RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-palestinian-protesters-target-manhattan-cancer-hospital/

Pro-Palestinian protesters holding signs that read “Healthcare Workers for Free Palestine” hurled insults at Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on Monday.

Within Our Lives Palestine organized Monday’s “Flood Manhattan for Gaza MLK Day march for healthcare.” Hundreds of people marched past the cancer center, which is also a pediatric hospital, as part of the protest.

“In the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ we stand with the Palestinian people amid a grave healthcare crisis amidst the genocide in Gaza,” Within Our Lives said on Instagram.

Videos of the march show children inside Sloan Kettering watching from windows as protesters scream “shame” at them.

“Make sure they hear you; they’re in the windows,” a female organizer of the protest said.

With signs that read “Honor the martyrs of Palestine” and “NYC city workers for Palestine,” the group also marched past the United Nations, the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Starbucks (“Starbucks, you can’t hide; you make drinks for human genocide”), and McDonald’s (“McDonald’s, you can’t hide; you make meals for genocide”).

“What about refusing to acknowledge an attack on Palestinian people, and especially the healthcare system, shows any form of compassion or respect for health?” one speaker said during the protest.

“Shame, shame, shame,” protesters shouted in turn.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/crime-and-history

In Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s shimmering portrait of 1980s New York, Sherman McCoy’s father offers his son the following advice: if you want to live in the city, “you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate” yourself from crime and disorder. “The cynicism and smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant,” Wolfe writes. “If you could go breezing down the FDR Drive in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars?”

Academics are hardly less self-interested than Wall Street bond traders like the fictional McCoy. Indeed, scholars who hope to thrive in the American historical profession should “insulate, insulate, insulate” themselves from unfashionable topics—especially the crime crisis that plagued American cities in the last third of the twentieth century. If you can earn honors and accolades by condemning the carceral state and “warrior policing,” why venture into the vexing subjects of predatory crime or the crime-control strategies of the police?

Problem is, from the 1960s to the 1990s, urban crime was among the most significant domestic issues in the United States. It was an urgent matter of national concern, contributing to the changing complexion of our cities and to a political realignment that shapes our politics today. Yet scholars of recent U.S. history tend to downplay crime, either by minimizing its significance or by overzealously criticizing cops and the courts.

The reason for this is obvious, though rarely expressed. Left-wing intellectuals do not want us thinking too much about urban crime. When crime throws American cities into disarray—as has happened before and in some places is happening now—it is a bad look for the Left.  

Start with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, one of the most influential scholarly books of the twenty-first century. Mass incarceration, Alexander writes, “is a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racial control,” designed perpetually to harm people of color—a “racial caste system.” Yet Alexander’s book should be infamous for its well-documented flaws. She defines “mass incarceration” as broadly as possible to make the problem seem worse than it is—she considers those on probation or parole, or awaiting sentencing, to be “incarcerated.” She doesn’t point out that in the early 1960s, violent crime began rising sharply along with nonviolent drug crimes. She doesn’t acknowledge that nonwhites drove the three-decade crime climb, or that urban African Americans are more likely to be victimized by crime, which is why many blacks supported the punitive crime measures she decries.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-contracting-is-the-next-dei-target-race-affirmative-action-supreme-court-ca60eaf4?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Critics of diversity, equity and inclusion policies scored an important victory with last year’s Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and a symbolic one with Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president. But while some universities and businesses have pivoted from DEI to get in line with the high court’s ruling, Washington’s diversity-industrial complex marches on. It’s time for the federal government to play by the same antidiscrimination rules private companies have to follow.

Federal affirmative-action programs originated in the Nixon administration. In 1969 Labor Secretary George Shultz launched the Philadelphia Plan, which required companies bidding for federal construction projects in that city to commit to minority hiring goals. Within a year of announcing the plan, the administration extended it to cover all federal agencies. Fifty-five years later, those rules are still in place.

Federal regulations require prime contractors or subcontractors “with 50 or more employees and a contract of $50,000 or more” to submit “a written affirmative action program” for each of their locations. The rules dictate that a contractor’s workforce should “reflect the gender, racial and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which the contractor recruits and selects.” Employing less than 80% of the local share of “any race, sex, or ethnic group” is categorized as an “adverse impact.” Failure to comply with these federal diversity mandates could mean the cancellation of existing contracts, and violators could be barred from doing future business with the federal government. It’s safest to hire by the numbers.