RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/09/the_social_justice_mob_tries_to_do_to_tech_what_it_did_to_academia_145731.html

The same tactics used to suppress dissent in academia — with the goal of making colleges “safe spaces” that feel “welcoming” to snowflakes — have graduated to the tech world.

Fortunately, rather than let activists do to their startups what they did to academia, some CEOs are fighting back.

This episode begins when a new employee at Basecamp, a Chicago-based software firm, formed a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI, as it is known) committee to improve workplace diversity.

In short order, the atmosphere at Basecamp became so toxic that management told staff to stop pushing their politics at work.

“No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account,” CEO Jason Fried announced in a blog post. “It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialogue toward dark places.”

The Verge’s Casey Newton reported that a third of Basecamp’s roughly 58 employees planned to quit.

ttps://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/can-we-please-ditch-the-term-systemic?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo5

The Elect are direly committed to teaching us the difference between personal racism and systemic racism. It is considered the fulcrum of true wokeness to understand that racism is systemic, with the idea that to understand this is to have achieved a maximal comprehension of sorts, a kind of pure, Kantian wisdom from which we can proceed to … well, celebrating one another for having achieved it, roasting those who seem not to have, and calling that “antiracism.”

But if the mantra is that what we need to do to solve black America’s problems is “get rid of systemic racism,” we’re in trouble. That analysis, be it explicit or tacit, is based on a third-grader’s understanding of how a society works. More importantly, that analysis does not help black people and often hurts us.

* * *

First let’s review what systemic racism means. There are inequities between whites and blacks. The reason is not that blacks are inherently less capable than whites. This presumably means that the discrepancies are traceable to devaluation of black people of some kind at some point in the pathway. This devaluation, even if not conscious, is a kind of racism, and this means that the society “is racist.” Thus the way to get rid of this kind of discrepancy is to undo the racism in the system.

But note that if we take this as a succession of logical statements rather than as a musical sequence valuable primarily because the term racism is intoned within it, then we hit a snag. Just what do we do to undo “racism” that is bound up in a complex system, and especially given that the system has a past that is unreachable to us now, as well as a present?

Here, The Elect burn to insist that, well, systemic racism exists anyway! And you the reader may want to reiterate that systemic racism exists. It does. There are indeed such discrepancies. The question is not whether they exist, but what one does about them.

“Undoing the racism in the system,” in this light, is word magic, not an intelligent prescription for change in the real world. Grouchy? Not really – just grounded. Here’s an example.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-latest-jobs-whopper-11620685389?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

President Joe Biden’s empty boasts about his economic plan are going to make Americans long for the understatement of Donald Trump. They may already be longing for Trump-era policies on job creation.

One Trump proposal that never came to fruition is nonetheless instructive in demonstrating the modesty of the Trump economic team compared with the Biden braggadocio.

In March of 2018, the Trump White House’s Council of Economic Advisers sketched out a plan and described the likely results:

In this paper, CEA investigates the likely impacts from a comprehensive public infrastructure program. The program includes a 10-year, $1.5 trillion program of infrastructure investment as well as new administrative and regulatory policies intended to increase efficiency and speed delivery of infrastructure projects…
The President’s plan would likely result in the employment of 290,000 to 414,000 additional infrastructure workers, on average, over a 10-year window, although these employment gains may be offset by losses elsewhere in the economy.

As President, Mr. Trump did implement some valuable regulatory reforms, but never reached an agreement with Congress on new infrastructure spending. Now consider the $2.7 trillion Biden plan, which doesn’t include the Trump regulatory reform agenda and spends far more in total but less on actual infrastructure. On Thursday in Lake Charles, Louisiana President Joe Biden said, according to the official White House transcript:

Everything we’re — we’re gone through is now the, sort of — the blinders have been taken off the American people. They know how bad of shape things are in. But it creates — if we move — all the economists, including the liberal as well as conservative think tanks, point out what we’ll create when we pass this Jobs Plan — we’ll create up to 16 million good-paying jobs. Not $8 an hour or $12, not $15 — prevailing wage jobs. Wages you can raise a family on.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/michelle_claims_to_live_in_fear_barack_actually_does.html

On Friday’s broadcast of “CBS This Morning,” Michelle Obama made the delusional claim, one among several, that “many of us still live in fear as we go to the grocery store, or walking our dogs, or allowing our children to get a license.”

Had Michelle attributed that fear to a wariness of black drive-by gang bangers or street muggers, it might have made some sense. But her fear, she implied, was of racist police.

Barack Obama knows better, but he has lived in fear as well. That fear deformed his presidency and sent the nation spiraling down a lethal rabbit hole that has benefited no one more than the Mao-loving matrons of BLM.  

Not surprisingly, as I learned in researching my forthcoming book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, there is no one Barack fears more than wife Michelle, his personal emissary from the world of authentic African-Americans.

In a May 2011 interview, activist professor Cornel West nailed Obama on this fear. “All he has known culturally is white,” said West. “He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.”

Obama had reason to be frightened. Following a Father’s Day speech by Obama at a largely black Chicago church in 2008, Jesse Jackson was heard on a hot mic at a Fox News studio saying, “See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith-based—I wanna cut his nuts out.”

Here Jackson made a sharp slicing motion with his hands and continued, “Barack—he’s talking down to black people—telling n*****s how to behave.”  In the original, as one might expect, Jackson did not speak in asterisks.

Obama had made the rookie mistake of attributing the absurd crime rate in America’s black neighborhoods to fatherlessness. Jackson, Chicago’s most prominent baby daddy, suggested that a leftward course correction was in order, and Obama cravenly obliged him.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/09/tuning-out-wokeism/

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

911 No Longer

As big-city prosecutors choose not to prosecute “property crimes” or “brick and mortar” arsons and thefts, or what they consider “minor” misdemeanors or “nonlethal” felonies, crime spikes. The ancient principle of human nature then reigns supreme. The criminally inclined conclude the upside of hurting the weak, killing the innocent, stealing, destroying, looting, or simply causing mayhem far outweighs the rarer downside of being arrested, convicted, incarcerated, or worse. So all deterrence is lost. A cycle of chacun pour soi prevails.

Police in response make the necessary adjustments. Consider their bleak choices. Either they: 

1) Go into increasingly high crime areas and get attacked or shot in the failed effort to make an arrest or restore calm; or

2) proceed to make an arrest, but the suspect, usually with prior felony convictions, resists, bolts, or attacks, and they use force to subdue him. In some cases, they can make a decision to risk doing so lethally, if they judge, rightly or wrongly, that the arrested is a threat to their lives. As a result, they are suspended, ruined, doxxed, vilified in the media, and their families and homes are put in danger; or 

3) they apprehend the suspect, make the arrest without incident, but the woke district attorneys decide the suspect was not worth the time and controversy of prosecuting or find that the police acted in a way that might be suspect or at least alienate a jury of the suspect’s peers. Therefore, the arrested is released—omnis effusus labor; or

4) they safely arrest the suspect without incident. The state successfully indicts and prosecutes the accused. And if he is found guilty, he is incarcerated to protect society and to pay for his crimes.

In these revolutionary times, I think plenty of police officers—if they still have career choices and can afford temporary financial losses—will make the necessary adjustments. So they will decide that the odds of scenarios one through three are as great or greater than number four.

Therefore they will quit, retire, or move to rural, mostly crime-free jurisdictions. Or if not, they simply will not respond promptly to 911 calls from high-crime areas, and perhaps suggest that other police, those less likely to inspire community wrath, go in their stead. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/pete-du-pont-conservative-ahead-of-his-time/

Du Pont, who died Saturday, was a great two-term GOP governor and conservative innovator.

Pete du Pont, the man who inadvertently may have jump-started Joe Biden’s political career in Delaware, passed away on Saturday at age 86.

Du Pont, an heir to one of the most successful corporate legacies in America, had a bigger impact on American government than his failed 1988 presidential bid for the GOP nomination would indicate. He served as a congressman and then rescued his bankrupt state during two terms as governor by applying classic Reagan conservatism: cutting taxes, deregulating, restraining spending, and expanding economic opportunity.

His record as Delaware’s governor won bipartisan plaudits and prompted him to run for president in 1988, when Ronald Reagan retired. His campaign attracted plenty of attention from pundits, but GOP primary voters plumped for a more well-known member of another aristocratic family: George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president.

Though he never ran for office again, du Pont devoted another quarter century to building and supporting the conservative movement, including a stint as president of the National Review Institute from 1994 to 1997.

He studied engineering at Princeton and law at Harvard, and then he worked for six years in product development at the family company. Frustrated that he would have to wait his turn to run the company until he was past 60, he entered politics at age 33 and won a seat in Delaware’s part-time legislature. In 1970, he easily won Delaware’s sole congressional seat.

In 1972, Republican U.S. senator J. Caleb Boggs was preparing to retire. Du Pont prepared to run, but he would have faced then–Wilmington mayor Harry G. Haskell Jr. in a bitter Senate primary. To avoid a divisive primary, President Richard Nixon helped convince Boggs to run again with united party support.

But Boggs was 63 — he looked tired and ran a lackluster campaign. He was upset by a hard-charging young Democrat named Joe Biden, who beat Boggs, even though he didn’t reach the required age of 30 until after the election. We can speculate how different history might have been if du Pont had beaten Biden and sent “Uncle Joe” in a different direction.

Instead, in 1976, du Pont decided to tackle a real challenge. Delaware had 9 percent unemployment, some of the highest taxes in the nation, a staggering debt, and one of the lowest bond ratings in the country. Previous governors had failed to halt the slide: None had been reelected in 25 years.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/love-song-bill-and-melinda-daniel-greenfield/

After Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleoptra, and Pepé Le Pew and Penelope, there were Bill and Melinda. The Microsoft technocrat and his spouse were a love story for the ages.

In 1993, Bill proposed to Melinda: an executive at his company. In 1994, they were married. In 1995, Melinda debuted Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob treated computer users like idiots who were too stupid to be allowed to use their computers without a lot of handholding.

Condescending handholding was also what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offered the world as one of the industry’s most notoriously miserable human beings decided to become a philanthropist and save the world from all the people who weren’t running it properly.

In 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, left his day-to-day role in 2008, and departed as chairman of the board in 2014. He also jettisoned 8 million shares of the company.

Forget CEO of Microsoft, Bill would use his vast wealth to become the CEO of the world.

Each of Bill’s resignations followed another ‘Microsoft Bob’, another failed Microsoft project, from Windows 2000, to Windows Vista in 2006, and most infamously, Windows 8 in 2014.

Every time Microsoft screwed up badly, Bill Gates seemed to decide that he should spend less time trying to make the company that had temporarily made him the richest man in the world succeed, and more time trying to run the world. Running the world hasn’t gone well for Gates.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/texas-muslim-who-helped-his-father-evade-capture-robert-spencer/

In Fort Worth, Texas on Tuesday, a 32-year-old Muslim named Islam Said was sentenced to ten years in prison for spending the last thirteen years helping his father, Yaser Said, one of the FBI’s Most Wanted criminals, evade capture. Yaser Said was wanted for murdering his two daughters, Islam Said’s sisters, Amina and Sarah Said. What kind of man would know that his father had murdered his two sisters and then help his father avoid justice, rather than turning him in? The answer to that question is far too uncomfortable and inconvenient for law enforcement officials to face honestly.

Islam Said was arrested along with Yaser last August. Apparently he was in hiding with his father, although he doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the killings. And according to the Dallas Morning News, Islam Said denies that the killings were honor murders or had anything to do with Islam. “It’s something else. Religion has nothing to do with it.”

Yet that raises the question of why Islam Said was with his father at all. If these weren’t honor killings, why would Islam Said go on the run with Yaser and help him hide for all these years? Why wouldn’t he have the normal human reaction of thinking that what his father had done in murdering his sisters was abhorrent, and turn his father in to authorities? Did Islam Said’s commitment to the religion of Islam override that natural human reaction and make him think that what his father had done was good and praiseworthy?

For despite media denial and obfuscation of the fact, honor killing is something that many Muslims believe to be good and in accord with their faith. According to Islamic law, “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (Reliance of the Traveller o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law. In this case the victim was the murderer’s daughter, a victim to the culture of violence and intimidation that such laws help create.