Tag: DEI

And … I’m Back

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“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”  Huzzah! I’m back.  Like a Phoenix rising over Arizona.  Like Prometheus released from his cruel shackles I am back again!

Now what to discuss?  Of course, Jason Arday!

I mean this story is practically unbelievable.  Arday was the poster boy for DEI overreach.  Someone who was illiterate until he was eighteen was given a doctorate and then made the youngest black professor at Cambridge University with a dissertation that was plagiarized from the work of another black doctoral candidate.  And then there are the outrageous lies on his resume and about his private life including the statement that he ran 30 marathon races in 35 days with six of them on a broken leg.  He claimed to be a college instructor in Ohio at a college that had no knowledge of him at all.  He even claims to have had brain cancer without anyone else having ever heard of it.  And after being exposed as a fraud he has now, apparently committed suicide.

Presently, the Left is attempting to frame the people that uncovered his various frauds as his murderers.  A few have started describing his death as a “lynching.”  Well, I have an alternative opinion.  My underlying thesis is that DEI as it is currently perpetrated in academia is responsible for Arday getting into the terrible mess he suicided over.  If his thesis advisor had checked his work against the other published works in his field they would have discovered that he was a plagiarist.  In fact if they had bothered to check his references they would have known that several of them were fake.  And based on the comments by several of his students who have come forward, Arday was absurdly unqualified to teach in his discipline and should have been close to being discharged by the university already.  The fact that the department that gave him his doctorate degree didn’t acknowledge how woefully unqualified he was to teach at Cambridge proves that he was being hired as a DEI figurehead to show Cambridge’s commitment to social justice even at the cost of depriving his students of a decent education in that subject matter.  So DEI at Cambridge is responsible for Arday’s mess and is therefore the root cause for his death.

Now, Arday is only one of several black academicians recently exposed for plagiarism and other fraudulent practices.  This recent trend seems to have as its source a willingness of honest academicians to admit that “the emperor has no clothes.”  Colleagues who have watched as universities rewarded black academicians for substandard work now see that it is safe to speak up.  And now that they have, the truth has penetrated into the open and more and more cases will surface.

Jason Arday had a wife and two children.  His death is a catastrophe for them.  I take no pleasure in it.  But if his wife is looking to start a lawsuit then Cambridge University is the logical defendant to sue.  They should be punished for allowing plagiarism and fraud to be their public policy.

 

Coming to a Theater Near You

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I was watching a movie from the 1980s (Moonstruck) with Camera Girl tonight.  I’ve been busy with book marketing for the last month and it’s been a grind.  So, I sat down after dinner and we just enjoyed the show.  It’s a ridiculous romantic comedy with Cher and Nicholas Cage as the couple and a veteran cast of character actors with New York City as the backdrop.  It’s an absurd movie but it’s genuinely funny and it means no harm.

And I found myself enjoying the movie immensely.  Afterwards I tried to figure out why.  First off it was about 1980s America; a place where normal life proceeded and people were generally happy.  And secondly, the movie was well made.  It wasn’t deathless prose.  It wasn’t profound.  It was silly.  But it was good-hearted and the script, the acting and the production were professional and enjoyable to watch.

But why should that be such a big deal?  And then it hit me.  Nothing that has come out of Hollywood in the last five or ten years has been any good.  Everything is poorly made and poorly written and poorly acted.  Nothing makes you laugh or cry or even think.  It’s all dreck.  And that’s crazy!

And it occurred to me that this won’t go on forever.  Someone is going to step forward and make something good.  And I think what they’ll do is break the rules.

Someone is going to refuse to only hire DEI writers and DEI actors and DEI directors and instead they’ll hire the old white guys who used to make stuff in Hollywood and used to make us laugh and cry and think.  It’s a cinch those guys haven’t all died in the last ten years and I’m sure they could use the work.  I’m sure they haven’t forgotten how to ply their trades.  All it will take is someone with enough money to put together a production crew (outside of Los Angeles) and has the nerve to make a movie about the America we used to make movies about.  And it doesn’t have to be a period piece about the 1950s when everyone was white.  There can even be some immigrants in the cast.  After all the problem isn’t having non-white people in a movie.  It’s about the writer and director hating white men so hard that they have to make believe they don’t exist.

It’s a funny thing.  The eastern and southern European immigrants who came to this country at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t look like the English and northern European people who were already established here and from whom the movie characters were selected.  Blond haired, blue-eyed stars weren’t them.  But they could be stand-ins for the dreams that those immigrants had about being prosperous and happy in their adopted country.  They had enough imagination to realize that the American dream was transferrable to people who chased the American dream.  Work hard, follow the rules and dream big.  It was aspirational to watch Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne as a cowboy saving the day and winning the girl.  Hating on Anglo-Americans made no sense.

Well, that’s what needs to happen again.  Aspirational movies with Americans acting like Americans and not apologizing for being smart and successful is what we should be seeing on the screen.  And there shouldn’t be any DEI box checkers making sure there are the correct number of interracial couples or black lesbian brain surgeons in the story line.  Of course, 2026 is the year that Christopher Nolan is casting a black woman as Helen of Troy in his Odyssey.  Well at least it wasn’t a trans-woman.  But I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer.  I can wait because I know it’s coming to a theater near me soon.

Star Trek – Starfleet Academy – A Rant

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Paramount spent somewhere north of a hundred million dollars on a tv series called “Star Trek – Starfleet Academy.”  I guess they realized after the fact that it was unwatchable and so they put the first episode on YouTube for free.  But nobody watched it.  Now that’s an exaggeration.   Technically thirteen hundred (1,300) people viewed it.  But on YouTube that’s equivalent to zero.

So basically, they spent a hundred million dollars on something that no one wants to see.

If you watch the trailer you’ll understand why.  Starfleet Academy seems to be made up of fat lesbians.  Some are human, some are alien but all of them are fat and all of them are lesbians.  Once again this is an exaggeration.  They also have Holly Hunter as the captain or head schoolmarm or something.  And I believe there is a gay Klingon.  So, yay.

Just as with Star Wars, Star Trek has finally reached the epitome of destruction.  Over the course of the last sixty years or so it went from a mildly entertaining sci-fi adventure series to a Woke DEI Struggle Session.  Well, who wouldn’t pay to see that?

As with Star Wars, the makers of this new show miscalculated something about the audience and their products.  And it’s this:  The audience that enjoys the “message” they’re pushing in these shows doesn’t like science fiction.  And the audience that likes science fiction doesn’t like their “message.”  It’s like that day in math class where they explain Venn diagrams and unions and intersections and all that jazz.  Well, the circle of people who like the message and the circle of people who like science fiction do not intersect at all; open space between the blue and red circles.  No purple.

This show was green-lit before Paramount was purchased by David Ellison.  He isn’t woke.  I’m guessing that losing a hundred million dollars on a show nobody wants to see is going to make him very mad.  Hopefully this will result in the series being cancelled and the team responsible for this travesty being fired.

Coincidentally, Kathleen Kennedy has just been fired from running Lucas Films over at Disney.  It was described as her desire to get back to personally producing pictures for Disney but I’m pretty sure they’ve had enough of her “golden touch.”  She singlehandedly incinerated the Star Wars brand and lost many hundreds of millions of dollars at Disney by doing the same thing that the Star Trek franchise did.  They made a Star Wars brand for girls and girls don’t like science fiction.

Well, here we are.  A decade into the complete feminization of action adventure and all the major franchises have been rendered toxic and unwatchable.  Even the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been losing money on its girl-boss outreach program.  Now what?

I guess we’re all hoping that losing all that money will finally get the studios to step back and reflect.  We’re about to find out.  Summer 2026 is right around the corner and we can expect to get some kind of answer from the tent pole summer movie list.  If it’s more estrogen laden, DEI boiler plate then I guess they still have some more money to burn.  But I can always hope.

Women in the Military – God Help Us

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I saw two stories today about the military and both of them were associated in one way or another with women and DEI.

The first one has to do with Defense Secretary Hegseth’s orders to force women to pass the same physical fitness tests as men for combat and other physically challenging roles.

You would think this should already be in place since women claim not to be inferior to men in any way.  But reality rears its ugly head and now this will essentially eliminate 99.9% of female candidates from the special forces organizations and a very large chunk of women from even basic combat roles.

This is one of the first things I see happening in the Trump administration that I can point to as a clear improvement on the status quo.  Ever since Obama the military has been woke and women in command positions has been a big part of the problem.  Hopefully now a lot of combat officer positions will be restricted to men and that should have a very positive effect on our combat capability.  Now if there are women who are physically capable of pulling their own weight in combat circumstances, I don’t necessarily think they should be in combat roles.  There are other problems with mixing women and men in close physical quarters.  But at the very least eliminating women who aren’t strong enough to fight from the equation is a big plus.

The second story is a NY Times article about the investigation of the crash of the Black Hawk helicopter and the civilian airliner near Ronald Reagan airport.

https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/black-hawk-pilot-rebecca-lobach-ignored-key-instruction-before-dc-crashreportclaims-article-151511950

The first item is that the pilot was a woman who was performing a periodic training flight to maintain her flight status.  The article says she had 500 hours of flying experience at that time.  But the most disturbing aspect of the article was the statement that the control tower had warned her of the collision danger and her trainer told her to change course to the left to avoid the collision and she did not.  She had fifteen seconds to change course and she did not.  In addition, the female pilot had some linkage to the Biden White House.  I didn’t see any details about what her role was.  But that immediately raised a red flag in my mind.

So, it’s very easy for me to immediately take these details and say that this disaster was caused by DEI.  Is that fair?  I don’t know, but as a first approximation I think it’s a reasonable starting hypothesis.  If even the NY Times is throwing this woman under the bus, then who am I not to cast the second stone?  And this goes hand in hand with a number of stories I’ve read of women in the military whose aircraft and naval vessel piloting have been less than adequate.  When I think of Camera Girl behind the wheel of her car and all the times I’ve told her to go left and she’s gone right (or other-left as she calls it) I get the sense that DEI can be a recipe for disaster.

Well, anyway, Pete Hegseth, keep going the way you are.  Put women back in the kitchen and the nursery and everyone will be that much safer and happier.

Update:

Here’s another more detailed article about the female helicopter pilot.