Civility For Thee, But Not For Me

Can we finally just agree that the liberals' "new civility" charade after the Giffords shooting was just that, a charade?  Being good Alinskyites they expect everyone else to practice it but always find reaons (read: excuses) not to practice it themselves.

North Carolina, a state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, passed a constitutional amendment yesterday defining marriage as being heterosexual only (I don't know if North Carolina has a civil union or domestic partnership statute or not).  Anyway, check out the "civility" demonstrated by those on the losing side of this issue.

For the record, I don't support government's redefining marriage.  If the people vote to do so, I'm ok with that, but I don't want government to redefine the word "marriage".  I support California's domestic partnership law, part of which which can be found here.  You want equality?  This is pretty darned equal:

(a) Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon spouses.

(b) Former registered domestic partners shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon former spouses.

(c) A surviving registered domestic partner, following the death of the other partner, shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon a widow or a widower.

(d) The rights and obligations of registered domestic partners with respect to a child of either of them shall be the same as those of spouses. The rights and obligations of former or surviving registered domestic partners with respect to a child of either of them shall be the same as those of former or surviving spouses.

(e) To the extent that provisions of California law adopt, refer to, or rely upon, provisions of federal law in a way that otherwise would cause registered domestic partners to be treated differently than spouses, registered domestic partners shall be treated by California law as if federal law recognized a domestic partnership in the same manner as California law.

(f) Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights regarding nondiscrimination as those provided to spouses.

Those are just sections a-f. There are more, but you get the idea.  And this is what you get in liberal California.

Update:  According to this article, the new North Carolina amendment also bans civil unions and domestic partnerships.

Update #2: Just saw this on Instapundit and thought it funny:

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It is good to see that after intense political pressure that President Obama has finally come around to the Dick Cheney position on marriage equality.”
– GOProud’s Chris Barron; more at Reason.com.

California

What will have to happen to get my fellow citizens of the Golden State to take a big bite of reality?

In Chief Executive’s eighth annual survey of CEO opinion of Best and Worst States in which to do business, Texas easily clinched the No. 1 rank, the eighth successive time it has done so. California earns the dubious honor of being ranked dead last for the eighth consecutive year.

This year, 650 business leaders responded to our annual survey, up from 550 in 2011. CEOs were asked to grade states in which they do business among a variety of areas, including tax and regulation, quality of workforce and living environment. The Lone Star State was given high marks foremost for its business-friendly tax and regulatory environment. But its workforce quality, second only to Utah’s, is also highly regarded...

It may be no accident that most of the states in the top 20 are also right-to-work states, as labor force flexibility is highly sought after when a business seeks a location...

California’s enduring place of perpetual decline continues in this year’s ranking. Once the most attractive business environment, the Golden State appears to slip deeper into the ninth circle of business hell. The economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms. And its status as the most ruinously contentious place to operate remains undisturbed in eight years. Its unemployment rate, at 10.9 percent, is higher than every other state except Nevada and Rhode Island. With 12 percent of America’s population, California has one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Each year, the evidence that businesses are leaving California or avoid locating there because of the high cost of doing business due to excessive state taxes and stringent regulations, grows. (See “Eastward Ho!”) According to Spectrum Locations Consultants, 254 California companies moved some or all of their work and jobs out of state in 2011, an increase of 26 percent over the previous year and five times as many as in 2009.

The following is a representative sample of comments from participating CEOs:

• California is the worst! They are doing everything possible to drive a business out of their state. If it were not for the climate, they would have lost half their population.
• California regulations, taxes and costs will leave only tech, life sciences and entertainment as viable. If you aren’t an elitist, no room here for the middle or working classes.
• California treats business owners like criminals. California has different overtime policies for its own employees vs. private sector.
• California’s labor regulation is a job killer. We will be moving our business out of the state, which will lose hundreds of jobs simply due to the poor regulatory environment.
• California should secede from the union—it is like doing business in a foreign country, it has its own exchange rate, and its regulation is crazy.

Although Gov. Jerry Brown deserves credit for some spending cuts, his proposed budget promises more out-of-control spending financed with higher personal income taxes. It’s little wonder that most Silicon Valley CEOs say they won’t expand in California because of high taxes and burdensome regulation. Intel long ago moved its plants to Nevada, and Cisco, Google and others have located their server farms to places like Utah, Arizona and Oregon. California still ranks first in technology, agriculture and entertainment, but even this advantage in time can be undermined.

 You can't strangle the goose that lays the golden eggs and expect it to keep laying them.

I Was Paid A Strong Compliment Today

It's a fun time of year for those of us who teach high school, and especially for those of us who teach a lot of seniors.  I enjoy hearing where my students will be going to school next year--I've got a few Cal Polys already!--and it's a treat to watch them prepare for their first steps away from home, steps that are simultaneously tentative and affirmative.  Part of me is envious about the journey they're about to embark on, and part of me wouldn't go through that again for all the tea in China!

We have a very strong AVID program at our school, and one of the annual May events is a lunchtime "dessert social" put on by the AVID students.  The junior AVID students host it while the teachers and the senior AVID students are the guests.  Ice cream, cookies, cakes, pies, brownies--it's a horrible meal but a great lunch!  Anyway, spread out on the tables were pictures of the graduating AVID seniors along with where they're going to college, what they plan on majoring in, etc.  I had taught so many of them!  What a nice opportunity to say good-bye to them if I don't get to see them before graduation.

At this lunch each year a few teachers are honored for the impact they had on the graduating seniors, and what a shock it was for me to hear my name called!  Let's be honest, math teachers aren't usually the teachers kids think of when they're asked who had an impact on them.  But there I was, and one of my current stats students was talking about what kind of teacher I am.  One thing she said that really struck home for me--I'll paraphrase as best I can:

He won't move on until everyone understands.  When he sees that "deer in the headlights" look, he'll stop and try something else until we understand.  If he didn't do that, I think I'd have had that look all year long.  And he doesn't just teach us math, he tries to teach us life lessons.

What better compliment could a teacher ask for?

The President's Screw-ups

He was supposed to be the post-racial, "not red America or blue America but the United States of America" guy.  It hasn't quite turned out that way, has it?

OBAMA’S NOT-SO-HOT DATE WITH WALL STREET:

[N]egotiations over the implementation of the new Dodd-Frank financial regulations had made large Wall Street institutions, chiefly banks, wary of open war with the White House. “Most of them are scared stiff of the president,” a top Romney bundler on Wall Street told me recently. “Including the ones on our side.”
But by the beginning of the year, it had also become obvious to many on Wall Street that Obama’s campaign was going to take a populist turn. Some bankers believed that the administration’s strategy was to talk tough in public and play damage control in private, and they were sick of playing along.
One day in late October, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, slipped into the Regency Hotel in New York and walked up to a second-floor meeting room reserved by his aides. More than 20 of Obama’s top donors and fund-raisers, many of them from the financial industry, sat in leather chairs around a granite conference table.
Messina told them he had a problem: New York City and its suburbs, Obama’s top source of money in 2008, were behind quota. He needed their help bringing the financial community back on board.
For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration, some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators.
Messina politely pushed back. It’s not the president’s fault that Americans are still upset with Wall Street, he told them, and given the public’s mood, the administration’s rhetoric had been notably restrained.
One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich?

As Orrin Judd writes, that’s from the New York Times, not the Onion. (Though admittedly sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart.)

But hey, what could go wrong with such a speech? Other than America’s class warrior-in-chief might use soothing, diplomatic language that suggests getting opponents’ faces and punching back twice as hard? Or these earlier examples of the president’s pro-business rhetoric:

Here’s Barack Obama on the campaign trail, in February of 2008:

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

There’s this quote from an attorney who deposed Chrysler’s president in May of 2009:

“It became clear to us that Chrysler does not see the wisdom of terminating 25 percent of its dealers… It really wasn’t Chrysler’s decision. They are under enormous pressure from the President’s automotive task force.”

“My administration,” the president told bank CEOs in April of 2009, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
Obama as quoted by the New York Times in March of 2009 on AIG bonuses:

“I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I’m angry,” Mr. Obama said, his voice reaching a peak seven days after learning of the bonuses given to employees of the American International Group. “What I want to do, though, is channel our anger in a constructive way.”

Obama during the BP oil spill:

“I was down there a month ago, before most of these talkin’ heads were even paying attention to the gulf. A month ago…I was meeting with fishermen down there, standin’ in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be. and I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminare, we talk to these folks because they potentially…have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

Obama in April of 2010, in the middle of a speech on Wall Street “reform” blurted out, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
In June of 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted this telling passage in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

That’s the pro-business president you want giving a “healing speech about class and inequality,” and urging “an end to attacks on the rich.”
Today at the Washington Post, former GWB speechwriter Michael Gerson notes that “The brand of the Obama reelection campaign, so far, is ruthlessness:”

Obama’s agenda, strategy and rhetoric are now solidly blue — perhaps for sound political reasons. But Obama’s talent for inspiration was the single most interesting thing about him as a politician. Without that aspiration, what is left of his appeal? This is the reason his Ohio speech seemed so boring, particularly in comparison to his speeches four years ago. There was little that couldn’t be said by any liberal politician, at any time. Obama has lost more than a campaign talking point; he has lost one of the main reasons for his rise.
What principle or purpose unites Obama’s initial campaign with his current reelection effort? There is little obvious continuity — apart from one, unchanging commitment. The cause that has outlasted hope and change is Obama himself.
There have always been two parts of Obama’s political persona, both of which were essential to his rapid advancement. There is the Hyde Park Obama, lecturing on constitutional law, quoting Reinhold Niebuhr and transcending old political divisions. There is also the South Side Obama, who rose in Chicago politics by doing what it takes.
This is not unusual. All politicians believe that their tenacity and competitiveness are servants to their idealism. But as the Hyde Park Obama fades, the South Side Obama becomes less appealing.
All of the atmospheric elements of politics — unity, bipartisanship and common purpose — are significantly worse than four years ago. This is not all Obama’s fault. But he is choosing — in a campaign so nasty, so early — to make it worse. At some point, ruthlessness just leaves ruins.

To paraphrase Peter Arnett, Obama apparently believes it’s necessary to destroy the country in order to save it.
RELATED: Charles Krauthammer on the “Divider-in-Chief.”

I don't usually copy someone's entire post on my blog, but I want all this information to be available even if the Instapundit site, from which the above comes, ever goes away.

Happy VE Day

It's been 67 years....

To The (College) Class of 2012

This is so entertaining it's painful:

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.

No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern from West Point. She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which she kept a bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes brilliantly and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now she's in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

If you're like that intern, please feel free to feel sorry for yourself. Just remember she doesn't.

You voted for him, I didn't.  Are you so unwilling to admit you made a mistake that you'll double down on that mistake this November?  I hope not.  I want you to get a job.

(OK, this post is a little cynical--but not much!)

Do Unions Care About All Teachers, Or Only Some?

I believe this anecdote is typical and serves to answer the question:

The Clark County School District said layoffs are likely to happen after some 18,000 teachers won arbitration for pay raises.

On Wednesday, the district said the ruling will result in paying salary increases to teachers for this school year and the next despite a deepening budget deficit.

CCSD said a budget reassessment will move forward and is slated to be presented May 16. The reassessment may reveal how many jobs the district will be forced to eliminate after the pay raises, CCSD indicated.

If you're a newbie, you're just meat.  You don't count.  You're just a source of union dues, and nothing more.

The RIFing Season

March 15th is the date by which districts in California must notify teachers who could potentially be laid off, and they must give definite layoff notices by May 15th.  Unfortunately the "May revise", the springtime "report card" of the state budget, doesn't happen until after May 15th, so districts must always prepare for the worst case scenario--and have no doubt, this year will be a worst case scenario for the state budget.  What's the impact?

In a survey of 230 school districts, the state Legislative Analyst's Office found that roughly 75% of teachers who received layoff warnings were either never laid off or laid off and called back to work, according to a 27-page report that recommended changes in the layoff process.

That left, however, some 32,000 teachers who did lose their jobs over the past three years, 11% of the state's teacher workforce.

Districts say they have little choice but to overestimate the number of layoffs because state-mandated deadlines in the budgeting process leave them in financial limbo until late in the school year.

I wonder how many thousands of dollars our district had to spend on just substitutes for all the pink-slipped teachers who exercised their right to attend the layoff hearings in person.  Add in the cost of the administrative law judge, and of course all the work of the district personnel to analyze the budget situation and identify the several hundred teachers to be given layoff notices, and one begins to wonder if there isn't a better way of doing this.

Cupcakes!

One of the reasons I'm a conservative, with strong libertarian leanings, is that I understand human nature.  I know that for some people, especially do-gooders, the urge to tell other people how to live is just too strong to overcome.  I've quoted Daniel Webster on this blog several times:

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”

Keep that in mind as you read about cupcakes:

Bake sales, the calorie-laden standby cash-strapped classrooms, PTAs and booster clubs rely on, will be outlawed from public schools as of Aug. 1 as part of new no-nonsense nutrition standards, forcing fundraisers back to the blackboard to cook up alternative ways to raise money for kids.

At a minimum, the nosh clampdown targets so-called “competitive” foods — those sold or served during the school day in hallways, cafeterias, stores and vending machines outside the regular lunch program, including bake sales, holiday parties and treats dished out to reward academic achievement. But state officials are pushing schools to expand the ban 24/7 to include evening, weekend and community events such as banquets, door-to-door candy sales and football games.

Is this really the type of society in which you want to live?

Update, 5/9/12:  Thankfully there are a few sane people in Massachusetts' legislature:

State lawmakers overturned a controversial ban on school bake sales this afternoon after a fierce public outcry over school nutrition guidelines that also prohibited pizza, white bread and 2 percent milk.

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve seen in my career,” state Rep. Cory Atkins (D-Concord), moments after the House unanimously voted to ease the statewide cupcake crackdown. “Talk about hitting the nerve of government reaching far into people’s lives"...

The ban passed as an amendment to the House’s supplemental budget. It still has to pass the Senate and be signed by Gov. Deval Patrick.

Makes you wonder why they passed it in the first place.

Pantywaste Whiners

Things must be pretty good if this is all these overly-sensitive students have to complain about:

The outreach of Badgers Against Racism on campus Friday raised the profile of the group’s issue behind the Mifflin Street Block Party’s unofficial “Cinco de Mifflin” theme, but it did not stop a number of students from wearing costumes that played on Mexican stereotypes.

Around 30 participants held “Ask me about Cinco de Mifflin” signs, played music and gave out T-shirts and fliers Friday seeking to spread the newly formed student group’s message of cross-cultural sensitivity and understanding.

But some Mifflin attendees prominently displayed the kind of costumes the group spoke out against at Saturday’s block party, dressing in sombreros and ponchos or wearing “Cinco de Mifflin”-themed shirts.

For BAR member CJ Rios, these outfits can be “hurtful,” no matter how innocent their intent.

I am very serious here.  CJ Rios, allow me, who has been compared to Rafiki in The Lion King, to share some advice and wisdom with you:  buck up.

Another Former Student Of Mine In The News

From the major Sacramento newspaper:

Mweluke Kyumba was the most dapper student at American River College on Friday afternoon, donning a black vest and tie over his satin blue shirt while other students welcomed the sunny weather with shorts and tees.

It was a sign of just how seriously Kyumba, 22, takes his ballroom dancing class. At first, it was just a recreational course, but after his fourth time around, dancing has become his life, he says.

There are few subject areas at community colleges where students can repeat classes, but many do so with arts and physical education courses under the mantra that practice makes perfect.

That soon could change.

The article is about a proposal that would ban students from repeating courses unless they've previously earned a less-than-satisfactory grade in the course.

Mweluke was always dapper. 

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/07/4470592/community-colleges-look-to-save.html#mi_rss=Top%20Stories#storylink=cpy

The Theory's Almost Dead When They're Reduced To Blaming Ancient Global Warming On...

...you won't believe it, but some scientists are now blaming it on dinosaur farts:

The team calculated the animals would have collectively produced more than 520m tons of methane a year - more than all today's modern sources put together.

It is thought these huge amounts could easily have been enough to warm the planet.

It is even possible that the climate change was so catastrophic that it caused the dinosaurs eventual demise.

The High Cost of Affirmative Action

So-called reverse discrimination is a high enough cost, penalizing innocent students merely because people with their same skin color, a long time ago, did things of which we today are rightly not proud.  A utilitarian could conceivably argue, though, that at least the recipient of affirmative action wins out--but that might not be the case, either:

A major study, led by Rutgers-Newark psychology professor Kent D. Harber, indicates that public school teachers under-challenge minority students by providing them more positive feedback than they give to white students, for work of equal merit. The study, which is currently available online in the Journal of Educational Psychology (JEP), involved 113 white middle school and high school teachers in two public school districts located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area, one middle class and white, and the other more working class and racially mixed.

Teachers read and commented on a poorly written essay which they believed was composed by a student in a writing class. Some teachers thought the student was black, some thought the student was Latino, and some thought that the student was white. Teachers believed that their feedback would be sent directly to the student, in order to see how the student would benefit from their comments and advice.

In fact, there was no actual student, and the poorly written essay was developed by Harber and his team. The real purpose was to see how teachers would respond to subpar work due to the race of the student who composed it. As Harber and his team predicted, the teachers displayed a "positive feedback bias," providing more praise and less criticism if they thought the essay was written by a minority student than by a white student.

But we need to encourage the poor babies, say the paternalists among us. Does it work?

"The social implications of these results are important; many minority students might not be getting input from instructors that stimulates intellectual growth and fosters achievement," notes Harber. "Some education scholars believe that minorities under-perform because they are insufficiently challenged -- the 'bigotry of lowered expectations,' in popular parlance," he explains. "The JEP study indicates one important way that this insufficient challenge might occur: in positively biased feedback," according to Harber.

When you set the bar low, people don't jump high.

The Earth Isn't Done Just Yet

QUANTIFYING THE DEATH SPIRAL OF CLIMATE SCIENCE: “In 2008, James Hansen declared that we were at a tipping point due to ice loss at both poles which was going to decimate life on the planet…Since the same date in 2008, Arctic ice has increased by more than 15%.”

link

I Guess Murdering Thousands Is OK

Have we really become sheep like this?

Cheryl Bormann, counsel for defendant Walid bin Attash, attended the arraignment Saturday dressed in a hijab, apparently because her client insisted on it. She further requested that the court order other women to follow that example so that the defendants do not have to avert their eyes "for fear of committing a sin under their faith." 

Looking at a woman is a sin, helping people fly airplanes into buildings is not.  Got it.

They Can't Bear To Have Some Succeed

They'll enforce equality by not allowing some to succeed:

The Assembly passed a bill Thursday which would require school districts to dumb down the successful Gifted And Talented Education program in public schools, in order to allow “children of color” into the program.

Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield, D-Los Angeles, the author of this bill, said Thursday that “children of color” are not fairly represented in GATE programs across the state.

Blumenfield and supporters must assume that “children of color” are not capable of testing into the GATE program, and need the assistance of another affirmative action program.

But the GATE program is a meritocratic program, in which students participate entirely on the basis of merit, rather than by birth or privilege, or because of skin color or socioeconomic status. There are obviously many children of all races and genders in the GATE program...

 “The people behind the bill don’t want to have to raise the performance of kids, and instead, want to do the easy thing of reducing requirements,” said Lance Izumi, director of education at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank. “And the reason they don’t want to do the heavy lifting is because the successful methods go against liberal orthodoxy–more choice for parents, and more individualized delivery of education.”

Another Obama Failure

Has this man done anything right?  I note that almost 3 1/2 years into his presidency the Guantanamo Bay prison is still open; wasn't closing it the very first executive order he signed?  And after trying to get the 9/11 criminals tried in civilian court--in Manhattan, of all places--now they're going to be tried in military tribunals, just like the evil Bush was going to do all along?  Oh, but the tribunals are fair now, they were going to be kangaroo courts under Bush.  Of course they were.

As the United States restarts its effort to prosecute — and ultimately execute — five detainees accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, it has fallen to Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins both to prove them guilty and to show the world that the tribunal system is now legitimate.  (emphasis mine--Darren)

Nope, no bias at the New York Times....

Diversity Training

If there is an article that is any clearer than this one is about the failure of so-called diversity training, I'd love to read it:

Our friend Suzanne Lucas, the Evil HR Lady, has kicked up quite a storm with her recent piece citing research that questions the effectiveness of diversity training. Maybe it’s the provocative title: Why you should stop attending diversity training.

Or maybe it’s the tagline from the Peter Bergman article from Psychology Today that Suzanne quotes: “Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it.”

Or maybe the suggestions she makes for alternatives to diversity training are rubbing people the wrong way. She thinks that everyone should be treated “nicely and fairly” and that individuals in the workplace should not “look to be offended.

Don’t believe that anyone would actually take offense at those suggestions? Read the comments on Suzanne’s piece. Apparently, the objectives of diversity training are so noble that the actual results delivered don’t matter. To question diversity training is to be opposed to diversity itself, even though both Bergman and Lucas provide suggestions for what they believe would be more effective ways of optimizing communication and understanding within a diverse workforce.

Okay, so assuming that diversity training must exist, I have a couple of ideas for how it might be improved.

Two of his suggestions for improving it are "no double-standards" and "don't invent new ways for people to be offended."  I especially loved this point:

The main class had an exercise in which people wrote down every “fact” they could think of  related to various ethnicities and religions and the two genders. These were written on huge post-it notes that were then stuck on to people representing the various groups. It was a great exercise. Seeing these people covered with these big sheets of paper — some saying good things about them; some, bad — really drove the point home that it’s almost impossible to value people as individuals if we insist on labeling them. (boldface mine--Darren)

I think that's the point, though--the diversophiles don't want us to see people as individuals. Individuals think for themselves, and when we're trying to control people, that's not a desired outcome.

Hate-speech, or Anti-Christian Bias?

A Canadian high school student was suspended for a week because wore a t-shirt promoting his Christian beliefs and he was told if he wears it again – he could be suspended for the remainder of the school year.

William Swinimer, a student at Forest Heights Community School in Nova Scotia, was punished for wearing a shirt that read, “Life is wasted without Jesus.” The shirt is a reference to a passage of Scripture from the New Testament.

Swinimer told Fox News that he was told the shirt was a form of “hate talk.”

“I’ve been told by my principal that it is hate talk and is disrespectful to other people’s religions,” Swinimer said. “She said it (the shirt) cannot be in school because people would get offended.”

Nancy Pynch-Worthylake, the school board superintendent, told The Canadian Press that the wording on the shirt is “problematic.”

“If I have an expression that says, ‘My life is enhanced with Jesus,’ then there’s no issue with that, everybody is able to quickly understand that that’s my opinion about my own belief,” she told the newspaper. “If the shirt were to say, ‘Without Jesus, your life is a complete waste,’ then that’s clear that it is an opinion aimed at somebody else’s belief.”  link

Let's ignore for a moment that this occurred in Canada. Is the language really "hate speech" of the type that should be banned? 

You think they'd ban a similar shirt mentioning Allah instead of Jesus?  I don't.

I Never Thought About It Like This Before

Each year when I get a new pair of glasses, I put my old pair in the glove box of my car and take the old glove box pair and donate them.  I don't pat myself on the back for doing this, or go have an ice cream sundae to reward my own generosity, it's just something that I thought about once for maybe 3 seconds and then just did without any further thought.

And it's a silly thing to do, when you actually think about it:

I’ve long since had my myopia surgically corrected -- the proverbial miracle of modern medicine -- and now stash cheap over-the-counter reading glasses in every room of my house. Still, I remember what it was like to need glasses and not be able to get them. So I sympathize with charities that collect eyeglasses to distribute to people who can’t otherwise afford them.

But such efforts turn out to be a terrible waste, for reasons that are completely logical once you think about them. The case of recycled eyeglasses illustrates how easy it is to fool ourselves when we think about thrift, waste and charity. We overestimate the importance of the physical things we can see and forget about the real costs of time and attention, as well as the importance of intangible values like aesthetics to the people we’re trying to help.

In a paper published in March in the journal Optometry and Vision Science, four researchers compare the full costs of delivering used glasses to the costs of instead delivering ready-made glasses in standard powers (like my drugstore readers, but for myopia as well). The authors find that recycled glasses cost nearly twice as much per usable pair.

Here's the kicker:

Recycling old glasses makes people feel generous and thrifty. They believe they’re helping people and saving money. They think the glasses they donate are “free,” because they don’t consider all the hidden costs of sorting and shipping them. And they don’t realize just how cheap manufacturing new glasses has become. If they really wanted to help people see, they’d send money. Unlike leftovers, it’s guaranteed to fit.

I think the author missed one key point, and that's that that donators "believe they're helping people and saving money" at no additional cost to themselves.  Now that I know that I'm not really helping anyone, I have to consider if it's better just to throw my old specs out--especially considering that I have a funky prescription.