Monday, August 08, 2016



Incompetent multicultural dentist in Britain



A woman has been awarded £10,000 compensation after a series of dental blunders left her with a 'tooth like a shark'.  Lauren Field, 21, first noticed pain and a strange lump in her upper gum when she was 10 years old.

However when her family dentist failed to refer her to an orthodontist and did not pull the milk tooth out, the adult tooth began growing horizontally out of her gum for the next eight years.

Because the tooth grew horizontally, it cut against her lip and made it bleed.

The graduate, from Bletchley, Milton Keynes, returned to dentist Dr Ashwin Bechar several times - but she says he refused to refer her to an orthodontist.

Ms Field said he insisted the milk tooth would fall out on its own - but when it didn't her adult tooth grew through her gum.

She said her confidence was 'shattered' because of the blunder, which led to children at school teasing her because of her appearance.

Ms Field said: 'I thought he'd pull the baby tooth out, but he said it would fall out naturally. It caused really bad ulcers.

'When I closed my mouth you could see a lump on the side of my face. 'I was so embarrassed as kids at school would point it out.  'My confidence was shattered.'

It wasn't until she was 18 and had visited three separate dentists that she was referred to a specialist.

Lauren said: 'I am having to go through this traumatic experience as an adult.  'It's so frustrating because, had Dr Bechar taken the right action immediately, it would have saved me so much time and suffering.'

Lauren is now worried employers won't take her seriously as she is forced to wear braces to job interviews.  She said: 'I am having to wear braces to job interviews, which makes me feel so self-conscious because I think they're not going to take me seriously.'

Dental Law Partnership helped Lauren land a £10,000 out of court settlement from Dr Bechar.

SOURCE






Israel accuses World Vision Gaza manager of siphoning off $50million intended to help starving people and transferring it to Hamas militants



A senior manager with a Christian aid charity siphoned off up to $50million intended to help starving people in Gaza and transferred it to militant group Hamas, Israel's internal security agency has claimed.

The Shin Bet has accused Mohammed el-Habibi, the Gaza zonal manager with World Vision, of a sophisticated scam to help the Islamic group build tunnels and purchase arms.

They added that he diverted millions to the group, which rules Gaza, creating fictitious humanitarian projects and doctoring inflated receipts.

El-Halabi, who is in his late 30s and from Jebaliya in the Gaza Strip, was arrested in June as he was crossing from Israel into Gaza.

The Shin Bet said he underwent Hamas military and organisational training in the early 2000s and was 'planted' by the group at World Vision in 2005, where he climbed the ranks to become director of the Gaza branch.

His LinkedIn profile says he previously worked at UNDP, a UN agency.

The Israel Security Agency said in a statement: 'He began to conduct security operations for Hamas' military wing which was essentially exploiting the organization's funds for Hamas' fortification.'

They also claimed that el-Halabi initiated fictitious projects meant to help farmers, the disabled and fishermen and would falsely list Hamas operatives as workers on those projects and write up inflated receipts.

Companies hired to carry out certain projects under fictitious tenders were 'made aware' that 60 per cent of the project's funds were destined for Hamas, the Shin Bet statement said, adding that some of World Vision's budget was used to pay the salaries of Hamas operatives.

The agency also said el-Halabi would transfer to Hamas materials such as steel, digging equipment and pipes that were meant for World Vision agricultural assistance.

Thousands of packages with food and medical aid received monthly would allegedly be diverted to Hamas operatives and their families rather than reach Gazan civilians.

Beyond arms purchases and tunnel digging, the funds also helped build military bases, including one constructed in 2015 built entirely from British aid money, according to the statement.

The security agency said el-Halabi also divulged intelligence about employees working for United Nations agencies and other aid groups who were also assisting Hamas, without elaborating.

World Vision, a US-based aid group that works in nearly 100 countries, said in a statement on its website that it was 'shocked' by the allegations and said it has 'no reason to believe' they are true.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry official said that Kent Hill, a senior official with the organization, was holding meetings in Israel over the accusations. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the meetings were private.

SOURCE




Welfare Is Not Friendly to Family Formation

The last thing couples should face when contemplating tying the knot is a “marriage penalty.” Sadly, thanks to America’s onerous welfare system, that’s something many couples are taking into account. “Does Social-Welfare Policy Affect Family Formation?” That’s the question at the heart of a new study, “Marriage, Penalized,” by researchers W. Bradford Wilcox, Joseph P. Price, and Angela Rachidi. The evidence, while not comprehensive, does appear to draw a link between welfare eligibility and marriage among certain groups.

According to the study, “Today, more than four in ten families in America receive some kind of means-tested government assistance, from Medicaid to food stamps. The expanding reach of the welfare state means that a substantial share of lower-middle-class couples with children receive such aid — and many of these couples receive more generous support if they are unmarried [emphasis added]. That’s especially the case if their total income as a cohabiting couple is not considered in determining their eligibility for assistance, as often appears to be the case.” As the authors go on to deduce, “To use the term of public policy analysts, these couples face a ‘marriage penalty,’ where it makes more financial sense for them to cohabit rather than marry.” For example:

“Our analysis of American couples whose oldest child is two years or younger indicates that 82 percent of those in the second and third quintiles of family income ($24,000 to $79,000) face this kind of marriage penalty when it comes to Medicaid, cash welfare, or food stamps. By contrast, only 66 percent of their counterparts in the bottom quintile (less than $24,000) face such a penalty.”

This translates to a form of marriage disincentive for some couples. “In sum,” the executive summary adds, “our findings suggest that marriage penalties related to means-tested benefits do not discourage marriage among the poorest families in the U.S. But marriage penalties may play a role in discouraging marriage among lower-middle-class families.” The welfare state, though its designers had good intentions, has many problems, one of which the evidence suggests is a detrimental effect on the family — a core feature of a healthy, bedrock society.

SOURCE





Judge Anti-discrimination law by results, not good intentions

Helen Andrews comments from Australia

In the midst of public debate about exemptions to anti-discrimination law and whether they should be expanded or eliminated, we often forget to take a step back and ask the larger questions.

Like "Does anti-discrimination law work?".

Thousands of complaints are filed every year under the various anti-discrimination provisions in Australian law, from the Racial Discrimination Act to the Fair Work Act.

But do these laws ultimately help the groups they are intended to?

Not always. The wage gap between men and women, for example, narrowed dramatically prior to the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act 1983 and plateaued after it. The law ratified larger cultural changes that were already well in motion. It was not itself an engine of change.

Sometimes these laws can even hurt the groups they are supposed to help. Workforce participation among the disabled went down after the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992.

The same thing happened in the United States after the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990 --workforce participation among the disabled went down.

The laws themselves are partly to blame, since they incentivize employers to act defensively.

If there is a risk that hiring an employee who belongs to a protected class will leave an employer vulnerable to a lawsuit (or, in the case of disability, an expensive accommodation claim) sometime in the future, it makes sense for managers to err on the side of caution.

Too often, discussion of anti-discrimination law gets bogged down in culture war battles and ostentatious moralizing, and no one stops to consider these laws in a pragmatic light, on the basis of evidence.

Any future reform or consolidation of anti-discrimination law should begin with weighing the costs and benefits -- especially since it turns out the benefits may be a lot fewer than most people assume.

SOURCE






The Emperor’s New Gender

 You see all kinds of unusual in the city. The other day, I saw something unusual, but increasingly common. I was walking behind two transgender women. Not to be confused with what we knew as transvestites back in the day, who usually identify as gay men and seem to regard the whole thing as a bit of performance art and a lark.

Transvestites wouldn’t have taken themselves so seriously, and wouldn’t have expected everyone else to either. Your garden-variety trannie would have probably laughed in your face if you’d started tiptoeing and fawning over them with Cultural Marxist newspeak like ‘gender fluid’ or ‘gender binary’, or whatever other term replaced some previously-acceptable-but-now-unthinkable term three minutes and thirty-seven seconds ago.

But a funny thing happened. Much like the dot com boom, the similarly intangible sub-victim boom took off like a rocket. People who were previously miserable, insufferable, and in need of micro-management over every aspect of their lives fell over each other in a race to the finish line of perceived persecution.

Instead of seeking help for various mental illnesses and frequent suicidal compulsions like any pro-active person might do, they seemed to embrace misery and conscious self-defeatism as a loud and proud (even with all that shame) lifestyle choice. It was a veritable gold rush of whiny prospectors in search of rich veins of sub-group persecution they could call their own.

Sub-victim mining claims were lodged left right and centre with websites like Salon.com and Slate. Transitional honkies like Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King staked claims on rich deposits of trans-racial gold. Lena Dunham found a rich vein of feminist ore beneath a perceived glass ceiling that inexplicably still allowed her to prosper in a ‘sexist patriarchal’ entertainment industry despite not being particularly charming, not particularly attractive, not particularly talented, and not particularly entertaining. It was a sub-victim gold rush that made a select few excessively wealthy, and made the rest look incredibly foolish, though most of us were too polite to tell them so.

The thing that surprised me most about these two dudes or dudes in transit wasn’t them, but the hard wired reactions of myself and pretty much every other pedestrian regardless of age, gender (bona fide gender that can be confirmed by DNA testing), or race was exactly the same.

I did a double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them. The young African woman coming the other way did a double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them. The elderly Asian man walking with the aid of a cane did a double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them. A young, very hipster-looking guy, who you’d assume wouldn’t be fazed by too many things in life and would appreciate the irony of what he was seeing, did a double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them.

Then I saw a woman with a small child coming the other way. The woman similarly did double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them (I was seeing a trend). As soon as I saw the look of disbelief in the face of the child, the ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ theme started playing in my head.

The child attempted to point, but his embarrassed and very aware of her surrounds mother grabbed his arm mid-raise and hurried past the pair, red-faced with a sheepish embarrassed grin. Honesty from the mouths of babes averted.

I imagine that these two individuals put the stares down to the lecherous leering that attractive women are subjected to every day by sexist males, and the jealous stares of less-attractive and less-stylish women. Never would it have occurred to them in a million years that the trigger for these stares was as simple as seeing the unusual spectacle of a couple of dudes in dresses.

It occurred to me soon afterwards that the reaction of myself, and every other person save the innocently honest child was a good metaphor not only for the transgender agenda, but for standard policy regarding most Cultural Marxist pet causes. It is the art of conspicuously pretending not to notice the bleeding obvious.

For people who were allegedly born as the very ether of womanhood inside, these two honestly weren’t fooling anyone. Only a psychologically confused dude would assume that garish furs, gaudy pearls, way too much makeup, an evening gown, and a pesticide-like dousing of perfume without any feminine subtlety was appropriate for a lunchtime CBD power walk. I’m sure any genuine ladies reading would see such a spectacle as something akin to caricature, and would be confused as to how somebody who truly feels such a strong connection to womanhood inside can produce such a poor approximation of it.

Much like the old fable about the Emperor’s New Clothes, we’re made to feel ashamed about doing a very natural double-take over something that doesn’t appear quite right, then play a disingenuous and harmful game of politeness and enabling of mental illness.

I totally get that there are people who don’t feel they were born into the right body. Who will never feel comfortable in their own skin. Who are mortified every time they look in the mirror and see a person who looks completely alien to them. They’re called anorexics. We try and help them get better through psychiatric help. We don’t help them buy laxatives and discourage them from eating. Nor do we tell them they look fantastic, beautiful, and brave at 38kg.

There is little tangible difference between anorexia and the whole transgender issue. Any family who has been touched with anorexia will plainly recognise the parallels and the madness of enabling transgender people.

Both are mental illnesses with strikingly similar symptoms. Both have an unusually high mortality rate by suicide. Both are very much first world manifestations. A doctor would be medically negligent to feed into the first, yet the transgender issue has become politicised to such an extent that many practitioners are certainly too afraid to explore mental illness as a possible root cause before green-lighting catastrophic body modification.

Another disorder strikingly similar to the transgender phenomenon (and Cultural Marxism in general) is Munchausen Syndrome. Munchausen Syndrome is a psychological disorder that sees the sufferer deliberately keeping him or herself ill to gain sympathy, usually with non-lethal ingestion of poison. It’s a manufactured state of victimhood, surely a medical manifestation of regressive leftism if ever there was one.

Even more disturbing parallels to the transgender debate appear when you look at Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. MSBP occurs when a relative (usually a parent) keeps a child sick with non-lethal doses of poison in order to get attention and sympathy themselves. We now see all of these coincidentally heavily left-leaning parents deciding that their very effeminate son or masculine daughter has been born as the wrong sex and requires gender reassignment immediately and without measured consideration.

The yearning for victim status is so great among these self-loathing types that they will take a child who, in all likelihood, would otherwise mature into a happy and fulfilled gay or lesbian (or, God forbid, heterosexual) and make their life as traumatic and doomed to end in tragedy as humanly possible, just so that they can feel suitably progressive. Throwing family members under the bus to appease regressive left doctrine is a common theme for these types. A decade ago, a gay or lesbian child would have satisfied their cravings for victimhood. But in 2016, a gay man is virtually part of the patriarchy and just won’t cut it. Gender reassignment will, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Anorexia sufferers are 47 times more likely to commit suicide than members of the wider community. Post-operation transgender individuals are 27 times more likely to commit suicide than those in the wider community. A staggeringly disturbing statistic when you consider that only 0.3% of the population identify as transgender, and fewer still are post-op. There are only two conclusions to be drawn from this mortality statistic. The first is that gender reassignment is a horrible mistake in at least a sizeable proportion of cases. The second is that many if not most of these individuals are clearly psychologically disturbed, and even a full attainment of their desired identity won’t bring the peace and stability that so many of us take for granted.

Drugs and medical procedures with clear tendencies toward failure are discontinued or legislated against all the time. An elderly relative of mine with depression was taken off Lithium because some users were experiencing damage to their liver over a prolonged time. The fact that this patient was elderly and enjoyed a higher quality of life on Lithium, and probably wouldn’t live long enough to see any of these negative side effects, were irrelevant to the medical profession. She went through an unstable and unhappy last few years for the sake of a politically correct and politically popular decision.

A few patients with liver issues was enough to dramatically reduce the quality of life that millions enjoyed. Millions who to a man would probably have been willing to take that risk as the benefits outweighed the minor risks. Meanwhile, a procedure that in all likelihood will make a mentally disturbed person 27 times more likely to commit suicide, that will see a rate of post-op regret of 20%, and remains scientifically unproven to improve quality of life in any way, shape, or form not only continues, but is encouraged and promoted as a positive healthy lifestyle choice.

One in six or 16.666% of people with a tattoo regret the decision. Less than the percentage of regret of those who opt for gender reassignment. We’d all be outraged if a parent allowed their child to get a tattoo. Nobody would take issue with our opinion. Yet the regressive left are happy for parents to opt for a life path for their children that has a 20% rate of regret, and makes them 27 times more likely to end their own life. Nobody would tolerate any non-political medical procedure with such spectacular failure rates, but add a pinch of social justice, a clove of regressive leftism, and a half a cup of mental illness, and you have something that is popular conformist opinion in 2016, but will be spoken of in the same hushed infamous tone as thalidomide in decades to come.

Believe me, as someone with a few libertarian leanings, the conclusion I’ve arrived at is a tough one. Sleep with whoever you want to, dress as you like, do what you like as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. Live and let live. But therein lies the problem. We have a duty of care to at least try to protect the clearly mentally imbalanced from themselves. I’m sure none of you would actively encourage someone with severe anorexia by telling them they look great, or encourage someone with severe depression to jump off a bridge because that’s their right. Why then are we so eager to get behind such a self-destructive (both literally and figuratively) medical procedure? Libertarianism has its limits, and we definitely don’t need to be medically enabling somebody’s psychosis.

The regressive left takes a different approach to transgender than they do with other victim sub-groups. Usually the left regards Blacks for example as fragile, completely hopeless, and incapable of self determination without their big government micromanagement to maintain order. On the transgender side of things, they take people that they should be realising have issues with self-determination, and who could do with a little micromanagement (not to mention some medication) to bring some semblance of happiness to their lives, and give them free reign to explore their psychosis.

The Hans Christian Anderson tale ‘The Emperors New Clothes’ was strangely prescient in regard to this whole situation. Nobody actually believes that these men are women, or that these women are men. Nor do they believe that these people are making life decisions of sound mind. They just have to pretend they do out of fear of being ostracised. They dare not say that they don’t see any suit of clothes, and won’t until a child points as the one that I saw attempted to and cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”

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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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Caitlyn Jenner can attest to not being fulfilled by the gender transition operations. He's going back.