A Religious Freedom Ruling: More of an Essay than a Masterpiece

04 Monday Jun 2018

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The Nine today ruled 7-2 in favor of a Christian baker in Colorado and against the bigoted, anti-Christian, anti-freedom Colorado “Civil Rights” Commision.

The ruling, as lop-sided as it was, was mired in the kind of language employed by judges to maintain their employment in the future. Still, we’ll take what we can get. Also, I sense, here nearing the end, the pendulum beginning to swing back this way. I suspect it may return Poe style; one might hope, for once, that rats are available when needed. Anway, if you’re so inclined,

READ THE OPINION

 

The intelligent discussion begins on page 26 with the concurrences of Justices Gorsuch and Thomas.

As the Court also explains, the only reason the Commission seemed to supply for its discrimination was that it found Mr. Phillips’s religious beliefs “offensive.” Ibid. That kind of judgmental dismissal of a sincerely held religious belief is, of course, antithetical to the First Amendment and cannot begin to satisfy strict scrutiny. The Constitution protects not just popular religious exercises from the condemnation of civil authorities. It protects them all. Because the Court documents each of these points carefully and thoroughly, I am pleased to join its opinion in full.

–Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd., et al. v. Colorado “Civil Rights” Commission et al., 584 U. S. ____, at Slip 27, (June 4, 2018)(Gorsuch Concurrence).

This was not a case about a baker discriminating against gays. It was a case about a government discriminating against Christians. The ruling, murky as it is, is a slap in the face of tyranny and a blow for freedom. That’s needed as the animus is everywhere. Times have changed indeed when traditional Christian beliefs (and associated expression and determinations of association) are declared “offensive.” I find that offensive.

I suspect that the commision membership has changed since the underlying events of this case. The director is newer, innocent perhaps. Still, for the curious, one can find the current Colorado “Civil Rights” Commision, probably held up under a rock, maybe worshiping Moloch, in Suite 825, 1560 Broadway, Denver.

Valediction – from 2015

01 Friday Jun 2018

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Seems appropriate to run this one again:

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At ceremonies coast to coast these meanings serve a justifiable purpose. The valedictorian speaks first to bid the class farewell to the sheltered academic lives the members have known. The salutatorian then speaks to the promise of the coming years. Or, something like that.

Those acquainted with the works of John Taylor Gatto or who have children of school age, surely understand the decline of quality in American public education. Gatto was formerly New York’s teacher of the year (State and City). His distinguished career spanned decades. Now he speaks and writes of the critical need for drastic school reform. His writing is frequently published at lewrockwell.com. He is the author of The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling (2000).

Gatto has related the American model of public education to Soviet-era brainwashing:

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The Original.

Homeschooling Rising in Popularity

01 Friday Jun 2018

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For good reasons.

One is avoiding public school culture and violence.

After a gunman opened fire on students in Parkland, Florida, the phones started ringing at the Texas Home School Coalition, and they haven’t stopped yet.

The Lubbock-based organization has been swamped with inquiries for months from parents seeking safer options for their kids in the aftermath of this year’s deadly school massacres, first in Parkland and then in Santa Fe, Texas.

“When the Parkland shooting happened, our phone calls and emails exploded,” said coalition president Tim Lambert. “In the last couple of months, our numbers have doubled. We’re dealing with probably between 1,200 and 1,400 calls and emails per month, and prior to that it was 600 to 700.”

Demands to restrict firearms and beef up school security have dominated the debate following the shootings, but flying under the radar is the surge of interest in homeschooling as parents lose faith in the ability of public schools to protect students from harm.

That’s violent physical harm, the risk of which is actually, statistically lower than it was 20 years ago. The greater danger, outside an immediate, isolated incident, is the admitted harm the schools do by graduating students who can’t read or calculate.

Five Things to Know Before Getting Started, by Melodie Kennedy.

 

Free Schools, Home Schools, and Un-Schools

31 Thursday May 2018

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Solutions for better, education abound.

From today’s TPC bit:

Today, some good news. Great news. Last week, in PART ONE of this series, we examined the dreadful state of the existing public high schools. The state spends a small fortune per student and then produces horrific academic results, even by its own watered-down standards. And, the kids have the luxury of experiencing this fraud while suffering prison conditions to shock the Nuremberg prosecutors.

I promised I’d be back this week with solutions. We’re about to get to those. First, it occurred to me that this short series on education just happens to coincide with graduation schedules. This is a coincidence, I suppose. I also suppose we can graduate to something better.

The problems in the schools result from many factors. But, they are mostly the product of a never-ending series of increasingly heavy-handed laws, regulations, and rules. Students, parents, taxpayers, and those who enjoy intelligent civil society keep trading one liberty after another in exchange for fake security that resembles illiterate, zero tolerance fraud and little else. The trouble boils down to, in a word: “tyranny.”

The solution, in a word, is “freedom.”

READ ALL AT TPC

 

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The Addison Gallery of American Art, Fall Opening, 2013, Andover.

A Scale in Every Publix (in Flordia)

30 Wednesday May 2018

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I was with a friend at a South Carolina Publix last year. We walked in, she looked around, and then asked someone where the scale was? They didn’t have one. Turns out that’s a strictly FLA affair:

The scales have actually been there since Publix founder George Jenkins opened his first “food palace” Publix in 1940. At the time, the only opportunity to weigh yourself was at the doctor, or maybe by finding a coin-operated scale. Jenkins offered it as a free service, and it stuck.

That original Publix scale still works. It now sits in the late founder’s old corporate office, where new associates see it when they take tours.

The model No. 2830 people weigher found in a new Publix today is identical to the ones the old Toledo Scale company started manufacturing in Ohio around 1950. Mettler Toledo, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Switzerland, now makes industrial equipment, precision lab instruments and high-tech scale components. But for decades, they kept manufacturing the low-tech, but reliable, people weighers for Publix, essentially the only company that wanted them.

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In a 1988 feature in the Orlando Sentinel, writer Donna Bouffard, with the help of store employees in Winter Park, identified seven recurring categories of scale users, including “pickpockets,” who set aside keys, change and wallets,” “bashfuls,” who go to great lengths to make sure nobody is looking, “hoppers,” who leap on in a single bound, and “mechanics,” who insist this thing must be broken.

Now you know, if you ever wanted to. I thought it was a So. Tampa thing as just about all the customers are in shape and would want to confirm that metrologically. Maybe it’s all just as well. At that one SC store, there would be a lot of scale mechanics…

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Usually right up front. Martha Asencio Rhine/ TB Times.

Kim Kardashian Graduates

30 Wednesday May 2018

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From the reality of television to the reality of politics and law. This may represent a sea change as the curvaceous lady, formerly known for her … assets, lobbies for prison reform.

After months of back-channel talks between Kim Kardashian and Jared Kushner, the high priestess of reality television is coming to the White House. By late afternoon on Wednesday, Secret Service agents will wave Kardashian and her attorney through the southwest appointment gate to the West Wing, where they will meet Kushner to discuss prison reform before he walks with them to sit down with President Donald Trump, likely in the Oval Office, along with White House counsel. According to a person familiar with the meeting, Kardashian plans to ask Trump to pardon a woman serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time drug offense. (White House staffers have joked about who will get to accompany her to the West Wing, and what they should wear for the occasion. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

I’ve heretofore only understood Kardashian through the lens of trivial popular culture. The masses adored her for reasons which escaped me. Now, at last, I have good cause to celebrate her celebrity – she’s using it for a good and noble cause. Applause.

A life sentence for the first offense of a grandmother. For dope charges. I did not look into those charges, the case, or anything else associated with the matter. But I hope she gets the pardon. That’s because I have looked into the Constitution. You might recall that document which created (and supposedly limited) the federal leviathan. The creation part is indisputable. The limits part used to be debatable. Used to be. People all over the political spectrum love to discuss the Constitution. I recently witnessed a debate or sorts about Constitutional merits on Facebook (which I’ve come to detest) between two old friends, a liberal and a conservative. You’ve likely seen the same recently. It makes, I suppose, for good rhetorical sport. But little else.

I reviewed the old parchment again this morning and I still cannot find a single word about narcotics and criminal offenses. In fact, I only see three clearly delineated and named crimes: piracy, counterfeiting, and treason.

That point is, at this extremely late hour, moot. I used to professionally stand before the emissaries of Mordor and loudly proclaim the truth, such as that the federal government has no authority to prosecute drug offenders. In hindsight, it would have made a better comedy routine. But it’s still the truth.

The woman Kardashian champions should be pardoned and freed. As should all federal drug offenders. And most federal convicts, period. Given Kushner’s involvement and Trump’s affinity for the curvy ladies, I have high hopes for the grandmother. Not so much for the rest.

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Suddenly serious. Vanity Fair.

Hey! You made it this far. As a reward, here’s a link to today’s cogent if speculative comments by Vox Day on what comes next: War Coming Soon. As he might say, you need not agree, nor even understand. If you do, however, then this issue may eclipse the Constitutional autopsy debates.

UPDATE: Of course the quislings at CNN say, ” She shouldn’t be here talking about prison reform.” On their planet maybe she shouldn’t; she certainly is not a swamp critter.

Seeing Signs: ‘Suddenly” Realizing the Economy May Crack

29 Tuesday May 2018

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The WSJ sees the signs, suddenly.

CBS reports on the sudden pension funds problems.

Even Soros suddenly sees a problem.

Must be a cray aberration. “Real” economists, of the Fed variety, reliably tell us the next downturn is at least a decade away (if we ever see another one).

Never Ending Gun Control Lies

29 Tuesday May 2018

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They never give up. Gotta give ’em credit for that. They’ll bring back Stalin, if only in their minds. Even if the lies evaporate on contact.

A Mad Mom belittles the recent defensive gun incident in Oklahoma:

“Bad guy gets a gun – shoots three at Lake Hefner restaurant – and the @NRA calls it a victory,” Watts groused on her Twitter feed. “In other high income countries, bad guys don’t get guns. People don’t get shot at restaurants. And armed strangers don’t have to risk their lives in the line of fire.”

If you get your news from the TeeVee, then know that a nut in OKC shot some innocent dinners and was then “limited” by a good guy with a gun. This being one of about 2.5 million such happy endings we can expect this year.

Back to the crazy woman – the grabbers love suggesting that, as America is the most heavily armed nation in the world, we thereby suffer the highest gun crime rate. The only trouble with the suggestion is the numbers. The US, with the most gun-toting private citizens on Earth, doesn’t even rank among the top 100 per capita gun murder nations. That truth thingy.

As for the “high income” BS, it’s just that. One has to wait but a day or two and definitive disproof will provide itself. Like this: from Belgium:

This is the moment Belgian special forces took down a suspected terrorist who had shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he shot and killed two policewomen and a 22-year-old civilian.

After carrying out three brutal murders this morning, the attacker took a female cleaner hostage in a nearby high school.

The footage shows him running out of the school with two guns blazing before he was shot dead in the street. Several officers were injured in the gun battle.

The man, who is understood to have been on a day release from a nearby prison, had approached the female officers at around 10.30am, slashed their throats and stabbed them several times from behind, before disarming them.

He has been named as Benjamin Herman, 36, an alleged Muslim convert who had been radicalised in prison.

The victims have been named as police officers Lucile Garcia, 45, and Soraya Belkacemi, 53, and 22-year-old Cyril Vangriecken, who was shot dead sitting in a parked car with his mother.

Aloha Snackbar! Prison radicalization! Per Perrin’s First Law, this guy wasn’t just known to the police in advance, he was out of jail on a day pass or something. Wow. The grabbers also say you’re 10,000,000 times more likely to be killed by a criminal with your own gun than to kill a criminal in self-defense. They say only the police (and military) need guns. They say gun control works. I say it’s a pattern of lying, probably indicative of amygdala deformity.

Anyway, to the high income lie. The US boasts a GDP-based per capita income of $55,200 (number 8 in the world). Belgium (that’s a little country in Europe) has a similar income, of $47,260 (No. 16). The US and Belgium are, compared to most of the world, high-income. Thus, according to the maniac mom, bad guys in Belgium DO NOT GET GUNS. Except that they obviously do, in spite of (or because of) those strict gun control laws. That, or else she might not consider this guy bad – he did Snackbar, after all.

The Belgium story, as bad as it was predictable, had a happy ending, similar to that in OKC. Here’s the last Snackbar!:

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The prison convert in red circle is about to get it. Daily Mail.

Decoration Day 2018

28 Monday May 2018

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Last for I celebrated Memorial Day at an aquarium and attached museum. Not a fish fancier, I did delight in a cigar box.

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This year I loafed at the gym and then enjoyed a cigar. I think that’s about all for the day.

Wait, later I need to wrap up the TPC article for Wednesday. I just read a little reinforcement in this month’s copy of American Consequences, which you might want to inspect.

That’s all…