RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

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.