Category Archives: America
A town hall meeting about building a mosque, but residents can’t talk about Islam or Muslims
BERNARDS TOWNSHIP, N.J. — A lawsuit has been filed challenging a settlement agreement that bans residents in a New Jersey town from making remarks about Islam or Muslims during an upcoming public hearing centering on the forthcoming construction of a mosque.
The Thomas More Law Center has filed suit on behalf of a family that lives within 200 feet from where the mosque is expected to be built in Bernards Township.
Christopher and Loretta Quick would like to speak during the Aug. 8 hearing about the various aspects of Islamic life and worship that might affect them as neighbors, but are prohibited from doing so due to city’s acceptance of a settlement agreement that states, “No commentary regarding Islam or Muslims will be permitted” during the event.
“Despite their desire to speak at the special meeting regarding the construction of the Islamic mosque and relevant Muslim worship practices (among other factors related to the impact on their home), plaintiffs are foreclosed from doing so by the settlement agreement based solely upon the content of their speech,” the lawsuit states.
It contends that by banning speech on Islam alone, the township is showing favoritism toward the Islamic religion since the prohibition doesn’t apply to other religions.
“No religion other than Islam is protected … under the settlement agreement. For example, speakers at the hearing are free, under the settlement agreement, to disparage, criticize, and otherwise comment on Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other religion—except Islam,” the complaint notes.
The Quicks are asking the court to declare the settlement agreement unconstitutional and to issue an injunction preventing its enforcement.
Hiring locals due to ‘shortage’ of foreign labour
Businesses in Bar Harbor, Maine are turning to locals to make up for a shortage of foreign guest workers that normally fill summer jobs in the bustling seaside resort town.
Because the H-2B visa program has already reached its annual quota, Bar Harbor’s hotels, restaurants and shops can’t bring in any more foreign workers for the rest of the busy summer tourist season. Like hundreds of similar coastal resort towns, Bar Harbor has for many years depended on the H-2B visas for temporary workers. The program allows non-agricultural companies to bring in foreign labor if they are unable to find suitable employees domestically.
[…]
The annual limit for H-2B visas is set at 66,000, half for the winter season and half for the summer. In the past, workers who had previously come to the U.S. on H-2B visas were given a “returning worker” exemption and not counted against the cap. Congress did not include the returning worker provision in this year’s authorization, but instead gave Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly the power to raise the limit by as many as 70,000 extra visas for the summer.
Several lawmakers are pressuring the Trump administration to authorize more H-2B visas, and DHS is expected to announce a higher cap this month. Independent Maine Sen. Angus King has introduced legislation that would restore the returning worker rule.
In the meantime, Bar Harbor’s businesses are scrambling to find locals to pick up the slack.
Incredible…
If buttercups buzz’d after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.
– The World Turned Upside Down
To give credit where due…
… good on Trump for two things recently: rolling back the scope of America’s actions in Syria (moving away from toppling the Assad regime as the supreme goal) and trolling the progs and neo-cucks with his Twitter-announced ban on transgendered serving in the military. It’s most revealing to once again see not only progs losing it over Trump’s tweet, but also the neo-cons, and crunchy con bearded Orthodox hipster Rod Dreher.
And we know that no other Republican would have dared gone there.
But Trump did.
Moar of this, please.
Cyborgs, or the Mark of the Beast; take your pick…
What some have warned us about is coming to pass:
Wisconsin company offers microchip implants to employees
Company says it is first in United States to offer the technology to staff
A Wisconsin vending machine company is offering its employees a chance to have a microchip implanted in their hands that they could use to buy snacks, log in to computers or use the copy machine.
About 50 employees at Three Square Market have agreed to the optional implant of the chips, which are the approximate size and shape of a grain of rice, said Tony Danna, vice president of international sales at the River Falls-based company.
The company, which employs 85, said it was the first in the United States to offer staff the technology which is similar to that used by contactless credit cards and chips used to identify pets.
The implants made by Sweden’s BioHax International are part of a long-term test aimed to see if the radio-frequency identification chips could have broader commercial applications, Danna said.
“We’ve done the research and we’re pretty well educated about this,” Danna said in an interview.
The company is holding an Aug. 1 “chip party” where employees will have the device inserted between their forefinger and thumb using a syringe-like instrument.
The RFID chips use electromagnetic fields to communicate and can be read at a distance of no more than six inches (15 centimetres), Danna said.
Critics of using chips in humans include Nevada State Senator Becky Harris, who in February introduced legislation that would make forced installation of microchips illegal.
“It is possible to hack the information that is contained within the chips,” Harris told a state Senate judiciary committee meeting at the time.
The company’s CEO Todd Westby in a statement predicted the technology could become popular among companies.
“Eventually, this technology will become standardized allowing you to use this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc.,” he said.
Heaven help us…
Nikki Haley either finds non-Christian religious sites ‘holy’, or feels the need to pretend she does, while denigrating the cultural heritage of the country in which she was born, rather than treasuring it
I know it’s eleven days after this repost, but I want to expand on it.
Something I noticed in the quote below the 2014 YouTube clip linked in the previous post:
Haley was born as Nimrata Nikki Randhawain in Bamberg, South Carolina, US, on January 20, 1972, to an Indian Sikh family. Her parents, Ajit Singh Randhawa and Raj Kaur Randhawa, are immigrants from Amritsar District.
[…]
Haley was born and raised as a Sikh. On September 6, 1996, she married Michael Haley in both a Methodist church ceremony and in a Sikh gurdwara. Haley identifies herself today as a Christian. She said, “We converted to Christianity, but it was not political. It was out of the fact that when you change, when you grew up, you need more, and when you don’t understand the language.”
However, she said she was very proud of her upbringing, and very proud that she grew up in that environment. She said, “Christianity spoke to me that I could understand it. But, when you come to a holy place, you feel it.”
So, though ostensibly a Christian and not a Sikh now, she nevertheless feels overcome with a sense of the ‘holiness’ of the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, India.
This shows she either has a poor understanding of her Christian faith (a Christian should truly feel no sense of divinity or holiness in a heathen temple); or her Christian faith isn’t genuine and she’s still a Sikh in her heart; or maybe she just doesn’t give a shit about religion at all but feels compelled to act as though she does when visiting her ancestral homeland, with the cameras rolling.
Not sure which of those three alternatives is the worst; they’re all bad, really.
After this visit, came the Dylann Roof massacre, and Haley felt the need to jump on the bandwagon to remove the Confederate flag at the South Carolina State Legislature grounds.
So, in the video she has real or fake emotion on full display, either embracing or paying lip service to the heathen religion which she supposedly left, but she can’t understand or relate to the heritage of the people where she was actually born and raised, South Carolina.
And so like all the other converged neo-cucks, she embraced taking down the Confederate flag.
And now, she’s among the warmongering chickenhawks trying to pressure Trump into neo-con warmongering.
Not very Christian, that, though it is in line with neo-cuck evanjellyfish Churchianity, I suppose.
It’s also in line with her Punjabi, Sikh heritage, which surely means more to her.
