PETER THIEL: FBI, CIA should probe foreign influence on Google.

BILL WHITTLE ON THE APOLLO 11 ANNIVERSARY: What We Saw | Part 1 – We Choose to Go to the Moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAeSmerpn_A

It’s too long to watch on Instapundit, so I embedded just the trailer here. But it’s a helluva good show, and the set Bill is on is real, not virtual. The headline link (above) will take you to the premiere episode, with four more to follow between now and July 20.

EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: Should you boycott Amazon Prime Day? “There’s a deeper queasiness to Prime Day that’s harder to dismiss. It’s Amazon at its most Amazonian — fast, cheap, convenient, and totalizing. Prime Day draws you in, not just to Amazon Prime membership but to a whole world of seamless consumerism. It’s the kind of intra-corporate pride that was on display in the bizarre concert series, and much of the company’s messaging around Prime Day in general. But is Amazon really something to be proud of?”

Things must be pretty good, when people have the energy and free time to get this worked up over a sale.

AMERICA’S FIVE MOST-STRESSED CITIES: Detroit tops the list compiled by WalletHub, followed by Cleveland, Newark, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Next five are St. Louis, Cincinnati, Birmingham, Wilmington and Shreveport. Maybe that’s why four of top five are also top five for divorces?

MAYBE A HOSPITAL ISN’T THE BEST PLACE FOR ANTI-VAXXERS TO WORK (REGARDLESS OF THEIR REASON FOR BEING ANTI-VAXXERS): The EEOC just announced it reached another settlement (this one for $74K) with a hospital that had declined to hire a job applicant with religious objections to flu vaccines. The hospitals want workers who, in the event of a flu epidemic, will show up for work and won’t make other people sick.

I wrote sympathetically about religious accommodations here. But I was responding to my totalitarian colleagues on the Commission on Civil Rights who wanted to coerce people with sincere religious beliefs into doing things they didn’t want to do. Some of the stuff they were writing was pretty scary.  Now the EEOC is coercing hospitals into hiring someone that they don’t think is the best person for the job. And their reason doesn’t sound at all crazy to me.

In a few (but not all) of these cases the EEOC has argued that because the hospital accommodates people who have medical conditions that prevent them from getting flu shots, they must also accommodate religion too. Of course, the hospitals probably weren’t thrilled to have to accommodate the medical condition either.  But the Americans with Disabilities Act may require them to. Note that the legal standards are very different under Title VII (religion must be accommodated only if employer inconvenience would be de minimus) and under the American with Disabilities Act (“reasonable” accommodations to disability must be made).

One day there will be a serious epidemic that we are utterly unprepared to handle. Please God let us put it off for a few hundred years.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Congress’ awful anti-sex-trafficking law has only put sex workers in danger and wasted taxpayer money.

Three months after the bill’s passage, the sponsor of the bill, Rep. Ann Wagner of Missouri, said, “We have shut down nearly 90% of the online sex-trafficking business and ads.” The Washington Post fact-checked this claim and gave her three Pinocchios.

Among other issues with her comment, most of the decline in sex-work ads came after the government seized the website Backpage, a move that happened before FOSTA-SESTA was passed. And, The Post wrote, “after the initial drop, advertising for the sex trade appears to have rebounded, such as on new websites that mimic Backpage with named like ‘Bedpage.'”

As for the actual business of sex trafficking, there’s no evidence that the law has made any difference whatsoever.

The cofounder of the St. James Infirmary, “a health clinic that supports sex workers in California’s Bay Area,” told The Verge “that in the weekend following FOSTA, the infirmary’s mobile van outreach saw a dramatic increase of street-based sex workers in the Mission District.” Sex workers weren’t just going to disappear, and police departments across the country seem to have been caught off-guard by this influx.

“Getting hookers back on the streets!” isn’t much of a rallying cry, and it’s probably riskier for everyone involved than screening first in virtual space.

INCOMING! That’s the message from Sundance at The Last Refuge, after sorting through the tea leaves following China’s decision to re-start those trade talks with the U.S. Beijing’s chief negotiator is back but this time there’s a handler to stiffen his spine for full-on, all-out trade war with the Trump team.

IS HONG KONG’S EMBATTLED LEADER ABOUT TO QUIT? The Epoch Times’ Frank Fang says Carrie Lam offered to resign but Communist authorities in Beijing said no. Fang cites a Financial Times report that the response was: ““No one else can clean up the mess and no one else wants the job.”

IF SHE WASN’T A ROGER STONE PLANT, WHAT WOULD SHE BEING DOING ANY DIFFERENTLY? Private Democratic Poll: AOC Most Recognizable Democrat in America Among Swing Voters.

AT AMAZON, Happy Prime Day! Scoop up the bargains before they’re gone!

ANOTHER SIGN OF SECULAR HUMANISM’S FAILURE? America is rapidly becoming more secular as scientific enlightenment and progressive education dispel religious ignorance from the past, right? Wrong.

The numbers just don’t add up to anything remotely like an emerging godless paradise on Earth, according to two accomplished data jockeys, Rodney Stark and Glenn Stanton.

They dug deeply into multiple data sources, including the General Social Survey, Gallup World Poll and Pew Research Center, and found America is becoming more, not less, religious. Ditto for most of the rest of the world where Christianity is growing extremely quickly, Hinduism and Islam less so but still increasing, while Buddhism is declining.