Tuesday, April 17, 2018



Dating app for people who went to private school slammed. A NEW app exclusively for people who attended a private school has been slammed as “elitist”, “classist” and “totally ridiculous”

It's anything but ridiculous.  Going to a private school makes you one of Britain's ruling class.  It's a warrant that you have worked hard and had a good education.  If you went to a government school you could be a know-nothing nobody. 

The 7% of the population who went to private schools in Britain basically run everything. They even dominate Britain's Olympic team.  Britain is lucky to have them.  Britain would be a real mess if it were run by the know-nothing, never-stretched graduates of the State schools. 

So you see why the system below touches on a real need for people to meet others with a common background and with common values. Private school graduates are actually different

And to be even more politically incorrect, private school graduates are also an intellectual elite.  So much so that doubts have arisen over whether the later-life success of private school graduates is due to their schooling or their higher IQs. 

There are two prerequisites for getting into a private school.  Your parents have to  be able to afford some pretty steep fees and you have to pass the Common Entrance Examination (CE), which is little more than an IQ test.  And the money requirement is also intellectually selective.  Going back at least as far as Terman & Oden in the 1920s it has been known that high IQ people tend to get rich.  Herrnstein & Murray wrote a well-known book a couple of decades ago which also showed that.

Not all rich people are smart but most are. The dim aristocrat is a well-known figure in British life but they tend to lose their money -- so once again the relationshp between money and IQ is established.

So it is pretty clear that private school kids are intellectually more gifted and we know that IQ is an important factor in assortative mating -- people's general tendency to marry  others with a similar background to themselves.  So the facility described below should be very helpful.  It pre-sorts your partners into a potentially useful category

For the sake of balance, I should add a few qualifying notes to what I have said below.  There are quite a lot of smart working class kids who will do as well as private school kids if they are offered schooling similar to what private schools students get. That happens in Britain's government-funded Grammar schools. And Grammar schools too require the student to pass an admission test -- the 11 plus -- which is also largely an IQ test.  And many Grammar School graduates have gone on to do well both economically and in other ways.

Sadly, however, the British Left are furiously opposed to Grammar Schools so there are not now many of them, thus entrenching  Britain's low social mobility.  What school you went to is overwhelmingly important to life-success in Britain.  And it is the British Left who stand in the way of broadening access to advantageous schools



THE world’s first dating app for the privately-educated has launched — but its founder insists it has nothing to do with snobbery or social division.

The app, Toffee, launched earlier this week and is the brainchild of Londoner Lydia Davis.

It is strictly off-limits to anyone who attended a state school thanks to a “hybrid checking process” that uses “automated social media cross checks” and a “manual screening process” to make sure the great unwashed don’t slip through the cracks.

But despite restricting membership to those from privileged backgrounds only, Ms Davis, 36, told The Mirror it was designed purely to help people find their soulmates.

“Toffee is just about helping people meet and fall in love. It’s not supposed to be snobby or divisive. I just want to help people do their thing,” she said.

“It’s just another niche dating app — there are lots of other dating apps for normal people.

“But there are also apps specifically targeted at smaller groups. There’s one for finding a sugar daddy, one for Jewish daters.”

She told the publication she expected the app to be controversial.  “Navigating the dating scene is really difficult, and it’s proven that people want to meet like-minded people who share the same interests and values,” Ms Davis said.

“I know it might bring about lots of feelings but it’s not meant to offend anyone. “Toffee is just a dating app for a group of people. We’re not trying to be snobby.”

But despite Ms Davis’ assurances, Toffee has been slammed as “elitist”, “classist” and “totally ridiculous” online, with one reviewer even labelling it a “classist hate crime”.

Ms Davis, a professional matchmaker, is now in a relationship with an unnamed man from a “similar background” who was also privately educated — but she insisted she would have been open to dating someone from any background.

She also told The Mirror she would be happy if her potential future children married a commoner. “I’m a total romantic and finding someone to fall in love with is so special. Everyone’s preferences are different and that’s what makes it exciting,” Ms Davis said.

Toffee has an Instagram account and a Facebook page, and its bio states: “Toffee is the world’s first dating app for people who were privately educated. We set it up because we know people from similar backgrounds are more likely to stick together.”

SOURCE






Planned Parenthood Tells HIV-Infected Kids They Don't Have to Disclose Status to Partners

What kind of sex educators would tell kids with AIDS they don't have to disclose their health status to a sexual partner? Planned Parenthood, that's who! International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has an information campaign they've put out for kids with HIV called "Healthy, Happy and Hot" that begins:

Young people living with HIV may feel that sex is just not an option, but don’t worry — many young people living with HIV live healthy, fun, happy and sexually fulfilling lives. You can too, if you want to! Things get easier (and sex can get even better) as you become more comfortable with your status.
A few pages later they drop the deadly and stupid claim that HIV-positive people have the right to NOT disclose their HIV status to their sexual partners.

"Young people living with HIV have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose their HIV status," the booklet states. "Some countries have laws that say people living with HIV must tell their sexual partner(s) about their status before having sex, even if they use condoms or only engage in sexual activity with a low risk of giving HIV to someone else. These laws violate the rights of people living with HIV by forcing them to disclose or face the possibility of criminal charges."

This terrible advice flies in the face of facts revealing that HIV is killing African teens at alarming rates. UNICEF at a press conference in S. Africa noted, "Despite gains made among adults and babies with HIV, the number of 10-to-19-year-olds dying from AIDS-related diseases has tripled since 2000," reported Fox News. 

How does the IPPF justify telling HIV-positive kids it's okay not to tell your partner you have a deadly communicable disease? Rights of course. The left has an uncanny way of discovering rights most of us can't even imagine. In this case, they've decided that an orgasm is more of a right than knowing your girlfriend has a virus that will kill you. Planned Parenthood has chosen to value the sexual satisfaction of HIV-positive teens over the lives of their sexual conquests. Sex is more important than death—and it is morally acceptable to kill for it, because after all, "young people living with HIV have a right to sexual pleasure," says IPPF, elevating sex over the human right to life. This is no surprise, considering their main mode of doing business consists of dismembering human babies in the womb via abortions. They have now expanded their philosophy that some lives matter more than others to teenagers.

This is unconscionable.

Is nothing more important to the left than kids having sex with each other? Advising teens they do not have to disclose their HIV status to sexual partners is part of the Planned Parenthood-led "comprehensive sex education" program that is being implemented in American public schools and across the world through IPPF and other organizations partnered with them.

The message being sent to young people with HIV is that their sexual rights are more important than the rights of others not to die. They go so far as to encourage them to lobby their governments to decriminalize not disclosing HIV status. Gee, where did I hear about that happening again? Our very own land of fruits and nuts, California. The purposeful spreading of HIV is no longer a felony in California. Who do you think was behind pushing the bill SB 239, which allows people to spread a deadly disease with no consequence? (Three guesses.)

But one thing California can do immediately is remove the discrimination in the law against people with HIV.
That is what SB 239 is designed to do and that’s why over 100 organizations support the bill, including APLA Health, the Black AIDS Institute, Equality California, Positive Women’s Network-USA, ACLU of California, National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD), HIV Medicine Association, SF AIDS Foundation, Bienestar, Planned Parenthood of California, Transgender Law Center and Human Rights Watch.

Why is this rogue organization, responsible for the deaths of millions of human babies, allowed to spread the damaging and misleading propaganda around the world that all sex all the time is good no matter who dies? Join the parent-led SexEdSitOut on April 23 to tell educators and our representatives that we will not accept or pay for this blatant political indoctrination that will harm children by getting them pregnant or infecting them with an incurable disease. They're our kids and we have the right to teach them our morals and not subject them to the depraved psychosis of the left masquerading as "education."

SOURCE






Ted Cruz Highlights Mark Zuckerberg's Liberal Bias

In yesterday’s joint session of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees the star of the show wasn’t Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was conservative Texas Senator Ted Cruz who drilled down on Facebook’s liberal bias.

The exchange stood out, noted NBC News, in large part because many of the other senators seemed reluctant  Ted Cruz Mark Zuckerbergto go after the Facebook founder.

Cruz said many Americans are “deeply concerned” that Facebook engaged in a “pattern of bias and political censorship” in recent years, Cruz said. He listed the Conservative Political Action Conference, a House Republican investigation into the IRS and Glenn Beck, a conservative media personality who was among Cruz’s most high-profile supporters, as victims of potential bias at Facebook.

Cruz, who has been known since his Princeton debate team days as a gleefully caustic interlocutor, clearly arrived in the meeting chamber in the Hart Senate Office Building with a plan of attack observed Time magazine’s Nash Jenkins.

Only before the first five-minute bathroom break of Zuckerberg’s lengthy hearing did he choose to execute it. And when he did, for a few moments, Zuckerberg appeared on edge.

“Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?” Cruz asked Zuckerberg innocently.

“Senator, we consider ourselves to be a platform for ideas,” Zuckerberg replied.

It was a canned marketing point, and Cruz — with an air that suggested he knew Zuckerberg had walked into his trap — retorted with a more pointed query. “Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing your views or are you a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak?” Cruz demanded according to Jenkin’s report.

It’s a worthwhile question in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as the internet continues to grow from a mere communications system to a plane on which we conduct our everyday lives, demanding new considerations of speech rights and the privatization of public space observed Jenkins.

Zuckerberg said there was no such effort to harm conservatives and also rebuffed Cruz’s suggestion that a Facebook employee might have been fired over political differences with the company’s leadership.

But Cruz was having none of it.

As Nash Jenkins reported, the Texas Senator proceeded to rattle off a laundry list of examples: A “Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day” page that was banned in 2012, around the time that homosexuals were organizing a boycott of the fast-food chain after its chief operating officer spoke in favor of traditional marriage. Diamond and Silk, the outspoken Trump fangirls who were reportedly told by Facebook this month that their “content and brand” were “unsafe to the community.” Palmer Luckey, the virtual reality prodigy who parted ways with Facebooks after it was reported that he backed a pro-Trump conservative group that trafficked in anti-Hillary Clinton content.

Senator Cruz’s question was related to what The Vege’s Adi Robertson called “a thorny political mini-scandal from 2016,” when The Daily Beast reported that Palmer Luckey was secretly funding a pro-Trump political activism group called Nimble America, which was dedicated to the idea that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real.”

Luckey withdrew from the public eye after the details came out, but it’s never been clear whether he was fired or left voluntarily. He was at Oculus for several months afterward, and “still working in an active capacity” during that time, according to Adi Robertson’s reporting of comments by CEO Brendan Iribe.

Zuckerberg tried to assure lawmakers that he didn’t fire Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey for his political views.

Senator Cruz also asked Zuckerberg about 2016 reports that the company had removed conservative political news from its trending stories box and followed up with questions about its moderators’ political views.

When Zuckerberg said he didn’t ask employees for their political views, Cruz nailed him with the question “Why was Palmer Luckey fired?”

“That is a specific personnel matter that seems like it would be inappropriate to speak to here,” Zuckerberg told Cruz in response to his question. Cruz fired back, asking if it was accurate that Facebook “didn’t make decisions based on political views,” as Zuckerberg had said. “I can commit that it was not because of a political view,” said Zuckerberg.

This exchange seems to imply that Luckey was fired, but for reasons that weren’t political noted The Verge’s Robertson. This could still cover a pretty broad range of motivations, and Zuckerberg didn’t offer any details.

Adi Robertson says The Daily Beast described Luckey as “funding Trump’s meme machine” in 2016, which is an apparent overstatement since the donation was supposedly a fairly small $10,000, and Nimble America’s only clear action was putting up a “Too Big To Jail” billboard.

The group’s stated goal was to “get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not.” (Luckey later reportedly donated $100,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund through shell companies named after Chrono Trigger references.) However, Nimble America’s real offense was being associated with former Breitbart Digital Editor and online provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

Why Facebook and confirmed leftwinger Zuckerberg parted ways with Palmer Luckey, if it wasn’t about politics, remains one of Silicon Valley’s more interesting mysteries.

Luckey is the charismatic entrepreneur who once graced the cover of Time Magazine — the poster boy for the future of virtual reality, made real by his invention: The "Oculus Rift." Facebook liked the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset so much that it bought the company that Luckey co-founded, Oculus VR, in 2014 for $2 billion.

Luckey was in his early-20s at the time.

What’s more, Senator Cruz must know Palmer Luckey well enough to have some insight into what happened because Luckey hosted a fundraiser for Senator Cruz last April, and Cruz seemingly believes that Luckey's firing was politically motivated reports the Business Insider’s Ben Gilbert.

Zuckerberg conceded that Silicon Valley is “an extremely left-leaning place,” but denied Cruz’s underlying question that the bias had infiltrated the machinations of Facebook. When Cruz asked Zuckerberg if any members of the Facebook team tasked with monitoring users’ content had ever supported Republican political candidates, Zuckerberg said that he did not know.

Senator Cruz did a great job of squeezing some interesting admissions out of Zuckerberg, but perhaps a better, more revealing question would have been to ask Zuckerberg if any of the team monitoring users’ content even knows what conservatives think about issues such as same-sex “marriage,” open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens, and does opposing such liberal shibboleths constitute “hate speech” or the free expression of mainstream American opinion on such matters?

SOURCE





Boris is not the only Russia baiter

Too many today think Russia is to blame for everything.

The latest bout of Boris Johnson bashing, following the British foreign secretary’s overconfident assertion that Russia was to blame for the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, makes for a perplexing spectacle.

Yes, Johnson overstated the case when he claimed on German TV that ‘the guy’ at Porton Down, the UK weapons lab, had ‘no doubt’ that the Russian state was responsible for the nerve agent that left the Skripals in hospital. And, yes, as one of his eager critics managed to say, amid her prattle about the ‘teflon-like qualities’ of privileged ‘rich white men’, Johnson has, on the basis of an untruth, effectively been stoking conflict with ‘a heavily armed superpower’.

But what sticks in the craw about the all-too-easy berating of Boris is that what he has done is little different to what so many in Western political and media circles have been doing for the best part of a decade (especially since the West-backed ‘revolution’ in Ukraine in 2013 prompted Russia to secure its borders through the annexation of Crimea). That is, like Boris, they have been seeing Russia’s hand in every world happening, blaming Vladimir Putin for what they perceive as the dark turn of world events, and conjuring up modern-day Russia as a sinister iteration of its imperial or Soviet past.

So, while many on the liberal left were gorging on Boris’s latest gaffe, the US was busy announcing new sanctions against Putin’s inner circle, including seven Russian oligarchs and 17 top government officials. Trump’s administration was not doing so on the basis of a misheard conversation with a weapons lab official, but in response to what treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin described rather vaguely as ‘malign activity’. ‘The Russian government operates for the disproportionate benefit of oligarchs and government elites’, said Mnuchin. ‘Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilising activities.’

This move against Russia is longstanding. It derives its legitimacy less from hard evidence of Russian social-media trolling than the conviction that the Russian state is behind the struggles of the West’s political class. These struggles are of course nothing to do with stagnant economies, visionless, futureless technocracies, and the elites’ often open disdain for the plebs, be they the basket of deplorables, clinging to their guns and religion, or the low-information, migrant-bashing working classes of the UK. No, sirree: it is actually Russia that is to blame. It has been ‘meddling’ in Western democracies, as The Economist had it recently. It has discredited and disrupted the smooth working of Western democracy, backing Trump in the US, funnelling cash to Front National in France, and gifting ‘dark money’, as Labour’s Ben Bradshaw asserted, to the Leave campaign and UKIP backer Aaron Banks. And some think Johnson went over the top when blaming Russia for the botched murder of a Russian traitor.

Yet where are the voices calling for caution when the flagrantly absurd claim that Russia is responsible for the state of Western politics is given yet another airing? Where are those invoking the spectre of dodgy dossiers, still-to-be-found WMDs and the Iraq War when yet another claim of Russian involvement in Brexit is made? Where are those urging a period of self-reflection for the pundits and politicos who think nothing of blaming Putin for Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity, or likening Russia’s intervention in Syria to the Nazi bombing of Guernica?

They are nowhere to be seen, of course. Which is hardly a surprise, because while they enjoy Boris Johnson’s latest diplomatic calamity as proof of the Tories’ weakness, and, more to the point, of the buffoonery of leading Brexiteers, they have no real interest in a sober evaluation of Russia’s global role and intentions. Rather, they are as monomaniacally anti-Russian as Johnson and the Tories often seem to be, blaming Putin and his McMafia of oligarchs for everything that appears to them as wrong in the world, from the rise of Donald Trump to the British people’s decision to leave the EU.

Here is a prominent Observer columnist going far beyond Johnson in proofless conspiracy mongering, and deep into the world of dark powers behind thrones: ‘Liberals and socialists in the 19th century feared Russia as the world’s greatest reactionary power. So Putin wants it to be again. He is uniting the anti-immigrant, illiberal and, as often as not, misogynist and homophobic forces in Europe and the US into a far-right version of the old Soviet Comintern.’ Here is one-time presidential candidate Mitt Romney calling Russia America’s greatest geopolitical foe. And here is Jeremy Corbyn’s some-time cheerleader at the Guardian, going on a Russian dirty-money tour of London, to expose Russia’s sinister presence in our midst.

None of this is to excuse the authoritarian reality of Russia today. Nor is it to excuse Johnson and indeed the British state’s response to the Skripal poisoning. Too many have indeed eagerly used it as an opportunity to have another go at Russia, to puff themselves up as paragons of virtue beside the callous, murdering beasts of the East. It has been a rush not so much to judgement, as to posture, a willingness to play on fears of chemical weapons and the rogue Russian state, as a means to bolster the long flagging authority of Western elites. The Foreign Office may cite the expulsion of Russian diplomats by the UK’s allies as proof that others, and not just Johnson, believe all the evidence in the Skripal case points to Russia. Yet what that really shows is other Western political classes are as just as dependent on half-baked ideas of Russia’s nefarious intent for their authority as Johnson and his pals are.

But as overstated and unjustified as the response to the Skripals’ failed assassination is, it is not an aberration. It is a product of a deep-seated animus towards Russia that has been gaining traction for at least a decade. It seems that today it is simply too easy to blame Russia for everything, with few ever, if at all, batting an eyelid. And with Nato and the EU continuing to perform their respective military and political manoeuvres on Russia’s borders, BoJo’s latest cock-up is the least of our worries. Johnson may have added to the Cold War-mongering in the West, but he is certainly not its prime mover.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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