Sunday/Equality

On this day:

1187
Saladin begins the Siege of Jerusalem.
1378
Cardinal Robert of Geneva, called by some the Butcher of Cesena, is elected as Avignon Pope Clement VII, beginning the Papal schism.
1519
Ferdinand Magellan sets sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda with about 270 men on his expedition to circumnavigate the globe.
1863
American Civil War: The Battle of Chickamauga ends.
1893
Charles Duryea and his brother road-test the first American-made gasoline-powered automobile.

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Pornography, in particular, is “not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.” This desecration, “which spoils the experience of freedom, is also a denial of love. It is an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it.”--Scruton

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All five people at dinner last night expect the Republicans to lose the House.

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KLVN Coffee Lab in Larimer announced on social media that it will close on Thursday.
A team led by John Graf is acquiring Penn Brewery.

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Margin debt in the US increased by 2.6% in August, reaching $1.45 trillion after a decline the previous month. This represents a 37.2% increase compared to the same period last year, or 33.1% when adjusted for inflation.

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Pirate's second baseman Lowe's qualifying offer for next year is $24 million.

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The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence. A major theme of the book—I would say the major theme—is how strong and competitive the rivalries have been between Dario, Altman, and Musk. Each believes that the others cannot be trusted to gain super-powerful AI capabilities.

Thus, when you observe these individuals and their companies jockeying for position and preeminence, it is too cynical to think it is just about the money (each of them already has plenty). The actions of each are rooted in the sincere belief that their own company would best serve the world by winning the race toward very powerful AI.

So when these CEOs plead altruism, you should actually believe them...from Cowen

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A crazy case in Britain in its "equal value" case at Next. Next has won its appeal and may go on paying warehouse workers more than “equal value” retail workers.
The landmark ruling allows the retailer to pay warehouse workers more than shop staff on the basis that it costs more to recruit and retain them.
Pay more to recruit and retain people? Eight years of litigation to establish that wages have something to do with supply and demand.

But there are gender questions too. That should be more complex than just eight years of legal give-and-take. England is Bleak House.

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When the book of goofy things Trump has said is written, this will be right up there: Trump: We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries. We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year.

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Sunday/Equality

I am not the first to notice that the moral imagination of the modern world feels, in certain respects, flattened. Not long ago, after immersing himself in nineteenth-century novels, Matthew Yglesias remarked on how foreign the language of honor now sounds to us and how distant from the moral world of someone like Dorothea in Middlemarch. Think about it: when was the last time you praised someone for being noble or honorable? Even “good” has been replaced by the epithets “kind” or “nice”.

The ends we pursue now tend to cluster around three dominant aims: safety, utility, and equality. Of these, only equality still gestures toward something like a moral ideal; the others are entirely managerial and materialistic in nature.

Having noticed this, I began to wonder: why equality? Why the persistent fixation on oppression and the moral drama of victim and perpetrator? Why, out of all the possible goods, has this one become so central?

Nietzsche suggested that egalitarianism was the afterglow of Christianity—a moral residue lingering after faith itself had faded. But Christianity bequeathed many values to the modern world: humility, charity, forgiveness, self-sacrifice. Why did equality, in particular, survive as the organizing principle?

It seems to me that equality functions as a kind of consolation prize in a secular age. The shift from an “enchanted” premodern cosmos to a “disenchanted” secular order has undoubtedly expanded individual freedom. Yet in casting off the old metaphysical scaffolding, we have also stripped the so-called “losers” of society of any sense of inherent dignity rooted in a larger cosmic story.

At the same time, secular narratives place an immense weight of responsibility on the individual. In a world without providence and fate, outcomes appear to flow almost entirely from human choice and human systems. Nothing is “meant to be” or cosmically allotted.

The contemporary fixation on oppression narratives—closely allied with the language of equality and often emerging from the same moral circles—can be understood, in part, as a response to this strain. By locating suffering within structures of domination, it externalizes at least some portion of the otherwise crushing responsibility modernity places on the self.
Man shall not live by bread alone

“She appeared at daybreak one rainless morning, at the top of a hill on the road from Quijingue, carrying a wooden cross on her back. She was twenty years old, but she had suffered so much she looked ancient. She was a woman with a broad face, bruised feet, a shapeless body and mouse-colored skin (…)

She had cut all her hair herself after being raped for the fourth time.”

So begins the story of Maria Quadrado in The War of the End of the World, one of Mario Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious and unsettling novels. On her journey through the Brazilian backlands she is violated repeatedly — by a constable, a cowboy, two hunters, and finally a goatherd who had offered her shelter. The first three times she feels only revulsion and prays she will not be left pregnant. But the fourth time something more troubling occurs: she feels pity for her assailant. Horrified by this flicker of compassion, she punishes herself by cutting off her hair, remaking herself into something grotesque, as if to extinguish the last trace of tenderness within her.

Maria Quadrado is not an isolated tragedy in the novel. She is one among many broken figures who gather in the doomed settlement of Canudos. Set in late nineteenth-century Brazil, the novel recounts the rise and annihilation of this community in the arid sertão of the northeast. Around a wandering ascetic known as the Counselor, the destitute and displaced assemble: former slaves, bandits, prostitutes, the mutilated and abandoned — those for whom the promises of the modern republic – secular, rationalizing and impatient with religious fervor – mean nothing.

At the heart of the novel lies the most important question: what does the modern world offer to such people? The republic promises progress, order and rational administration. But these abstractions do not feed the souls of “the wretched refuse” that constitute the citizens of Canudos. In this social order, they would be losers anyway.

The Counselor offers something the Republic cannot. He does not promise comfort or prosperity, but dissolution — the surrender of the isolated self into a transcendent design. And he encourages this dissolution quite explicitly:

“Although he mentioned God and said that it was important for the salvation of a person’s soul that the person destroy his or her own will - a poison that gave everyone the illusion of being a little god who was superior to the other gods round about him – and put in its place the will of the Third person, the one that built, the one that labored, the Industrious Ant, and things of that sort, he spoke of these things in clear language, every word of which they understood”.

In Canudos, the wretched give away their will and in return, they are no longer superfluous. Instead, they inhabit a cosmic narrative, brought on Earth by the Counselor.

The newly established Brazilian Republic interprets Canudos as a threat to order and modernity and it dispatches military expeditions to crush the settlement. Yet again and again, these better-armed and professionally trained forces falter against the ragged defenders of the town. The defeats acquire an almost fantastical quality: a modern state, armed with technique and confidence, undone by a people who possess little but belief.

For a brief season, the annihilation of the isolated will — the surrender of individuality into a single, sacred purpose — seems to generate a force capable of holding even the republic’s army at bay. In losing themselves, the inhabitants of Canudos discover an intensity that they did not know existed.

And yet Canudos ultimately falls. Surrounded, starved, and overwhelmed, it is finally obliterated.

The disenchanted world

The inhabitants of Canudos are not equals in any modern sense. The settlement does not rest on the fiction of symmetry. It is hierarchical, ordered and shaped by charisma and submission.

One of the Counselor’s most impressive powers is precisely this: men who once lived by violence and appetite — the bandit Pajeú among them — bend before him without coercion or the need or persuasion. Their obedience arises as though it were the most natural fact in the world. What he offers to them is simple: in Canudos, each person occupies a place, and that place, however lowly, is intelligible within a sacred whole.

The disenchanted, secular world has killed Canudos for most people. So what is left for them? As a consolation prize, a sterile “equality.”

In a disenchanted world, a world that has lost its connection to transcendence, an obsession with equality is born out of a desperate structural necessity. This is the only remaining safety net preventing the autonomous self from sliding into total dehumanization.

This goes the other way too. In earlier times, even the powerful, kings included, understood themselves as subordinate to God. Now, it is one’s talent and will, or agency, if one is to speak in currently popular terms, that brings about their fortune.

There are many other ways, in my mind, in which the disenchanted world makes things hard for the “losers” of this world. One obvious loss is eschatological. In the older, enchanted imagination, earthly failure did not exhaust a life’s meaning. The poor, the humiliated, the obscure could inhabit a story whose resolution lay beyond mortal time. Salvation, not success, was the final measure. An inversion of status, even, was heavily hinted at: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Yet disenchantment also robs “the weak” of dignity in this life. In the enchanted world, society was as it was due to a divinely ordained order, as per Taylor: “A kingdom could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than mere human action in secular time. And beyond that, the life of various associations which made up society, parishes, boroughs, guilds and so on, were interwoven with ritual and worship (...) One could not help but encounter God everywhere”. In this divinely ordered world, one’s station, not matter how limited, was not arbitrary, but was understood to participate in a cosmic design.

Medieval society could thus be imagined as a hierarchy of complementary functions: the clergy praying for all, the lords defending all, the peasants laboring for all. The roles were unequal in honor, yet mutually necessary. Even the humblest life had intelligibility within a larger whole.The buffered, modern self stands in a different landscape. There is no divinely ratified structure into which one is fitted. There is only the immanent frame: a social world understood as the product of human construction, revisable and contingent.

What, then, consoles the weak? Very little. Without transcendence, there is no deferred compensation. Without a sacred order, there is no given place of inherent dignity that one might inhabit in the world. And with radical responsibility comes the realization that some might “deserve” to be the losers of this world.

And more disturbingly, without all these, it becomes difficult to resist the conclusion that some lives contribute less, matter less, and perhaps even, are less necessary.

It is in erecting barriers to reaching this conclusion that post World War II modernity’s moral energy gathers. The relentless pursuit of equality, the acute sensitivity to oppression and the refusal to accept hierarchy as natural are not merely fashions. They are attempts to supply, through political means, what religion once provided: an assurance that no life is negligible. In a world where dignity no longer descends from heaven, it must be constructed on earth. Or else the weak are left with nothing at all.

The classical liberal dilemma

We still glimpse fragments of enchantment in modern life. Meaning has not entirely disappeared. In fact, it is now most accessible through work and especially work that presents itself as larger than the individual, as participation in a mission rather than the mere earning of a wage.

Nowhere is this more visible than in start-ups. In such spaces, even the pretense of equality is often suspended in practice. Employees willingly subordinate themselves to a founder, often investing that figure with a quasi-prophetic aura. An entire mythology around the figure is born. "Founder-mode” might be the closest we get in the modern era to a grand hero narrative.

This hierarchy is accepted, even celebrated, because it promises belonging to a grand narrative: building the future and bending the arc of history through innovation. In recent years, companies like Anthropic have inspired precisely this kind of near-religious devotion in their employees.

For the fortunate — the talented and the educated— this becomes a form of salvation. One may dissolve oneself into “the mission”, much like the inhabitants of Canudos.

But such salvation on Earth is rarely available to “the weak”. In modern America, where meritocracy has taken perhaps its most uncompromising form, the psychological weight of absolute personal responsibility grows even heavier. The Statue of Liberty may welcome the “wretched refuse,” but even that promise carries an implicit demand: that they transform themselves, that they succeed. The refuge it offers is also a challenge.

And so the final excuse disappears. For those less endowed by talent or circumstance, for those who chose poorly or were never given real choices at all, possibility itself becomes more of a burden.

The high-IQ classical liberal often fails to perceive the existential strain this creates. He speaks of growth, mobility and opportunity — of the long arc of history bending favorably. In doing so, he resembles the bewildered journalist at the end of The War of the End of the World, who confronts the doomed inhabitants of Canudos with incredulity: “I don’t understand, I don’t understand. What sort of creatures are you all anyway? What are you doing here, why didn’t all of you flee before they had you surrounded? What madness to wait in a rat trap like this for them to come kill you all!”

And the reply, given by the deformed Lion of Natuba, cuts through the incomprehension: “There isn’t anywhere to flee to. That’s what we kept doing before. That’s why we came here. That was the place we fled to.”

There is nowhere left to flee and retreat to. The secular age has dismantled the old sanctuaries that once shielded people from the full weight of responsibility. There is nowhere to hide from the self. And in the absence of a grand narrative, sterile equality is itself a rather pathetic consolation prize.
-- from Ruxandra Teslo's Substack

Your SpaceX IPO

On this day:

1876
Battle of the Little Bighorn and the death of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.
1906
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania millionaire Harry Thaw shoots and kills prominent architect Stanford White.
1910
The United States Congress passes the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes”; the ambiguous language would be used to selectively prosecute people for years to come.
1950
The Korean War begins with the invasion of South Korea by North Korea.
1960
Two cryptographers working for the United States National Security Agency left for vacation to Mexico, and from there defected to the Soviet Union.

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"The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition." --G K Chesterton

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At least 164 people have been killed and 971 injured after Venezuela’s most powerful earthquake in more than a century, according to the country’s acting president. The 7.5 magnitude quake struck just 40 seconds after a 7.2 magnitude foreshock. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable, and the disaster is likely widespread,” the USGS warned — estimating that the death toll could climb to at least 10,000, and potentially 100,000.


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Astronauts coming home from long stays on the International Space Station have, for years, described a strange perceptual aftertaste: a sense of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame. They sit at dinner with family and feel like a guest. They drive on a familiar street and feel like they’re piloting it. The room is loud, and they are in it, but a part of them is hovering near the ceiling, taking notes.

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Your SpaceX IPO

The SpaceX IPO has given a booster rocket to a very virulent popular myth, the Zero-Sum Game of Personal Finance. It states that Elon Musk's grotesque financial worth is actually yours. This stunning declaration is usually followed by the equally unsupportable, "He didn't earn it, you did." (By 'you,' the professional pot-stirrer and amateur economist does not mean the guy working in the dark underground in a mineshaft or the woman working a 12-hour shift in an E.R. with drunks, criminals, and armed illiterates. No, she means the drunks, criminals, and illiterates. Only circumstances have prevented them from issuing their own IPO.)

Fortunately, the selfless politician is there to balance the scales.

It would be different if such a redistributionist fever arose in a kind, burning heart, but, as history has shown, envy works better, especially when bred with revenge. So, not only is inequality unjust, but it is someone's fault. And he will pay in more than coin.

Just as original sin begs for spiritual shepherds, and chaos demands divine rights and hierarchies, inequality cries out for retribution, often against the most unlikely criminals against humanity. Pensioners and skinflint retirees, the wide-eyed daughters of the tsar, the well-dressed passerby--all have unknowingly created or inherited their malicious part in the world's imbalance. 

Like 'slavery reparations', where people who have no connection to slavery are taxed to give their money to people who were never slaves, it is faith-based. And in our world of ubiquitous information, any cult can have its day.

Tempest

On this day:

1146
Bernard of Clairvaux preaches his famous sermon in a field at Vézelay, urging the necessity of a Second Crusade. Louis VII is present, and joins the Crusade.
1492
Queen Isabella of Castille issues the Alhambra decree, ordering her 150,000 Jewish subjects to convert to Christianity or face expulsion.
1717
A sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provokes the Bangorian Controversy.
1854
Commodore Matthew Perry signs the Treaty of Kanagawa with the Japanese government, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade.
1994
Human evolution: The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull.
1995
Selena, an American singer, was murdered by her friend and employee of her boutiques, Yolanda Saldívar, who was embezzling money from the establishments. The event was named “Black Friday” by Hispanics.

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“The worst enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge”--Hawking

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America first, right after I call my broker: 

A broker for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to make a ​big investment in major defense companies in the weeks ‌leading up to the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

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Bangorian Controversy: From John 18:36, "My kingdom is not of this world." Hoadly deduced, supposedly at the request of the king himself, that there is no biblical justification for any church government of any sort. He had not delegated his power, like temporal lawgivers during their absence, to any persons as his deputies; and that the church of England, as all other national churches, was merely a civil or human institution, established for the purpose of diffusing and perpetuating the knowledge and belief of Christianity.

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NASA is targeting an April 1 launch for the historic Artemis II mission, with meteorologists currently tracking an 80% "Go" weather forecast at Kennedy Space Center.

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13 starting pitchers across all of MLB were drafted out of high school, are still with the team that drafted them, and, according to FanGraphs' 2026 playing time projections, are projected to be one of their team's primary starting pitchers this season. The Pirates have four of them — Mitch Keller, Braxton Ashcraft, Bubba Chandler, and Jared Jones.

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Tempest

The American court is a microcosm of the evolution of the American democracy. 

A debate over right and wrong, sometimes life and death, is moderated by a supervisor of uncertain--but undeniably unpredictable-- intelligence and knowledge, carried out between equally unpredictable individuals willing to debate either side of the conflict for money. This is resolved by the votes of twelve average citizens assigned this duty against their will.

A recent case is enlightening. Meta, a huge company that deals in complex technology and algorithmic predictability, was accused of luring children into an interactive computer program, habituating them to it, and distorting their personalities and judgment. They were accused of developing a product that encouraged people to like it and then changing how they think.

People selling a product with the hope that customers will like it? A technology company can predict how people's minds develop and work when no psychiatrist, or physician, or research scientist can? The complex ball of yarn that is nature and nurture has been untangled?
These complexities will be debated and decided by the same people on your bus?

Oh, brave new world!

Abundence

Local. District. National. These are the areas of judicial catchment and influence. A local judge cannot influence national policy. Foreign residents' due process ends with the executive administrators.
These judges may well start interfering with battlefield decisions.

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Kermit the Frog will deliver the address to the University of Maryland’s graduates this summer.

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This security leak molehill shows the real impact devoted media accomplices can have on the national stage.

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Abundence

A recent review in--I think 'The Atlantic'--skims the debate that has roiled this country since its creation: efficiency vs. freedom, fiat vs. evolution, great vs. small, central vs. local. How is power distributed within an organizing entity and its constituent parts? There are vaults of debates on the topic but apparently nothing is new. This is a running commentary on that review.

Two new books are at the heart of this discussion. One is  Abundance, by Ezra Klein, the star New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Derek Thompson, a journalist at the Atlantic. The other, Why Nothing Works, comes from Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. All three writers are Democrats or sympathetic to the Democratic cause. All dislike Donald Trump. All want blue cities, blue counties, and blue states from coast to coast. 

These books have been very well-hyped. Many feel they offer the Left new direction and hope, the next years' Democrat blueprint.

All three feel the United States, despite its inordinate wealth, is not matching its twentieth century dynamism. Could this government — Republican or Democratic-run — stand up another interstate highway system? A network of railroads? Could this Department of Defense effectively invent the internet?

The Klein-Thompson duo argues that an “anti-growth” mentality has constrained the left for the last several decades. NIMBYism and aggressive regulations have strangled housing supply and innovation. As government support for research and development dried up, science produced fewer society-wide breakthroughs. Once, we built whole subway systems in a decade, sent human beings to the moon, and created the internet. Klein and Thompson do blame neoliberalism — a long-running retreat from government investment and a foisting of responsibilities on the private sector. But they’d prefer lighter zoning and environmental laws to speed up growth.

The dynamism and growth here are obviously not the growth that everyone sees with the nation knocking on the moon's door or developing medications, developing new energy sources, or improving water efficiency. Their growth is more targeted and moral. Like equal housing or educational outcomes. These may well be desirable to many, but their rationale is faith-based and, in our increasingly secular world, that is a hard sell. More, it demands an extension of the traditional constitutional guarantees of equality of all men before the law to equity for all men in growing areas of social sensitivities like housing, more charity-based than legal.

Dunkelman’s thesis is similar. For New Yorkers, there’s plenty in Why Nothing Works to devour. He begins with the great bête noire of the modern left, Robert Moses, and argues that the master builder’s legacy is somewhat misunderstood. Or, at least, we’ve overlearned the lessons of the Moses era. Moses, of course, ran roughshod over much of New York, ramming highways through thriving neighborhoods and thwarting the expansion of mass transit. He behaved like a tyrant and cared little for conventional democracy. Politicians couldn’t move him, nor could protest. For 40 years, he was emblematic of an imperial approach to governing, and it was Robert Caro’s The Power Broker that exposed, finally, many of his excesses.

Under Moses, the government could be unfeeling — but it worked. And it was not Moses-style development that triggered New York’s decline in the 1970s, as Caro strongly intimated. Rather, it was the collapse of the manufacturing sector, white flight, and fiscal mismanagement. The public works Moses left behind were necessary for New York’s post-fiscal crisis renaissance.

Mussolini made the trains run on time. All autocracies struggle with the limited vision of their citizens.  

Dunkelman frames American views of governance as a centuries-long clash between Hamiltonians, who argue for stronger centralized authority, and Jeffersonians, who are wary of government overreach.

But the trouble began when the Jeffersonians kept winning. Beginning in the 1970s, skepticism of government power began getting baked into both political parties.

And projects like the California high-speed train--estimated in 2008 at a cost of $33 billion with a completion date in 2020 is now estimated at over $100 billion, with completion in 2030 and no ridable track exists yet (currently, $10 billion has been spent.)--for some reason are not cautionary tales for these people.

The review, at this point, takes a strange turn. It argues that the Left’s role is poorly understood, and Dunkelman is a wonderful guide. 

Watergate taught a generation of young progressives to distrust federal power, and the left began to favor hamstringing government whenever possible. Numerous new chokepoints, some of them well-meaning, were invented, from arcane local laws to community boards that could stifle building that alienated locals. Preservationists warred to freeze urban neighborhoods in place, hoping to avoid catastrophes like the obliteration of the old Penn Station — but they also, in their zeal for saving the Old, helped to ensure these cities would grow less affordable. Building new affordable housing, commuter railways, or any other type of large infrastructure project became far harder in the era of community control.

If only the stubborn citizenry would succumb to the benign and creative overarching vision of the Left. But it is a lot more complicated than that. There are all sorts of motives in the community movements. One is the aesthetics of government housing. One is energy efficiency. One is the snail darter. One is community home value, i.e., selfishness. And, while a home is a quintessential Amerian achievement, it may not be a successful gift. Housing is more than a construction project; it comes with people. I would bet that the unreliability of government--a huge problem--is way, way down the list.

It gets stranger. 

How to make America dynamic again, he asks? How to build here like they do in China and Japan, where it’s routine to throw up new high-speed rail lines every decade? And if we solved these problems, would it be enough? 

But we are not China nor Japan. We are unique, conceived in liberty and equality before the law. And the deep regard for personal property. These are not impediments to be overcome; these are what we are. The success of this nation is a result of these concepts, an escape from those of the feudal East and Old Europe. These books complain that restoring the grand old days of fiat governments and religious wars will be an uphill fight.

David Sirota, the founder of Lever News and a former Bernie Sanders speechwriter, summed up one stinging progressive critique of the whole project: “Abundance being defined as ‘kill zoning laws and corporate regulation’ but not ‘give everyone decent medical care’ — that’s the tell, and you’re the mark.” It’s true that this is not a focus among the advocates of abundance. Relaxing zoning laws won’t do anything to bring us universal healthcare or bolster the social safety net. It may not even, in the short-term, do enough to create affordable housing. One of the great divides within the YIMBY movement, which can be folded into the abundance push, is how much regulation should exist around what people pay in rent. Some YIMBYs do back stronger tenant protections and versions of rent control while others, like Klein ally Matthew Yglesias, plainly do not. Yglesias is also skeptical of lifting the federal law that effectively bans the construction of new public housing.

Abundance, then, can hold different meanings for different advocates. If the belief is that a robust, efficient federal government should do more to help working class Americans, then we need a new program of mass home-building like we saw in the 1930s and 1940s. Without the New York City Public Housing Authority, the largest city in America would probably have an unfathomably large amount of homeless, the tent cities in the five boroughs making the Tenderloin and Skid Row look like minor, quasi-pastoral encampments. If you believe zoning reform is enough — and the government need only get out of the way — then how much housing must be built, exactly, for rents to start falling enough so a family making well under $100,000 can comfortably afford a market-rate apartment? Turning New York (or any city) into Tokyo is easier said than done.

So neither book nor Sirota accept the idea that local political events and national faith-based concepts are in any way separate. Rather, they are reflections in the same mirror, the expression of an activist core, based upon government-imposed faith-based equity. The stagnation they see is very focused and, dangerously, concentrated in a pinpoint devotion to equity at any cost.

Then, the bland "conclusion:" 

"What abundance advocates do get right is that governments — federal, state, and local — must do far better. We have fallen a long way from the twentieth century; we led the world in building and innovation until we didn’t. We are still a remarkably wealthy nation and we must find a way, as we persevere in this new century, to beat back stagnation. Otherwise, the future is going to be much more frustrating."

Freedom and property as impediments, government as a competent prime mover; little is new.

Disaster Equity

Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men’s performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal charges, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small, detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men’s perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers’ perceptions of workplace quality, with the effects driven by units integrated with a woman in a position of authority. We discuss how these findings shed light on the roots of occupational segregation by gender.--Kyle Greenberg, Melanie Wasserman & E. Anna Weber.

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The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn’t work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good.--Sowell

***

The leader of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Los Angeles Fire Department addressed concerns that female firefighters may not be strong enough to carry a man out of a burning building, responding: 'He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.'

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Disaster Equity

A startling 2023 FEMA webinar features federal health and disaster personnel trumpeting the urgent need to move away from policies that benefit the greatest number of people and instead turn focus toward “disaster equity” where aid is distributed based on innate characteristics like sexual orientation and gender identity.

The roundtable discussion, recorded in March of last year, was entitled “Helping LGBTQIA+ Survivors Before Disasters,” included panelists like Maggie Jarry of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and was moderated by Tyler Atkins, an Emergency Management Specialist at FEMA who uses he/they pronouns.

The panelists covered a range of topics around the notion that disaster services are short-changing marginalized groups when it comes to relief efforts.

“LGBTQIA people, and people who have been disadvantaged already, are struggling. They already have their own things to deal with. So when you add a disaster on top of that it’s just compounding on itself,” Atkins mused to the group.

“I think that is maybe the ‘why’ of why we’re having these discussions, because it isn’t being talked about, it isn’t being socialized, we’re not paying attention to this community,” he claimed.

As the remaining panelists nodded in enthusiastic agreement, Jarry made a startling revelation that federal agencies ostensibly tasked with saving as many lives as possible in a disaster should be focusing their attention elsewhere.

“The shift we’re seeing right now is a shift in emergency services from utilitarian principles — where everything is designed for the greatest good for the greatest amount of people — to disaster equity. But we have to do more,” she urged.
She then suggested existing disaster management agency policies may have been deliberately engineered to leave out vulnerable communities.
She was not referring to the policy to withhold help from Trump supporters after the hurricaine as that occurred later.

“The topic at hand here is, are the policies that have been developed actually biased in benign neglect or intentional erasure of the specific communities that are probably most in need of those services, and does the aid then bias toward people with assets or other types of situations that weren’t part of the norm of this industry in the past.”

Atkins, visibly moved by her oratory, capped off her words with a DEI word salad.“The topic of preparedness and preparedness resources and the intersectionalities within equities and discrimination and hate — it’s a real thing that needs to be discussed, needs to be vocalized, and we need to start looking at how we can find solutions to this.” 

The initiatives raised at the panel discussion echo many of those on FEMA’s own website, which proudly proclaims instilling “equity as a foundation of emergency management” as goal 1.“Underserved communities, as well as specific identity groups, often suffer disproportionately from disasters. As a result, disasters worsen inequities already present in society,” the declaration reads in part.“This cycle compounds the challenges faced by these communities and increases their risk to future disasters. By instilling equity as a foundation of emergency management and striving to meet the unique needs of underserved communities, the emergency management community can work to break this cycle and build a more resilient nation.”

FEMA has come under fire after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted to reporters that the agency “does not have the funds” to safeguard Americans through the remainder of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, its coffers depleted in part by the more than $1.4 billion it has spent addressing the migrant crisis since fall 2022.

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment by The Post inquiring whether the sentiments expressed by the panelists are reflective of the agency as a whole. But this may explain the strange FEMA directive in the hurricane to avoid homes with Trump signs.

DEI Studies

Biden pardons Hunter, saying his conviction was political. Does this validate the accusation the justice system is weaponized and has become 'lawfare?' Is this definitive support for Trump? Does Biden's pardon open the door to Jan. 6 pardons? What will Corine say? Is there any line of expediency or personal advantage a politician will rise above?

Has there ever been an administration where lies have been so common as to be policy?

***

The 2024 election is over. But Kamala Harris’ fundraising emails keep coming. Urgently.  
“Even a quick donation of $50 is enough to help us in this fight,” said one email sent two weeks after Election Day. “And with only hours left to hit our goal today, NOW is the best time to rush your support.” 

Why anybody would respond to this plea is hard to explain. But it is not unusual. Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign ended with $25 million in debt — some were personal loans — that was not fully paid off until 2013. Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign reported $6.8 million in debt after that election; it was not fully retired until 2018.

***


DEI Studies

The Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab released the study “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias” on Monday. The study examined whether the themes and materials common in DEI trainings foster inclusion or exacerbate conflicts and whether such materials promote empathy or increase hostility towards groups labeled as oppressors.

Although proponents of DEI trainings claim that they are designed to educate individuals about biases and reduce discrimination, the study found that participants primed with DEI materials were more likely to perceive prejudice where none existed and were more willing to punish the perceived perpetrators.

Both the New York Times and Bloomberg were preparing stories on the findings but axed them just before publication citing editorial decisions. Best not to muddy contentious waters with reality

Inequality

For democracy to work as a long-term component of government, its role must strictly be limited, as the Founders intended. There is a tendency to view criticism of democracy as anti-American, but an analysis of American political history shows that its Founders tried to prevent the creation of the type of democracy that characterizes twenty-first-century American government.--Holcombe

***

Advocates of reducing the U.S. trade deficit should realize that doing so would also reduce the inflow of capital from abroad. Do we really want to do that? If so, why? U.S. governors and mayors who now go to Europe and Japan with delegations of boosters to attract investors may not have heard that they might be boosting the trade deficit by encouraging capital inflows.--miegs

***

From obscure academic topic to major campaign issues, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing has erupted onto the political scene. Projections indicate ESG fund assets will balloon from around $20 trillion in 2022 to a staggering $40 trillion by 2030.

Our new paper in the Santa Clara Journal of International Law examines whether market forces or government interventions drive ESG’s rise. We conclude that government policies, rather than investor preferences, primarily fuel ESG.--Mendenhall and Sutton

***

Inequality

"Average is Over," written by Tyler Cowen explores a theme quite commonly heard nowadays, income inequality and potential social instability. (The social instability is always hinted at, written in a whisper, as if the tipping point is so close the mere mention of it will precipitate chaos.) Cowen generally agrees that there is a division of income in the U.S. that he believes will continue but he is much more confident in its outcome. His thesis is that the computer, Internet, and increasing freedoms will make education and advancement much more democratic with a rise in quality and production. A “hyper-meritocracy” is developing. With computer advances, chess has become a common analogy now, and he uses it too. Before online chess, an Armenian player would have to move to Moscow to compete at the highest levels. Now, Armenia is a “perennial competitor” for international chess honors. The advance of machine intelligence will cause a surge in income inequality, but will also level the playing field for opportunity. In a recent interview with NPR Cowen predicted that “for a lot of people upward mobility will be a lot easier.” Competence, not social status, will decide.

As to the instability that doomsayers predict will result, Cowen calls these theories of the revolutionary consequences of income inequality “some of the least thought-out and least well-supported arguments with wide currency.” His argument is that there are stronger bonds in society than economic similarities. In a 2011 article for The American Interest, Cowen wrote, “By broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.” (This is reminiscent of de Tocqueville who always thought there was an esprit in the nation based on liberty.)

More, wealth has risen dramatically. The Dallas Federal Reserve Bank published a report showing that the increase in income disparity is overwhelmed by the rise in the standard of living. In 1919 it took the average American eighty minutes of work in order to buy a dozen eggs. Today it takes him five minutes. That diffuse wealth is a very soothing--and perhaps sedating--element in society.

So income inequality might rise but so will opportunity. The real question is this: How does a society like ours judge social equality? Is income equality the best way? Or does the equality of opportunity and the collateral increase in wealth offer so much more?

Another question: If there is a complacency that develops in the "have-nots," what about the risk it will develop in the "haves," in the producers the "have-nots" need?

The Substance of Work

Dubas struck down any notion that Guentzel would be moved speaking on his bi-weekly GM Show with Josh Getzoff and said a conversation will be had with the forward about his future, but he has not been shopping the forward.

***

The U.S. secretly warned Iran that Islamic State was preparing to carry out the terrorist attack early this month that killed more than 80 Iranians in a pair of coordinated suicide bombings, U.S. officials said. The confidential alert came after the U.S. acquired intelligence that Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, ISIS-Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, was plotting to attack Iran, they said.

***

King Charles III announced he had been suffering from an enlarged prostate, also known as benign prostatic hyperplasia, and would be undergoing a corrective procedure at the hospital sometime this week.

***

Roughly 70% of battery-powered electric car sales in the United States are courtesy of Tesla. However, for four straight quarters, TSLA stock has plummeted after reporting earnings, and the stock is more than 50% off its all-time high of $414.50, which was achieved in 2021.

***


The Substance of Work

The FAA website carries the declaration that the FAA is actively recruiting disabled people to employ. That is to say, disabilities have entered the hierarchy of desirable employment elements--but not skills--presumably competing with more traditional qualities--skills.

What does this mean?

Apparently, the search for workers has separated from worker performance; the job itself has become the objective of the hire. The purpose of the entity has become employment, not the achievement of an occupational objective. So the job does not demand efficiency and quality. 

If this has a familiar ring to it, it should. The old Marxist idea is that the value of a commodity can be measured by the average number of labor hours required to produce that commodity. The product and the workers that produce it are only distantly related. Indeed a product created by one organization in X hours has half the value of the same product in another organization created in 2X hours.

This confuses value with cost. Such thinking adds value to inefficiency and mediocrity. 

It's a bad economic idea. We can only wait to see what kind of aerodynamic idea it is.

Fighting Inequality

A student opened fire Thursday at a university in Prague, killing at least 14 people, officials said, and injuring more than 20 in the Czech Republic’s worst mass shooting.

***

Police in Alabama arrested Crimson Tide offensive lineman Elijah Pritchett on Wednesday for allegedly knowingly passing on a sexually transmitted disease.

***

United Launch Alliance received buyout bids from Blue Origin, the space-exploration company owned by Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, and Cerberus, the private-equity firm led by billionaire Stephen Feinberg, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. ULA is jointly owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and had dominated rocket launches for the U.S. ULA has faced delays in the development of its new rocket named Vulcan Centaur, which will carry Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander in its first launch in January. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine powers the spacecraft's first stage. 

In recent years, ULA's launch dominance has first been challenged and then supplanted by the rise of SpaceX and its less expensive and highly reliable Falcon 9 rocket. ULA has developed the large Vulcan rocket, which is intended to be more cost-competitive with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles while also ending ULA's dependence on Russian-made rocket engines. The Vulcan launcher uses the BE-4 rocket engine manufactured by Blue Origin.

***

Less than half the employees in the U.S. public education are teachers.

***

Fighting Inequality

There are some new distortions that recent studies have exposed the demon inequity in the American culture, specifically in scholastic and demographic analysis.

First, the Chicago school system produces very different results depending on the school attended. Its charter system--which has to be tested into--produces better students with higher scholastic achievement, testing, and progression to higher education and better earnings than the regular public system. Different outcomes. Bias.

Secondly, the children of married parents with two-parent households outperform other children in education accomplishment and advancement--and eventual earnings.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has recognized this education disparity and vowed to stop it and restore "equity" by moving to end the selective enrollment process at Chicago schools. This will create a more homogeneous education experience and eliminate the distortions that develop in such a biased system.

This blow for equity could be applied elsewhere, like the marriage bias. There is, without doubt, better academic performance in households with two parents. An obvious solution is to eliminate it by randomizing the children among married and unmarried families or, more efficiently and less bureaucratically, outlawing marriage and two-parent households altogether.

Equality by Fiat

Jose Altuve recently hit a home run in each of the first three innings of a game. The logistics are amazing. But it has happened three times before.

***

I've been watching a lot of Netflix recently. I think the writer's strike has been going on longer than they say.

***

Equality by Fiat

The elimination of the Senate dress code is more important than it appears. The highest-profile legislative body in the Free World has decided to broaden its standards--e.g. lower its criteria--to accommodate Fetterman's unconventional clothing choices.

It is a virtual symbol of the problematic preoccupation in the West, the inclusion of the outlier under the umbrella of the bell curve. The need the culture has to normalize the peripheral. 

Apparently, the ideal in America is a bell curve that is not a curve, it is a narrow, straight, vertical line. It is an ideal without criteria or quality.

The Inequality of Experts

A few cobras in your home will soon clear it of rats and mice. Of course, you will still have the cobras. -Will Cuppy, journalist (23 Aug 1884-1949)

***

Hands down, Nikki Haley won the first GOP debate. And I don’t say this just because she’s a South Carolinian or because she was the only woman among the fiery pack of primary candidates. She was simply smarter (even smarter than you, Vivek), more sensible and more experienced – and it showed.--Kathlene Parker

***

The problem of unsustainable Social Security and Medicare trajectories? Simple, says Ramaswamy: Just achieve sustained 5 percent economic growth, and the problem will disappear. (Average annual economic growth from 1947 to 2022 was 3.1 percent, according to Cato Institute fiscal analyst Norbert Michel; only once was it more than 5 percent for three consecutive years.)--Will

***

The Inequality of Experts

Dr Stephen Schneider, of Stanford University, is a well-respected climatologist who is also quite active in the media and politics. He has a famous quote that is often published by non-apocalyptics. The entire quote is here:

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."

Sometimes the last sentence is omitted. Apocalyptics see the last sentence as clarifying and saving.

They are too kind.

This debate is emblematic of the growing problem in the democracy of 'the expert,' whose input is seen as much more important and reliable than the rest of us slugs. Regrettably, it will not be solved easily because their high position in the culture, unlike the aristocracy of old, is earned. Their relationship with us is more like the old days of the dismissal of women, a disparity of circumstance.

This creates a tough problem for 'experts' because they want to pretend we are all equal.

Aberrant Nukes

Perfect game last night.

“Entitlement” is not only the opposite of achievement, it undermines incentives to do all the hard work that leads to achievement.--Sowell

Aberrant Nukes

Writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, Louis Reitmann and Sneha Nair offer the strongest argument for preventing the “queering of nuclear weapons” by arguing in favor of such a policy:

"Exclusion creates nuclear security risks. Exclusion and unfair treatment of queer individuals and other minorities by a homogenous, cis-heteronormative community of practitioners also creates vulnerabilities in nuclear decision-making. Cis-heteronormativity is the automatic assumption that someone is heterosexual and identifies with the sex assigned to them at birth. It creates the idea that being heterosexual and cisgender is normal and natural, whereas being queer or trans is a deviation."

There is a narrative gaining traction that diversity is a tool truth uses to examine itself. A broader bell curve examines truth through a wider lens. Insight comes from the periphery. Our norms should be examined by the fringe. So truth should escape the confines of...what? Consensus?  Success? 

Are we to spend the rest of our lives re-centering?

America 2

On January 1, 2020, wage compensation for au pairs rose to $528.63 for a 45-hour work in Massachusetts – a 170 percent increase in the minimum wage. Consequently, the number of new au pairs arriving in Massachusetts in 2022 was 68.1 percent below 2019

***

Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Monday to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seeking an explanation for why journalist Matt Taibbi received an unannounced home visit from an IRS agent. We’ve seen the letter, and both the circumstances and timing of the IRS focus on this journalist raise serious questions.--WSJ

***

At places like Brown University, the cost of attendance (tuition, room, board and fees) is almost $85,000, well above what the typical US household earns.



America 2


Barnum's original statement was more complex than is known: It is not just that a sucker is born every minute, it is that Americans want to be fooled.


Equality is a difficult aspiration. Remarkably, equality before the law is a cinch compared to other types. There are, after all, a lot of differences among people unless you plan on repealing the bell-shaped curve. And we don't have to go far to find them. Angelina Jolie--Tamara Press, Ray Lewis--Stephen Hawkins. How would equality be created here? Would someone be upgraded? How? And what would be emphasized? Would you make Lewis smarter or Hawkins more physical? Would you make Tamara prettier or Angelina stronger? What about Angelina and Ray Lewis? Or is there some subtle, deeper element of equalization the equalizers are not sharing?

Leveling out is never done by leveling up. Historically, equality is usually achieved by subtraction, not addition. The poor are never made rich, the ugly never beautiful. So Angelina would be scarred, Lewis hamstrung, and Hawkins hit on the head several times. Vonnegut in one of his books tied weights to the legs of athletic ballerinas so the audience would not be ashamed.

The very nature of life is diversity, diversity not for variety or spice, but for competition, destruction, and advancement. It is the true dialectic. The great religions solve this by putting worldly inequity aside and making all men spiritually equal before God. But in the demands of worldly homogeneity, because we are not the same, it must be made to appear we are. This involves fooling ourselves and each other with imitation, disguise, and deception. Participation in the deception creates not equality but similarity disguised as sameness.

Cross-dressing.

Equality/Equity Under Attack

Interesting discussion between Sanders and Maher on HBO. Maher asked Sanders the definition of 'Equality' vs. 'Equity' and which he preferred. It was clear Sanders preferred to confuse the two but, when pressed, chose 'Equality.' The others on the stage got upset. Forcing the definition and clarifying the distinction unmasked even Sanders.

***

The House and Senate passed an anti-ESG bill.

***

Four U.S. citizens have been kidnapped after gunmen opened fire on their vehicle in the northern Mexico border city of Matamoros, the FBI said Sunday.

***


"The Bad People thought the lab leak might be true, therefore as journalists we couldn't be expected to actually evaluate the evidence for it."--Nate Silver


***

Equality/Equity Under Attack

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the brains of men and women shows women have a far greater capacity for communicating with and evaluating people than men do. Women have between fourteen and sixteen areas of the brain to evaluate others' behavior versus a man's four to six areas.

The female brain is organized for multitracking -- the average woman can juggle between two and four unrelated topics at the same time. She can talk about several unrelated topics in one conversation and use five vocal tones to change the subject or emphasize points. Most men can only identify three of these tones and often lose the plot when women are trying to communicate with them. 

Vision is a factor too. Most men's close-range and peripheral vision is far poorer than women's.

Inequality

 

                                                                                Inequality

According to the historian Walter Scheidel, inequality can be solved by the Four Horseman of Leveling: Mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics. These are the historical solutions to inequality. 

Perils of Equity

 

                           Perils of Equity

"Equity" has crept into the political conversation, unbidden and subtle as an odor. It is a profound distortion of the American historical debate and confronting it requires some understanding of the true nature of the country, its creation and energy. Such insight is mundane now.

Here is a heartfelt observation:

"The replacement of the word “equality” with “equity” was a subtle yet deliberate move by politicians, activists, the mainstream media, and the rest of the ruling class in the hopes that people would think the terms hold the same meaning. Equality and equity are not synonymous. In fact, they are in direct conflict. Equity requires uniform outcome and uniform outcome requires unequal standards — certain rules apply to some but not to others.

Our obsession with equity has created a caste system that actively segregates, discriminates, and judges based on sex, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. Your individual characteristics, which you have no control over, are now either your greatest asset or biggest deficit. In order to justify the logic of discriminating based on superficial characteristics, you must buy into the notion that our entire country is entrenched in a system of oppression towards minorities in each of these categories. If this were true, then no amount of equity councils or policy changes could rectify the unjust system. The system cannot cure itself if the very system is the problem — the system itself must be destroyed.
…..
Inequality and unequal treatment are the foundation of equity, and discrimination and racism are the building blocks. Equity is a house that will never cease to be under construction. We can keep trying to take those building blocks and stack them as high as we want, yet we will never see a world where disparity does not exist and where outcome is uniform. We will only continue to teach our children that the most important thing about them is their skin color or sexual orientation, and that the content of their character, individual choices, and abilities are of no consequence. We will continue to give the system power to alleviate “problems” that every individual, regardless of identity, has the power to alleviate themselves.

Equal treatment, equality under the law, and equality of opportunity must all come crumbling down in order to keep the dream of equity alive. Liberty, meritocracy, and individual responsibility must die in order to sustain a system run on the misguided view of social justice. However, equity will always be a dream and justice will never come."

--with some changes from Alyssa Ahlgren’s Alpha News commentary “The Bigotry of Equity“

 

Smith

 

                                                              Smith

There s a crisis at Smith, a problem magnified by our preoccupation with race. Lawyers are involved so there will be distortions but it appeared in the NYT yesterday with some surprising objectivity. This is a letter of resignation of one of the principals.

Dear President McCartney:

I am writing to notify you that effective today, I am resigning from my position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life at Smith College. This has not been an easy decision, as I now face a deeply uncertain future. As a divorced mother of two, the economic uncertainty brought about by this resignation will impact my children as well. But I have no choice. The racially hostile environment that the college has subjected me to for the past two and a half years has left me physically and mentally debilitated. I can no longer work in this environment, nor can I remain silent about a matter so central to basic human dignity and freedom.

I graduated from Smith College in 1993. Those four years were among the best in my life. Naturally, I was over the moon when, years later, I had the opportunity to join Smith as a staff member. I loved my job and I loved being back at Smith.

But the climate — and my place at the college — changed dramatically when, in July 2018, the culture war arrived at our campus when a student accused a white staff member of calling campus security on her because of racial bias. The student, who is black, shared her account of this incident widely on social media, drawing a lot of attention to the college.

Before even investigating the facts of the incident, the college immediately issued a public apology to the student, placed the employee on leave, and announced its intention to create new initiatives, committees, workshops, trainings, and policies aimed at combating “systemic racism” on campus.

In spite of an independent investigation into the incident that found no evidence of racial bias, the college ramped up its initiatives aimed at dismantling the supposed racism that pervades the campus. This only served to support the now prevailing narrative that the incident had been racially motivated and that Smith staff are racist.

Allowing this narrative to dominate has had a profound impact on the Smith community and on me personally. For example, in August 2018, just days before I was to present a library orientation program into which I had poured a tremendous amount of time and effort, and which had previously been approved by my supervisors, I was told that I could not proceed with the planned program. Because it was going to be done in rap form and “because you are white,” as my supervisor told me, that could be viewed as “cultural appropriation.” My supervisor made clear he did not object to a rap in general, nor to the idea of using music to convey orientation information to students. The problem was my skin color.

I was up for a full-time position in the library at that time, and I was essentially informed that my candidacy for that position was dependent upon my ability, in a matter of days, to reinvent a program to which I had devoted months of time.

Humiliated, and knowing my candidacy for the full-time position was now dead in the water, I moved into my current, lower-paying position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life.

As it turned out, my experience in the library was just the beginning. In my new position, I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race.

Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.

Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.

The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.” I was the only person in the room to abstain.

Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of “white fragility.” They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a “power play.” In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.

I filed an internal complaint about the hostile environment, but throughout that process, over the course of almost six months, I felt like my complaint was taken less seriously because of my race. I was told that the civil rights law protections were not created to help people like me. And after I filed my complaint, I started to experience retaliatory behavior, like having important aspects of my job taken away without explanation.

Under the guise of racial progress, Smith College has created a racially hostile environment in which individual acts of discrimination and hostility flourish. In this environment, people’s worth as human beings, and the degree to which they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, is determined by the color of their skin. It is an environment in which dissenting from the new critical race orthodoxy — or even failing to swear fealty to it like some kind of McCarthy-era loyalty oath — is grounds for public humiliation and professional retaliation.

I can no longer continue to work in an environment where I am constantly subjected to additional scrutiny because of my skin color. I can no longer work in an environment where I am told, publicly, that my personal feelings of discomfort under such scrutiny are not legitimate but instead are a manifestation of white supremacy. Perhaps most importantly, I can no longer work in an environment where I am expected to apply similar race-based stereotypes and assumptions to others, and where I am told — when I complain about having to engage in what I believe to be discriminatory practices — that there are “legitimate reasons for asking employees to consider race” in order to achieve the college’s “social justice objectives.”

What passes for “progressive” today at Smith and at so many other institutions is regressive. It taps into humanity’s worst instincts to break down into warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly leading us to a very twisted place. It terrifies me that others don’t seem to see that racial segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter what its victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of discomfort somehow upholds “white supremacy” is not just morally wrong. It is psychologically abusive.

Equally troubling are the many others who understand and know full well how damaging this is, but do not speak out due to fear of professional retaliation, social censure, and loss of their livelihood and reputation. I fear that by the time people see it, or those who see it manage to screw up the moral courage to speak out, it will be too late.

I wanted to change things at Smith. I hoped that by bringing an internal complaint, I could somehow get the administration to see that their capitulation to critical race orthodoxy was causing real, measurable harm. When that failed, I hoped that drawing public attention to these problems at Smith would finally awaken the administration to this reality. I have come to conclude, however, that the college is so deeply committed to this toxic ideology that the only way for me to escape the racially hostile climate is to resign. It is completely unacceptable that we are now living in a culture in which one must choose between remaining in a racially hostile, psychologically abusive environment or giving up their income.

As a proud Smith alum, I know what a critical role this institution has played in shaping my life and the lives of so many women for one hundred and fifty years. I want to see this institution be the force for good I know it can be. I will not give up fighting against the dangerous pall of orthodoxy that has descended over Smith and so many of our educational institutions.

This was an extremely difficult decision for me and comes at a deep personal cost. I make $45,000 a year; less than a year’s tuition for a Smith student. I was offered a settlement in exchange for my silence, but I turned it down. My need to tell the truth — and to be the kind of woman Smith taught me to be — makes it impossible for me to accept financial security at the expense of remaining silent about something I know is wrong. My children’s future, and indeed, our collective future as a free nation, depends on people having the courage to stand up to this dangerous and divisive ideology, no matter the cost.

Sincerely,

Jodi Shaw