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October 3, 2014

KFC Bans Hand Wipes — Because They Might Offend Muslims

By Selwyn Duke

It’s a culture clash that could drive a man to drink: A customer at a U.K. KFC was told he couldn’t have a hand wipe because the alcohol in it might offend Muslims.

While the customer himself was offended (in the relevant usage of the word) and said it wouldn’t bother him because he liked alcohol, this didn’t persuade staff at the “Halal-only branch” to relent; after all, tolerance is the order of the day. The Times provides the story’s details, writing:

Graham Noakes, 41, said he was astonished when staff at the fast food chain’s outlet in St George’s retail park [in Leicester] refused to give him a hand-wipe because it was against its Halal policy.

Staff said this was because the wipes are soaked in an alcohol-infused liquid. Alcohol is forbidden in the Muslim Holy book, the Quran.

Graham said: “They told me it might offend other customers”.

The 41-year-old added: “I’ve never experienced anything like this before, [sic] I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Why shouldn’t I be allowed a wipe for my hands? They use wipes in hospital, [sic] what happens when we start being told we can’t have wipes there? I just can’t understand it.”

But what happens may already be known. According to FrontPage Mag’s Daniel Greenfield, “Muslim staff in hospitals have already compromised hygiene in the UK.”

Read the rest here.
October 3, 2014

City to Fine Residents for Putting Too Much Food in Garbage

By Selwyn Duke

Your refrigerator fails and you dump a large amount of spoiled food in the garbage? That could mean a fine under a new ordinance in Seattle.

The measure is designed to encourage composting, and it empowers garbage collectors to conduct a “cursory” inspection of residents’ trash in an effort to find violators.

Read the rest here.
October 2, 2014

Prominent Cancer Doctor Prescribed Unnecessary Chemo, Killing Healthy Patients

By Selwyn Duke

Imagine a well-renowned oncologist gives you the life-rending news that you have cancer. You then undergo rounds of sickening, body-rending chemotherapy only to much later learn it was all a con designed to make money prescribing unnecessary medical treatment.

This is precisely what prominent Michigan cancer specialist Dr. Farid Fata pled guilty to recently in a case a U.S. Attorney called "the most egregious" example of healthcare fraud her office had ever witnessed. The Detroit Free Press’ Tresa Baldas reported on the story:

"It is my choice," Fata said on Tuesday [9/16] of his surprise guilty plea, which included rattling off the names of numerous drugs he prescribed for his patients over the years. In each admission, he uttered these words:

"I knew that it was medically unnecessary."

Read the rest here.
October 2, 2014

Equal Work? Government Has No Idea What That is

By Selwyn Duke

“Equal pay for equal work!” the mantra goes. “Women get only 73 cents on a man’s dollar!” These are oft-heard slogans, and we may well hear them again during the fall campaign with the War on Women afoot. Now, going beyond the rhetoric, it’s not widely known but nonetheless true that the intersex pay gap is attributable to different career choices men and women make: women tend to choose less lucrative fields (e.g., soft sciences instead of hard ones), work shorter hours even when “full time,” are more likely to value personal fulfillment and job flexibility over money, are more inclined to take time off, generally have less job tenure and more often decline promotions. But while I’ve examined these factors at length in the past, the topic today is something more fundamental. This is that there would be a problem with even a well-intended equal-pay-for-equal-work scheme:

Hardly anyone knows what equal work is.

And the government hasn’t the foggiest idea.

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October 1, 2014

Government Plan to Stop School Shootings: Monitor Homeschoolers

By Selwyn Duke

A government advisory commission assembled in the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook shooting has issued a proposal for preventing similar events that is raising eyebrows:

Monitor certain homeschoolers.

The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission (SHAC), consisting of 16 educators, local and state officials, and “behavioral experts,” was created 18 months ago by Governor Dannel Malloy after 20-year-old Adam Lanza committed the Connecticut mass shooting that transfixed the nation in December 2012. Lanza, “described as being ‘dark and disturbed’ before his death … coldly murdered his own mother in their expensive home near Newtown, Connecticut. Then he took her legally registered guns to the nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot and killed 20 children and six adults. Then he took a handgun and shot himself,” writes WND.com, describing the chain of events. The commission is targeting homeschooling apparently because Lanza’s mother removed him from the government school system in 10th grade and taught him at home for one and a half years.

The SHAC’s “chief recommendation” — which is for “tighter scrutiny of homeschoolers” — would only apply to home-educated students labeled with “emotional, social, or behavioral problems.” But observers worry this will be used as a pretext for gratuitous state intrusion into homeschooling families, as those with “problem” children “would have to file progress reports prepared by [government] special education program teams,” reports CTPost.com. Of special concern is the matter of who will determine what constitutes “emotional, social, or behavioral problems.”

Read the rest here.
September 30, 2014

Michelle Obama Criticizes America at UN for Treatment of Women

By Selwyn Duke

In a recent address to a United Nations education event, First Lady Michelle Obama decided to shine the light on a certain nation’s treatment of women. No, it wasn’t Saudi Arabia where females aren’t allowed to drive, or the Congo where rape is brutal and systematic. It was the United States.

Here’s the relevant portion of the First Lady’s speech of September 24: “[W]omen here are still woefully underrepresented in our government and in the senior ranks of our corporations. We still struggle with violence against women and harmful cultural norms that tell women how they’re supposed to look and act.”

Now, it’s not just that singling out the United States for such criticism in our rough-hewn world is a bit like maligning a neighbor who wouldn’t buy his wife a new mink while ignoring the wife-beater across the street; it’s that, critics might point out, what’s explicit and implicit in M. Obama’s criticism is very much the opposite of the truth.

Read the rest here.
September 30, 2014

Obama Prohibits FBI From Scrutinizing Muslims When Seeking Domestic Terrorists

By Selwyn Duke

Could you imagine if the government had prohibited consideration of ideology (Nazi leanings) in identifying possible internal threats during WWII? That’s exactly how many critics might analogize new rules handed down by Attorney General Eric Holder that hamstring the FBI, rules disallowing the use of religious factors in the pursuit of terrorist suspects. In other words, all other things being equal, Muslims must be viewed as no more likely to carry out terrorist attacks than are Catholics, Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, or Episcopalians.

This was brought to light by Steven Emerson, head of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, while a guest on Fox News’ Justice with Judge Jeanine earlier this month. Emerson, who has said that ISIS is “Al Qaeda 3.0” and that it already has a US presence and is planning terrorist attacks, warned that the new domestic rules of engagement (disengagement?) imperil every American. As he explained to show host Jeanine Pirro:

The FBI [has been constrained by] the Department of Justice…. If someone was a religious extremist, though they didn't plot to carry out an attack, that [indicator] could not be factored into an investigation … into identifying them as a potential threat to the United States. Therefore, they [law enforcement] would have to wait until they actually plotted to carry out an attack. Well, that's too late. And unfortunately, what we're seeing right now is the fact is that we've seen massive numbers, increasing numbers of volunteers going over not just from Europe, from Asia and Africa, but we're seeing ISIS recruiting biophysicists, engineers, social media types, people who have expertise in really carrying out sophisticated terrorist attacks coming back to the United States.

Thus, since the FBI’s focus can’t be on mosques as terrorist breeding grounds, there’s freer rein for jihadists’ focus on them as terrorist recruitment centers. Emerson continued:

Read the rest here.
September 30, 2014

Sex Education for Five-year-olds — Pushed by Pedophiles

By Selwyn Duke

Unfortunately, when it comes to sexualizing young children, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.

Sin City is certainly earning its nickname, becoming the latest municipality to consider explicit sex “education” for tender-aged children — as young as five years old. The proposed curriculum would apply to all of Clark County, Nevada, of which Las Vegas is the county seat. The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Trevon Milliard provides some details, writing:

Considered changes include education of homosexuality as early as ages 5 through 8…. School children of that age range would also be taught that “touching and rubbing one’s genitals to feel good is called masturbation.”

… The district presented these 101 pages of possible changes in closed-door meetings with community members last week. Parent Nicole Luth attended one of the “community input” meetings and was shocked at how they were run, allowing only those invited to attend.

The proposed curriculum, taken from the Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education, published by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), would also teach 12-year-olds “about the very details of anal and oral sex,” as one parent put it, and that abortion is “safe.”

Read the rest here.
September 24, 2014

Black-on-white Violence Rampant, Ignored by Authorities and Media

By Selwyn Duke

Imagine you’re walking down the street and someone sucker punches you, breaking your glasses and swelling your lip. Your attacker then continues raining down blows upon you, spits on you, and pejoratively refers to your religious orientation while provoking you to fight. Imagine this happens in front of tens of witnesses who are willing to corroborate events.

Now imagine that the authorities tell you no arrest can be made because the incident wasn’t witnessed by a police officer.

But no imagination is necessary because this is precisely what happened to Jewish dentist Elliot Einbinder on September 11 as he was walking on Smith Ave. in Baltimore, Maryland. His attacker was a 24-year-old black female who, after initially lying to the police and claiming Dr. Einbinder initiated the confrontation, admitted she was “just having a bad day.” Baltimore Jewish Life explains the police inaction, writing, “Apparently an attack of this sort is considered a 2nd Degree Assault and unless witnessed by a Police Officer, and/or unless any type of weapon is used[,] an arrest cannot be made.… The victim must take the information to a court commissioner. The commissioner determines whether to issue a warrant for the perpetrators [sic] arrest or to send a summons for them to appear in court.” This is despite the incident smacking of a “hate crime,” with the assailant — who hasn’t even been named and shamed — challenging Dr. Einbinder with, “C'mon, fight me, Jew.”

Read the rest here.
September 24, 2014

Liberal BBC Asks, “Is Sport Sexist?” While Promoting Inequality

By Selwyn Duke

It long ago became clear to me that, despite all the pretense, protesting and politicking, no one who has ever seriously thought about equality actually believes in it. When making this case, one could point to how Eric Holder’s DOJ is currently suing the Pennsylvania State Police for treating women equally (how dare they!), but there’s perhaps no better example than a recent BBC writer who asks, “Is sport sexist?”

The author, Aimee Lewis, poses the question because there are still sports where the women’s categories don’t precisely correspond to the men’s; for example, she mentions how women gymnasts and swimmers don’t always compete in the same kinds of events, the no-contact rule in women’s lacrosse and how in tennis, “While men play five sets at Grand Slams, women can only compete over three sets.”

Now, the last example well illustrates the convoluted thinking underpinning much of the equality movement. Is the correct way of framing this that “women can only compete over three sets”?

Or it is that men must compete over five?

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