Five years in prison for offending someone online…

Guest Post by Simon Black

Let the weekly absurdity begin!

New SAT scoring will combat Asian privilege

The infamous SAT has been used since 1926 as a sort of university entrance exam to objectively test high school students’ scholastic aptitude. Until now.

Test administrators announced plans this week to include an ‘adversity score’ for every student taking the SAT.

This score will excuse poor test results if the student lives in a high crime neighborhood, went to a poor high school, is living in a single parent or low income household, and so on.

And this should really put a dent in Asian privilege. Yes you read that right. With an average SAT score of 1223, Asians achieve the highest marks among all the ethnic groups tracked by SAT administrators.

But these same Asian test takers also typically come from dual-parent, higher-income households. So they’ll be penalized because of their parents’ success.

This is truly amazing thing to be teaching young people.

Universities and the SAT administrators don’t want high school students to identify as strong, self-reliant, independent individuals who seek to solve problems and overcome adversity.

Instead they’re encouraging young people to make their socioeconomic circumstances the strongest part of their identities. And, based on those socioeconomic circumstances, cultivate a guilt or victim mentality, and expect penalties or handouts for the rest of their lives.

Click here for the full story.

Harvard lynch-mob runs professor off campus

Harvard Professor Ronald Sullivan has spent his career as a lawyer defending some of the poorest people in the country.

He was previously the public defender in Washington DC and personally overturned dozens of wrongful convictions.

Professor Sullivan also represented Michael Brown’s family after the teen was shot to death by police. Huffington Post even called him the “man who dealt the biggest blow to mass incarceration.”

But now he and his wife– the first black student housing deans in Harvard history– have been run off campus by an angry mob of #metoo zealots.

His crime: joining Harvey Weinstein’s defense team.

Sullivan believes in justice for ALL, and that even a man like Weinstein who has already been convicted by the Twittering classes in the court of public opinion, is entitled to competent legal defense.

“It is particularly important for this category of unpopular defendant to receive the same process as everyone else — perhaps even more important…

“To the degree we deny unpopular defendants basic due process rights we cease to be the country we imagine ourselves to be.”

Powerful words that absolutely ring true. But now all these whiny students at Harvard claim they no longer feel safe with Sullivan on campus, and they’ve demanded the university do something.

Sadly, Harvard has buckled under the pressure, and they announced earlier this week that they would not renew his appointment as Faculty Dean at Harvard College’s Winthrop House.

These Social Justice Warriors are starting to feed on their own.

Click here for the full story.

Prison for online trolls in Australia

Online trolls could soon face up to five years in prison, if the Prime Minister of Australia gets his way.

It’s already illegal to “menace, harass or cause offence” online in Australia. That’s right. It’s illegal to offend someone in Australia.

And that cybercrime carries up to three years in prison if “reasonable persons” would consider the online behavior offensive or menacing.

But the Prime Minister wants a stiffer penalty of up to five years for offending someone else’s delicate feelings.

As usual, the government keeps their laws nice and obscure so that they can make the case that practically anyone has broken them.

Click here for the full story.

Charges dropped against Florida Man with “I Eat Ass” bumper sticker

Speaking of offending people, last week a sheriff’s deputy in Florida arrested a man because he had a bumper sticker which eloquently read “I Eat Ass.”

I almost have to admire the transparency. This man leaves no question about where he stands on the issue.

The officer pulled the man over because of the obscene sticker, and insisted he removes all or part of it. But the man refused, citing his First Amendment free speech right to display potentially offensive bumper stickers.

So the officer charged him with violating obscenity laws, as well as resisting arrest without violence.

The prosecutors determined bringing a case against him would be met with a valid First Amendment defense, so the charges were dropped.

Read the full story here.

San Francisco chasing away tech companies with IPO tax hike

San Francisco has long had what they refer to as an “IPO tax”; this is a tax on the value of shares that companies give to their employees.

And the tax is on the value of the shares itself. So when a big company goes public and all those employee shares are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the city of San Francisco rakes in the tax revenue.

Ten years ago during the last recession, San Francisco cut its IPO tax. There was a bit of revolt by some local tech firms who threatened to leave the city over the tax, and San Francisco wanted to prevent this exodus at all costs.

But not anymore.

Now the local government intends to raise the tax from 0.38% to 1.5%, an almost 4x increase.

This is pretty hilarious given that they slashed the tax a decade ago to tempt companies to stay.

But now that it’s cool and trendy to chase productive businesses away, San Francisco wants to jack up the IPO tax.

This is in addition to new taxes passed in November on large corporations to support the homeless population.

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