Meet the ladylike British army command 490

James Delingpole predicts mutiny in the British army.

We hope he’s right. It cannot come too soon.

He writes at Breitbart:

Sooner or later there is going to be a mutiny in the British Army.

As exhibit a) I present this essay  — titled The Army Needs More Feminists — by some brown-nosing major, presumably written with a view to ingratiating himself with his PC superiors.

British Army Centre for Army Leadership@Army_Leadership

‘The Army Needs More Feminists’. Intrigued? Read our latest #Leadership Insight by Maj Tim Towler available for you to read now. https://www.army.mod.uk/umbraco/Surface/Download/Get/6840 …

Picture a hall with a stage. You are part of an audience consisting mostly of women. You don’t know how you got there, but now you are there you’ll stay for the entertainment. .

Enter Major T. of the Royal Scots regiment. He stands center stage. He smiles and nods acknowledgment of polite applause.

He is dressed in black pantyhose and red high-heeled shoes. A pink tulle tutu. His fingernails are painted blue. He has shaved carefully, and put on red lipstick. He is buttoned into the jacket of his regimental formal wear, with medals. They remind you that he is a member of the armed forces of a country that once ruled over the greatest empire in history, whose soldiers won famous battles on all inhabited continents. Let martial music sound in your memory, the drums, the pipes. And attend to Major T.

In a small high voice – put on for the occasion – he delivers his speech, the text of the article.

A Good Time To Be A Girl [by Helena Morrissey] is not a title that will immediately draw soldiers to grab this book off the shelf. Ashamedly, I would not have read it a couple of years ago. Perhaps it is this shame that is forcing me to write now, or, the shame that previously I might not have acted when I should have done; a guilt knowing that I have let objectifying and discriminatory comments go by unchallenged in the past. As an infantry officer, my experience of working with women is limited, a poor excuse, but my recent roles alongside diplomats and business leaders have been a turning point. They have opened my eyes to some of the challenges and biases that still exist and have made me feel empowered and duty bound to act. I had not considered feminism a leadership issue before, but if 2 leadership is truly about enabling others to succeed, then feminism (and diversity more broadly) is critical. Embracing diversity, standing up for what is right, and maximizing everyone’s potential is vital to leading at all levels, and especially to leading through change. …

If leadership is truly about enabling others to succeed, then feminism is crucial … I felt ashamed … I felt guilty … now I feel empowered and duty bound to act … work towards a truly inclusive modern society …

Burble, burble, burble.

Feminism is a fight for equality … equal but different … celebrate the difference between genders … we need to embrace diversity  … change the patriarchal society … for the good of us all …

He raises a shoulder and looks at you coyly. He sways his hips.

He does not know that he is clowning. He is serious. He believes that what he is doing is virtuous. Very, very virtuous because politically correct and à la mode.

Do you leave feeling ashamed, guilty, determined to do better, to become a feminist? Or shaking your head, laughing bitterly?

Let’s return to Delingpole.

He comments on the article:

After [the first paragrpah, quoted above], it gets worse. Much worse. Apart from being badly written (“Ashamedly”??), it is simply not the kind of wheedling, breast-beating milquetoastery one would expect of an officer charged with defending Britain from her myriad enemies.

What, in heaven’s name, is this pantywaist pillock doing reading feminist tracts anyway? Surely, if he’s going to be remotely effective at his job, he should be reading Clausewitz. Or Sun Tzu. Or Churchill. Or Napoleon. Or, if he’s not up to those, tattered copies of War Picture Library and Commando.

That essay — or, more to the point, the fact that the Army’s PR department felt it was worth boasting about on Twitter — embodies so much of what is wrong with Britain’s armed forces. (And the United States’s, and Australia’s and the rest — for they’re all susceptible to the same social pressures): their emasculation and near-ruination by political correctness.

He proceeds to his “exhibit b)”:

As exhibit b) I present this video of a bunch of squaddies protesting at the fact that one of their ex-comrades has been chucked out of the Army for the ‘crime’ of posing for a selfie with Tommy Robinson. 

Please go there and watch the 30 second video. The laughing happiness of Tommy and the soldiers is wonderful to see.

Mutiny is not something you associate with the British Army and its proud traditions of discipline and loyalty to the Crown. But I see after a quick search that there was one as recently as 2013 when 16 soldiers of the Yorkshire Regiment were court-martialled for “disobeying a lawful command” after staging a sit-down at a parade.

Their complaint — apparently in response to an unpopular captain and colour sergeant — was that they were being “led by muppets”.

Since that incident, the number of muppets in senior positions in the Army has increased exponentially.

Hence, for example, the toe-curling recruitment ad the Army released earlier this year showing soldiers on exercise in the mountains pausing reverently, mid-patrol, to observe a Muslim comrade ritually wash himself in a stream, whip out his prayer mat, don his prayer hat and bow down in prayer. “Keeping my faith”, the ad was titled.

This rampant PC is causing huge damage to Army morale (not to mention operational effectiveness) and may go some way to explaining why the Army is having such problems attracting new recruits.

After all, who wants to sign their life away for a minimum of four years service if it’s going to entail endless lectures from [officers] on the vital importance of racial sensitivity and the valuable contribution to society made by women? You join the Army to be the best, prove your manhood and see the elephant. Everything else is for the birds.

You join the army to kill your country’s enemies.  

At the weekend, I attended a panel event on this very subject at the Battle of Ideas. It was called The Military: Muscle or Mindfulness — and one of the panelists was an obviously very pissed off ex-soldier called Beverley Henshaw. She clearly had no truck with all the New Age, touchy-feelie nonsense which her superiors think is the way forward. She wanted the Army to get on with its core business: defending the realm and — I’m guessing — killing the nation’s enemies.

A senior officer on the panel — Lt Gen Sir Simon Mayall — clearly sympathized with this view. But when I asked which of the top brass were to blame for the Army’s cuckolding he was too politic to name names. (I’m told privately that the rot goes right to the top with Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of Defence Staff, who apparently can’t get enough of all this PC stuff. He was educated at Winchester, the school which traditionally trains all our diplomats to suck up to and sell out to foreigners, so that explains a lot.)

The problem, of course, is that the people who get to the very top of the military tend to be creatures of the Establishment. And the current political Establishment, as we know, right now, is very, very squishily PC and excruciatingly risk averse.

This would explain the Army’s massive overreaction when some of the squaddies posed for photos with Tommy Robinson. The Army felt compelled to issue the following statement:

Far-right ideology is completely at odds with the values and ethos of the armed forces. The armed forces have robust measures in place to ensure those exhibiting extremist views are neither tolerated nor permitted to serve. Anyone who is in breach of the army’s values and standards will face administrative action.

But this says more about the Establishment’s prejudice than it does about who the real Tommy Robinson is or what he stands for. He is only “far right” or “extremist” in the Guardian sense of “anyone to the right of Jeremy Corbyn”. But it suits the Establishment — led by his arch nemesis Theresa May — to pretend that Tommy Robinson is representative of some terrible far-right threat to Britain. In this, he performs the function of Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – as the state’s officially designated hate figure on whom everyone can pour their righteous scorn in order to show their virtue and cement societal solidarity.

Ordinary people aren’t buying this. They just can’t see what’s wrong with a working-class lad making a fuss about all the Muslim gangs which, over a period of twenty years or more, have been raping the girls in mostly working-class areas. Also, they think he’s right to stand up for our troops and right to express his disgust when those troops come back from active service in hellholes like Afghanistan and Iraq only to be jeered at by the kind of jihadist sympathizers who, given half the chance, would be blowing up little girls at pop concerts or massacring kufar in shopping malls. They know what Britain’s enemies look like — and they don’t look like Tommy Robinson.

Since it’s ordinary people from whose ranks Britain’s soldiers are mostly recruited you can see why there’s a problem. The Army’s Top Brass are where the rest of the Establishment are: terrified of doing anything that might upset the Religion of Peace; painfully eager to give the Army some kind of post-conflict-era relevance as an agency for diversity and gender outreach and mindfulness.

And the squaddies are all thinking: sod this for a game of soldiers — I didn’t join the Army for this bollocks.

BBCLGBTQ+ 236

Everyone in Britain who has a TV, or even just a radio, Internet connection, or a Smartphone, has to pay to keep the BBC going – under threat of severe penalty for delinquency.

What has this once much respected, once thoroughly trusted, sensible institution become?

Not respectable, not trustworthy.

Silly and menacing.

As Virginia Hale reports in an article at Breitbart:

The BBC is to fight a “heteronormative culture” with a raft of pro-LGBT reforms, despite figures showing sexual minorities are already overrepresented as much as fivefold in the broadcaster’s workforce.

Staff will be told to use gender-neutral pronouns for workers who say they are “non-binary” — identifying as neither male or female — under new BBC policies, which also detail plans to put additional support in place for transgender individuals, especially while they are “transitioning”.

Workforce training on diversity, inclusion, and “unconscious bias” will also be expanded to include LGBT issues, while non-heterosexual mentors will guide less senior staff who identify as a sexual minority.

Teams working in television, news and radio broadcasting have been told to increase representation of sexual minorities, specifically that they insert more “incidental” portrayals of LGBT relationships and individuals not directly related to a storyline or news item.

In addition, the BBC said it will raise the profile of employees who are not heterosexual and urge them to “bring their whole self to work”.

“Straight Ally” badges will be handed out to heterosexual members of staff.

The reforms were brought in following an internal survey of 300 LGBT members of staff, who called for “improvement” in a number of areas including the demand that the BBC adopt the umbrella term LGBTQ+ for sexual minorities so as to be “inclusive” towards people who claim to belong to identities other than Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender, including “Queer”. 

James Purnell, director of radio and education, said: 

One of our big challenges currently is around young audiences. In a recent YouGov survey only 51 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds said they identified as completely heterosexual. An organisation that appears to have a heteronormative culture is not one that is going to cut ice with them either as a consumer or an employee.

As Breitbart London reported last year, official government figures showing that just 4.1 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds reported themselves to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) was published just a week after an Ipsos Mori poll for the BBC showed only 66 per cent of young people said they were heterosexual.

Pause. Only two-thirds (at most) of the 16 to 25-year-old people of Britain are “completely” heterosexual?

No. To use an overused and much abused word correctly for once – INCREDIBLE!

Announcing in July the results of a confidential staff survey revealing that sexual minorities were overrepresented by about five times at the corporation the BBC praised the “very, very high” proportion of LGBT workers but insisted there was more to be done, suggesting a drive to hire lesbians.

According to the figures, more than 400 transgender individuals are employed at the BBC, while 11 per cent of its total workforce and 12 per cent of senior staff identified as sexual minorities.

The broadcaster’s seeking of an ever-more “diverse” workforce in terms of employing increasing numbers of staff from ethnic and sexual minorities is driven by the BBC’s “commit[ment] to reflecting and representing the diversity of the UK”, it claims.

It is unclear then why the significant underrepresentation of heterosexuals has at no point been raised as an issue of representation in the way lesbian staff numbers were.

Well, because Whites and heterosexuals are born despicable. Criminal. Because their ancestors were patriarchal imperialists. See? Understand now?

And about those “gender-neutral pronouns”. Surely it is not enough that they be used inside the temple itself?

Should they not also be used in the programs? In the news reports? In the drama, the movies, the documentaries? 

Let’s review those Newspeak pronouns.

Here’s an American guide for university students (almost all US universities now being propaganda factories for the far-Left):

So the BBC has gone over, holus-bolus, to the dark side. 

Ne is obsessed to the point of lunacy, as is the entire international Left, with race, “gender”, and the weather a hundred years from now.

(And – yes – also with promoting Islam.)

And the citizens of the United Kingdom are forced to pay for nem.

Posted under Britain, Environmentalism, Leftism, media, Race, Sex, United Kingdom by Jillian Becker on Saturday, October 13, 2018

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Waiting for Brexit 3

Pat Condell on waiting for Brexit, and asking who were the morons – those who voted for it or those who voted against it:

Posted under Britain, Europe, Globalism, nationalism, Populism, United Kingdom by Jillian Becker on Monday, October 1, 2018

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Out of the atheist closet – and into the mosque? 98

Britons – and most indigenous Europeans – have given up believing in “God” just in time to submit to “Allah”.

Of course British and European atheists don’t see it that way. The men don’t think they’ll be forced into mosques or to pray five times daily while groveling on the ground and banging their foreheads on it, letting their  wives and daughters out only if they’re encased in black tents, having their daughters’ reproduction organs mutilated and killing them themselves if they are raped or letting the neighbors half bury them in a hole and stone them to death, have their own hands cut off if they borrow from the till, and so on … or alternatively choose to hand over their earnings to the Islamic government and live in abject poverty.

Breathe deeply the air of freedom, British and European atheists! It will be possible only for a little while.

Here’s the first Member of Parliament to declare himself an atheist. While the shadows of Christian darkness have not entirely gone from corners of his world, he feels safe to admit that he’s godless.

James Arbuthnot writes at The Spectator (UK):

I’m a Conservative MP who doesn’t believe in God. Polls suggest that my lack of belief puts me in the same position as most people in the country. So what’s the big deal?

The reaction to my saying this has been mixed. One was a comment under an article in the Independent – ‘What kind of a pussy MP keeps his faith quiet just because there is pressure to do so?’  The answer, self-evidently, is this kind of pussy, the kind that wanted to be selected as a Conservative candidate and then elected as an MP.

… Peter Walker …  when he was a Minister answering questions in the House, was asked something about whether his motivation for supporting a particularly right-wing policy had been sycophancy or cowardice, and his answer was, ‘Almost certainly both’. It was a well-received joke (I was in the House at the time) which no doubt contained a kernel of truth.  And I would give the same answer in relation to my keeping quiet about not believing in God.

My lack of belief would not have prevented my election – the people of North East Hampshire are a generous lot – but it could well have stopped my being selected as a candidate, a notoriously competitive arena.  Conservative activists who used to do the selecting tend to be older and more traditionally minded – this is no surprise.

Another reaction has been, ‘Oh dear. Why did he need to say anything?’ This rather confirms what I have said.  In politics, the pressure of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is similar to that applied in the armed forces – and in some families – about being gay.  There’s nothing spoken about this pressure, but everybody knows it exists.

I don’t know of any other Conservative MP or candidate who has admitted publicly to not believing in God.  And yet, if the statistics are correct, only around a third of the country does believe in a God or Gods.  Either that makes Tory MPs completely unrepresentative (of course that’s possible, but I don’t myself believe it to be true) or it suggests that the Conservatives might benefit from more openness, in order to be more in touch with and representative of the electorate.

They have little to fear. The vast bulk of the reaction I have received, and not only from those who do not believe in God, has been ‘Well done. About time we had some rationality in politics!

Oh, James! On whom do you call now to save your gracious Queen?

On whom will you call in the coming years to save your gracious King?

Will he too kneel to Allah? Or be replaced with a caliph?

 

(Hat-tip to our British associate Chauncey Tinker)

Posted under Atheism, Britain, Christianity, Europe, Islam, United Kingdom by Jillian Becker on Friday, August 24, 2018

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Tommy set free 693

Tommy Robinson has been released from prison.

He is the leader of the grass-roots resistance movement of the British people against a tyrannical and treacherous government intent on Islamifying the United Kingdom.

They jailed him over and over again. They deliberately put him in prison among Muslims who beat him to a pulp. Though once they offered to stop persecuting him if he would become their tool, their secret agent!  He refused, so the persecution was stepped up.

They imprisoned him yet again in May this year. He was sentenced to thirteen months penal servitude by a kangaroo court. Now, on appeal, he has been freed – at least for a few weeks – by the Lord Chief Justice. Not, we suspect, because Britain is still a country under the rule of law, but because the ill treatment of Tommy has become an international scandal.

From Breitbart:

Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett quashed the contempt of court conviction … which saw [Tommy Robinson]  going from arrest to trial, and to prison in just five hours and under a blanket of enforced media silence.

The court’s written judgement stated the speed with which the original conviction was made “gave rise to unfairness”, and that there was a “lack of clarity” over evidence for the charge of contempt given to Robinson.

Further, the document states the original judge should have resisted “the temptation” to rule on Robinson’s behaviour there and then, as after he had offered to delete the video he created from Facebook the “urgency went out of the matter”. Instead, the judge should have referred the matter to the Attorney General rather than acting immediately.

In all, the judgement found, the original case had the opportunity to “have avoided the risk of sacrificing fairness on the altar of haste”, but failed to take it.

Robinson’s defence team have maintained that the unusual speed with which he was jailed had led to “deficiencies” in the legal process.

The QC defending Mr Robinson in the appeal told the court the original trial had been “unnecessarily and unjustifiably rushed”, had featured “procedural difficulties”, and the sentence was “manifestly excessive”.

Robinson had been live-streaming the arrival of defendants of another trial outside Leeds Crown Court at the time of his arrest, and part of his bail conditions prevents him from returning to that court. Another trial has now been ordered to take place by the Court of Appeal, but the Lord Chief Justice ruled that Robinson had already served sufficient time pending the outcome of the retrial, and was, therefore, to be released.

The order to release came after a short hearing which followed longer proceedings on July 18th, where the judges hearing the case delayed their finding to give themselves time to confer.

Now free, Tommy has described the torment he endured inside the prison.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

The jailers of newly freed human rights activist Tommy Robinson deliberately subjected him to inhumane treatment behind bars in England, according to independent journalist Ezra Levant of the Canadian news website, TheRebel.media.

The goal of the authorities seems to have been to silence Robinson, perhaps permanently.

“Tommy has endured two months as a genuine political prisoner, and I say that thoughtfully,” Levant said. “I don’t want to throw around the word political prisoner. Britain is still a great liberal democracy, but not in the case of Tommy Robinson, they weren’t.”

We don’t agree that Britain can still be described as “a great liberal democracy”.

Robinson’s lawyers, Carson Kaye of London, released a statement celebrating his release: “The rule of law and the right to a fair hearing are fundamental to every individual and this ruling [is] an example of the procedural safeguards of our system, and its potential for protecting every citizen equally.”

Well, they have to say that. If they said “Tommy Robinson is being released because of an international outcry against the injustice he’s been subjected to”, they would feel the heavy had of tyranny falling on their own shoulders, or its boot in their own faces.

… [On May 25, 2018] Robinson had been trying to bring transparency to an opaque legal system distrusted by the public. The 35-year-old married father of three used his smartphone to live-stream on Facebook the arrival of accused rapists on trial for acts allegedly committed while being part of a so-called Muslim grooming gang.

The filming of the alleged pedophile rapists infuriated trial judge Geoffrey Marson Q.C. because he had imposed a ban on publishing news from their criminal proceeding. Within five hours Robinson had been railroaded and sentenced to 13 months in prison.

But on Wednesday a judicial panel headed by Baron Burnett of Maldon, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, quashed Robinson’s contempt of court conviction and ordered him released on bail. The Court of Appeal ordered that Robinson be released pending a fresh trial on the contempt charges before a different judge. …

Marson failed to provide sufficient particulars of the contempt allegation, which meant Robinson did not know what case he had to meet. Because of the extreme rush, Robinson didn’t have sufficient time to work with counsel to prepare a defense. In fact, the proceeding was so expedited he had to rely on a public defender –as opposed to his own regular lawyer— who had no time to prepare. The appeals court questioned the appropriateness of the 13-month sentence and found it was wrong of Marson to hand it down so quickly without sober reflection, Levant said.

According to a three-page summary of the decision provided by the appeals court: “The order at Leeds Crown Court was also erroneously drawn up to suggest the appellant had been convicted of a criminal offence rather than having been committed for contempt of court.”

Marson’s mistakes were grave. “Errors like this have serious consequences upon the classification of prisoners, resulting in the deprivation of privileges and release on license.”

Ezra Levant is further quoted:

Robinson’s “brutal incarceration, solitary confinement, and the constant threats of violence he faced in prison, all flow from the errors of the judge in Leeds.”

Initially, Robinson was sent to Her Majesty’s Prison Hull, which is “one of the safer prisons in the U.K. for Tommy.” … “By safer I mean it is not dominated by Muslim prison gangs.”

But then a faceless bureaucrat in the prison system ordered Robinson transferred to the much tougher, Her Majesty’s Prison Onley, which is “a much more Islamized prison.” 

On whose orders, or according to whose policy, did the “faceless bureaucrat” incarcerate Tommy where he was likely to suffer the most?

Whose but the government’s?

And why?

Because the Islam-coddling rulers of the land wanted –

… either to get Tommy killed at the hands of a Muslim prison gang, or to force him to do what they knew he would do because he’s done it before – to request to be put into solitary confinement to save his own life. But the thing is you cannot live for 13 months in solitary confinement. You’ll go mad. It would be regarded as torture. But that’s where Tommy was placed. …

Prisoners would regularly be given access to the front of Tommy’s cell and they would open up the flap to his cell and shout threats at him. And this was permitted by the prison. It’s obviously a form of psychological torture. Let me give you more examples. There is also a window in Tommy’s cell for a breeze in the hot summer. The prisoners were permitted to go up to the window and spit into Tommy’s cell which is a form of assault and battery and it’s gross and it’s psychologically abusive so Tommy had to shut his window in this particularly hot British summer. …

On at least three occasions his cell door was accidentally not locked. Accidentally, eh?

Reviled by the Left and milquetoast Conservative Party leaders like Prime Minister Theresa May, Robinson has been trying for years to raise awareness about the Islamization of the U.K.

Milquetoast they may be in submitting to the corrupt rulers of the EU, but at home they’re sadistic bullies.

The deck is stacked against those skeptical of Islam. In the United Kingdom the police now monitor statements on social media and jail those who express frowned-upon sentiments. In the U.K., Big Brother is no longer just something from George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Political correctness and fears of being smeared as racist or Islamophobic have led authorities in the United Kingdom to downplay or ignore sex crimes committed by unassimilated, misogynistic Muslims who rape Britons. From the 1980s to the 2010s, as many as 1,400 Britons, mostly white girls, were raped largely by Muslim men in Rotherham, England. In recent years Muslim rape gangs have been uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Aylesbury, Banbury, and in many other British communities.

The fear of “being smeared as racist” makes British officials tolerate appalling crimes committed by foreign gangs! Britons who used to sing that they “never never never shall be slaves”! Britons whose forefathers of the last thousand years fought fearlessly on battlefields at home and abroad for freedom and justice, afraid of being smeared as racist?

Yes. Afraid of being called a name. Let all the young daughters of the kingdom be debauched and sold, what is that compared to being called a name?

To no one’s surprise, Britons do not trust their government to deal with such grooming cases fairly or protect the public from such sexual predators. British politicians worship at the altar of multiculturalism and would rather protect criminals from victims.

And this seems to be why the British authorities felt they needed to silence Robinson.

Seems? That IS why they are trying to silence Tommy Robinson.

And the press is on the side of the tyrants. The BBC, the posh papers and the tabloids, all choose to denigrate Tommy. He is frequently called a “far right activist”, even a “neo-Nazi”. And of course a “racist”, “xenophobe”, “Islamophobe”, “bigot”.  None of which he is.  

Only the social media give him his due as hero and political martyr.

Here is what a Murdoch-owned rag called The Sun says about this genuine hero:

Tommy Robinson is a nasty thug and a grandstanding idiot.

He is not a freedom fighter. Nor is he the hero he is made out to be in the sewer which social media has become.

Nor is he a “reporter” fearlessly exposing an establishment cover-up of rapes by gangs of Asian men. That scandal has been exposed by actual journalists.

In fact Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, almost wrecked the trial of some accused of serious crime …

The crime of debauching and selling underage girls …

… thus potentially denying both them and their alleged victims justice.

Yesterday he was freed on appeal over his contempt of court. Supporters say he was locked up too hastily and for too long. But he was already serving a suspended sentence for the same offence.

His many convictions stretch from violence to fraud. We have no sympathy.

He tells his own story, not omitting the why and how of the violence and the fraud, in his book Enemy of the State. 

We think it more than likely that John of Gaunt, Henry V, Nelson, Wellington, Churchill would be proud of Tommy Robinson.

The ruinous cost of free health care 188

“Free” government benefits are the most expensive goods in the world.

The Democratic Socialist Party – formerly the Democratic Party – is trying to win votes by promising free health care for all.

Supposing a national health service were to be introduced into the USA, what would it cost?

Investor’s Business Daily reports and comments:

Democrats have been falling over themselves to endorse Bernie Sanders’s government takeover of health care. Maybe they should have taken a closer look at his “Medicare for all” plan before signing up. The gargantuan price tag is just one of its many terrible flaws.

Last year, 16 Senators, including three presidential hopefuls, co-sponsored Sanders’s “Medicare for all” bill. And earlier this month, more than 70 Democrats signed on to form a “Medicare for all” caucus. Support for the bill is now something of a litmus test for Democratic hopefuls.

Do they have any idea what they’re endorsing?

A new study out Monday from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center finds that the Sanders plan would add $32.6 trillion to federal spending in its first 10 years, with costs steadily rising from there. That closely matches other studies — including one by the liberal Urban Institute — that looked at the Sanders plan.

To put this in perspective, “Medicare for all” would nearly double the size of the already bloated federal government.

Doubling corporate and individual income taxes wouldn’t cover the costs.

Even this [estimate of $32.6 trillion over 10 years] is wildly optimistic. To get to this number, author Charles Blahous had to make several completely unrealistic assumptions about savings under Sanders’ hugely disruptive plan.

The first is a massive cut in payments to providers. Sanders wants to apply Medicare’s below-market rates across the board, which would amount to a roughly 40% cut in payments to doctors and hospitals. Blahous figures this will save hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Democrats are also apparently unaware that “Medicare for all” would be a more expensive than anything that exists anywhere else in the world … 

Sanders’ plan would eliminate all out-of-pocket expenses for medical, dental and vision care. The only exception would be a small copay for brand-name drugs. …

There is no industrialized country in the world that does this.

Even in the Scandinavian countries that Bernie Sanders directs us to admire (rather than Stalinist Russia which is actually his ideal), “people pay as much as 30% of their nations’ health costs out-of-pocket”. 

And – perhaps surprisingly to American communists –

In Communist China, almost a third of health spending is out-of-pocket.

In Bernie’s USA, the illusion of all medical treatment being “free” would need to be maintained. But how? After all, doctors cannot work for nothing. Hospitals have running costs.

Because Sanders would eliminate prices entirely from health care, the only way to control health spending would be to slap stiff price controls on doctors, hospitals and drugs, or ration care.

Rationing is inevitable in any government-run health service. Administrators have to decide how to allocate resources. When you are in control of your own medical decisions, you decide what treatment, what drugs you are able or prepared to pay for. When the state decides for you, it will not consult your preferences. It will make kill-or-cure, life-or-death decisions for you. The “death panels” that Sarah Palin warned against will determine how long you live; and, for as long as you live, in what state of health.   

Here’s what health care in the U.S. would look like as a result:

There would be chronic shortages of doctors nationwide. Hospital overcrowding would be epidemic. Waits for everything from hip replacements to cataract surgery to cancer treatments would be extensive. Drug innovation would come to a virtual standstill. And there would be endless fights over the size of the government’s health budget, along with massive amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.

How do we know this? Because this is precisely what’s happened in countries that have already gone down the “Medicare for all” road.

In Canada, the average wait time for a hip replacement is nearly two years in some provinces. Patients with cataracts can end up waiting a year for surgery. The UK has fewer doctors, nurses and hospital beds per capita than any other industrialized nation, and is in a state of almost constant crisis.

Almost constant crisis”? There is no break, no pause, no relief for the briefest of moments from the crisis that is the National Health Service of Great Britain.

Here at home, the Veterans Health Administration — once touted by the left as a model of socialized medicine — has seen deadly delays and massive corruption, even as its budget ballooned in size.

Almost 10% of Medicare spending today is for what the government euphemistically calls “improper payments”, but anyone else would label it waste. Extend this across the entire health care system and Sanders’s “Medicare for all” would result in some $400 billion a year in “improper payments”.

But the biggest problem with “Medicare for all” — and any plan to socialize medicine — is its underlying assumption. Namely, that a handful of government central planners can manage trillions of dollars’ worth of resources better than hundreds of millions of people making trillions of decisions every day in the free market. They can’t.

We already know central planning never works, since it has miserably failed where it’s been tried. It didn’t work in the Soviet Union. It doesn’t work in North Korea or Cuba, and it’s causing untold misery in Venezuela.

A socialist government – which is what the government would be that saves or executes its subjects by controlling their health care – is always, necessarily, inescapably, one big Death Panel.

Thousands rally in London to support a US president and a UK prisoner 84

The excellent Middle East Forum (MEF), under the presidency of Daniel Pipes, carries out wide, deep, totally reliable research on Islamic terrorism and terrorists.

It is also an active force to be reckoned with. 

The MEF organized a 25,000 strong protest in support of Tommy Robinson, and plans more rallies and other actions to gain his release from prison.

On July 8th, 2018, MEF Director, Gregg Roman, issued this statement as a press release from their HQ in Philadelphia:

Tommy Robinson, the imprisoned English counter-Islamist activist, journalist, and book author, justifiably titled his autobiography Enemy of the State, for he has long been a target of the U.K. authorities impatient with his criticism of Islamism.

The Middle East Forum (MEF) is helping Robinson in his moment of danger. It does so in the context of its Legal Project which since 2007 has defended activists, journalists, politicians, et al. who face harassment, fines, or imprisonment because of their views concerning Islamism and related topics.

MEF is sponsoring and organizing the second “Free Tommy Robinson” gathering in London on July 14. MEF previously provided all the funding and helped organized the first “Free Tommy Robinson” event held June 9 in London.

MEF, along with a coalition of UK advocacy groups and international figures will assemble to advocate for Mr. Robinson’s release and demand greater protections for freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the United Kingdom. MEF is arranging for U.S. Congressman Paul Gosar (Republican of Arizona) to travel to London to speak alongside the Dutch political leader Geert Wilders, and others.

The latest incident began on May 25 with Mr. Robinson reporting on a rape-grooming trial involving Muslim defendants in Leeds, England, for which he was arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced to 13 months prison, and jailed – all in the course of a few hours. To make matters worse, he was tricked out of the right to confer with counsel. Now, he has been moved to historically violent Olney prison, where he is a potential target of Islamist gangs.

“The police allow rape gangs to operate for decades but swoop down within minutes on Tommy Robinson for a peccadillo,” notes Forum president Daniel Pipes. “We worry that his life is now in immediate peril.”

Forum director Gregg Roman adds: “Western democracy requires a robust public discussion of Islam – including terrorism, terrorist funding, Islamism, immigration and related matters – not its suppression. No matter one’s views of Mr. Robinson, all decent people must support his right to discuss controversial matters without fear of arrest, secret trial, and imprisonment.”

The Middle East Forum is aiding Mr. Robinson’s defense in three main ways:

  • Legally – By using Legal Project monies to fund his legal defense.
  • Diplomatically – By bringing foreign pressure on the UK government to ensure Mr. Robinson’s safety and eventual release.
  • Politically – By organizing and funding the 25,000-person “Free Tommy” London rally on June 9 and now the July 14 protest, also taking place in London.

The Middle East Forum promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects the Western civilization from Middle East threats.

For more information, contact:
Gregg Roman, Director
[email protected]

The rally was held, although the Muslim mayor of London ordered the Metropolitan Police to ban two proposed demonstrations. One of them was pro-Trump, as the US President was visiting Britain at the time and was being subjected to much spiteful denigration, in part by a  permitted anti-Trump rally. The other was pro-Tommy. The two marches were scheduled to converge on the MEF-organized rally.The potentially massive turnouts for both were more than the Enemy-in-Charge could stomach.

Also, Geert Wilders, who is under death-threat by jihadis, was prevented from coming to London to speak at the rally by the pro-Islam authorities refusing either to let his own bodyguards be armed or to supply local armed guards to protect him. He had spoken at a pro-Tommy rally a month ago on June 9 – so effectively that the Theresa May police-state would not allow an encore. (We posted his June 9 speech here.)

The persecution of Tommy Robinson by the British government has become an international scandal.

Tommy tells the truth about Islam, and the European governing globalists who invited millions of Muslims to settle in their countries cannot stand it. So they shut him up behind bars. Then President Trump tells them the same truth, and they cannot put him in prison or clap their hands over their ears and shout “La-la-la”.

Tommy Robinson    President Trump

Strange that a working-class prisoner in Britain and the president of the United States should be allies. But they are, and they know they are. President Trump’s ambassador to the UK complained to the British ambassador to the US about the injustice meted out to Tommy. 

The president and the prisoner serve the same cause: the protection of Western civilization, under attack by the savage force of Islam intent on its destruction. 

*

Probably because Tommy’s case has become an international scandal attracting the attention of the president of the United States, it is now being put in the hands of the highest judge in the Kingdom.

The [British] government had delayed the court date for Tommy’s appeal from July 10 to July 24, making him rot in solitary confinement for two more weeks. Well, that date has moved again, but it is now sooner:

Tommy Robinson’s appeal will now be heard on July 18.

[And] there is a new judge.

The first judge appointed was Lord Justice Brian Leveson, the head of all criminal justice in the United Kingdom.

But now there are a panel of three judges, presided over by Sir Ian Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.

It would be as if, in the US, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States were personally hearing the case

So Ezra Levant reports. He adds:

Tommy has asked me to personally come to London to attend at court. 

He doesn’t trust the mainstream media to report fairly on his case. And I agree.

Sir Ian Burnett, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales

*

Update July 18, 2018:

The decision on Tommy Robinson’s appeal against a conviction for contempt of court, expected today, has been delayed, but will be revealed “by the end of July”.

So yet again Tommy waits in jail.

Rapists without borders 3

They call it charity. And “saving the children”.

Virginia Hale reports at Breitbart:

Poverty-stricken children in third world countries were gang-raped and paid for sex by staff working for foreign aid NGO” [British members of Parliament] have been told.

The International Development Committee heard how children revealed a decade ago that they were abused by men at peacekeeping camps while their families reported being powerless to act.

Corinna Csáky, a child development consultant who investigated claims of child abuse carried out by humanitarian staff and peacekeepers in 2008 for Save the Children, said both local and international aid workers were involved in the sexual exploitation of children.

MPs investigating exploitation in the charity sector were told how the research found perpetrators preyed on the most vulnerable, with victims often existing “outside the system” — not on any register for schooling, humanitarian aid nor other services.

“These children are often alone. They are separated from their families. …

How? Why?

“… They are living in extreme poverty. Without the protection and support from families, many are using transaction sex just to survive,” Csáky said.

Sharing testimony from the research, for which she interviewed victims from Haiti, South Sudan and the Ivory Coast, she reported a father lamenting that aid workers who abused children “don’t even hide what they are doing”. MPs heard from the report, entitled ‘No One To Turn To’, how a homeless girl in Haiti was taken “to a man who works for an NGO” by a “group of people who decided to make money off of her”.

“He gave her one American dollar and the little girl was happy to see the money,” according to a young whistleblower. “It was two in the morning. The man took her and raped her. In the morning the little girl could not walk.”

Testimony given at the committee also included evidence from a 14 year-old boy who had described how he and his peers went to work [?] at the peacekeeping camp in order to “earn money to help support our families”. “Sometimes they ask us to find girls. Sometimes they ask us to find girls, especially our age. Often between eight and 10 men will share two or three girls. They also use their mobile phones to film the girls,” the boy disclosed.

A young girl in Haiti had stated that “the people who are raping us and the people in the office are the same people”, Ms Csáky said, telling the committee that the majority of abuse goes unreported because victims are “scared of retaliation”.

Save the Children, which was last year accused of working with criminal gangs smuggling migrants into Europe, has been under serious scrutiny amidst allegations that the pro-open borders NGO failed to properly investigate claims of sexual misconduct by staff including former chief executive Justin Forsyth and former policy director Brendan Cox  …

Having withdrawn from government funding bids as a result of the controversy, the organization has announced that it expects income this year to plummet by more than £67 million.

Give it a dollar. Then let it die.

For more about the corruption and criminality of professional philanthropists, see our post, Charity: a weapon of mass destruction (February 15, 2018). It relates that …

Personnel from Doctors Without Borders have been sexually exploiting the most vulnerable people, including children, in the poorest and frailest societies they go to “help.

And how …

The UN killed hundreds of thousands in Haiti, and the Clintons found a way to grow richer out of both the natural and the man-made disasters.

The international charities would do the world a favor by dying.

Stop all foreign aid. Let there be strong borders.

And of course –

The UN must be destroyed!

The unending persecution of Tommy Robinson 168

The website Politicalite.com supports the Free Tommy movement, Brexit, and President Trump.

Today (July 1, 2018) it breaks the silence Theresa May’s tyrannical government is trying to impose on news of Tommy Robinson’s treatment in prison by reporting this:

Letters sent by jailed right-wing activist, Tommy Robinson, are not being sent to his wife.

HMP Onley, the prison that Tommy is in, has refused to post his letters to his wife and children over fears that they may be shared online. 

Tommy is locked up 23 hours a day, he’s allowed a shower and one phone call to his wife at 1-1.30pm, but at that time his little kids are at school – so he can’t speak to them and the prison won’t post his letters.   

He’s being treated worse than a terrorist.

He was arrested for “disturbing the peace” –  which he wasn’t doing. He was sentenced to 13 months in prison for “contempt of court” – of which he was innocent.

He is actually being punished for drawing attention to the sex-enslavement of hundreds of underage girls by Muslim gangs, and generally to the Islamification of his country.

His letters are being intercepted and retained by the prison authorities because the one his wife received – and made public – revealed what his life was like in solitary confinement. (See it here.)

The excuse for locking him up alone for 23 hours a day may be that he is being protected from physical harm – even murder – by members of the large Muslim population of the prison (far from his home) that he’s been sent to. (Deliberately sent to because of its large Muslim population?) The likelihood of such an attack prompted Lord Pearson – the only member of Parliament who has raised his voice in support of Tommy – to warn the (Muslim) Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, that if any such harm came to Tommy while serving his sentence, he, Lord Pearson, would hold the Secretary personally responsible and make him answer for it in court.

The next event to protest the jailing and treatment of Tommy will be held in Whitehall, London, on Saturday, 14th July.

Posted under Britain, Islam, jihad, Muslims, tyranny, United Kingdom by Jillian Becker on Sunday, July 1, 2018

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Women’s hour 145

… comes round at last.

Dark women taking preference over pale women.

For every plum job, every position of power, including in government and at the top of government.

Pale men – OUT!

We pursue thoughts arising from yesterday’s post, The woman who knows she can save the United States

From the Washington Post, by Michael Scherer and David Weigel:

The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate.

The newest star of the Democratic Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, launched her New York congressional campaign by declaring “women like me aren’t supposed to run for office” — a jarring embrace of her distinction as a 28-year-old Latina less than a year removed from a job tending bar.

Her campaign slogan: “It’s time for one of us.”

That appeal to the tribal identities of class, age, gender and ethnicity turned out to be a good gamble, steering her to the nomination in a year when Democratic voters are increasingly embracing diversity as a way to realize the change they seek in the country.

“Diversity” meaning, as usual when used by Leftists: women, blacks, Hispanics, and (preferably black and female) persons who declare “non-normative” sexual preferences. Which is to say, anyone except a white male. Even a gay white male being not very welcome.

Given an option, Democratic voters have been picking women, racial minorities, and gay men and lesbians in races around the country at historic rates, often at the expense of the white male candidates who in past years typified the party’s offerings. …

The divide is more stark than any other so far in the primary season, and it reflects the party’s growing dependence on female and minority voters. …

The tribal trend has implications for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, where an historic number of nonwhite and female candidates are considering launching campaigns, including Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and Cory Booker (N.J.). …

At a rally in Nevada over the weekend, [the blonde blue-eyed Cherokee] Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), another potential 2020 Democratic contender who never fails to mention her own hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma, got cheers when she let slip that she wanted to see a woman occupy “that really nice, oval-shaped room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”. …

This proved the case again in New York on Tuesday, when ­Ocasio-Cortez toppled [Joe] Crowley, one of the most powerful Democrats in the nation and one widely seen as heir apparent to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. …

Through the end of June, 151 women have won House Democratic primaries, nearly doubling the 81 female nominees at the same point in the 2016 cycle, according to data collected by the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. Republican nominations of women rose much more slowly, to 32 in 2018 from 27 in 2016.

On this difference, Neil Munro comments at Breitbart:

Unlike tribal Democrats who organize themselves into semi-fixed identity groups, the conservative GOP conserves the classical intellectual ideals built into the U.S. Constitution, and which aspires to help all people compromise on their voluntary political differences, regardless of color, sex, creed or tribe. According to the libertarian Mises Institute:

“Classical liberalism” is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism

[Recent US-style] social liberalism deviates fundamentally … it denies the self-regulatory capacity of society: the state is called on to redress social imbalance in increasingly ramified ways. …

The progressive, elite-socialist ideology of “diversity” uses government to impose variety on settled, coherent communities with the goal of fragmenting political resistance to progressives’ centralized power. …

U.S. conservatives oppose the centralized variety of “diversity” and the grass-roots variety of semi-fixed tribalism.

Conservatives instead favor a small-government ideal which allows a shifting mix of personal freedoms and voluntary affiliations. They expect people — regardless of race, class, sex or birthplace — to organize themselves and their ideas to meet their own needs …

What the Democrats’ policy of “diversity” has come to mean in practice is choosing women “of color” as candidates.

In Europe, where there are fewer women “of color” to choose, white women seem to be preferred to white men. Whether such a policy has been articulated or not, women occupy a great many seats of government, and feminists almost all of them. The Swedish cabinet – fully half of it female – calls itself a “feminist government”.  As Western Europe under such governance declines – the female Chancellor of Germany having insisted on swamping the continent with immigrants from the Muslim countries of the Levant, North Africa, and the Middle and Far East – popular nationalist movements are arising and strengthening, and Italy recently elected a nationalist government (a coalition of two popular nationalist parties led by white males) which is taking active steps to stem the tide of the Muslim invasion. And Austria now has a white male Chancellor who in principle opposes more Muslim immigration into his country.

In fairness, and against our prejudice, we must admit that some of the popular nationalist movements (dubbed “far-right” and “neo-Nazi” by the globalist progressives) are also led, and ably, by women – notably Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party in France, Frauke Petry of Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Anne Marie Waters of the new For Britain party. But they rose on their merits, not because they are women. And that applies also to the excellent women in President Trump’s cabinet.

The thing is, if people are not chosen for a job because of their proven ability to do it well, but for irrelevant and ridiculous reasons such as their color, sex, or sexual behavior, the results will not be good. It’s obvious, but the Left studiously overlooks it. Of course the best person for a job might be female, black, Hispanic, homosexual, transgender, but any such state of being is incidental and cannot in itself be a qualification.

The supreme qualification for power in the US, and ideally everywhere, is the understanding that only the nation-state can protect the freedom of all, equally under the rule of law; that the nation-state must have well-guarded borders to survive; that small unobtrusive government is the only good government; and that only free market capitalism can produce general prosperity.

And those ideas, well proved to be good, were taught to us by – cry! Democrats, social democrats, socialists, communists, feminists – white men.

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