Images | Commentary | Digital Scrapbook
JOHN HINDERAKER:
Starbucks is one of America’s growing cadre of “woke” companies. Now that one need not be a customer to hang out in a Starbucks store, the inevitable consequences are beginning to appear. These observations were penned by a friend of mine:
When I quit smoking, coffee replaced cigarettes and I’ve been frequenting a Starbucks in downtown Minneapolis twice a day since November, 2017. One day in March 2018, I couldn’t. The branch, like every other one nationwide, had closed so staff could be trained in some sort of ‘social justice’ thing after some guys were kicked out of a Starbucks in Philadelphia for not buying anything. Starbucks’ response was to make their branches ‘safe spaces’ for anyone, whether they had bought anything or not.
At that point, Starbucks stopped being a chain of coffee shops and turned into a network of public urinals and flop houses with a coffee bar attached.
You might not have seen this in some of the suburban branches. But the branch I go to downtown quickly filled up with non-paying ‘customers’ who would get their complimentary water – in a planet-suffocating plastic cup with plastic straw, no less – and make themselves at home. Often, around half the seating in this branch was taken up by people with these complimentary drinks, charging their phones, with their baggage spread out around them.
Many of these people were perfectly pleasant. But many of them were not. I saw arguments. I saw fights. I saw paying customers pestered for money. I saw people helping themselves to food without paying. I saw people breaking out a speaker and blaring their music out, whether anyone else wanted to hear it or not. I saw groups of people disappearing into the bathroom together. I saw another guy’s butt.
I’ve done a few ‘nametag and hairnet’ jobs in my time, so I felt sorry for the staff, who have never been anything less than thoroughly professional and courteous. Here they were, without the wages or training to do so, having to act as counselors to people with drug and mental health issues, all so some millionaire CEO somewhere could feel #woke. They thought they were going to be working at a trendy coffee shop, they ended up in the Double Deuce from the movie Road House instead.
This winter, the situation got so bad that the management had to act. Half of the branch’s seats – the comfortable ones by the window – were removed. A security camera was installed, with the goings on at the back of the store by the bathroom being broadcast on a big screen. A private security guard was brought in to expel the more brazen offenders. ‘All Are Welcome’ ceases to apply when people actually take you up on it.
“TV Ignores Conservative Authors of #1 Book in the Country, While Putting Liberal Author of #3421 on Major Tour.”
Hat Tip to Gail Heriot
“…Fode Bade did not know he was supposed to feel oppressed in the United States. However, as a native of Guinea, he certainly knew what oppression was. Entrenched poverty and periodic political violence plagued the African nation, and Bade’s survival to the next day was not guaranteed. In 2005, he came to the United States as a political refugee and was granted asylum. Free from the oppression of his native land, Bade prospered in America. And on July 4, he brimmed with pride as his four daughters and son became legal citizens of the United States at a special naturalization ceremony at the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia.
On July 1, at the behest of Colin Kaepernick, Nike recalled their special Betsy Ross Flag Air Max 1 USA sneakers after the former quarterback expressed concerns over what “he believed are its associations with an era of slavery.” A billion-dollar corporation and a millionaire ex-athlete declared the patriotic flag as a symbol of racial oppression. Yet, on July 4, an African family, from a country victimized by the transatlantic slave trade, eagerly became citizens of a country under that very flag. Bade proudly stated, “I’m so grateful to this country.”…”
U.S. Soldiers with 1st Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment (Attack Reconnaissance), 12th Combat Aviation Brigade, conduct routine maintenance on an AH-64 Apache helicopter June 28, 2019, at Katterbach Army Airfield in Ansbach, Germany.
“…The question is asked, and pressed with a great show of earnestness at this momentous crisis of our nation’s history, What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated?
… Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. The Negro should have been let alone in Africa—let alone when the pirates and robbers offered him for sale in our Christian slave markets—(more cruel and inhuman than the Mohammedan slave markets)—let alone by courts, judges, politicians, legislators and slavedrivers—let alone altogether, and assured that they were thus to be let alone forever, and that they must now make their own way in the world, just the same as any and every other variety of the human family. As colored men, we only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves, subject only to the same great laws for the welfare of human society which apply to other men, Jew, Gentiles, Barbarian, Sythian. Let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows. When you, our white fellow countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power or privilege which you yourself would die before you would submit to have taken from you…”
Hat Tip to Gail Heriot
Conrad Black:
“…It is easier to notice the drift of American political public opinion after being away from it in England for six weeks. It is obvious that President Trump is steadily gaining ground. The human wave of kooks and retreads seeking the Democratic nomination have been shooting furiously inside their 360-degree firing squad and some of the 1 percent group will have to be carried out soon to make it a tighter circle. (The most irritating loudmouth of all of them, Representative Eric Swallwell of California, had the honor of being the first to fold on Monday.)
The Democrats’ major problems are that almost all the president’s policies are working. The collapse of the Russian collusion fraud has created an eerie silence as the country awaits possible indictments of the Democrats responsible for that outrage; and the Democrats themselves are completely unfeasible.
All the economic news is positive: 83 percent of taxpayers have had their taxes reduced and those who have not are the citizens of chronic Democratic states where the state governments have been so incompetent they have laid on higher state income taxes that the administration no longer will deduct from federal taxes. Why should the residents of other states pay for the profligacy and incompetence of the Andrew Cuomos and Jerry Browns of the big blue states? One hundred percent of taxpayers in states where Trump has a reasonable chance to win have lower taxes. There are now more than 1.5 million additional Americans jobs to be filled than there are unemployed people…”
Liz Sheld:
“…A (Obama-appointed) New York judge has denied the Department of Justice request to change the attorneys who are working on the dumpster fire citizenship question on the census. The judge said the change request was denied because it was “patently deficient” and provides no “satisfactory reasons.” This is an unusual move but if you are a hyper-politicized judge intent on blocking and obstructing everything your specified political opponent does, it does makes perfect sense. That’s what is going on here, they are trying to drag out the clock since the census question issue needs to be resolved because of printing deadlines…”
Jennifer Harper:
“…Two-thirds of voters approve of a citizenship question on the 2020 census, and that includes a majority of Hispanic voters — despite claims by Democratic lawmakers that the inquiry would discourage participation in Latino communities.
A Harvard University Center for American Political Studies/Harris poll found that 67% of all registered U.S. voters say the census should ask the citizenship question when the time comes. That includes 88% of Republicans, 63% of independents and 52% of Democrats.
Most notably, the poll found that 55% of Hispanic voters favor the idea.
Also in agreement: 74% of rural voters, 59% of black voters, 58% of urban voters and 47% of voters who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. At 44%, liberal voters were the least likely to favor the citizenship question.
At the other end of the scale, 92% of Trump voters and 90% of conservatives back the question…”