SURE, LIKE THEY RENAMED WUHAN FLU BECAUSE OF RACISM: WHO Renames Monkeypox to ‘Mpox’ Because Racism.
But in this case they’re reflecting their own racism. Only they think that “monkey” has anything to do with human races. Idiots. Pernicious idiots. Also verbalists who think language controls reality.
WHEN EVERYTHING IS RACIST, NOTHING IS: Even daylight savings time is racist.
I’M FAIRLY SURE HE’LL GO TO WAR: Elon Musk Confirms Apple Is Threatening Twitter’s Presence In Its App Store.
THEY’RE JUST STRAIGHT UP PSYCHOPATHS: Biden Transgender DOE Official Charged With Felony for Allegedly Stealing Luggage.
CAN THIS BE SO, OR ARE WE JUST BEING GASLIGHTED? ‘Gaslighting’ named Merriam-Webster word of the year in the ‘age of misinformation’.
AND THEY’D HAVE GOT AWAY WITH IT, TOO, IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR THOSE POUNCING REPUBLICANS: Balenciaga finally cops to mistakes in disturbing BDSM ad campaign, condemns child abuse amid scandal.
BECAUSE THEY ARE: This is why they think you’re a racist.
A LOT OF TIPPING POINTS: “End the Chinese Communist Party” | Protesters rally in Vancouver to oppose CCP influence in Canada.
THERE’S A LOT OF TIPPING POINTS UPON US: The Tipping Point Cometh? Maybe?
MUSK: “THE TWITTER FILES ON FREE SPEECH SUPPRESSION SOON TO BE PUBLISHED ON TWITTER ITSELF.” It’s really too bad that he committed suicide tomorrow before he could publish that info. Who knew he was even depressed?
I’LL BELIEVE IT’S A CRISIS WHEN THEY START EATING BUGS ON THE REGULAR THEMSELVES. They really really want you to eat bugs.
IF YOU SEE IT ON THEIR TRANSCRIPT, DON’T HIRE THEM: Have the Anticapitalists Reached Harvard Business School? Social justice joins discounted cash flows on the syllabus as essential knowledge for aspiring corporate leaders.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Reinventing the Root of All Evil.
The migration of ID and money into the network accomplishes an extraordinary thing. It promises to protect the public from bad players but leaves everyone potentially vulnerable to a perverse playing field run by the Big Guys. The saga of Sam Bankman-Fried may be over, but the story of the system he was advocating is not. Despite our desire to virtualize everything the physical still has its place in the world. One of the enduring problems facing all cryptographically protected digital assets is the five dollar wrench attack, so named after the hypothetical heavy who threatens to beat you with a 5 buck wrench unless you tell him the PIN to your cold wallet. That’s why totalitarianism plus digital assets equals less money in the bank than you think. We have not yet invented a way to banish men from the loop.
https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1597282329181159425
Read the whole thing.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China outlines pathway for lunar and deep space exploration.
OUT ON A LIMB: The Packers need to find the guts to say no to Aaron Rodgers. “Will the Packers do that — bench Rodgers — if the doctors say things are good? He has been playing with a broken thumb on his throwing hand for weeks and now he has issues with his ribs. He also turns 39 later this week and I can’t imagine anything less fun at that age than playing tackle football in the freezing cold against grown men who would love nothing more than to slam you to the turf. There’s nothing left for Rodgers to do here. There’s a lot left for the Packers to learn from with [Jordan] Love. The timing all just seems to be right. Will the Packers have the guts to do it? Their fans should hope so.”
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: An Emergent State. I believe this one is based on his experience as a policeman in New Guinea.
HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Babylon Bee Publishes a Hysterical Spoof of a College English Course Description. Oh, Wait!
If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:
Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5
How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.
Sadly, this nonsensical, unintelligible gibberish was copied, word-for-word, from an actual English course description currently appearing on the website of Kenyon College, one of the nation’s preeminent liberal arts colleges. That Kenyon approved a course description (and course) so replete with esoteric academic jargon and hackneyed, woke buzzwords reveals the intellectual vacuousness that currently permeates the college.
Could actually be worse, though: Duke University To Publish A ‘F*ggotology’ With Intro That References Anal Sex.
CYBER MONDAY DEAL AT THE SHOP OF ONE OF MY FANS: If you do gaming figurines, or even like to paint and collect minies, give MurphicIndustries a look.
Oh, and because everyone is tight this year, Promo code HOYTSHOCKED, for 25% off of orders over $10.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Preparations begin for a rail strike.
I’D BE INTERESTED TO SEE IF THE QUALITY IS ANY HIGHER, TOO: Study shows prestigious institutions produce more published manuscripts because they have a bigger labor pool. “The researchers found a pattern—more prestigious schools tend to produce more papers because they have more people available to work on research teams. They noted that neither the senior- nor junior-level people working on the papers were more productive than others working at less-prestigious institutions; it was just more people working and getting more done.”
PRIORITIES: WHO renames monkeypox as mpox, citing racism concerns. “Although WHO has named numerous new diseases shortly after they emerged, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS and COVID-19, this appears to be the first time the agency has attempted to rechristen a disease decades after it was first named. Numerous other diseases, including Japanese encephalitis, German measles, Marburg virus and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome have been named after geographic regions, which could now be considered prejudicial. WHO has not suggested changing any of those names.”
In other words, they’re idiots.
HAPPY 93rd BIRTHDAY: Berry Gordy: The Visionary Who Made Motown.
A company that was started with a loan of $800 went on to help shape the sound of the 20th century. We could only be talking about Motown Records, founded on January 12, 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr, who was born in the city he helped make synonymous with soulfulness, Detroit, on November 28, 1929. Unfailingly spritely, just ahead of his 90th birthday, Gordy announced his retirement at the Hitsville Honours ceremony, safe in the knowledge that his achievements will last forever.
Gordy built his empire on his early success as a songwriter, notably of “Reet Petite,” “Lonely Teardrops” and others for perhaps the pre-eminent black music entertainer of the late 1950s, Jackie Wilson. Detroit, the Motor City itself, was sharing the fruits of America’s post-war economic boom, and there were possibilities for a young and savvy business creative, as we’d call them now. But no one, surely not even Berry himself, could have known exactly the global dimensions that those possibilities would assume in the coming decades.
Gordy’s genius was to adopt the assembly line methods of both Detroit and Hollywood to the music industry, a topic I explored in my interview with Allan Slutsky, the producer of one of the best documentaries about the record label in the 1960s, Standing in the Shadows of Motown.
WHEN REALITY IS TOO OUT THERE FOR THE BABYLON BEE TO SATIRIZE: Controversial energy official charged with stealing woman’s luggage at MSP. “Sam Brinton, one of the first ‘openly genderfluid individuals in federal government leadership,’ was charged with felony theft last month after allegedly stealing a woman’s luggage at MSP Airport.”
You remember Sam, right?
Here’s the story:
Law enforcement at the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport were alerted to a missing suitcase in the baggage claim area on Sept. 16. The adult female victim said she flew into MSP on a Delta flight from New Orleans and went to retrieve her checked bag at carousel seven.
Airport records confirmed the navy blue Vera Bradley roller bag arrived at 4:40 p.m. but was missing from the carousel. So law enforcement reviewed video surveillance footage from the baggage claim area and observed Brinton removing a navy blue roller bag from carousel seven, according to a criminal complaint.
The complaint says Brinton removed a luggage tag from the bag, placed it into a handbag he was carrying, and “then left the area at a quick pace.” Brinton arrived at MSP Airport around 4:27 p.m. on an American Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., but did not check a bag, meaning he had no reason to visit baggage claim, according to the complaint.
Police showed the surveillance video to the victim and she confirmed it was her bag.
Brinton left the airport in an Uber for a stay at the InterContinental St. Paul Riverfront hotel, where he checked in with the blue bag, the complaint says.
He returned to MSP on Sept. 18 with the bag in hand for a departing flight back to Washington, D.C., authorities allege.
Surveillance video from Dulles International Airport shows Brinton traveling with the bag on an Oct. 9 return trip from Europe, the complaint notes.
The victim said the estimated value of the bag and its contents was around $2,325.
“Brinton’s first court hearing is scheduled for Dec. 19 in Hennepin County. Alpha News attempted to contact Brinton via email but received an automatic reply saying he is on leave and unable to access his email.”
THANKS FOR NOTHING, TIM: Apple Blackmailed Developer Into Blocking COVID Searches… and Maybe Elon Musk’s Twitter, Too. “‘Secret suppression of free speech by Apple,’ Musk tweeted back. ‘Customers were never told. What the hell is going on here?'”
HE’D RATHER ENRICH COMMIES IN VENEZUELA THAN TEXANS IN AMERICA:
Doocy: Why is it President Biden would rather let U.S. companies drill for oil in Venezuela than here in the US?
Kirby: That's not accurate.
Doocy: He said no more drilling… Does the President think there's some benefit to the climate to drill oil in Venezuela and not here? pic.twitter.com/Oj3QpNFlt8
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) November 28, 2022
CHINA TRYING TO HIDE PROTEST VIDEOS BY SPAMMING SOCIAL MEDIA WITH PORN.
CYBER MONDAY: The Biggest PJ Media VIP Sale Ever.
CYBER MONDAY DEALS are here. #CommissionEarned
IT’S A CRAZY OLD WORLD: “Idaho Law Banning Transgender Athletes Heard in 9th Circuit.”
(My step-by-step argument for why Title IX does not require schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers of the sex they “identify” with is adaptable to the athletic context).
GUN-CONTROL HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT DISARMING BLACK PEOPLE SO THIS ISN’T REALLY NEW: Birmingham Mayor’s Common-Sense Proposal: Just Regulate Guns in Cities.
As I’ve noted before, in the music world “Urban” is just a synonym for black. And when people say urban areas should have different rules, well . . .
INTERESTING MIX: Microgravity tomatoes, yogurt bacteria, and plastic eating microbes are headed to the ISS.
Not so sure about the plastic-eating microbes. I’ve read the book.
LINCOLN BROWN: The Transing of the Christ. “This is an old heresy in new clothes.”
OH: Warnock sees massive cash advantage over Walker ahead of runoff election. “Warnock reportedly holds roughly $30 million in reserves, while Walker commands just under $10 million, according to FEC filings.”
YEP: Anti-Semitism is creeping back into America. “The progressive Left, of course, will have a field day with Trump’s unseemly banquet, and will no doubt use it to link the GOP with ‘semi-fascists’ like Fuentes and his followers. Yet these same progressives — including powerful Jewish organisations like the Anti-Defamation League — have a history of downplaying anti-Semitism from the Left. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt admitted as much when he criticised anti-Semitic elements in the BLM movement. At a recent seminar I conducted during Yom Kippur, an ADL leader even admitted the group backed BLM because they ‘did not want to appear racist.’ The frightening development is not just the existence of anti-Semitism but its growing acceptability.”
HAHAHA: Fauci: “We need to keep politics out” of investigating origin of COVID.
Yeah, Tony, like you kept them out of your response.
NO. IT’S A TERRIBLE IDEA. ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD PROPOSE IT. Should We Bring Masks Back Into the Classroom?
The classroom experience with masks is drastically inferior, and masking as actually practiced in schools is of dubious benefit.
NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Chinese Rise Up Against Lockdowns that Elites Advocated in the US.
It’s an open question why the CCP remains so obsessively dedicated to this policy of Zero Covid; theories range from bureaucratic inertia to “saving face,” to a test of loyalty for Party members, to keeping ‘the science’ alive, to simply putting on a show to reassure international onlookers that the CCP really does believe in what it sold them and at least they don’t have it as bad as in China. It remains to be seen whether these protests will result in any real change in the country’s direction. But in the meantime, it’s worth remembering who it was exactly who advocated these insane Zero Covid lockdown policies and urged us to emulate them: Our own media elites and health officials.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their love for the CCP’s lockdowns (as reflected in the many screencaps at the above link) makes perfect sense.
WERE EBOOKS ON YOUR CHRISTMAS GIVING LIST? It’s a Cyber Monday Extravaganza.
LIKE THEIR BUDDY JOE BIDEN, THE CCP SPEWS A LOT OF NONSENSE: China Boasts About ‘Thriving’ Economy as Mass Protests, Police Violence Fill Streets.
I WONDER IF WOMEN WOULD TRUST MEN WHO SAID THEY WERE ON BIRTH CONTROL? New male contraceptive does not involve hormones.
On the other hand, trusting women on that point can be iffy too.
MICHAEL WALSH: Big Trouble in Little China. “The Peoples Republic of China is a slave state boasting a record of military ineptitude unrivaled by any other large nation on earth, and is entirely of a piece of nearly all Chinese governments that have come before it. It has no affinity with the West, nor does it desire one. Almost congenitally incapable of creativity, innovation and exploration, it has instead adopted financial colonization as a central instrument of its foreign policy, using its own people as pawns in an international chess game only one side is playing.”
THE RAIDER IS SHAPING UP TO BE ONE OF THOSE INCREASINGLY RARE PROCUREMENT WINS: The Public Finally Gets to See the B-21 Stealth Bomber this Week. “The company has used digital engineering and advanced manufacturing to build the plane, which has allowed it to move much faster than historic military development projects.”
OUT ON A LIMB: Americans Still Don’t Enjoy Soccer.
CYBER MONDAY DEAL: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation). #CommissionEarned
IT’S A POLICE STATE, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? BBC: Beijing’s goons beat our accredited journalist while covering Shanghai protests. “Both explanations are nonsense. Police and China’s authorities know who Lawrence is and what he’s doing in Shanghai. In a society with as many Orwellian controls over public spaces as Xi’s regime has, police likely know every movement of Lawrence and other foreign reporters in China. They arrested Lawrence because his reports help expose the crumbling foundation of Xi’s power in his insane attempt to turn the entire country into a COVID-19 prison.”
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Is ‘Moonage Daydream,’ the New David Bowie Documentary, Worth the Roller Coaster Ride?
My latest, over at Eddriscoll.com.
CHINA PROTESTS: Xi Faces Toughest Test of His Social Credit Controls. “What happens when millions of people forget their lessons, take to the streets, and turn against the police, because they’re so desperate that it doesn’t matter any longer if they aren’t allowed to board a commuter train?”
ERICK ERICKSON: Groundhog Day. “The point here is very basic — we are 708 days from a presidential election and we’re already having this much drama from both Trump personally and the inept and incompetent staff around him who should be preventing this stuff from happening. Either Trump knew Fuentes or he didn’t. That the staff let the guy in the room is the problem and Trump is ultimately responsible for his staff. Given three straight Trump related election losses and all the extra soap opera drama, Republicans, do you really want to put up with this crap and hope he ekes out a win in 2024, or do you maybe want to consider someone fresh and new who has a history already of beating back a hostile press and the left? Such people do exist.”
WE’RE ONLY #7 IN FOOTBALL, BUT WE’RE #1 IN MACHINING: UT Students Clinch Inaugural SEC Machining Competition.
#JOURNALISM:
This is a direct quote:
“The Times provided Mr. Portnoy with detailed questions about this article. Barstool executives did not respond to repeated messages. Mr. Portnoy did not provide answers.”
Here is reality https://t.co/IIHcpY72V7 pic.twitter.com/N3Ew8JEq8Z
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) November 20, 2022
And it seems Dave Portnoy agrees with my bring your own camera advice. And that the NYT fears it.
RED VS. BLUE: Texas Vs. California Budgets: 2022 Edition. “For a while California’s tech and entertainment industry strengths were outrunning its massive blue state economic mismanagement and green energy delusions. That’s no longer the case.”
If Elon Musk can make Twitter run smoothly and profitably with a headcount 75-80% smaller than when he bought it, the employment shakeout at other Bay Area tech firms could kill off Sacramento’s golden-egg-laying goose.
THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO LIKE HIGH GAS PRICES ARE THE NOMENKLATURA WHO WANT THE PROLES FORCED ONTO PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WHILE THEY DRIVE THEIR ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Voters Say, ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’
THEY’LL STAY WOKE AND BROKE: ‘Bull***t’ — CNN’s New Chief Addresses Nasty Rumors That It Might Become ‘Centrist.’ “Though he’s rejiggered the lineup since replacing Jeff Zucker in May, viewers can still expect nothing close to a down-the-middle foray into facts.”
IN THE FUTURE I RECOMMEND DRONING ON IN YOUR BEST BEN STEIN IMPRESSION: UCF students complain about professor dressing up as different characters in video lessons. They want boring, give them boring.
HAPPY Cyber Monday. #CommissionEarned.
GLEICSCHALTUNG! University changes ‘Thanksgiving Closure’ to ‘Fall Break:’ A professor argued last year that ‘we are not a white Christian organization, we are a university.’ How dare Professor Twitchell erase the Indigenous People who were an integral part of the first Thanksgiving.
IVORY BLOAT: NC STATE SPENT $131 MILLION MORE ON ADMINS THAN TEACHING LAST YEAR. And I’m sure it’s hardly the worst example. The frequent focus on high college president salaries (colleges are complicated organizations, and imagine what you’d demand to run a place like Berkeley) may mask the real problem of the sheer number of admins. I suspect many colleges could use the Musk/Twitter treatment.
THAT PRETTY WELL SUMS HIM UP: Trump deems Kanye West a ‘seriously troubled man’ who ‘just happens to be Black’ after Mar-a-Lago trip fallout.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Republicans Might Make House Takeover the Wrong Kind of Interesting. “The problems with not winning a decisive majority in the House are going to be rearing their ugly heads for quite some time. There is now a chance that they might get uglier than a Hillary Clinton Halloween mask.”
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Balenciaga and the rise of paedo chic. “Balenciaga is blaming the photographer, and is even threatening to sue him. It has apologised for the pics, and for the inclusion of ‘unsettling documents’, and has wiped the campaign from its Instagram. The photographer, meanwhile, insists he had nothing to do with choosing the products or the models. He just set up the lighting and clicked. So no one’s to blame? You know how it is – you take a few photos to promote your products and, darn, you accidentally include children with pervert teds and a nod to a ruling that dismantled part of the child-porn law. Could happen to anyone.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): It’s a mystery how this could have happened:
TWITTER IS FUN AGAIN: Twitter new user signups at an ‘all-time high,’ says Elon Musk.
As of November 16th, Twitter was adding more than 2 million new users per day over the last seven days, according to one of the graphs Musk shared. He added daily signups are up 66 percent compared to the same seven-day period in 2021.
Musk said user active minutes were also at an all-time high, with Twitter’s userbase averaging nearly 8 billion active minutes per day over the last seven days as of November 15th – representing a 30 percent increase from the same period last year. He also used a graph to claim hate speech impressions recently decreased.
To be fair, I’ve also noticed an uptick in spam accounts following me, which I block as soon as I catch them.
On the campus of Peking University in the capital, whose students led the Tiananmen protests in 1989, a swelling crowd gathered to face down the security guards, then began to sing the left-wing anthem The Internationale.
At Tsinghua University in Beijing some students took part in silent protests and held up blank pieces of paper, while others loudly called for: “Democracy, rule of law, and freedom of expression!”…
Footage showed people gathering and chanting “Freedom! We want freedom!” under Sitong Bridge, where Peng Lifa was arrested after unfurling a banner last month….The Chinese government has blamed “forces with ulterior motives” for linking a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang province to its strict Covid measures….
[T]he English-language edition of the Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper… quoted an academic at Shanghai’s Fudan University, saying: “Due to ideological differences, it has become almost an instinct of Western countries and media to criticise communist governments with an aim to subvert the latter with colour revolutions.”…
Chinese social media appeared to be devoid of any news about the rallies.
Yes, their social media platforms suppress everything that could threaten the regime. Good thing that could never happen here.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: White House Report Card: The need for Thanksgiving ‘talking points’ says it all.
This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden vacationing on exclusive Nantucket Island, where the average home price is $3.6 million, and still telling the rest of us how to live.
From paying off countries for U.S. global warming to telling some 22 million people to give up their sporting rifles, Biden was full of Thanksgiving advice. And if you didn’t believe him, the White House handed out talking points for the Thanksgiving dinner table to prove he’s smart.
He’s smart. Real smart. Not dumb like people say.
RIGGED: How Corporations and a Nonprofit Partnered to Stop the Red Wave. “Rock the Vote was ahead of the curve in combining corporate partnerships and nonprofits to boost Democrat voter registration and turnout. Rock the Vote’s blueprint has since become the Democrat standard without the IRS ever lifting a finger against a nonprofit blatantly violating the tax code.”
IT ISN’T ELECTION DENIAL WHEN THE RIGHT PEOPLE DENY ELECTIONS: Election Denier Refuses to Give Up House Leadership Position.
GLENN GREENWALD: The Media’s Deranged Hysteria Over Elon Musk’s Promised Restoration of Free Speech.
They always show you what they’re afraid of. (Bumped).
CHANGE? McCarthy struggling to secure GOP votes in House speaker’s race. “McCarthy launched his effort to be House speaker earlier this month in a closed-ballot vote by his conference. At the time, he only earned 188 of the 218 votes necessary to become speaker, with 31 votes going to his surprise challenger: House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Biggs (R-AZ). Biggs is one of the dozens of Republicans who have refused to support McCarthy’s speakership bid. That opposition, combined with a less-than-stellar turnout by Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections, is jeopardizing McCarthy’s chances of securing the gavel.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Thanks, Joe! 41% of small businesses can’t pay their rent this month.
The gym that I love has just closed for that very reason.
Related: US Business Activity Contracts for Fifth Straight Month.
IT STILL HASN’T BEEN ACTED ON, SO MAYBE THIS IS HAVING AN EFFECT: Asian American groups urge rejection of nominee for U.S. Attorney in Tennessee’s Eastern District: Casey Arrowood prosecuted University of Tennessee professor now cleared of spying charges.
The Biden administration in August nominated Arrowood for the top job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Knoxville despite his role in the wrongful prosecution of University of Tennessee professor Dr. Anming Hu as part of former President Donald Trump’s “China Initiative.”
In an exclusive interview with the Tennessee Lookout earlier this month, Hu called the nomination “ridiculous” and shocking and has since penned a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to withdraw Arrowood’s name from consideration.
After the story was published, a slew of advocacy groups, including APA Justice, Asian American Scholar Forum, Tennessee Chinese American Alliance and United Chinese Americans, have teamed up with Hu to try to defeat Arrowood’s nomination. . . .
Armed solely with a Chinese press released translated on the fly via Google, Sadiku in 2018 falsely accused Hu of being a spy, tried to press the UT professor into spying on China for the U.S. government and, when Hu refused, spent more than a year surveilling Hu and his teenage son, trial testimony showed.
When that surveillance turned up no evidence of espionage by Hu, testimony showed, Sadiku and other federal agents convinced UT leaders to help ensnare Hu by approving his proposal for a NASA research grant — without telling Hu the project could run afoul of an obscure provision of the law that the university had repeatedly insisted did not apply to Hu or any of its professors.
Arrowood then mounted a wire fraud case against Hu in 2020. When Hu refused to plead guilty in the case, Arrowood took it to trial. The case proved so weak a jury in U.S. District Court deadlocked. When Arrowood threatened to retry Hu, U.S. District Judge Tom Varlan stepped in and tossed the case out of court last year.
Flashback: Trial reveals federal agents falsely accused a UT professor born in China of spying.
And this was an ordinary case, not a politically charged one. And it gets worse.
CYBER MONDAY DEALS are here. #CommissionEarned
Companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Delta Air Lines Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have reduced educational requirements for certain positions and shifted hiring to focus more on skills and experience. Maryland this year cut college-degree requirements for many state jobs—leading to a surge in hiring—and incoming Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro campaigned on a similar initiative.
U.S. job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree were 41% in November, down from 46% at the start of 2019 ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the future of work. Degree requirements dropped even more early in the pandemic. They have grown since then but remain below prepandemic levels. . . .
The majority of its U.S. roles at IBM no longer require a four-year degree after the company conducted a review of hiring practices, IBM spokeswoman Ashley Bright said.
Delta eased its educational requirements for pilots at the start of this year, saying a four-year college degree was preferred but no longer required of job applicants.
Walmart Inc., the country’s largest private employer, said it values skills and knowledge gained through work experience and that 75% of its U.S. salaried store management started their careers in hourly jobs.
“We don’t require degrees for most of our jobs in the field and increasingly in the home office as well,” Kathleen McLaughlin, Walmart executive vice president, said at an online event this fall. The company’s goal is to shift the “focus from the way someone got their skills, which is the degree, to what skills do they have.”
A four-year college degree holder has more lifetime earnings than one without. The lifetime earnings of a worker with a high-school diploma is $1.6 million while that of a bachelor’s degree holder is $2.8 million, according to a 2021 report by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.
But many people don’t finish college and are left with mountains of debt—more than 43 million people in the U.S. hold a total of $1.6 trillion in student-loan debt. While a college degree can provide specific workplace skills, workers can gain the skills needed for many jobs without a four-year degree.
Black and Hispanic people are less likely to have a college degree compared with white and Asian people, according to the Commerce Department. Men are less likely than women. . . .
Mr. Deitchman said since the policy change he is seeing more applicants and higher quality job applicants.
“I would rather have someone with experience,” he said. “It’s just something that should have been done years ago.”
Employers are learning the difference between credentialed and educated. All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Energy Crisis Reshaping Global Markets.
PROF. ROBERT STEINBUCH: Measuring qualifications by merit.
In 1996, California aptly decreed that the state may no longer discriminate by granting preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, and public contracting. That is, California eliminated affirmative action in public entities.
Eight other states have done the same, creating an interesting mix of strong blue states (California and Washington), purple states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire), a lean red state (Florida), and a strong red state (Oklahoma) prohibiting this insidious prejudice. Arkansas has not.
During the initial application of affirmative action in the 1960s, minority candidates were given a slight bump up–“a thumb on the scale”–when they applied for jobs or to be students. As President Lyndon Johnson famously said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” True enough.
But affirmative action hasn’t come close to Johnson’s vision for decades. It didn’t take long for affirmative action to devolve into race-based quotas. And when the Supreme Court ostensibly banned numerical limits, schools and other left-leaning entities often lied by simply characterizing as “holistic” their admissions and hiring processes that still employed race quotas.
You can call admissions programs a “banana” for all I care. These Orwellian euphemisms don’t alter reality. If race dominates consideration towards target outcomes, that’s race-based quotas. And the problem for advocates of such smokescreens is that the overwhelming role of race is blatant.
No longer is race a thumb on the scale. It’s a cinder block, crushing the weight of all other factors, chief among them merit. This awful behavior is rampant in both hiring and admissions in higher education in Arkansas. It’s a travesty of law, equity, and justice.
Oh wait, I forgot–we’ve redefined “equity,” haven’t “we”? Now it means equal outcomes (quotas). Darn! I still haven’t memorized that little red DEI-to-English dictionary provided “free” during one of those toothpick-assisted eye-opening re-education gavages.
The outcomes of these racialized policies are terrible. I collect and study evidence of the effects of affirmative action in law schools. In one large Arkansas dataset, the first-time bar-exam failure rate for the largest minority group was double that of whites; 40 percent of the Black graduates failed on their first try.
Objective merit is bad because it limits the discretion of people in power, thus hampering their ability to favor people they like and harm people they dislike.
Related: Law School Admissions Without LSATs.
HORSES VANISHED, BARN DOOR BEING LOCKED: U.S. Bans Huawei, Sales of China-Made Surveillance Equipment.
YEAH, BUT THEY JUST KEEP LYING: Government lies versus COVID truths.
I SOMEHOW FAIL TO FIND THIS REASSURING: Ex-Military Intelligence Officer Reveals PSI Psychic Unit Used Remote Viewing to Predict Disasters.
BUT I WAS RELIABLY INFORMED THAT UNDER PROGRESSIVE GOVERNANCE THERE WOULD BE AN END OF RACISM AND DISCRIMINATION: Dominican teachers threatened by DOE staffers to keep quiet over steep living costs — or face deportation.
WOKE IS A CULT: Mount Holyoke grad deprogrammed from women-only woke culture.
THINGS ARE GETTING…. SPORTIVE: Shanghai hit by COVID protests as anger spreads across China.
YEAH, WELL, THERE AIN’T GONNA BE MONEY FOR ALL THE FUN AND GAMES REAL SOON: The Real Story Behind Drag Queen Story Hour.
YOU’D PROBABLY FIND YOUR TIME BETTER SPENT READING BAZOOKA JOE COMICS (AT LEAST YOU’D GET BUBBLE GUM): How to read Prince Harry’s explosive memoir ‘Spare’ for free.
WELL, I’D SAY THAT HAS A LOT MORE TO DO WITH WHAT HAPPENED THAN HIS RELIGION OR HIS GRANDFATHER’S POLITICAL AFFILIATION: Colorado shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich’s estranged dad is an ex-con MMA fighter turned porn star.
BUT ISN’T PARTICULARLY HARD TO FIND, IF YOUR RESEARCH IS DEEPER THAN DISNEY MOVIES: Thanksgiving a “Myth” or a “Problematic Holiday”? What Nobody Tells You About Indians and Other Native Americans.
OH, IF WE WERE TO LIST THAT, WE WOULD NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Analysis: What in the Actual F— Is Wrong With These People?
BUT HEY “FREE HEALTHCARE.” WELL, FREE SOMETHING: Here’s what it’s like when your kids get sick in Québec right now – a long thread.
And as for some of the idiots in the stream blaming it on people not wearing their masks…. Yeah. Because it’s not like even our CDC has admit they do nothing, right? Dear Lord.
CANADA BECAME CHINA SO QUICKLY I ALMOST DIDN’T NOTICE: Assisted suicide plans for children unveiled at Toronto’s Sick Kids hospital.
