NYT: Efforts to Advance Racial Equity Baked In Throughout Biden’s Budget

From The New York Times:

Sprinkled throughout the president’s enormous spending plan are scores of programs amounting to tens of billions of dollars intended to specifically bolster the fortunes of Black people, Asian people, tribal communities and other historically underserved groups in the United States.

…That idea — of focusing special attention on the distribution of taxpayer money across racial groups — has never been approached as methodically as it has this year by Mr. Biden, advocates say.

…That approach has incited anger from conservatives, who accuse the president and his advisers of pursuing a racist agenda against white Americans. Fox News ran a headline accusing Mr. Biden of trying to “Stoke Nationwide Division With ‘Racial Equity’ Push.” And The New York Post published an editorial, titled “In Push for Woke ‘Equity,’ Biden Abandons Equality,” that accused the president of being “un-American.”

A group called America First Legal, which is run by Stephen Miller and Mark Meadows, two top aides to former President Donald J. Trump, won a preliminary injunction this week from a Texas judge against an effort by Mr. Biden’s Small Business Administration to prioritize grants from its $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund to businesses owned by minorities or underserved groups.

“This order is another powerful strike against the Biden administration’s unconstitutional decision to pick winners and losers based on the color of their skin,” the group said in a statement.

Posted in America | Comments Off on NYT: Efforts to Advance Racial Equity Baked In Throughout Biden’s Budget

When The Gay Money Comes Pouring In

From the New York Times Book Review:

How the Religious Right Made Same-Sex Marriage a Gay Rights Crusade

THE ENGAGEMENT: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage By Sasha Issenberg

Money itself, especially the importance of “gay economic might,” also takes center stage in Issenberg’s book. “A galaxy of covert donors orbiting around Denver software millionaire Tim Gill remade the gay-rights movement in their own image,” he writes, “ideologically conservative and strategically radical.” Gay marriage activists, modeling themselves on corporate PACs, successfully transformed into a lobbying force one likened to a “Gay Pfizer,” using the carrot of political contributions and the stick of funding one’s opponents. The strategy worked: In 2011, three Democrats in the New York Legislature reversed their earlier positions on gay marriage after witnessing gay organizations’ ability to end political careers. In 2012, after President Obama announced his support of gay marriage, according to one campaign staffer, “You could literally hear the gay money pouring in.”

…Through Issenberg’s illumination of the donors, activists and attorneys on both sides of the saga, another aspect of the battle for marriage equality becomes starkly clear: its whiteness. Obama plays an important role, certainly, but nearly all of the individuals at the core of the narrative — dozens of them — are white. Issenberg doesn’t shy away from examining the role of race in electoral politics (the loss of the Black vote against Proposition 8, he concludes, was merely the symptom of a more widespread messaging problem), but we don’t learn why, exactly, queer Black activists were such a rarity in the upper echelons of the marriage fight.

They have long told us the reasons: In addition to broader racism and transphobia within the mainstream gay rights movement, marriage was always primarily a white, cisgender issue. “Gay marriage? Please,” wrote Jasmyne Cannick, a Los Angeles-based political strategist and journalist, after the passage of Proposition 8. “The white gay community is banging its head against the glass ceiling of a room called equality, believing that a breakthrough on marriage will bestow on it parity with heterosexuals. But the right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both Black gays and Black straights. Does someone who is homeless or suffering from H.I.V. but has no health care, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?”

Posted in Homosexuality | Comments Off on When The Gay Money Comes Pouring In

NYT: ‘Pandemic Fuels Surge In U.S. Guns Sales’

I don’t think the pandemic fueled gun sales. It was the violence surge initiated by BLM/Antifa that has led to this.

America did not have a surge in murders until after the George Floyd death on May 25 and accompanying protest movement. Prior to that, crime was stable.

New York Times:

“There is a breakdown in trust and a breakdown in a shared, common reality,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who writes about political violence. “There is also all this social change, and social change is scary.”

…Sales did not change much under former President Donald J. Trump, but they exploded in 2020, up by 64 percent from the previous year. The single highest month last year was in June, as protests swept across the country after the murder of George Floyd.

…But while research has shown that higher gun prevalence is associated with a higher rate of gun deaths — including suicide — the question of whether a sudden surge in gun sales prompts a corresponding rise in gun violence does not have a clear answer…

Violent gun death rates in the state dropped by about half from 1989 to 2019, said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, compared to a 13 percent drop for the nation.

Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, said laws were often less effective than gun control advocates say. He said controls that targeted high-risk individuals, like mentally ill people, seemed to work better than those that sought to prevent young people from buying guns. Mass shootings, he said, were the least likely type of violence that laws would be effective against.

I suspect gun deaths dropped in California for reasons of changing demographics (fewer young people) and tougher sentences for criminals (three strikes law).

Posted in America | Comments Off on NYT: ‘Pandemic Fuels Surge In U.S. Guns Sales’

Just Be Yourself (5-30-21)

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Just Be Yourself (5-30-21)

Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World (5-28-21)

00:00 My 55th birthday
03:00 Disunited Nations 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuwVaUntpNQ
06:00 The Inflating of Fears, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwzU9MxmGy4
09:00 Life After Trump – China, https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=de2bc41f8324e6955ef65e0c9&id=bba991dfd7
27:00 Emotional Energy Levels, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdga_AHBGv4
33:00 Who won the great debate? Nick Fuentes or Robert Barnes?
37:00 Whiteshift by Eric Kaufmann: A Video Review, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R6MQVW35DU
41:00 Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome- causes, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, pathology
44:30 Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome: My Story, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQr8Gu4WImg
49:00 “Sleep Disorders in Ehlers-Danlos and Related Syndromes: A Panoply of Paradoxes” – Alan Pocinki, MD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr6Iv8_NVOw
54:20 Barricade Garage: “PLEASE SATISFY MY WHITENESS”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_IYNt79XIM
57:20 Opie & Anthony Was A Place For Men, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r3P47R6sAg
59:20 Robert Barnes says Nick Fuentes hates Jews
1:00:10 Every Dr. Fauci Interview
1:01:50 Jewish matchmaking
1:04:00 The Opie & Anthony Show – Anthony “Dice” Seinfeld
1:06:45 Jewish girl prank calls her parents on Z100
1:11:00 Vaush Reacts To A MASK OFF “Pro-White Europe” Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N9UILCQ53A
1:15:00 What if there is no such thing as character?, https://medium.com/stoicism-philosophy-as-a-way-of-life/what-if-there-is-no-such-thing-as-character-f71f02a75f02
1:19:00 Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139670
1:24:00 Empirical approaches to moral philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-character-empirical/
1:32:00 The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-accidental-superpower
1:40:20 Israel is a Giant Machine for Generating Anti-Semitism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpurS8LyuLI
1:44:30 Fat acceptance
1:48:10 The Psychology of Israel and Palestine | Jordan B Peterson
1:55:00 Pilleater: An Introduction to Al Stankard (HAarlem VEnison), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NcKRIWrIMc
1:56:30 Tucker Carlson on the Left’s war on science

Posted in America | Comments Off on Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World (5-28-21)