Utopia, you are standing in it!

I did not call this blog Forgotten History since his story is quite well known in some parts of the world,nevertheless it is a story that needs be re-told especially nowadays where we need to hear about heroes.

Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, CBE (28 February 1898 – 30 October 1963) was an Irish Roman Catholic priest and senior official of the Roman Curia, and significant figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism. During World War II, he was responsible for saving 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews. His ability to evade the traps set by the German Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst, earned O’Flaherty the nickname “The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican”. He was the first Irishman named Notary of the Holy Office.

This ingenious priest was the mastermind of an underground movement to house and save over 6,500 jews and allied soldiers. He was so audacious that the nazi germans painted a large…

Like many people I have ceased to donate to Amnesty following the revelation they took advice from Pimp Lobby groups before deciding to adopt the stance #SexWorkIsWork. The majority of the sold are women and the purchasers are, almost invariably, male no matter the sex of those being traded. A purported human rights organisation which prioritises male sexual entitlement over their victims is a Human Rights organisation only because they self-identify as such. 👇

You can read about this in full here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/22/pimp-amnesty-prostitution-policy-sex-trade-decriminalise-brothel-keepers

As if to remove all doubt about their anti-women stance Amnesty Ireland recently castigated women for defending their sex based rights. Below is an astonishing foray into the controversy of allowing men to self-identify as women. Women who point out the conflict with sex based rights are lazily conflated with far right organisations and, Amnesty argues, should be denied representation for these views.

You can…

I have done a number of twitter threads on School policies, ostensibly, about protecting “transgender children”. I have already blogged, on the way they treat parents. We are treated as potential bigots who need educatingon Gender Identity issues. The Schools, invariably, take it upon themselves to keep parents in the dark about our “Gender Dysphoric” kids. They blithely inform us our kids are at significant risk of attempting suicide but stillthink it is good practice to hide pertinent information from parents. You can read that post here: Putting the Loco in Loco Parentis.

This is the second of a series on the policies I have found. Some have already been withdrawn but we need to preserve a record of the extent of the policy capture. Note that this series will be repetitive as they are clearly modelled on a small number of templates. The poor practice is…

I have done a number of twitter threads on School policies, ostensibly, about protecting “transgender children”. The only one I have blogged, thus far, focussed on the way they treat parents. We are treated as potential bigots who need educatingon Gender Identity issues. The Schools, invariably, take it upon themselves to keep parents in the dark about our ” Gender Dysphoric” kids. They blithely inform us our kids are at significant risk of attempting suicide but stillthink it is good practice to hide pertinent information from parents. You can read that post here: Putting the Loco in Loco Parentis.

I will now do a series on the policies I have found. Some have already been withdrawn but we need to preserve a record of the extent of the policy capture. Note that this series will be repetitive as they are clearly modelled on a small number of…

As activists in the trans community work to remove the “onerous” burdens placed on the community to legally “transition” I became curious about  the legal cases in this area.  Far from excessive gatekeeping the act is explicitly designed to be “permissive”.  Has this permissiveness gone too far? It seems there is a low bar to be, legally, redefined as a woman. If you are not convinced have a scroll through my blogs.  If you don’t want to take my word for it, fine, I would not believe me either! In every piece I  link to the legal records.  You can bypass my commentary and go straight to the Transcript

In brief no surgery, attempted rape convictions, being incarcerated for paedophilia are no bar to claiming “womanhood”! Remember that when someone tells you they “live as a woman”.   Interrogate that phrase. Its ubiquitous and meaningless.  Can I, a white…

Better a live daughter than a dead son! 

This blog is in response to the consistent use of versions of the above phrase.   Parents are being told a failure to comply with medicalisation, for their “gender confused” offspring, will result in a significant risk of  suicide. Lobbying organisations are using suicide rates of “trans” kids to influence public policy, advocate for legislative change and dictate clinical guidelines for kids/teens with Gender Dysphoria. Despite the headline grabbing claims the data does not stand up to scrutiny.

A selection of headlines:

A more recent one from September2019 includes a direct demand that legal change is required to mitigate against these suicides:

These are not isolated examples. This theme is used consistently by lobby groups, in particular, Mermaids. Below is a link to a taped Mermaids representative in a training session. When an audience member notes that some academics have criticised…

One of America’s greatest documentary filmmakers adds another exclamation point to her resume with “Desert One,” a thorough and moving remembrance of the failed Special Forces mission to rescue American Embassy hostages being held in Iran.

Barbara Kopple, a two-time Oscar winner and a near legend in the field since “Harlan County, USA” (1977), got access to an American president and vice president, and newsman Ted Kopple, perhaps the Americans most famously associated with “The Iranian Hostage Crisis.” But she gained entry to Iran and spoke to Iranian hostage takers and the site of the disaster.

And she interviewed surviving hostages, to the military men who helped plan and attempt the doomed mission, which went awry when poor intelligence, equipment failures, weather and a lack of a full dress rehearsal collided on a dry desert lake bed rendezvous point that gives the film its title — “Desert One.”

We…

Only you know what your tolerance for dark, grim stories that offer little hope for justice in an unjust world, little hope for hope itself, for that matter.

But “Watch List” is a bleak but riveting thriller worth girding yourself for and immersing yourself in. It’s a Filipino thriller directed by American Ben Rekhi (“The Ashram”) about a newly-widowed mother of three, a recovered junkie, caught up in the authoritarian slaughter of President Rodrigo Duterte.

“Extra judicial killings” is one of those phrases, like “ethnic cleansing,” that tidies up a murderous horror. That’s what “Watch List” is about, the rapid descent of a half-compliant culture into off-the-books but state-sanctioned murder and “disappearances.”

A police van empties out in Quezon City’s District 120. It’s part of Operation Tokhang, which news footage shows the Filipino strong man authorizing. They’re rounding up everybody ever caught and convicted of using or selling drugs, giving…

Say this for “Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies.” It’s thorough, almost academic textbook/video-accompanying-a-film-studies-class broad in its scope.

The documentary’s two hours and nine minutes take us from the first naked moving images of the human body to #MeToo, coming a lot closer to mentioning and showing a clip from EVERY movie that has ever had nudity in it than you might expect, or than is absolutely necessary. No, “Skin” doesn’t just dance through the hundreds of movies that the academics, historians, filmmakers, journalists and actors label as “groundbreaking,” or that moment when “the floodgates opened.”

Maybe that’s to be expected as Jim McBride appears in it and has a producing credit. The “senior entertainment editor” at the online film nude scene repository MrSkin.com is something of a completist, after all.

There’s marvelous, little-known history brought out, from “pre-code” to post-MPAA, “Extase” to “Henry & June,” “Magic Mike”…

“Cromwell” came out in 1970, a late entry in a formidable run of stately British period pieces.

It’s inferior to “Anne of a Thousand Days,” “Becket,” “A Man for All Seasons” and even the somewhat stagebound “The Lion in Winter.” But it’s got realistic English Civil War battles, glorious Puritan/Cavalier era costumes, an abridged and bastardized piece of British history and Richard Harris and Alec Guinness, so it’s worth a go if you haven’t seen it.

Harris plays the gentleman-farmer Cromwell, about to emigrate to America where his fellow Puritans have set up shop, when he’s goaded into returning to Parliament to show the imperious, constitution-flouting Charles I (Guinness) that “the people” are in charge of the purse strings, and thus the country.

The high-handed Charles needs money, and only the Parliament — which he dissolved years before — can raise it. And with Cromwell and his fellow puritans like…

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THIS POST IS A PRESENTATION OF AN UNRESOLVED ECONOMICS PUZZLE IN THE PROPOSED CLIMATE ACTION PLAN OF REDUCING FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS

1. BACKGROUND: Climate scientists have determined that the use of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution has caused carbon dug up from under the ground to be released into the atmosphere. It is argued that because fossil fuel carbon is not part of the current account of the carbon cycle it acts as a perturbation that causes atmospheric CO2 concentration to rise and thereby to cause warming by way of the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. Climate scientists have also determined that such warming is unnatural, human caused, and harmful to nature and to the planet itself and that therefore it cannot be allowed to continue. Climate scientists have therefore…

Zarah Sultana: Letter to Liz Truss

Labour MP attacks Liz Truss for delaying reform of the Gender Recognition Act and  restricting access to medical  intervention for “transgender” children.  Not for the first time I find myself  agreeing with the party I have opposed my whole life. I have been a member of and donated hours of my time, and money, to support Labour.  I am still an economic leftie but sadly I refuse to forfeit women’s rights and turn a blind eye to the medicalisation of  “trans kids”. There are some good Conservative Women who appear to be getting a hearing from their party leadership. That’s been quite eye-opening. Meanwhile the Labour Party leadership candidates, bar one, all deemed women like me to be part of a Hate Group.  All of them signed up to some version of the Mantra “Transwomen are Women” with no concern about women being redefined without…

We make our mind up about people after seeing their faces for barely a fraction of a second.

Far from being trivial, these impressions impact our decision making and have real world implications. For example, politicians that simply appear more competent are more likely to win elections.

Can we reliably discern character from people’s faces, or are we being misled?

In Face Value, Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov tells the scientific story of first impressions and argues the snap judgements we make of people’s faces are predictable, yet usually inaccurate.

Alexander Todorov manages to weave the psychological science of first impressions into a grand story, accompanied with slick photography and illustrations on virtually every other page which makes reading the book an engaging aesthetic experience. Face Value would make a great gift for anyone interested in the human mind, laymen and psychology nerds alike.

Physiognomist’s promises

The story starts with…