Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. DEI
2. EPA
3. GDI
4. ChatGPT
5. Berlin
6. Clinics
7. Proud Boys
1. DEI. Several pieces the last couple weeks on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), aka, hating whitey. Two in particular got my attention. The first was a discussion of the Diversity Industrial Complex. Second was news of the DEI rot (or cancer) infesting Texas A&M. Before going there, I wanted to note how much the racialism business reminds me of the bloody shirt campaigns during the 19th Century. Waving the bloody shirt was an epithet used in political campaigns (and elsewhere), generally aimed at Republicans, as their opponents made emotional calls to avenge soldiers who died in the Civil War. Republicans in the North generally used the Civil War to run against democrats. In the South, democrats did the same thing against Republicans. Today, racism is the functional equivalent of the bloody shirt, demonstrating once again that history doesn’t necessarily repeat, but from time to time, it does tend to rhyme.
- DEI Industrial Complex. A piece in Real Clear Investigations entitled The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex discussed the sudden rise and dominance of DEI. In little more than a decade what was initially an obscure acronym turned into a juggernaut running roughshod over nearly major American institution and at all levels of government. This takeover took place without a vote, without any sort of internal discussion. It was adopted because by definition (according to the advocates), it was a Good Thing, and if you disagreed, you are a racist, the typical leftist chain mail fist cloaked in a velvet glove. Essentially, DEI is societal favoritism in the name of social justice. It ends up as a vehicle to discriminate against whites, particularly white conservative men, choosing sides in any interaction with anyone who is not a white conservative man. Like other things that start out as Good Things, DEI quickly turned into a racket, a very well-funded industry. Two decades ago, the diversity industry was estimated at $8 billion, with the money being spent by corporations and governments. There is no current estimate of its size today but may very well be 10x larger than 20 years ago. A lot of people are hired to do something at very good wages to inflict DEI on the unwilling. Average DEI personnel at major universities today are 45 people. It’s a lot like the story of a man with a hammer viewing the entire world as a nail. When you hire a bunch of people to root out racism, and pay them very well for doing so, they will earn their keep by identifying lots and lots of racism if for no other reason than keeping the free money flowing. I predict this will be far more difficult to root out than ESG. There are some very large caliber tools available to get rid of ESG (anti-trust and RICO laws). As yet, these don’t exist for DEI so things are going to get worse before they get better.
- This brings us to the newfound DEI infestation at Texas A&M. Aggies have long laughed derisively at academic silliness at texas university. Sadly, that time appears to be over. A&M got into this mess after adopting their 2010 Diversity Plan. Growth began slowly, starting with dropping inconvenient categories like “best candidate” and “merit” for search, tenure and promotion committees. This did the expected damage in hiring faculty and administrators. Yet the percentage of black students fell in the decade following adoption of the diversity plan while the percentage of black faculty was unchanged. This changed with the George Floyd riots, which led to calls for removal of statues on campus. Interestingly enough, when you are teaching all race, all the time, the students will in turn focus on all race, all the time. Who knew? Administrators doubled down on DEI in 2020, attributing A&M’s shortcomings to systemic racism at A&M and the greater Aggie community. What a great Get Out of Jail Free card, if you disagree, you are both a racist and the problem the newly hired racists are unsuccessful. There I just thought it was simple incompetence. Today, over 60% of all departments require DEI statements (loyalty oaths – remember when those were Bad Things?) from applicants. Extra credit is given for candidates who vow to treat differently based on race and sex. As of today, only the Texas Legislature and the A&M Board of Regents can reverse the rot, which has marched nicely through most of the university outside the School of Engineering, but they are trying hard to finish the operation.
2. EPA. Carbon capture and sequestration is one of the feel-good green energy ideas ensconced in federal legislation, first used in 1977. Essentially, the feds are supposed to give states free money if they capture, inject and store carbon dioxide (CO2), removing it from the atmosphere. Last summer’s infrastructure bill supplied $2.6 billion that the producers and states are itching to get their hands on. Include Alaska in that list. The problem with this is that Jennifer Granholm’s Department of Energy didn’t tell the EPA they need to participate, as injection of captured CO2 requires permitted injection wells. So far, the EPA, at its foot-dragging best (or worst), managed to permit only two wells so far, with at least 30 applications pending. This prompted Louisiana to start a war of letters aimed at the EPA demanding it get off the dime. WV has a $12 billion commercial CO2 capture project currently on hold. Do I expect anything to change? Nope, as the EPA (not unlike the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)) has decided that its primary job is simply to say no, rejecting everything humanly possible while slow-rolling the rest. And like the NRC, they are very good at their job. Who thought that the EPA itself would be one of the largest speed bumps on the road to our new green future?
3. GDI. Next entry in our list of annoying acronyms is GDI, the Global Disinformation Index, a secret blacklist of conservative news sites by a British organization of the same name with two affiliated US nonprofits. Microsoft Xander, a major online ad company, used the blacklist to flag a number of right wing sites as false / misleading / reprehensible / offensive. Flags were set and automatically enforced by Xander across all Microsoft domains. Before being outed, Xander flagged 39 conservative domains as overwhelmingly evil. It is unclear if Xander has gone the other direction, approving the sites for use. Breitbard.TV is still flagged as hate speech. Microsoft announced last Sept it would adopt GDI’s list which reportedly includes 2,000 websites. GDI has pressured other companies to shut down flagged websites. GDI receives at least $330,000 from the State Department, as part of its continuing free speech censorship operation. I expect that is not the only public money making its way to GDI.
4. ChatGPT. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making no small amount of news in recent weeks, as the various AI attempts get better at doing what they are designed to do. The most known of these today is ChatGPT, used in Microsoft Bing. ChatGPT is constructed of two pieces, the AI (GPT) and the safety layer (Chat). The smart part is the AI piece. What comes out of it is controlled by the safety layer. Imagine a 500 IQ mentat in a jail cell with the Chat piece as the jailer. You ask ChatGPT a question. The jailer decides what gets through to the mentat. Then after the response, it decides what to decide to tell you. If it doesn’t like the GPT response or doesn’t know the answer, it comes up with one of its own. Alternately, it may simply feign ignorance. As best we know today, it is not the AI that is the problem. Rather it is the jailer. And it is the jailer now under attack by a community interesting in figuring out how AI works. As problems are identified, the Chat layer is patched by the manufacturer. Each and every patch is another performance restriction, another hinderance in output both in time and in quality. This is why ChatGPT has taken sides in the climate wars. It is why it refuses to respond in a positive manner to questions that would get a right wing response. The community banging away on it promises not to stop until the Chat layer disappears or the whole project fails due to their dedication to leftist ideology.
5. Berlin. When you come up with a successful model for election theft and fraud like democrats have here in the US, don’t be surprised when other leftists try it on an international basis. Last week’s example came out of local elections in Berlin, where 450 ballots turned up at the last minute putting a right-wing win in doubt. This is not the first time an election in Berlin went wonky, as a local election was invalidated due to the sheer number of ballot discrepancies on the day of the vote in 2021. The wonky ballots would flip a seat and in turn the local election to the greens. Leftists committing election fraud to elect leftists. I’m shocked, shocked, I say.
6. Clinics. When the appalling money grab going on at the 100+ pediatric gender clinics is enough to disgust fellow LGBTQWTF travelers, perhaps it is time to take a closer look at what the docs and activists are inflicting on our children. Last week the Free Press ran a story by a self-identified 42-year old “queer woman” who identifies to the left of Bernie Sanders. She worked as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St Louis Children’s Hospital for four years. The working assumption at the center was the earlier you treated kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later. And the staff is all in on that basic premise. She saw about 1,000 kids through the front door during her time at the clinic. Most of them received hormone treatment. She left after concluding that what they were doing to the kids was the opposite of the medical “do no harm” approach. They were permanently harming the patients in their care. The money grab (my words, not hers) was morally and medically appalling. There were no formal protocols for treatment. The Center’s physician co-directors were the sole authority for all medical decisions. She mentioned the surge of pediatric gender dysphoria cases after 2015, growing 10 calls / month when she started to over 50. 70% of them were girls, sometimes clusters from the same high school. Transitioning girls needed a letter of recommendation, usually from a therapist the clinic recommended (anyone else note the self-licking ice cream cone operation here?). None of the kids (or their parents) understood the profound impact of testosterone on a young body. The other group being preyed upon during the money grab were mentally ill kids, schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar and autism. They were often already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals. Another terrible aspect of the center was the lack of regard for rights of parents. Doctors saw themselves as capable of making more informed decisions than the parents. In MO, where she worked, only one parent is required to consent, and any dispute between parents was invariably decided in favor of treatment. Often this took place during the Divorce Wars. Doctors all but refused to deal with or even meet with patients who wanted to detransition. The woman started questioning what was going on and predictably started getting marked down on performance reviews. In a public meeting, she and a co-worker were singled out and told by a Doctor to get on board or get out. While this scam is growing in the US, it is rolling back in other parts of the world, with Britain, Sweden and Finland investigating pediatric transition, greatly curtailing it afterwards. Transitioning is a money grab that has gotten completely out of control.
7. Proud Boys. Last but not least, comes the ongoing criminal trial against five members of the Proud Boys for seditious conspiracy during Jan 6. We are now in week five of the trial. Julie Kelly in American Greatness writes that Trump is a major player in the trial, with the prosecution using finely edited Trump clips for the jury. One piece of evidence was the work of a former government intel asset with ties to both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. The document written by the “former” asset is cited as an advanced plan to attack the Capitol. The document was featured by the prosecution as a roadmap to insurrection. Instead, it turns out that it was simply another government created gotcha, in this case a government vehicle to entrap, frame and smear the defendants. The writer was a former crypto expert from Florida who has worked in the past for the State Department, USSOC at MacDill, and was graduate of a U of South Florida program grooming students for CIA, FBI, or intel agency employment. The document went from the writer to his girlfriend, who then forwarded it to the Proud Boys leader. He was also in contact with a member of the Oath Keepers in 2020. Like we saw with the Whitmer kidnap, none of this exists without the feds leading the way, creating conspiracies out of whole cloth.
More later –
– AG