Offensive

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Three dentists in North Carolina dressed up in traditional clothing of an American Indian, a Japanese, and a Scot in order to run an advertisement under the catchphrase “Everyone smiles in the same language!”

Oh, the hoo-raw.  SJWs crawled out through their baseboard holes on this one, proclaiming the ad to be “ignorant and offensive” and racist.

No.  What’s ignorant and offensive is the naked racism of manufacturing a beef where there is none for the sole purpose of supporting the professional victim industry.

Dismantling?

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Northern Korea has announced that it will dismantle “its nuclear test site” sometime between 23 and 25 May.  It’s one of several sites, though, not its only one.

Still, it’s a hopeful move, to be sure.

On the other hand, it also could be a disingenuous con job.  Northern Korea has lied before about dismantling its nuclear facilities; it also has dismantled and then rebuilt nuclear facilities.  In the present case, the facility Baby Kim is purporting to dismantle is the same site that People’s Republic of China researchers have indicated is already ruined by earthquakes and collapses from northern Korea’s latest nuclear bomb test.  That test generated an explosion far greater than the mountain under which the test occurred could handle.

We’ll see.

An Education Failure

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A Miami-Dade police officer’s 14-year-old daughter dissed her teacher at Pinecrest Cove Preparatory Academy charter school, and her father was called to the school.  The video at the link shows the ensuing abuse: the “father” whipped his daughter with his belt, slugged her, yanked her hair.  Fortunately, no serious physical damage appears to have been done, but I have to wonder about the emotional damage, I have to wonder about the quality of her home life, and I have to wonder whether that life might have been a factor in her relationship with her teacher.

But that’s not what the only thing wrong here (the cop has been charged with a felony child abuse beef, so there may be a measure of justice coming on that front).

Look at the video carefully.  The abuse occurs in the school’s office with two school employees alternately watching and going about their business (one is at the bottom of the video imagery; she’s not easy to see).  They didn’t lift a finger to intervene, they didn’t say a word in intervention.  The employee plainly visible just goes on about her job, if not her duty; the other employee is similarly uninvolved.  The reporter narrating the scene says this woman was pregnant and feared for her baby’s welfare as well as the 14-year-old; maybe that’s an excuse.  But she waited until the cop had left before she called any authority or otherwise reported the beating.  The reporter didn’t say anything about the other woman, who was similarly too timid to act, but without an apparent excuse for her avoidance.

This…timidity…gives charter schools a bad name.  And it’s despicable in its own right.

Felons and Voting

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In general, felons have no voting rights—it’s part of their punishment for having committed their crimes.  There also are growing movements to restore voting rights to felons—they are, after all, US citizens.  (I’m eliding here felons who aren’t citizens; they have no voting rights to restore.)

It’s a debate worth having, but a couple of misunderstandings need to be cleared up first.  These misunderstandings are illustrated in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

As the midterm elections draw closer, Dameon Stackhouse is eager to cast a ballot, but he can’t under New Jersey law because he remains on parole after more than a decade behind bars for second-degree robbery.

If he’s on parole, he’s still serving his punishment for his crime; he’s only entered a new stage of that punishment.  With his punishment still in progress, he shouldn’t get his right to vote back.  On successful completion of his parole—successful completion of the punishment society has said is required for his crime—then it’s worth seriously considering reenfranchising him and others in similar situations.

And this, from Stackhouse:

We have no say [without a right to vote].  This is one of the worst things you can do to a citizen.

No, Stackhouse did this to himself with his decision to commit his crime; no one else did this to him as a citizen.  His apparent inability to accept responsibility for the outcomes he created with his misbehavior in addition to the misbehavior itself does not suggest that his rehabilitation is being entirely successful.

I am spring-loaded to restore the franchise to those who’ve successfully completed their punishment—for the vast majority of crimes, there should be an endpoint to the punishment short of death, whether by execution or old age.  But the punishment must be completed before reenfranchisement.

It’s Not Your Company

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Seattle wants to charge a head tax on businesses operating in the city, a tax whose amount would be just what it sounds like—a tax based on the number of hours worked by each employee the business has on its payroll.

In response to the proposal, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, paused construction on a 17-story office tower in downtown Seattle.

In response to Amazon, the Left in Seattle, spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union-backed activist gang—Working Washington—wants Amazon charged with a felony.

Amazon, after all, doesn’t belong to its investors, and it’s not run by Bezos.  No, the activists, the SEIU, and the city’s governing machine that wants the tax, all insist that Amazon is public property, and it must do what they demand, not what its owners want.

Because those owners don’t own that.  They only hold it in conditional fee from these city Know Betters.

Is Seattle as much a harbinger of future Progressive-Democrat demands as is Jerry Brown’s California?

Update: The Seattle City Council on Tuesday voted 9-0 to impose the head tax, although rather than being based on hours worked per employee, it’s a flat head tax: $275 per employee per year.