Friday, October 24, 2014



Multicultural nursing in Britain



A carer admitted hitting a vulnerable teenager with learning difficulties on the head after he was caught on a secret camera the boy's parents had put up in his room.

Zak Rowlands, 19, is the size of a 12-year-old and suffers from autism and severe learning difficulties. He was born with a chromosome disorder.

His parents decided to install a secret camera in the care home in Lancashire where he was living after they noticed their son was flinching every time he was approached. 

Stanley Nkenko, 35, admitted assaulting the teenager after he was caught on camera hitting him in his room at Oxen Barn specialist care home in Leyland in Lancashire.

Father Paul Rowlands installed the secret camera.  They decided to install the camera secretly in his room at the care home.

When Zak's father Tom Rowlands viewed the footage it showed Nkenko slapping him twice across the back of his head as he put him to bed on May 21.

The care home has branded Nkenko's behaviour as 'unacceptable' and said he had now been dismissed. The Lancashire care home said it 'fully supported' the prosecution.

In a statement it said: 'We are deeply sorry for the impact this has had on the family and are in regular contact with them to ensure all lessons are learned from this event and that their son, who continues to be resident in our home, is receiving the highest quality of care possible.”

At a hearing at Preston Crown Court Nkenko, who lives with his wife and two-month-old son in Bolton, Greater Manchester pleaded guilty to a charge of ill treatment or neglect of someone who lacked mental capacity.

The case was adjourned until November 8 and Nkenko was warned he is likely to be jailed.

SOURCE






"Recognizing" Palestine

When Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced his decision to recognize the non-existent state of “Palestine” earlier this month, he inadvertently gave the game away.

Lofven said, “A two-state solution requires mutual recognition and a will to peaceful coexistence. Sweden will therefore recognize the State of Palestine.”

The Palestinians refuse to recognize or peacefully coexist with the State of Israel.

Like his coalition partner Hamas terror master Khaled Mashaal, and despite his sweet talk to Western audiences, PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas  has pledged, repeatedly, over decades that he will never, ever recognize Israel. During his speech to the UN General Assembly last month he reverted to PLO language from the 1970s, referring to Israel repeatedly as “the occupying Power,” and “the racist occupying State.”

So when Lofven recognized “Palestine,” he joined the Palestinian campaign to destroy Israel. He used the language of the “two-state solution,” to reject the Jewish state.

Former British foreign minister and Labor MP Jack Straw went a step further this week as he addressed his Parliament before its lopsided 274-12 vote to recognize “Palestine.”

The vote, he explained, was not about advancing peace. It was a straightforward bid to harm Israel.  In his words, “The only thing that the Israeli government…understands is pressure.”

Lofven, Straw and their colleagues throughout Europe aren’t stupid. They know what they’re doing.  They know that Gaza, which Israel vacated nine years ago, is a terror state run by the genocidal jihadists of Hamas.

They know that if Israel succumbs to their political and economic warfare and cedes its capital city and historic heartland to its enemies, it will be unable to defend its remaining territory.

And they know that like Gaza, those areas will quickly be taken over by Hamas, which will use them to launch a war of annihilation against Israel in conjunction with its jihadist brethren in surrounding states.

In other words, they know that in recognizing “Palestine” they are not helping the cause of peace. They are advancing Israel’s ruin.

If they were even remotely interested in freedom and peace, the Europeans would be doing the opposite. They would be working to strengthen and expand Israel, the only stable zone of freedom and peace in the region.

They would abandon the phony two-state solution, which as Straw and Lofven revealed is merely doublespeak for seeking Israel’s destruction and its replacement with a terror state.

With strategic blindness and moral depravity now serving as the twin guideposts for European policy towards Israel, Israel and its supporters must tell the truth about the push to recognize “Palestine.”

It isn’t about peace or justice. It’s about hating Israel and assisting those who most actively seek its obliteration.

SOURCE





UK: Unemployed foreigners will be barred from claiming welfare payments

Unemployed foreigners will be barred from claiming benefits in Britain under the government's flagship Universal Credit scheme, the Work and Pensions Secretary has said.

Iain Duncan Smith said that a future Conservative government will end the "something for nothing" culture by withdrawing benefits paid to jobseekers from the European Economic Area.

Under the present system, foreigners can claim job seeker's allowance worth up to £72.50 a week after they have been in Britain for three months.

However Mr Duncan Smith plans to use Universal Credit, which will be fully rolled out by 2018, to end the "pull factor" which attracts benefit tourists to Britain.

He said: "The structure of Universal Credit is such that a person will not be claiming universal credit if they haven't established a residency here. It's different from Jobseeker's allowance. We actually lose a chunk of people that may well come. You start to lose the pull factor for being unemployed in the UK."

Sources close to Mr Duncan Smith said he is prepared to work with the European Commission to implement the proposals.

Mr Duncan Smith was speaking yesterday as the Department for Work and Pensoins announced that Universal Credit will boost the economy by £7 billion a year and help 300,000 households find work.

The Department for Work and Pensions is also preparing trials under which people could have their benefits cut unless they take up offers to work longer hours.

Universal Credit combines jobseeker's allowance, income-related employment and support allowance, income support, child tax credit, working tax credit and housing benefit. A total of 14,170 people are claiming the credit, with most benefit claimants likely to have transferred to the scheme by the end of 2018.

A survey by the DWP found that jobseekers are spending twice as much time looking for work under the government's flagship benefits scheme as they do under the existing "perverse" regime, a new study has found.

An analysis of 1,000 of the first universal credit claimants found that claimants spend 29 hours a week looking for work rather than 16 hours under the job seeker's allowance scheme.

The survey found that claimants are working more and 65 per cent believe that the new scheme provides a "better financial incentive" to work and is "easier to understand".

The DWP analysis also provides a stark analysis of the current benefits system, under which couples working 20 hours a week are significantly worse off than if they work 10 hours a week because of the withdrawal of benefits.

SOURCE





I hate this insidious trend for belittling men, says MELISSA KITE

Watching a recent episode of the female detective drama Scott And Bailey, I suddenly felt deeply uncomfortable.

The heroines of the ITV show — two gutsy, senior, women police officers —were discussing how to solve a crime, while their bumbling male counterparts sat around, gawping helplessly.

Whenever the men managed to get a word in edgeways, it was to suggest a course of action that was utterly stupid and they were put in their place by their female superiors.

No doubt this demonstration of ‘girl power’ is intended to make the show appeal to me as a woman, but instead, it made me feel rather queasy. There was something dishonourable about the portrayal of men as completely useless for the purposes of entertainment.

Yet the more I flicked through the channels, the more I realised that, increasingly, almost everything on TV — from comedies to reality shows, murder mysteries and even adverts — now features women as the heroines, equipped with a fine brain, while men are depicted as thoughtless buffoons, aggressors, or ineffective idiots.

Take a recent KFC advert. A dad and his two offspring are sitting at a table in one of the chain’s restaurants, waiting for Mum to bring their order over. Both children remain engrossed in their phones, as Dad unsuccessfully attempts to get their attention by suggesting activities for the afternoon.

When Mum returns and makes the same suggestions, naturally both kids answer immediately, leaving Dad looking like a twit. It gets a cheap laugh and might be easy to shrug off, were it not for the fact that any advertiser who tried to achieve sales by belittling women wouldn’t be tolerated.

It’s the same story in TV comedy. In the really big hit shows, there seems to be a pretty set formula, whereby the male characters are idiotic, if endearing, fools, saved from themselves by the women.

In Friends, for example, the male characters, Ross, Chandler and Joey, are, respectively, two well-meaning but ineffectual geeks and an unthinking lothario, while the female characters, Rachel, Monica and Phoebe, are far more well-rounded and worldly.

From Everybody Loves Raymond to Two And A Half Men, the most influential U.S. shows feature flaky men who won’t be serious, or take responsibility for anything.

The formula persists in popular British TV. In Gavin And Stacey, buffoonish Smithy, played by writer James Corden, veers between sentimental fool and drunken idiot and is, apparently, incapable of growing up. He’s constantly wrong-footed by his on-off love interest, the formidable Nessa (co-writer Ruth Jones).

In family comedy Outnumbered, Pete is the blundering dad who is constantly befuddled by his children. His wife, Sue, is exhausted and long-suffering, but far sharper, shrewder and more capable.

The trend begins early. In the wildly popular children’s cartoon show Peppa Pig, the family’s father, Daddy Pig, is a hapless bumbler, while it’s clear Mummy Pig is the boss of the household.

What all of these shows have in common is that they exaggerate the uselessness of men.

But it’s the insidiousness of this socially-acceptable sexism that’s most concerning. For it’s not overt hatred of men, rather the casual denigration of them, so often done for comic effect.

It seems belittling men barely registers any more, yet making fun of women — especially joking about violence towards women — is something we’d never stand for.

Consequently, comedienne Jo Brand is able to make jokes about men that would never be deemed acceptable the other way around. For example: ‘What’s the way to a man’s heart? Straight through the chest with a kitchen knife.’

And don’t laugh, but there is also an alarming trend for men to be portrayed as sex objects. Gone are the days when a half-naked woman could come on stage in a skimpy, lamé two-piece, smiling inanely, as a magician’s assistant.

But the amount of male flesh on display in shows like Strictly Come Dancing is staggering. Yes, the women wear skimpy costumes, too, but when the camera lingers over the naked torsos of dancers like Pasha Kovalev, the whoops from the audience are reminiscent of the Roman amphitheatre.

When Gavin Henson danced the Paso Doble topless in series eight, head judge Len Goodman congratulated him on ‘working your assets’, while Alesha Dixon declared: ‘Your body looks amazing, which helps.’ They would never get away with it if they leered over a woman’s physique so blatantly.

Is it all harmless fun? I don’t think so. In Spreading Misandry: The Teaching Of Contempt For Men In Popular Culture, Katherine Young and co-author Paul Nathanson warn that this patronising of men is now so pervasive in movies, TV, comic strips and even greetings cards, that it could have ‘disastrous consequences’ for society, and eventually provoke a serious backlash against women.

Since the mid-1990s, they argue, men have been increasingly portrayed as evil or inadequate. They have gone so far as to say there is now a culture of ‘misandry’ — literally ‘hatred of men’.

‘Our hypothesis is that, like misogyny once upon a time, misandry has become so deeply embedded in our culture that few people, including men, even recognise it,’ they write.

Feminists have rightly fought for an end to men putting women down, but we will surely never improve relations between the sexes by ushering in a new era of sexism that consists of women constantly traducing men.

Once you are aware of it, you start noticing how this culture of misandry seems to permeate everything. As I had lunch with a friend recently, she snatched up her ringing phone and began barking a tirade of abuse into it.‘What do you mean, you can’t find their football kit? I don’t have time for this! Show some initiative. I can’t nursemaid you. Don’t call me again.’

I assumed she was having bother on the nanny front, but no — it was her husband, a man who works tirelessly, in a highly-pressurised career, to support her and their children. He was off work that day and had offered to stay at home with the kids so she could go to lunch with me.

I wish I could say her diatribe was an isolated incident. I notice more and more that my girlfriends speak to their husbands and boyfriends in a derogatory manner, as if they are somehow inferior. Needless to say, they then complain that they are not ‘manly’ enough in their attitude, or in the bedroom.

I have to confess that I’m not altogether innocent. My boyfriend, Will, and I were in Pizza Express the other day, when I snapped at him to hurry up because he couldn’t decide what to order. He walked out, which was hugely embarrassing for me.

But I wouldn’t have put up with him talking to me in this obnoxious way, so why should he? I count myself fortunate to have a boyfriend who is an unreconstructed, traditional — even macho — male.

What’s particularly worrying is that a lot of my friends do not hesitate in putting their husbands down in front of the children. Surely, in doing so, they teach their daughters to denigrate and disrespect men and make their sons feel emasculated and demoralised.

Is it any wonder girls are now outperforming boys at GCSE and A-level? Girls are already ahead in most subjects by the age of five and the gap widens as they get older, the latest research shows.

Last year, there were 40,000 more female applicants for university places than male, while women outnumber men by three to two in many universities. There are also more young women entering the top professions such as medicine.

Research also suggests a quarter of UK women are now the family breadwinner — five times more than at the start of the Seventies. Female earnings have soared 44 per cent since then, compared with 6 per cent for men.

Psychologist Mark Sherman, author of Boys And Young Men: Attention Must Be Paid, says relegating men to supporting roles, such as stay-at-home dad or house-husband, is damaging.

‘Weren’t under-education, under-employment and relegation to the home among the major motivators for the modern women’s movement? Are we parents of sons simply supposed to sit back and say to our boys, “College isn’t essential, but if you do go, maybe you’ll meet a future doctor or lawyer; in fact, maybe you could be her secretary. And, listen, there’s nothing wrong with being a house-husband!”

‘Did women working far below their true abilities turn out to be a good thing? Obviously not. Then why should we expect it to be a good thing for men?’

Ultimately, if the background noise of our lives is banter about male inadequacy, while leering at their biceps, it is in no one’s interests — least of all women’s.

One of the unintended consequences of belittling men is that we women end up with the sort of men we really don’t like, if truth be told. For, when we are not lampooning men for being idiots, we seem to be attacking them for not being manly enough.

We only have ourselves to blame. If we want our men to be in any way exciting, gallant, high-earning, swashbuckling, or, indeed, protective, we have to allow them to keep their dignity and self-respect.

Running a man down never turned him into Clint Eastwood.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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