The Blog of Record

No, not a joke:

When it comes to hiring staff, there are plenty of legal pitfalls employers need to watch out for these days.

So recruitment agency boss Nicole Mamo was especially careful to ensure her advert for hospital workers did not offend on grounds of race, age or sexual orientation.

However, she hadn’t reckoned on discriminating against a wholly different section of the community – the completely useless.

When she ran the ad past a job centre, she was told she couldn’t ask for ‘reliable’ and ‘hard-working’ applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people.

Mrs Mamo, a divorced mother of two, added: ‘I had to battle to have “must speak English”, which they also said was discriminatory.

You never hear about ridiculous PC tyranny like this in any of the new democracies in Eastern Europe, nor in some third-world hell hole like Russia or Yemen. No, it’s always a declining Western country that, by habit, calls itself a democracy. Usually Britain.

News from Florida:

A chaplain at Hospice by the Sea in Boca Raton has resigned, she says, over a ban on use of the words “God” or “Lord” in public settings.

[The Rev. Mirta] Signorelli said that she and other chaplains were told Feb. 23 to “cease and desist from using God in prayers.”

Signorelli said her supervisor recently singled her out for delivering a spiritual reflection in the chapel that included the word “Lord” and had “a Christian connotation.”

“But that was the 23rd Psalm,” Signorelli said — not, strictly speaking, Christian, as it appears in the Old Testament.

“And I am well aware that there were people from the Jewish tradition in attendance. I didn’t say Jesus or Allah or Jehovah. I used ‘Lord’ and ‘God,’ which I think are politically correct. I think that’s as generic as you can get.”

Signorelli resigned Feb. 25.

She should have said Allah. I bet this would’ve been no problem.

A Los Angeles City College professor called an arts student a “fascist bastard” for speaking against same-sex marriage, told him to “ask God what your grade is”, and threatened to have him expelled when he complained to the administration. The student, Jonathan Lopez, is now suing the L.A. Community College District over religious discrimination.

In addition to financial damages, the suit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeks to strike down a sexual harassment code barring students from uttering “offensive” statements.

Lopez, a Los Angeles resident working toward an associate of arts degree, is described in the suit as a Christian who considers it a religious duty to share his beliefs, particularly with other students.

I wonder if the professor would have called Lopez a fascist bastard if the student were a Muslim.

(Via Interested Participant.)

Race, gender, and sexual orientation quotas are threatening to stifle American charitable giving:

American philanthropy is the envy of the world. Since colonial times, when Benjamin Franklin’s Junto Society, a proto–think tank of public-minded Philadelphia citizens, developed volunteer fire departments and a lending library, Americans have evolved a unique civic culture of giving and entrepreneurial problem solving. From 1995 to 2002, charitable donations as a percentage of GDP were nearly six times higher in the United States than in France and 14 times higher than in Germany. In 2007, America’s charitable giving amounted to $306 billion. No wonder that European universities and arts organizations look first to their American alumni and patrons for support when their government funding dries up.

Yet American generosity is under fire. A growing number of activists and politicians argue that foundations should meet diversity targets in their giving and on their staffs. If foundations fail to diversify “voluntarily,” threaten the race, ethnicity, and gender enforcers, they risk legislation requiring them to do so. In other words, the diversity police, having helped bring on the subprime meltdown through mortgage-lending quotas, now want to fix philanthropy. And instead of rebuffing this power grab, the leaders in the field have rolled over and played dead.

A document by a bunch of bureaucrats trying to justify their pay proposes “strategies for addressing mental health wellbeing in any classroom” and says, “Don’t mark in a red pen (which can be seen as aggressive) – use a different colour.” 

I wonder how people get struck by such ideas. What kind of person does it take to look at a copybook with red marks and think, “We must save the children’s mental health from this naked aggression!”?

National Post:

Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., has hired six students whose jobs as “dialogue facilitators” will involve intervening in conversations among students in dining halls and common rooms to encourage discussion of such social justice issues as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability and social class.

“Ability”. They sure know their PC terminology. But “sexual orientation”? Don’t they know it’s “lifestyle choice” now?

[T]heir activities will also include formal discussion sessions, perhaps after controversial incidents in residence, and open discussions of topical books or movies.

I take it to mean that students won’t be able to just tell the thought cop to take a hike.

[T]he six facilitators will receive full room and board and a stipend for the full-year commitment, and will receive regular training.

Way to spend taxpayer money for a public university.

It is just one of many recent efforts to promote diversity – such as gender-neutral washrooms, prayer space, and halal and kosher food service – at a school that is still smarting from a report on systemic racism two years ago that criticized its “culture of whiteness.”

FINALLY, the real reason. Can you imagine how SCARED a Canadian university gets when it’s hit with a report by an “anti-racism expert” accusing it of “systemic racism”? No wonder they are bending over backwards to show how much they love minorities.

But don’t call the anti-racism diversity warriors fascists. Remember, only conservatives are fascists.

(Via Newsbeat 1.)

The Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s lead “hate speech investigator” hacked a woman’s wireless Internet account to make racist posts under a fake name on a site in order to charge its owner with hate speech (which, of course, is a crime in Canada). The Royal Canadian Mounted Police says there’s nothing it can do.

(Via Newsbeat 1.)

HS Daily Wire has a list of piracy countermeasures available to the shipping industry, and the industry is bending over backwards not to hurt the pirates. There’s no mention of guns or killing the pirates. Instead, here are some of the solutions being offered:

• An “acoustic barrier” created by powerful loudspeakers that emit a disorienting, high-frequency blast.
• Pepper sprays, slippery foam dispensers, or glue guns that shoot a giant glob of sticky goo at intruders (all these are ideas suggested by Dutch military research organization TNO).
• Infrasound — low-frequency noise that is claimed to induce involuntary bowel movements.

Fighting pirates by trying to induce involuntary bowel movements – you can’t make this stuff up. And, sadly, you don’t have to.

(Via Link Collection.)

Dr. Block, a professor of economics, said in a college lecture that there could be biological reasons (causing a gap in productivity) behind the male – female and white – black wage gaps. I’m sure you can imagine what followed.

When even Jesuit colleges have no tolerance for “insensitive” ideas, and complete disdain for free enterprise and private property rights in their economics departments, one can only imagine the situation in the rest of academia.

(Via Division of Labour.)

This “Asian” police officer totally intimidated his bosses at the Metropolitan Police. He threatened them with a law suit to an “employment tribunal” over racial, religious and age discrimination, and they gave him a nice fat settlement.

British cops seem awfully easy to intimidate these days – you just need to be “Asian”. Even if, like this guy, you were born in Uganda. I wonder what his religion is that he says got him discriminated against, because it’s never mentioned. Krishnaism? Could be. No one likes those Hare Krishna guys.

The word “Muslim” seems to be taboo in Britain. It’s “Asian” now. Sure, guys – keep pretending the problem does not exist, and it will go away. Maybe if you don’t call them by their real name, they won’t bomb you again for a while.

Jerry Lewis can say whatever the hell he wants - he’s earned it by being 82, and by being Jerry Lewis. But apologizing? He’s losing my respect.

…Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told.

(Found via Unfair Doctrine.)