News Round-Up
- “Gove told to stop funding interfaith charity that failed to condemn Hamas attack” – Michael Gove faces calls to stop public funding for an interfaith charity that has received millions from the taxpayer and has ties to a group barred from Whitehall, reports the Telegraph.
- “How UNRWA grooms terrorists” – It is high time for the international community, and those who actually want a better future for the Palestinians, to liquidate the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, says Bassam Tawil for the Gatestone Institute.
- “Britain is no longer safe – and few police chiefs care” – Too many police forces view appeasing social justice activists as a worthy substitute for fighting crime, says Rory Geoghegan in the Telegraph.
- “Rishi Sunak faces backlash from Tory MPs over Cummings meetings” – Rishi Sunak is facing a backlash from furious Tory MPs over claims by Dominic Cummings that he had secret meetings with the PM, reports the Telegraph.
- “Nicola Sturgeon’s remarkable downfall” – Political downfalls, such as Nicola Sturgeon’s, are rarely so precipitate or dramatic, observes Iain Macwhirter in the Spectator.
- “Why the Spectator didn’t cancel Karol Sikora” – In the Spectator, Fraser Nelson explains why he didn’t cancel Karol Sikora at the behest of an NHS sponsor of a Spectator debate at the Tory Party Conference.
- “‘Beginning of the end’ for EU as we know it after surge in hard-Right support” – Polls are predicting that Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orban will lead their Right-wing parties to victory in next year’s European Parliament elections, reports the Telegraph.
- “Councils are hiking car parking prices by up to 54% next year” – Local authorities across England have proposed a slate of increased car parking fees for the new year, says the Mail.
- “Professor claims Andrew Tate and Greta Thunberg tweet got him sacked” – An Australian academic was sacked over a tweet responsing to eco-zealot Greta Thunberg and influencer Andrew Tate, according to the Mail.
- “Why did it take so long to give Tim Martin a knighthood?” – Wetherspoons is more than a successful business. It is almost a charity, says Christopher Snowdon in the Spectator.
- “The year in review” – On Substack, Laura Dodsworth presents the personal, political, pretty, painful and published in 2023.
- “Sunday strip: Fasten your seatbelt!” – On Substack, Dr. Robert W. Malone reflects on the past year through a carefully curated collection of satirical cartoons.
- “The New Conservative Alternative Honours List” – The New Conservative’s Frank Haviland honours the movers and shakers who laboured night and day to make 2023 the unmitigated disaster it was.
- “Woke crime guidelines and questioning branded ‘ludicrous’” – Police are being told to ask suspects and crime victims whether they are male, female or ‘intersex’, reports the Mail.
- “Police tsar: Trans activists trying to force me out over gender views” – A Tory police tsar claims transgender activists and Left-wing rivals are trying to oust her over her anti-woke views on sex and gender, according to the Mail.
- “Woke corporatism has started to implode” – 2023 has turned out to have been the year when so-called ‘woke corporatism’ keeled over and died, writes Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
- “Mission to planet Woke! NASA plans ‘diverse’ new lunar adventure” – Critics are castigating NASA’s commitment to ‘diversity’ and gender balance among astronauts as it plans a new lunar trip, according to the Mail.
- “A new age of prohibition” – Rishi Sunak’s tobacco ban is a sign of things to come, warns Christopher Snowdon in Spiked.
- “Will we worship the AI?” – AI will eventually be better than us in ways we do not yet understand, says Sean Thomas in the Spectator.
- “Google settles $5 billion lawsuit over allegedly spying on people using Chrome’s Incognito mode” – Google has settled a $5 billion privacy lawsuit that alleges it spied on people who used the ‘Incognito mode’ option in Google Chrome, reports Complex.
- “South Park was right once again” – On X, Collin Rugg shares a prophetic clip from South Park, following the news that USA Boxing will now allow biological males to compete with females starting in 2024 under their new “Transgender Policy”.
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/12/30/michael-gove-told-scrap-funding-inter-faith-network/
Our so-called government has no business whatsoever in handing over taxpayers money to fake, tax-dodging charities.
Taxes are raised to benefit society as a whole. Personally I object to ALL payments to charities by government. If a charidee cannot raise funds legitimately on merit then it deserves to die.
Always remember…donations to charidees are simply secondary taxation for the gullible.
Charitable status should be allowed only for organisations that do something useful. Lobbying, “research” and political campaigns should not be charities.
only incidental research and policy work directly in support of their main function should be permitted.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12881399/Councils-hiking-car-parking-prices-54-year-Hertfordshire-New-Forest-Southampton-seeing-sharpest-increases-does-area-fare.html
As WEF instructions go this must be the most blatant – how to kill high streets and town centres in one easy go. Bloody hell some town centres are half dead already. Increasing parking charges should effectively kill off most High Streets and the markets and businesses therein.
Agenda 2030 going to plan.
As far as I can see most town centres are in their death throes. And, I agree, by design. The places that are thriving are the retail parks on the edges of towns that are just full of big chains. Control the flow of traffic, control the flow of money, control the destruction of independent business. Keep reducing the fail-safes until the only ones that exist are the ones you control. Then…. bang.
The big chains are in trouble too in Town Centres. Councils seem to see parking charges as both revenue maker and Earth Saver. I know people see Agenda 2030 in this, but its more to do with stupidity of following yet another ill-thought out ‘plan to save the world’, imo. Lose the vibrant city centre, lose jobs, lose business rates, more benefits, more social issues, more decay, all the time people are shopping online where small businesses thrive if they have their internet game sorted out. Big High Street is dead with or without A2030.
Happy New Year to everyone. No caveats.
.And to you FL, and all commentators on DS.
Covid Jab Alarming Rise In Illness
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
“South Park was right once again”
Ah.! The contradictory nature of woke strikes again. Toxic masculinity makes men compete physically > Women should never be subjected to male violence. Solution: Put them together in a boxing ring. I marvel at their ability to tie their logic and themselves in knots.
When it comes to a sport such as boxing that’s divided into weight categories do biological men have much of an advantage over women? Obviously people will recoil at the idea of men hitting women, but if a woman is able to fight back fairly against a similar sized man, the woman has trained to gain the same muscle mass as the man and chooses to enter the fight maybe boxing, and other martial arts, are one of the few sports where women can compete fairly against biological men who have reduced their testosterone levels. If I’m wrong and people can link to studies showing that biological men will always have an advantage over similar sized women fair enough I’ll admit I’m wrong. However I think that most of the studies into male advantage in sport have compared ‘average’ men with ‘average’ women and obviously find that biological men who have gone through puberty as males have a natural advantage due to their larger average size. Obviously this means that in most sports that aren’t divided into weight categories it’s unfair for biological men to compete against women but having weight categories might largely create an almost level playing field.… Read more »
It’s an interesting concept if we’re directly comparing weight for weight. IMHO the structural and metabolic differences that occur during puberty will still give trans women-who-were-men an advantage but as you say, difficult to find direct data which doesn’t compare averages; early days, perhaps. This general article highlights a few of the more salient points (heart size/lung capacity differential, metabolic oxygen uptake, body shape, slow/fast twitch muscle fibre differences, peak power per Kg bodyweight, etc):
https://www.shapefit.com/exercise/men-vs-women-exercising.html
The Spina article referenced in the above (endurance VO2 max increases through different sex based mechanisms):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8226490/
As with other sports, we’ll probably have to wait until a sufficient number of XX women boxers have suffered serious injury for the differences to be accepted….
I boxed on and off for over 30 years and had many competitive fights in that time, and I can say without doubt that it wouldn’t be a fair fight. I don’t need to see a study. I hung up my gloves a few years ago but females had been a common sight in the gym many years before that; pound for pound, men hit harder and quicker. I would also say they generally recover from taking a good shot better. It’s not exactly surprising given the natural biological differences between the sexes.
I don’t know why you’ve attracted so many downvotes. It’s not an unreasonable question. I think the simple answer is that strength is not distributed in the same way between the sexes – men have stronger upper bodies which are important in combat sports. I think they will also most likely have more fast twitch muscles and better ability to utilise oxygen.
Thanks for this, it’s a shame so many people automatically downvoted my comment without trying to provide any evidence that I may be wrong. Men may generally have stronger upper bodies but this may be something women can equalise with proper training. Oxygen utilisation might not be an issue in martial arts when rounds only last 3 minutes whereas it would be in events such as distance running or cycling where athletes keep going for much longer periods of time without breaks.
Indeed a shame. I don’t think “proper training” would make a difference. Women are worse at pretty much every sport pound for pound, at the elite level, compared to elite men. A well trained fit woman could probably beat a lot of men in a boxing match, but that’s not really what we are talking about here. Oxygen utilisation is also about your anaerobic threshold which relates to short burst activity. Women are I believe almost as good as men at ultramarathons. People’s athletic ability like most abilities will probably form a bell curve, and the elite are outliers – but the female bell curve will be slightly to the left of the male one, just like the different bell curves in sprinting of people of west African origin vs everyone else, or people of east African origin in distance running. As someone else points out, logically the “open” category would be males plus trannies, not females plus trannies. The trannies, assuming they are mediocre, would not qualify for elite level competition with males – they would be competing in a category appropriate to their level. In non-contact sports, women could enter men’s events but they would simply almost never… Read more »
I agree with athletic ability being a bell curve, and the general female curve being to the left of males, but a lot of this is down to men on average being larger than women. When comparing men and women of equal weights is the female bell curve to the left of the male curve? I’m thinking of Laura Hubbard the bloke who represented New Zealand in female weightlifting at the Tokyo Olympics and finished well outside the medal positions. Obviously one example doesn’t prove a point but he didn’t have any massive advantage as a biological male.
You only need to look at weightlifting world records which are by the weight of the competitor. List of world records in Olympic weightlifting – Wikipedia I picked a couple at random and in both cases the male record is way higher than the female one. I don’t have time to check but I imagine there will be hundreds of men who can lift more than the best female – maybe thousands. Of course a given woman could outlift a given man but at the elite level they would not get the qualifying score to be able to compete. Dividing people into categories that are not simply the level of performance by sex, age and weight is an attempt to level the playing field so that more people in each category can compete for medals/records. You may view this as somewhat arbitrary, but it’s what has evolved and it seems to suit people – both at the professional and amateur level. There’s also a safety aspect for combat/contact sports. Removing those categories would screw the whole thing up royally. Having men and women compete against one another would destroy female elite sport – they would not get on TV, not… Read more »
Essentially, the women’s category becomes the ‘open’ category. Surely, if you’re going to offer an ‘open’ category it should be the men’s.
Nicola Sturgeon is still an MSP. That’s not a downfall but a reduction in pay, responsibility and media attention but retaining the opportunity to influence.
Alongside that, she gets to monetise her previous dictatorial role with a book deal.
When does Alex Salmond’s “reckoning” start?
“Woke corporatism has started to implode”
Dream on. They’ll just find other, more sinister, ways to push/nudge/indoctrinate the same DEI/ESG/2030/globalist/useless eater tropes.
They can let woke themes on gender, sexuality and race go back and forth like tennis ball watching as long as they can hold the line at energy, money and identity control.
A very happy new year to all my fellow blogees on DS.
May your posts prosper.
“Britain is no longer safe – and few police chiefs care”
It’s called ‘ to hell in a handcart ‘ welcome to 21st century Britain!
More shyte, different year😁 let’s make it a green one🤯
The very best to all of you!
“Woke crime guidelines and questioning branded ‘ludicrous’”
Rape victim: “I’m a man”
Rapist: “I’m a woman”
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2023/12/31/lithium-ion-battery-fire-in-hold-of-cargo-ship-near-dutch-harbor-extinguished/
Are you sure?
“After lithium-ion batteries burned in a large cargo ship’s hold for a number of days, the U.S. Coast Guard said late Saturday that the fire was out and directed the ship to anchor near Dutch Harbor.”
“Near”Dutch Harbor? If your so confident it’s out, why not bring it in to the dock?
More liar liar pants on fire (no pun intended)
to protect your little green precious toy battery🔋agenda!
Best Wishes for 2024 fellow Sceptics ,(until the WHO treaty gets waved through 🤯) “May your Gods go with you” 🥰
“NEW: USA Boxing will now allow biological males to compete with females starting in 2024 under their new “Transgender policy”
In a sport where the ultimate win is to stop your apponent’s brain from working (knockout)!
So, Mike Tyson calls himself a woman and kills his female apponent! How many women will die before they realise this wasn’t such a good idea?
I’m surprised John Pilger’s death was not included.
I’m not surprised but it’s a big loss.