Society's ChildS


Bullseye

Union puts out 'guidelines' for sex scenes in response to #MeToo, but do these changes mean anything besides PR?

Zachary Leeman
RT
Wed, 29 Jan 2020 17:37 UTC
Still from 'Fifty Shades Freed'
Still from 'Fifty Shades Freed'
The SAG actors' union issued new guidelines for on-set "intimacy coordinators" working to battle potential sexual harassment in sexually explicit scenes in film and television.

The guidelines require these intimacy coordinators to have pre-production meetings with filmmakers to outline the specific requirements for the scenes in question. The coordinators would also have one-on-one meetings with actors to cement what they do and do not consent to.

Union President Gabrielle Carteris claims the guidelines will "ensure the safety and security" of SAG-AFTRA performers and encourage the use of intimacy coordinators.

The move is the latest official step taken by the industry in the wake of the #MeToo movement to prevent performers from being taken advantage of. Past steps include a code of conduct put in place in 2018 stating that auditions and professional meetings should not occur in homes or hotel rooms.
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Eye 2

Psychopath: NYPD cop Michael Valva allegedly taunted son Thomas Valva for being cold before he died

Tina Moore, Lorena Mongelli, Alex Taylor and Natalie Musumeci
NY Post
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 17:28 UTC
Mike Valva
© John Roca
A heartless NYPD cop and his wicked fiancée starved and tortured his autistic 8-year-old son, even mocking the child as he collapsed from the hypothermia that would claim his young life, officials said Friday as the Long Island couple was charged in the boy's murder.

Michael Valva, 40, a 15-year officer assigned to the transit bureau, and fiancée Angela Pollina, 42, tried to make it look like they were as idyllic as the Brady Bunch, living with Valva's three sons and Pollina's three girls — each from previous relationships — at the couple's home in Center Moriches, but their sitcom veneer hid a sinister secret, a former nanny said.

"It's sad. They wanted to give the impression they were the 'Brady Bunch' family when it was more like a home crashing," Amanda Wildman, who babysat the family from 2017 to 2018, told The Post.

"There was always screaming. The boys were constantly being yelled at. There never was a day where somebody wasn't screaming and the boys would just sit there quietly and take it."
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Eye 1

Iowa child sex predator who had victims as young as one year old, to be set free because he identifies as a woman

Tom Cullen
Des Moines Register
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 16:28 UTC
Joseph Matthew Smith
The Iowa Attorney General's Office is no longer seeking the commitment of a former Midwest Christian Services student convicted of myriad sex crimes because the individual now identifies as a woman.

Court records show the state dismissed the application on Jan. 9. Attorney general spokesman Lynn Hicks wouldn't comment on the reason for the dismissal other than to say "an offender's hormone levels are an important part of substantiating an offender's likelihood of recidivism."

In November, the Storm Lake Times reported that Joseph Matthew Smith, a 23-year-old convicted of molesting a fellow MCS student in 2014, was "undergoing medical treatment that is needed prior to (Smith) potentially undergoing gender reassignment surgery."

Comment: Hormones do not dictate the activity of the criminal mind. This man will not suddenly become more virtuous just because he has a few surgeries and calls himself a woman.

From Anna Salter's book Predators:
"The dry research figures only confirm what I have seen over and over in this field: there are a lot of sexual offenses out there and the people who commit them don't get caught very often. When an offender is caught and has a thorough evaluation with a polygraph backup, he will reveal dozens, sometimes hundreds of offenses he was never apprehended for. In an unpublished study by Pamela Van Wyk, 26 offenders in her incarcerated treatment program entered the program admitting an average of 3 victims each. Faced with a polygraph and the necessity of passing it to stay in the treatment program, the next group of 23 men revealed an average of 175 victims each."
It's rather horrifying to now see how a correctional facility is letting loose a serial child sex offender and putting children in harms way because they have become 'woke'.

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Fire

Grenfell Tower fire firms want immunity guarantee over evidence


BBC
Wed, 29 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
Grenfell Heart
© Reuters
Firms involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower have asked the public inquiry into the fire for a guarantee that anything they say in the hearings will not be used for any prosecution. They want a guarantee from Attorney General Geoffrey Cox that they will be protected when they give evidence.

The fire in June 2017 killed 72 people.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has "apologised unreservedly" for a "number of failings" by its building control services.

The inquiry's second phase, which began on Monday, is looking at how the building came to be covered in flammable cladding during its refurbishment between 2012 and 2016. Experts have previously said the work failed to meet building regulations.

Representatives from organisations including cladding company Harley Facades, building contractor Rydon and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation made the application for the guarantee.

Comment: See also:

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Palette

Dali artwork worth $520,000 stolen from Stockholm gallery in smash-and-grab heist


RT
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 12:33 UTC
Art gallery
© REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
Sculptures and etchings by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali have been stolen from an art gallery in Stockholm, Sweden, in what police say was a brazen smash-and-grab heist.

Exhibition halls of the Couleur Art Gallery in Ostermalm were emptied on Thursday night, with a pair of unknown perpetrators smashing the windows and dragging Dali's artwork away.

Located in the capital's upmarket district, the gallery had around 10 etchings and sculptures by the Spanish artist on display, all loaned from Switzerland. "They were worth 200,000 to 500,000 kronor [$21,000 to $52,000]," gallery owner Peder Enstrom told local media, describing the loss as "terrible."
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Bullseye

Best of the Web: The Terrifying Parable of Laurence Fox's Question Time Appearance

Douglas Murray
The Spectator
Mon, 20 Jan 2020 15:01 UTC

Comment: In the aftermath of British actor and comedian Ricky Gervais tearing into woke Hollywood celebrities' virtue-signaling at the Golden Globes awards ceremony earlier this month, another British actor recently joined the fray, making no-holds-barred appearances on British TV and radio. Only Fox, unlike Gervais, is most certainly not joking...


laurence fox woke question time
In what turned out to be the last year of his life, Roger Scruton often mulled on the nature and techniques of twenty-first century denunciation. For Roger, like others who had seen totalitarian societies up close, knew what intimidation and officially-imposed forms of thinking were actually like.

Which is not to say, of course, that modern Britain or America are totalitarian societies. Only that we have people among us who act with precisely the same techniques as those did in totalitarian societies. In modern Britain, as in communist Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the habits are the same. A member of a profession comes into their workplace in the morning to find a letter of denunciation signed by all their colleagues. An organ of official opinion castigates someone for having fraternised with the wrong elements. Almost all of this is done by people who think they are doing good. As it happens I have spent the first part of the year reading Vasily Grossman, and this last notion has been particularly striking of late. Bad things are rarely done by people who think they are doing bad things. They are almost everywhere done by people who imagine that they are acting for the common good.

Which brings me to Laurence Fox, or rather the response to Laurence Fox in recent days.

Comment: Follow Mr. Fox on Twitter.

Here's Fox at his most irreverent and non-PC, in a recent interview with journalist James Delingpod:


His music's not bad either. Here's his latest single:




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Bug

Police allowed to conduct illegal searches of vehicles at concerts and music festivals

mapi
MassPrivateI
Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
Police Allowed To Conduct Illegal Searches
© Hudson Valley 360
A recent Appeals Court ruling in Tennessee reveals a disturbing window into how police use concerts, music festivals and sporting events to trample our Fourth Amendment rights.

When Brian Wiley purchased tickets to the Bonnaaroo Music Festival in 2016 he never thought that police would be allowed to search his car without probable cause.

Yet that is exactly what happened.

The Bonnaroo Music Festival is a four-day music festival that provides overnight camping to concertgoers with the added bonus of being searched free of charge.

According to Coffee County Sheriff's investigator James Sherrill, Mr. Wiley should have known that concertgoers and campers would be searched the moment they stepped foot onto the festivals grounds.

The police argued that Mr. Wiley's music festival ticket gives police permission to search everyone, including their vehicles.

Comment: It was, and is, events like the intelligence-agency-manufactured Las Vegas massacre that has provided the justification of such illegal searches as we are now reading about:

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No Entry

Bayer considers stopping sales of glyphosate to private users amid settlement discussions with 75,000 Roundup cancer claimants


Channel News Asia
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 11:30 UTC
Monsanto
© REUTERS/Regis DuvignauFILE PHOTO: A man uses a Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller spray containing glyphosate in a garden in Bordeaux, France, June 1, 2019.
Bayer is considering stopping sales of the weedkiller glyphosate to private users who apply it in their gardens, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Thursday, citing financial and corporate sources.

The business daily said the move was part of ongoing talks with tens of thousands of plaintiffs in the United States about an out-of-court settlement. The plaintiffs blame Bayer's glyphosate-based weedkillers for their cancer.

Bayer was not immediately available for comment.

Comment: While this may seem like a victory, as has happened elsewhere, such as France, farmers - who are struggling as it is - are permitted to use glyphosate where there's 'no alternative', so the food supply will continue to be toxic. One also wonders what it will be replaced with, because it's unlikely the big chemical companies will willingly give up those profits.

In the end, what's really needed is a paradigm shift in our approach towards nature, and there needs to be an international effort to find the most optimal ways to work with it to achieve our goals:

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Network

Article 13: UK will not implement EU copyright directive


BBC
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:01 UTC
EU copyright directive
© Getty Images
Universities and Science Minister Chris Skidmore has said that the UK will not implement the EU Copyright Directive after the country leaves the EU.

Several companies have criticised the law, which would hold them accountable for not removing copyrighted content uploaded by users, if it is passed.

EU member states have until 7 June 2021 to implement the new reforms, but the UK will have left the EU by then.

The UK was among 19 nations that initially supported the law.

Comment: See also:

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No Entry

Russia to close border with China amid coronavirus outbreak - Prime Minister Mishustin


Sputnik
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 10:16 UTC
temp check coronavirus china
© REUTERS / CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINSA worker uses a thermometer to check the temperature of a customer as she enters a Starbucks shop as the country is hit by an outbreak of the new coronavirus, in Beijing, China January 30, 2020
So far, the coronavirus epidemic has left 170 people dead and over 7,700 more infected in China.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said he had signed a decree to close Russia's border in the Far East as part of the effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus from China.
"A relevant order was signed today, and the implementation has already started. Later in the day, we will brief everyone, through an established procedure, on all the events on closing the border in the Far Eastern region and on other measures that the government has implemented," Mishustin said at a cabinet meeting.

Comment: See also:

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