TargaGTS in reply to Virginia42. | May 1, 2024 at 8:02 am
I can tell you who started it (George W Bush) and exactly how and even when it started: March 13th, 2007. That was the day Gen Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said this in defense of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe that the Armed Forces of the United States are well-served by saying through our policies, “It’s OK to be immoral in any way.”

Pace, a former CO of mine and one of the finest Marines I have ever known, is a devout Catholic and offered his opinion in response to a direct question on the subject. So, ‘conservative’ president George Bush had Pace’s back, right? Nope. Bush immediately threw him under the bus and Pace became one of the only CJCS who wasn’t renominated for a second term.

That incident sent a message to O-4s and O-5s (like myself at the time), that if they were traditionalists, religious and/or held conservative social views, they had no home and NO CAREER PATH in the military. So, when they reached a point in their tenure when they were eligible for retirement, they took it.

Bush replaced Pace (a decorated combat veteran and Academy grad), with Mike Mullins, a naval officer who was known to possess ‘progressive’ social opinions. Mullins was also the first CJS who did not rate the Combat Action Ribbon/Badge. The slow embrace of everything woke began under Mullins. He was the architect of what we have today…all thanks to George Bush.

The Federal Aviation Administration is the subject of a massive class action lawsuit alleging that since 2013, thousands of qualified applicants have been denied employment as air traffic controllers based on race. //

These programs, run in cooperation with the FAA since 1991 to train and test future air traffic controllers, were the entry point for the overwhelming majority of the ATC workforce.

In 2013, the Obama Administration ended the program to increase diversity in ATC hiring. The screening test stopped being ATC-specific coursework and became a "biographical questionnaire." Allegedly, this questionnaire was based on the personality traits of successful ATCs. But its real purpose was to increase the number of "underrepresented" demographics. As if to underscore the point, the FAA provided the correct candidates with a list of buzzwords to use on the questionnaire. Minority applicants were also coached on how to format their job applications so friendly selection board members could recognize them. //

For reasons that aren't all that clear, this racially discriminatory hiring program continued under Donald Trump, but it really hit high gear under Joe Biden. I swear I'm not making any of this up.

The Secretary of Transportation has set a hiring goal of three (3) percent per fiscal year for individuals with targeted (severe) disabilities. //

In 2023, the situation had deteriorated to the point that even the New York Times had noticed.

They were part of an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways of the United States, a Times investigation found. While there have been no major U.S. plane crashes in more than a decade, potentially dangerous incidents are occurring far more frequently than almost anyone realizes — a sign of what many insiders describe as a safety net under mounting stress. //

It is difficult to see how this policy survives a legal challenge. The American Bar Association cautions that under current Supreme Court precedents, diversity hiring cuts two ways.

Diversity initiatives should not be a zero sum game. Lawful diversity initiatives should be designed to expand opportunity for underrepresented groups without also negatively impacting opportunities for those in the majority.

There are many reasons the faculties at law schools are overwhelming liberal and crazy but the main reason is because that is where the money is. Many are the well-funded liberal law firms — the ACLU being the most notorious one. They are hiring. Rare are the conservative groups.

To be sure, big corporations pay better to defend themselves, but that does not stop abuses outside the corporate world. There is no money to be made by Exxon (for example) in stopping the student loan steal. And so the theft occurs with Republicans talking the talk but walking away.

Until Republicans go to court, get a TRO and force Biden to defend forcing women to undress before men in their locker room, I do not want to hear Republican complaints.

“We just had a midair,” the pilot of the Hawker is heard saying in an audio recording posted on LiveATC.net, which shares live and archived recordings of air traffic control radio transmissions.

Someone in the control tower responds by saying, “Say what?”

“You guys cleared somebody to take off or land, and we hit them on a departure,” the Hawker pilot says.

The recent accident in Houston is just the latest noteworthy instance in what a major New York Times investigation this summer determined to be “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.” According to internal records of the Federal Aviation Agency, the Times reported that these safety lapses and near misses occurred as a “result of human error.” The Times report further revealed that “runway incursions” of the sort described above have nearly doubled, from 987 to 1732, despite the widespread proliferation of advanced technologies. //

While the disturbing decline in aviation safety is complex and multifaceted, we identified two major contributing factors that have received scant media attention. The first such factor is the likely contribution of disastrous COVID-era policies to the staffing shortage of many air traffic control rooms. The second factor is that aggressive affirmative action policies implemented during the Obama administration have resulted in a catastrophic collapse in the quality of controllers. In short, COVID policies have gutted the quantity of air traffic controllers, and diversity policies have gutted the quality of air traffic controllers, creating unprecedented danger for the aviation industry. //

The implications of these findings reach far beyond the scope of aviation, as important as this industry is. Rather, the collapse of the aviation industry must be understood in the context of a broader collapse in our ability to maintain the infrastructure of a First World society. This is a major and significant trend that we highlighted years ago in our coverage of the repeated failures of Texas’ electric power grid.

NASA. You might think of NASA as the place for “rocket scientists.” A place where really smart people aren’t shackled by DEI hires and “every culture is equal” nonsense. NASA, where steely-eyed missile men went from a John Kennedy speech to building Titan rockets and sending men to the moon in less than a decade. Steely-eyed missile men are so last century. We need equity hires, diversity ambassadors, and indigenous science.

On Monday, during the total eclipse of the sun, America also had a total eclipse by the dumb. //

I dug a little deeper to see what NASA is doing in its search to auger-in the next rocket launch. NASA, under Biden, has pushed hard for DEI, including awarding contracts to “underserved communities” and hiring a diversity ambassador, and is pushing employees to include pronouns in emails. So, it is no shock that NASA is in the fifth year of a 14-year partnership with the Navajo Nation. Why? NASA views the Navajo as particularly “sciency.” //

Cowboysurfpunk
23 minutes ago
... Blinded by the Light... ;)

I came to Vanderbilt with the dream of escaping the rampant bigotry and institutional repression I experienced in the Deep South.

That dream has soured. //

Shouldn't he have come to Vanderbilt to, I don't know, get a degree? This idea that college is supposed to do anything but provide tangible life skills is absurd.

Regardless, do you want to know where Petocz is from? He's from a wealthy suburb in Northeast Florida. //

Petocz is cosplaying. He's dressing up as a revolutionary fighting against injustice when he's really just a spoiled brat who thinks he can harass and bully his way through life.

In fact, maybe the only thing that DEI has accomplished is giving racist white people cover to be openly racist. //

Real DEI is only going to come from black leadership. I don't know how to do it because I'm not a black leader, but I do know how to tell if it's working. //

bk
an hour ago
CTG: DEI is just CYA for white corporations and isn't doing sh*t, but let's measure success on how much racist Fox News is whining. Wait what?

The Equal Protection Project, which is equalprotect.org, is a nonprofit that I founded in order to fight against what I loosely call DEI racism. So racism done in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our operative motto is that there is no good form of racism and that the answer to racism is not more racism. And that’s what has developed on campuses throughout the country and increasingly corporations and government, is that people seem, some people seem to think that the answer for past discrimination or even current is more discrimination, to discriminate against whites or Asians or Hispanics or anybody else. And we are against any of that. We’re against discrimination against any person on the basis of race. And that’s why we founded it. And we bring legal challenges too, we’ve done over 20 so far to programs that on their face have discriminatory eligibility requirements.

This is a community of people who slay dragons for fun and oftentimes together. Our hobby teaches us to fight and keep fighting, no matter how many blows we take. If you fail, you press "continue" and try again until you win.

As such GamerGate became one of the biggest black eyes the radical left ever received and they've never forgiven or forgotten how bad gamers made them look...nor how much gamers cost them and continues to cost them. //

I said gamers are costing woke sites like these but it'd probably be more accurate to say that these social justice-obsessed games journos are costing themselves. They told us they hated us so we stopped clicking on their articles and listening to their game reviews. They told us we were sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and more, so we stopped taking them seriously. They're now suffocating under their hubris. Gamers picked up the toys they said we should be embarrassed by and went elsewhere.

These activists posing as journalists thought their audience was much bigger than it actually was. The "modern audience" they surrounded themselves by is very loud but incredibly minuscule. As I've noted in the past, if a modern audience did truly exist in any substantial way then everything from Kotaku to Star Wars would be thriving. //

Sure, they may see a temporary surge of success but sooner or later their radicalism costs them because there is no "modern audience," and the number of people who will bend the knee to prove themselves innocent of accusations of social sins is diminishing by the day. //

Weminuche45
15 minutes ago edited
Any space that is predominantly male will be deemed evil, infiltrated and destroyed. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated is the message.

It follows and is the same pattern from the same human nature sinful drives as this. Leftism is toxic femininity, girls gone wild.

1. Identify a respected institution (or a man)
2. kill it (him)
3. gut it (him)
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect (his carcass)
   • iowahawk

No wonder they are after pronouns and man/woman. It covers their actual motive: resentment and revenge. //

anon-9s7n
3 minutes ago
Who could have predicted that a group of people who usually can't see each other (and therefore are unable to discriminate based on physical appearance), who often straddle vast distances, timezones, languages and nationalities, who team up to attack borg like hive mind enemies for entertainment, who could have foreseen that these people would resist wokeness?

There's not a single animal in the local zoo that is less self aware than these highly educated morons in game "journalism".

You ought to do your self a favor, if you never have, and listen to General Douglas MacArthur’s 1962 speech to the cadets at West Point shortly before his death explaining the meaning of Duty, Honor, Country:

https://youtu.be/lafPwwmRvf0

gitarcarver | March 14, 2024 at 1:57 pm
According to West Point, the phrase “duty, honor, country,” was added to the mission statement in 1998 – a mission statement that has been changed 9 times over the last century.

That means the phrase has been around for only 26 of the 222 years (11.7%) West Point has been in existence.

How did West Point ever manage to train leaders like Lee, Grant, Pershing, the “Class the Stars Fell On,” Abrahms, Schwarzkopf, MacArthur, etc., without “duty, honor, country” being in the mission statement?
...
Finally, the “Character Development Strategy” at the USMA contains many statements such as this:

The West Point Character Development Strategy describes how, at all levels and across programs, the United States Military Academy (USMA) develops leaders of character who internalize the ideals of Duty, Honor, Country and the Army Ethic.

“Duty, Honor, Country” is being not removed from the core values at West Point.

My advice is to ignore the advice of people who scaremonger about the gaming community and the industry. Many haven't been in the gaming space long and don't fully understand the people or the games in it. In truth, the gaming space and conservatives could truly be allies in a mutual fight against the influence of radical leftism. //

Peregry
16 minutes ago
Long term gamer, and just as long term Conservative. Games, like any medium, has it's good and bad messages, it also is a very young medium and that means it also has its edgy and experimental side still in tact.
...
Further, because of the mature of the medium it lends itself strongly to games that celebrate more masculine virtues. They have yet to make a compelling and fun video game that pushes Woke morality, because Woke morality does not lend itself to a strong gameplay loop. Foremost is this: Within the Woke worldview oppression innately disadvantages people and the only way to overcome it is by outside forces from the individual fixing. Meanwhile no video games are all about player agency, and the impact the player, as an individual, can have on the world. Games where the player has no agency and can do nothing to effect their own outcome are not enjoyable. Thus, games are inherently, structurally conservative, which is why the Woke progressives have spent so much time and effort to try and force propaganda into them, because they cannot overcome that base, innate factor. //

mopani  Peregry13 minutes ago

Very well stated.

Games where the player has no agency and can do nothing to effect their own outcome are not enjoyable.

Just like life. Woke makes you depressed. //

anon-Ram
an hour ago edited
Reading well written history is great. Watching well done media on the subject might be okay. But playing a proper historical computer game is another level of learning.

Heck, XKCD #1356 says it all:
https://xkcd.com/1356/

The U.S. military has had its ups and downs, but since ending the draft half a century ago, it has been the most expertly trained and exquisitely armed force the world has ever seen. Even during the draft years immediately before World War II to the end of Vietnam, we paid for and usually got the best weapons and training the country could afford.

And unlike those militaries in all those shi*hole countries, our forces were apolitical. They didn’t serve a president or a party, but the country.

In the last several years, wokeness has come to infect our military just as it previously had our universities, news outlets, and the entertainment industry.

Our readiness now is about what you'd expect: “U.S. military is only ‘marginally’ prepared to defend America’s interests at a time when adversaries are ramping up military capabilities.”

I’ve begun thinking of our postmodern military not as a useless Woke Force but as a Third World military: a force that isn’t any good at fighting foreign wars but is perfectly suited for putting down domestic undesirables.

Doctors are expected to uphold a certain ethical standard but if DEI is involved, a doctor's first priority isn't to the patient but to the political ideology they hold to, which has to be leftist or else. This highlights the true nature of DEI.

It's not here to help anyone. It prioritizes political power and control and sees humanity as a means to an end. People will die but they're just sacrifices on the altar of the Marxist endgame for those who wish to push it on the populace.

DEI has to go. Our society, our country, and our way of life cannot coexist with it. It's not good or righteous and it doesn't help anyone, even those who implement it at the top. Innocent people are going to get hurt and that could easily include you and your friends and family.

DEI is going to be the death of many if we don't stop it soon and that's not an exaggeration. //

anon-cdoc
an hour ago
DEI is just another name for affirmative action and both are just another name for the bigotry of low expectations. You don't need either one of those if you fix the damn schools.

“No White Saviors” is a far-left group that specializes in tarring white missionaries to Africa as irredeemably racist. The group is shown in the docuseries as developing its audience and donor network after it began to exploit internal strife at Bach’s Ugandan clinic. //

when the clinic suffered a brief closure over a licensing issue, during which time several children died, Bach’s mother pulled together the clinic’s data and reported that of the 940 children treated by Serving His Children over a six-year period, 105 total children did not survive their severe acute malnutrition — a mortality rate of 11 percent. Meanwhile, a study of patients with the same condition at Uganda’s largest children’s hospital revealed the hospital’s mortality rate was 14 percent. Opponents of the Christian mission, however, were more fixated on Bach’s skin color than her efforts to save starving kids. //

Bach also announced the same month that Serving His Children would be dissolved, with services no longer available to sick children desperate for treatment.

No White Saviors no doubt counts Serving His Children as a feather in its cap, a white-run nonprofit demonized as a neocolonialist organization that served no other purpose than to assuage some form of white guilt. But Bach was just a Christian missionary who was answering a spiritual call, even if she made mistakes and couldn’t restore every child she served. At the end of the day, Bach will go on living with her family in Virginia. It will be the sick kids in Uganda who suffer from the woke-led destruction of her mission.

Time to complete the trilogy of reclaiming the DEI acronym from the left. A conservative view defines the D as discipline and the E as example. But what of the I? //

This is why the contemporary left struggles with Dr. King’s ideals. The contemporary left cannot admit to shared humanity or brotherhood, for to achieve these things means abandoning the notion of smug superiority that permeates its entire operational structure. It cannot embrace a notion of shared humanity and the universal need for salvation, for it believes itself to be superior to all who do not wholly embrace its views and the implementation of same as humanity’s sole hope.

The contemporary left is incapable of seeing beyond skin color. Even as it marinates itself in the outward trappings of white guilt and fragility, its actions and attitudes declare its belief in its superiority to minorities who are but helpless victims in need of white liberals’ guiding hand and generous doling out of taxpayer dollars to get through life.

Modern liberalism makes no demand on anyone for personal accountability, for it accepts none as it is utterly convinced it is in no need of same due to its gleaming perfection. It has blinded itself to its fundamental paradox of believing humanity, or at least its conservative and moderate portions, is beyond redemption. At the same time, it itself, individually and collectively, has no need of same. Modern liberalism believes that with proper embracing of groupthink and policy, every person can become a little god. Their god is false and far too small. //

There can only be advancement once an individual acknowledges his or her need for improvement and stops making excuses or seeking alibis instead of achievement. The DEI of diversity, equity, and inclusion is mythology designed to line the pockets of those who preach self-righteous babble. True DEI — discipline, example, and integrity — will never be popular, for it demands these things from oneself instead of begging for an undeserved handout. But it is the only definition of DEI worth anything.

The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.

jester6
2 hours ago
One thing that always makes me chuckle is the folks on the left will do something that breaks the social contract (like block traffic, or heckle, or spray paint a building) and still expect their oppoents will still abide by the social contract.

"Don't f'in touch me, don't f'in touch me"

He is lucky they didn't throw a punch.

The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer "severe intellectual" disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.

"Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring," the FAA’s website states. "They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism."

The initiative is part of the FAA’s "Diversity and Inclusion" hiring plan, which claims "diversity is integral to achieving FAA's mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond." The FAA’s website shows the agency’s guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022. //

At what, precisely, does the FAA plan to put these people to work doing? It's safe to assume that by "severe intellectual disability," one means at best a substandard IQ, if not an outright inability to function in any organized workplace; //

The FAA - who I remind you, is responsible for ensuring safe air travel - is planning to ramp up hiring of those with "psychiatric disabilities." What kind of psychiatric disabilities? Sociopathy, I would posit, is a psychiatric disability, as is schizophrenia or "other psychotic disorders," bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive disorder. Surely the FAA isn't going to be hiring people with these kinds of disorders to do, well, anything the FAA needs done?

Has our federal government gone absolutely bonkers?

Despite Gay publishing just eleven papers in her academic career, five of which were shown to contain plagiarism, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her conspiratorial race-baiting The 1619 Project, declared that attacks on the Harvard’s president’s qualifications are “racist”. President of the Black Economic Forum Alphonso David found Gay’s accusers to be engaged in an exotic kind of hate called “misogynoir,” reserved by the white supremacy exclusively for black women in positions of power. The Southern Poverty Law Center published multiple hit pieces on Rufo — they probably were banking them just in case he did something damaging.

I find their line of defense well-meaning but insufficiently radical. If the goal is to insert unqualified diverse apparatchiks into Western institutions — then yes, by all means shriek racism every time you get caught red-handed. But if the goal is not merely to create a wealth-sucking DEI attachment on capitalism, but to bring down the West, plagiarism should be celebrated.

The stay of removal comes after a group called Defend Arlington, which is affiliated with Save Southern Heritage Florida, filed a lawsuit Sunday seeking the restraining order. The lawsuit accuses the Army, which oversees the administration and maintenance of the cemetery, of moving too fast in seeking the memorial's removal. Per the lawsuit, "The removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker and impede the Memorial’s eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places."

In issuing his order, Judge Alston acknowledged there was merit to the argument by the plaintiffs that the work involved in removing the statue would disturb nearby gravesites. Alston ordered participants in the matter to be ready to argue their cases this Wednesday, and also noted that he "takes very seriously the representations of officers of the Court, and should the representations in this case be untrue or exaggerated, the Court may take appropriate sanctions.” //

The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American South. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.” //

smagar
3 hours ago
If Congress really wants to see this statue come down, wouldn't it speak up and object to the TRO?

Anyone who's studied this issue knows that the Naming Commission recommendations were buried in an NDAA. Hardly anyone saw them before they began to be implemented.

Since then, the House of Representatives has approved an amendment by Andrew Clyde (R-GA) to this year's defense appropriations, which would prohibit federal dollars from being spent to remove this memorial. If you put two and two together, this is a clear sign from one half of Congress that it doesn't want to see this memorial moved. Now that everyone's had a chance to read all the commission's recommendations and weigh their impact, it's telling that one house of Congress has voted this way.

Let's hope the judge considers this. Sounds as if it's time for the House to hold hearings on the Naming Commission recommendations themselves. Seems as things aren't as cut-and-dried as they were depicted to be.