One more company joins the list
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Affirmative Action - time to DIE
Rufo got Trump to ban any DEI within the government and government contractors at the end of his first term, which was remarkably effective albeit only for a few months before it was immediately reversed. Once you stop paying these DEI people, a lot of this nonsense goes away. That goes for government hiring and training, government contractors and top universities. He’s more than ready this time around -
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/christopher-rufo-education-trump-dei-bb9e7178
Rufo said he is meeting with members of the Trump administration next month. He has said he thinks colleges and universities have been taken over by the left, and he wants to recapture them by cutting federal money to schools that continue to engage in DEI practices. He also wants to excise race-based affirmative action from any institution with which the federal government does business.
He has a particular animus toward elite universities, which he says traded merit and rigor for neo-Marxism and discrimination against white and Asian people.
Rufo said he has succeeded in demonizing CRT and DEI in the public’s mind. Now he wants to uproot what he sees as an administrative state that keeps the policies in place across universities, government and businesses. Rufo, along with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, says Trump should reverse President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order establishing affirmative action in the federal government.
As a reminder of how few morals the DEI industry and its mainstream media proponents have, here was a carefully done study on the terrible psychological effects of DEI training. It resulted in significantly increased interracial hostility and perceived offenses where there were none (by design). What a bunch of worthless, divisive junk!
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/why-was-this-groundbreaking-study
The NCRI study investigated the psychological effects of DEI pedagogy, specifically training programs that draw heavily from texts like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility . The findings were unsettling… Through carefully controlled experiments, the researchers demonstrated that exposure to anti-oppressive (i.e., anti-racist) rhetoric—common in many DEI initiatives—consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed. Participants were more likely to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders… hostility and punitive tendencies increased by double-digit percentages across multiple measures. Perhaps most troubling, the study revealed a chilling convergence with authoritarian attitudes, suggesting that such training is fostering not empathy, but coercion and control.
Worse, the NYT is covering up these study results despite happily citing the same research group for years… until they didn’t like the outcome.
Too many institutions to burn down, not enough torches.
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The New York Times , which has cited NCRI’s work in nearly 20 previous articles, suddenly demanded that this particular research undergo peer review—a requirement that had never been imposed on the institute’s earlier findings, even on similarly sensitive topics like extremism or online hate.
If true, demanding peer review is not as surprising to me as NOT asking for peer review for the 20 prior studies. For studies with significant potentially policy-influencing conclusions, this review process should be the norm, not the exception. Getting a second (or third) expert opinion on major findings should go without saying. In the scientific community, papers not peer reviewed are essentially worthless and routinely ignored.
Fact that newspaper picks and choose which to ask for peer review and which to take at face value, seems to point towards agenda coming before confirming facts. It could be lessons learned not to jump onto conclusions without careful review like many did on initial DEI-supporting studies. Time will tell whether they’ll cover this study with extended coverage, including the results of the peer review. If not, they’ll lose a lot more credibility by proving their bias.
That’s pretty much the point. Those 20 prior studies had conclusions that supported the agenda so they didnt need to be challenged.
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DOGE target - NIH spending $1-2B on racism research.
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From the article
reflecting the growing demand for sustainable luxury.
This is news to companies like Ford that is losing about $60k for every battery car they sell. Maybe Ford is not woke luxury enough?
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Merriment at the expense of Jaguar. The article calls them a British company, but they’re owned by the Indian Tata company.
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I’m not sure how a pink car is considered “woke”? Seems more like targeting a certain female demographic.
How about Batmobile?
I’ve never used the app, but I’ve seen funny schadenfreude videos of young women cutting off all their hair.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/appeals-court-upholds-us-ban-of-tiktok/ar-AA1voQlU
Appeals Court Upholds U.S. Ban of TikTok
Afederal appeals court ruled Friday that TikTok can be banned in the U.S. over national security concerns, upholding a federal law requiring the popular social media app to shed its Chinese ownership to keep operating.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said Congress has the power to take action against TikTok to protect U.S. interests.
The ruling rejected a First Amendment challenge brought by the app and several of its star users, who argued the ban was an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.
The sell-or-ban law—signed by President Biden in April—passed with bipartisan support after lawmakers received classified briefings from the intelligence community about China’s ability to use TikTok to surveil Americans and spread Chinese propaganda.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote for the court.
Continue reading
TikTok, a U.S. entity owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has claimed that American security fears are speculative and overblown. It didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ban’s terms are set to take effect in mid-January, but that doesn’t mean that TikTok will necessarily disappear from app stores by that time.
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On a related note, Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Chicoms claim that American concerns about Covid-19 are speculative and overblown.
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May be well-intentioned, but I somehow doubt the usefulness of this ban.
Our daughter’s university banned it from campus wifi. Within a couple of days, most kids had a (free) VPN allowing them to watch the videos normally. Only difference with a nationwide ban, is likely gonna be which VPN server they need to use. It may give some people the illusion that the ban eliminates the threat but I’m skeptical that the VPN use will thwart Chinese tracking and data collection.
And even the disappearance from app stores may do more harm than good. People will still find ways to download the .apk from third party sources, except with much less securely.
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Requiring those extra steps will be enough to kill it.
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Fire them all
America doesn’t need a permanent DEI bureaucracy. America needs an effective administration that treats its citizens in a fair manner without regard to race. This is broadly popular, morally just, and, with this administration, achievable as a public policy for the first time in a generation.
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It is not going to be easy. The leftist bureaucracy will disappear like cockroaches into the overall federal bureaucracy. Here is some of their censorship of conservatives. Of course NPR is not ‘risky’ but the NY Post is
Elon] Musk put the GEC on the map in March 2023, when he deemed it to be the “worst offender in U.S. government” when it comes to censorship and media manipulation.
According to revelations from the “Twitter Files”—a trove of internal records about the censorship decisiosn made within the social media company—the GEC funded groups such as the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which in turn compiled blacklists of Twitter accounts that were supposedly tied to foreign disinformation campaigns. The Digital Forensic Research Lab sent those blacklists to Twitter so that the company could deactivate the accounts listed.
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I was hopeful it’d contribute to making use of VPN ubiquitous at least among the new generation. If only to balance the drawbacks of these dopamine fest apps.
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I dont want my teens using a VPN. I want my wifi router to be able to tell me what sites they are accessing, and filter/block attempts to access certain sites. VPNs kill non-invasive parental oversight.
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That ship has sailed for most in middle school and above. Many kids learn how to use a free VPN to get around their school wifi blocking youtube or other social media sites. A friend showing them how to do it during lunch break is all it takes. If they face a blocked site on your wifi, they’ll just use their mobile data, go to a free wifi establishment, or a shady friend and still access it, VPN or not.
But setting aside the age at which one should be entitled to their privacy, don’t you agree that VPN use is a net positive thing for freedom, security, and privacy?
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The VPN technology can certainly provide all of that. But commercial implementations that you’d install on your device can be broken / corruptible, without guarantees for freedom, security, or privacy. And you could be wrong even if all evidence says such guarantees exist.
Knowing what it is and how to use it is a positive, but lacking education (or care) about the specific details is akin to letting in the Trojan Horse. There are so many VPN providers that I had to do quite a bit of research, including in the seedier parts of the web, before settling on a provider. I suspect only l33t h4x0rs and journalists/whistleblowers care about such details. Most people don’t bother.
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I need a VPN about as much as I need an invisibility cloak for my car, so no one sees that I’m going to the mall or the grocery store. I really couldnt care less if there’s a data record somewhere of me searching for pink hair ribbons at prissymissy.com any moreso than I care that someone saw me browsing the cat food in Walmart.
Besides, I’d really rather not have my online activity tied to the same VPN IP address as potential criminals. In typical FatWallet (RIP) fashion, a lot of my financial activity is unusual. If looked into, I’d rather it stand on it’s own, not be tainted by the activities of others using the same VPN.