Quick Roundup 394

Raed Jarrar Update

About a week ago, through a press release by the Ayn Rand Institute, comes news of a matter I blogged about over two years ago: An incident in which an airline faced a federal lawsuit simply for attempting to exercise its property rights.

Thomas Bowden succinctly describes the injustice of the outcome:

It's an injustice when a private airline is penalized for exercising its rights as an owner. ... Property owners are entitled to set standards for conduct, including dress codes, that their customers must observe when using company property. If a potential customer finds those standards unreasonable, he is free to take his business elsewhere.

... JetBlue should have been legally entitled to forbid Mr. Jarrar from frightening other passengers aboard its privately owned jetliner. In deciding the matter, JetBlue had a right to consider that Mr. Jarrar’s behavioral and physical profile resembled that of terrorists who have left a trail of blood and bone across the globe, both before and after destroying the World Trade Center with hijacked airliners in 2001.

Now, however, Mr. Jarrar is a quarter-million dollars richer because our anti-discrimination laws forbid businesses to use their own judgment in these matters. [bold added]

I agree completely with Mr. Bowden.

At Study Group for Objectivists: The Ominous Parallels

Burgess Laughlin will be moderating a six-week look by the Study Group for Objectivists at Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels this spring.

Being a participant in the OAC, I'm sitting this one out, but it does sound interesting.

Lying in Wait

Awhile back, I noted that there can be value in, "having rational commentary 'out there', just waiting to be Googled." Recently, I have seen just that with a very old post about Large Group Awareness Training that a relatively new blog, The Truth about Human Potential Seminars, has recently linked to, causing a small, steady, trickle of traffic to head my way.

Some Tunes

Reader Adrian Hester points me to a pretty good (but embedding-disabled) music video.

I found this as I was looking for videos of my favorite African singer, Baaba Maal.... [The] video features him singing his style of music (yela) along with reggae. Works quite well, beautiful scenery, fun dancing, and if you listen to the reggae enough you'll have all the major acts about Senegal stuck in your brain forever, so it's even educational! Heh.

Loved the music, liked some aspects of the video -- but was reminded by other aspects of a dated and lame UB40 video of one of my favorite songs of theirs. (You can hear a slightly better version of "Dubmobile" here, as well as "I've Got Mine" following directly after.)

Well, that's a wrap. Working weekend ahead for me!

-- CAV