Read it.

As Detroit’s call-it-anything-but-bankruptcy budget crisis drags on and the city government is unable to provide the most basic of services, residents have discovered an alternative to lawless anarchy: cooperative anarchy! A number of experiments in spontaneous order are popping up in Motor City, and both the rich and the not-so-rich are pitching in.

You don’t need an expensive and corrupt government bureaucracy to get things done.

Of course, this is all a drop in the bucket for the city’s problems, but even that much self-management and tiny amount of voluntaryism has Katherine McFate of the Center for Effective Government (read their anti-austerity argument here) worried:

“The idea that we are now outfitting first responders through charitable contributions should be very concerning,” she said. “There are certain functions that you want government to perform that should not be at the whim of individuals or charities.”

Clue: All services are provided at the whim of individuals; the question is whether those individuals get a government paycheck.

Well, let’s see what functions the government of Detroit is engaging in that is so much better than the “whims” of individuals and charities, shall we?

Hint: Not even close.

Read it.

Working with a continuous record of Arctic climate reaching back 3.6 million years, researchers have documented a period when the region was significantly warmer and wetter than it is today and when the atmosphere’s inventory of carbon dioxide was comparable to today’s levels.

Read it.

From, say, California or Michigan to, say, Texas.

Moving provides one of the few limits on the megalomania of state bureaucrats.

Arnold Kling reviews an important new book.

Weiner looks at the problem of social order from the perspective of legal history and anthropology. He finds a pattern of order that he calls the rule of the clan, which does not require a strong central state. However, he shows that rule of the clan relies on a set of rules and social norms which are inconsistent with libertarian values of peace, open commerce, and individual autonomy. He argues that the atrophy of the state would lead to an undesirable resurgence of the rule of the clan.

Read it.

Yeah, we can laugh, but modern life has place educrats between a rock and a spiky hard place. If they don’t want to get sued, they can take a chance on exercising ‘discretion’. In order to avoid exercising ‘discretion’, they put in place ‘mandatory’ policies. ‘Hey, it’s not my fault, the policy left me no option. Go complain to that guy over there.’ And mandatory policies, when pursued in a it’s-not-my-fault mode, lead to absurd results. But they’d rather look stupid (or at least dull followers of stupid policies) than be sued. Nobody ever got fired for following policy, no matter how stupid the policy might be, and bureaucrats are all about not getting fired. (If they can teach some kids along the way, that’s gravy, but that’s not what they’re there for.)

It’s just that simple.

Read it.

Feel free to use this information to construct a News Story Bingo card. Modern ‘journalists’ have very little imagination and even less creativity, so they all follow the talking points issued by the White House and the New York Times.

Read it.

As a way to improve the gene pool, I suspect that this scheme can’t be beat. I’ll be happy to chip in.

Read it.

Whiskey Row in the Arizona mountain town of Prescott has seen its share of bar fights, biker gangs and rowdies.

But the bar fights aren’t supposed to involve a biker gang made up of police officers carrying brass knuckles and knives. The fallout from such a brawl in December has led to the retirements of a police chief and two senior sheriff’s officials and recommendations of felony charges against the former chief for his alleged role in trying to cover it up.

Hey, it’s Arizona — what else is there to do? It’s not as if they’re allowed to arrest illegal immigrants, after all.

Read it.

I’ll just bet they do.

Read it.

As the Pixar-centric site Pixartimes.com reports, the studio behind such beloved movies as Toy Story 3 have long made it known that they’re working on a film related to the Latin American holiday Día de Los Muertos—or, Day of the Dead. On May 6, Stitch Kingdom reported that Disney had filed applications to trademark the phrase “Día de Los Muertos,” which some speculated would be movie’s title. The trademark would have covered snacks, audio recordings, jewelry, cosmetics, key chains and lots of other potential merchandise related to the film. It was a move that raised the ire of many who found distasteful the idea of a major media company trying to establish “ownership” of an important cultural event.

John Derbyshire looks at your typical Democrat Congressman.

Rep. Weiner became ex-Rep. Weiner after Tweeting suggestive pictures of himself to female e-acquaintances and then lying about the matter. He resigned his seat, sub-editors at the New York tabloids showered so many puns and double entendres on the city that the Sanitation Department had to clear them from the streets with snow plows, and those of us who’d never seen eye-to-eye with Weiner (sorry, it’s contagious) assumed we had heard the last of him—that his premature withdrawal (sorry, sorry) from public life would be permanent.

…

Given the manner of Weiner’s leaving Congress, he didn’t seem very electable. As the New York Post opined, Weiner’s road to the mayoralty would surely be “long and hard.” Possibly so; but at the end of April Weiner was holding his own (look, you try writing with a straight face about this guy) in the polls.

Read it.

Head Start teachers and administrators told The Daily Caller that their most pressing concern is not budget impacts from sequestration but changes coming from President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

In 2014, the impact of 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act “is probably going to be a 9 percent [cost] increase, and significantly more the next year,” said Nancy Nordyk, director of the Head Start program in southern Oregon.

Rising healthcare costs will likely force Oregon to reduce some Head Start workers’ hours so they’re not eligible for the medical program, said Nordyk, who spoke to TheDC during a national Head Start conference held just outside D.C. in Maryland.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The bottom states are, of course, all Blue states.

Read it.

Which will only encourage them to spend more. As Maggie Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it. And watch the video.

We have the technology.

Two tweets:

Read it.

It is no accident, as we conspiracy theorists say, that campuses that are the steamiest hothouses of “diversity” — often the most elite, selective institutions — frequently experience the most dissatisfaction with their racial “climate.” When race is like a constantly picked scab, the sore never heals.

Read it.

It’s not a secret that replicating what the human brain and senses do naturally still presents a substantial challenge in engineering. New advances in restoring and improving hearing are getting closer to the real thing by going mobile and taking cues from nature.

Read it.

Oh, boy.

Guy Somerset doesn’t believe the same things that everyone else believes.

Every schoolchild is taught that the evil Germans invaded Poland in 1939 because they loved killing people (usually infants). This crippled account of history with hatred as its crutch continues throughout high school and university only to be mended, to the extent it ever is, in graduate school or by self-education. Then the inquisitive mind learns that the war was perhaps not entirely caused by Germans’ insatiable need for babies’ blood.

Lamentably an area known as the Danzig Corridor was to drag Britain and France into a continent-wide conflict that resulted not in the legitimate surrender of a Polish strip of historically German land, but instead the sacrifice of Poland to decades of Soviet tyranny. Some heroic individuals foresaw this and attempted to avert it.

In the end, Britain and France blundered into a charnel house that need never have existed, and it was largely in the service of promises, assurances, and treaties with Warsaw. After all, they reasoned, had not Germany crossed a red line?

Thankfully history never repeats itself and the United States is blithely in the process of threatening the Syrian government over a set of red lines that the US drew.

That’s sarcasm, incidentally.

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard questions. (Well, not so hard, in this case.)

What did Mitt say to provoke Marcotte’s bizarre rant? He simply gave this advice to college seniors: “If you meet someone you love, get married. Have a quiver-full of kids if you can.” But Amanda Marcotte hates babies. She is such a bloodthirsty enthusiast for abortion that one imagines that she would have paid Kermit Gosnell for the opportunity to come to his clinic and help kill babies.

Amanda Marcotte is not “pro-choice.” She is pro-death.

John Hinderaker faces a serious problem.

It is not easy to select the dumbest article to appear in the New York Times in any given week. Even if we exclude columns by Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman on the ground of lifetime achievement, there is plenty of idiocy to choose from. My nominee for this week is this piece by Nancy DiTomaso, titled “How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment.” Ms. DiTomaso, a professor at Rutgers business School, undertakes to explain persistently high unemployment among African-Americans. Some would say the obvious culprit is the anti-growth policies of the Obama administration, but Ms. DiTomaso is not interested in turning over that particular rock. Her starting point is quite different….

Read it.

In March 2013, the writer Harold Rhode at the website of Gatestone Institute commented on a recent Chinese report that tried to explain what holds the Muslim world back compared to other countries and cultures. Some Chinese observers, in behind-the-scenes discussions, kept saying they were perplexed about the Muslim world’s — and particularly the Arab world’s — inability to deal with the challenges of modern society.

The Chinese and the Muslims, they thought, had both suffered humiliation by foreigners over the past two centuries, but their reactions to these experiences are very different. “We also suffered,” the Chinese said, “but now we control our destiny, and are doing everything we can to learn from these foreigners so that we can benefit from the modern world and ensure that we do not suffer this humiliation again. We Chinese ‘look to the future.’”

The Muslims, on the other hand, seem to have a different approach: Instead of looking to the future they “are mired in the past,” more concerned about taking revenge against foreigners who they believe humiliated them long ago than about dealing rationally with contemporary problems to improve their societies and futures.

Read it.

Homeschoolers typically score higher on the ACT than their public school counterparts and have higher grade point averages (GPA) than other students once they are in college. Nevertheless, homeschoolers are schooled by their parents at a cost around $500-$600 per year. In public schools, the cost per student averages $10,000 per year.

Recruiters from colleges are noticing the trend, since the majority of homeschoolers graduate and obtain a four-year bachelor’s degree at a much higher rate than public school and some private school competitors. Colleges such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Duke have begun recruiting homeschooled students.

Another knock on homeschoolers is that they miss the socializing aspect of student life. According to a
National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) survey, homeschoolers have “healthy social, psychological, and emotional development, and success into adulthood.” Homeschoolers typically have core groups of students and do not operate completely alone, contrary to popular perception.

Read it.

 After a sex scandal forced Eliot Spitzer from the governor’s mansion in Albany, he turned up at City College, teaching a course called “Law and Public Policy.” After another sex scandal forced James E. McGreevey from the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, he turned up at Kean University, teaching in the global M.B.A. program.

More recently, Parsons the New School for Design announced that John Galliano, the celebrated clothing designer who lost his job at Christian Dior after unleashing a torrent of anti-Semitic vitriol in a bar, would be leading a four-day workshop and discussion called “Show Me Emotion.”

And David H. Petraeus, the general turned intelligence chief turned ribald punch line, will have not one college paycheck, but two. Last month, the City University of New York said he would be the next visiting professor of public policy at Macaulay Honors College. On Thursday, the University of Southern California announced that Mr. Petraeus would also be teaching there; he will split his time between coasts.

The traditional path to an academic job is long and laborious: the solitude and penury of graduate study, the scramble for one of the few open positions in each field, the blood sport of competitive publishing. But while colleges have always courted accomplished public figures, a leap to the front of the class has now become a natural move for those who have suffered spectacular career flameouts.

The Crust takes care of their own.

Read it.

Tony Bandermann was at work when he got the call. His son, Braden, was on a camping trip sponsored by California’s Garden Gate Elementary School when teachers discovered he had brought a small Swiss Army knife. Officials had suspended the boy for a day, and they wanted Bandermann to drive 100 miles, pick him up and then bring him back when the suspension was over. Bandermann refused, telling them they were overreacting. So teachers made the boy serve the suspension at the camp, isolating him from the other students, making him eat his meals by himself and not allowing him to take part in any activities for one day.

Read it.

The problems lie not with college-educated engineers or graduates with general bachelor’s degrees but in the dearth of skilled machinists, welders, robotics programmers and those who maintain equipment.

Apprenticeships could help reduce youth unemployment, widen opportunities for young people who do not want to sit in class all day and help ensure that the potential resurgence in manufacturing is not thwarted by a mismatch of skills. With effective apprenticeship systems, highly developed economies sustain jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing accounts for 20 percent of jobs in Germany and 16 percent in Switzerland but only 10 percent in the United States.

But nobody in authority cares because these jobs aren’t taken by Scions of the Crust, all of whom have to go to college and take glorified finger-painting degrees until their trust funds come through.

Read it. And watch the video.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen: Which fascist Democrat legislator will be first in line to ban it?

Read it.

And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

We’ve been saying for some time that Obamacare will be a central issue in the 2014 election, and that it offers Republicans the hope, if they nominate solid candidates, of taking control of the Senate. Now, Senate Democrats have figured this out, as well.

It’s not as if they’d be sacrificing anything like a principle, after all.

The young women, that is. Lefty rag Business Insider examines the conjunction of feminism and our litigious society.

In Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, “Lean In“, she suggests that part of the problem facing women in the workplace is reluctance from male executives to mentor younger female employees.

Actually, it’s reluctance to get sued for sexual harassment.

Read it.

INTJ here.

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Many conlanging projects begin with a simple premise that violates the inherited conventions of linguistics in some new way. Aeo uses only vowels. K?len has no verbs. Toki Pona, a language inspired by Taoist ideals, was designed to test how simple a language could be. It has just a hundred and twenty-three words and fourteen basic sound units. Brithenig is an answer to the question of what English might have sounded like as a Romance language, if vulgar Latin had taken root on the British Isles. Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”

Read it.

Answer: Not as long as the eco-nazis freak every time they hear the work ‘nuclear’.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Read it.

A few months ago, when a clip aired revealing that current Arab Spring president of Egypt Morsi had, before he was elected, maintained that the Jewish people are “apes and swine”, it became apparent to any rational observer of the mainstream media that the mainstream media’s knowledge of Islam is an inverse limit approaching zero. Like one of those horrendous calculus strings as things go from bad to worse, the media either didn’t report Morsi’s sentiments because it is salaciously inconvenient, or chose to obfuscate by appeals to western ignorance of the nuances of the region, alleged Israeli atrocities, and its flagship ideology, Islam.

Obfuscation is the latest and only tactic left for the media in all matters concerning Islam and Muslims, a tactic not afforded to any other group. It has hallmarks of an affirmative action mindset, where everything is reduced to grievance and historical justification, and causes are deduced from those grievances.  And in so being, it is highly incoherent. Tangentially, as an easily accessible example, the conclusion that is often nimbly deduced from this mindset is that nationalism is bad because nationalism is the cause of the abuse of which Muslims have been subjected; whether it be the French, the British, Israelis or the Russians, a nation and their xenophobic national pride or colonial avarice is to blame.  But without an idea of a collective nation or culture, what use is the argument of collective grievance? And if it is of no use in regards to the French, but in fact a source of great self-deprecation, why is it used in respect to the Chechens, the Palestinians, or, for that matter, the Tibetans?

Nobody bothers to answer these questions because nobody bothers to ask them. Rather, the western powers are subjected to the idiocy of a one David Sirota when its civilians are killed and maimed.

Read it.

Late last year, within the service world, this change was already occurring – at restaurants, at hotels, and in retail stores, managers were already formulating plans.  In a large sense, by making this prediction, I was betting on the score of a game that had already been played — all we are doing now is waiting for the media to catch up and report the results to the public at large.

And you can thank Obama for putting the final nail in its head. Aren’t you proud?

But one thing has been very clear:  The best way to be “safe” and avoid the costs imposed by the law was to have one’s workers be classified as “part-time”, or for this particular law working less than 30 hours per week.  The other fact that emerged from some IRS rule-making (yes, the IRS is in charge of creating and enforcing many of the rules, and doesn’t that make you feel better) was that whether a worker was to be classified as part-time on January 1, 2014 would be based on his or her work patterns in 2013.   This is why savvy companies, including ours, were planning hard for work force changes last year.  Our goal was to get every worker in the company under 30 hours a week before 2013 even started.

All part of the long-term Democrat program to make every American who isn’t a Scion of the Crust one of the welfare-dependent class.

The service industry generally does not operate 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, so its labor needs do not match traditional full-time shifts.  Those of us who run service companies already have to piece together multiple employees and shifts to cover our operating hours.  In this environment, there is no reason one can’t stitch together employees making 29 hours a week (that don’t have to be given expensive health care policies) nearly as easily as one can stitch together 40 hours a week employees.   In fact, it can be easier — a store that needs to cover 10AM to 9PM can cover with two 5.5 hour a day employees.   If they work 5 days a week, that is 27.5 hours a week, safely part-time.  Three people working such hours with staggered days off can cover the store’s hours for 7 days.

Based on the numbers above, a store might actually prefer to only have sub-30 hour shifts, but may have, until recently, provided full-time 40 hours work because good employees expect it and other employers were offering it.  In other words, they had to offer full-time work because competition in the labor market demanded it.  But if everyone in the service business stops offering full-time work, the competitive pressure to offer anything but part-time jobs will be gone.  The service business may never go back.

How soon before erstwhile fully-employed middle-class people drop below the ‘poverty line’ (which keeps inching upward) and start depending on SNAP and Medicaid to keep body and soul together? We see before us the modern equivalent of the Company Store: The politicians who provide you with food and education and health care are going to demand (and get) your vote,  or else the trough goes empty. Like immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, what used to be the backbone of the country are going to be working two or three jobs just to keep afloat.

The Lion of the Blogosphere deals out some inconvenient truth.

1. Despite the myth in the conservative blogosphere that big business and rich people are Republican, in fact big business and rich people are far more Democratic than conservative-blogosphere types want to believe.

2. They are putting massive support behind more immigration so they can fill up their cubicles with cheap computer programmers from India.

The Republican party hasn’t been the ‘party of the rich’ since FDR. It is, however, the party of the Real Middle Class who run the small businesses of America and who are getting it packed up their pooper by the quasi-fascist alliance of the Crust Corporate and the Crust Political. All this noise about ‘soaking the rich’ is just handwaving to disguise the fact that (a) there aren’t enough rich to pay for all the promises coming out of Washington and (b) ‘the rich’ aren’t scared by tax increases any more than people who live on a hill are scared by flooding.

Read it. And watch the video.

George Will explains it all to you. This is one of the reasons why you want to go to someplace like Yale.

Read it.

Fake meats have been around for years, but a new crop of Bay Area startups backed by tech investors think they can make meat substitutes good enough to compete with the real deal. Beyond Meat — backed by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone via their company Obvious Corp — created an eerily accurate chicken substitute, for example.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Read it.

You know you’re in hipster Brooklyn when someone who looks like a 19th-century farmer tells you that his line of work is “affinity marketing.”

…

So I decided to embed myself among the rooftop gardeners and the sustainability consultants and the chickeneers. I wanted to see what the demographic behind nanobatched chervil and the continually cited show “Girls” could teach me about life and craft cocktails. I wanted to see what sullen 25-year-old men had to tell me beyond “Leave me alone during this awkward period of beard growth.”

Only in New York. (And they laugh at ‘flyover country’….)

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.

A funny thing happened on the way to the long-trumpeted triumph of the city: the suburbs not only survived but have begun to regain their allure as Americans have continued aspiring to single-family homes.

People want their own space, the more the better. That’s why, when people get rich, they buy bigger homes rather than smaller ones. You have to be an intellectual to ignore evidence like that.

Read the actual Brookings report that led to the “Suburbs Lose” headline: it shows that in 91 of America’s 100 biggest metro areas, the share of jobs located within three miles of downtown declined over the 2000s. Only Washington, D.C., saw significant growth.

Your tax dollars at work, that.

Suburbs have never been popular with the chattering classes, whose members tend to cluster in a handful of denser, urban communities—and who tend to assume that place shapes behavior, so that if others are pushed to live in these communities they will also behave in a more enlightened fashion, like the chatterers. This is a fallacy with a long pedigree in planning circles, going back to the housing projects of the 1940s, which were built in no small part on the evidently absurd, and eventually discredited, assumption that if the poor had the same sort of housing stock as the rich, they would behave in the same ways.

The reason we lived close together was because in the Old Days it took time to get information from Point A to Point B, and those who got their information before others tended to have an advantage. Well, information travels a lot more quickly now, as do other things, and so the rationale for living cheek-by-jowl went away — and people responded appropriately.

The new low-cost suburbia, wrote Robert Bruegmann in his compact history of sprawl, “provided the surest way to obtain some of the privacy, mobility and choice that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.”

One of the reasons that the Crust like living in urban cores is that they still have plenty of space because they can afford it, and having plenty of proles around makes the Servant Problem less acute.

Read it.

There are several factors that help define our food preferences, Phillips said, adding that we can change the foods we enjoy if we so choose. It just takes a bit of time and effort.

That’s like saying that we can learn to function in life walking backwards, it just takes a bit of time and effort. My response to that is, why bother? You already have a way of life that works. If it ain’t broke, don’t ‘fix’ it.

Why I hate Mexican food (and other foodstuffs originating in places from which people are eager to escape(I) is quite straightforward — it is the sort of food you eat if you can’t do any better, either financially or intellectually.

I can get better food, so I refuse to eat Third World Shit just because it’s fashionable and some well-meaning but foolish people may have developed a taste for it … just as I refuse to smoke or drink alcohol just because it’s fashionable and some well-meaning but foolish people may have developed a taste for it. (If you have to ‘develop a taste’ for something, that’s Mother Nature telling you that you are a fool to be doing it in the first place. You may think you know better than several thousand years of evolution but I assure you that you do not.)

That goes for Middle Eastern peasant food, Southeast Asian peasant food, Central and South American peasant food, Indian subcontinent peasant food, and food from any place where the number of people moving from there to here exceeds the number of people moving from here to there. (You might ask yourself what they know that you don’t. Typically, it’s how crappy their food is compared to, say, Dead Cow and Spuds.)

“As they say, ‘you are what you eat,'” she says.

So don’t eat shit. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Sadly, life doesn’t come with an instruction manual custom designed for you.

But you can make one.

Freeberg, as usual, has some good stuff to say.

The medication explosion is both a cause and a symptom of the forced female-friendliness. It is a cause because drugging a boy so that he can pay attention to what he’s being told, is a different thing entirely from drugging a boy so that he will engage the problems and make effective decisions. Our drugs yield passive, not active, participation. This difference has deep meaning. I wonder why more people don’t make something of it.

And it’s a symptom because — again, I speak from personal experience — participating in any class structure that is female-friendly, when you’re a boy, is boring as snot. That, too, is another deeply meaningful point that people don’t talk about as much as they should, if they really want to make the situation better, and I’m left wondering why.

It’s difficult for me to use actual English words to describe the utter lack of respect or sympathy I have for people who claim to have difficulty capturing the attention of boys. Oh, I suppose I can relate to it a little bit. The problem comes about when they conclude that it can’t be done, and it’s time for some little blue pills. Have you ever taken a gaggle of zoned-out boy kids outside, and moved the subject matter around to something they want to learn? It’s quite a striking effect. Think of an old metal three-pound coffee can filled with mice, with a blowtorch put under it. It’s like that — but reversed, approach instead of avoidance — lots of writhing and jostling as everyone struggles to get a look. What we should be studying here, is not what drugs force the boys to concentrate on girl-stuff, but what subject matters bring about this writhing and jostling and sudden interest.

Very well said.

We could use the movies as an example. Men who actually enjoy being around their wives will take them to see Titanic, The Notebook, The English Patient, even the latest Barbra Streisand Farewell Tour. But a Twilight movie crosses the line into “I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”

Well, when it works for the movie house, it works for school. If the clock and the window are the most interesting things to watch in the classroom, there’s a problem.

Yup.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

When I did the Backpack Tour of Europe in 1980, I came to the same conclusion as just about all those young aristocrats who did the Grand Tour of Europe in the 18th Century: Italy is the best country to visit as a tourist.

He also quotes some interesting bits from Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times (unfortunately behind a paywall):

     Much commentary about immigration to Europe is written as if no reasonable person could possibly care who, specifically, a country’s residents are and where, specifically, they come from.

…

Another problem is that Italy is the land of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and the Sistine Chapel. It might be possible to convince an American or an Australian to believe (or to say) that a big arrival of migrants will be a cultural “enrichment”. It is a harder case to make in Italy, even in the 21st century. Immigration may enrich Italy in many ways, but is unlikely to do so culturally.

Read it.

Last March, a local administration’s decision to approve for the first time the reciting of the Muslims’ call to prayer from the minaret of the Grand Mosque had strengthened the ties between Muslims and Sweden.

The move had also been hailed by Turkey as Europe Minister Egemen Ba??? had thanked Sweden in an official letter expressing his gratitude for the decision.

Read it.

I suppose that in a Blue State having educators burn books is not that big a deal.

Read it.

So when the owners needed a bartender last year, they sought someone who knew the territory. “Energetic and enthusiastic men and women with an appreciation of craft beer, good food, whisky and real football (a k a soccer),” the Craigslist ad read in part. “Being British definitely works in your favor.”

The résumés trickled in. One applicant, however, was not really looking for a job. She already had one: trolling the classifieds for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Soon, Longbow received a legal notice. The bar, it said, had violated discrimination law “by giving a preference to employment applicants based on their national origin.”

The commission offered to settle the matter for $2,500.

How generous. Nice to know that justice in New York can be bought.

 Justin Brannan, spokesman for the local city councilman, Vincent J. Gentile, had some choice words for the commission’s efforts, including “quintessential ‘letter of the law,’ versus ‘spirit of the law’ ” and “predatory ‘gotcha’ enforcement” that he said belied the city’s pro-small-business cant. “They’re not enforcing these laws to protect the public,” said Mr. Brannan, who is also president of a club, the Bay Ridge Democrats, that has held events at Longbow. “They’re enforcing them to generate revenue.”

Oh, ya think? (And to look good in front of their bosses.)

 On Thursday, Ms. Colbert said, she got a call from a commission official who warned that the fine could rise to $7,500 if she went to trial before an administrative law judge. “He also had the audacity to tell me that according to my requirements, I was not qualified to work in my own pub,” she added.

The official, Ms. Colbert said, urged her to pay the fine before the date of a coming “conciliation meeting.” The meeting is to be scheduled for next month, she said.

In other words, pay us now or pay us more later. Stand up for your rights and common sense, and the price goes up.