This summer we stayed in a hotel that was hosting a Knanaya Catholic Congress of North America convention. There were some very fine people attending the KCCNA convention, but others couldn’t resist partying until 4 or 5 am in the hallway outside our room and there were elevator issues. I decided to see if there was a way to contact Marriott’s “unhappy customer” line. Here’s the “Customer Care” section of the Bonvoy app:
What is the #1 concern of a hotel guest who requests “care”? “Where Can I Find Information on Diversity & Inclusion?”
First time at the Oshkosh airshow for United Airlines. Their senior captains did some yanking and banking in a 777 in front of the crowd. The most frightening maneuver was approaching the crowd (west side of the runway) from the east in a dive and then climbing over the crowd. Some years ago I was in one of the jump seats of an empty Boeing 757 being ferried out of JFK and the captain put the plane into a 40-degree bank so that a friend on the ground could get a photo. The avionics were unhappy, shouting “bank angle, bank angle” repeatedly.
As the plane carved up the sky, the United announcer proudly disclosed the quota-based hiring policy for the company’s new flying school. Only 20 percent of the slots would be available for white males while 80 percent would be allocated to “women” (however that term is defined by the airline’s team of biologists) and “people of color” (however that term is defined by the airline’s team of diversity consultants). Curiously, there is no quota for student pilots who identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+. Numerous folks sitting near me grumbled angrily on hearing the airline’s plan of sex- and race-based discrimination. It is unclear why United thought that this message would be warmly received by the audience at Oshkosh. General aviation is overwhelmingly white, male, old, and conservative. The young people there who talked about pursuing a dream of professional aviation were also overwhelmingly white and male (i.e., they’d have to fight for the 20 percent scrap at the United school). Here’s the United AVIATE booth within the “EAA Career Center”:
It seems that United has taken over Lufthansa’s old school in Goodyear, Arizona, perhaps because Lufthansa could no longer get students in and out due to coronapanic. Cirrus SR20s with air conditioning are used for primary training.
If United were serious about diversifying its pilot group, the company would offer a “no-overnight” schedule (see Ryanair: airline that is not a hotel customer for how the world’s lowest cost airline does this). Right now, the only people who can consider flying for the U.S. airlines are people who are willing to be away from friends and family up to 22 days per month (trending down to 10 or 11 for the most senior pilots in a seat, but it can take decades to reach this level of seniority as a captain at a major U.S. airline). This makes it a terrible job for anyone who might become a parent. When the mostly-at-home spouse files the inevitable divorce lawsuit, he/she/ze/they is a slam-dunk winner to obtain primary custody, a free house, and a river of child support cash under a typical U.S. state’s family law that looks to see “who was the primary historical caregiver of these now-lucrative children?” How many women want to fly around for a few years and then spend the rest of their lives paying a former husband to hang out at home with what used to be her kids plus some new sex partners from Tinder?
If we visit the EAA official merchandise market, we can learn that pilot and astronaut are already jobs held exclusively by females.
Airplane constructor is also exclusively a woman’s job, according to EAA’s merchandise selection. Here is the only plane-builder featured:
Pilots identifying as “women” can get a free T shirt and participate in a variety of exclusive events at Oshkosh under the rubric of WomenVenture, a 15-year-old event started just in time for the term “women” to become undefined. As a measure of progress, what had been the “innovation” pavilion at Oshkosh, showcasing new technologies, is now the “WomenVenture Center” (complete with pink theme).
Meanwhile, gender ID is somewhat less fraught at the SOS Brothers tent, “BeerVenture” until some litigation with EAA forced a re-titling. Here are the “bikini bartenders” that EAA complained about in its lawsuit:
Our Florida neighborhood, which has no “immigrants welcome” signs, is now home to at least two groups of Ukrainian refugees (mother-child in both cases). That’s out of a sample of about 200 houses and apartments.
Our former neighborhood, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has more than 2,000 homes and perhaps 4,000 “migrants welcome” signs (squeezed in among the rainbow flags, BLM banners, In This House We Believe… laundry lists, and #StopAsianHate memes). The Ukrainian refugee count there? According to friends who still live in Lincoln… zero.
Readers: What’s the story in your own neighborhoods? Have you met any displaced Ukrainians or does the war remain an abstraction for you?
Related:
If you’re looking for a way to help Ukrainians and don’t want to copy me by giving money to displaced Ukrainians and/or their hosts (part of my overall offer to pay for food to anyone who says that he/she/ze/they support expanded immigration and are willing to host migrants in their own homes), you can look at The Bond of Sports Foundation (disclosure: I am actually a board member of this 501c3 corporation, the first of whose core values is “empathy” so you know that I am a huge contributor in non-monetary ways)
Although I don’t like to sort people by skin color, I have noticed that we interact much more frequently with Black and Latinx people here in Florida than we did in Massachusetts. Everyone who worked on our house in Massachusetts was white, for example, while folks in the service industries here come in a rainbow of skin tones, often within the same crew. For white suburbanites in Boston, Black people might as well be aliens. They exist on a different planet and interactions are uncommon, even in service settings.
Although Florida has a higher percentage of Black residents, the difference is not large enough to explain our experience. I’m wondering if the explanation can be found in the states’ respective welfare systems. CATO’s Work versus Welfare Trade-Off 2013:
In Massachusetts, unless a person puts a $0 value on leisure time, being a successful welfare entrepreneur is vastly smarter, from an economic point of view, than working at the median salary. The spending power of the welfare recipient is 118 percent of the worker’s and that’s before considering cash income that the welfare recipient might obtain from under-the-table work and also discounts to EBT cardholders.
How about in Florida? The same chart shows that Florida is one of the worst states for enjoying the welfare lifestyle (unless you love the beach!). At least as of 2013, a welfare recipient in Florida enjoyed only about 41 percent of the spending power of a worker. Therefore, it is not economically rational to spend multiple generations on welfare unless one puts a very high value on leisure time/Xbox.
Whatever the reason, I think it is good for our kids to see that the well-paid guy who runs a paver restoration business happens to be Black while his helper is white.
Separately, we have learned a lot about pavers! Our patios, walks, and driveway are a mosaic of red bricks and white concrete tiles. Over time, the brick color had faded so that the contrast between these items was reduced. More seriously, tree roots had grown underneath and made the surface uneven. Cleaning up after 20 years of neglect required (1) picking up a lot of the tiles/bricks and removing all of the tree roots underneath, then putting everything back down again, (2) painting the bricks with “concrete stain” to restore their bright color, (3) putting new sand in between all of the bricks and tiles to hold them in place, and (4) sealing everything with clear sealer that is supposed to last 2-3 years (at which point it will just need a pressure wash and a reapplication of the sealer). Total cost to rehab 3,000 square feet of patio? $8,000. That’s 8,000 good reasons to continue being a renter!
Lunch in Little Italy, San Diego on Juneteenth (observed):
What did folks enjoying slow lunches on a Monday at the expensive restaurants have in common? Nearly all were white. It seems that Juneteeth is a holiday for members of the laptop class and for government workers and that these fortunate folks are predominantly white. Who was serving the white people who now have an extra paid day off work each year? Quite a few Black people who did not get a paid day off.
Speaking of stuff that white people in San Diego do, here’s a yacht heeling in the bay with the USS Nimitzin the background (on the actual Juneteenth):
(I too was on a sailboat on June 19. I tried to persuade a friend’s fearful 11-year-old to join by noting “Being on a boat is like being in prison, except that you can’t drown in prison.” This was not effective.)
Juneteenth is the ultimate holiday for White Supremacy — it signals that blacks were incapable of independently securing their own freedom. They needed white men to fight other white men to free the hapless blacks from slavery. The account of Lincoln coming upon blacks worshipping him as he visited the just-conquered Richmond is embarrassing to read. He begged them to get off their knees, quit their unbecoming adulation, and conduct themselves as free men.
The darker the skin colour, the less woke the person. In the same vein, the whiter the crowd, the more woke the sentiment. Wokeness is a group dynamic, not an individual phenomena. Wokeness demands group support to maintain itself.
The commenter raises a good point. Instead of a holiday celebrating an achievement by a Black person or by Black people, the holiday celebrates the actions of literal white saviors (white folks who wanted to rule the entire North American continent and therefore did not want the South to secede). Should tomorrow be called White Savior Day?
and this year… “Happy Juneteenth …TRY THE WATERMELON SALAD!!!” (TMZ): The Indianapolis Children’s Museum is in hot water after serving up a racially insensitive dish … specifically to commemorate Juneteenth.
I wanted to check on our car insurance, so I went to the progressive.com web site. The #1 priority of the company, as indicated from the position of this information on the page, is a commitment to diversity and inclusion (not actual diversity and inclusion, but a commitment). Measured by screen area and location, this commitment is roughly 100X more important than paying claims:
Communities of color are #1 in importance (gold medal in the Victimhood Olympics). The LGBTQ community takes silver at #2 (the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is simply left out). Everyone else is “marginalized”.
The NYT, under a headline about “A Transformative Justice”:
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will help make the Supreme Court look like the nation but will have little power to halt its rightward trajectory.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman confirmed to the Supreme Court, will in one sense transform it. Once she replaces Justice Stephen G. Breyer, one of the 108 white men who preceded her, the court will look a lot more like the nation it serves. … there will be two Black justices. And a Latina.
U.S. Census says that the percentage of Americans who identified as Black in 2020 was 12.4 percent. If a numerate person were setting up racial quotas for the Supreme Court, therefore, just 1 out of 9 justices (11.1 percent) would identify as Black. With 22.2 percent Black justices, for those who “see color”, the Supreme Court will actually look less like the nation it serves.
Maybe it isn’t about the skin color criterion established by President Biden, but about socioeconomics. Wikipedia says that Ketanji went to Harvard undergrad, then Harvard Law School, and is married to a surgeon from a “Boston Brahmin” (i.e., rich) family. So someone from a household containing two Harvard graduates and enjoying an income of at least $1 million per year will make the Supreme Court look like more of a cross-section of typical Americans?
Separately, let’s look at microaggressions from the world’s nerds. Microsoft Word recognizes “Ketanji” as a legitimate word/name yet here in a text area on Google Chrome it is flagged as a spelling error. (Who else on Planet Earth has a first name of “Ketanji”?)
The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday in a historic vote… Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to serve as vice president, presided over the chamber during the historic vote in her capacity as president of the Senate. … Senate Democrats and the White House have continually highlighted the historic nature of the nomination. … The Senate chamber was packed for the vote, with most senators seated at their desks for the historic occasion.
We have all just witnessed a historic event. What will change as a result of this rich Harvard graduate joining the Supreme Court?
Finally, if Ketanji Brown Jackson were to change her gender ID to “man”, thus disqualifying himself from the job under the race+gender ID criteria established by President Biden, would he be subject to impeachment? CNN seems to think that Ketanji Brown Jackson and 2SLGBTQQIA+ are related topics:
Notice the ad at right regarding a TV biography of Elizabeth Holmes, who certainly made history as the first teenage multi-billionaire founder of a chemistry company without any degree in chemistry.
Related:
“The Nation’s Latino Population Is Defined by Its Youth” (Pew): “Nearly half of U.S.-born Latinos are younger than 18” (i.e., a Supreme Court that looked more like the nation it serves should have a 20-year-old Latinx justice)
A review of salary data shows that the universities of Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, plus Virginia Tech, boast some of the highest-paid DEI staffers at public universities, a Fox News review found. These institutions’ top diversity employees earn salaries ranging from $329,000 to $430,000 – vastly eclipsing the average pay for the schools’ full-time tenured professors.
Fox implicitly considers Comparative Victimhood to be simpler than Quantum Electrodynamics and, therefore, it is not reasonable for a diversity bureaucrat to get paid 5X what a young Physics professor earns (see AIP salary calculator).
Colleges that have gone “test optional” enroll — and graduate — a higher proportion of low-income and first generation-students, and more students from diverse backgrounds, the researchers found in the study
In short, Science proves that dispensing with the SAT leads to more diversity.
Within our office, we have a dedicated research and analysis team that continuously studies our processes, outcomes, and criteria …. not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education, relative to having them, given these other inequalities
There are some helpful hashtags, including #diversity:
When we combine NPR and MIT we find that Science proves that requiring the SAT reduces diversity and also that requiring the SAT increases diversity. It is therefore not unreasonable for someone tasked with applying this Science to earn $430,000 per year at a taxpayer-funded state university.
“It’s not a requirement of law, but it’s a requirement, I think, of just some generic decency,” the president told NBC News’ Lester Holt.
President Joe Biden called out the lack of Black head coaches in the NFL in an interview that aired during the Super Bowl, saying having diverse leaders in the league is a requirement of “generic decency.”
As NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell pointed out, Biden said in an interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, “they haven’t lived up to what they committed to and lived up to being open about hiring more minorities to run teams.”
“The whole idea that a league that is made up of so many athletes of color, as well as so diverse, that there’s not enough African American qualified coaches ‘to manage these NFL teams,’ it just seems to me that it’s a standard that they’d want to live up to,” he said. “It’s not a requirement of law, but it’s a requirement, I think, of just some generic decency.”
But how many Black cabinet secretaries has Joe Biden hired? He has hired some white-looking people who identify as “women” and at least one member white member of the “men who have sex with men” (the official CDC phrase) group, perhaps proving that white women and white 2SLGBTQQIA+ are the enemies of Black advancement in the Victimhood Olympics (if a company can get equal “diversity” credit for hiring a white woman as for hiring a Black man, essentially the white woman has grabbed the quota that had previously been reserved for Blacks).
In 2019, there were 46.8 million people who self-identified as Black, making up roughly 14% of the country’s population. This marks a 29% increase since 2000, when there were roughly 36.2 million Black Americans.
If we assume that at least 20 million out of the 46.8 million identify as “women”, why can’t the entire cabinet be people who identify as Black women, a historically underrepresented group in the highest levels of American government? President Biden said “there’s not enough African American qualified coaches” was an unacceptable excuse for the NFL. Does Joe Biden expect us to believe that, with respect to cabinet jobs, there aren’t enough qualified candidates in a pool of 20 million?
