Please donate to enable this blog to continue
Topic: Unspecified
Good Thursday to all. If you value this blog and its daily newsfeed, please consider making a donation to sustain it at the Paypal button or Bitcoin links to the side of this post. If you wish to donate in another manner, please write to me at wendy©wendymcelroy.com. Your contribution will be well used and greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Cooper announces 'rapid national audit' into grooming gangs, new local inquiries
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: BBC News
The government today announced a new national-level "rapid audit" of grooming gangs, plus up to five new local inquiries. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says the government will launch a national three-month audit, led by Dame Louise Casey, which will examine "cultural and societal drivers" of child sexual exploitation. More victims will be able to request their cases are re-examined, the Home Office announced today. The plans follow renewed calls in recent weeks from the Conservatives, Reform, a handful of Labour MPs and Elon Musk for a new national inquiry into grooming gangs.

Iron Age Celtic women’s social and political power just got a boost
Topic: Women's Studies, Scholarship, and History
Source: Science News
DNA clues hint men married into women-led communities. DNA clues indicate that around 2,000 years ago, married women in a Celtic society, known as Durotrigians, on the coast of south-central England stayed in their home communities while their partners came from outside the area, say paleogeneticist Lara Cassidy of Trinity College Dublin and colleagues. This female-centered marriage pattern, called matrilocality, in ancient and modern societies tends to accompany greater opportunities for women to wield household and community power.

West Virginia governor bans DEI programs at public universities
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The College Fix
Executive order prohibits pronoun mandates, demands schools dismantle DEI programs within 90 days. West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed an executive order Tuesday banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at all public institutions, including universities across the state. “Theories of DEI are contrary to equal protection guarantees of the West Virginia and United States Constitution,” the executive order states. “It is in the interest of the citizens of West Virginia that the State government treat them as equals under the law instead of preferentially or discriminatorily based on race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin,” it states. The order defines DEI as “any effort to promote differential treatment of or provide special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.”

San Diego State U Pride Center says ‘fatphobia’ is ‘rooted in anti-Blackness’
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Campus Reform
...calls on students to champion ‘fat bodies. The Pride Center claims that ‘[a]nti-Fatness/fatphobia is intrinsically rooted in anti-Blackness racism, classism, misogyny, homophobia, and many other systems of oppression.’ The center encourages overweight students to not lose weight because ‘fatness is lovely and has value.’

Texas Sends Millions to Crisis Pregnancy Centers.
Topic: Children and Family
Source: ProPublica
It’s Meant to Help Needy Families, But No One Knows if It Works. Year after year, while Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, Texas legislators passed measures limiting access to abortion — who could have one, how and where. And with the same cadence, they added millions of dollars to a program designed to discourage people from terminating pregnancies. Their budget infusions for the Alternatives to Abortion program grew with almost every legislative session — first gradually, then dramatically — from $5 million starting in 2005 to $140 million after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion…. But an investigation by ProPublica and CBS News found that the system that funnels a growing pot of state money to anti-abortion nonprofits has few safeguards and is riddled with waste…. Lawmakers around the country are considering programs modeled on Alternatives to Abortion

SCOTUS Hearing Did Not Go Well for the Porn Industry
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: Vox
Justices appear likely to support Texas age-verification law. A Supreme Court hearing Wednesday on a Texas law designed to stop minors from accessing online pornography did not go well for the porn industry. In the court's first major First Amendment case involving pornography in more than 20 years, all six conservative justices and Justice Elena Kagan appeared to be willing to uphold the Texas age-verification law, Vox reports. Conservative justices were skeptical of arguments that parents could protect children with content filtering software, the New York Times reports. "Do you know a lot of parents who are more tech savvy than their 15-year-old children?" Justice Samuel Alito, a father of two, asked Derek Shaffer, a lawyer representing the porn industry.

Trump Asks Appeals Court To Reconsider Overturning $5M Carroll Verdict
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: ABC News
After the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit determined last month that Trump failed to prove he deserved a new trial, lawyers for Trump on Tuesday requested an en banc hearing, in which the full court would hear the case rather than a select panel. A New York jury in 2023 awarding Carroll $5 million in damages after it found Trump liable for sexually abusing her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her in 2022 when he denied the allegations.

Washington Dems Propose Bill Banning Child Care Workers
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Zero Hedge
Despite Trump's win in November and his inauguration in less than a week, Democrats aren't letting go of the illegal immigration rope... In fact, now, Washington Democrats have proposed a bill barring child care employers, including families, from reporting criminal illegal immigrants to federal authorities, even if suspected of crimes against children, according to KTTH. House Bill 1128 creates the Washington State Child Care Workforce Standards Board, giving Democrats greater control over the child care industry. It sets new rules for wages, benefits, and working conditions, along with additional "rights" for child care workers.

Hegseth takes heat for disparaging women in the military
Topic: Gender Discrimination
Source: Politico
Democrats pushed the expected Pentagon pick on his past comments about females in combat. Democratic senators Jeanne Shaheen and Kirsten Gillibrand sharply criticized defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth for his views on women in the military during his Tuesday confirmation hearing, bringing up his past public comments on women being unsuited for combat. Shaheen pointed to Hegseth's conflicting comments on women in the military, from his previous writings and interviews in which he claimed that standards have been lowered to allow women to serve, and post-nomination comments saying he welcomes women in the military.

Free Speake: Music Professor to Sue Over Cancel Campaign
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Jonathan Turley
Martin Speake, a British jazz “composer, saxophonist, academic and educator” is preparing a lawsuit against Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance over a cancel campaign that targeted him after he criticized the school’s “BLM/anti-racist policies and initiatives” and denied that there was “systemic racial inequality in the UK jazz scene.” His case is strikingly similar to other targeted professors discussed in my recent book on free speech. The controversy began when Speake was asked to give feedback on the policies. As he later explained, he was immediately set upon by critics calling him a racist

House Girls' Sports Vote Exposes Democrats as Unrepentant Extremists
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Washington Stand
The House bill to protect girls’ sports wasn’t remarkable for passing — it passed last year. What was remarkable is what the vote says about Democrats. In the first big test of whether Joe Biden’s party had learned its election lessons, the answer was a shocking and resounding “no.” Every Democrat but two — Texas Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar — ignored the rallying cry of November 5 and stood stubbornly on the side of radical transgenderism, leaving our nation’s daughters vulnerable to injury, lost privacy, and stolen innocence.

The Kids Aren't Alright: Gen Z Admits They Don't Know How To Change Lightbulbs
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The New York Post
“The ability to do basic, practical tasks is being lost amongst younger generations.” Well, they’re not the brightest bulbs in the box — and their cluelessness comes at a high cost. The adult babies of Gen Z can cry about strict workplace mores and whine over the anxiety-inducing stress of making a phone call. But they can’t even change a lightbulb, per new data on the youngsters’ incapacity to tackle everyday, do-it-yourself duties. “The ability to do basic, practical tasks is being lost amongst younger generations,” warned Andy Turbefield of Halfords, a UK-based motoring and cycling retailer.

A DEI Green New Deal Hydrogen Bomb
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Watts Up With That?
That’s how Victor David Hanson describes this week’s catastrophic wildfires in California. “It was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention and forest management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy, you put it all together and it’s something like a DEI Green New Deal hydrogen bomb… Gavin Newsom was fiddling, he’s almost Nero Newsom. And this has been something that is just unimaginable… The systems breakdown. And to finish, what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19th century pastoral condition. They are de-civilizing the state and de-industrializing the state and de-farming the state."

Anti-Abortion Movement’s Backup Plan Won’t Work Without Trump
Topic: Abortion
Source: Slate
A week before Donald Trump’s inauguration, one thing seems conspicuously absent from Republicans’ plans to advance the president-elect’s plans in his first days in office: abortion. It’s much too early to know whether Trump will stick to vague campaign promises to leave abortion to the states or will instead use executive power to impose national restrictions. Will Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services secretary nominee who has reassured Senate Republicans that he is open to anti-abortion strategies, encourage the Food and Drug Administration to impose new limits on mifepristone? And will Trump’s Department of Justice fulfill the hopes of anti-abortion groups who have pitched the Comstock Act, a 19th-century obscenity law, as a de facto ban on mailing all abortion-related items?

Biden’s Transgender Prison Policy Goes to Trial
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Free Press
Rhonda Fleming says being forced to shower with male inmates violates her constitutional right to bodily privacy. On Tuesday, a court will hear her case. For years, Rhonda Fleming has been trying to get male criminals out of women’s prisons. The 58-year-old, who is serving a 27-year sentence for Medicare fraud, has spent nearly a third of her life behind bars, and for most of that time, she has been in federal prisons where she says she’s been forced to share facilities, including showers and restrooms, with male felons who identify as transgender.

Alamo Drafthouse Workers Seek to Cancel ‘September 5’
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Hollywood in Toto
Oscar favorite deemed 'Zionist propaganda' by film festivals, workers. That hasn’t deterred NY-based workers at Alamo Drafthouse and other far-Left groups. They want to block the screening of “September 5,” a powerful film recalling the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis that left 11 Israeli athletes dead at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. The film has earned rave reviews and should figure prominently in the upcoming Oscars race.

How Research Credibility Suffers in a Quantified Society
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Social Science Space
To address research credibility issues, we must reform the role of metrics, rankings, and incentives in universities. Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.

North Dakota State University Under Fire Over “Violent Speech” Policy
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Jonathan Turley
This week, North Dakota State University is under fire for its statement of diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, including from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The university issued a “statement of inclusivity” that included a pledge to combat “violence in language or in action.” The notion of “violent speech” is a touchstone for the anti-free speech community, which treats the expression of viewpoints as akin to physical attacks on students. While this is merely a university statement, the inclusion of combatting violent speech as a priority was concerning for many. As I have previously written in columns and my recent book on free speech, violent speech has long been a rallying cry in higher education.

Trudeau shows why you should never trust a ‘male feminist’
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked Onine
The self-proclaimed defender of women eviscerated sex-based rights in Canada. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who announced his intention to resign last week, was one of these insufferable so-called feminists. Not long before he was elected in 2015, he announced he was a ‘proud feminist’. The following year, he attended the United Nations’ 60th session of the commission on the status of women. Here, he proclaimed: ‘I am going to keep saying loud and clear that I am a feminist until it is met with a shrug.’ The idea that, in 2016, it was brave or controversial for men to call themselves ‘feminist’ is laughable. In truth, it was all the rage. Celebrities like Matt McGorry, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ryan Gosling and Benedict Cumberbatch were being lauded as feminist heroes, featured on magazine covers as swoon-worthy warriors against sexism. I mocked this at the time. Now, as we all witness the unravelling of Trudeau’s facade, I feel vindicated in my deep dislike of and distrust towards this ‘good guy’ schtick.