90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Sweden’s deputy PM describes the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorist attack as ‘the September 11 accidents’

Sweden's Deputy Prime Minister has come under fire after branding the September 11 terror attacks 'accidents'.

Åsa Romson made the comments during an interview on Tuesday, regarding the recent resignation of Sweden's Minister for Housing and IT after he compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Romson, 44, of coalition partner the Green Party, commended Mehmet Kaplan on his work with young Muslims during 'tough situations like at the 11 September accidents'.

Kaplan, also of the Green Party, resigned Monday after likening Israel's treatment of Palestinians to the persecution of Jews in by the Nazis before and during the Second World War.

Romson said: 'He [Kaplan] has been chairman for Swedish Young Muslims in tough situations like around the September 11 accidents and similar.'

The September 11 attacks, also referred to as 9/11, were the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in modern history.

Islamist terrorist network Al-Qaeda launched four co-ordinated attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, claiming the lives of 2,996 people (including the 19 hijackers).

Shortly after her interview on SVT on Tuesday morning, debate exploded on social networks, with the Deputy PM becoming the top trending topic on Twitter in the Scandinavian nation.

While some online commentators have settled for criticising her comments, others have called for her resignation.

Romson later defended her comment, saying: 'The "accident" [of 9/11] is that we ended up with a very harsh debate on integration and how society grows with different religions side by side, and the discrimination that...

#gunrights

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California Considers Ban on All Gun Dealers

On April 19, a bill that could literally ban all Federal Firearm License holders (FFLs) from doing business in the state of California goes before the State Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection.

The bill–Assembly Bill 2459–is sponsored by Assembly Member Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento). If passed, it would shackle FFLs with four new requirements, the totality of which could simply force gun stores to close their doors.

The NRA-ILA reported the four proposed requirements:

A prohibition on licensee business premises being on a residential property.
A clear statement that localities may impose more restrictive requirements on licensees than those imposed by state law.
A requirement that licensees...

Here’s my question — are intelligent liberals actually ignorant of Islamic history or do they actively attempt to whitewash its extraordinarily long record of military aggression? Over the weekend I read an interesting piece in The Atlantic by Robert Kaplan that makes the case that “Europe” as we understand it was actually “defined by Islam.” In antiquity, Europe was the region that bordered the Mediterranean, including North Africa. As Kaplan notes, Saint Augustine “lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece.” True enough, but then what happened?

The swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force. Since then, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, “all European history has been a great emigration toward the North.”

That’s an interesting way to describe a terrifying jihad that swept aside Middle Eastern and North African Christianity and captured the Iberian Peninsula — as a “swift advance.” There was no mere “emigration” to the North. There was a flight to the North. Then there’s this:

Islam did much more than geographically define Europe, however. Denys Hay, a British historian, explained in a brilliant though obscure book published in 1957, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, that European unity began with the concept (exemplified by the Song of Roland) of a Christendom in “inevitable opposition” to Islam—a concept that culminated in the Crusades. The scholar Edward Said took this point further, writing in his book Orientalism in 1978 that Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and—most crucial—inferior.

So here’s Kaplan’s history of the conflict between Islam and Christian Europe — first there is a morally neutral Islamic “swift advance,” then came the Crusades and a Christian sense of superiority that culminated in colonialism. That fits neatly into a view of the world that sees Muslims as victims and the marauding West as...

Monday, April 18, 2016

Girls With Guns

Two women in IT tell how they are losing their jobs to offshore contractors, and having to train their replacements...

At New York Life, IT employees are training overseas workers to do their jobs. It's a difficult task that takes an emotional toll, and there are odd rules and processes to follow.

The training starts with sessions over the Web with the offshore contractors. Eventually, the IT employees expect to train the contractors in-person.

One IT employee, who is training replacement contractors, said she has been told by management not to ask the contract workers any questions. Even simple queries, like, "Did you have a chance to read this document?" or, "Are you familiar with this technology?" to the contract workers, from India-based Tata Consultancy Services, are not allowed.

"We should have the understanding that [the offshore contractors] have all the skill sets," said this IT employee, whose name cannot be disclosed because of the risk to her job. Asking questions is "like insulting the process."

There's also a regular survey process that seems like a Catch 22 system. As the replacement training moves along, the IT workers have to rate the offshore contractors on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest. If the contractor receives the highest score, the thinking among the employees is it may accelerate their replacement. If the contractor gets a low score, the IT employee may be blamed for providing poor training, which may also accelerate job loss.

"The employees are playing this game, playing defense, trying to figure out what to do," she said.

The IT employees also must be pleasant on the calls with contractors, not just matter-of-fact, but pleasant. The process is anything but that. As this IT employee, a computer science graduate, grappled with the reality of it, she said, "I break down. It's so hurtful."

Meanwhile, the offshore contractor on the calls is beginning to use possessive pronouns, saying "our" or "my" to show he is taking ownership of her job. "It's bad for my heart when I hear that," she said.

There was a time when working in IT was a good job, she said. Back then, there was promise, and computer science was a worthwhile major.

"I've been telling high school students and college students that you should not major in computer science anymore," she said. IT work has "turned into a factory job."

Two female employees were interviewed at the company and both are training their replacements. The interviews were arranged by Sara Blackwell, a Florida attorney who is representing Disney IT workers who were also replaced by offshore workers.

What New York Life is doing is no different than...