Tag Archives: culture

Progressive Idiocy

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The New York City Council is striking again. These wonders are pushing their cutely named Choose 2 Reuse bill, which

aims to improve sustainability in the restaurant business, but would add some friction to a customer experience that is typically defined by its convenience. Consumers would be asked to later return their reusable food containers, knives, forks, and chopsticks either through delivery or logistics partners who come to pick them up or in person via receptacles at participating restaurants. The bill doesn’t require reusable beverage containers.

It’s interesting that the City Council excludes beverage containers. There was a time when beverage containers—soda bottles, for instance—could be returned for a return of a deposit paid when the (sodas) were sold, a practice that enabled more than a few boys and girls to earn a bit of extra money by collecting up the bottles and doing the return. And there never was a problem cleaning the then-glass bottles for reuse, nor was there a liability problem arising from the reuse of inadequately cleaned bottles.

That sort of thing fell into disfavor when tin, and later aluminum, cans proved easier and cheaper to manufacture (and wend their way through the bottling process)—and far from being one-use disposable, they could be recycled through a different chain.

Now NYC is bent on reverting to that greater cost—never minding that one-use food containers for takeout are easily manufactured for breakdown and return to the soil when disposed of in landfills. Or in many jurisdictions, converted to mulch for DIY gardeners. Or recycled for yet other non-food related uses.

Now, in addition to the added costs inflicted on restaurants and consumers alike, the Wonders of the Council also want to expose the city’s restaurants to liability through suits centered on real or imagined food poisoning from allegedly inadequately cleaned-for-reuse containers and utensils. Even stipulating that utensils would no longer be included (presumably by restaurant choice; nothing in the proposed bill suggests this)—requiring consumers to use their own—the containers would need to be made sturdy enough to survive the restaurant’s dishwashers—or to survive the consumers’ dishwashers, should they be offered a discount for doing the cleaning for the restaurant. And which the restaurant would have no guarantee that the consumer had cleaned the containers well enough to meet the government standards imposed on the restaurant.

BlackRock Misses Again

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The Woke BlackRock, and especially its CEO Larry Fink, are not just wide of the mark, they’ve missed the target altogether. Not only does the company push its intrinsically racist and sexist “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology onto those companies in which it invests—often for the sole purpose of the push; investment quality being irrelevant—now it’s been caught out applying its racism and sexism in its internal hiring practices.

America First Legal Foundation sent a letter Tuesday to the New York District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to demand an investigation into the asset management giant for allegedly “engaging in unlawful employment practices in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
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“This program is just one piece of a long-term practice of BlackRock to use unlawful discriminatory employment practices to build its workforce,” the complaint stated. “Indeed, BlackRock has affirmatively and repeatedly represented to its shareholders, to its investors, and to the Securities and Exchange Commission, that its employment practices are infused with facially unlawful considerations of race, color, sex, and/or national origin.”

AFL added in a separate communication,

The odious and illegal practice of hiring based on immutable characteristics like race is a flagrant attack on civil rights that harms all Americans[.]

I’ll go further: it’s an insult to those minorities and women; BlackRock and Fink are saying that minorities and women are intrinsically inferior, inherently too stupid, to be able to compete without the special treatment and coddling that is preferential, DEI-based hiring.

There’s no doubt that there remains a disparity, especially in STEM environments, between white hiring into good-paying jobs and minority and women hiring into those jobs. But that disparity won’t be cured by preferentially hiring minorities and women; they still too often aren’t qualified for the positions, so they fail and set the program, and the hiring company, back.

The correction for the disparity lies in a factor that’s at the foundation of our nation: equal opportunity. That equality of opportunity doesn’t currently exist in our education system (among other milieus); see for a canonical example, the Baltimore, MD, school system’s failure and subsequent coverup by those responsible.

If BlackRock and similar entities put the money and energy they’re currently committing to push wokeness into improving our educational system (without the Woke…foolishness) and getting our children taught—from pre-K through high school—science, technology, engineering, and math, along with American history, Civics (and more of this than a single semester in junior high), Western Civilization, logic, and literature, with equal emphasis on inner city schools and wealthy district schools, those disparities would disappear in a generation.

 

The letter itself can be read at the first link above.

20th Century Bigotry Updated

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined on the fraud that’s rampant—and hard to root out—in Federal programs intended to give a special leg up on project awards to “Disadvantaged Business Enterprises.” They closed their piece with this bit of truism on the…foolishness…of singling out government-favored groups of Americans for special treatment.

Trying to do social engineering via civil engineering makes federal projects opaque, inefficient and—far too often—dishonest.

To which I add, it’s also just another way for the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party to repeat—updated for the 21st century—the segregationist bigotry of the middle of the last century.

Defenseless

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Wisconsin State Congressman Scott Allen is proposing a state law that would give local school boards the ability to decide for themselves whether to allow firearms in their districts rather than being hamstrung (in several senses) by a Statewide ban on firearms in all schools. Allen, on the origin of his bill:

This bill came about at the request of the Germantown School Board who wrote that the “gun free school zone” signs do nothing but notify a criminal that there will be few, if any, people in the building that can defend themselves. Schools provide soft targets for those looking to do harm, and this bill gives school boards the option to change that.

That’s a pretty sensible step toward Wisconsin’s citizens being able to defend themselves and their children until the second responders, the police, arrive on the scene just a very few minutes later. Those very few minutes are when the shooter’s butchery occurs unless the first responders, the citizens already present, can defend.

Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democratic Party Governor, Tony Evers, says otherwise.

This bill shouldn’t make it to my desk—but if it does, I’ll veto it. Plain and simple. I already vetoed Republicans’ bill to allow loaded guns on school grounds because increasing firearms on school grounds won’t make our schools or our kids safer. So, let me be clear: I’ll veto any bill that weakens Wisconsin’s gun-free school zone law. Period.

Evers doesn’t take Germantown’s school board seriously; he wants that Gun-Free Zone sign posted and that exposure proclaimed. Evers is showing that he doesn’t want common sense firearm laws, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Evers is insisting, instead, that he wants Wisconsin’s schools to be target zones for shooters.

Evers plainly wants Wisconsin’s school children, teachers, and school staff to be as defenseless in those critical minutes as is his gun control ideology.

Rogue Judge

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A couple of teachers had the impudence to demur from compulsory “antiracism training” imposed by their Springfield Public Schools district managers.

In response, US District Judge Douglas Harpool, of the Western District of Missouri, not only ruled against the teachers, he ordered them to pay $313,000 in legal costs for bothering the district, and he did this cavalierly disregarding their arguments and issuing his ruling via summary judgment—which means the court—Harpool—never really took the case up, or took it seriously. He wrote in pertinent part, as summarized by Just the News:

They have not provided evidence they were compelled to “speak favorably” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.

Never mind that the very parts that Harpool cited demonstrates the compulsory nature of the requirement not to speak unfavorably about the district’s “message” and not to remain unaffiliated or unassociated with the district’s “message.” That pressure to not be unaligned or to not speak unfavorably is exactly the compulsion to speak favorably and to align. The fact that the beratement went unchallenged by the program’s instructors or the district’s managers further emphasizes the compulsory nature of the district’s “message.”

This is a Federal judge who needs to be removed from the bench forthwith. He has shown himself not just incapable of, but openly refusing to, adjudicating a case objectively and on the basis of the facts and statute(s) presented. Instead, Harpool reigns over his court on the basis of his personal agenda.

Harpool’s ruling can be read here.