Read it.

If you have ever wondered how it can be that two generations of affirmative action and diversity besottedness have brought us to the worst campus race relations in memory, the Senior Fellow and Associate Director for Curricular and Research Programs at the Rockefeller Center, Ronald Shaiko, has thoughts that will make blood boil in Parkhurst (where the President and Provost seem to think about nothing else). The resurgent Review has a well crafted interview with Professor Shaiko entitled The Diversity Debacle, the contents of which expand on thoughts Shaiko first expressed in a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Admissions Is Just Part of the Diversity Puzzle….

Read it.

A federal judge in Washington, DC, called the Army’s plan to require a Sikh soldier to undergo special testing to make sure his long hair, beard and turban did not interfere with proper, safe wear of his helmet and gas mask “unfair and discriminatory.”

Seems like plain common sense to me. But, then, no federal judge’s decision has ever seemed like plain common sense to me, so at least one of us is consistent.

“Singling out the plaintiff [Singh] for specialized testing due only to his Sikh articles of faith is, in this context, unfair and discriminatory,” Howell wrote. “It is this singling out for special scrutiny — indeed, with the initial precaution of requiring an escort and observers for the plaintiff as he was subjected to the tests–that has a clear tendency to pressure the plaintiff, or other soldiers who may wish to seek a religious accommodation, to conform behavior and forego religious precepts.”

Except that’s not what’s happening. In reality, he’s being given special consideration to accommodate the requirements of his faith, with proper safeguards for his own safety (and those of his comrades) under modern battle conditions. US District Judge Beryl A. Howell has, of course, no military experience, and her CV of Swarthmore, Columbia, and Columbia Law is pretty thoroughly Crustian.

Read it. And watch the video.

Is America’s welfare system destroying the incentive to work? That’s what Phil Harvey and Lisa Conyers contend in their recent book, The Human Cost of Welfare: How the System Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help.

“The prospect of having all your benefits cut off…or a significant part of your benefits cut off makes people look on earning income as risky,” says Harvey.

The co-authors sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to talk about what they learned from hundreds of welfare recipients they interviewed around the country.

Read it.

And Hitler was all the Jews’ fault. It’s perfectly clear to me now.

Oberlin College professor Joy Karega, a social justice writing instructor at the Ohio-based liberal arts college, has published a series of posts on social media that largely blames the 9/11 attacks and the rise of the Islamic State and Charlie Hebdo attacks on Israel, according to a report in the campus newspaper that included numerous screenshots of the scholar’s comments.

What is a ‘social justice writing instructor’? And why does an educational institution (outside of a Communist state) have one?

A campus spokesperson told The Tower in response to the revelation of Karega’s comments that “Oberlin College respects the rights of its faculty, students, staff, and alumni to express their personal views. …The statements posted on social media by Dr. Joy Karega, assistant professor of rhetoric and composition, are hers alone and do not represent the views of Oberlin College.”

But if anyone had published similar screeds against Muslims, it would have been Hate Speech Hell for whoever was involved: Fired, expelled, sued, and pilloried in the media.

#BlackLiesMatter. Never doubt it.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, turns over a rock.

Suppose it’s true, however, that modern markets are chock-full of devious phishermen preying successfully upon helpless phools who buy too many oranges in the belief that each has been “kist” by the sun. What’s to be done? The authors offer no specific proposals. Yet they clearly imply that more government regulation is a key part of the solution. At one point, for example, they advocate “more generous funding” for the Securities and Exchange Commission; at another, they speak approvingly of greater regulation of slot machines.

Solutions via government are based on a glaring fallacy: that people deficient in choosing for themselves in the marketplace will automatically shed those deficiencies once the government authorizes them to choose for others. Ironically, while citing slot machines, the authors make no mention of a related scam: government-run lotteries. The lotteries are perhaps the most obvious example of how those who are supposed to protect us from phishing scams themselves eagerly phish for phools.

Nothing, indeed, could be more phoolish than for ordinary men and women to submit to elites who are as confident as professors Akerlof and Shiller that they know best how other people should behave. Such elitism poses a far worse danger to society than entrepreneurs offering aromatic pastries for sale.

The world is just chock-full of people who are utterly convinced that they are far more qualified than you are to determine how you ought to live your life, from how you spend your money to how you spend your time to how you eat your fargin’ food.

Resist them, steadfast in the faith.

Read it.

Indeed. Neither one has ever held a real job where he had to get a product out the door and meet a payroll.

Both were elected based on who they were rather than what they have accomplished.

Drones of a feather flock together.

Read it.

Considering debt, it should be said up front that realistically all government spending is debt. Governments can only spend to the extent that they extract resources from the real economy first, at which point debt amounts to an accounting abstraction. A focus on debt misses the real barrier to economic growth, which is government spending itself. As the late Robert Bartley put it in his classic book on the Reagan economic revival, The Seven Fat Years, “The deficit is not a meaningless figure, only a grossly overrated one.” Government spending is the true tax signaling resource consumption by politicians lacking market discipline. The unseen with the spending is all the experimentation (and yes, voluminous failure) that is never pursued by market-driven entrepreneurs (cancer cures, transportation innovations, technology advances that would render the internet dated) thanks to government existing as a size consumer of always limited resources.

There is no such thing as ‘federal money’, ‘state money’, ‘city money’, or any other kind of government money. It’s all TAXPAYER MONEY, taken from you with the gunman visible in the background.

The rich, for being rich, have money to lose. That’s why much lower tax rates on wealth that is earned or inherited are so crucial to the economic well-being of everyone else. Precisely because the rich are flush with funds, they can take risks on the dynamic companies of tomorrow that are tautologically necessary for the prosperity that Anderson would like. Adam Smith was very clear that investment migrates away from economies that are stationary, and if the tax-cut focus is on the middle class, a more stationary economy will be ours. Such an economy will do little for the typical American whom Anderson would like to aid.

History is once again very clear here. Since the rich have money to lose, they alone can pursue the intrepid investments that make the typical American much better off. Indeed, it was J.P. Morgan who took a flyer on Thomas Edison’s light bulb despite the protests of his father, it was Howard Hughes who brought a pile of inherited money to California in order to fund the aviation boom, families with names like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Phipps were the initial money behind the venture capital explosion out in Silicon Valley, PayPal co-founder Thiel was the money behind Facebook, and then Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was a pioneer investor in both Google and Uber.

Lion of the Blogosphere points out something that I haven’t seen discussed.

Mitt Romney said that Trump is a con-artist, as if that’s a reason not to vote from.

I say that one of the benefits of having a con-artist for president is that he can spot when other people are trying to con him. Do you want a president who is easily conned? I don’t.

Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter showed us why we don’t want that to happen.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

I wish I were.

Egg Ninjas. Go ahead, laugh, but they work.

Smart Jump Rope.

Anti-Theft Lunch Bags. Kinda gross but I bet they work.

Sarah Hoyt is pretty steamed at the Servants of the Crust.

I hear everywhere Americans just don’t learn other languages.  But that’s not true.  Americans aren’t TAUGHT other languages.  Not in a way anyone can learn.  After four years of watching my son hit his head against the wall of French (which NO ONE EVER in my family had trouble learning) I took his summer away to learn it the way I did it: lists of vocabulary, books of verbs, endless grammar drills, and reading the Three Musketeers in French.  By the end of summer he was fluent.  (We don’t do it much now.  Well, he doesn’t live at home.  But when we made runs to the hardware store or whatever we often spoke in French to each other, (mostly in the car) to keep in practice.)

Read it.

Because it’s Friday, and who wants to work on a Friday?

Read it. And watch the videos.

The Wintergatan Marble Machine was built by Swedish musician Martin Molin of the band Wintergaten. It’s a hand-made machine that powers a kick drum, bass, vibraphone and other instruments using a hand crank and 2,000 marbles.

Read it.

A major British discovery is expected to lead to revolutionary bespoke treatments for patients with advanced cancer that could enter trials within two years.

The scientists behind the breakthrough believe they have identified the “Achilles’ heel” of cancer cells.

In a video about the findings, Cancer Research UK, described how immune cells could be marshalled to exploit this weakness.

Read it.

But the US State Department has admitted that its round-the-clock hotline service for Syrians to report violations of the recent ceasefire needs improvement, following reports that the volunteers manning the phones were unable to understand the Arabic speakers who called in.

Hey, if they have anything important to say, they’ll say it in English. Ask Hillary.

Read it.

Hey, if you can dream it, you can do it. Ask Obama.

Like the apocryphal story of the state legislature that passed a law dictating that pi equals 3, the Oregon state legislature has passed two laws that pretend the laws of supply & demand don’t exist. The difference is that, in reality, no state legislature ever did pass a law saying that pi equals 3, but Oregon’s legislature is totally ignoring basic economic principles.

First, earlier this week, the legislature passed a new minimum wage law increasing the minimum to as high as 14.75 per hour in the Portland area by 2022 (with lower minima for other parts of the state). This will supposedly be the highest in the nation, but only in the unlikely event that no other state raises its minimum wage in the next six years. However, after adjusting for the cost of living, Oregon’s new minimum wage probably is the highest in the nation even before 2022.

…

Buoyed by its success, the legislature yesterday passed a law legalizing inclusionary zoning, that is, forcing homebuilders to sell a certain percentage of their products below cost. This will also lead them to build fewer homes and to sell the market-rate homes they do build for higher prices to offset their losses on the “affordable” homes. In other words, this law relies on the counterintuitive notion that making housing more expensive will make it more affordable.

Read it. And watch the video.

A few days ago we posted a hidden-camera video aired by TV2 in Denmark. It featured an imam at the Grimhøj Mosque who justified various acts of violence — including the death penalty for apostasy — based on Koranic instructions.

Below is another video in the series featuring Imam Abu Bilal Ismail. In this episode the Indiscreet Imam explains the requirements for and limits on beating children, both for the sake of their education and to follow the precepts of Islamic law.

Read it.

Greenland’s snowy surface has been getting darker over the past two decades, absorbing more heat from the sun and increasing snow melt, a new study of satellite data shows. That trend is likely to continue, with the surface’s reflectivity, or albedo, decreasing by as much as 10 percent by the end of the century, the study says.

While soot blowing in from wildfires contributes to the problem, it hasn’t been driving the change, the study finds. The real culprits are two feedback loops created by the melting itself. One of those processes isn’t visible to the human eye, but it is having a profound effect.

The results, published in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere, have global implications. Fresh meltwater pouring into the ocean from Greenland raises sea level and could affect ocean ecology and circulation.

“You don’t necessarily have to have a ‘dirtier’ snowpack to make it dark,” said lead author Marco Tedesco, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and adjunct scientist at NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies. “A snowpack that might look ‘clean’ to our eyes can be more effective in absorbing solar radiation than a dirty one. Overall, what matters, it is the total amount of solar energy that the surface absorbs. This is the real driver of melting.”

Read it.

What Trump has discovered by accident is that many conservatives aren’t as attached to conservative policies as they seemed; that labels don’t mean much to voters; that you can bring new people into the Republican coalition instead of playing by the old rules; and that at least a significant plurality of Republican primary voters don’t care whether you bend your knee to the memory of Ronald Reagan or not.

We may be seeing proof that the era during which the Republican party was explicitly ‘conservative’ (1964-?) is now over, and it may be reverting to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century, when Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican President who proudly carried the Progressive banner into the White House.

Watch it.

Can’t really blame them.

Read it.

Health officials will baldly lie to you because they know, know, that they know more about how you ought to live than you do.

But you knew that.

A group of scientists are challenging the now conventional wisdom that a low-sodium diet is better for your long-term health, asking whether people should take official advice on the matter with a pinch of salt.

In a new review of the evidence, a team of experts from Columbia University found there were “two distinct bodies of scholarship” on the matter – those who believe reducing salt intake will improve the overall health of the population, and those who don’t.

Gee, where have we heard that before? Let’s see — could it be ‘climate change’?

Watching your salt intake has become one of the core pieces of dietary advice in the UK in recent years, and in the US it has got to the point where New York is requiring by law that restaurants label salt content in their food.

New York has many stupid laws because New York is full of stupid politicians and stupid people who vote for them.

So it will be a surprise to many to find that just 54 per cent of the 269 academic reports included in the review found in favour of a salt reduction hypothesis.

DENIERS! BURN THEM!

“Decision-makers often must choose a course of action in the face of conflicting, uncertain evidence,” he said.

Only if they’re trying to make a decision in a matter which is NONE OF THEIR FARGIN BUSINESS.

And rightly so, I think, having a more useful skillset than, say, a Gender Studies and Queer Theory major.

Read it.

Turns out a fingerprint can be “spoofed,” just like a password. Jason Chaikin, president of New York City-based Vkansee, which develops fingerprint-based security systems, says he can hack the fingerprint sensor of an iPhone in 10 minutes.

At his booth at the Mobile World Congress here, he showed Digits how. The good news: It still takes a bit of work, as well as cooperation from the victim.

Bad news for Stupid People.

Read it.

Sounds like a great idea to me. I wish to Hell we’d divided Iraq.

Jürgen Todenhöfer, a journalist and former politician who visited Isis territories after intense negotiations in 2014, claimed the US “likes” to weaken Middle East countries and had already done so in Libya and Iraq.

Uh, I think the natives did all that by themselves. They’re quite good at it.

Read it.

In 2014, the University of Vermont became the first school to allow students to select their preferred pronouns, like xe or zir, in a campus-wide database. Harvard University, the University of California system and the University of Tennessee, among others, have since followed suit.

But for those unfamiliar with gender-neutral pronouns, using them properly can prove confusing, sometimes simply due to the abundance of terms available

Some widely used pronouns include, but are not limited to, they, ne, ze (singular)/hir (possessive), ze (singular)/zir (possessive), spivak, ve and xe. Each pronoun has first-, second- and third-person conjugations plus plural versions.

Be the first on your block to be so open-minded that your brain falls out.

Read it.

From a New York Times article about Clinton campaign fundraisers in London organized by Anna Wintour:

The designers Alber Elbaz, Christopher Bailey of Burberry and Tom Ford were among the couple of hundred guests paying $500 each for the gallery event ($1,000 including a photo with Chelsea Clinton) or $2,700 for the dinner. Mr. Elbaz, who cannot vote as he is not an American citizen, said he went to support his partner, Alex Koo, who is. Mr. Bailey, who is British, is a friend of Chelsea Clinton.

From the Federal Election Commission website: “Foreign nationals are prohibited from making any contributions or expenditures in connection with any election in the U.S. Please note, however, that “green card” holders (i.e., individuals lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the U.S.) are not considered foreign nationals and, as a result, may contribute.”

I guess laws are just for the Little People.

Read it.

Saco farmer Rick Grant does not want to run afoul of any labor laws. He’s a straight up kind of guy and pays more than minimum wage to his field workers. But as the laws relate to family-owned farms his size – 125 acres under cultivation, so good-sized but far from Big Ag – some aspects of the Fair Labor and Standards Act are confusing. Or worse.

“Some of their rules seem silly, or silly to me,” he said. Like the one that means workers on Grant’s Farm shouldn’t lay hands on peppers grown by his cousin on another farm a few miles away.

All the hunderace of labor unions with none of the benefits. Thank you, Washington D.C.

Complexities in labor laws mean job descriptions that shift at surprising, some would say nonsensical, points, creating bookkeeping headaches and opening the door to potential penalties from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. Grant keeps his books and his accountant up to date and wants to avoid a bureaucratic nightmare for doing something as deceptively simple as doing his cousin a favor.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division has increased its efforts to enforce fair labor laws nationwide. “Vigorously” is the department’s term for it. They’ve added investigators and focused on traditionally low wage industries, like farm work, launching 1,400 investigations in agriculture in 2015. The department found that 80 percent of its investigations in the areas of migrant, seasonal and guest workers uncovered violations worth a total of $4.3 million in back wages to more than 10,000 workers.

Of course. Bureaucrats have to be able to demonstrate that they are doing their jobs, even if those jobs are terminally stupid.

But recently the Department of Labor also imposed penalties on Vermont farms and a vineyard in New Hampshire for violations of fair labor laws. Grant, like many in Maine’s agricultural community, has his ear to the ground and a lot of questions. Have inspectors been by? Has anyone been penalized? Does anyone really understand this stuff, besides lawyers and bureaucrats?

Nowadays, getting a visit from government employees is like being raided by the KGB. And God help you if your papers aren’t in order.

“I think the best thing to do is stay small and not hire anybody,” Lazor said. “That’s easier said than done though.”

But the only way to be safe.

Read it.

We have followed the saga of the “Minnesota men” indicted on terrorism charges as they sought to leave the United States to join ISIS. ON slightly closer examination, these “Minnesota men” turn out to be Somali Muslims seeking to join the jihad abroad. I wrote about them in the Weekly Standard article “The threat from Minnesota men” and in the Star Tribune column “Islam and Minnesota: Can we hear some straight talk for a change?” I followed up on Power Line in several posts and in the series “Islamophobia in one state.”

The number of “Minnesota men” charged in last year’s indictments reached nine or ten. Ringleader Abdirizak Warsame was the last man charged. Before he sought to join ISIS, he worked for two employers on the tarmac at the Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport. An FBI informant recorded him aspiring to blow planes out of the sky with rocket-propelled grenades. We still don’t know how his employment at the airport came to an end.

Read it.

If you are tired of reading columns about Affordable Care Act failures, don’t read any further. If you’re not, please meet yet another example of how the shockingly incompetent government has wasted so much of our money in developing and administering services that are taken for granted in the private market—namely, the ACA exchanges.

The federal government spent an eye-popping $2.1 billion on 60 different contractors to build the HealthCare.gov boondoggle, and President Barack Obama’s proposed budget calls for another $535 million to operate the exchange in fiscal 2017. Billions more has been sent to the states, which also failed in a similarly spectacular fashion to construct their own portals. A Government Accountability Office report found that even by September 2015, none of the 14 states that operate their own exchange had one that was fully functioning. This was despite the fact that $5.51 billion was funneled to the states to facilitate the portals’ construction.

A number of exchanges have already failed outright, with perhaps the most notable being the implosion of Cover Oregon. The $300 million spent building Oregon’s exchange made it the third-most expensive, behind New York and California, two far more populous states. Cover Oregon also infamously spent $21 million on folksy ads that were widely mocked on the Internet and late-night talk shows.

Steve Sailer examines the brawl among Fashionable Minorities [tm] as to who is the victimiest.

American Jews would be prudent to be concerned that the growing anti-Israel BDS movement on college campuses, which is typically a favorite cause among exotic immigrant students. It’s a big deal at places like UCLA because student politics is divided up into a pro-Israel alliance funded by Israeli millionaires and an anti-Israel side among lot of foreign and immigrant students from Muslim or other Afro-Eurasian countries, along with some Europeans.

So far, the big American domestic minorities like blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese don’t pay much attention to BDS. But it could eventually spill over into or even merge with the current domestic white-bashing represented by #OscarsSoWhite and #JournalistsSoWhite. A nightmare scenario for American Jews is domestic blacks and Latinos and Asians eventually denouncing as discrimination the very high Jewish proportions found in most of the really good jobs in America.

Read it.

The University of Texas at Austin has recommended expulsion for a male student who was found responsible for sexual misconduct by the university’s Title IX bureaucrats. But the woman he supposedly raped didn’t formally accuse him—they remained friends and even flirted via text messages subsequent to the encounter.

In fact, it was the woman’s father who initiated the Title IX proceedings against the male student, “John Doe,” who is suing UT-Austin to prevent the university from expelling him.

The woman, “Jane Roe,” is not a UT-Austin student, which raises an important question: Should a university really have a responsibility to meddle in students’ private sex lives when parents of non-students file complaints?

The Title IX bureaucracy at UT-Austin evidently believes so.

Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.

Read it.

Personally, I can’t think of anyone more appropriate to name a post office after than a communist.

Read it.

How do I know the kid is black?

1. His race is not mentioned.
2. He’s living with his mother and grandmother – no mention of a father, or even a grandfather.
3. He has a 12-year-old sister and a nephew, the son of his elder sister. No husband mentioned for her, either.

More here.

Watch it.

Pretty cute.

‘Muffy, meet Adolf. Adolf, eat Muffy.’

Read it.

Kelly Potter, 35, was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer in July 2015 and was among the first to be enrolled on a cancer vaccine trial that will run over the next two years involving up to 30 volunteers.

Medical researchers have designed the vaccine to encourage the immune system to react against a part of the cancer cell that allows it to continuously replicate without ever dying.

Read it.

If all you want to do is protest, why are you wasting time and money on college?

Uh, because it’s their time but somebody else’s money? Either Mommy & Daddy or the Gummint.

Read it.

They also share a different political tradition. It may seem to contradict their shared fascist pedigree, but Trump and Sanders are both, in a meaningful sense, conservatives.

By this, of course, he means ‘people resistant to change’, rather than what, say, National Review means by ‘conservatives’.

They are both conservatives from the perspective of classical liberalism. More specifically, they are conservatives in the sense that F.A. Hayek used the term in 1960 when he wrote the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”

A great essay that everyone ought to read.

They share a fear of uncontrolled and undesigned change, especially in the economy. This is most obvious in Trump’s bluster about how America never “wins” and his desire to raise tariffs on Chinese imports and close the flow of immigrants, especially from Mexico. Economic globalization is a terrific example of uncontrolled change, and using foreign workers and producers as scapegoats for that change — especially when those changes have largely benefited most Americans — is a good example of this fear of the uncontrolled.

Read it.

Hundreds of billions of foreign-aid dollars have gone to fight rural poverty in the developing world since the end of World War II. But ask people in this dry, mountainous outback what has made the most difference in their difficult lives and you get only one answer: remittances.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank have brought remarkable prosperity to Northern Virginia and Maryland. But it’s the fruits of migrant labor sent home that explain how, in places like this, hardscrabble poverty is slowly giving way to development. I emphasize “slowly,” but the change is real. And as one local told me, “When you build something yourself, you value it more.”

One of the reasons that people cross the border illegally is because they can get better jobs in the U.S. The Mexican government doesn’t mind this because their poor and unemployed are shipping themselves out of the country, and the money they send back to their families is boosting the Mexican economy with no effort on their parts.

One might call this “re-imported jobs” — rather than ‘exporting jobs’ overseas so that the work can be done by foreigners in their own country, we’re effectively importing the foreigners so that they can do the same work here; the effect is the same, with the earnings of those foreigners going overseas to benefit their native countries.

And, rather than the U.S. government sending taxpayer dollars overseas in foreign aid, to be stolen by kleptocrats in the recipient countries with a small trickle winding up in the hands of the intended beneficiaries, this form of ‘foreign aid’ uses dollars that are actually earned by the foreigners involved rather than stolen from taxpayers, and almost always find its way to the people who need it.

Whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

This is the new Democrat platform.

Read it.

f you have a penis, use the men’s room.

If you look like a man, but don’t have a penis, use the men’s room, but please don’t use the urinal.

If you look like a woman, and don’t have a penis, use the woman’s room.

News you can use, from Lion of the Blogosphere.

As the elephant said when he pooped on the sidewalk, that about covers it.

Read it.

A Doo radio transmitter, officially known as a T-1151 radio transmitter, is a radio transmission device camouflaged as a pile of animal droppings or, in its most common form, a large single fecal dropping from an animal indigenous to the area of intended use. Regardless, the external form of the device was designed to discourage close examination and thus, detection or disruption.

John Stossel turns over a rock.

We know government understands that new technologies are important. The military invests in robots and traffic cops use radar guns. But when the rest of us use robots or fly drones, government gets eager to put rules in place before things get “out of control.”

When it’s hard to innovate in the U.S., innovation happens elsewhere. The Japanese already offer largely automated hotels. At the Henn-na (or “Weird”) Hotel, the front desk clerk is a robot dinosaur—popular with the kids. Another robot stores your luggage, and another takes you to your room.

This may sound like an expensive stunt, but the robot hotel is cheaper than others nearby—partly because it employs fewer people.

That alarms politicians who fear change. Whenever there’s been innovation, experts predict massive unemployment.

Hence why none of the Adults believed Obama’s ‘Hope and Change’ slogan.

If we crushed every machine that did things humans used to do, we’d still be living in caves and hunting tigers with spears. Every time there’s a new invention, some people lose jobs, and there’s a period of adjustment.

But we come out ahead.

Not that any government employee will ever admit that.

More bogus racism charges.

The allegation set social media ablaze, sowing shock and outrage as it went: Three black students at the University at Albany had been attacked on a city bus by a group of white men who used racial slurs as other passengers and the driver sat silently by.

The Jan. 30 episode, reported to the police, would draw hundreds of people to a campus rally against racism; an emotional response from the university’s president; and even the attention of Hillary Clinton, who condemned the attack on Twitter.

…

But only a few weeks later, what seemed to be the latest iteration of a now-familiar debate about race on campus — the protests, the anguished soul-searching, the calls for greater faculty diversity and administrative changes — has metastasized into a controversy of an even more scorching kind: the allegation, the authorities said, was a lie.

Oops.

Surveillance videos did not support the accounts of the young women, Ms. Burwell, Alexis Briggs and Ariel Agudio. Neither did the statements of multiple fellow passengers. Rather than being victims of a hate crime, the authorities said, the women had been “the aggressors,” hitting a 19-year-old white woman on the bus.

All three pleaded not guilty on Monday to misdemeanor assault charges; Ms. Burwell and Ms. Agudio, who publicized the episode through Twitter, also pleaded not guilty to charges of making a false report. The judge who oversaw the arraignment called the charges, if proved, “shameful.”

Hey, #BlackLiesMatter.

“People were forced to think about things that they didn’t think about, maybe, before,” said Amberly Carter, a coordinator at the university’s Multicultural Resource Center who helped organize the rally. “So do we now stop defending black women because of what happened?”

Well, these black women, anyway; that seems clear enough.

But whatever solidarity emerged has fractured over the charges against the young women, putting their supporters on the defensive. Behind the rush to declare the matter a hoax, they say, is an ingrained prejudice against taking the concerns of minority women seriously.

Given their modern penchant for lying about incidents, I’d say that’s a good thing.

“I walked away saying, ‘I can’t tell you what happened in that video; you haven’t shown me anything to confirm what these young women are saying, and I can’t deny it either, because it’s just not clear to me,’” said Alice Green, a social justice activist and the director of the Center for Law and Justice, based in Albany.

After all, who are you going to believe, us or your lying ears?

She was one of several community and university leaders whom the district attorney invited to review the evidence before charges were brought. “But once you lodge charges against someone,” she added, “in the minds of most people, that’s guilt.”

Although they seemed perfectly comfortable with it when the shoe was on the other foot.

To Ms. Agudio’s lawyer, Mark Mishler, public opinion had outstripped the available evidence.

As it did with the original complaint. But nobody gets to Notice that.

Sami Schalk, an assistant professor in the university’s English department, who has devoted class time since the bus episode to talking through the implications with her students, said she was concerned that the women’s detractors had failed to consider the prejudice and “racialized language” the young women may have encountered on campus or before the bus ride that could have played a role in provoking the fight.

In other words, they did it, but Society was to blame. The broken record makes another turn.

Read it.

Christians in the Middle East and Africa are dismayed to discover that the increasing anti-Christian violence by local Islamic conservatives and terrorists is largely being ignored in the West. One of the worst examples is Nigeria where, since 2004 over a million Christians living in the Moslem majority north of the country have been chased from their homes and over 10,000 of them killed by Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram. Nearly all the Moslems killed in the north are victims of Boko Haram and most of the few Moslems killed by northern Christians are Boko Haram men killed by self-defense militias protecting their homes and families.

Boko Haram literally means “Western education is forbidden” and to many Islamic terrorists nothing is more “Western” and forbidden than Christianity. This despite the fact that Christianity has been around a lot longer than Islam. Often, as in Nigeria, the first invaders were Moslems not Christians. In Nigeria the south is largely Christian while the north is largely Moslem. But for over a century Moslem tribes from the north have been moving south looking for more grazing lands and consider it an economic and religious duty to chase out any Christian tribes in the way.

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A “Danish” imam named Abu Bilal Ismail has caused a sensation after a series of hidden-camera videos aired on TV2. In his capacity as an imam at the Grimhøj Mosque, Mr. Ismail called for the stoning of adulterers, the killing of apostates, and other violent policies. If he were not a member of a protected culture-enriching minority, he would surely have been prosecuted for his publicly-expressed sentiments.

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The source of their justification for attacking unbelievers comes not only from the Qur’an, but also their other sacred text found in the Sira or biography of Mohammad and the Hadiths or traditions. When people (usually liberals ) ask where in the Qur’an is there support for violence against the kafir, this really shows their limited understanding about Political Islam. The Qur’an is just one of three books. The Hadiths must also be thoroughly be examined to gain a fuller understanding of the Islamic agenda. All three books support violent Jihad against the unbelievers.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology in the guise of a religion with which no co-existence is possible.

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You like what Bernie’s calling for, but you just don’t think he’s likely to win the general election, perhaps because “this country would never elect a socialist.” And even if he did win, you don’t think he’d be able to accomplish his goals, given how entrenched the GOP opposition is. Maybe you even think it’s already settled—that Hillary’s got the nomination locked up.

Here’s why going with that assumption—and backing Hillary in general—would be, in the words of Donald Trump, a disaster.

Apparently she is insufficiently communist for Salon magazine. Who knew?

But even apart from question of feasibility, we have to ask: Were Clinton to take office, would she seriously push for greater economic fairness, more peace and a generally progressive agenda, or would she defend the status quo?

I’m thinking not. So, apparently, are a lot of ‘progressives’.

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In the summer of 2014, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld previously passed French legislation, popularly known as the “burqa ban.” In doing so, it accepted the argument that the public wearing of this Islamically-connected full-body and face veiling violated a core value of French society, the principle of “living together” (le vivre ensemble). A review of how the court arrived at this conclusion, and what other arguments against the burqa it chose to ignore, may offer clues as to what forebodes for European Union societies and their relations with burgeoning Muslim populations.