Archive for 2015

BECAUSE #TOLERANCE!:  Charles C.W. Cooke on the Intolerant Jeweler Who Harbored an Impure Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage. Oh, the irony is deep on this one.  A Canadian jeweler who opposed same-sex marriage nonetheless makes wedding bands for a lesbian couple.  The lesbian couple then demanded their money back, claiming the jeweler’s thoughts tainted their rings.

Geez, either you do or you don’t want service.  You cannot, however, demand agreement, even in Canada.

MICHELLE MALKIN: Entrepreneurs Are Not “Lottery Winners.”

For radical progressives, life is a Powerball drawing. Success is random. Economic achievement is something to be rectified and redistributed to assuage guilt. Only those who take money, not those who make it by offering goods and services people want and need, act in the public interest. Those who seek financial enrichment for the fruits of their labor are cast as rapacious hoarders in Obama World — and so are the private investors who support them.

Wealth-shaming is a recurrent leitmotif in the Obama administration’s gospel of government dependency.

In 2010, the president proclaimed, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

Maybe he was thinking of Hillary. Plus:

The progressives’ government-built-that ethos is anathema to our Founding Fathers’ first principles. They understood that the ability of brilliant, ambitious individuals to reap private rewards for inventions and improvements benefited the public good. This revolutionary idea is a hallmark of American exceptionalism and entrepreneurship. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the doctrine of enlightened “self-interest rightly understood” was a part of America’s DNA from its founding. “You may trace it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all they say. It is as often asserted by the poor man as by the rich,” de Tocqueville wrote.

Francis Grund, a contemporary of de Tocqueville’s, also noted firsthand America’s insatiable willingness to work. “Active occupation is not only the principal source of their happiness, and the foundation of their natural greatness, but they are absolutely wretched without it. …Business is the very soul of an American,” he wrote.

Here is the marvel Obama and his command-and-control cronies fail to comprehend: From the Industrial Age to the Internet Age, the concentric circles of American innovation in the free marketplace are infinite. This miracle repeats itself millions of times a day through the voluntary interactions, exchanges and business partnerships of creative Americans and their clients, consumers and investors. No federal Department of Innovation or Ten-Point White House Action Plan for Progress can lay claim to the boundless synergies of these profit-earning capitalists.

No, but those government programs produce superior opportunities for graft.

I USED TO LOVE MY ‘BERRY:  The Inside Story of How the iPhone Crippled BlackBerry.

If the iPhone gained traction, RIM’s senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM’s core business customers valued BlackBerry’s secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.”

The iPhone’s popularity with consumers was illogical to rivals such as RIM, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc. The phone’s battery lasted less than eight hours, it operated on an older, slower second-generation network, and, as Mr. Lazaridis predicted, music, video and other downloads strained AT&T’s network. RIM now faced an adversary it didn’t understand.

“By all rights the product should have failed, but it did not,” said David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer. To Mr. Yach and other senior RIM executives, Apple changed the competitive landscape by shifting the raison d’être of smartphones from something that was functional to a product that was beautiful.

“I learned that beauty matters….RIM was caught incredulous that people wanted to buy this thing,” Mr. Yach says.

For me, moving to the iPhone wasn’t about aesthetics at all.  I loved my ‘Berry’s actual keyboard and its battery, which lasted a full 24 hours. Heck, I even loved my old trackball. But every time I wanted to quickly look something up on the internet, I felt like I was swimming in molasses, it was so freaking slow. So I converted to iPhone, and I’ve never looked back, because BlackBerry has never been able to offer fast, seamless internet access.

BECAUSE MARXISM HAS GLOBAL SUPPORT: This is the answer to the question Steven Hayward over at Power Line asks: “How is Liberation Theology Still a Thing?”  Liberation theology is a Marxist version of Catholic teaching, which views poverty through the lens of capitalist oppression, much like Black Liberation theology–of which President Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is an adherent–views black poverty as a consequence of white, wealthy capitalist oppression of blacks.  As Hayward observes, yesterday’s front page New York Times story about Pope Francis’s actions to bring liberation theology out of the shadows, a subject I’ve I’ve written about before.  But in typical NYT fashion, the reporter fails to even seriously consider the deep Marxist undertones of liberation theology, much less what the Pope’s embrace of it might portend. The only mention of Marxism comes in this brief passage:

“With the end of the Cold War, he [Francis] began to see that liberation theology was not synonymous with Marxism, as many conservatives had claimed,” said Paul Vallely, author of “Pope Francis: Untying the Knots.” Argentina’s financial crisis in the early years of the 21st century also shaped his views, as he “began to see that economic systems, not just individuals, could be sinful,” Mr. Vallely added.

Since becoming pope, Francis has expressed strong criticism of capitalism, acknowledging that globalization has lifted many people from poverty but saying it has also created great disparities and “condemned many others to hunger.” He has warned, “Without a solution to the problems of the poor, we cannot resolve the problems of the world.”

Notice that liberation theology’s linkage to Marxism is dismissed offhand as a “conservative[] . . . claim.”  Yet in the next breath, the NYT reporter concedes that Pope Francis “has expressed strong criticism of capitalism.”  Hayward is right to ask why liberation theology is “still a thing,” but the answer is that it never stopped being a thing, because the Marxist ideology is alive and well, with powerful apologists or allies (even if not full-fledged adherents) in the Vatican, White House and beyond.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Teacher says she shouldn’t be fired for having sex with student. “A Brooklyn public-school teacher whines in a new lawsuit that she was unfairly fired from her job for bedding her 12-year-old student — even though DNA, videotape, text and financial records pin her to the dirty deed.”

THE SCOURGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE: “Back-to-back winters of historic ice coverage have reversed a 15-year trend of diminishing ice cover on the Great Lakes. The epic ice coverage of the winters of 2013-14 and 2014-15 led to difficult and extended ice-out seasons that hurt the shipping industry and led to a drumbeat for more icebreaking resources. . . . The drumbeat for another heavy icebreaker like the 240-foot Mackinaw started during the winter of 2013-14, when the Great Lakes were as much as 92.6 percent covered in ice. Ice out that year on Lake Superior wasn’t declared until June 6.”

Related: Lake Superior Ice Amazes This Year. “Lake Superior, the largest of the great lakes, froze almost completely this winter, for the first time in years. It was so unexpected 18 ships were trapped in the ice.”

Also: It’s nearly Memorial Day, it snowed in Wisconsin and there’s ice on Lake Superior.

Fallen Angels is just a science-fiction novel, right? Hey, an ice age is “climate change,” too, but I don’t think restricting carbon output is the right response.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Greeley Teacher Katerina Bardos accused of long sexual relationship with middle school pupil. “The Greeley Police Department said the former Brentwood Middle School teacher allegedly had sex with a 13-year-old boy whom she taught in her sixth grade classroom in 2014. Police believe the sexual relationship continued over the course of a year. The teacher is also accused of providing the student with pot.”