Society's ChildS


Smoking

Flashback Smoking banned in Lebanon parks, city-owned buildings

Tim Camerato
Valley News
Thu, 04 May 2017 19:54 UTC
No smoking in Lebabon
© Valley News - James M. Patterson
The City Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to adopt a smoking ban in Lebanon's parks and outside city-owned buildings.

The ban, which includes chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes, is scheduled to take effect on July 1.

It forbids smoking in about a dozen public areas throughout Lebanon, but city officials say they're planning to build several designated smoking spaces.

"What we are not saying is that smoking is going to be banned everywhere or that smokers do not have the right to smoke," Paul Coats, Lebanon's director of recreation and parks, cautioned the council on Wednesday night.

Coats said his department has been considering a smoking ban for years, but wanted to wait and see how other communities implemented similar restrictions. With Wednesday's vote, Lebanon joins Claremont and Newport, two other Upper Valley communities that ban smoking in some capacity on public property.

Comment: The Fascist war on smoking tobacco continues. See:

Lies, Damned Lies & 400,000 Smoking-related Deaths: Cooking the Data in the Fascists' Anti-Smoking Crusade

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Black Magic

SJWs hit on worthy cause: Fat Studies course deems 'weightism' a social justice issue

Dan Jackson
Campus Reform
Wed, 09 Aug 2017 18:37 UTC
sjw weightism sad fat person
© Nomadsoul1/Dreamstime
  • "Fat Studies" is returning to Oregon State University next spring, when students will be able to earn three credits to explore "forms of activism used to counter weightism perpetuated throughout various societal institutions."
  • "My course now frames body image disturbances more as a function of oppressive societal structures than of individual pathology," Patti Lou-Watkins explains in a 2012 academic journal article.
Oregon State University will offer a spring course on "fat studies" in order to teach students how "weight-based oppression" is a "social justice issue."

According to a syllabus for the course obtained by Campus Reform, students will examine "body weight, shape, and size as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and ability."

Comment: Another set of examples from the referenced Daily Caller article:

University of Maryland College Park
The syllabus for "Introduction To Fat Studies" states that the field of fat studies "is not concerned with the eradication of fatness, but with offering a sustained critique of anti-fat sentiment, discrimination, and policy."
And Willamette University offers a course that:
[...]"takes the perspective of the growing field of fat studies-an approach that asks us to suspend the dominant culture's often reflexive and moralistic negative judgments about fat."
The overweight do face a lot of negativity and discrimination for a condition that for most part is not their fault. These courses can help raise awareness of that discrimination in the wider public.

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Chart Pie

Hypocrisy: Google fails at diversity - only 13% female executives

Kia Kokalitcheva
Axios
Wed, 09 Aug 2017 19:51 UTC
In 2014, Google started publishing employee demographic data and pledging to invest in major initiatives to recruit a more diverse workforce, spending at least $265 million on the efforts.

Why it matters: Google has been thrown into the controversy over Silicon Valley's lack of diversity and sexist culture by an internal memo by a (now former) employee ascribing some of the tech industry's gender gap to biological differences. The memo also suggested the company's efforts to hire a more diverse workforce have been ineffective.

On that point, the memo isn't far off. Axios took a look at the data released by the company over the last few years.
google diversity
© Chris Canipe / Axios
Data: Google EEO-1 reports
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Dominoes

Protests over election fraud turn violent in Kenya with blocked roads and clashes with police


RT
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 19:44 UTC
kenya election protests
© Thomas Mukoya / ReutersDemonstrators carry sticks as they run along a street in Mathare, Kenya August 9, 2017
Rallies in Kenya over alleged election fraud have turned violent, with protesters attacking polling stations and clashing with police officers. At least four people have been killed in election-related unrest in the East African nation.

The demonstrations broke out following the announcement of the results of the presidential election held on Tuesday. The current president, Uhuru Kenyatta, received over 54 percent of the vote. However, his opponent Raila Odinga claimed that the election results were hacked and falsified.

On Wednesday, violence flared in several cities, with angry protesters setting tires ablaze and blocking roads in the Mathare slums of the capital, Nairobi. Police deployed tear gas against the protesters, while a standoff near Mathare resulted in two deaths.

The two people who were killed tried to "attack our officers with pangas [machetes] and that's when the officers opened fire on them," Japheth Koome, police chief for Nairobi, told AFP.

Comment: Guess who's behind Kenya's sudden unrest: Surprise! George Soros and his Open Society network are all over Kenya's elections

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Light Sabers

Five transgender US soldiers sue Trump claiming transgender ban violates Constitution


RT
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 19:25 UTC
pride flags
© Andrea Comas / Reuters
Five anonymous transgender members serving in the US military are suing President Donald Trump, claiming his military transgender ban violates constitutional protections of the Fifth Amendment.

Two advocacy groups filed the lawsuit on Wednesday in US District Court in Washington, DC, according to Reuters.

The suit was filed against President Trump, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top officials, on behalf of the five, who said the ban violated the rights of service members' due process and equal protection under the Fifth Amendment, and asks the court to declare Trump's directive unconstitutional and to issue injunctions to stop its implementation.

In a Twitter post on July 26, Trump said the US government "will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity" in the military, a reversal of Pentagon policy that the lawsuit said was made without consulting senior military commanders.
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Camcorder

Federal court of appeals rules citizens don't have constitutional right to film cops and politicians in public

Claire Bernish
Free Thought Project
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 22:50 UTC
record police cellphone
Contradicting the rulings of six others federal courts, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals annihilated free speech rights in upholding a district court decision stating citizens do not have the right to film public officials - politicians, police, and others - in public.

In affirming the decision of the lower court to dismiss, the Eighth Circuit effectively ended free speech activist Matthew Akins' challenge to the Columbia, Missouri, Police Department, which he accuses of unlawfully stopping and arresting him on multiple occasions - though nearly all charges were later dropped - as he filmed their encounters with the public, in public.

Akins says the spate of arrests and harassment from law enforcement is brazen retaliation for the nature of his activist work - filming officers on the job.

As a journalist and founder of Citizens for Justice in 2011, a group committed to monitoring police for accountability purposes, Akins frequently stopped to record officers' interactions with the general public - a tactic employed by a plethora of civilian impartial observation groups to stem an epidemic of police violence and veritable impunity in courts, so common to law enforcement officers who misbehave.
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Attention

Three injured after 'chemical substance' delivered to Borough Market restaurant in envelope


RT
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 21:02 UTC
London policemen
© Neil Hall / Reuters
Three people have been injured in London after a "chemical substance" was delivered to a Borough Market restaurant in an envelope.

The unidentified substance, believed to have been corrosive, was sent to Feng Sushi restaurant on Stoney Street - one of the locations targeted by the London Bridge terrorists in June.



The restaurant has been evacuated as a precaution and cordoned off by police.

The Metropolitan Police said the incident is not being treated as terrorism related "at this early stage."
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Brain

Sexual neuroscience PhD: Google memo engineer is right, sex differences are real

Debra Soh
The Globe and Mail
Tue, 08 Aug 2017 18:45 UTC
debra soh
Debra W. Soh is a Provost Dissertation Scholar and PhD. candidate in psychology, specializing in the neuroscience of sex, at York University.
By now, most of us have heard about Google's so-called "anti-diversity" manifesto and how James Damore, the engineer who wrote it, has been fired from his job.

Titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber, Mr. Damore called out the current PC culture, saying the gender gap in Google's diversity was not due to discrimination, but inherent differences in what men and women find interesting. Danielle Brown, Google's newly appointed vice-president for diversity, integrity and governance, accused the memo of advancing "incorrect assumptions about gender," and Mr. Damore confirmed last night he was fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes."

Despite how it's been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.

As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone - higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.

Comment: More on the Google memo controversy:

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Attention

Executions have dramatically increased since change in Saudi leadership


Sputnik
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 18:34 UTC
human rights watch
© AFP 2017/ JOHN MACDOUGALL
A prominent human rights organization expressed its concerns Thursday over the dramatic increase in the number of executions in Saudi Arabia after changes were made to the country's leadership two months ago.

In late June, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud replaced then-Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef with his 31-year-old son Mohammad Bin Salman.

"Saudi Arabia's public relations firms and management consultants have recently sold a reform narrative, but executions have only increased since Saudi Arabia's leadership change, and many more could be on the way. Executions are never the answer to stopping crime, especially when they result from a flawed justice system that ignores torture allegations," Human Rights Watch Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement.

Whitson also called on Riyadh to halt executions as well as "sham trials" that use confessions obtained through illegal methods.

Comment: Coerced confessions, torture, execution of political dissidents. Sounds like a perfect match for a U.S./Canada/UK ally!

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Attention

17yo NY mother charged with attempted murder after infant baby found abandoned in plastic bag


RT
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 18:13 UTC
mother attempted murder
© Elmira Police Department / Facebook
An 8-month-old baby was found alive in a plastic bag outside a home in upstate New York after being abandoned by her 17-year-old mother for three days.

Officers from the Elmira Police Department (EPD) responded to a call Tuesday about an infant child that was found alive in a plastic bag behind a home in upstate New York, according to a press release posted on the department's Facebook page.

Police said that the child was found by neighbors around 1:00pm after they heard a suspicious noise they thought might be an animal. When they went to investigate, they were amazed to find an infant's feet sticking out of a garbage bag.

"Her legs were just dangling in the bag, her head was in the bag, her whole head was covered all the way down," Kayla Seals, one of the neighbors who rescued the baby girl, told WENY.
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