Chick-fil-A

‘‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’--Carl Schmitt

GoT: All gunned up for it last night. The denouement is never near as much fun as the first three and a half acts. Still, its final episode is next week and I will miss it.

Freddie and Fannie, the gatekeepers of the American mortgage market, are increasingly backing loans to borrowers who have heavy debt loads, highlighting questions about mortgage risk. wsj

The German government has withdrawn proposed legislation that would have banned immigrants in polygamous marriages from obtaining German citizenship. The proposed ban had been included in draft changes to Germany's naturalization law, but was quietly removed from the final text, apparently in the interests of political correctness and multiculturalism.

Although German law clearly prohibits polygamy for German nationals, some have argued that the law is unclear as to whether the law applies to foreign nationals living in Germany. 

This has a big impact on social programs  as the polygamist can marry one wife and the others can claim welfare as single mothers.

The Americans years ago fought this over Mormonism. Is this an impingement of freedom of religion? How can those freedoms be clear if the religion has so many social elements? From what I saw of Jehovah's Witnesses last week, faith-based social structures have a significant appeal in this modern culture.

The popular unrest that dislodged Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is part of a wave of conflict engulfing northern Africa and posing grave risks to stability in the region and beyond. The discord is likely to produce major new refugee flows and increase the potential for a dramatic expansion of Islamic State and Al Qaeda in northern Africa.

Libya is its own reward.

“Walmart’s U.S. store managers earn an average of $175,000 per year and receive benefits including parental leave, health benefits and 401(k) contributions. That’s higher than the average salary of some of the country’s best paying jobs, including dentists, who make an average $174,110 a year, according to U.S. News & World Report, and lawyers, who make an average of $141,890.” (NBC) According to Walmart, “75% of its Walmart U.S. store operations management team members started as hourly employees.”

Countries that have pushed the laudable doctrines of equality of opportunity most assiduously (that would be the Scandinavian states) have the lowest rates of STEM enrollment among females in the world, as it turns out that freed females, so to speak, given free choice, do not often voluntarily become engineers and mathematicians and physicists. Perhaps they do not know their own minds.

IRAs contain 29 trillion dollars. In savings. In what American workers have put aside for retirement and their children and deprived themselves of in their working years.  And the government wants it. The FESA aka Secure Act will in essence eliminate the stretch IRA. The estimate is that will reduce the wealth of family IRAs by 50% and will be the largest tax increase in the country's history. Remember,this can not be done without the cooperation of the house and the senate, the dems and the republicans. i have not seen a single story about this in the press.

Concern has grown in Germany about the influence of foreign funding sources for mosques for the country's estimated five million Muslims, who hail mostly from Turkey and Arab countries. Some 900 mosques in Germany are run by the Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion (Ditib), under the authority of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government. Its imams are paid by the Turkish state, and the group has come under scrutiny with some of its members suspected of spying on Turkish dissidents living in Germany. In Germany, church taxes are collected from practicing Catholics and Protestants in order to fund church activities. They are collected by the state and then transferred to religious authorities. So the Germans subsidize religion in the belief it will make them independent of government. They are actually thinking of subsidizing the mosques.

On this day in 1981,Pope John Paul II was shot and seriously wounded while passing through the square in an open car. The assailant, 23-year-old escaped Turkish murderer Mehmet Ali Agca, fired four shots, one of which hit the pontiff in the abdomen, narrowly missing vital organs, and another that hit the pope’s left hand. A third bullet struck 60-year-old American Ann Odre in the chest, seriously wounding her, and the fourth hit 21-year-old Jamaican Rose Hill in the arm.

                                               Chick-fil-A 

The city governments of San Antonio and San Jose both oppose the openings of Chick-fil-A restaurants in the airports of their respective cities. In March, Buffalo Niagara International Airport was also against the restaurant opening its doors there. New York Assemblyman Sean Ryan (D-Buffalo) argued that Chick-fil-A was not an appropriate restaurant at a publicly financed airport.

The corporate policy is to not do business on Sunday. And Christian songs can be heard in the background. And the company mission statement is “To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with Chick-fil-A.” But that's about it. It does not selectively hire nor does it selectively serve. As such, it is not truly a Christian business.

So, why the fuss? CEO Dan Cathy has publicly stated that he believes that marriage is a contract reserved for a man and a woman. He opposes same sex marriage. They are opposed to what the CEO of Chick-fil-A thinks and they want to punish him and his company for it.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a thought crime.