Sunday noon roundup

A look around this world to help grandma's after-church fried-chicken dinner go down more smoothly:

Seems that two people at a workplace (name / type / location of workplace not known) are playing out a microcosm of the general stifling of free speech:

It was only a matter of time, really. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that displaying the Gadsden Flag in the workplace — the yellow flag with the words Don’t Tread on Me below a coiled rattlesnake — may be punishable racial harassment. 

Eugene Volokh at the Washington Post has the story, and the EEOC’s report, which gives the requisite background: 

On January 8, 2014, Complainant filed a formal complaint in which he alleged that the Agency subjected him to discrimination on the basis of race (African American) and in reprisal for prior EEO activity when, starting in the fall of 2013, a coworker (C1) repeatedly wore a cap to work with an insignia of the Gadsden Flag.

In case you’re wondering: That’s it. That’s the extent of the offense. There were no racist statements. No slurs. No threatening looks. A dude wore a cap. “Repeatedly.” But:

“Repeatedly.” But: 

Complainant stated that he found the cap to be racially offensive to African Americans because the flag was designed by Christopher Gadsden, a “slave trader & owner of slaves.” 
Other American slave owners include Benjamin Franklin. Is it racial harassment to wear bifocals? It is by the complainant’s logic.

But it goes further. Yes, it’s likely that Christopher Gadsden had racial opinions that would be noxious, to put it mildly, in 2016. But it’s ridiculous to judge a man born to the 18th century by the prevailing morality of our own. Some context is advisable. Additional context that might be helpful in this particular case: Gadsden was delegate to the Stamp Act Congress; delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses; commander of the 1st South Carolina Regiment of the Continental Army; and called “the Sam Adams of the South.” In other words, he was a man of his age in certain ways; he was also an American patriot. It was with the latter in mind that he designed his namesake flag. As the EEOC concluded: “It is clear that the Gadsden Flag originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context.” 

Ah, but:

Complainant maintains that the Gadsden Flag is a “historical indicator of white resentment against blacks stemming largely from the Tea Party.”

As Hillary Clinton would say: Sigh. There is no evidence that the Tea Party as a movement was motivated by racial animus (even some of the “racist” episodes that critics cited never happened). But there is a strong vein of leftwing historical revisionism that says it was so, presumably because that is easier to accept than the possibility that right-leaning voters circa 2009 had legitimate, defensible discontents. 

Well, tofu and sprouts to you, too:

This report from the BBC is confirmed by first hand accounts from not only the Israeli team, but from the hateful Lebanese team as well. More on the Lebanese reaction in a moment.  Here are the basics from BBC:

Lebanese athletes refused to share a bus with the Israel team to get to Friday’s Rio Olympic Games opening ceremony, members of both teams said.
Lebanon and Israel are officially at war and have no diplomatic relations.
The incident happened as the Lebanon team sat on the bus waiting to head to the Maracana stadium, before demanding the Israeli athletes must not board.

The Israeli team refused to be bullied and they boarded the bus heading for the Kumbaya, world peace ceremonies.

Good on ya, Benjamin:

In a recent interview, Baltimore Ravens tight end Benjamin Watson said that the original idea behind Planned Parenthood, founded by Margaret Sanger, was to "exterminate blacks."

Discussing pregnancy, faith and abortion with Turning Point Pregnancy Resource Center, Watson, the author of Under Our Skin, a book about race relations in America, was asked how race factors into the abortion issue. He said that "blacks kind of represent a large portion of the abortions, and I do know that honestly the whole idea with Planned Parenthood and [Margaret] Sanger in the past was to exterminate blacks, and it’s kind of ironic that it’s working."

The outspoken Christian athlete lamented that minority voters overwhelmingly support candidates who support Planned Parenthood without considering the reasons behind its founding."We are buying it hook, line, and sinker, like it’s a great thing," he said. "It’s just amazing to me and abortion saddens me period, but it seems to be something that is really pushed on minorities and provided to minorities especially as something that they should do."

How Fatah appeals to the voting base:

In an effort to appeal to Palestinians ahead of hotly contested elections, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas listed one of its main achievements as having “killed 11,000 Israelis.”
The party, Fatah, made the incendiary claim on Tuesday in an Arabic-language post on one of its official Facebook pages.
“For the argumentative … the ignorant … And for those who do not know history,” begins the Facebook post, “The Fatah movement killed 11,000 Israelis.”
Fatah also claimed to have “offered 170,000 martyrs,” and hundreds of its followers, it said, were in “Israeli occupation jails.” By Thursday the post had been shared 30 times and liked 163 times.
The post garnered additional attention after it was translated into English by Palestinian Media Watch, an organization that monitors anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements in the Arab news media. The website noted that it was the second time Fatah had made the inaccurate claim. The first was in August 2014.
 

The climate jackboots say the hurricane drought in no way disproves their claim that the global climate is in trouble.  "Long-term global trends," doncha know.