Keeping five copies on the shelf seems like an odd choice in a town where forty acres and a mule would, if available, cost more than $40 million. While my mother was in the Large Print section, I did a quick survey of the patrons and found just one who appeared to identify as “Black”.
(There’s a separate part of Palm Beach County just west of us called Jupiter Farms that isn’t part of the Town of Jupiter and a 40-acre farm there might be assembled for $10 million. Wikipedia says that roughly 1.2 percent of Jupiter Farms residents identify as Black. (The “white” population of Jupiter Farms fell between 2010 and 2020, according to the Census data in the Wikipedia page, while the overall population grew. Only a racist conspiracy theorist, however, would say that white people were being “replaced” in Jupiter Farms.))
I touched on my visit to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Is Donald Trump worse than George Washington? but I’d like to share some additional history lessons from the signage. This is a government-funded institution, so the lessons are, presumably, official State of North Carolina versions.
We learn that rich people love to laugh at peasants:
The Dutch were bad in general:
One Dutch guy was especially bad, being responsible for “Dutch expansion, exploitation, and violence” and giving Dutch people ships was bad because they used them for “violent establishment of foreign colonies”:
The English were bad settler-colonialists in North America (see previous post regarding a wall-sign biography of George Washington) and the Bostonians were especially bad, e.g., Sir William Pepperrell who was “the sole heir to a well-known merchant and enslaver in Massachusetts”:
The bird nerd is bad:
If you think that racism 200 years ago isn’t relevant, note that the National Audubon Society continues to support the party of slavery, with more than 98 percent of its political contributions going to Democrats (opensecrets.org; I think this might measure the contributions of executives and officers since a nonprofit org itself shouldn’t be donating to any political candidates).
Unlike Audubon, the museum bravely takes a stand against slavery (“deplorable”!) and “systemic racism”:
Has all of human civilization been exploitation and violence? No. Elites and peasants lived in harmony in pre-Columbian America. They danced and made music together at “communal feasts” where “diverse parts of society coexisted, sharing food and drink.”
When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor.
Andrés de Tapia, a conquistador, described two rounded towers flanking the Templo Mayor made entirely of human skulls, and between them, a towering wooden rack displaying thousands more skulls with bored holes on either side to allow the skulls to slide onto the wooden poles.
Reading these accounts hundreds of years later, many historians dismissed the 16th-century reports as wildly exaggerated propaganda meant to justify the murder of Aztec emperor Moctezuma, the ruthless destruction of Tenochtitlán and the enslavement of its people. But in 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at the Templo Mayor excavation site in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs—none other than the very skull towers and skull racks that conquistadors had described in their accounts.
While it’s true that the Spanish undoubtedly inflated their figures—Spanish historian Fray Diego de Durán reported that 80,400 men, women and children were sacrificed for the inauguration of the Templo Mayor under a previous Aztec emperor—evidence is mounting that the gruesome scenes illustrated in Spanish texts, and preserved in temple murals and stone carvings, are true.
In addition to slicing out the hearts of victims and spilling their blood on the temple altar, it’s believed that the Aztecs also practiced a form of ritual cannibalism. The victim’s bodies, after being relieved of their heads, were likely gifted to noblemen and other distinguished community members. Sixteenth-century illustrations depict body parts being cooked in large pots and archeologists have identified telltale butcher marks on the bones of human remains in Aztec sites around Mexico City.
Maybe show up for the concert, but don’t stay for dinner?
How could this have happened to a company with diverse employees and diverse suppliers? Exhibit A:
They promise to discriminate against Asian male and white male suppliers for $1 billion. Intel spent “$300M to support a goal of reaching full workforce representation of women and underrepresented minorities in our U.S. workforce by 2020” (that’s $300 million that shareholders won’t now see, apparently).
(The person wearing the Pride shirt is next to the person in Islamic attire. Is this a Queers for Palestine situation?)
Intel says “Diversity, equity, and inclusion have long been Intel’s core values and are instrumental to driving innovation and delivering strong business growth.”
If diversity drives innovation and “strong business growth,” why is Intel being left in the dust by NVIDIA, TSMC, AMD, et al.? Does TSMC have more diversity in Hsinchu than Intel can find here in the U.S.? Is diversity not a strength for Intel or not a strength for a tech company or not a strength for any company?
If Intel’s diverse employees don’t concern themselves with making money every day for the shareholders, what have the employees been focused on? The official state religion:
A long-term perspective:
If you put $100 into Intel 25 years ago, your investment would still be worth $100. pic.twitter.com/CxtnA7P8fR
(Can this be correctly adjusted for splits? Yahoo! Finance says that it is.)
Update: Intel lost 26 percent of its value by the end of the day, falling to $21.48 per share. That results in a price/earnings ratio of 22.5, a bit lower than the average for the S&P 500. Intel is a huge bargain compared to AMD, which has a P/E ratio of 160! Maybe it is time to buy Intel?
Exactly one year ago, I proposed an Oshkosh to San Francisco Tent Truck that would help those experiencing homelessness in a state where everyone with political power agrees that housing is a human right.
This year, Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order encouraging California cities to clear homeless encampments. It is unclear where unhoused Californians will go. The order merely suggests “Contacting of service providers to request outreach services for persons experiencing homelessness at the encampment.” That’s not a guarantee of shelter, certainly. CNN:
Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the parent organization of the Housing is a Human Right initiative, accused Newsom of “criminalizing poverty” and “doubling down on failed policies.”
“Governor Newsom, where do you expect people to go? This is a shameful moment in California history,” Weinstein said in a statement Thursday.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, called Newsom’s executive order “a punch in the gut.”
She said there are already thousands of people on a waitlist for housing, and all shelter beds in San Francisco are already full. Roughly 8,000 people are homeless every night in the city, which has 3,300 occupied shelter beds, Friedenbach told CNN.
Here’s a post that is being celebrated by Deplorables as evidence that Social Justice is under pressure in Corporate America:
Our customers’ trust and confidence in us are of the utmost importance to everyone at John Deere. We fully intend to earn it every day and in every way we can. pic.twitter.com/8BgyPyQJQo
If you read to the bottom however, the company promises to “continue to track and advance the diversity of our organization”. Isn’t that a promise to continue discriminating by skin color and gender ID? If they don’t discriminate how are they going to “advance” diversity?
“Our D&I commitments remain unchanged,” a Microsoft spokesperson, Jeff Jones, said in a statement. “Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering and we are holding firm on our expectations, prioritizing accountability, and continuing to focus on this work.”
One common demand from the encamped righteous has been that colleges bring in more students from “Palestine” (example in Oregon; state-sponsored NPR gives us an example from New Jersey). If we look at photos from Gaza, however, we don’t see people who dress and act like American college students. Nobody is drinking alcohol. Nobody has a pet dog (“Islam forbids Muslims to keep dogs,”). Females don’t go out without being well covered in hijab and long dress (to do otherwise would be to dress like a prostitute (BBC)). Here’s an example from UNRWA (they provided 3 million medical consultations to 2.3 million Gazans during 6 months of war, which means that it is easier to get in to see a doctor in Gaza during wartime than in the U.S. during peacetime):
Lets have a look at the encampments. Here’s one at the University of Coimbra, founded in 1290:
There were about 10 protesters (out of 25,000 students total at Portugal’s oldest university) and at least two of them had pet dogs. In the photo above, a dog is not only kept as a pet, contrary to Islam, but is allowed to walk on the sacred Palestinian flag.
Here’s the encampment at Brown:
Instead of hijabs, students who appear to identify as “female” are wearing halter tops, showing cleavage, etc.
How are students from Gaza supposed to feel welcome in this debauched environment? Shouldn’t the pro-Hamas college students demand that administrations ban alcohol (including for those over 21, e.g., at faculty and alumni events), ban immodest dress, and ban dogs from their campuses?
The evidence is clear: wherever women take part in a peace process, peace lasts longer. In fact, a peace agreement, which includes women, is 35 per cent more likely to last at least 15 years. And without the solid foundation of peace, development is doomed to be unstable and unsustainable.
A recent Secretary-General’s report to the Security Council called women leadership and participation in peacebuilding a “prerequisite for the fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” In other words, without women’s participation, we will not achieve lasting peace; and without the stability of peace, we will not achieve sustainable development.
Put forward by the Resolution 1325, the idea that women should be given greater access to leadership roles in peace and security is closely aligned with the aim of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, on gender equality and women empowerment.
When more women are empowered to lead, everyone benefits. Decades of studies show women leaders help increase productivity, enhance collaboration, inspire organizational dedication, and improve fairness.
Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.
More from the United Nations, this time a complaint that only 26 of the world’s countries have implemented McKinsey’s recommendations and selected female heads of state:
FACT: 🤯 113 countries have never had a woman Head of State and only 26 countries are led by a woman today.
Gender parity in politics is crucial for an equal future for ALL.
Given all of the above, shouldn’t we expect celebratory and congratulatory tweets from the United Nations, UN Women, McKinsey, et al. following Marine Le Pen’s recent electoral victory in France, the world’s 7th largest country by GDP (while working 32 hours/week and taking 8 weeks of vacation per year!)? Instead, the Guardian describes female leadership in France as “unthinkable”. The Washington Post says “Marine Le Pen is now part of France’s mainstream. That should scare us all.”
Separately, no discussion of France is complete without this poster:
Portugal so far has been short on what Americans would consider Social Justice. We witnessed one pro-Hamas march on a Lisbon synagogue and the number of participants (about 50) was a tiny percentage of the Lisbon metro area population (nearly 3 million). The pro-Hamas encampment at the University of Coimbra was also poorly attended (and they let a dog walk on the sacred Palestinian flag; see future post). Our almost-9-year-old’s sharp eyes spotted a single rainbow flag, rather faded, above a bar in Lisbon (i.e., that’s one rainbow flag in a 10-day period). At Portugal dos Pequenitos, a theme park of miniature houses and architectural monuments designed to delight children, the Portuguese “voyages of discovery” are presented as great achievements, not as pernicious precursors to slavery and colonization:
Does all of the above mean that I am not participating in Juneteenth? Au contraire, as they say in Lisbon! Today I tried to return a phone call from John Hancock regarding my 90-year-old mom’s insurance. I turned on my Xfinity Mobile SIM ($10 per day of usage, with a meagre 0.5 GB data allotment that one will blow through in less than a day of using Google Maps, uploading a few photos, etc.) and called John Hancock. I spent about 15 minutes dealing with their automated system before an attempt was made to connect me with a human. My reward was a recording: “Our offices are closed today in observance of Juneteenth” (this became a new paid day off for government workers in 2021; see “Biden Signs Law Making Juneteenth a Federal Holiday” (NYT)).
Readers: How did you observe Juneteenth? Were you obstructed in any of your attempts to be productive?
Here’s Joe Biden crediting Black Americans as having “led the march from slavery to freedom”, but weren’t the relevant marches for Juneteenth led by Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman? Is he saying that Grant and Sherman identified as “Black”?
I was proud to have made Juneteenth a federal holiday –
It was and will always be a testimony of and testament to the resilience of generations of Black Americans who led the march from slavery to freedom toward that more perfect union. pic.twitter.com/W3HjtwffUC
Which young Americans care enough about their fellow humans (or at least those oppressed by Jews) to camp out in support of Hamas? The rich. From “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” (Washington Monthly):
Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.
By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools.
Whatever the cause, the pattern is clear: Pro-Palestinian protests are overwhelmingly an elite college phenomenon.
A couple of charts from the article:
(Why would it be accurate to characterize these as “pro-Hamas” protests? See Talking with a pro-Hamas college student for how the expectation among the protesters is that their success will enable Hamas to rule Gaza for the foreseeable future.)
George Floyd should be alive. He deserved so much more.
Today, I join all those who loved him and all those touched by the civil rights movement he inspired in remembering the tragedy and injustice of his death.
George Floyd changed the world and we should “act in his memory”.
Readers: what have you done today (or recently) to act in George Floyd’s memory? What did this American hero do that we should also do so that our children can see an ideal way for an adult to act?
Some other things that happened on May 25 that Joe Biden isn’t talking about (source):
1241 1st attack on Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main, Germany
1784 Jews are expelled from Warsaw by Marshall Mniszek
1787 Constitutional convention opens at Philadelphia, George Washington presiding
1927 Henry Ford announces that he is ending production of the Model T Ford
1942 First commercial fluid catalytic cracking facility begins production at Exxon – now produces half the world’s gasoline, developed by the “Four Horsemen” research team at Exxon
1961 JFK announces US goal of putting a man on the Moon before the end of decade
1961 NASA civilian pilot Joseph A. Walker takes X-15 to 32,770 m
1968 Gateway Arch in St Louis dedicated
1973 US launches 1st Skylab crew Kerwin, Conrad, Weitz
1977 Original “Star Wars” movie (Episode IV – A New Hope), directed by George Lucas and starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, premieres
1979 Israel begins to return Sinai to Egypt
1986 Hands Across America – 6.5 million people hold hands from California to NY 1991 Israel evacuates 14,000 Ethiopian Jews
2017 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg receives an honorary degree from Harvard University, after dropping out in 2004 (a Harvard commencement without a pro-Hamas component!)
2018 Harvey Weinstein turns himself in to New York police to face charges of rape, a criminal sex act, sex abuse and sexual misconduct (conviction overturned in 2024)
