Mick Hartley

Killed by a samurai sword

Oh ffs. Woman, 70, in court over husband's death. It's a man:

A woman has appeared in court charged with the murder of her husband, who was found dead at their home in East Sussex.

Emergency services were called to a property in Lavender Street, Brighton, at about 19:30 BST on 27 May.

Joanna Rowland-Stuart, 70, was charged arrested and charged with killing Andrew Rowland-Stuart, also 70, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

Ms Rowland-Stuart appeared before magistrates in Crawley on Friday. She has been remanded in custody ahead of a hearing at Lewes Crown Court on 3 June.

The former transgender rep for the Civil Service's LGBT group Proud, 'Joanna' Rowland-Stuart, who made media appearances discussing violence against LGBT people, has been charged with murder, after his husband was found dead, killed by a samurai swordhttps://t.co/neDou9JUtl

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) May 31, 2024

Like Pavlov’s dogs

Joan Smith at UnHerd:

An intolerant movement has found a new target: literary festivals. Last night, in a development that should worry everyone who values open debate, the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) followed the example of the Hay Festival by suspending links with one of its sponsors, the investment company Baillie Gifford.

Both festivals have been hit by authors withdrawing and fears of disruption, prompted by a little-known group calling themselves “Fossil Free Books”. In recent weeks, they sent an email to writers, calling on them to protest about Hay’s sponsorship deal with Baillie Gifford or withdraw from appearing. The activists accuse the company of investing in the petrochemical industry and criticise its links with companies that operate in Israel.

In reality, Baillie Gifford’s investment in fossil fuels is 2%, well below the industry average, while their involvement in Israel consists of investing in companies such as Amazon and Airbnb, which millions of consumers use without qualm everyday. Predictably, the flight from Hay was led not by authors, but the singer Charlotte Church, the Labour MP Dawn Butler and the Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti. But around 600 authors signed an open letter, leading to events being cancelled and tickets having to be refunded. In Edinburgh, similar pressure was being exerted....

In an over-heated atmosphere, where prominent people live in terror of saying or doing the wrong thing, activists have enormous influence. During the Labour leadership campaign in 2020, a previously unknown organisation calling itself the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights demanded that the candidates sign a series of pledges, including one to expel “transphobic” members of the party. Most did, including Lisa Nandy, Rebecca Long-Bailey and current deputy leader, Angela Rayner.

The speed with which well-known people give in to the demands of self-appointed moral arbiters is astonishing. Some appear to have lost any capacity for critical thinking, responding like Pavlov’s dogs to a series of cues: trans rights, fossil fuels, Israel. Writers, of all people, should know better. This is not moral clarity, but its exact opposite.

But, encouragingly, there has been a backlash:

Dozens of Scotland’s top writers have criticised the ”perverse” and “deeply retrograde” impact of protests over the sponsorship of Edinburgh International Book Festival. Close to 70 celebrated authors, including Val McDermid, Liz Lochead, Jackie Kay, Chris Brookmyre, Andrew O’Hagan and Alexander McCall Smith, have signed an open letter raising concerns about the campaign and the future of the festival.

Writers, that is, who you've heard of, unlike the signatories of that open letter - Michael Rosen plus a load of numpties.

In the open letter, sent exclusively to The Scotsman, the writers said they were “profoundly concerned” about the fate of the UK’s book festivals and other cultural events, and the “likely consequences” of calls for boycotts related to festival sponsorship by Baillie Gifford.

It said: “In particular we are deeply concerned about the future of the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF). As citizens, we are absolutely right to keep up the pressure for fossil fuel divestment. We also call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for the release of hostages.

“However, a strategy of protest which results in EIBF being left without a principal sponsor will jeopardise its future: this would be a Pyrrhic victory, and merely deprive writers and activists of platform and influence.”

A seminal moment in contemporary medicine

An opinion piece in the BMJ from Glasgow GP Margaret McCartney - Medical institutions must treat the Cass review as a significant event and act upon it:

The conclusions of the Cass review should not be surprising to anyone who has watched the promotion of medical interventions as necessary or curative in young people with gender dysphoria. As Cass states, there is a “lack of evidence” on the long term impact of hormonal prescriptions in young people, for example. Work now begins on how to design better, more evidence based, holistic services. The conclusion that services “must operate to the same standards as other services seeing children and young people with complex presentations and/or additional risk factors” is astonishing, in that it needed to be said. We need, says the report “a different approach to healthcare, more closely aligned with usual NHS clinical practice.”2 In other words, this suggests that the approach the NHS has taken with respect to gender dysphoria has been at odds with the usual, evidence based approach taken elsewhere. This should be deeply discomfiting. As the dust settles, and we reflect on the report’s conclusions, we should ask why this has happened.

There are multiple potential explanations. One is alluded to clearly by Cass: “the toxicity of the debate is exceptional,” she writes. Indeed. I know many senior medics who were concerned about the lack of evidence for interventions, but felt their reputation and job would be under threat if they spoke up. Anonymous personal attacks online is one thing; personal abuse from senior medics for raising clinical concerns is quite another. When considered in the context of whistleblowing more broadly, medicine clearly has an ongoing problem.

But when it comes to large, well funded, professional medical organisations, there is even less excuse. The job of medical institutions is in large part to remember the mistakes of history. These organisations should respond with care, consider evidence, uncertainty, and the recurrent tendency of well meaning medicine to do harm with good intentions. Popularity should be resisted over the need for evidence and caution. This requires strong leadership. Shutting down, or trying to shut down debate about serious clinical uncertainties—as has happened—is unacceptable.

This has not been helped by the multiple lobby groups, welcomed by many institutions to influence their policy making in this area. The same rules that we would normally use to guard relationships with any other pressure group—be it promoters of disease “awareness campaigns” or party politicians looking for support—seem to have dissolved against social pressure to achieve a compliance badge on a website.

The other explanation for what has happened that I think pertinent is this. Doctors, quite rightly, have been afraid to make the same mistakes as medicine did when homosexuality was treated as an illness in the 1950s. Then, electric shocks, desensitisation, hormones, and psychotherapy were attempted to be used to “treat” homosexuality—shamefully. What medicine did then was to intervene—ineffectively and harmfully—in something that was not a disease and should not have come under a medical purview. As Cass states, for most young people experiencing gender dysphoria, it is temporary; it is often associated with neurodiversity; it mainly resolves over time, and medical intervention does not benefit the majority. There is a comparison, but it is in favour of medicine backing off from prescriptions and surgery, and understanding why a phenomenon might be happening, why it is being seen in a medical context, and what is the best and least harmful way to respond to such expressed and profound distress.

An interesting comparison. In both cases - homosexuality and gender dysphoria - doctors felt obliged, in line with the social mores of the times, to intervene medically. This was shameful on both occasions. For homosexuality no intervention was required: just a change in the social mores. Gender dysphoria, on the other hand, was an extremely rare complaint until very recently. It's a social contagion, driven by the gender industry. Whatever the answers may be, they shouldn't involve immediate prescription of puberty blockers followed by hormone replacement therapy. At least, thanks to Cass, that much is now clear.

Standing on the right side of history

Dear university students in the United States of America, you are standing on the right side of history.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) May 29, 2024

[And again: "Dear university students in the US, my advice to you is to become familiar with the Quran."]

Further proof, if proof were needed: at the People's Conference for Palestine on May 26 in Detroit (post yesterday): North Korea "has never once recognized the Zionist tumor that goes by the name of Israel." "PFLP founder George Habash received training in Pyongyang".

With Iran and North Korea on your side, all that's needed now is an endorsement from Putin. Case closed.

"Exaggerated or false complaints"

She had it coming.

I bet there are loads of women reading this - a judge sentencing a man to six years for killing his wife - thinking "if my partner ever kills me, that's the story he'd tell people about me" https://t.co/IQC8AuE2Ow pic.twitter.com/PVpB1owgsr

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) May 30, 2024

From Manchester Evening News - Grandad who strangled wife before going to Costa jailed for six years.

Science-denying loons

Darren Johnsom seems to have been one of the rare Green Party members who wasn't deranged - so they threw him out. The party, he believes, has been taken over by trans ideology: their dismissal of the Cass Report was the final straw.

He writes about it in the Telegraph:

In the Scottish Parliament Green MSPs now stand completely isolated on the Cass findings. Their co-leader, Patrick Harvie, was reluctant to even accept the report as a valid scientific document.

In London, Zoë Garbett, the Green mayoral candidate last month (who now sits as a London Assembly Member after her predecessor resigned her seat just days after getting elected) joined Harvie in attempting to undermine the findings. Apparently without even a pause for reflection over the monstrous way vulnerable young people had been let down by the NHS, she put out an upbeat and bouncy but completely nonsensical video dismissing the Cass Review as “really worrying” and saying that while “it’s widely recognised there are problems with trans healthcare, this review does not speak to the heart of those.”

This casual dismissal of such a landmark report was absolutely gut-wrenching for me. I had twice stood as the Green Party’s candidate for mayor of London and spent 16 years representing the Greens as a London assembly member. Throughout that time, children’s health featured high on my list of priorities, whether it was pushing for tough measures on air pollution or fighting for better homes for families living in overcrowded conditions. How dare leading Greens be so dismissive of a well-researched, scientific review tackling a shameful medical scandal.

I reacted with fury. “Vote Green if you want to completely ignore medical evidence and see more children pumped full of harmful drugs.” I wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in response to that awful, glib video from Garbett.

I knew at the time it would put my 37-year membership of the party in jeopardy. Numerous women in the party have already been suspended or expelled but I was not going to sit back and stay silent while leading members of the Green Party went out of their way to rubbish the Cass Review. The Green Party has also accused me, erroneously, of endorsing the Labour candidate in Brighton Pavilion. I have not, although I will admit to calling some of my erstwhile colleagues “science-denying loons”. Well, if the cap fits.

I am beyond despair that the political party I’ve been a member of for decades, that has always said “trust the science” when it comes to climate change or air and river pollution, is apparently putting ideology before science when it comes to pushing untested medical treatments for children.

By suspending me this week, the Green Party perhaps hopes it can bully me into silence in the run-up to the general election. They will not succeed. Whether they decide to lift the “temporary suspension” they have slapped on me or expel me on a more permanent basis, I will not stop speaking out on this grotesque medical scandal that has harmed many vulnerable young people and harmed the credibility of the political movement I’ve spent most of my life fighting for.

The Ben-Gurion Canal revisited

Yet another deranged Green Party candidate. From the JC:

A Green Party parliamentary candidate suggested that the Israeli government may have paid Hamas to commit the October 7 attack so they could build a canal through Gaza....

Joe Belcher, who is standing in the West Midlands seat of Aldridge-Brownhills, questioned on X/Twitter last November why Palestinian terror leaders would have “sold their people down the river” by attacking Israel.

"Why would Hamas commanders order Oct 7 to then have their territory destroyed and their people killed or displaced from Gaza?” he asked.

"For money? If so, who offered them this money? The Israel government?”

Belcher continued: “It's certainly convenient now that Israel can attempt to justify wiping out Palestinians from Gaza and to claim Gaza as Israel.

“Why would they do that? To claim rights over the oil and gas reserves in Gazan waters and to clear the way to create the Ben Gurion Canal through Gaza?”

Ah yes - the Ben Gurion canal. I wrote this in December:

The Ben Gurion Canal was a project conceived in the US in the early 1960s and quickly abandoned, involving the construction of a rival to the Suez Canal, from the Mediterranean at Gaza through to the Gulf of Aqaba at the top of the Red Sea. The level of hare-brained crackpottery involved can be seen from the suggestion that the colossal amount of excavation work required would be facilitated by the use of over 500 nuclear explosions. But - this being Israel, and this being Gaza - the story is loved by conspiracy theorists. The blocking of the Suez Canal in 2021 was seen by some as deliberate, and part of a plot by the West to support this alternative Israeli canal. And now, of course, it's cited as the real reason for Israel's attack on Gaza. Money, hidden Jewish power, shady deals - what more could you want?

Jonas Hessenauer explored this in Fathom, and explained the current popularity of this particular conspiracy theory, in the UK at least:

‘Israel and the United States want the giant amounts of gas in Gaza, and to create a rival to China’s New Silk Road’, said the British-Syrian ‘journalist’ Richard Medhurst in a video that he published on X (formerly known as Twitter) on 27 October, and which has since been viewed over 1.6 million times. In the same clip, he relativises the Holocaust and demonises Israel, when he calls the Gaza Strip a ‘concentration camp run by the Israelis’. Medhurst also claims that the UK, the US, and Israel were responsible for the explosion in the port of Beirut (2020) as well as for blowing up the Nord-Stream-pipelines (2022). He expresses himself openly antisemitic, anti-American, and conspiracist in other videos too.

And a Green Pary candidate lapped it all up. Who would have guessed?

The solidarity between the Korean and the Palestinian people

That would be the North Korean people. Or more exactly the Kim dynasty, that keeps its population in a hell-hole of repression and human rights violations. So yes, not unlike the Palestinians under Hamas...

From MEMRI:

At the closing session of the People's Conference for Palestine on May 26, 2024 in Detroit, Nadya Tannous, the general-coordinator of the Palestinian Youth Movement said: "We will not be distracted by […] a tiny concession – because we want the whole thing. It would be a dishonor for our people to accept anything less than that." The crowd chanted that they will return to Safed, Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, the Galilee, Lod, and Ramle.

Ju-Hyun Park of Nodutol for Korean Community Development said that "the DPRK has never once recognized the Zionist tumor that goes by the name of Israel." Park, who uses the pronoun 'they,' added that PFLP founder George Habash received training in Pyongyang. Mohammed Nabulsi of the Palestinian Youth Movement said: "They tell us they want us to say democracy. We want to save our people. To hell with their democracy!" Manolo De Santos, the founder and executive-director of The People's Forum Participants, which purportedly has financial ties with the Chinese Communist Party, said: "We have to bring down this empire with one million cuts."

The conference was streamed live on BreakThrough News on YouTube. It is worth noting that the keynote speaker at the conference was Sana' Daqqa, widow of terrorist Walid Daqqa, who died from terminal illness while serving out a life sentence in an Israeli jail. Daqqa was part of a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) comprised of Arab Israelis who kidnapped IDF soldier Moshe Tamam and murdered him. Other speakers at the conference were U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib, mayor of Dearborn Abdullah Hamoud, and PFLP member Wisam Rafidee.

Diasporism

Elliott Abrams in Fathom - American Jewish Anti-Zionist Diasporism: A Critique:

In some ways this is an old story. As soon as Zionism was invented, anti-Zionism was invented. It was mostly religious: the view that hastening the return to Zion was substituting human will for God’s, was indeed rebellion against God; God sent the Jews into exile and the messianic age would arrive when He decided. That view was largely destroyed by the Holocaust and the need for a refuge in the Jewish State. It lingers on in the views of the Satmar Hasidim and of Neturei Karta—whose positions on Israel are precisely what one now hears from the far Left. The Satmar Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum said in 2018 that ‘We have no part in Zionism. We have no part in their wars. We have no part in the State of Israel.’

Three weeks after the 7 October massacre, Neturei Karta spokesman Rabbi Yisroel David Weiss said ‘We are crying with the Palestinians.’ He went on: ‘Judaism and Zionism are as different from each other as the earth and the sky; they contradict each other … As devout Jews, we pray to God every day for the swift removal of the Zionist state of Israel, which has caused so much bloodshed among Palestinians and Jews. We pray to God for the speedy liberation of Palestine.’

Twenty years ago, as a White House official I met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in his residence in Amman, Jordan. He took me to his private office for a quiet talk, and that room was decorated with only two photographs. One was of Yasser Arafat. The other showed Abbas receiving an award from the rabbis leading Neturei Karta. Today we hear the same sort of language from the Left. We hear it, of course, in the eliminationist chants on college campuses: ‘From the river to the see, Palestine will be free.’ We hear it from ‘progressives’ like the author Naomi Klein, who is ‘Professor of Climate Justice’ at the University of British Columbia. Klein’s Passover message in the Guardian newspaper was that ‘We need an exodus from Zionism … too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again … that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.’

This is Diasporism—the view that the creation of the State of Israel, and the entire Zionist movement, was a ghastly mistake and that Jewish life is best led in exile. ‘Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here,’ Klein wrote. It’s an important point: her objection is not to one policy or one leader; as she also wrote, ‘it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.’ The only remedy is for Jews to separate from, as the Iranian regime calls it, the ‘Zionist entity.’

More than humanity in general, Jews in particular are born to suffer - so the anti-Zionist argument seems to go - and should function as permanent canaries in the coal mine, exemplifying and reminding the rest of us of the woes of this cruel world. Israel as a successful state just offends the Wandering Jew image.

In the deepest sense, the Leftist anti-Zionists are adopting the view of the Satmar and Neturei Karta: a Jewish State cannot exist until the Messianic Age arrives because the one we have, built by men and women, is not pure enough. As Andre Spokoiny rightly described their view, ‘By virtue of their powerlessness, Jews could become the conscience of the world, the ultimate parameter of the morality of a human society. By sustaining a romance with powerlessness, and an idealisation of the lack of agency that transforms tragedy into virtue, Jewish vulnerability in the Diaspora could be reimagined as the ultimate engine of Jewish moral and intellectual genius….’ The moral blindness inherent in this view is well depicted in this vignette Spokoiny recounted: ‘Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, synthesised better the bargain that Jews needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, ‘How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?’ ‘Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,’ he answered.’

Worth a read.

A flagrant defiance of the state’s anti-epidemic policy

As I noted yesterday, North Korea blamed the South for introducing Covid into the country. The way the whole wretched Covid saga played out was all about reinforcing Kim Jong-un's authority and increasing the North's isolation. The truth, or the people's health, didn't.figure:

In September 2021, a researcher at a bioengineering laboratory under the North Korean State Academy of Sciences in Pyongyang examined samples taken from a Pyongyang resident suspected of having COVID-19. By comparing the samples with information from an international research paper, the researcher discovered scientific grounds to confirm that the patient did indeed have COVID-19.

The researcher immediately reported the findings to his superiors. However, the North Korean authorities, who claimed that the country had not seen a single confirmed case of the infectious disease, believed that the researcher’s work was a flagrant defiance of the state’s anti-epidemic policy.

While the researcher deserved recognition for a research breakthrough, he was instead branded a traitor to the state and secretly executed that December. His family members disappeared without a trace around the same time....

The most important thing for the North Korean regime at the time was to strengthen Kim Jong Un’s political base under the guise of a successful campaign against the disease. That is why North Korea so vigorously claimed that Kim’s brilliant leadership had kept COVID-19 out of the North while the world was ravaged by the disease.

North Korea also instilled the idea that the extreme measures taken to control the disease, including closing the national border and cutting off all contact with the outside world, actually demonstrated the state’s prioritization of individual health and safety amid the global COVID-19 crisis.

North Korean authorities emphasized that citizens faced a fateful choice: they could either endanger their children by crossing the border for materials they could live without, or they could protect their children by enduring some hardship. According to regime propaganda, the only way to maintain North Korea’s status as a “COVID-zero” country was to place complete trust in Kim Jong Un and follow his lead.

The logic of public control in COVID-era North Korea, where the top priority was to highlight Kim’s leadership in the midst of the pandemic, was used to justify the hardships that North Koreans had to endure. Numerous people lost their lives in the process, including, as we have seen, the researcher who discovered the scientific basis for positively identifying a person infected with COVID-19.

One Pyongyang resident recalled the dark days of the pandemic as follows: “When the state claimed there were no cases of COVID-19, infected people couldn’t call their condition COVID-19 and had to suffer in silence. It would have been better to die than to go through this physical, mental and financial ordeal.”

Ironically, North Korea officially admitted that COVID-19 had entered the country in May 2022, just six months after the researcher was executed behind closed doors. Then, in July, North Korea claimed that the first place the cases had appeared was in the village of Ipo, in Mt. Kumgang County, Kangwon Province, on the border with South Korea, and linked the cases to a “strange object,” understood to be a propaganda pamphlet flown across the border by balloon. In effect, the North Korean authorities blamed the COVID-19 outbreak on South Korea and attempted to exploit the disease for their own political purposes.

Ideology trumps science. We've been seeing a lot of that.