RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/14/dei-overpromised-under-delivered-ran-amok/

The concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been in the ascendancy for nearly a decade. The movement is an outgrowth and expansion of affirmative action, whose intention was to proactively promote opportunity for racial and ethnic minorities that were perceived to be historically disadvantaged. But as awareness that Affirmative Action had evolved into applying “good” discrimination to cure past “bad” discrimination, support for it waned, culminating in its virtual elimination by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

For many reasons, despite its noble aspirations, DEI should follow affirmative action into the dustbin of discarded feel-good but perverse social causes. In practice, DEI is irretrievably flawed. It has devolved into toxic authoritarianism on the part of those who control and promote it, while undermining basic tenets of American values, societal cohesiveness, and free expression.

The recent turmoil at Harvard concerning the discriminatory treatment of certain groups according to their identities or ideologies has helped to bring some of these failings to light. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 4, Douglas Belkin quotes professor Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist in the Department of Astronomy on how the DEI bureaucracy functions on campus:

Under Gay’s leadership [as Dean of the Faculty] … the mandate of the administrative state of the university continued to expand and shift from serving faculty to monitoring them. The message was, ‘Don’t deviate from what they find to be appropriate’ … [DEI] became more of a police organization.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/15/put-a-kill-switch-on-govt-bureaucrats-not-our-cars/

Remember that “kill switch” mandate for new cars that media fact-checkers years ago assured the public was just a crazy right-wing conspiracy? Well, the federal government recently took the first step toward a rule that would …. require all new cars sold to come with a kill switch.

A provision in the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed in 2021 directed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to come up with a rule by this year requiring new cars to have “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.”

The law describes this tech as being able to “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle” and “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected.”

Critics immediately raised privacy, cost, and reliability concerns any such “monitoring” system would raise, only to be reassured by the mainstream press that this was much ado about nothing. The provision was meant only to keep drunk drivers off the road.

The fact checkers also said that law enforcement and government agencies wouldn’t be notified of an impaired driver or ever be able to remotely disable your car.

Phew.

But the law doesn’t specifically forbid such systems from communicating with third parties or allowing them to shut down cars remotely. And you can bet that cops, government agencies, insurance companies, and who knows who else will all want access to it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/will_white_males_become_an_endangered_species_in_the_workplace.html

DEI is producing some pernicious situations in the workplaces of America, particularly with one egregious case in Seattle.

America was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal.” 

So how did whites end up at the bottom of a new hierarchy of races?  Why are lawsuits by whites alleging “reverse discrimination” -– racism of another kind -– on the rise?

Conservative writer Christopher Caldwell says it all began in the 1960s.  The decade marked a radical change in how America –- especially official America -– viewed itself.  In The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, his objective, incisive analysis of the process, Caldwell writes:

Today slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s self-understanding.  Never before the 1960s was this the case.

Until then, racial conflict in America was always seen against the larger story -– of building a constitutional republic. 

But after the 1960s, he writes, “the constitutional republic was sometimes discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human lives.”

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) -– which Caldwell describes as “less a judicial argument than a judicial order” -– and the Civil Rights Act (1964) ended up casting a “rival Constitution” incompatible with the original and bypassing the democratic process. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/still-not-learning-from-history/

From its beginning 2400 years ago in ancient Greece, the purpose of history has been to counsel the present by documenting the mistakes of the past. Thucydides explicitly made this goal the purpose of his History of the Peloponnesian War: to memorialize “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”  At the violent end of the Roman Republic, the historian Livy similarly explains his intent: to shows us “what to imitate,” and “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.”

Yet here we are, two millennia later, despite our wealth, technological advances, and much vaster knowledge, still repeating the mistakes and follies not just of the distant past, but of the last half-century. The four years of the Biden administration’s failing foreign policy are the consequence of bad ideas and practices that we have already witnessed over and over.

Until we pay attention to the blunders of the past, and acknowledge the tragic nature of human affairs, we will continue to let misplaced idealism, electoral politics, ideological mantras, and sheer laziness endanger our national security and interests.

The conflict ignited by Hamas’ war crimes on October 7 features another lesson our foreign policy and national security mavens have failed to learn.  U.S. forces in the region have been attacked 170 times by Iranian proxies, with scores of U.S. troops wounded, some critically, and three killed. Yet during that time, the Biden administration has responded with telegraphed and limited missile attacks on proxy assets in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Red Sea. Yet the aggression against our forces and international shipping has persisted.

https://tomklingenstein.com/woke-equality-is-a-myth/

Editor’s Note: The woke regime, or the group quota regime, is defined by its pursuit of group outcome equality: a leveling of social and economic results across racial categories, irrespective of actual differences and the realities of the individual. Yet credible social science, especially the work of Thomas Sowell, suggests that such outcome equality is not just undesirable — a threat to the republic of liberty and merit established by the Constitution — but impossible. Variation in outcomes stems from human nature and from reality, social and otherwise. A society that ensures group outcome equality cannot possibly be one that respects human liberty.

This central insight of Sowell’s work explains, in part, the stunning radicalism the group quota regime has exhibited in recent years: Driven toward a virtually unattainable goal, the woke set themselves up in direct opposition to the natural law — and seek ever more power in hopes of overcoming its influence on American society and the American regime. That quest for power has ignited a cold civil war between the partisans of this revolution and those who still believe in the free society  — even a free society marked by disparate outcomes.

This essay was originally published in the Summer 2018 issue of the Claremont Review of Books under the title “Thomas Sowell’s Inconvenient Truths.”

New York City’s vast public school system enrolls 1.1 million students, some 18,000 of whom attend nine “specialized” high schools, where the curriculum is particularly rigorous and admission is both widely sought and highly competitive. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech are the oldest, largest, and most famous such institutions. Eight of these schools base admission decisions solely on applicants’ scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), developed by an education assessment company under contract to the New York school system, which began using it in 1971. (The ninth concentrates on art, music, and the performing arts. It admits students on the basis of portfolios or auditions, since no standardized test can reliably identify those 13-year-olds who will, over the ensuing four years, turn out to be the most annoying.)

In June, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called for his city’s schools to replace SHSAT with an admissions process relying on two measures: middle-school class rank, and scores on a test taken by every student in New York state. Using SHSAT is a “monumental injustice,” he contended, because blacks and Hispanics account for two thirds of all New York City public school students but only one tenth of those enrolled in the specialized high schools. For de Blasio, this gap shows that using SHSAT denies students “an equal chance to get into one of their city’s best high schools.” Under the admissions procedure the mayor has proposed, which cannot be implemented without the New York state legislature’s approval, the specialized high schools will “start looking like New York City.” Black and Hispanic students, that is, would account for about 45% of enrollment, much higher than the current figure, though still only two thirds of their numbers in New York’s entire school system.

Tellingly, de Blasio treats SHSAT’s unrepresentative outcome as proof that its use constitutes an unfair process. His reasoning applies to a specific situation the general principle recently expressed by Ibram X. Kendi: “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Kendi, a historian who directs the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University, is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won a National Book Award in 2016. He recently wrote in the New York Times that “many racist Americans” resort to what he considers the only alternative explanation for racial disparities: “black inferiority.” In the same spirit, de Blasio writes that objections that his admissions proposals will “lower the standard” at the specialized schools are based on a “narrative” that not only “traps students in a grossly unfair environment,” but “actually blames them for it.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/bidens-disastrous-press-conference

“My memory is fine!” insisted a defensive President Joe Biden at a hastily convened press conference last Thursday, at which he identified Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico and blanked on the name of the cathedral where he received a rosary upon the death of his son Beau. For much of the press conference, Biden, 81, resorted to indignation to bat away questions about his mental acuity from an unusually insistent White House press corps.

Just before the press conference was called, Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur released what should have been welcome news for the Biden administration: a 345-page report concluding that the president should face no criminal charges over his improper storage of top-secret government documents and sharing of top-secret information with a ghost writer who held no security clearance. Hur’s report, however, also found that Biden displayed significant memory lapses during the investigation, including an inability to state when he had served as vice president or the year in which his son died. Biden, Hur concluded, is an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

Were it not for Biden’s ill-advised press conference, the main topic of discussion might have been the legal implications of Hur’s report. Biden and his supporters could have claimed vindication, while his opponents might have carped about prosecutorial double standards in light of Donald Trump’s federal indictment for broadly similar alleged offenses. But after Biden left the podium, the desperation was like blood in the water for the beltway sharks, who closed in to feed on a public relations catastrophe—a “nightmare,” according to an anonymous Democratic congressman interviewed by NBC News.

Doubts about Biden’s mental competency can no longer be ignored in any serious analysis of American electoral politics. As long ago as May 2023, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that only 32 percent of Americans believed Biden had the “mental sharpness” to serve as president, against a majority that thought so only three years earlier, when candidate Biden led the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. By last September, however, a CNN poll found that 73 percent of Americans were seriously concerned about Biden’s physical and mental competence, and that 67 percent of Democrats favored another nominee for their party in 2024. Four days before this week’s press conference, an NBC poll registered Biden’s lowest approval rating ever, 37 percent. More than three-quarters of those surveyed said that they have “major” or “moderate” concerns about Biden’s health in a second term, which would end in his 86th year, with the “major” category accounting for 62 percent. Only 11 percent registered no concern.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-too-demented-to-be-found-guilty-of-crimes/

Special Counsel Robert Hur just found Joe Biden was guilty of violating national security laws in removing classified documents— after examining then Senator and Vice President Biden’s some 15-year habit of removing classified files to his offices and residences, where they were stored in unsecured fashion.

Period. End of story.

Hur then, as a disinterested Special Counsel, not a local county prosecutor on a limited budget, logically would have indicted and prosecuted Biden. It really is a jury’s decision to determine whether Biden was guilty or innocent, or whether he is pardoned/exempted by reason of dementia.

It is not the role of Hur, as a prosecutor and advocate for the state, to imagine how difficult his case might be to prove someone so incapacitated like Biden was guilty, as Hur’s own research and investigations had otherwise indicated that he was.

Is mindset, intention, or mental status a normal consideration of violations of national security laws, or is it the act itself? So we are back to the James Comey defense:

Hillary was guilty but in Lord and Savior Comey’s judgement no jury would likely convict a presidential candidate of such stature of violating national security laws. (After her reprieve, Hillary immediately claimed such extenuating circumstances were proof of her innocence. And Biden in a nanosecond likewise claimed he is now exonerated too, as was the administration’s plan all along).

Finally note the following:

1) The Left, Hur, and others believe that someone who has lost his faculties and who would not be allowed to drive a semi-truck, teach a class, diagnose a patient, argue a case, wire a house, or cook a hamburger is nevertheless fit enough to run the United States of America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dems-roll-out-welcome-mat-for-worlds-criminals/

Maria Manaura, who’s been arrested at least eight times in the six months since she arrived in New York City from Venezuela, is living at the Row NYC hotel, once hailed for its unbeatable Times Square location and front-row view of the theater district. Now it’s drug-infested and violent, but still costs taxpayers $500 a night for each of the 1,300 rooms given over to migrants.

Manaura was busted again Jan. 30 for snatching a woman’s cellphone on the No. 6 train. She was charged with grand larceny and resisting arrest, but instead of getting locked up, Judge Jay Weiner granted supervised release, likely in time for her to make it back to the hotel and another prepared meal paid for by you and me. It’s sickening.

Migrants like Manaura who rack up clashes with police should be made ineligible for the city’s largesse. Handing out hotel rooms and free meals to repeat thugs makes it easier for them to commit crimes and makes us into patsies.

The Democratic Party is turning New York City into a Shangri-La for international theft rings and migrants here to rob and burglarize. Taxpayers foot the bill for the thieves’ hotel accommodations, plus three meals a day and a long list of other benefits, even free bus tickets if they have to skip town in a hurry. If you’re a criminal, what’s not to like?

This stupidity isn’t new. For over a year, New York City has coddled criminal migrants with long rap sheets, sheltering and feeding them while they continue their crime spree.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/12/do-leftists-now-believe-leftism-doesnt-work/

It is hard to destroy a naturally beautiful city like San Francisco, with ideal weather and stunning infrastructure inherited from far better earlier generations.

Yet San Francisco continues its much-publicized and self-inflicted doom loop. The productive classes still flee the increasingly crime-ridden city and its self-induced pathologies. The city is eroding not because of the doomsayers and not because of what people say about San Francisco, but because of what San Franciscans have done to San Francisco.

In 2023, more than 40,000 crimes were reportedly committed in San Francisco. The great majority of the perpetrators were either not arrested or never jailed, indicted, or convicted.

Downtown office vacancy rates exceed 35 percent—and are climbing. Tourists have ostracized the city, given the thousands of homeless that occupy sidewalks and downtown. San Francisco claimed to be on the cutting-edge of the woke green movement, proud that it had enacted the most stringent environmental laws and regulations in the world—except when it came to defecation, injection, and urination on the sidewalks, doorways, and parks and during storms, when the toxic, effluviant human waste escapes sewage treatment and flows into the once-cherished bay.

In a mere five years, the city went from being one of the most envied and wealthy in the world with a vibrant nightlife and new high-tech start-ups to a West-Cost Detroit.

Now billionaires are trying to heal San Francisco by returning it to the old normality in the era before the progressive city councils, the boards of supervisors, and mayors defunded the police, allowed the homeless to absorb the downtown, and promoted prosecutors who refused to enforce the laws.

The rich are rallying to undo the damage wrought by the very officials whom they and the majority of the city voted into office. Their principles seem simple—start doing the very opposite of the progressive agenda: enforce laws; arrest, convict, and incarcerate criminals; balance city budgets; and insist that the homeless leave the streets, follow the laws of the city, and relocate to shelters.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20394/boeing-leadership-crisis

There was a time when any aircraft Boeing built was a flying example of American innovation, excellence, and aviation dominance. They were the cornerstone of a multi-billion dollar sector of our nation’s economy.

Shockingly, that is no longer the case, as they suffer a series of issues with the latest news that crucial bolts were never replaced in a 737 MAX 9 from which a door plug blew off in mid-flight.

While the issue of safety is paramount, Boeing’s apparent loss of manufacturing quality control has the means to deprive the United States of global leadership in this crucial arena. And Boeing’s airliner woes are not their only issue. Their military contracts are also facing problems, in the form of the much troubled KC-46 tanker.

Overseas, Airbus, a one-time distant second in manufacturing airliners, has a book of backorders that runs far into the future. And the Chinese are acquiring subcontracting work on airline components that is anything but a casual sideline.

Make no mistake. Boeing’s woes are ours as well, for this onetime leader in aviation has made a series of missteps that go far beyond their own financial and reputational damage. The company has compelled a worldwide market to ask whether the United States has slid into mediocrity. In aviation, that is nothing less than catastrophic. Wall Street analysts may do the numbers regarding Boeing’s future, but we need to ask ourselves, especially this year, have Americans lost their sense of pride in the work they do? In our nation? In our future? Is Boeing’s crisis symptomatic of our nation’s challenges at a time when deliberate disinformation is designed to break our spirit and abdicate our leadership?