RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/15/bidens-disaster-most-voters-give-him-failing-marks-for-leadership-key-policies-ii-tipp-poll/

The days remaining for the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration are few, but before they go, it’s only fair to ask Americans what kind of job the pair did over the last four tumultuous years. As it turns out, data from the latest I&I/TIPP Poll suggest, voters will not be sad to see this Democratic tenure come to an end.

The national online poll of 1.424 adults, taken Jan. 8-Jan. 10, asked a number of questions to get at how voters feel about the job Biden has done, including questions on how Biden did in particular policy areas. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.6 percentage points.

Apart from Democrats, Biden finds little support anywhere across the nation.

The first broad question posed involved leadership: “Overall, is your opinion of Joe Biden generally favorable, generally unfavorable, or are you not familiar enough to say one way or the other?”

Biden doesn’t come out well in the reckoning. Of those surveyed, just 38% give him a “favorable” rating, while 51% rated him “unfavorable” and another 7% said they didn’t know enough to render an opinion.

But, when gauged by political party affiliation, Americans were far apart.

Democrats handed Biden high ratings (71% favorable, 17% unfavorable), while Republicans slammed Biden (15% favorable, 81% unfavorable) and independent voters more or less followed suit (26% favorable, 59% unfavorable).

https://www.city-journal.org/article/mark-zuckerberg-meta-abolish-dei-fact-checking

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook, made a stunning announcement. He was abolishing the company’s DEI programs and discontinuing its relationship with fact-checking organizations, which he admitted had become a form of “censorship.” The left-wing media immediately attacked the decision, accused him of embracing the MAGA agenda, and predicted a dangerous rise in so-called disinformation.

Zuckerberg’s move was carefully calculated and impeccably timed. The November elections, he said, felt like “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” DEI initiatives, especially those related to immigration and gender, had become “disconnected from mainstream conversation”—and untenable.

This is no small about-face. Just four years ago, Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding left-wing election programs; his role was widely resented by conservatives. And Meta had been at the forefront of any identity-based or left-wing ideological cause.

Not anymore. As part of the rollout for the announcement, Zuckerberg released a video and appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, which now functions as a confessional for American elites who no longer believe in left-wing orthodoxies. On the podcast, Zuckerberg sounded less like a California progressive than a right-winger, arguing that the culture needed a better balance of “masculine” and “feminine” energies.

Executives at Meta quickly implemented the new policy, issuing pink slips to DEI employees and moving the company’s content-moderation team from California to Texas, in order, in Zuckerberg’s words, to “help alleviate concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.”

Zuckerberg was not the first technology executive to make such an announcement, but he is perhaps the most significant. Facebook is one of the largest firms in Silicon Valley and, with Zuckerberg setting the precedent, many smaller companies will likely follow suit.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/14/la-fires-illustrate-a-nationwide-competency-crisis/

Los Angeles is burning, and the raging fires appear to be some of the worst in recent memory. Entire neighborhoods, fancy and regular alike, have burned to the ground. Harrowing video of people trapped in their homes convey some of the human cost of the fires and foretell the inevitable deaths that will be confirmed in the weeks ahead.

There are a surprising number of obstacles challenging the emergency response, considering that we are supposed to live in a first-world country. Fire hydrants ran dry for reasons not yet fully explained, and there were cuts to statewide firefighting budgets in advance of the fires. It now appears that the ongoing homelessness crisis in Los Angeles was a harbinger of third-world conditions across the board.

The political leadership also leaves a lot to be desired. Governor Gavin Newsom shrugged and pinned empty hydrants on locals. In spite of extreme risk warnings, the Los Angeles mayor was away on an overseas junket and went catatonic when reporters asked her some basic questions about events. She is now back and facing sustained criticism from her erstwhile supporters.

Multiple Failure Points Contributed to Disaster

There are lots of theories about what went wrong, and everyone is reaching for their well-worn hobby horses. Some say it’s affirmative action destroying once-competent institutions. Others blame generic incompetence and mismanagement.

Another factor may be changing patterns of home building. Apparently, building on the hills and in the canyons—which are periodically subject to fires—is inherently risky. The recent dry spell, coupled with heavy winds, only made things worse.

Finally, at least some of the fires appear to be a result of arson, whether by the mentally ill or the malevolent.

My intuition is to blame all of these things in combination. While I do not know enough to have a strong opinion about the relative weight of one cause versus another, I start with the prejudice that most failures in life arise from systemic failures, which themselves result from the accumulation of smaller errors similar to the stacking of tolerances in engineering.

A well-designed system can withstand incompetent executives, some affirmative action appointees, and even a shortfall in funding for one year. But most systems cannot withstand all of these things, year after year, which seems to be the unifying factor in Los Angeles’ current predicament.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/13/you-know-who-will-cheer-the-death-of-dei-the-working-class/

So, is it RIP DEI? The boss class’s favourite ideology certainly seems to be in trouble. Big business everywhere is rethinking its devotion to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. As part of his coming out as a pretty standard tech bro who bristles at woke and loves Joe Rogan, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has said DEI might be for the chopping block. He even instructed his minions to take the tampons out of the men’s bathrooms at Meta HQ. Expecting people who menstruate to use the ladies’ loo? Guys, this is big.

The legacy media is noisily lamenting Zuck’s bonfire of the diversity initiatives. Meta is ‘eliminating’ DEI, weeps CNN. It quotes an internal Meta memo that basically says it’s game over for ‘equity and inclusion’. To these people, Zuckerberg is an apostate. To renounce the religion of DEI, the divisive ideology that holds such fierce sway on college campuses and in HR departments, is to make oneself an enemy of the new elite. I reckon we’re days away from a Vox piece calling Zuckerberg a fascist.

And the Rogan-pilled Facebook founder is not alone. Other corporations are likewise beating a retreat from DEI. Capitalist giants including McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford and Amazon have ‘pulled the plug’ on DEI, says a clearly emotional CBS. Cue meltdown among the woke. These once right-on capitalists are capitulating to MAGA, we’re told. They’re initiating a ‘rightward shift’ ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump. We’re witnessing a ‘conservative backlash’ against diversity, cries business bible Forbes, and the repercussions could be dire.

Of course the cultural class will mourn the flailing regime of DEI. After all, they were its architects and enforcers. Both their social sway and personal wealth were boosted by this insidious ideology that empowered them to re-educate the great unwashed in the finer details of racial correct-think. But you know who won’t mourn it? The working class. For them, this poisonous dogma was never anything more than a patrician system of moral instruction that diminished their workplace clout and divided them from their fellow workers.

DEI is always presented as a nice, fair thing. It’s about ‘embracing the differences’ that ‘everyone brings to the table’, said CNN last year. It’s about making workplaces welcoming to all, regardless of their ‘race, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation [or] physical ability’. These knackered platitudes mask the grim truth about DEI, which is that it is divisive rather than unifying, and spectacularly intolerant of difference – especially political difference – rather than ‘welcoming to all’.