Dogs prepare you for babies.
Cats prepare you for teenagers.
*.*
ME: Is this the helpline for alcoholics?
VOICE: Yes it is.
ME: What's a good Mojito recipe?
*.*
Having been married ten years and still living in an apartment, the wife would often complain about anything, as she was tired of saving every penny to buy a "dream home."
Trying to placate her, the husband found a new apartment, within their budget. However, after the first week, she began complaining again.
"Joel," she said, "I don't like this place at all. There are no curtains in the bathroom. The neighbors can see me every time I take a bath."
"Don't worry," replied her husband. "If the neighbors do see you, they'll buy curtains."
*.*
Top five possible brand names for lab-grown chicken:
Chicken Pretenders
Shake 'n Fake
Imposter Farms
Fake Breasts
What the Cluck?
*.*
If every day is a gift, can you tell me where I can return Monday?
Quote of the Times;
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” - 1 Timothy 6:10
Link of the Times;
BlackRock Exec Admits on Camera: “We Control the World – Depopulation Is Good for Business”:
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/blackrock-exec-admits-on-camera-we-control-the-world-depopulation-is-good-for-business/
Issue of the Times;
Churchill’s War: The Real History of World War II by Paul Craig Roberts
All truth-tellers are denounced, and most end up destroyed. Truth seldom serves the agendas of powerful interests.
The one historian from whom you can get the unvarnished truth of World War II is David Irving.
On the bookjackets of Irving’s books, the question is asked: What is real history?
The answer is that real history is history that travels straight from history-maker to the history-maker’s documents and from the document archives to the historian’s book without political input and free of academic and patriotic prejudice. It is history that cannot be bought.
Irving’s Hitler’s War was published in 1977. Irving was an archaeologist digging in history who located and dug up previously unknown documents and archives. He lets the factual record tell the history. He is exact and scrupulous and does not curry favor. The Board of Deputies of British Jews wrote: “The book was thoroughly researched . . . It confirmed Irving’s reputation as one of the world’s most thorough researchers and an exciting and readable historian.”
The first volumn of Irving’s Churchill’s War was published in 1987. The second volumn in 2001. The third and final volumn is awaited.
These works far surpass all previous histories of the war and all accounts of the agendas and events that produced the war. Irving is not motivated to curry favor with the ruling establishment, to make us feel self-righteous in our victory by demonizing the opponent or to grind any personal, ideological, or political axe. He lets the history-makers speak for themselves in their own words, and it is seldom a pretty picture.
Irving’s books sold millions of copies, and he was well-to-do. But he fell foul of Zionists, oddly enough because he documented actual atrocities against Jews. The problem was the attrocities he found differed from the official holocaust story. He documented a holocaust of a sort, but it is a different one than the Zionists prefer. If I understand correctly, infuriated Zionists with plentiful funds used unethical tactics and brought lawsuits, the defense against which eventually bankrupted him. Little wonder most historians choose to suck up to powerful interests by validating their claims and explanations. The fake history they write is a self-protective device like a bullet-proof vest.
I previously reported on Hitler’s War and the first volumn of Churhill’s War in my most widely read article— https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/05/13/the-lies-about-world-war-ii/ . As I quoted Irving’s account that Jews were killed, but in a more ad hoc than organized way, Zionists rushed to my already defective Wikipedia biography to attribute Irving’s words to me, thereby labeling me a “holocaust denier.” When I complained of the misrepresentation, I was fobbed off with the reply that I would not have quoted Irving if I had not agreed with him. In other words, if you report in a book review what a writer says, it means you agree with him. I am not qualified to agree or to disagree with Irving. Indeed, few people are.
People in the Western world have been indoctrinated for 75 years into a white hat/black hat story of World War II that exonerates the “allies” and demonizes Hitler and Germany. To tell people, especially elderly ones whose memory of the war was formed by war propaganda, that the “allies” were as bad or worse war criminals than the Germans brings fire and brimestone down on one’s head. It nevertheless needs to be done, because our view of ourselves reflects the make-believe story of the war with which we are inculcated. In the false history comes strength for the opinion that we Americans and our country are exceptional and indispensable and that these traits justify Washington’s hegemony over the world. Our destruction in whole or part of seven countries in the 21st century, our withdrawal from arms limitation agreements, our dangerous demonization of militarily powerful countries such as Russia and China all rest in our self-righteous view of ourselves. Of course, not all Americans share these self-righteous views, but the views are the basis for both Republican and Democrat foreign policy. Even the left-wing, or whatever remains of it, believes in war in order to overthrow dictators and “bring democray and human rights.”
In what follows I am not going to attempt a review of Irving’s second volumn on Churchill. Instead, I will report some of the findings that documents reveal, findings that will be new information for most readers. But first a preface.
Hitler did not start World War II. England and France launched World War II with a declaration of war against Germany. Hitler did not want a war with Britain and France and tried to avoid it and then end it with a peace agreement very favorable to Britain and France. Hitler regarded the British Empire as essential to the survival of European dominance. He promised Churchill in exchange for an end of hostilities that Germany would defend the British Empire with the German military anywhere in the world that it was in jeopardy. Hitler left a large part of France and French North Africa unoccupied. He left the French fleet in French hands.
Hitler’s aim was to restore the integrity of the German nation which had been torn apart and distributed to Czechslovakia, Poland, Denmark, and France by the Versailles Treaty which had been forced on Germany after World War I by a policy of starvation. Germans in the territories turned over to Czechoslovakia and Poland were being persecuted and murdered. Hitler had no choice but to do something about it. He recovered German territorty from France, Czechoslovakia, and Denmark without war.
The same outcome was likely in Poland except the British interfered. The British gave the Polish military dictatorship a “guarantee” to come to Poland’s aid if Poland refused Hitler’s demands. Consequently, the Polish dictatorship broke off negotiations with Germany. Germany and the Soviet Union then split Poland between them.
The guarantee compelled “British honor” to declare war on Germany—but not on the Soviet Union—and the hapless French were pulled along.
The British relied on the “powerful French military” and sent an expeditionary force which was promptly trapped at Dunkirk where Hitler let them go, thinking that an act of magnanimity and his refusal to humiliate the British would bring an end to the conflict. However, Churchill kept Hitler’s overly generous peace terms from the British people and from Parliament. Churchill had wanted war and had worked hard for one and now that he had power and a chance to repeat the military leadership of his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, he was determined to keep his war.
With Hitler in control of Europe, Churchill began working harder to get the US into the war. All along the way President Roosevelt had given Churchill war encouragement but without promising any definite course of action from America. Roosevelt wanted Britain at war. He knew it would bankrupt the British and place them economically in Washington’s hands, which would permit the US to break up the British system of trade preferences that allowed Britain to control world trade, destroy the British Empire, dethrone the British pound and replace it with the dollar. Roosevelt was an enemy of empire except America’s own. From FDR’s standpoint, World War II was an arrack by the US on British trade preferences that were the backbone of the British Empire.
So Churchill got his war which cost Britain her empire, and Roosevelt replaced the British Empire with an American one. FDR paid a cheap price—about 300,000 US combat deaths. In her defeat of Germany, Russia lost about 9,000,000 soldiers in combat deaths and 26 million people altogether,
After the Russians stopped the German offensive, the war could have ended, but FDR and Churchill had established a policy of unconditional surrender, which shackled allied wartime foreign policy to two more years of death and destruction.
As Pat Buchanan said, it was The Unnecessary War:
https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/030740515X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1587252427&sr=1-2
The war served Churhill’s path to power and Washington’s empire.
Volumn 2 begins in 1941. Irving has tracked down and unearthed many documents that permit a better understanding of the war. Many official papers are still under lock and key and many have been destroyed. The effort to suppress truth from coming out continues 75 years after the war.
Secrecy is used to hide crimes. It is reputations that are protected, not national security.
Churchill used secrecy to protect his war crime of ordering the bombing of civilian residential areas of German cities with his emphasis on bombing the homes of the working class as they were closer together which helped the conflagation to spread. Churchull would first have the civilian areas firebombed, and then when firemen and rescue workers were engaged the British would drop high explosives. Churchill ignored military targets, preferring instead to break the morale of the German population by bombing civilian areas. He tried to get the British Air Force to include poison gas when dropping incendiary and high explosive bombs on civilian residential areas.
As the British people did not know Churchill was bombing civilians, Churchill hoped Hitler would be provoked into replying in kind. Hitler refused for three months to take the bait, but finally his military insisted that unless he bombed the British they would keep on bombing German civilian areas. Hitler gave in but initially insisted that only British industrial targets be bombed. Once a few bombs went astray, Churchill had his rallying cry that the Nazi barbarians were bombing civilians. He got away with this, but officials in the know worried that the British Air Force, especially “Butcher” Harris, would face war crimes trials when the war was over. British generals and admirals disagreed with Churchill’s bombing policy. They regarded it as unprofessional and unprincipled. They complained that it harmed the war effort by denying the army and navy needed air support.
In November 1942 British Air Chief Portal compared the German bombing of Britain with the British bombing of Germany. The Germans had dropped 55,000 tons of bombs, killing 41,000 British and destroying 350,000 homes. The British had dropped 1,250,000 tons of bombs, killing 900,000 German civilians, maiming one million more, and destroying 6,000,000 German homes. The UK/US firebombing of Dresden at the end of the war stands as one of the worst war crimes in history. It killed as many or more civilians as the atomic bombs Washington dropped on the two Japanese cities, also at war end.
Churchill was determined to bomb Rome, but was resisted by the British Air Force. In contrast, Hitler ordered the German military not to risk the destruction of Rome by defending it.
Churchill ordered the bombing of the French fleet, which Hitler had left in the hands of Vichy France, killing around 3,000 French sailors. Churchill together with FDR and Eisenhower invaded French Northwest Africa which was in the hands of Vichy France. Vichy France Admiral Darlan used his influence to persuade the French not to resist the invasion, thus minimizing British and American casualties. Darlan cooperated in every way. His reward was to be assassinated in a plot organized by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, later one of Britain’s disastrous prime ministers. The assassin protested that he was promised immunity by the British, but was quickly executed to silence him. Eden, whose ambition was larger than his intelligence, was in DeGaulle’s pocket, and DeGaulle wanted Darlan out of his way to power.
The military schemes that Churchill imposed on the British military, such as his invasion of neutral Norway, always came to a bad end, but he rescued himself with masterful speeches in Parliament.
The British had a poor opinion of Eisenhower, and FDR had a poor opinion of Eden. There was so much conflict between the British and the Americans that it is amazing they were able to agree to any plan of action. The American people disliked the British for drawing them into “their war.” The British disliked the Americans for the Negro troops sent to England where they were believed to be responsible for rapes and a crime wave. A lot of propaganda was necessary to focus the hate on the Germans.
The British did not want to sacrifice Arab interests to Zionists but usually did because Zionist had the money. Churchill himself was indebted to a multimillionaire Jew who bailed him out when he faced bankruptcy. Zionists attempted to use their leverage over Churchill to force his approval of both more Jewish immigration to Palestine and for the formation of a “Jewish fighting force,” allegedly to fight the Germans but in reality to drive Palestinians out of Palestine. Zionists promised Churchill that if he would agree to their demands, they would bring the US into the war against Germany. Such was their power.
The British saw Zionists interests as detrimental to their hold on their Arab colonies. When deportations of Jews and their mistreatment began leaking out, the British Foreign Office saw the reports as the work of the international Zionist campaign to create sympathy and to use the sympathy in behalf of their Palistanian purpose. When 700 Jews found incapable of work were shot in a work camp, the Foreign Office responded, “Information from Jewish refugees is generally coloured and frequently unreliable.” Eisenhower was pleased with Darlan and was unaware of Eden’s plot against him. An American newsman told Eisenhower’s staff that the agitation against Admiral Darlan came from “Jews of press and radio who wish to make certain we were fighting a war to make the world safe for Jews.” The Jews cried wolf so often that when he actually showed up they were not believed.
Much information emerges in the second volumn about Churchill’s charcter, personal habits, excessive drinking—he was dependent on alcohol—and autocratic ways. He could turn people against him and then with a speech or by taking special notice of them put them back in his pocket. Churchill had flaws and the ability to survive them. Irving does not excoriate Churchill. He merely shows us what he was like. There are things to admire and things to disapprove.
Moreover, it is not only Churchill who was ambitious. All were. It is a mystery that organization survived ambition. Somehow officers were able to devote time to war against the Germans from the time they spent warring against one another for commands and promotions. The same with cabinet ministers. The same for the military services fighting one another for resources. And the same for the Germans. The Italian and German generals were so jealous of Rommel’s initial successes in North Africa that they worked to undermine him.
And German efficiency also bites the dust. German intelligence never caught on that the British were reading their codes and knew precisely every shipment to resupply Rommel which the British seldom failed to send to the bottom of the Mediterranean. One would think that after nothing gets through time and again that a light would come on.
Churchill was frustrated by his inability to come to Stalin’s aid. He tried to compensate by sending supply convoys. The convoys lost half of more of the ships along with escorting Royal Navy warships. British admirals resisted these death convoys, but Churchill, perhaps afraid that WW I would repeat with a Russian separate peace, leaving Britain to face Germany alone, insisted. He continually sent reassuring messages to Stalin, who was not reassured.
Stalin must have despaired of the fighting capability of his British and American allies. All the British could do was to sic an entire fleet on a single German warship and bomb French and German civilians. In North Africa the British failed to push out the outnumbered Germans and called in the Americans. Eisenhower was far from a good field commander. After Rommel smashed through the Kasserline Pass, delivering to the American army “one of the most resounding defeats ever inflicted on the Americans in war,” Rommel reported to Berlin that despite being outnumbered and without supplies, he could again take the offensive. He attributed success in part to “the low fighting value of the enemy.” Eisenhower’s aide Harry Butcher recorded, “We sent out some 120 tanks and 112 didn’t come back.” Churchill shared Rommel’s dismissal of the American fighting man. “After Kasserline Churchill made little attempt to conceal his contempt for the American forces and their fighting value.”
The Germans, of course, were vastly overextended. In addition to a 1,000 mile Russian front and being bombed at night by the cowardly British who attacked unprotected civilian residential areas, Hitler had to occupy Europe and to rescue his Italian ally by sending troops to Greece and North Africa. The Germans might have had the will, but they did not have the resources to fight most of the world in a war of attrition.
Germany lost 4 million soldiers on the Russian front. On the Western front, which did not materialize until the Soviets had the war won, Germany lost a few hundred thousand. The Americans and the British never faced an intact Germany army. They faced understaffed divisions of an army exhausted and worn down by three years of fighting the Red Army. Hitler had 80% of his remaining forces on the Russian front. To oppose the Normandy invasion in June 1944 Germany had divisions of less than full strength with no reserves and little fuel. Despite the weakness of German forces, it took the Americans six and one-half months to reach the Ardennes, where the invasion was halted for 6 weeks by a German counterattack.
Despite these facts, in recent celebrations of the Normandy Invasion the Americans in a show of extreme pettiness prevented the participation of Russia. The Americans and British persist in pretending that they all by themselves won the war.
Volumn 2 has 200 pages of footnote references. It has a 35 page index. It is the kind of history that only gets written once in a century. Irving is clearly the master of historical documentation. When you disagree with Irving, most likely you are disagreeing with the documented historical record.
News of the Times;
Biden Regime Lumps Christians, Conservatives, and Republicans into Same Category as Nazis:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/biden-regime-lumps-christians-conservatives-republicans-same-category/
Majority of “new jobs” in the US under Biden have gone to foreigners, not Americans:
https://www.newstarget.com/2023-06-05-majority-new-jobs-america-went-to-foreigners.html
Rogan Rips Biden Over Lifetime Of Lies, Shady Ties To Ukraine And China:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hes-always-been-ct-rogan-rips-biden-over-lifetime-lies-ties-ukraine-and-china
Delaware Prosecutors Hid FBI Bribery Document From IRS Investigators:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/22/delaware-prosecutors-hid-fbi-bribery-document-from-irs-investigators/
Florida man sentenced to life without parole for murder of pregnant 19-year-old:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/i-kill-women-and-children-too-florida-man-sentenced-to-life-without-parole-for-murder-of-pregnant-19-year-old-and-baby/
Biden ‘mainstreams terror financing’ of Hizballah, using American tax dollars:
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/06/biden-mainstreams-terror-financing-of-hizballah-using-american-tax-dollars
Desperate Army, Air Force Recruit Immigrants With Promise Of Rapid Citizenship:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/desperate-army-air-force-recruiting-immigrants-promise-rapid-citizenship
What Is the Talmud? Definition and Comprehensive Guide:
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3347866/jewish/What-Is-the-Talmud-Definition-and-Comprehensive-Guide.htm
Rabbi who is charged with raping adoptive sons was arrested for attacking ANOTHER boy:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11830771/Rabbi-Hayim-Nissim-Cohen-charged-raping-sons-arrested-2019-assaulting-boy.html
Rabbi caught in underage sex sting gets prison time:
https://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/2023/02/ex-pepper-pike-rabbi-caught-in-underage-sex-sting-gets-prison-time.html
Jew Caught Cashing Father’s Holocaust Reparation Checks After He Died:
https://christiansfortruth.com/jew-caught-cashing-fathers-holocaust-reparation-checks-after-he-died-but-refuses-to-return-stolen-money/
Nation’s First Elected Transgender State Rep. Arrested On Child Porn Charges:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/nations-first-elected-transgender-state-rep-arrested-on-child-porn-charges-police
Texas Homeless Map Shows a Shocking 10K Living in Camps:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/shocking-liberal-utopia-austin-texas-homeless-map-shows/
Progressive Activist's Killer Has Finally Been Caught:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2023/06/26/friends-of-slain-progressive-activist-dont-want-her-killer-to-go-to-jail-n2624987
1,000 accidental 911 calls from music festival:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/bonnaroo-911-call-iphone-crash
Churchill?
Issue?
So, HBO Max is now just Max.
Your move, Peacock.
*.*
A waiter brings the customer the steak he ordered, with his thumb over the meat.
"Are you crazy?" yells the customer. "What's with your hand on my steak?"
"Sorry," answers the waiter, "I don’t want it to fall on the floor again."
*.*
We visited our newly married daughter, who was preparing her first Thanksgiving dinner. I noticed the turkey thawing in the kitchen sink with a dish drainer inverted over the bird. I asked why a drainer covered the turkey.
Our daughter turned to my wife and said, “Mom, you always did it that way.”
“Yes,” my wife replied, “but you don’t have a cat!”
*.*
Top five things that Bigfoot has to say to people every summer:
"No, I'm not with ZZ Top"
"Keep that Nair away from me!"
"Size 35, if you must know."
"Hanson's Plumbing? Yeah, the shower drain is clogged again."
"How do you know that hair in your soup is from me?"
*.*
Supreme Court Judge Samuel Alito is coming under fire for accepting a luxury fishing trip from a Hedge Fund owner and Republican megadonor who has appeared in front of the Supreme Court 10 times.
I'm not one to judge, but I would for a luxury fishing trip.
Quote of the Times;
“The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.” - Lynd
Link of the Times;
Hyped Ukraine Counteroffensive Flops:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/hyped-ukraine-counteroffensive-flops-zelensky-msm-have-admit/
Issue of the Times;
The Issue that must Not be Mentioned by John Hinderaker
Over the last few years, the establishment, including government agencies like the FBI, the hegemonic tech companies that control social media, and the press generally, has tried hard to suppress information on several topics. These topics include, among others, the effectiveness of anti-covid measures and treatments, the safety of covid vaccines, Joe Biden’s corruption, and the existence and prevalence of voter fraud. Wrongspeak on any of these topics has been branded as disinformation, and has been likely to result in a ban from Twitter, Facebook and so on.
Despite these efforts at censorship, Rasmussen finds that most Americans have no illusions about the integrity of our elections:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters believe cheating is likely to affect the outcome of the next presidential election, including 30% who think it’s Very Likely. Forty-one percent (41%) say election cheating is unlikely to affect the 2024 outcome, including 24% who consider it Not At All Likely.
***
Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters believe it is likely that state and federal officials are ignoring evidence of widespread election fraud, including 36% who think it’s Very Likely. Forty percent (40%) say it’s unlikely officials are ignoring election fraud, including 27% who view it as Not At All Likely.
***
A majority (52%) of voters now believe that cheating likely affected the outcomes of some races in last year’s midterm elections, including 30% who say it’s Very Likely. Thirty-eight percent (38%) don’t think last year’s midterm elections were affected by cheating, including 25% who view it as Not At All Likely. Another 10% are not sure.
So, to the extent that liberals have tried to instill confidence in the integrity of our elections by banning discussion of that subject, they have failed. Actually, I suspect that pretty much everyone understands that talk of voter fraud is more or less verboten, and many probably infer that election fraud is a worse problem than it actually is. Similarly, I suspect that censorship of discussion of adverse side effects of covid vaccines has created in some minds a perception that the vaccines are more dangerous than they really are.
Probably the instance where censorship was most successful was the boycott on information about Joe Biden’s corruption in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election. In that case, the boycott undoubtedly delayed widespread knowledge of the evidence of corruption that had emerged, but not for long. Current polls indicate that most Americans correctly believe that the Bidens have been taking money from foreign interests in influence-peddling schemes.
It must frustrate liberals no end to see that their apparent control over the flow of information, via their dominance of the press and social media, avails them so little, and in some instances may actually be counterproductive.
News of the Times;
Durham Goes Off On FBI, CIA, Schiff During Wednesday Testimony:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/our-findings-were-sobering-john-durham-gives-fiery-testimony-fbi-abuses-schools-schiff
Confidence In America Is Collapsing:
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/ecm-armstrongeconomics101/confidence-in-america-is-collapsing/
Here's how NATO trainers knowingly sent Ukrainian troops to their deaths:
https://www.rt.com/russia/578411-nato-ukraine-counteroffensive-training/
Kids' reading scores have soared in Deep South states:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mississippi-miracle-kids-reading-scores-040628304.html
Former CNN producer sentenced to 19+ years in prison for sexually assaulting 9-year-old girl:
https://notthebee.com/article/former-cnn-producer-sentenced-to-19-years-in-prison-for-luring-9-year-old-girl-in-for-sex-acts/
Vegan Activist Group Goes After Minor League Baseball Team:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/chris-queen/2023/06/22/vegan-activist-group-goes-after-minor-league-baseball-team-n1705520
Dem lawmaker equates American Muslims with 'white supremacists':
https://www.wnd.com/2023/06/democrat-equates-american-muslims-white-supremacists/
12 killed, more than 100 shot in Juneteenth celebrations:
https://thepostmillennial.com/twelve-killed-more-than-100-injured-in-juneteenth-celebrations-across-the-us
House Democrat Stacey Plaskett says Trump 'needs to be shot':
https://thepostmillennial.com/delegate-for-uvi-stacey-plaskett-says-trump-needs-to-be-shot-then-corrects-herself-to-stopped
Council Member Who Wanted to Tax White Owned Businesses Loses Reelection:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/denver-city-council-member-who-wanted-tax-white/
The trans school conspiracy exposed:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12202901/Midwest-teachers-trade-tips-subversively-quietly-transitioning-kids-without-telling-parents.html
University of Cincinnati gender studies professor giving ZERO grade for using phrase 'biological women':
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12180019/Gender-studies-professor-BRAGS-failing-students-offend-woke-gender-beliefs.html
Democrat Donor Arrested for Starting Massive California Fire that Destroyed 100 Homes:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/democrat-donor-lincoln-project-democrat-campaigns-arrested-starting/
Four nursery children, aged 1 to 3, stabbed at random in play park:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-france-school-knife-attack-30181994
45,000 still without power in Houston area as extreme heat returns:
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/houston-power-outage-18167416.php
Your move, Peacock.
*.*
A waiter brings the customer the steak he ordered, with his thumb over the meat.
"Are you crazy?" yells the customer. "What's with your hand on my steak?"
"Sorry," answers the waiter, "I don’t want it to fall on the floor again."
*.*
We visited our newly married daughter, who was preparing her first Thanksgiving dinner. I noticed the turkey thawing in the kitchen sink with a dish drainer inverted over the bird. I asked why a drainer covered the turkey.
Our daughter turned to my wife and said, “Mom, you always did it that way.”
“Yes,” my wife replied, “but you don’t have a cat!”
*.*
Top five things that Bigfoot has to say to people every summer:
"No, I'm not with ZZ Top"
"Keep that Nair away from me!"
"Size 35, if you must know."
"Hanson's Plumbing? Yeah, the shower drain is clogged again."
"How do you know that hair in your soup is from me?"
*.*
Supreme Court Judge Samuel Alito is coming under fire for accepting a luxury fishing trip from a Hedge Fund owner and Republican megadonor who has appeared in front of the Supreme Court 10 times.
I'm not one to judge, but I would for a luxury fishing trip.
Quote of the Times;
“The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.” - Lynd
Link of the Times;
Hyped Ukraine Counteroffensive Flops:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/hyped-ukraine-counteroffensive-flops-zelensky-msm-have-admit/
Issue of the Times;
The Issue that must Not be Mentioned by John Hinderaker
Over the last few years, the establishment, including government agencies like the FBI, the hegemonic tech companies that control social media, and the press generally, has tried hard to suppress information on several topics. These topics include, among others, the effectiveness of anti-covid measures and treatments, the safety of covid vaccines, Joe Biden’s corruption, and the existence and prevalence of voter fraud. Wrongspeak on any of these topics has been branded as disinformation, and has been likely to result in a ban from Twitter, Facebook and so on.
Despite these efforts at censorship, Rasmussen finds that most Americans have no illusions about the integrity of our elections:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters believe cheating is likely to affect the outcome of the next presidential election, including 30% who think it’s Very Likely. Forty-one percent (41%) say election cheating is unlikely to affect the 2024 outcome, including 24% who consider it Not At All Likely.
***
Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters believe it is likely that state and federal officials are ignoring evidence of widespread election fraud, including 36% who think it’s Very Likely. Forty percent (40%) say it’s unlikely officials are ignoring election fraud, including 27% who view it as Not At All Likely.
***
A majority (52%) of voters now believe that cheating likely affected the outcomes of some races in last year’s midterm elections, including 30% who say it’s Very Likely. Thirty-eight percent (38%) don’t think last year’s midterm elections were affected by cheating, including 25% who view it as Not At All Likely. Another 10% are not sure.
So, to the extent that liberals have tried to instill confidence in the integrity of our elections by banning discussion of that subject, they have failed. Actually, I suspect that pretty much everyone understands that talk of voter fraud is more or less verboten, and many probably infer that election fraud is a worse problem than it actually is. Similarly, I suspect that censorship of discussion of adverse side effects of covid vaccines has created in some minds a perception that the vaccines are more dangerous than they really are.
Probably the instance where censorship was most successful was the boycott on information about Joe Biden’s corruption in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election. In that case, the boycott undoubtedly delayed widespread knowledge of the evidence of corruption that had emerged, but not for long. Current polls indicate that most Americans correctly believe that the Bidens have been taking money from foreign interests in influence-peddling schemes.
It must frustrate liberals no end to see that their apparent control over the flow of information, via their dominance of the press and social media, avails them so little, and in some instances may actually be counterproductive.
News of the Times;
Durham Goes Off On FBI, CIA, Schiff During Wednesday Testimony:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/our-findings-were-sobering-john-durham-gives-fiery-testimony-fbi-abuses-schools-schiff
Confidence In America Is Collapsing:
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/ecm-armstrongeconomics101/confidence-in-america-is-collapsing/
Here's how NATO trainers knowingly sent Ukrainian troops to their deaths:
https://www.rt.com/russia/578411-nato-ukraine-counteroffensive-training/
Kids' reading scores have soared in Deep South states:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mississippi-miracle-kids-reading-scores-040628304.html
Former CNN producer sentenced to 19+ years in prison for sexually assaulting 9-year-old girl:
https://notthebee.com/article/former-cnn-producer-sentenced-to-19-years-in-prison-for-luring-9-year-old-girl-in-for-sex-acts/
Vegan Activist Group Goes After Minor League Baseball Team:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/chris-queen/2023/06/22/vegan-activist-group-goes-after-minor-league-baseball-team-n1705520
Dem lawmaker equates American Muslims with 'white supremacists':
https://www.wnd.com/2023/06/democrat-equates-american-muslims-white-supremacists/
12 killed, more than 100 shot in Juneteenth celebrations:
https://thepostmillennial.com/twelve-killed-more-than-100-injured-in-juneteenth-celebrations-across-the-us
House Democrat Stacey Plaskett says Trump 'needs to be shot':
https://thepostmillennial.com/delegate-for-uvi-stacey-plaskett-says-trump-needs-to-be-shot-then-corrects-herself-to-stopped
Council Member Who Wanted to Tax White Owned Businesses Loses Reelection:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/denver-city-council-member-who-wanted-tax-white/
The trans school conspiracy exposed:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12202901/Midwest-teachers-trade-tips-subversively-quietly-transitioning-kids-without-telling-parents.html
University of Cincinnati gender studies professor giving ZERO grade for using phrase 'biological women':
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12180019/Gender-studies-professor-BRAGS-failing-students-offend-woke-gender-beliefs.html
Democrat Donor Arrested for Starting Massive California Fire that Destroyed 100 Homes:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/democrat-donor-lincoln-project-democrat-campaigns-arrested-starting/
Four nursery children, aged 1 to 3, stabbed at random in play park:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-france-school-knife-attack-30181994
45,000 still without power in Houston area as extreme heat returns:
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/houston-power-outage-18167416.php
Deniable?
About 1500 people will be treated in emergency rooms this year after getting hurt playing Ping Pong.
As a public service, this is where I'll remind you this is NOT the sport where you jump over the net when you win.
*.*
Judge: "Haven’t I seen you before?"
Man: "Yes, your Honor. I taught your daughter how to play the drums."
Judge (banging the gavel): "Twenty years!"
*.*
Oneliners:
We get to the point where A.I. mows my lawn and I'll be a fan.
Mothers of teenagers know why animals eat their young.
Non-conformists are all alike.
The trouble with doing it right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was!
The extra mile isn't half as long as all those other miles.
A grown-up is someone who suffers from responsibility.
They who are afraid to ask are ashamed of learning.
Sign in a travel agency window: "Please go away."
Hummingbirds have forgotten the words,
Everything on land is within walking distance.
*.*
Nothing looks good on me anymore,” wailed a customer modeling an outfit in front of the department store’s mirror.
“Nonsense, ma’am,” soothed the salesclerk. “That dress says it all.”
“That’s the problem,” the woman replied. “I need a dress that keeps its mouth shut.”
*.*
In Star Wars, anyone can jump into any spaceship and know how to fly it.
I've just spent 20 minutes in a rental car and can't figure out how to turn on the headlights.
Quote of the Times;
If God believed in free speech, blasphemy would not be a sin. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
What Is Cognitive Dissonance:
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012
Issue of the Times;
Why Propaganda Works by Caitlin Johnstone
It’s not really deniable that western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes. Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the US empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought. Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every US war, rally behind the US foreign policy objective of the day, and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.
To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect. It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.
By continually hammering our minds with simple repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.
Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview, and because powerful plutocrats like John D Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.
Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.
This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda. I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools, and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests, and I’m sure both of these factor into the equation to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.
Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system. Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true, so now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.
This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.
So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries which protect those worldviews you implanted. Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.
I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why. A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs. Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the US military to do something evil and stupid.
The Oatmeal has a great comic / https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible to change one’s beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm one’s biases. It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.
Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you.
And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it. The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.
News of the Times;
The Most Depraved Crime I Ever Handled:
https://resistthemainstream.com/transgender-activist-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-the-most-depraved-crime-i-ever-handled/
Lesbian couple 'beat one woman's 5-year-old son with a Hammer:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3398118/Lesbian-couple-beat-one-woman-s-5-year-old-son-HAMMER-duct-taped-eyes-kicked-groin-bled-suffered-two-strokes.html
Biden Baffles US Audience, Closing Speech With 'God Save The Queen':
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-baffles-audience-closing-speech-god-save-queen
'If You Love Your Children, Flee The State': California GOP Lawmaker:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/if-you-love-your-children-flee-state-california-gop-lawmaker
New Jersey Schools Report More Than 4,200% Increase In Nonbinary Students In Four Years:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-jersey-schools-report-more-4200-percent-increase-nonbinary-students-four-years
Instacart driver allegedly leaves infant daughter in 100-degree car for nearly an hour:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/bodycam-instacart-driver-allegedly-leaves-infant-daughter-in-100-degree-car-for-nearly-an-hour-while-shopping-in-publix/
Burisma Energy Accountant, Who Blew Whistle on Biden Bribery Scheme, Found Dead:
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/burisma-energy-accountant-who-blew-whistle-on-biden-bribery-scheme-found-dead/
Cabinet secretary admits to lying under oath - why does she still have her job:
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2023/06/10/cabinet-secretary-admits-to-lying-under-oath-why-does-she-still-have-her-job-n557053
Illegal border crossers so far this year outnumber the population of 8 states:
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_3227124e-0b78-11ee-9599-97d6d9962e84.html?a
Five Dead:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/five-dead-democrats-to-blame.php
Migrant-Smuggling "Influencers" Use TikTok To Advertise:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/migrant-smuggling-influencers-use-tiktok-advertise-illegal-border-crossing-services
Celebrate Good Times, Come On! Patriotic Boycotts Cost Woke Corporations $28 BILLION:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2023/06/17/celebrate-good-times-come-on-patriotic-boycotts-cost-woke-corporations-28-billion-in-market-value-n1704126
Massachusetts middle school students tear down rainbow decorations and chant their pronouns are 'U.S.A.':
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12190331/Massachusetts-students-tear-rainbow-decorations-chant-pronouns-U-S-A.html
Penn State Professor and Dog Lover Accused of Bestiality is a Longtime Liberal:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/comfirmed-penn-state-professor-accused-bestiality-is-longtime/
Politicians In Our Major Cities Have Decided The Solution To The Crime Wave:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/politicians-in-our-major-cities-have-decided-the-solution-to-the-crime-wave-is-to-help-criminals-commit-more-crimes/
As a public service, this is where I'll remind you this is NOT the sport where you jump over the net when you win.
*.*
Judge: "Haven’t I seen you before?"
Man: "Yes, your Honor. I taught your daughter how to play the drums."
Judge (banging the gavel): "Twenty years!"
*.*
Oneliners:
We get to the point where A.I. mows my lawn and I'll be a fan.
Mothers of teenagers know why animals eat their young.
Non-conformists are all alike.
The trouble with doing it right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was!
The extra mile isn't half as long as all those other miles.
A grown-up is someone who suffers from responsibility.
They who are afraid to ask are ashamed of learning.
Sign in a travel agency window: "Please go away."
Hummingbirds have forgotten the words,
Everything on land is within walking distance.
*.*
Nothing looks good on me anymore,” wailed a customer modeling an outfit in front of the department store’s mirror.
“Nonsense, ma’am,” soothed the salesclerk. “That dress says it all.”
“That’s the problem,” the woman replied. “I need a dress that keeps its mouth shut.”
*.*
In Star Wars, anyone can jump into any spaceship and know how to fly it.
I've just spent 20 minutes in a rental car and can't figure out how to turn on the headlights.
Quote of the Times;
If God believed in free speech, blasphemy would not be a sin. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
What Is Cognitive Dissonance:
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012
Issue of the Times;
Why Propaganda Works by Caitlin Johnstone
It’s not really deniable that western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes. Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the US empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought. Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every US war, rally behind the US foreign policy objective of the day, and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.
To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect. It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.
By continually hammering our minds with simple repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.
Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview, and because powerful plutocrats like John D Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.
Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.
This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda. I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools, and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests, and I’m sure both of these factor into the equation to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.
Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system. Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true, so now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.
This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.
So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries which protect those worldviews you implanted. Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.
I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why. A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs. Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the US military to do something evil and stupid.
The Oatmeal has a great comic / https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible to change one’s beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm one’s biases. It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.
Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you.
And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it. The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.
News of the Times;
The Most Depraved Crime I Ever Handled:
https://resistthemainstream.com/transgender-activist-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-the-most-depraved-crime-i-ever-handled/
Lesbian couple 'beat one woman's 5-year-old son with a Hammer:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3398118/Lesbian-couple-beat-one-woman-s-5-year-old-son-HAMMER-duct-taped-eyes-kicked-groin-bled-suffered-two-strokes.html
Biden Baffles US Audience, Closing Speech With 'God Save The Queen':
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-baffles-audience-closing-speech-god-save-queen
'If You Love Your Children, Flee The State': California GOP Lawmaker:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/if-you-love-your-children-flee-state-california-gop-lawmaker
New Jersey Schools Report More Than 4,200% Increase In Nonbinary Students In Four Years:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-jersey-schools-report-more-4200-percent-increase-nonbinary-students-four-years
Instacart driver allegedly leaves infant daughter in 100-degree car for nearly an hour:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/bodycam-instacart-driver-allegedly-leaves-infant-daughter-in-100-degree-car-for-nearly-an-hour-while-shopping-in-publix/
Burisma Energy Accountant, Who Blew Whistle on Biden Bribery Scheme, Found Dead:
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/burisma-energy-accountant-who-blew-whistle-on-biden-bribery-scheme-found-dead/
Cabinet secretary admits to lying under oath - why does she still have her job:
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2023/06/10/cabinet-secretary-admits-to-lying-under-oath-why-does-she-still-have-her-job-n557053
Illegal border crossers so far this year outnumber the population of 8 states:
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_3227124e-0b78-11ee-9599-97d6d9962e84.html?a
Five Dead:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/five-dead-democrats-to-blame.php
Migrant-Smuggling "Influencers" Use TikTok To Advertise:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/migrant-smuggling-influencers-use-tiktok-advertise-illegal-border-crossing-services
Celebrate Good Times, Come On! Patriotic Boycotts Cost Woke Corporations $28 BILLION:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2023/06/17/celebrate-good-times-come-on-patriotic-boycotts-cost-woke-corporations-28-billion-in-market-value-n1704126
Massachusetts middle school students tear down rainbow decorations and chant their pronouns are 'U.S.A.':
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12190331/Massachusetts-students-tear-rainbow-decorations-chant-pronouns-U-S-A.html
Penn State Professor and Dog Lover Accused of Bestiality is a Longtime Liberal:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/comfirmed-penn-state-professor-accused-bestiality-is-longtime/
Politicians In Our Major Cities Have Decided The Solution To The Crime Wave:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/politicians-in-our-major-cities-have-decided-the-solution-to-the-crime-wave-is-to-help-criminals-commit-more-crimes/
Slowly?
Must be Father's Day on Sunday.
My family just asked, "So, how do you want to get this over with?"
*.*
It's a good time to not be in Texas.
With tarantula mating season being in May, it’s around now that baby Tarantulas start popping up out of their burrows. A female spider can lay as many as 1,000 eggs in a location. And get this - after a female finds a partner and mates, she often eats the father of their offspring for two reasons: added protein, which creates "larger eggs" and it gets rid of the need to worry about a Father's Day gift.
It's a win-win.
*.*
I was just having a conversation with someone who is about to buy a Mac computer. I was against it and an argument started.
I said there were too few people supporting the Mac.
He responded, "When was the last time you heard of a virus on a Mac?"
And I said, "See, even people who write viruses don't support them!"
*.*
A man went to the doctor and said: “Doctor, I keep having visions of the future.”
“When did these start?”
“Next Thursday.”
*.*
Twitter is a lot like hockey.
I only watch it for the fights.
Quote of the Times;
“A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he fells for those around him.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
Link of the Times;
Tucker on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson
Issue of the Times;
Merrick Garland Is Slowly Defining A New Criminal Class, And Soon You’ll Be Part Of It by Michele Sosa
What do Kyle Rittenhouse, Donald Trump, Nick Sandmann, Mark Houck, Sarah Comrie (the so-called “Bike Karen”) and Daniel Penny all have in common?
All of them are victims of the “two-tiered justice system” and the leftist media court of public opinion. Conservatives often protest this double standard, understandably since none of these people committed any crime. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has effectively become a symbol for this kind of persecution in tandem with its local lackeys, criminal foot soldiers and the corporate press.
Crying about double standards or “two-tiered justice,” however, misses the point. There is no “double standard” — only a hierarchy without you in it. Their persecution of everyone from political opponents to everyday people is designed to remind you that they are the elite and you exist at their pleasure.
To enforce this new hierarchy, Garland and his allies have created a new category of criminal straight out of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917: the “political criminal.”
Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in Gulag Archipelago (pg. 505 if you’re interested) that in the early days of the USSR, thieves and murderers were often treated with kid gloves. They could be rehabilitated, the party line went, and they were often allowed to commit crime if they targeted the right people.
Not so for anyone considered a “political criminal,” either directly or by association. Those people eventually ended up in the GULAG. Now this might seem unsurprising, until you realize that the crime of opposing the state could be something as simple as having more money than your neighbor, belonging to the wrong ethnic group, being Christian or simply existing.
Such people were referred to as “terrorists.” Sound familiar when Joe Biden and the media constantly harping about “white supremacist, ultra-MAGA terrorism?” That label should terrify you.
We’ve seen how we deal with terrorism abroad. We lock them up, don’t give them any due process, or just kill them. That is what Biden and co. are implying they want for you, the political terrorist.
In the leftist mind, conservatives who oppose them are peons. Leftists and their minions are the elite (or at least above you in the social hierarchy) and can do whatever they want without consequences. As long as they serve a purpose, the party has their backs no matter how evil or depraved they are.
In practice, this relationship means that Kyle Rittenhouse was supposed to let his attackers bash his head in. They supported our corrupt system and held all the right views. Kyle Rittenhouse, regardless of his political views, was wrong for opposing them, making him an enemy of the state.
Donald Trump was supposed to roll over and surrender the presidency without a fight. His crime was opposing the Swamp. Same with Daniel Penny. Jordan Neely was part of the left’s strategy to foment chaos. He had every right to be a criminal. Penny had no right to stop his activities as far as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is concerned.
Don’t want your kids to be sexualized in schools and raped down the road? That makes you a terrorist too. You don’t even have the right to defend your own children.
As for Sarah Cowrie, even if she paid for that bike, as far as the left is concerned, she had no right to it because in the left’s twisted world, white people are always wrong – the facts be damned. And if things had gotten violent, you bet the media would have justified it all the way or covered it up.
And the list goes on, and on, and on.
Meanwhile, violent criminals get a pass every time. They are victims of society, liberals say. They can be rehabilitated if only we give a little more money to the system – usually money coming from the political enemies they persecute.
But the reality is that the criminals are coddled not because leftists love them but because they are useful. The Soviets even had a term for this – “social allies.” And for the left, every type of anti-social, child-grooming, murderous criminal is indeed an ally to knocking down the system that allows free people to flourish.
And one more thing: if leftists are trying to lock conservatives up for “terrorism” now, it won’t be long before they start trying to kill you.
News of the Times;
Owner of two of San Fran's largest hotels STOPS making payments on $725 million loan:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12165817/The-owner-San-Franciscos-two-largest-hotels-STOPS-making-payments-725-million-loan.html
Doom Loop Accelerates As Westfield Abandons Largest San Fran Mall:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cre-doom-loop-accelerates-westfield-abandons-largest-san-fran-mall-stops-paying-558-million
US Air Force tweets image of soldier saluting the LGBTQI+ Pride flag:
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-us-air-force-tweets-image-of-soldier-saluting-the-lgbtqi-pride-flag
Man Arrested While Attempting To Read Bible Verse at Pennsylvania Pride Event:
https://resistthemainstream.com/man-arrested-while-attempting-to-read-bible-verse-at-pennsylvania-pride-event/?expand_article=1
UN Sending Home Peacekeepers Implicated in Sexual Abuse:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2023/06/mil-230609-voa02.htm
Assisted Suicide Deaths Up 35% in Canada:
https://www.lifenews.com/2023/06/12/assisted-suicide-deaths-up-35-in-canada-as-more-than-13500-people-killed-in-2022/
Maryland Democrat declares White women should be struck down from leadership:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/maryland-democrat-declares-white-women-should-be-struck-down-from-leadership-to-dismantle-systemic-racism/ar-AA1cld0A
Ellen Page was violently punching herself in the face and hearing voices in her head:
https://notthebee.com/article/this-actress-began-violently-harming-herself-and-hearing-voices-in-her-head-a-few-weeks-later-a-doctor-approved-her-for-transgender-surgery
The US is building factories at a wildly fast rate:
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-building-factories-census-data-chips-act-inflation-reduction-act-2023-6
Biden and ATF just created 29 million felons:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/biden-and-atf-just-created-29-million-felons
WaPo out with helpful "How NOT to get carjacked in D.C." guide:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2023/06/09/wapo-out-with-helpful-how-not-to-get-carjacked-in-d-c-guide-n556746
Agency lets workers individualize email signature lines, then bans Christian symbol:
https://www.wnd.com/2023/06/agency-workers-individualize-email-signature-lines-bans-christian-symbol/
U.K. Royal Navy ‘Distressed and Concerned’ by Illegal Chinese Salvage of WWII Wrecks:
https://news.usni.org/2023/05/25/u-k-royal-navy-distressed-and-concerned-by-illegal-chinese-salvage-of-wwii-wrecks
Nottingham triple murder suspect:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12193333/Nottingham-triple-murder-suspect-refuses-answer-questions.html
Federal jury awards regional Starbucks manager $25 MILLION for being fired because she is white:
https://notthebee.com/article/federal-jury-awards-white-starbucks-manager-25-million-for-being-fired-due-to-her-race
My family just asked, "So, how do you want to get this over with?"
*.*
It's a good time to not be in Texas.
With tarantula mating season being in May, it’s around now that baby Tarantulas start popping up out of their burrows. A female spider can lay as many as 1,000 eggs in a location. And get this - after a female finds a partner and mates, she often eats the father of their offspring for two reasons: added protein, which creates "larger eggs" and it gets rid of the need to worry about a Father's Day gift.
It's a win-win.
*.*
I was just having a conversation with someone who is about to buy a Mac computer. I was against it and an argument started.
I said there were too few people supporting the Mac.
He responded, "When was the last time you heard of a virus on a Mac?"
And I said, "See, even people who write viruses don't support them!"
*.*
A man went to the doctor and said: “Doctor, I keep having visions of the future.”
“When did these start?”
“Next Thursday.”
*.*
Twitter is a lot like hockey.
I only watch it for the fights.
Quote of the Times;
“A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he fells for those around him.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
Link of the Times;
Tucker on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson
Issue of the Times;
Merrick Garland Is Slowly Defining A New Criminal Class, And Soon You’ll Be Part Of It by Michele Sosa
What do Kyle Rittenhouse, Donald Trump, Nick Sandmann, Mark Houck, Sarah Comrie (the so-called “Bike Karen”) and Daniel Penny all have in common?
All of them are victims of the “two-tiered justice system” and the leftist media court of public opinion. Conservatives often protest this double standard, understandably since none of these people committed any crime. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has effectively become a symbol for this kind of persecution in tandem with its local lackeys, criminal foot soldiers and the corporate press.
Crying about double standards or “two-tiered justice,” however, misses the point. There is no “double standard” — only a hierarchy without you in it. Their persecution of everyone from political opponents to everyday people is designed to remind you that they are the elite and you exist at their pleasure.
To enforce this new hierarchy, Garland and his allies have created a new category of criminal straight out of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917: the “political criminal.”
Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in Gulag Archipelago (pg. 505 if you’re interested) that in the early days of the USSR, thieves and murderers were often treated with kid gloves. They could be rehabilitated, the party line went, and they were often allowed to commit crime if they targeted the right people.
Not so for anyone considered a “political criminal,” either directly or by association. Those people eventually ended up in the GULAG. Now this might seem unsurprising, until you realize that the crime of opposing the state could be something as simple as having more money than your neighbor, belonging to the wrong ethnic group, being Christian or simply existing.
Such people were referred to as “terrorists.” Sound familiar when Joe Biden and the media constantly harping about “white supremacist, ultra-MAGA terrorism?” That label should terrify you.
We’ve seen how we deal with terrorism abroad. We lock them up, don’t give them any due process, or just kill them. That is what Biden and co. are implying they want for you, the political terrorist.
In the leftist mind, conservatives who oppose them are peons. Leftists and their minions are the elite (or at least above you in the social hierarchy) and can do whatever they want without consequences. As long as they serve a purpose, the party has their backs no matter how evil or depraved they are.
In practice, this relationship means that Kyle Rittenhouse was supposed to let his attackers bash his head in. They supported our corrupt system and held all the right views. Kyle Rittenhouse, regardless of his political views, was wrong for opposing them, making him an enemy of the state.
Donald Trump was supposed to roll over and surrender the presidency without a fight. His crime was opposing the Swamp. Same with Daniel Penny. Jordan Neely was part of the left’s strategy to foment chaos. He had every right to be a criminal. Penny had no right to stop his activities as far as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is concerned.
Don’t want your kids to be sexualized in schools and raped down the road? That makes you a terrorist too. You don’t even have the right to defend your own children.
As for Sarah Cowrie, even if she paid for that bike, as far as the left is concerned, she had no right to it because in the left’s twisted world, white people are always wrong – the facts be damned. And if things had gotten violent, you bet the media would have justified it all the way or covered it up.
And the list goes on, and on, and on.
Meanwhile, violent criminals get a pass every time. They are victims of society, liberals say. They can be rehabilitated if only we give a little more money to the system – usually money coming from the political enemies they persecute.
But the reality is that the criminals are coddled not because leftists love them but because they are useful. The Soviets even had a term for this – “social allies.” And for the left, every type of anti-social, child-grooming, murderous criminal is indeed an ally to knocking down the system that allows free people to flourish.
And one more thing: if leftists are trying to lock conservatives up for “terrorism” now, it won’t be long before they start trying to kill you.
News of the Times;
Owner of two of San Fran's largest hotels STOPS making payments on $725 million loan:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12165817/The-owner-San-Franciscos-two-largest-hotels-STOPS-making-payments-725-million-loan.html
Doom Loop Accelerates As Westfield Abandons Largest San Fran Mall:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cre-doom-loop-accelerates-westfield-abandons-largest-san-fran-mall-stops-paying-558-million
US Air Force tweets image of soldier saluting the LGBTQI+ Pride flag:
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-us-air-force-tweets-image-of-soldier-saluting-the-lgbtqi-pride-flag
Man Arrested While Attempting To Read Bible Verse at Pennsylvania Pride Event:
https://resistthemainstream.com/man-arrested-while-attempting-to-read-bible-verse-at-pennsylvania-pride-event/?expand_article=1
UN Sending Home Peacekeepers Implicated in Sexual Abuse:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2023/06/mil-230609-voa02.htm
Assisted Suicide Deaths Up 35% in Canada:
https://www.lifenews.com/2023/06/12/assisted-suicide-deaths-up-35-in-canada-as-more-than-13500-people-killed-in-2022/
Maryland Democrat declares White women should be struck down from leadership:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/maryland-democrat-declares-white-women-should-be-struck-down-from-leadership-to-dismantle-systemic-racism/ar-AA1cld0A
Ellen Page was violently punching herself in the face and hearing voices in her head:
https://notthebee.com/article/this-actress-began-violently-harming-herself-and-hearing-voices-in-her-head-a-few-weeks-later-a-doctor-approved-her-for-transgender-surgery
The US is building factories at a wildly fast rate:
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-building-factories-census-data-chips-act-inflation-reduction-act-2023-6
Biden and ATF just created 29 million felons:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/biden-and-atf-just-created-29-million-felons
WaPo out with helpful "How NOT to get carjacked in D.C." guide:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2023/06/09/wapo-out-with-helpful-how-not-to-get-carjacked-in-d-c-guide-n556746
Agency lets workers individualize email signature lines, then bans Christian symbol:
https://www.wnd.com/2023/06/agency-workers-individualize-email-signature-lines-bans-christian-symbol/
U.K. Royal Navy ‘Distressed and Concerned’ by Illegal Chinese Salvage of WWII Wrecks:
https://news.usni.org/2023/05/25/u-k-royal-navy-distressed-and-concerned-by-illegal-chinese-salvage-of-wwii-wrecks
Nottingham triple murder suspect:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12193333/Nottingham-triple-murder-suspect-refuses-answer-questions.html
Federal jury awards regional Starbucks manager $25 MILLION for being fired because she is white:
https://notthebee.com/article/federal-jury-awards-white-starbucks-manager-25-million-for-being-fired-due-to-her-race
Complex?
I couldn't find a parking spot at my job this morning, so I just left.
They must have enough people.
*.*
I need to re-home a dog. It's a small terrier and tends to bark a lot.
If you're interested, let me know and I'll climb over my neighbor's fence and get it for you.
*.*
Today marked the end of an era, as the Mafia announced it was officially closing its Chicago branch due to the rising wave of violent crime in the city.
"We just can't operate under these conditions," said street boss Albert "Albie the Falcon" Vena, speaking on behalf of Salvatore "Solly D" DeLaurentis, who has run the Chicago organization since 2002. "How are we supposed to conduct respectable business — loan sharking, bribery, racketeering, illegal gambling — with so much crime going on? It's insane!"
The Windy City has long been known for its organized crime operations, dating back even before the days of Al "Scarface" Capone in the 1920s Prohibition Era. Today's mobsters now lament the difficulty they face in doing horrible things behind the scenes in the city while so many even more horrible things are being done in broad daylight. "One of our best leg-breakers got his legs broken by a gang of 40 high schoolers last week," said organization member Frank "Toots" Caruso. "They recorded it and put it on TikTok. We just don't feel safe around here. I'm afraid to just walk down the street!"
Rising crime rates have become a staple under Democrat leaders, resulting in skyrocketing numbers of violent crimes and shooting deaths, despite the city having some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. "You think we're gonna be out there working?" asked Nicholas "Jumbo" Guzzino. "Are you kidding me? I don't wanna get shot!"
*.*
Oneliners:
The fridge is a perfect example that what matters is on the inside.
You know you're over 40 when you have 'upstairs ibuprofen' and 'downstairs ibuprofen'.
People write 'Congrats' because they can't spell 'Congratjulayshun'.
Without a doubt, the cashew is my favorite nut that sounds like a sneeze.
Studies show the most expensive vehicle to operate is a Costco shopping cart.
My toxic trait: Let's see if that food that normally hurts my stomach hurts my stomach TODAY.
I've made a lot of mistakes in my life but adding more cheese than a recipe calls for is not one of them.
Loved are the ones who are told of their faults in private.
Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
Say nothing, often.
*.*
Word of the day: Exhaustipated.
Definition: Too tired to give a crap.
Quote of the Times;
“What percentage of gun crimes are committed by Republicans?” - Scott Adams
Link of the Times;
Target reaffirms partnership with LGBT group pushing explicit homosexual books in schools:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/target-reaffirms-partnership-with-lgbt-group-pushing-explicit-homosexual-books-in-classrooms/
Issue of the Times;
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis by Harold Robertson
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
From Meritocracy to Diversity
The first domino to fall as Civil Rights-era policies took effect was the quantitative evaluation of competency by employers using straightforward cognitive batteries. While some tests are still legally used in hiring today, several high-profile enforcement actions against employers caused a wholesale change in the tools customarily usable by employers to screen for ability.
After the early 1970s, employers responded by shifting from directly testing for ability to using the next best thing: a degree from a highly-selective university. By pushing the selection challenge to the college admissions offices, selective employers did two things: they reduced their risk of lawsuits and they turned the U.S. college application process into a high-stakes war of all against all. Admission to Harvard would be a golden ticket to join the professional managerial class, while mere admission to a state school could mean a struggle to remain in the middle class.
This outsourcing did not stave off the ideological change for long. Within the system of political imperatives now dominant in all major U.S. organizations, diversity must be prioritized even if there is a price in competency. The definition of diversity varies by industry and geography. In elite universities, diversity means black, indigenous, or Hispanic. In California, Indian women are diverse but Indian men are not. When selecting corporate board members, diversity means “anyone who is not a straight white man.” The legally protected and politically enforced nature of this imperative renders an open dialogue nearly impossible.
However diversity itself is defined, most policy on the matter is based on a simple premise: since all groups are identical in talent, any unbiased process must produce the same group proportions as the general population, and therefore, processes that produce disproportionate outcomes must be biased. Prestigious journals like Harvard Business Review are the first to summarize and parrot these views, which then flow down to reporting by mass media organizations like Bloomberg Businessweek. Soon, it joins McKinsey’s “best practices” list and becomes instantiated in corporate policies.
Unlike accounting policies, which emanate from the Financial Accounting Standards Board and are then implemented by Chief Financial Officers, the diversity push emanates inside of organizations from multiple power centers, each of which joins in for independent reasons. CEOs push diversity policies primarily to please board members and increase their status. Human Resources (HR) professionals push diversity policies primarily to avoid anti-discrimination lawsuits. Business development teams push diversity to win additional business from diversity-sensitive clients (e.g. government agencies). Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), such as the Black Googler Network, push diversity to help their in-group in hiring and promotion decisions.
Diversity in Theory and Practice
In police academies around the country, new recruits are taught to apply an escalation of force algorithm with non-compliant subjects: “Ask, Tell, Make.” The idea behind “Ask, Tell, Make” is to apply the least amount of force necessary to achieve the desired level of compliance. This is the means by which police power, which is ultimately backed by significant coercive force, can maintain an appearance of voluntary compliance and soft-handedness. Similarly, the power centers inside U.S. institutions apply a variant of “Ask, Tell, Make” to achieve diversity in their respective organizations.
The first tactics for implementing diversity imperatives are the “Ask” tactics. These simply ask all the members of the organization to end bias. At this stage, the policies seem so reasonable and fair that there will rarely be much pushback. Best practices such as slating guidelines are a common tool at this stage. Slating guidelines require that every hiring process must include a certain number and type of diverse candidates for every job opening. Structured interviews are another best practice that requires interviewers to stick with a script to minimize the chance of uncovering commonalities between the interviewer and interviewee that might introduce bias. Often HR will become involved in the hiring process, specifically asking the hiring manager to defend their choice not to hire a diverse candidate. Because the wrong answer could result in shaming, loss of advancement opportunities, or even termination, the hiring manager can often be persuaded to prioritize diversity over competence.
Within specialized professional services companies, senior-level recruiting will occasionally result in a resume collection where not a single diverse candidate meets the minimum specifications of the job. This is a terrible outcome for the hiring manager as it attracts negative attention from HR. At this point, firms will often retain an executive search agency that focuses on exclusively diverse candidates. When that does not result in sufficient diversity, roles will often have their requirements diluted to increase the pool of diverse candidates.
For example, within hedge funds, the ideal entry-level candidate might be an experienced former investment banker who went to a top MBA program. This preferred pedigree sets a minimum bar for both competence and work ethic. This first-pass filter enormously winnows the field of underrepresented candidates. To relax requirements for diversity’s sake, this will be diluted in various ways. First, the work experience might be stripped. Next, the role gets offered to MBA interns. Finally, fresh undergraduates are hired into the analyst role. Dilution works not just because of the larger field of candidates it allows for but also because the Harvard Admission Office of 2019 is even more focused on certain kinds of diversity than the Harvard Admission Office of 2011 was.
This dilution is not costless; fewer data points result in a wider range of outcomes and increase the risk of a bad hire. All bad hires are costly but bad hires that are diverse are even worse. The risk of a wrongful termination lawsuit either draws out the termination process for diverse hires or results in the firm adjusting by giving them harmless busy work until they leave of their own volition—either way, a terrible outcome for the organizations which hired them.
If these “Ask” tactics do not achieve enough diversity, the next step in the escalation is to attach carrots and sticks to directly tell decision-makers to increase the diversity of the organization. This is the point at which the goals of diversity and competence truly begin displaying significant tension between each other. The first step is the implementation of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) linked to diversity for all managers. Diversity KPIs are a tool to embarrass leaders and teams that are not meeting their diversity targets. Given that most organizations are hierarchical and pyramidal, combined with the fact that America was much whiter 50 years ago than it was today, it is unsurprising that senior leadership teams are less diverse than America as a whole—and, more pertinently, than their own junior teams.
The combination of a pyramid-shaped org chart and a senior leadership team where white men often make up 80 percent or more of the team means that the imposition of an aggressive KPI sends a message to the layer below them: no white man in middle management will likely ever see a promotion as long as they remain in the organization. This is never expressed verbally. Rather, those overlooked figure it out as they are passed over continually for less competent but more diverse colleagues. The result is demoralization, disengagement, and over time, departure.
While all the aforementioned techniques fall into the broad category of affirmative action, they primarily result in slightly tilting the scale toward diverse candidates. The next step is simply holding different groups to different standards. Within academia, the recently filed Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit leveraged data to show the extent to which Harvard penalizes Asian and white applicants to help black and Hispanic applicants. The UC System, despite formally being forbidden from practicing affirmative action by Proposition 209, uses a tool called “comprehensive admission” to accomplish the same goal.
The latest technique, which was recently brought to light, shows UC admissions offices using the applicants’ high schools as a proxy for race to achieve their desired goal. Heavily Asian high schools such as Arcadia—which is 68 percent Asian—saw their UC-San Diego acceptance rate cut from 37 percent to 13 percent while the 99-percent-Hispanic Garfield High School saw its UC-San Diego acceptance rate rise from 29 percent to 65 percent.
The preference for diversity at the college faculty level is similarly strong. Jessica Nordell’s End of Bias: A Beginning heralded MIT’s efforts to increase the gender diversity of its engineering department: “When applications came in, the Dean of Engineering personally reviewed every one from a woman. If departments turned down a good candidate, they had to explain why.”
When this was not enough, MIT increased its gender diversity by simply offering jobs to previously rejected female candidates. While no university will admit to letting standards slip for the sake of diversity, no one has offered a serious argument why the new processes produce higher or even equivalent quality faculty as opposed to simply more diverse faculty. The extreme preference for diversity in academia today explains much of the phenomenon of professors identifying with a minor fraction of their ancestry or even making it up entirely.
During COVID-19, the difficulty of in-person testing and online proctoring created a new mechanism to push diversity at the expense of competency: the gradual but systematic elimination of standardized tests as a barrier to admission to universities and graduate schools. Today, the majority of U.S. colleges have either stopped requiring SAT/ACT scores, no longer require them for students in the top 10 percent of their class, or will no longer consider them. Several elite law schools, including Harvard Law School, no longer require the LSAT as of 2023. With thousands of unqualified law students headed to a bar exam that they are unlikely to pass, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is already planning to dilute the bar exam under the “NextGen” plan. Specifically, “eliminat[ing] any aspects of our exams that could contribute to performance disparities” will almost definitionally reduce the degree to which the exam tests for competency.
Similarly, standards used to select doctors have also been weakened to promote diversity. Programs such as the City College of New York’s BS/MD program have eliminated the MCAT requirement. With the SAT now optional, new candidates can go straight from high school to the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 exam in medical school without having gone through any rigorous standardized test whose score can be compared across schools. Step 1 scores were historically the most significant factor in the National Residency Matching Program, which pairs soon-to-be doctors with their future residency training programs. Because Step 1 scores serve as a barrier to increasing diversity, they have been made pass/fail. A handful of doctors are speaking out about the dangers of picking doctors based on factors other than competency but most either explicitly prefer diversity or else stay silent, concerned about the career-ending repercussions of pointing out the obvious.
When even carrot and stick incentives and the removal of standards do not achieve enough diversity, the end game is to simply make decision-makers comply. “Make” has two preferred implementations: one is widely discussed and the other is, for obvious reasons, never disclosed publicly. The first method of implementation is the application of quotas. Quotas or set-asides require the reservation of admissions slots, jobs, contracts, board seats, or other scarce goods for women and members of favored minority groups. Government contracts and supplier agreements are explicitly awarded to firms that have acronyms such as SB, WBE, MBE, DBE, SDB, VOSB, SDVOSB, WOSB, HUB, and 8(a).
Within large employers and government contractors, quotas are used for both hiring and promotions, requiring specific percentages of hiring or promotions to be reserved for favored groups. During the summer of 2020, the CEO of Wells Fargo, was publicly shamed after his memo blaming the underrepresentation of black senior leaders on a “very limited pool” of black talent was leaked to Reuters. Less than a month later, the bank publicly pledged to reserve 12 percent of leadership positions for black candidates and began tying executive compensation to reaching diversity goals. In 2022, Goldman Sachs extended quotas to the capital markets by adopting a policy to avoid underwriting IPOs of firms without at least two board members that are not straight white men.
When diversity still refuses to rise to acceptable levels, the remaining solution is the direct exclusion of non-diverse candidates. While public support for anti-discrimination laws and equal opportunity laws is high, public support for affirmative action and quotas is decidedly mixed. Hardline views such as those expressed in author Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America—namely that “any white man in a position of power perpetuates a system of white male domination”—are still considered extreme, even within U.S. progressive circles.
As such, when explicit exclusion is used to eliminate groups like white men from selection processes, it is done subtly. Managers are told to sequester all the resumes from “non-diverse” candidates—that is, white males. These resumes are discarded and the candidates are sent emails politely telling them that “other candidates were a better fit.” While some so-called “reverse discrimination” lawsuits have been filed, most of these policies go unreported. The reasons are straightforward; even in 2023, screening out all white men is not de jure legal. Moreover, any member of the professional managerial class who witnesses and reports discrimination against white men will never work in their field again.
Even anonymous whistleblowing is likely to be rare. To imagine why, suppose incontrovertible evidence was produced that one’s employer was explicitly excluding white male candidates, and a lawsuit was filed. The employer’s reputation and the reputation of all the employees there, including the white men still working there, would be tarnished. That said, we can expect to see more lawsuits from men who feel they have little to lose.
This “Ask, Tell, Make” framework, under various descriptions, is the method by which individuals with a vested interest in more diversity push their organizations toward their preferred outcome. Force begins requesting modest changes to recruiting to make it “more fair.” Force ends with the heavy-handed application of quotas and even exclusion. The American system is not a monolith, however, which means that the strength of the push and its effects on competency is not distributed evenly.
Competency Is Declining From the Core Outwards
Think of the American system as a series of concentric rings with the government at the center. Directly surrounding that are the organizations that receive government funds, then the nonprofits that influence and are subject to policy, and finally business at the periphery. Since the era of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race, the state capacity of the federal government has been declining almost monotonically.
While this has occurred for a multitude of reasons, the steel girders supporting the competency of the federal government were the first to be exposed to the saltwater of the Civil Rights Act and related executive orders. Government agencies, which are in charge of overseeing all the other systems, have seen the quality of their human capital decline tremendously since the 1960s. While the damage to an agency like the Department of Agriculture may have long-term deadly consequences, the most immediate danger is at safety-critical agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The Air Traffic Control (ATC) system used in the U.S. relies on an intricate dance of visual or radar observation, transponders, and radio communication, all with the incredible challenge of keeping thousands of simultaneously moving planes from ever crashing into each other. Since air controlling is one of the only jobs that pays more than $100,000 per year and does not require a college diploma, it has been a popular career choice for individuals without a degree who nonetheless have an exceptionally good memory, attention span, visuospatial awareness, and logical skills. The Air Traffic Selection and Training (AT-SAT) Exam, a standardized test of those critical skills, was historically the primary barrier to entry for air controllers. As a consequence of the AT-SAT, as well as a preference for veterans with former air controller experience, 83 percent of air controllers in the U.S. were white men as of 2014.
That year, the FAA added a Biographical Questionnaire (BQ) to the screening process to tilt the applicant pool toward diverse candidates. Facing pushback in the courts from well-qualified candidates who were screened out, the FAA quietly backed away from the BQ and adopted a new exam, the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA). While the ATSA includes some questions similar to those of the BQ, it restored the test’s focus on core air traffic skills. The importance of highly-skilled air controllers was made clear in the most deadly air disaster in history, the 1977 Tenerife incident. Two planes, one taking off and one taxiing, collided on the runway due to confusion between the captain of KLM 4805 and the Tenerife ATC. The crash, which killed 583 people, resulted in sweeping changes in aviation safety culture.
Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges. The first three months of 2023 saw nine near-miss incidents at U.S. airports, one with two planes coming within 100 feet of colliding. This terrifying uptick from years prior resulted in the FAA and NTSB convening safety summits in March and May, respectively. Whether they dared to discuss root causes seems unlikely.
Given the sheer size of the U.S. military in both manpower and budget dollars, it should not come as a surprise that the diversity push has also affected the readiness of this institution. Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard, a $750 million amphibious assault craft, two retired marines conducted off-the-record interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers. One recurring theme was the prioritization of diversity training over ship handling and warfighting preparedness. Many of them openly admit that, given current issues, the U.S. would likely lose an open naval engagement with China. Instead of taking the criticism to heart, the Navy commissioned “Task Force One Navy,” which recommended deemphasizing or eliminating meritocratic tests like the Officer Aptitude Rating to boost diversity. Absent an existential challenge, U.S. military preparedness is likely to continue to degrade.
The decline in the capacity of government contractors is likewise obvious, with the largest contractors being the most directly impacted. The five largest contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Company, and Northrop Grumman—will all struggle to maintain competency in the coming years.
Boeing, one of only two firms globally capable of mass-producing large airliners, has a particularly striking crisis unfolding in its institutional culture. Shortly after releasing the 737 MAX, 346 people died in two nearly identical 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The cause of the crashes was a complex interaction between design choices, cost-cutting led by MBAs, FAA issues, the MCAS flight-control system, a faulty sensor, and pilot training. Meanwhile, on the defense side of the business, Boeing’s new fuel tanker, the KC-46A Pegasus is years behind on deliveries due to serious technical flaws with the fueling system along with multiple cases of Foreign Object Debris left inside the plane during construction: tools, a red plastic cap, and in one case, even trash. Between the issues at ATC and Boeing, damage to the U.S.’s phenomenal aviation safety record seems almost inevitable.
After government contractors, the next-most-affected class of institutions are nonprofit organizations. They are entrapped by the government whose policies they are subject to and trying to influence, the opinions of their donor base, and lack of any profit motive. The lifeblood of nonprofits is access to capital, either directly in the form of government grants or through donations that are deemed tax-deductible. Accessing federal monies means being subject to the full weight of U.S. diversity rules and regulations. Nonprofits are generally governed by boards whose members tend to overlap with the list of major donors. Because advocacy for diversity and board memberships are both high-status positions, unsurprisingly board members tend to voice favorable opinions of diversity, and those opinions flow downstream to the organizations they oversee.
Nonprofits—including universities, charities, and foundations—exist in an overlapping ecosystem with journalism, with individuals tending to freely circulate between the four. The activities of nonprofits are bound up in the same discourses shaped by current news and academic research, with all four reflecting the same general ideological consensus. Finally, lacking the profit motive, the decision-making processes of nonprofits are influenced by what will affect the status of the individuals within those organizations rather than what will affect profits. Within nonprofits, the cost of incompetent staffers is borne by “stakeholders,” rather than any one individual.
While all businesses subject to federal law must prioritize diversity over competency at some level, the problem is worse at publicly-traded corporations for reasons both obvious and subtle. The obvious reason is that larger companies present larger targets for EEOC actions and discrimination lawsuits with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Corporations have logically responded by hiring large teams of HR professionals to preempt such lawsuits. Over the past several decades, HR has evolved from simply overseeing onboarding to involvement in every aspect of hiring, promotions, and firings, seeing them all through a political and regulatory lens.
The more subtle reason for pressure within publicly-traded companies is that they require ongoing relationships with a spiderweb of banks, credit ratings agencies, proxy advisory services, and most importantly, investors. Given that the loss of access to capital is an immediate death sentence for most businesses, the CEOs of publicly-traded companies tend to push diversity over competency even when the decline in firm performance is clear. CEOs would likely rather trade a small drag on profits margins than a potentially career-ending scandal from pushing back.
Whereas publicly-traded corporations nearly uniformly push diversity, privately-held businesses vary tremendously based on the views of their owners. Partnerships such as the Big Four accounting firms and top-tier management consultancies are high-status. High-status firms must regularly proclaim extensive support for diversity. While the firms tend to be highly selective, partnerships whose leadership is overwhelmingly white and male have generally capitulated to the zeitgeist and are cutting standards to hit targets. Firms often manage around this by hiring for diversity and then putting diversity hires into roles where they are the least likely to damage the firm or the brand. Somewhat counterintuitively, firms with diverse founders are often highly meritocratic, as the structure harnesses the founder’s desire to make money and shields them from criticism on diversity issues.
The most notable example of a diverse meritocracy is Vista Equity Partners, the large private equity firm founded by Robert F. Smith, America’s wealthiest black man. Robert F. Smith is one of the most vocal advocates for and philanthropists to historically black U.S. colleges and universities. It would be reasonable to expect Vista to prioritize diversity over competency in its portfolio companies. However, Vista has instead been profiled for giving all portfolio company management teams the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test and ruthlessly culling low-performers. Given the amount of value to be created by promoting the best people into leadership roles of their portfolio companies, one might imagine this to be low-hanging fruit for the rest of private equity, yet Vista is an outlier. Why Vista can apply the CCAT without a public outcry is obvious.
The other firms that tend to still focus on competency are those that are small and private. Such firms have two key advantages: they fall below the fifteen-employee threshold for the most onerous EEOC rules and the owner can usually directly observe the performance of everyone inside the organization. Within small firms, underperformance is usually obvious. Tech startups, being both small and private, would seem to have the right structure to prioritize competency.
The American System Is Cracking
Promoting diversity over competency does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. It also affects the people already working inside of America’s systems. Morale and competency inside U.S. organizations are declining. Those who understand that the new system makes it hard or impossible for them to advance are demoralized, affecting their performance. Even individuals poised to benefit from diversity preferences notice that better people are being passed over and the average quality of their team is declining. High performers want to be on a high-performing team. When the priorities of their organizations shift away from performance, high performers respond negatively.
This effect was likely seen in a recent paper by McDonald, Keeves, and Westphal. The paper points out that white male senior leaders reduce their engagement following the appointment of a minority CEO. While it is possible that author Ijeoma Oluo is correct, and that white men have so much unconscious bias raging inside of them that the appointment of a diverse CEO sends them into a tailspin of resentment, there is another more plausible explanation. When boards choose diverse CEOs to make a political statement, high performers who see an organization shifting away from valuing honest performance respond by disengaging.
Some demoralized employees—like James Damore in his now-famous essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”—will directly push back against pro-diversity arguments. Like James, they will be fired. Older, demoralized workers, especially those who are mere years from retirement, are unlikely to point out the decline in competency and risk it costing them their jobs. Those who have a large enough nest egg may simply retire to avoid having to deal with the indignity of having to attend another Inclusive Leadership seminar.
As older men with tacit knowledge either retire or are pushed out, the burden of maintaining America’s complex systems will fall on the young. Lower-performing young men angry at the toxic mix of affirmative action (hurting their chances of admission to a “good school”) and credentialism (limiting the “good jobs” to graduates of “good schools”) are turning their backs on college and white-collar work altogether.
This is the continuation of a trend that began over a decade ago. High-performing young men will either collaborate, coast, or downshift by leaving high-status employment altogether. Collaborators will embrace “allyship” to attempt to bolster their chances of getting promoted. Coasters realize that they need to work just slightly harder than the worst individual on their team. Their shirking is likely to go unnoticed and they are unlikely to feel enough emotional connection to the organization to raise alarm when critical mistakes are being made. The combination of new employees hired for diversity, not competence, and the declining engagement of the highly competent sets the stage for failures of increasing frequency and magnitude.
The modern U.S. is a system of systems interacting together in intricate ways. All these complex systems are simply assumed to work. In February of 2021, cold weather in Texas caused shutdowns at unwinterized natural gas power plants. The failure rippled through the systems with interlocking dependencies. As a result, 246 people died. In straightforward work, declining competency means that things happen more slowly, and products are lower quality or more expensive. In complex systems, declining competency results in catastrophic failures.
To understand why, one must understand the concept of a “normal accident.” In 1984, Charles Perrow, a Yale sociologist, published the book, Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies. In this book, Perrow lays out the theory of normal accidents: when you have systems that are both complex and tightly coupled, catastrophic failures are unavoidable and cannot simply be designed around. In this context, a complex system is one that has many components that all need to interact in a specified way to produce the desired outcome. Complex systems often have relationships that are nonlinear and contain feedback loops. Tightly-coupled systems are those whose components need to move together precisely or in a precise sequence.
The 1979 Three Mile Island Accident was used as a case study: a relatively minor blockage of a water filter led to a cascading series of malfunctions that culminated in a partial meltdown. In A Demon of Our Own Design, author Richard Bookstaber added two key contributions to Perrow’s theory: first, that it applies to financial markets, and second, that regulation intended to fix the problem may make it worse.
The biggest shortcoming of the theory is that it takes competency as a given. The idea that competent organizations can devolve to a level where the risk of normal accidents becomes unacceptably high is barely addressed. In other words, rather than being taken as absolutes, complexity and tightness should be understood to be relative to the functionality of the people and systems that are managing them. The U.S. has embraced a novel question: what happens when the men who built the complex systems our society relies on cease contributing and are replaced by people who were chosen for reasons other than competency?
The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems. In the case of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, PG&E fired its CEO, filed Chapter 11, and restructured. The system’s response has been to turn off the electricity and raise wildfire insurance premiums. This has resulted in very little reflection. The more recent coronavirus pandemic was another teachable moment. What started just three years ago with a novel respiratory virus has caused a financial crisis, a bubble, soaring inflation, and now a banking crisis in rapid succession.
Patching the specific failure mode is simultaneously too slow and induces unexpected consequences. Cascading failures overwhelm the capabilities of the system to react. 20 years ago, a software bug caused a poorly-managed local outage that led to a blackout that knocked out power to 55 million people and caused 100 deaths. Utilities were able to restore power to all 55 million people in only four days. It is unclear if they could do the same today. U.S. cities would look very different if they remained without power for even two weeks, especially if other obstructions unfolded. What if emergency supplies sat on trains immobilized by fuel shortages due to the aforementioned pipeline shutdown? The preference for diversity over competency has made our system of systems dangerously fragile.
Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.
The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.
News of the Times;
Stanford University and UMass Researchers Uncover Disturbing Pedo Network on Instagram:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/stanford-university-umass-researchers-uncover-disturbing-pedophle-network/
Leaked Video Shows D.C. Cops Were 'Rioters' and Instigators at J-6 Protest:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/06/09/leaked-video-shows-d-c-cops-were-rioters-and-instigators-at-j-6-protest-n1701634
Nearly 30% of people under 30 support government surveillance cameras in every home:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/nearly-30-of-people-under-30-support-government-surveillance-cameras-in-every-home-poll/
76 percent of Princeton students say it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/76-percent-of-princeton-students-say-its-acceptable-to-shout-down-a-speaker-survey/
San Francisco Homeowners Lose $260 Billion In Value:
https://www.hoover.org/research/san-francisco-homeowners-lose-260-billion-value
Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519.amp
America Signs Global Climate Agreement to Crack Down on Farming:
https://slaynews.com/news/america-signs-global-climate-agreement-crack-down-farming/
Target circulates memo that claims those who don’t support trans mutilations of children are “extremists”:
https://dcdirtylaundry.com/target-circulates-memo-that-claims-those-who-dont-support-trans-mutilations-of-children-are-extremists/
American Icon KitchenAid Pulls Its Products From Target: “We Have Different Values”:
https://breakingnewspapers.com/index.php/2023/06/09/american-icon-kitchenaid-pulls-its-products-from-target-we-have-different-values/
Vermont school district settles with family punished for opposing male student in girls’ locker room:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/family-punished-after-opposing-locker-room-policy-settles-lawsuit.html
Feds spent over $1.3 billion in Russia, China on controversial projects:
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_a1444bb6-03c5-11ee-93ab-c73ba17b7f10.html
Thank the green-energy cult for major blackouts this summer:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/05/thank-the-green-energy-cult-for-major-blackouts-this-summer/
Woman Accused Of Dismembering, Grilling Remains Of Her Mother:
https://newsradio1290wtks.iheart.com/content/2023-06-06-woman-accused-of-dismembering-grilling-remains-of-her-mother/
"We Are Not Alone": US Has Retrieved Craft Of 'Non-Human Origin' Says Whistleblower From Govt. Task Force On UFOs:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/we-are-not-alone-us-has-retrieved-craft-non-human-origin-says-whistleblower-govt-task
Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn Burns the Climate Change Argument to the Ground:
https://thelibertydaily.com/astrophysicist-piers-corbyn-burns-the-climate-change-argument-to-the-ground/
They must have enough people.
*.*
I need to re-home a dog. It's a small terrier and tends to bark a lot.
If you're interested, let me know and I'll climb over my neighbor's fence and get it for you.
*.*
Today marked the end of an era, as the Mafia announced it was officially closing its Chicago branch due to the rising wave of violent crime in the city.
"We just can't operate under these conditions," said street boss Albert "Albie the Falcon" Vena, speaking on behalf of Salvatore "Solly D" DeLaurentis, who has run the Chicago organization since 2002. "How are we supposed to conduct respectable business — loan sharking, bribery, racketeering, illegal gambling — with so much crime going on? It's insane!"
The Windy City has long been known for its organized crime operations, dating back even before the days of Al "Scarface" Capone in the 1920s Prohibition Era. Today's mobsters now lament the difficulty they face in doing horrible things behind the scenes in the city while so many even more horrible things are being done in broad daylight. "One of our best leg-breakers got his legs broken by a gang of 40 high schoolers last week," said organization member Frank "Toots" Caruso. "They recorded it and put it on TikTok. We just don't feel safe around here. I'm afraid to just walk down the street!"
Rising crime rates have become a staple under Democrat leaders, resulting in skyrocketing numbers of violent crimes and shooting deaths, despite the city having some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. "You think we're gonna be out there working?" asked Nicholas "Jumbo" Guzzino. "Are you kidding me? I don't wanna get shot!"
*.*
Oneliners:
The fridge is a perfect example that what matters is on the inside.
You know you're over 40 when you have 'upstairs ibuprofen' and 'downstairs ibuprofen'.
People write 'Congrats' because they can't spell 'Congratjulayshun'.
Without a doubt, the cashew is my favorite nut that sounds like a sneeze.
Studies show the most expensive vehicle to operate is a Costco shopping cart.
My toxic trait: Let's see if that food that normally hurts my stomach hurts my stomach TODAY.
I've made a lot of mistakes in my life but adding more cheese than a recipe calls for is not one of them.
Loved are the ones who are told of their faults in private.
Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
Say nothing, often.
*.*
Word of the day: Exhaustipated.
Definition: Too tired to give a crap.
Quote of the Times;
“What percentage of gun crimes are committed by Republicans?” - Scott Adams
Link of the Times;
Target reaffirms partnership with LGBT group pushing explicit homosexual books in schools:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/target-reaffirms-partnership-with-lgbt-group-pushing-explicit-homosexual-books-in-classrooms/
Issue of the Times;
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis by Harold Robertson
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
From Meritocracy to Diversity
The first domino to fall as Civil Rights-era policies took effect was the quantitative evaluation of competency by employers using straightforward cognitive batteries. While some tests are still legally used in hiring today, several high-profile enforcement actions against employers caused a wholesale change in the tools customarily usable by employers to screen for ability.
After the early 1970s, employers responded by shifting from directly testing for ability to using the next best thing: a degree from a highly-selective university. By pushing the selection challenge to the college admissions offices, selective employers did two things: they reduced their risk of lawsuits and they turned the U.S. college application process into a high-stakes war of all against all. Admission to Harvard would be a golden ticket to join the professional managerial class, while mere admission to a state school could mean a struggle to remain in the middle class.
This outsourcing did not stave off the ideological change for long. Within the system of political imperatives now dominant in all major U.S. organizations, diversity must be prioritized even if there is a price in competency. The definition of diversity varies by industry and geography. In elite universities, diversity means black, indigenous, or Hispanic. In California, Indian women are diverse but Indian men are not. When selecting corporate board members, diversity means “anyone who is not a straight white man.” The legally protected and politically enforced nature of this imperative renders an open dialogue nearly impossible.
However diversity itself is defined, most policy on the matter is based on a simple premise: since all groups are identical in talent, any unbiased process must produce the same group proportions as the general population, and therefore, processes that produce disproportionate outcomes must be biased. Prestigious journals like Harvard Business Review are the first to summarize and parrot these views, which then flow down to reporting by mass media organizations like Bloomberg Businessweek. Soon, it joins McKinsey’s “best practices” list and becomes instantiated in corporate policies.
Unlike accounting policies, which emanate from the Financial Accounting Standards Board and are then implemented by Chief Financial Officers, the diversity push emanates inside of organizations from multiple power centers, each of which joins in for independent reasons. CEOs push diversity policies primarily to please board members and increase their status. Human Resources (HR) professionals push diversity policies primarily to avoid anti-discrimination lawsuits. Business development teams push diversity to win additional business from diversity-sensitive clients (e.g. government agencies). Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), such as the Black Googler Network, push diversity to help their in-group in hiring and promotion decisions.
Diversity in Theory and Practice
In police academies around the country, new recruits are taught to apply an escalation of force algorithm with non-compliant subjects: “Ask, Tell, Make.” The idea behind “Ask, Tell, Make” is to apply the least amount of force necessary to achieve the desired level of compliance. This is the means by which police power, which is ultimately backed by significant coercive force, can maintain an appearance of voluntary compliance and soft-handedness. Similarly, the power centers inside U.S. institutions apply a variant of “Ask, Tell, Make” to achieve diversity in their respective organizations.
The first tactics for implementing diversity imperatives are the “Ask” tactics. These simply ask all the members of the organization to end bias. At this stage, the policies seem so reasonable and fair that there will rarely be much pushback. Best practices such as slating guidelines are a common tool at this stage. Slating guidelines require that every hiring process must include a certain number and type of diverse candidates for every job opening. Structured interviews are another best practice that requires interviewers to stick with a script to minimize the chance of uncovering commonalities between the interviewer and interviewee that might introduce bias. Often HR will become involved in the hiring process, specifically asking the hiring manager to defend their choice not to hire a diverse candidate. Because the wrong answer could result in shaming, loss of advancement opportunities, or even termination, the hiring manager can often be persuaded to prioritize diversity over competence.
Within specialized professional services companies, senior-level recruiting will occasionally result in a resume collection where not a single diverse candidate meets the minimum specifications of the job. This is a terrible outcome for the hiring manager as it attracts negative attention from HR. At this point, firms will often retain an executive search agency that focuses on exclusively diverse candidates. When that does not result in sufficient diversity, roles will often have their requirements diluted to increase the pool of diverse candidates.
For example, within hedge funds, the ideal entry-level candidate might be an experienced former investment banker who went to a top MBA program. This preferred pedigree sets a minimum bar for both competence and work ethic. This first-pass filter enormously winnows the field of underrepresented candidates. To relax requirements for diversity’s sake, this will be diluted in various ways. First, the work experience might be stripped. Next, the role gets offered to MBA interns. Finally, fresh undergraduates are hired into the analyst role. Dilution works not just because of the larger field of candidates it allows for but also because the Harvard Admission Office of 2019 is even more focused on certain kinds of diversity than the Harvard Admission Office of 2011 was.
This dilution is not costless; fewer data points result in a wider range of outcomes and increase the risk of a bad hire. All bad hires are costly but bad hires that are diverse are even worse. The risk of a wrongful termination lawsuit either draws out the termination process for diverse hires or results in the firm adjusting by giving them harmless busy work until they leave of their own volition—either way, a terrible outcome for the organizations which hired them.
If these “Ask” tactics do not achieve enough diversity, the next step in the escalation is to attach carrots and sticks to directly tell decision-makers to increase the diversity of the organization. This is the point at which the goals of diversity and competence truly begin displaying significant tension between each other. The first step is the implementation of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) linked to diversity for all managers. Diversity KPIs are a tool to embarrass leaders and teams that are not meeting their diversity targets. Given that most organizations are hierarchical and pyramidal, combined with the fact that America was much whiter 50 years ago than it was today, it is unsurprising that senior leadership teams are less diverse than America as a whole—and, more pertinently, than their own junior teams.
The combination of a pyramid-shaped org chart and a senior leadership team where white men often make up 80 percent or more of the team means that the imposition of an aggressive KPI sends a message to the layer below them: no white man in middle management will likely ever see a promotion as long as they remain in the organization. This is never expressed verbally. Rather, those overlooked figure it out as they are passed over continually for less competent but more diverse colleagues. The result is demoralization, disengagement, and over time, departure.
While all the aforementioned techniques fall into the broad category of affirmative action, they primarily result in slightly tilting the scale toward diverse candidates. The next step is simply holding different groups to different standards. Within academia, the recently filed Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit leveraged data to show the extent to which Harvard penalizes Asian and white applicants to help black and Hispanic applicants. The UC System, despite formally being forbidden from practicing affirmative action by Proposition 209, uses a tool called “comprehensive admission” to accomplish the same goal.
The latest technique, which was recently brought to light, shows UC admissions offices using the applicants’ high schools as a proxy for race to achieve their desired goal. Heavily Asian high schools such as Arcadia—which is 68 percent Asian—saw their UC-San Diego acceptance rate cut from 37 percent to 13 percent while the 99-percent-Hispanic Garfield High School saw its UC-San Diego acceptance rate rise from 29 percent to 65 percent.
The preference for diversity at the college faculty level is similarly strong. Jessica Nordell’s End of Bias: A Beginning heralded MIT’s efforts to increase the gender diversity of its engineering department: “When applications came in, the Dean of Engineering personally reviewed every one from a woman. If departments turned down a good candidate, they had to explain why.”
When this was not enough, MIT increased its gender diversity by simply offering jobs to previously rejected female candidates. While no university will admit to letting standards slip for the sake of diversity, no one has offered a serious argument why the new processes produce higher or even equivalent quality faculty as opposed to simply more diverse faculty. The extreme preference for diversity in academia today explains much of the phenomenon of professors identifying with a minor fraction of their ancestry or even making it up entirely.
During COVID-19, the difficulty of in-person testing and online proctoring created a new mechanism to push diversity at the expense of competency: the gradual but systematic elimination of standardized tests as a barrier to admission to universities and graduate schools. Today, the majority of U.S. colleges have either stopped requiring SAT/ACT scores, no longer require them for students in the top 10 percent of their class, or will no longer consider them. Several elite law schools, including Harvard Law School, no longer require the LSAT as of 2023. With thousands of unqualified law students headed to a bar exam that they are unlikely to pass, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is already planning to dilute the bar exam under the “NextGen” plan. Specifically, “eliminat[ing] any aspects of our exams that could contribute to performance disparities” will almost definitionally reduce the degree to which the exam tests for competency.
Similarly, standards used to select doctors have also been weakened to promote diversity. Programs such as the City College of New York’s BS/MD program have eliminated the MCAT requirement. With the SAT now optional, new candidates can go straight from high school to the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 exam in medical school without having gone through any rigorous standardized test whose score can be compared across schools. Step 1 scores were historically the most significant factor in the National Residency Matching Program, which pairs soon-to-be doctors with their future residency training programs. Because Step 1 scores serve as a barrier to increasing diversity, they have been made pass/fail. A handful of doctors are speaking out about the dangers of picking doctors based on factors other than competency but most either explicitly prefer diversity or else stay silent, concerned about the career-ending repercussions of pointing out the obvious.
When even carrot and stick incentives and the removal of standards do not achieve enough diversity, the end game is to simply make decision-makers comply. “Make” has two preferred implementations: one is widely discussed and the other is, for obvious reasons, never disclosed publicly. The first method of implementation is the application of quotas. Quotas or set-asides require the reservation of admissions slots, jobs, contracts, board seats, or other scarce goods for women and members of favored minority groups. Government contracts and supplier agreements are explicitly awarded to firms that have acronyms such as SB, WBE, MBE, DBE, SDB, VOSB, SDVOSB, WOSB, HUB, and 8(a).
Within large employers and government contractors, quotas are used for both hiring and promotions, requiring specific percentages of hiring or promotions to be reserved for favored groups. During the summer of 2020, the CEO of Wells Fargo, was publicly shamed after his memo blaming the underrepresentation of black senior leaders on a “very limited pool” of black talent was leaked to Reuters. Less than a month later, the bank publicly pledged to reserve 12 percent of leadership positions for black candidates and began tying executive compensation to reaching diversity goals. In 2022, Goldman Sachs extended quotas to the capital markets by adopting a policy to avoid underwriting IPOs of firms without at least two board members that are not straight white men.
When diversity still refuses to rise to acceptable levels, the remaining solution is the direct exclusion of non-diverse candidates. While public support for anti-discrimination laws and equal opportunity laws is high, public support for affirmative action and quotas is decidedly mixed. Hardline views such as those expressed in author Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America—namely that “any white man in a position of power perpetuates a system of white male domination”—are still considered extreme, even within U.S. progressive circles.
As such, when explicit exclusion is used to eliminate groups like white men from selection processes, it is done subtly. Managers are told to sequester all the resumes from “non-diverse” candidates—that is, white males. These resumes are discarded and the candidates are sent emails politely telling them that “other candidates were a better fit.” While some so-called “reverse discrimination” lawsuits have been filed, most of these policies go unreported. The reasons are straightforward; even in 2023, screening out all white men is not de jure legal. Moreover, any member of the professional managerial class who witnesses and reports discrimination against white men will never work in their field again.
Even anonymous whistleblowing is likely to be rare. To imagine why, suppose incontrovertible evidence was produced that one’s employer was explicitly excluding white male candidates, and a lawsuit was filed. The employer’s reputation and the reputation of all the employees there, including the white men still working there, would be tarnished. That said, we can expect to see more lawsuits from men who feel they have little to lose.
This “Ask, Tell, Make” framework, under various descriptions, is the method by which individuals with a vested interest in more diversity push their organizations toward their preferred outcome. Force begins requesting modest changes to recruiting to make it “more fair.” Force ends with the heavy-handed application of quotas and even exclusion. The American system is not a monolith, however, which means that the strength of the push and its effects on competency is not distributed evenly.
Competency Is Declining From the Core Outwards
Think of the American system as a series of concentric rings with the government at the center. Directly surrounding that are the organizations that receive government funds, then the nonprofits that influence and are subject to policy, and finally business at the periphery. Since the era of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race, the state capacity of the federal government has been declining almost monotonically.
While this has occurred for a multitude of reasons, the steel girders supporting the competency of the federal government were the first to be exposed to the saltwater of the Civil Rights Act and related executive orders. Government agencies, which are in charge of overseeing all the other systems, have seen the quality of their human capital decline tremendously since the 1960s. While the damage to an agency like the Department of Agriculture may have long-term deadly consequences, the most immediate danger is at safety-critical agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The Air Traffic Control (ATC) system used in the U.S. relies on an intricate dance of visual or radar observation, transponders, and radio communication, all with the incredible challenge of keeping thousands of simultaneously moving planes from ever crashing into each other. Since air controlling is one of the only jobs that pays more than $100,000 per year and does not require a college diploma, it has been a popular career choice for individuals without a degree who nonetheless have an exceptionally good memory, attention span, visuospatial awareness, and logical skills. The Air Traffic Selection and Training (AT-SAT) Exam, a standardized test of those critical skills, was historically the primary barrier to entry for air controllers. As a consequence of the AT-SAT, as well as a preference for veterans with former air controller experience, 83 percent of air controllers in the U.S. were white men as of 2014.
That year, the FAA added a Biographical Questionnaire (BQ) to the screening process to tilt the applicant pool toward diverse candidates. Facing pushback in the courts from well-qualified candidates who were screened out, the FAA quietly backed away from the BQ and adopted a new exam, the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA). While the ATSA includes some questions similar to those of the BQ, it restored the test’s focus on core air traffic skills. The importance of highly-skilled air controllers was made clear in the most deadly air disaster in history, the 1977 Tenerife incident. Two planes, one taking off and one taxiing, collided on the runway due to confusion between the captain of KLM 4805 and the Tenerife ATC. The crash, which killed 583 people, resulted in sweeping changes in aviation safety culture.
Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges. The first three months of 2023 saw nine near-miss incidents at U.S. airports, one with two planes coming within 100 feet of colliding. This terrifying uptick from years prior resulted in the FAA and NTSB convening safety summits in March and May, respectively. Whether they dared to discuss root causes seems unlikely.
Given the sheer size of the U.S. military in both manpower and budget dollars, it should not come as a surprise that the diversity push has also affected the readiness of this institution. Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard, a $750 million amphibious assault craft, two retired marines conducted off-the-record interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers. One recurring theme was the prioritization of diversity training over ship handling and warfighting preparedness. Many of them openly admit that, given current issues, the U.S. would likely lose an open naval engagement with China. Instead of taking the criticism to heart, the Navy commissioned “Task Force One Navy,” which recommended deemphasizing or eliminating meritocratic tests like the Officer Aptitude Rating to boost diversity. Absent an existential challenge, U.S. military preparedness is likely to continue to degrade.
The decline in the capacity of government contractors is likewise obvious, with the largest contractors being the most directly impacted. The five largest contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Company, and Northrop Grumman—will all struggle to maintain competency in the coming years.
Boeing, one of only two firms globally capable of mass-producing large airliners, has a particularly striking crisis unfolding in its institutional culture. Shortly after releasing the 737 MAX, 346 people died in two nearly identical 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The cause of the crashes was a complex interaction between design choices, cost-cutting led by MBAs, FAA issues, the MCAS flight-control system, a faulty sensor, and pilot training. Meanwhile, on the defense side of the business, Boeing’s new fuel tanker, the KC-46A Pegasus is years behind on deliveries due to serious technical flaws with the fueling system along with multiple cases of Foreign Object Debris left inside the plane during construction: tools, a red plastic cap, and in one case, even trash. Between the issues at ATC and Boeing, damage to the U.S.’s phenomenal aviation safety record seems almost inevitable.
After government contractors, the next-most-affected class of institutions are nonprofit organizations. They are entrapped by the government whose policies they are subject to and trying to influence, the opinions of their donor base, and lack of any profit motive. The lifeblood of nonprofits is access to capital, either directly in the form of government grants or through donations that are deemed tax-deductible. Accessing federal monies means being subject to the full weight of U.S. diversity rules and regulations. Nonprofits are generally governed by boards whose members tend to overlap with the list of major donors. Because advocacy for diversity and board memberships are both high-status positions, unsurprisingly board members tend to voice favorable opinions of diversity, and those opinions flow downstream to the organizations they oversee.
Nonprofits—including universities, charities, and foundations—exist in an overlapping ecosystem with journalism, with individuals tending to freely circulate between the four. The activities of nonprofits are bound up in the same discourses shaped by current news and academic research, with all four reflecting the same general ideological consensus. Finally, lacking the profit motive, the decision-making processes of nonprofits are influenced by what will affect the status of the individuals within those organizations rather than what will affect profits. Within nonprofits, the cost of incompetent staffers is borne by “stakeholders,” rather than any one individual.
While all businesses subject to federal law must prioritize diversity over competency at some level, the problem is worse at publicly-traded corporations for reasons both obvious and subtle. The obvious reason is that larger companies present larger targets for EEOC actions and discrimination lawsuits with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Corporations have logically responded by hiring large teams of HR professionals to preempt such lawsuits. Over the past several decades, HR has evolved from simply overseeing onboarding to involvement in every aspect of hiring, promotions, and firings, seeing them all through a political and regulatory lens.
The more subtle reason for pressure within publicly-traded companies is that they require ongoing relationships with a spiderweb of banks, credit ratings agencies, proxy advisory services, and most importantly, investors. Given that the loss of access to capital is an immediate death sentence for most businesses, the CEOs of publicly-traded companies tend to push diversity over competency even when the decline in firm performance is clear. CEOs would likely rather trade a small drag on profits margins than a potentially career-ending scandal from pushing back.
Whereas publicly-traded corporations nearly uniformly push diversity, privately-held businesses vary tremendously based on the views of their owners. Partnerships such as the Big Four accounting firms and top-tier management consultancies are high-status. High-status firms must regularly proclaim extensive support for diversity. While the firms tend to be highly selective, partnerships whose leadership is overwhelmingly white and male have generally capitulated to the zeitgeist and are cutting standards to hit targets. Firms often manage around this by hiring for diversity and then putting diversity hires into roles where they are the least likely to damage the firm or the brand. Somewhat counterintuitively, firms with diverse founders are often highly meritocratic, as the structure harnesses the founder’s desire to make money and shields them from criticism on diversity issues.
The most notable example of a diverse meritocracy is Vista Equity Partners, the large private equity firm founded by Robert F. Smith, America’s wealthiest black man. Robert F. Smith is one of the most vocal advocates for and philanthropists to historically black U.S. colleges and universities. It would be reasonable to expect Vista to prioritize diversity over competency in its portfolio companies. However, Vista has instead been profiled for giving all portfolio company management teams the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test and ruthlessly culling low-performers. Given the amount of value to be created by promoting the best people into leadership roles of their portfolio companies, one might imagine this to be low-hanging fruit for the rest of private equity, yet Vista is an outlier. Why Vista can apply the CCAT without a public outcry is obvious.
The other firms that tend to still focus on competency are those that are small and private. Such firms have two key advantages: they fall below the fifteen-employee threshold for the most onerous EEOC rules and the owner can usually directly observe the performance of everyone inside the organization. Within small firms, underperformance is usually obvious. Tech startups, being both small and private, would seem to have the right structure to prioritize competency.
The American System Is Cracking
Promoting diversity over competency does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. It also affects the people already working inside of America’s systems. Morale and competency inside U.S. organizations are declining. Those who understand that the new system makes it hard or impossible for them to advance are demoralized, affecting their performance. Even individuals poised to benefit from diversity preferences notice that better people are being passed over and the average quality of their team is declining. High performers want to be on a high-performing team. When the priorities of their organizations shift away from performance, high performers respond negatively.
This effect was likely seen in a recent paper by McDonald, Keeves, and Westphal. The paper points out that white male senior leaders reduce their engagement following the appointment of a minority CEO. While it is possible that author Ijeoma Oluo is correct, and that white men have so much unconscious bias raging inside of them that the appointment of a diverse CEO sends them into a tailspin of resentment, there is another more plausible explanation. When boards choose diverse CEOs to make a political statement, high performers who see an organization shifting away from valuing honest performance respond by disengaging.
Some demoralized employees—like James Damore in his now-famous essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”—will directly push back against pro-diversity arguments. Like James, they will be fired. Older, demoralized workers, especially those who are mere years from retirement, are unlikely to point out the decline in competency and risk it costing them their jobs. Those who have a large enough nest egg may simply retire to avoid having to deal with the indignity of having to attend another Inclusive Leadership seminar.
As older men with tacit knowledge either retire or are pushed out, the burden of maintaining America’s complex systems will fall on the young. Lower-performing young men angry at the toxic mix of affirmative action (hurting their chances of admission to a “good school”) and credentialism (limiting the “good jobs” to graduates of “good schools”) are turning their backs on college and white-collar work altogether.
This is the continuation of a trend that began over a decade ago. High-performing young men will either collaborate, coast, or downshift by leaving high-status employment altogether. Collaborators will embrace “allyship” to attempt to bolster their chances of getting promoted. Coasters realize that they need to work just slightly harder than the worst individual on their team. Their shirking is likely to go unnoticed and they are unlikely to feel enough emotional connection to the organization to raise alarm when critical mistakes are being made. The combination of new employees hired for diversity, not competence, and the declining engagement of the highly competent sets the stage for failures of increasing frequency and magnitude.
The modern U.S. is a system of systems interacting together in intricate ways. All these complex systems are simply assumed to work. In February of 2021, cold weather in Texas caused shutdowns at unwinterized natural gas power plants. The failure rippled through the systems with interlocking dependencies. As a result, 246 people died. In straightforward work, declining competency means that things happen more slowly, and products are lower quality or more expensive. In complex systems, declining competency results in catastrophic failures.
To understand why, one must understand the concept of a “normal accident.” In 1984, Charles Perrow, a Yale sociologist, published the book, Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies. In this book, Perrow lays out the theory of normal accidents: when you have systems that are both complex and tightly coupled, catastrophic failures are unavoidable and cannot simply be designed around. In this context, a complex system is one that has many components that all need to interact in a specified way to produce the desired outcome. Complex systems often have relationships that are nonlinear and contain feedback loops. Tightly-coupled systems are those whose components need to move together precisely or in a precise sequence.
The 1979 Three Mile Island Accident was used as a case study: a relatively minor blockage of a water filter led to a cascading series of malfunctions that culminated in a partial meltdown. In A Demon of Our Own Design, author Richard Bookstaber added two key contributions to Perrow’s theory: first, that it applies to financial markets, and second, that regulation intended to fix the problem may make it worse.
The biggest shortcoming of the theory is that it takes competency as a given. The idea that competent organizations can devolve to a level where the risk of normal accidents becomes unacceptably high is barely addressed. In other words, rather than being taken as absolutes, complexity and tightness should be understood to be relative to the functionality of the people and systems that are managing them. The U.S. has embraced a novel question: what happens when the men who built the complex systems our society relies on cease contributing and are replaced by people who were chosen for reasons other than competency?
The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems. In the case of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, PG&E fired its CEO, filed Chapter 11, and restructured. The system’s response has been to turn off the electricity and raise wildfire insurance premiums. This has resulted in very little reflection. The more recent coronavirus pandemic was another teachable moment. What started just three years ago with a novel respiratory virus has caused a financial crisis, a bubble, soaring inflation, and now a banking crisis in rapid succession.
Patching the specific failure mode is simultaneously too slow and induces unexpected consequences. Cascading failures overwhelm the capabilities of the system to react. 20 years ago, a software bug caused a poorly-managed local outage that led to a blackout that knocked out power to 55 million people and caused 100 deaths. Utilities were able to restore power to all 55 million people in only four days. It is unclear if they could do the same today. U.S. cities would look very different if they remained without power for even two weeks, especially if other obstructions unfolded. What if emergency supplies sat on trains immobilized by fuel shortages due to the aforementioned pipeline shutdown? The preference for diversity over competency has made our system of systems dangerously fragile.
Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.
The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.
News of the Times;
Stanford University and UMass Researchers Uncover Disturbing Pedo Network on Instagram:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/stanford-university-umass-researchers-uncover-disturbing-pedophle-network/
Leaked Video Shows D.C. Cops Were 'Rioters' and Instigators at J-6 Protest:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/06/09/leaked-video-shows-d-c-cops-were-rioters-and-instigators-at-j-6-protest-n1701634
Nearly 30% of people under 30 support government surveillance cameras in every home:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/nearly-30-of-people-under-30-support-government-surveillance-cameras-in-every-home-poll/
76 percent of Princeton students say it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/76-percent-of-princeton-students-say-its-acceptable-to-shout-down-a-speaker-survey/
San Francisco Homeowners Lose $260 Billion In Value:
https://www.hoover.org/research/san-francisco-homeowners-lose-260-billion-value
Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519.amp
America Signs Global Climate Agreement to Crack Down on Farming:
https://slaynews.com/news/america-signs-global-climate-agreement-crack-down-farming/
Target circulates memo that claims those who don’t support trans mutilations of children are “extremists”:
https://dcdirtylaundry.com/target-circulates-memo-that-claims-those-who-dont-support-trans-mutilations-of-children-are-extremists/
American Icon KitchenAid Pulls Its Products From Target: “We Have Different Values”:
https://breakingnewspapers.com/index.php/2023/06/09/american-icon-kitchenaid-pulls-its-products-from-target-we-have-different-values/
Vermont school district settles with family punished for opposing male student in girls’ locker room:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/family-punished-after-opposing-locker-room-policy-settles-lawsuit.html
Feds spent over $1.3 billion in Russia, China on controversial projects:
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_a1444bb6-03c5-11ee-93ab-c73ba17b7f10.html
Thank the green-energy cult for major blackouts this summer:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/05/thank-the-green-energy-cult-for-major-blackouts-this-summer/
Woman Accused Of Dismembering, Grilling Remains Of Her Mother:
https://newsradio1290wtks.iheart.com/content/2023-06-06-woman-accused-of-dismembering-grilling-remains-of-her-mother/
"We Are Not Alone": US Has Retrieved Craft Of 'Non-Human Origin' Says Whistleblower From Govt. Task Force On UFOs:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/we-are-not-alone-us-has-retrieved-craft-non-human-origin-says-whistleblower-govt-task
Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn Burns the Climate Change Argument to the Ground:
https://thelibertydaily.com/astrophysicist-piers-corbyn-burns-the-climate-change-argument-to-the-ground/
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No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.