OT the PIT - reincarnation

Yep.

Every time you post shit like this, I think it can't get any worse. Then almost everyday you prove me wrong. I would just like to know WTF is wrong with these people.

I didn’t realize that was a question. Don’t care for Romney but I’ll take Ryan over Trump for sure. 

Yeah, naive is a common thing people associate with me 😂 Either way, I’ll take just about anyone over Trump. He’s a rude, narcissistic, egomaniac with the emotional control/intelligence of a puppy. And I never agree with the “ends justify the means” in politics…so even though I agree with Trump on probably 90% of his policies, that is why I, and many other conservatives, will never vote for him. 

There is no concern if the minority candidates merit vs whites only that they are rejected at a higher rate. Why are schools not held to this same standard? If black kids are underperforming why are more white teachers not being let go?

Washington State Patrol has reassigned its staff psychologist of nearly three decades, hiring an outside contractor to conduct evaluations for new troopers amid pressure from Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee to diversify the hiring process despite law enforcement staffing shortages across the state.

Daniel Clark, who has been the staff psychologist for the Washington State Patrol for 27 years, was removed from the role of screening new recruits after finishing up his prescheduled exams last week, the Seattle Times reported. He still remains on the staff payroll but will fulfill other duties.

Public Safety Psychological Services, a private contractor that conducts preemployment screenings for law enforcement officers, firefighters and EMS personnel, took over Monday. Washington State Patrol signed a contract with the company on Oct. 26 that lasts through June 2022.

This comes two months after the Seattle Times and public radio Northwest News Network published its review of internal Washington State Patrol data since 2017 that showed psychological screenings rejected 20% of White candidates over the past four years ending in January. That compares to rejecting 33% of Black candidates, 35% of Hispanic candidates and 41% of Asian candidates.

"I treat everybody as an individual and make my recommendations based on an individual assessment," Clark previously told the Times, explaining that he administers national written tests during his evaluations of recruits. "Psychologically, I don’t believe that there is bias."

After findings of the investigation were published, several state lawmakers, including members of the House and Senate transportation committees, which oversee the Washington State Patrol, as well as the legislature’s Members of Color Caucuses, requested a video call with the governor.

"It’s been the work we’ve been doing for a number of years, but this finally just put it out on the table for everybody to see," state Democratic Rep. Bill Ramos said. "We basically went in and said, ‘Here, look, have you read this article? Are you aware of what’s happening?’"

When contacted by Fox News Digital on Monday, Tara Lee, spokeswoman for the governor, confirmed Inslee met with state lawmakers regarding the psychological evaluations and "has urged the State Patrol to do a more comprehensive job in hiring and recruiting." She declined to get into specifics.

Chief John Batiste, who is Black, later made the decision to replace Clark. As governor, Inslee has the power to appoint and fire the chief of the state patrol.

Batiste has previously resisted pressure to remove Clark and argued that Washington State Patrol hired its first diversity, equity and inclusion officer; the latest recruit class represented a "record high" in diversity; and the agency was stepping up recruitment in communities of color, according to the newspaper. Washington State Patrol will also hire an outside auditor to conduct an estimated three- to six-month evaluation of the agency’s psychological screening process for recruits.

Washington was pegged to have the most sweeping police reform in the nation that took effect in July, over a year after demonstrations in reaction to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis swept the country. Nearly a dozen bills, passed by a legislature controlled by Democrats, cover virtually all aspects of policing, including the background checks officers undergo before they're hired; when they are authorized to use force and how they collect data about it; and the establishment of an entirely new state agency to review police use of deadly force.

Meanwhile, law enforcement departments across the state are struggling with staffing shortages, KING-TV reported. To combat the issue in Seattle, Democratic Mayor Jenny Durkan, who is not seeking a second term, issued an executive order in late October creating an immediate incentive program for the hiring of 911 dispatchers and police officers, citing a "civil emergency" as staffing shortages have worsened with the onset of the vaccine mandate.

The order allows the Seattle Police Department to offer police officer candidates a hiring incentive of up to $25,000, depending on experience and training level, to be paid after beginning employment. New recruits may be given up to a $10,000 incentive, half of which will be paid in the first appropriate paycheck and the second half to come upon the completion of a probation period.

A hundred years ago, in New York City, 20,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in protest against one of the greatest public health policy experiments in history. One of them was wearing a sign featuring an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” beside the slogan, “Wine was served.” There were posters of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Another read: “Tyranny in the name of righteousness is the worst of all tyrannies.”

For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.

Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.

Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.

This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.

The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.”

Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020.

At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.

But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.

This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.

The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. The New York Times, Guardian, BBC, The Times, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.

And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.

DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%.

Once again, an underreported fact.

From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the “laboratories of democracy” have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.

Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the “noble experiment” of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t win because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful to people’s health. The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol. It simply moved from bars to “speakeasies”. People learned to brew their own spirits or smuggle it in from Canada. And the American mafia had a field day.

The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.

If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.

It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.

This is an edited translation of an article that first appeared in Sydsvenskan.

When are these company's going to stand their ground and simply state, We at (insert company name here) only hire  the best applicates we don't care what color you are or what gender if you choose to have a gender. We only hire the best applicants for the job.

Would these guys like their heart surgeon to be maybe the third best because the best couldn't get hired because of diversity hiring. I for one wouldn't care if the person was purple and defines itself as non binary if they were the best.    

The so called media admits knee jerk reaction is to defend the DNC:

The Washington Post admitted Wednesday it was wrong to do a knee-jerk defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s recent comment about racist highways and bridges.

"We should be more careful to double-check on the latest views of historians," Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, Nov. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, Nov. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

It started Monday when Buttigieg expressed dismay that people don’t understand how roads and bridges can be racist.

"I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or that would’ve been, in New York was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices," Buttigieg said during a White House briefing.

Buttigieg was swiftly mocked on social media by critics who objected to the comments, while others called for Kessler to chime in.

Kessler obliged, tweeting a defense of Buttigieg’s comment that claimed the tidbit was from Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Power Broker."

Washington Post national correspondent Phillip Bump also rushed to Buttigieg’s defense, writing an analysis mirroring Kessler’s tweets headlined, "And this is why it’s useful to talk about historical examples of institutionalized racism," which claimed the transportation secretary’s remark "served as an opportunity not only to elevate the specific story to which he was referring but the utility of educating Americans about a complicated history of systemic racism."

Bump reiterated that Buttigieg was referring to a story from Caro’s book, which described a decades-old plan to stop Black people from visiting a beach in New York by making it difficult for buses to access the parkways.

Washington Post staffers initially rushed to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. (ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images)
Washington Post staffers initially rushed to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. (ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images) (ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images)

Bump complained Buttigieg was mocked for his remark and enlisted left-wing historian Kevin Kruse to explain that many American highways were designed to keep Black and White neighborhoods separated. Bump even boasted that Kruse’s work was part of The New York Times’ controversial "1619 Project," and Kessler added Bump’s article to his Twitter thread defending Buttigieg.

But Kessler got cold feet, publishing a story on Wednesday declaring he jumped the gun after multiple historians reached out to him.

"Well, our knee jerked," he wrote, noting that associate professor of history at Case Western University Peter Shulman informed the Post the tale from Caro’s book was "largely debunked."

Kessler then decided to "dig a little bit deeper" and get to the bottom of the story he previously defended. The Post’s fact-checker went into a lengthy history of Robert Moses, the famed builder who spent most of the 1900s creating the infrastructure of New York City and its surrounding areas who is the key figure in Caro’s book.

Kessler figured out the only source used in the 1974 book for the story parroted by Buttigieg 47 years later died two years before the book was even published and many experts feel the claim was exaggerated.

Washington Post admitted it was wrong to do a knee-jerk defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s recent comment about racist highways and bridges. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Washington Post admitted it was wrong to do a knee-jerk defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s recent comment about racist highways and bridges. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
"There has been some revisionism and Moses’s achievements are now viewed in a better light. In particular, the anecdote about the parkway bridges has been increasingly questioned, along with other details in Caro’s book," Kessler wrote.


One historian told the Post that "Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country" because all parkways had low bridges at the time.

"Caro is wrong," a separate historian emailed to the Post, noting anyone could access the beach.

Other historians disagree in the polarizing tale, but the Post’s in-house fact-checker feels "The Bottom Line" is that the liberal newspaper shouldn’t have been so quick to defend Buttigieg.

"Obviously this cannot be easily resolved. Caro quotes one of Moses’s top aides as saying the height of the bridges was done for racist reasons, but increasingly that story has been questioned as not credible," Kessler wrote. "Buttigieg should tailor his remarks to reflect what is historically unimpeachable — and we should be more careful to double-check on the latest views of historians. Even a Pulitzer Prize-winning book is not always the last word on a subject."

Then how are these idiots going to fly their planes. Maybe there will be electric fire trucks and her house will be burning & the truck will run out of electricity.
 I hope people finally realize they get what they vote for. Bunch of 🤡

She's a cum laude graduate of a social sciences faculty in the flagship Soviet University. Her thesis was Karl Marx's Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital. At the time of her writing the thesis, given she graduated in 1989, you could not even be ambiguous on the topic yet, let alone critical. Now this person is a distinguished professor at Cornell. As if we haven't learned everything necessary about Ivy League schools already, though.