 1988, at the US Olympic trials in Indianapolis, Florence Griffith Joyner romped home in the female 100m quarterfinals to set a new world record of 10.49 seconds (1). This was an astonishing moment in female sports, and not just because of her (in)famous six inch long fingernails. In an event where records usually progress by mere 100ths of a second, she smashed the existing female world record time by nearly three 10ths (the previous holder was Evelyn Ashford, running 10.76s). The world went ‘Flo Jo’ crazy as they celebrated the ‘Fastest Woman Ever’, an accolade she still holds today, some 30 years on from the event and 20 years after her death.

10.49s. That 10.49 seconds stands as one of the oldest world records in athletics (2). The closest a female has ever got to it is Carmelita Jeter, with 10.64s in 2009. Marion Jones is recorded as the…

4thWaveNow reached out to Gallus Mag of GenderTrender after WordPress dumped the site yesterday. In her most recent post, Gallus Mag  broke the full story of a Canadian MTF trans activist who has launched “human rights” complaints against a group of women’s salon workers who were unwilling to touch and wax male genitalia. GallusMag revealed other details about the activist’s prior social media activities, some of which pertained to underage girls.

GenderTrender’s importance as a groundbreaking investigative reporting outlet covering the excesses of transgender activism cannot be overestimated. The site has also served as an incubator and launching pad for many other bloggers and writers; 4thWaveNow’s founder counts herself among them. The loss of GenderTrender is a huge blow. It is also the latest casualty in a growing clash between–on one side, a loose coalition of feminists, parents, gay and lesbian people, detransitioners, free speech advocates, and many supporters; and…