When Public Safety Agencies Reduced Physical Requirements for Employees Doing Jobs Requiring Strength...

Would you have expected it to go this far?

I am sure there are valuable jobs this short and clearly weak woman could have done for EMS, but this was not one of them.

Can We Just Abandon the Pretense That Affirmative Action and DEI Are to Pick Equally Qualified Applicants of Victim Groups?

6/27/25 College Fix has links to emails leaked by whistleblowers at Cornell:

"In the first whistleblower email, dated Dec. 2020, the STEM department chair begins with explaining their conversations with a DEI dean and “our hoped-for diversity hire” and how they want to do something “a little out of the ordinary.”

"It goes on to state “the best is to invite just one person” and “…not have that person in competition with others.”"

Essentially an admission that victim group members cannot handle competition with other applicants who are not designated victims.

The medical school was even worse:

"“A snapshot archived on August 27, 2024, shows that: ‘[d]epartments are eligible for up to $50,000 in subsidies for the hiring of faculty from groups that are underrepresented in medicine (URiM),’ with additional funds for hiring two URiM candidates.”"

Imagine if white racists ever became dominant voices in academia (right after the pigs fly over campus) and they adopted an internal policy of disregarding applicants unable to write an adequately white supremacist manifesto. 

The only way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating.

How Did I Miss This?

3/27/25 Fox News:

"FIRST ON FOX: Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) terminated more than $330 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and gender research in the state of California alone, Fox News Digital learned Thursday. ...

 ""Harnessing the power of text messaging to reduce HIV incidence in adolescent males across the United States," one $5,122,427 grant that was awarded to a nonprofit called the Center for Innovative Public Health Research reads, Fox Digital learned. 

"Sex hormone effects on neurodevelopment: Controlled puberty in transgender adolescents," was the title of a terminated $3,692,048 grant to Stanford University, according to HHS. 

""#TranscendentHealth – Adapting an LGB+ inclusive teen pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys," reads another $1,319,024 grant awarded to the Center for Innovative Public Health Research. 

The University of California, San Francisco's $2,554,402 grant for "Structural Racism and Discrimination in Older Men's Health Inequities" also was canceled, Fox Digital learned, as was a $822,539 grant to UCLA called "Buddhism and HIV Stigma in Thailand: An Intervention Study."'

Will starving academics turn to robbery?

What's in a Word?

5/1/25 NPR reports that Department of Education is cutting $1 billion in grants to school districts for hiring mental health workers because of DEI.

"In the email Fialkiewicz received, notifying him of the grant's end, the department wrote that the efforts funded by the grant violate federal civil rights law, "conflict with the Department's policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education; undermine the well-being of the students these programs are intended to help; or constitute an inappropriate use of federal funds."

"When asked if diversity played any role in his district's grant application, Fialkiewicz replied:

"Yes, in our application, we did state, because it was part of the requirements, that we would use equitable hiring practices. And that's exactly what we did. And to me, equitable hiring practices means you hire the best person for the job. That's equitable."

While i am generally supportive of making sure mental health services are widely available,  this explanation from Mr. Fialkiewicz does not fly.  

"Equity" is progressive dog-whistle for equal results based on race.  That is why it replaced the phrase "equal opportunity."

Remember When Trump Blamed the Crash on DEI?

He may have been right, in part.  There are a number of factors that played a role, but this excerpt from 4/27/25 New York Times does not look good:

"The helicopter crew appeared to have made more than one mistake. Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course."

Maybe a straight male or straight female would not have felt the need to ignore her flight instructor to prove superiority.  With nothing to prove, taking instruction would not have been an issue.

Historical Ignorance and Racism

10/24/25 Seattle Times:

"The case centers on the Covenant Homeownership Program, which state lawmakers approved last year in an effort to address the lasting effects of racist housing policies from the early 1900s. Among them are racially restrictive covenants that often limited properties to only white buyers and are present in the records of tens of thousands of properties across the state."

Racially restrictive covenants have not been lawfully enforceable since Shelley v. Kramer (1948).  It has been 77 years.  There are likely no more than dozen people in the U.S. who suffered any direct injury by these CC&Rs, even though many deeds still have these unenforceable clauses in them.  At most there are some people who grew up in homes purchased by parents who were excluded from what used to be called "exclusive neighborhoods," before this became realtorese for "nice places to live."

For the same reason that Shelley struck down these covenants,  this law that provides 0% mortgages and $120K down payments with no obligation to repay is a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Watch the DEI crowd argue that racial discrimination is not only permissible but mandatory to achieve racial justice.

Even better,  these deed restrictions often applied to Jews as well.  You will notice Jews are not eligible for this giveaway. 

Panic in the Ivory Tower

Idaho S1198 is a DEI ban bill primarily aimed an discrimination in training, employment, promotion, and classroom indoctrination.  It has a list of naughty words and phrases which will be familiar to you:

What is causing the panic?  Classes in some departments use some of these phrases and concepts as a fundamental part of the curriculum.  While some are, or should be, offensive to thinkers of any discipline ("white fragility," "internalized racism) others have some merit as concepts such as intersectionality: individuals are more than just one group identity.  Ms. A is not just black or female: she has multiple characteristics.  You know things that all together make her her an individual.  (Now that is a scary thought in some fields: individuals, not member of a group.  This might require some explication in a classroom.)  This discussion of intersectionality from Vox makes the point that conservative opposition to it is not based on the validity of the original theory but its use:

"In my conversations with right-wing critics of intersectionality, I’ve found that what upsets them isn’t the theory itself. Indeed, they largely agree that it accurately describes the way people from different backgrounds encounter the world. The lived experiences — and experiences of discrimination — of a black woman will be different from those of a white woman, or a black man, for example. They object to its implications, uses, and, most importantly, its consequences, what some conservatives view as the upending of racial and cultural hierarchies to create a new one."

This is always a problem.  Abstract theories (such as the Marxian emphasis on economics as a driver of history) may be fine in themselves if tempered with other possible causes.  How those abstract theories are implemented can means millions worked and frozen to death.  It is hard to ignore how that theory is implemented when writing laws.

But the bill specifically exempts from these provisions: an "academic course offered for credit and not otherwise subject to subsection (2)(f). [which requires students to enroll in DEI-related courses].  It is not clear to me that that instruction in academic courses is impacted by this language.  It is a complex and at times unclear bill (Idaho legislators are not prone to clear language).

I am going to write Gov. Otter and suggest a signing statement such as presidents have used for some decades to express an understanding that this law does not apply to classes in which discussions of diversity are incidental to the primary focus of the class.

This Will Not Help Her DEI Goals

2/21/25 Los Angeles Times:

"Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has fired Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley over the chief’s handling of the Palisades fire.

“Acting in the best interests of Los Angeles’ public safety, and for the operations of the Los Angeles Fire Department, I have removed Kristin Crowley as Fire Chief,” Bass said in a statement Friday. “We know that 1,000 firefighters that could have been on duty on the morning the fires broke out were instead sent home on Chief Crowley’s watch.”

“Furthermore, a necessary step to an investigation was the President of the Fire Commission telling Chief Crowley to do an after action report on the fires. The Chief refused. These require her removal,” Bass continued. “The heroism of our firefighters — during the Palisades fire and every single day — is without question. Bringing new leadership to the Fire Department is what our city needs.”

Yes, not having enough firefighters and trucks available during Santa Anas is gross incompetence.   No matter how cool it makes Los Angeles appear.

I Blogged About This Last Year

We do not know if the controllers at DCA were  hired under this DEI program but it is insane that these criteria existed instead of hiring based on merit. This is the archived FAA page:

"The FAA meets the goals of the PWD Program through a variety of practices:

"Targeted Disabilities
"Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring. They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.

"On-the-Spot Hiring
"A non-competitive hiring method for filling vacancies with Veterans and/or individuals with disabilities. Managers can choose to fill an open position through the On-the-Spot hiring process given they provide the required documentation for doing so."

A Real Problem Sinks into DIE

7/13/23 The Hill:

"Amid a cascade of devastating reports showing classroom test scores plummeting nationwide, U.S. students have also hit a record low in their leisure time: Casual reading has collapsed. 

"Only 14 percent of students say they read for fun every day, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report released recently, down 3 percentage points from 2020 and 13 since 2012. The report indicates 31 percent of students never or hardly ever read for fun."

All fine as far as it goes but:

"Miah Daughtery, the vice president of academic advocacy focused on literacy at NWEA, a nonprofit research organization, points to tracking by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center that shows a lack of diversity in published authors.

“If we take a look at it from a publishing perspective, the books that are even being published reflect a really small percentage of what’s available to students that reflect the balance of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, then you layer on top of that disorder that national conversation and rhetoric and I would even say insistence on book challenges and bans,” Daughtery said. “So all of those things together are not creating strong conditions that would consistently encourage independent reading.”

So white kids will not read Up From Slavery?  Can we get past this irrational focus on race?