Read it.

Tim Cook, Steve Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple, authored an op-ed in the Washington Post condemning laws that protect religious freedom. Cook, who is himself gay, concluded with these words:

Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.

We agree with that, and we would like to see Apple show some courage. Not by writing op-eds that will be hailed by Cook’s progressive friends and will cost Apple nothing, but by facing up to the fact that around the world, homosexuals face a lot worse problems than buying cakes for their weddings.

Millions for Indiana, but not one cent for Mecca. Cook and his Aeron-chair commandos are a good example of the Folk-Song Army:

“One type of song that has come into increasing prominence in recent months is the folk-song of protest. You have to admire people who sing these songs. It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.” — Tom Lerer

Read it.

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

Read it.

Hassan Munshi and next-door neighbour Talha Asmal, both 17, are understood to have flown to Dalaman in Turkey on a Thomas Cook flight from Manchester Airport hours after vanishing from their homes on March 31.

Police believe the friends have already crossed into Syria. The boys lived with their families in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, a mile from the former home of 7/7 bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan.

Read it.

A fine fisking of the notorious Timothy Egan, who writes about the world as viewed from the Upper West Side for the New York Times.

Read it.

That sort of sums up the whole of the last six years.

Read it.

The following incident from Quebec is as bad as any “hate speech” case in Britain. The father who objected to Islamic instruction in school for his 8-year-old son was threatened with prosecution by the school board for an “Islamophobic” Facebook post — which he made as a private citizen, not as a public employee, or even a private-sector employee. Just an ordinary dad, exercising what he thought was his right to free speech.

To make his persecution even more ironic, the issue was an assignment in which his son was required to draw Mohammed.

Where’s the fatwa? Why wasn’t the school firebombed? Why didn’t the teacher have to change her name and go into hiding?

Read it.

Among business-owners’ responses to a mandated higher minimum wage are greater efforts to economize on the use of low-skilled labor.  (HT Jan Jorgensen)  A slice:

[Seattle restauranteur Quynh-Vy] Pham says they are considering scaling down employment, possibly ending sit-down service and transitioning to a “fast-casual” concept to cut down on labor costs.

This report also features the fatuous comments of Seattle’s mayor Ed Murray – comments that are quite annoying to read.  While actual, experienced, skin-in-the-game business owners deal with the very real cost consequences of a mandated artificial hike in wage rates – and while many actual, skin-in-the-game employees who are willing to work at wages below the mandated minimum are denied by ‘their’ government the right to so work and, thus, will find themselves unemployed – prancing and preaching politicians make economically ignorant and irrelevant pronouncements as their cruel handiwork causes hardship to innocent victims.

Read it.

So some folks who have signaled their anger online that places like Memories Pizza have declared a right to discriminate are also angry that these businesses are now getting rewarded for it. That’s what happens with a culture war, folks. You send up your signals and they send up theirs, and on and on and on. People did not want Memories Pizza or Arlene’s Flowers to be punished for the principles they hold, and so they were willing to use their financial backing to counteract the actions of those who do want to punish them. Ignore this signal at your peril. Regardless of whether people want to see pizza parlors or bakeries or florists turning away gay couples getting married, there are enough of them offended by the idea of driving them out of business to counteract these shaming and boycotting efforts. And it goes both ways. How many gay or gay-friendly folks have made sure to do businesses with companies who supported them and had been targeted by the religious right back in the 1990s or so?

In other words, don’t start a pissing contest unless you’ve got the bigger dick.

Read it.

‘Bioethicist’ sounds prtty cool, doesn’t it? Sounds as if it ought to be a science-based field, in which one can earn a degree, do research, get published, and be subject to the discipline such a thing implies.

Well, actually no. ‘Bioethecist’ is just the same old Leftist ‘you must listen to us because we know better than you what you ought to be doing’ cant, just more narrowly focused. Its political agenda is plain to see — next time you read some outgassing from a ‘bioethicist’, ask yourself if it’s something you can see a Peter Pan Party functionary pushing. If it is, that tells you all you need to know.

Read it.

And why ought they? They were just doing their jobs — pushing the Narrative regardless of facts or truth.

Read it.

Hey, he’s more Hispanic than Elizabeth Warren is skraeling — at least he can speak the language.

Read it.

Tina Magaard knows Islam to the core, both personally and academically. She believes that the Danish experts on Islam have failed to disclose what is really written in Islam’s holy scriptures, and to what degree extremists draw their ammunition from them.

 

John Hinderaker asks the as-yet-unanswered questions.

The Columbia report takes us behind the scenes at Rolling Stone and adds new details about how the false story made its way into print. But it says little about why the scandal, one of the worst instances of journalistic malpractice on record, happened.

…

Of course: Sabrina Erdely and her editor, Sean Woods, believed “Jackie,” even though there were obvious indications of unreliability, because she was telling them what they wanted to hear, something that was consistent with a “larger pattern.” One might think that the nightmare the principals at Rolling Stone have lived through might generate some self-knowledge. But no. Their biases are intact.

…

I don’t know whether sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses or not. FBI statistics indicate not women aged 18-22 who are not college students are significantly more likely to be raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted, than those who are college students, as one would expect. It occurs to me that if you are a rapist, women aged 18 to 22 are probably a prime target group. But it is an article of faith within the establishment, of which Rolling Stone is emphatically a part, that campus rape is an epidemic. That’s why they wanted to publish the article, and that’s why they weren’t too particular about whether it was true.

Anything that happens is an opportunity to push The Narrative, whether true or not, whether relevant or not.

Heather MacDougal is the designated hitter expounding the Crustian party line.

Easter is a pagan festival. If Easter isn’t really about Jesus, then what is it about?

That’s the ‘progressive’ mind at work — ‘X ix Y, so why are you so wrong?’

However much ‘Easter’ may have at one time been a ‘pagan festival’, it is now a thoroughly Christian festival; it’s only called ‘Easter’ by the inheritors of a smallish section of the Latin Western tradition, and of course all the Crust knows is the modern West.

It really is about Jesus, Heather, and a little effort spent on research, although it will take you away from your day job of parroting cliches for the Left, it would really help you out. You might want to start here.

Read it.

Steve Hayward at Powerline pulls back the curtain.

Forget the scientific argument over climate change for the moment, or for that matter, assume that climate catastrophe is a certainty for purposes of discussion.  From the beginning the climatistas and their media cheerleaders have confined all policy discussion to one single track: suppress fossil fuels, even though no affordable, scalable substitutes for hydrocarbon energy is in sight.

The practical ideas for the suppression of hydrocarbon energy have taken two forms: the favorite is emissions trading (“cap and trade”), which failed in Congress when Democrats still enjoyed large majorities in both houses, chiefly because the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill was so chock full of special interest deals and cross subsidies that it became apparent even to honest environmentalists (yes—they meet in a phone booth at DuPont Circle) that the bill was a mockery of serious climate legislation.

Read it.

Amen to that.

Freeberg turns over a rock.

The workforce of Walmart is much more diverse than Apple’s. Walmart hires twice as many women and more than twice as many blacks as a share of its workforce than does Apple. As Steve Bartin points out on his blog, “We hear with enormous conviction by progressives that it’s important that a workforce looks like America.” Well, the data clearly show that Walmart is doing a much better job than Apple of hiring a workforce that “looks like America.”

…

Culture takes precedence, because the progressive agenda is first-and-foremost a cultural one, not an economic one. Over and over again we see these examples of certain selected well-heeled individuals and organizations escaping the proggie wrath that is all-but-expected to rain down, like fire from the heavens, upon anybody who makes too much, keeps too much, doesn’t manage to embrace, patronize, contract, employ the correct mix of pigments or sexual preferences. Certain names and certain brands get a pass.

Read it.

Someone attacked Harry Reid on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day; that much seems clear from photographs and from the nature of his injuries. So far, to my knowledge, no one has investigated to try to find out what really happened. My “investigation” consisted of answering my telephone. Perhaps those reporters who were so eager to dig through Sarah Palin’s dumpster and track down Mitt Romney’s high school classmates will now swing into action, carry out an actual investigation, and either confirm or refute the events described by Mr. Elliott.

Fridge Squircle.

Wide Path Camper. Perfect for SCA events.

Jevo Jello Shot Maker. There are people who need one of these, and you know who you are.

Grappling Hook. Hey, one of these babies can save your life.

Read it.

Getting a college degree is valuable, according to calculations by a group of economists including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. If more people went to college, they’d be much better off. It’s just hard to imagine how helping more high school graduates to earn college degrees could substantially undo the massive increase in inequality of the past several decades, which is largely a result of skyrocketing earnings among the very rich. Indeed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now claim nearly as large a share of national income as they did on the eve of the Great Depression.

“I am all for improving education,” Summers told Wonkblog earlier this month. “But to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion.”

Summers and his collaborators, the Upjohn Institute’s Brad Hershbein and Melissa S. Kearney of the University of Maryland, calculated what would happen if they could wave their magic wands and give a college education to about 6.8 million American men who don’t already have one. Relatively speaking, that’s an enormous increase — about the same proportion as the increase in the overall share of the population with a college degree since 1979.

Steven Hayward at Powerline thinks like a lawyer.

• If a member of the Westboro Baptist Church asks for a bakery to create a cake with their motto “God hates fags,” will the baker be charged with discrimination if she refuses?

• If a baker agrees to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but as matter of practice includes the slogan “God hates fags” in, say, Aramaic script on the side of the cake, wouldn’t this be protected speech and/or “expression” under the First Amendment?

• Just curious: why hasn’t anyone been to a Muslim bakery to press this newfound frontier of anti-discrimination?  Ah—Steven Crowder has.  Will the Human Rights Campaign Fund descend upon Dearborn, Michigan, tomorrow about this outrageous injustice?  I’m not holding my breath.  Video is about 5 minutes long:

Read it.

A North Carolina State University administrator is encouraging student leaders to censor speech they don’t like in a tunnel dedicated to free speech on campus.

In an email sent to all student group leaders Friday evening that was obtained by Campus Reform, Eileen M. Coombes, Director of Student Involvement, encouraged students to be creative while fighting against “social injustices and other forms of hate.”

“One way to do so is through the new ‘State not Hate’ stencils now available in Student Involvement,” Coombes said in her email. “If you see hate speech or offensive language in the Free Expression Tunnel, cover that speech with the stencil, indicating that you, as a member of this community of scholars, will not stand for any form of hate at NC State.”

Those who hate truth see truth as hate.

The Other McCain muses.

An astonishing phenomenon of the 21st century is the perversely ironic way in which the Information Age has actually increased ignorance. With all the knowledge in the world just a quick Google search away, many people have somehow managed to seal themselves off inside cocoons of confirmation bias, where they only encounter narratives that fit their preconceived personal prejudices. It is not simply a matter of people avoiding opposing opinions, but of filtering out facts in such a way that their worldview becomes wholly unrealistic. Paranoid hostility flourishes inside these online bubbles where kooks cluster, affirming their shared delusions and piling up “evidence” to “prove” their false beliefs to each other.

…

This raises the question of whether “Islamophobia” actually exists. The term “phobia” denotes an irrational fear, yet the history of recent decades offers enough rational basis for concern to make the word “Islamophobia” inherently problematic. One may perhaps distinguish between two phenomena — a vigilant concern about dangerous radicalism, on the one hand, and a simple-minded bigotry on the other — but making that distinction does nothing more than to say, “Ignorant people are ignorant.” To say that fair-minded and educated people should condemn ignorant prejudice isn’t controversial. What is controversial is to assert that “Islamophobia” is a more important problem than the actual dangers posed by radical Islam.

The flat statement that “Islamophobia has criminalized the brown body” is a falsehood, and to then throw in “the suffering of countless victims of . . . baseless hatred” as the emotional freight of an argument requires us to ask, “Are the ‘victims’ truly ‘countless’? Where is the evidence of this ‘suffering’?” In order to sustain such claims, it will not do to cite a list of incidents or anecdotes. No one disputes the fact that ignorant hateful people do ignorant hateful things.

What is in dispute is whether “Islamophobia” — specifically, the concern about Islamic terrorism — has generated such a spree of anti-Muslim violence and harassment as to produce “countless victims.”

To the extent that there are any Muslim victims, they are typically the victims of other Muslims.

Read it.

It was over a decade ago that purchasers representing a sometimes controversial segment of American society discovered that Home Depot had no interest in their business—in fact, it had a formal corporate policy against selling to them.

…

As it turned out, the move had little to to with a principled anti-war stance and everything to do with a principled anti-red tape stance. The federal government is a pain in the ass to deal with. With regard to a memo to store managers reiterating policy, Frank Fernandez, executive vice president and general counsel noted, “Since we have never been a federally approved contractor, our intent was to re-state our existing policy for our stores and associates and remind them of their responsibilities in complying with related rules.”

A Washington Post piece on the growing kerfuffle noted, “a firm that does $50,000 worth of business in a year with the federal government automatically becomes a federal contractor and must file reams of paperwork.”

Scott Johnson of Powerline fills you in.

The facts alleged in the indictment may to a great extent make out what former Wall Street Journal reporter Brooks Jackson denominated “honest graft.” Much of the indictment is devoted to a recitation of activities that must be business as usual in Washington, or close to it.

The activities itemized in the indictment go back as far as 2006. It is certainly fair to wonder why the indictment has been handed up now and to doubt that Senator Menendez’s leading role criticizing the foreign policy of the Obama administration is merely a big coincidence.

No doubt.

Read it.

A law raising the minimum wage to $12.25 an hour from $9 an hour recently went into effect in Oakland, California. And it’s leading daycare providers to raise prices and cut services and making some of the working poor fear they may not be able to find someone to care for their children while they work, not at rates they can afford.

Hey, Undercrust! Be careful what you vote for, you just might get it.

Steve Sailer reports on a trend.

“This is a really important point that, you know, CEOs have a lot of power and control on investment in states and we want to invest in states where there is equality,” Benioff said.

“One thing that you’re seeing is that there is a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs,” he said.

One that toes the Peter Pan Party line is not a ‘third political party’ but rather an wholly owned (or is it wholly-owning?) subsidiary of the Peter Pan Party.

I’ve always hated SalesForce and now I know why.

Read it.

As in recent years, thousands will flock from the Allied countries and elsewhere to Gallipoli for the Turkish-led April 24-25 commemorations. Numerous world dignitaries, including Australia’s and New Zealand’s prime ministers and Prince Charles, will also attend.

In April, the UK, Australia, and NZ hold Gallipoli remembrances on their own soil and elsewhere. And throughout the year, their citizens visit Gallipoli to pay tribute to the UK’s 21 thousand, Australia and NZ’s 11 thousand, and France’s 10 thousand dead. This is proper and honorable.

However, thronging to April’s sham commemoration staged in and by Turkey, a notorious human rights violator? Which had mistreated Allied POWs? Which today abuses its remaining Christians, as well as Alevis, Kurds, and Jews? Which also committed genocide and pillage against millions of indigenous Christian Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek civilians during the Gallipoli battle and for years afterward? And which arrogantly denies having done so?

Read it.

I didn’t know that there were so many morons in Indiana. Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

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

Read it.

In other words, being a modern politician.

Read it.

And why not? She saw what it did for Bill.

Read it.

Four months after Rolling Stone magazine published a shocking—and soon discredited—account of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville police department has released the results of its investigation into the alleged assault. It comes as no surprise that “no substantive basis” was found for the claim by a student known as “Jackie” that she was raped by seven men at a fraternity party as a UVA freshman in September 2012. What’s striking is to what lengths both the police and many in the news media have gone to tiptoe around the obvious fact that the tale was a hoax by a serial liar. This dance of denial suggests that in the current ideological climate, it is nearly impossible to declare any allegation of rape to be definitely false.

Read it.

The International Edible Book Festival is an annual event usually held on or around April 1, which is also known as Edible Book Day.The global event has been celebrated since 2000 in various parts of the world, where “edible books” are created, displayed, and small events are held. The creations are photographed and then consumed. Regular contributors to the site are groups from Australia, Brazil, India, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, The Netherlands, Russia, and Hong Kong. The event was initiated by Judith A. Hoffberg and Béatrice Coron in 2000.

Read it.

Mark Steyn looks at the latest leftist tar pit.

On Monday, when Trevor Noah landed the gig as Jon Stewart’s replacement, Salon‘s headline writers assured us:

Right-Wing Rage At ‘The Daily Show’ Is About To Get Very, Very Ugly

That’s because Trevor Noah is a mixed-race South African, and everyone knows right-wingers are ugly racists consumed with rage over miscegenation. As it turned out, there was not a peep from rage-consumed righties, perhaps because they don’t watch “The Daily Show” and had never heard of Trevor Noah, or perhaps because they were preoccupied with inconsequential foot-of-page-37 news stories like the nuclearization of Iran.

Once again. the left trips on its uncanny ability to see things that aren’t there. But wait, there’s more:

So instead by Tuesday morning it was the left that was all in a lather – or as those self-same Salon headline writers put it a mere 24 hours after their previous headline:

Did Trevor Noah’s Twitter History Just Kill ‘The Daily Show’?

That’s because the lefties were all mad about the oddly misogynist and anti-Semitic Twitter feed of Mr Noah, full of jests about porking fat chicks and running over a Jewish kid in his German car – which is certainly a strange choice of joke for a 21st century comic.

At this point, I realized that I did, after all, know who Trevor Noah is. I’d caught him on telly in Oz a couple of years ago, and in London at the Royal Variety Performance. He struck me as like a lot of chancers from around the Commonwealth, chaps who make a nice living tailoring their shtick to whichever corner of the Anglosphere they happen to be in. Yes, yes, I know, I do a bit of that meself. Anyway, passing through Britain only a few days ago, I got back after dinner and thought I’d watch ten minutes of TV before turning in. Unfortunately, it was the BBC’s annual “Comic Relief” fundraiser, a long night of leaden japes and forced jollity, in the midst of which up popped Mr Noah….

Read it.

flickrThe Steel Valley, Pennsylvania, school board has rejected a request from the teachers union to bar a disabled student from using the faculty restroom. Officials at Park Elementary School had agreed that Kaitlin Montgomery, 10, could use the faculty restroom because the nearest student restroom is up a flight of stairs and the girl has trouble walking. But the Steel Valley Education Association filed a complaint, saying their contract calls for that restroom to be used only by school employees.

Look for … the union label….

Read it.

$1.2 million will buy you a bus that can go 170 miles on a single charge of batteries. The bus has 60 seats, which is just what is needed in Spokane, where the average bus carries just 9 people.

Spokane Transit previously persuaded voters to double the sales tax in 2004. The improvements made with that money led to a small increase in per capita transit ridership from about 25 trips per person per year to 27. Based on this, it doesn’t seem likely that another 50 percent increase in funding will do much to boost ridership.

Public transit in Left Coast cities is rather like the ICBM and nuclear weapons programs of countries like North Korea. It spends money that they really can’t afford on things that are pretty much for show, to demonstrate they they’re In With The In Crowd, but with little advantage for ordinary people.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

Being a fact is what makes it racist. That the designated next host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah, doesn’t get that cornerstone of political correctness troubles a lot of nice white liberals, no matter how many Pokemon points being born in Soweto gets him.

Poor guy needs to get with the program and bone up on The Narrative if he wants a future in media.

More here: Circular Firing Squad Assembles for “Daily Show” Replacement

Read it.

As the 2016 election nears, contenders in both parties have been hiring staffers, traveling to early-nominating stats and feverishly raising money. Their operations can look to some like campaigns—but they aren’t subject to any of the restrictions that would otherwise apply.

That’s the subject of complaints filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission by two campaign-finance watchdog groups, who allege that four potential contenders—former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—are violating federal campaign finance laws.

How does one get to be a ‘watchdog group’? Apparently, coming up with an impressive-sounding name and reciting it to a reporter is sufficient. How about the more accurate ‘political stalking groups’?

The fact that three of the four are Republicans will not have been lost on the astute reader. Nor will the fact that Hillary Clinton has neither complied with this vague law nor been criticized by any of these so-called ‘watchdog groups’ for not doing so. Coincidence? I think not.