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14 Reasons Bosses Are Quickly Firing Gen Z Hires by Liane Starr

https://www.aol.com/finance/14-reasons-bosses-quickly-firing-130000679.html

What’s to Become of Gen Z?

Bad news for recent college grads — your bosses aren’t fans. A survey found that 6 in 10 bosses gave Gen Z employees the boot this year — and 1 in 6 companies are now hesitant to hire Gen Z employees. Why are bosses so unimpressed with the latest generation to join the workforce? As you might expect, it’s complicated.

They Lack Initiative

As you might expect from a generation that grew up during a pandemic, many employers are finding that some Zoomers aren’t prioritizing work. While previous generations assumed they’d have to shine (and spend plenty of time) in the office to impress the boss, Gen Z has had a crash course in learning that life is short. But that lack of motivation or initiative is referenced as a problem by 50% of the employers surveyed.

Lack of Professionalism

Considering that many Gen Z employees had internships over Zoom and may lack extensive real-life office experience, this may not come as a surprise. Not surprisingly, colleges like Michigan State University are offering students classes on how to behave and even write a work-appropriate e-mail.

Poor Organizational Skills

Roughly 45% of bosses say organization is a problem for Gen Z hires, likely because so much of their time is spent on phones —  a remarkable 7.2 hours per day.

Poor Communication Skills

Even Gen Z workers admit they have a hard time drumming up conversation with coworkers. A full 65% of them admit they aren’t great at communication, according to a recent Harris poll.

A Media Beyond Caricature The trust and prestige that took prior generations of journalists decades to earn have been thrown away in just a few years by incompetents and partisans. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/21/a-media-beyond-caricature/

CBS’s iconic 60 Minutes has had plenty of scandals and embarrassments in its long 57-year history, most notably the fake-but-accurate Dan Rather mess. Yet never has it found itself in greater disrepute than in 2024.

Donald Trump, for good reason, recently declined to join 60 Minutes for its traditional election-year in-depth interviews of the two presidential candidates. Why?

Last time he consented in 2020, anchor and interviewer Leslie Stahl attacked Trump’s accurate assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop (then in the possession of the FBI) was authentic—and authentically damning to Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.

Stahl falsely claimed the laptop “can’t be verified.” She further incorrectly asserted, “So this story about Hunter and his laptop, some repair shop found it; the source is Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.” The New York Post, in fact, reported the story. The FBI did not deny it.

Yet old Twitter and Facebook, under collaborating FBI tutelage and pressure, suppressed dissemination of the truth. Joe Biden’s then-advisor and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in conjunction with former interim CIA Director Michael Morrel, helped round up “51 former intelligence authorities” (among them Leon Panetta and both John Brennan and James Clapper, who had admitted previously of lying under oath to Congress) to claim falsely that the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian information gambit to warp the election.

Joe Biden used the “expert” consensus to further lie in the last Biden-Trump debate that the laptop was cooked up by the Russians. And neither CBS, the “intelligence authorities,” nor any of the Bidens have ever since apologized.

More recently, CBS got caught selectively editing the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, cutting and pasting an incoherent Harris response to lessen her embarrassing word salad. And in a subsequent interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the network once again edited and pruned his answers, but in contrast, on this occasion, to make him seem far less persuasive.

Interest Payments Top Defense Spending For First Time In History — Thank You Kamala

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/19/interest-payments-top-defense-spending-for-first-time-in-history-thank-you-kamala/

SUNNY HOSTIN: Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?

KAMALA HARRIS: There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.

On Friday, the Treasury Department released a report showing the kind of impact Harris is talking about. If nothing else does, it should cost her the election.

The latest monthly Treasury report shows spending and revenues for the full fiscal year 2024, which ended in September.

Among the terrible results: The federal deficit topped $1.8 trillion in 2024 — the third highest in history and eclipsed only by the two COVID-19 panic spending years.

That’s not for lack of revenues, which were up by nearly half a trillion dollars this year. Spending under Biden-Harris this fiscal year climbed more than $617 billion – a 10% increase.

But the real shocker is the explosive growth in interest payments on the national debt.

These payments hit $882 billion in FY 2024, the Treasury report says. That’s a 35% jump from last year.

And it’s $8 billion more than we spent on National Defense.

The Challenges of Utopian Thought in a Complex World By Allen Gindler

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/the_challenges_of_utopian_thought_in_a_complex_world.html

The phenomenon of children inventing imaginary friends is a well-documented and common occurrence in early childhood development. These imaginary companions are often endowed with idealized features, representing perfection in both character and behavior, and serve as companions in a fantasy world. However, as children grow and begin to form relationships with real peers, this phase of imaginary play typically fades.

In contrast to children, adults do not fabricate imaginary friends, but they do engage in the construction of grand ideals on a much larger scale. Rather than ideal companions, adults often imagine ideal societies — utopias in which human existence is perfected, and harmony with nature and fellow human beings is absolute. These utopian visions have historically shaped political and social ideologies. For instance, Karl Marx, while critiquing the utopian socialists for their collectivist fantasies, proposed a “scientific” theory for the construction of a communist society. In Marx’s vision, at the highest stage of communism, society would be free of class distinctions, inequality, and the state itself. Private property, conflicts, wars, and even the economic systems of commodity-money relations would cease to exist, and work would be driven by the common good, with individuals receiving according to their needs.

However, this utopian vision was not without its stipulations. To achieve such an ideal society, Marx advocated for the world dictatorship of the proletariat, a transitional phase in which the working class would mold the unconscious masses into a new kind of human being — one so ideal that it is reminiscent of Plato’s conception of ideal forms.

The new human being in Marx’s utopia would embody an ideal, perfect in nature, harmony, and cooperation. Yet, history has shown that those who resisted this transformation were quickly “crossed off the lists,” metaphorically and often literally, as the march toward communism pressed on. The tragic consequences of this pursuit were felt most acutely in the Soviet Union, where ordinary citizens, caught in the throes of communist ideology, cynically referred to their political and ideological leaders as “Kremlin dreamers.”

The Orwellian Noble Peace Prize Why we shouldn’t waste our time on the Nobel committee’s Newspeak. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-orwellian-noble-peace-prize/

Last week nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize were announced, and the nominees were typical of the Prize’s history. A perusal of past winners reveals that the majority of prizes are for good intention, moralizing internationalism and its institutions, short-lived peace treaties, feckless disarmament, and any choice that gratifies global anti-Americanism.

And let’s not forget terrorists and their enablers included in this year’s nominees: the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, the International Court of Justice, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. All three reflect the Prize’s long history of promulgating globalism and the “rules-based international order” that has serially failed to deter aggression.

The Wall Street Journal’s profile of this year’s nominees is a must read. Take the International Court of Justice, which took up South Africa’s specious charge of “genocide” against Israel, a despicable lie, given that South Africa seems unconcerned that Hamas’ founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Israel’s Jews. Worse, the ICJ “ruled that Israel ‘must immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah and other areas ‘which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’”

The other two nominees–– United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres––are just as morally idiotic, and obviously hostile to Israel and indifferent to the Israeli people. Employees of the UNRWA joined in Hamas’ butchery, and Secretary General Guterres claimed that Hamas’ violence, rape, and murder did “‘not come in a vacuum,’ but instead was grown from a ‘long-standing conflict, with a 56-year long occupation and no political end in sight.’”

The moral equivalence between the victims and murderers, like the lie “occupation,” makes a mockery of the UN’s claims to serve justice and peace. As the Journal concludes, “These aren’t peace makers. They’re apologists for war makers.”

Fortunately, the Peace Prize was awarded to Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo, an organization comprising atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who lobby to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This choice expresses the Nobel Committee’s preference for good intentions and impossible disarmament dreams, but it’s much more respectable and less morally offensive than celebrating enablers of terrorist murderers.

But the Nobel Peace Prize has before legitimized not just the enablers, but the terrorists themselves. In 1994, Yasser Arafat, head of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization, shared the prize with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” The fruit of that collaboration between the terrorist and two leaders of a liberal democratic state was the doomed Oslo Accord signed in 1993.

DEI Captures the Treasury Department How left-wing racialism is corrupting America’s national financial system. Christopher Rufo F. RUFO

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dei-captures-the-treasury-department
The Treasury Department is ground zero for the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” DEI agenda. The agency, which serves as the guardian of the American financial system, has translated critical race and gender theories into official policy—all under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals the stunning capture of the Treasury, which, under the current DEI mandate, has worked to advance the principles of left-wing racialism, directing billions of dollars to favored racial and “underserved” groups, hiring a cadre of radical race “experts” to cement the new orthodoxy within the department, and considering potential auditees’ race in IRS tax investigations.

This ideological shift started at the top. In her first months in office, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen sent a statement to the department’s workers that “commitment to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion is expected of every employee.” She sent the statement on the anniversary of the May 2020 death of George Floyd, at 9:29 a.m., to symbolize the nine minutes and 29 seconds that police officer Derek Chauvin had pinned Floyd to the ground. The statement set the tone: the Treasury secretary had a new ideological agenda—and expected compliance all the way down.

To implement this agenda, Yellen quickly built a centralized DEI apparatus within the department, establishing an official Equity Hub, tasked with implementing Biden’s executive orders on diversity, and an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, made up of activists and executives. She also hired left-wing race activist Janis Bowdler as the department’s first Counselor for Racial Equity, a high-level position “charged with coordinating Treasury’s efforts to advance racial equity including engaging with diverse communities throughout the country.”

Yellen and Bowdler wasted no time, working to advance some of Treasury’s most flagrant racial programs, which subordinated lending standards, federal contracting, hiring policy, and even IRS auditing rules to the new racial calculus.

FBI Caught Red-Handed Fudging Crime Data

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/18/fbi-caught-red-handed-fudging-crime-data/

Readers of I&I know all about how the Biden-Harris regime has been fudging jobs numbers to make monthly gains look bigger than they really are. Turns out, it’s been doing the same with crime statistics … this time to make it look like violent crime is on the way down.

RealClearInvestigations dug into the FBI’s data and found that the law enforcement agency had been criminally misreporting crime statistics in a way that just happened to help Biden-Harris look like it’s been tough on crime.

Last fall, for example, the FBI reported that violent crime had dropped by 2.1% in 2022. That number was celebrated by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the press, which said it was proof that Donald Trump was lying about a crime wave.

RealClearInvestigations discovered that the FBI had secretly updated its crime statistics, and instead of showing a 2.1% drop in violent crime, there was a 4.5% increase in 2022.  

These weren’t minor revisions in the crime numbers.

Where the FBI originally reported 21,288 fewer cases of violent crime in 2022, its revised number shows a 58,741 increase. Instead of a slight drop in the number of burglaries, the new numbers show an increase of nearly 30,000. Every category was revised sharply upward.

RealClearInvestigations quotes Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, who says that “the huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

Steven Malanga Hot Rod Hell States and cities battle the latest social media-fueled lawlessness: street takeovers.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/law-enforcement-cracks-down-on-street-takeovers

Rising social disorder in a post-Covid, defund-the-police America has forced cities and states to address new kinds of criminal outbreaks—from mass retail theft to squatting. Authorities have increasingly formed special police and prosecution units and toughened penalties in places as varied as New York City, Tampa, and Las Vegas to deal with these eruptions. Now added to the growing ranks of policing challenges is the latest lawless craze: street takeovers. In recent months, authorities in Texas, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Ohio, to name just a few places, have had to reorganize their increasingly undermanned police resources to confront these social media-fueled mass street demonstrations, which threaten other drivers and pedestrians and occasionally metamorphose into violent looting mobs. Localities are also rushing through new legislation aimed at discouraging mass vehicle gatherings. It’s the latest struggle to seize back streets that communities yielded to the lawless in the past few years.

While drag racing and biker rallies on local streets are nothing new, something larger and more dangerous formed during the tail end of Covid. The trend began when hot rodders took advantage of streets largely empty because of lockdowns to burn rubber, race against one another, or perform dangerous maneuvers like “doughnuts.” Sometimes, a group of drivers would assemble and ride in unison slowly down a street, effectively taking it over. Videos of these exhibitions on social media garnered huge audiences, and soon people were using Twitter and Instagram to advertise what became known as street takeovers. The events grew in number and intensity even as roads got busier once Covid restrictions faded.

These mass demonstrations emerged as police departments were being weakened by budget cuts and recruiting problems in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020. As a result, police were often overwhelmed and forced merely to observe these giant gatherings. In the Connecticut town of Milford, a single cop in a police car watched as a four-mile line of cars, motorcycles, and all-terrain vehicles passed by. Some of the cyclists popped wheelies in front of the cop, while others crossed the median and drove on the wrong side of the road to taunt him. In nearby Tolland, residents were outraged when state police stood by and allowed participants in a street takeover to attack a couple in a car who tried to maneuver around the congestion—stomping on the vehicle and smashing it until they totaled the car.

Junk Science is being used to Prop up DEI It’s even worse than I thought Eric Kaufmann

https://erickaufmann.substack.com/p/junk-science-is-being-used-to-prop

Don’t get fooled again by experts claiming that DEI rests on scientific evidence.

What follows is an updated and expanded version of the short piece I published at Unherd four days ago. Whereas I had thought the authors of a paper claiming discrimination against minority scholars in academia were only guilty of burying their key findings while touting weak results, it now looks like their results are garbage: a result of sloppiness, mendacity, or both. This tells us a great deal about the knowledge production system in the social sciences, and how it systematically skews what experts consider to be the ‘truth’ and ‘settled science’.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is on the ropes these days. This is a big problem for institutions, such as most elite universities or Science magazine, that have invested deeply in this belief system. One way to rescue the enterprise is to tout new scientific results that buttress the claim that minorities and women are discriminated against in academia. Ergo the need for affirmative action.

Now the woke popular science magazine Science is trumpeting a new academic paper in the equally woke Nature Human Behaviour as a riposte to the naysayers. ‘Racial bias can taint the academic tenure process,’ screams the headline.

The paper’s authors claim Black and Hispanic academics with the same track record are discriminated against when they come up for tenure and promotion. But their data, if anything, points to anti-White/Asian bias, propping up weak results while covering up inconvenient but powerful findings.

The authors briefly admit that disadvantaged minorities are advantaged over Whites and Asians when it comes to being promoted to full professor. But, at an earlier career stage, when moving from a relatively insecure non-tenured professorship to a secure tenured professorship, they are discriminated against. This helps explain minority underrepresentation in academia.

I was curious so I downloaded and crunched their data.

‘Progressive’ California At War With Progress The Golden State is Moving Backwards

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/16/progressive-california-at-war-with-progress/

Much has been made, as it should have been, about the stark differences with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the once-great NASA’s pathetic woke-DEI-politically correct existence. Musk wins on merit, but in California, that’s not what counts. So Musk has been vilified because he dared to leave the progressive plantation.

SpaceX has been launching rockets from the Vandenberg Air Force base in Santa Barbara County for more than a decade. It wants to increase the number of annual launches from six to 36, and maybe even more. The Air Force has no problem with the plans. The California Coastal Commission does. It voted 6-4 last week to block the increase.

As one would expect, the opposition was based on Musk’s political transformation. He also has the temerity to be successful in a society that has increasingly come to devalue success and deem failure and the amenability to be offended to be virtues. That will get him nowhere in California.

“​​We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race,” said Commissioner Chair Caryl Hart.
“​​Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” said Alternate Commissioner Gretchen Newsom.
“This company is owned by the richest person in the world with direct control of what could be the most expansive communications system in the planet,” Commissioner Mike Wilson said. “Just last week that person was talking about political retribution.”

The “official” reason for the commission’s decision is due “concerns that all SpaceX launches would be considered military activity, shielding the company from having to acquire its own permits, even if military payloads aren’t being carried,” reports Politico.

But it’s obvious that was concocted for public consumption.