Important Safety Tip

March 15th, 2023

Don’t attempt to steal a helicopter unless you can actually, you know, fly a helicopter.

Multiple helicopters were broken into and one was operated before crashing on Wednesday morning at the Sacramento Executive Airport, according to the Sacramento Police Department.

Police say that they received several reports of multiple helicopters being broken into early Wednesday morning.

Officers that responded found a helicopter with major damage that “appeared to have been operated,” police said in a statement.

The damaged helicopter was left on its side and is a Bell 429 model, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

A further investigation showed that when the helicopter crashed it also damaged several other helicopters.

Yeah, I’d say there was some serious damage.

I have so many questions about this. Like: What did they think they were going to do with the helicopter after they stole it? Take it for a joy ride and return it? Try to sell it? Just how do you go about selling a stolen helicopter? Did they think regional air traffic control was just going to ignore it? (“Hey, stray helicopter! No biggee!”) Did he not realize Sacramento Police have helicopters to chase you with? (Oh yeah: There was an alert.)

No suspect in custody, so police are looking for a doubly lucky dumbass…

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Crime, video | 16 Comments »

Oopsie! Russian Su-27 Crashes into U.S. Drone over Black Sea

March 14th, 2023

Somebody miscalculated.

A Russian military plane collided with a U.S. drone in international airspace over the Black Sea on Tuesday, prompting U.S. forces to land the unmanned aircraft in international waters.

U.S. European Command confirmed that a Russian Su-27 aircraft struck the propeller of a U.S. MQ-9 drone, which was on a routine mission in international airspace when two Russian jets attempted to intercept it.

“Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner. This incident demonstrates a lack of competence in addition to being unsafe and unprofessional,” a spokesman for the U.S. European Command said in a statement.

The Russian jets’ recklessness almost caused one of the fighter jets to crash, the statement added.

Sounds like a pretty stupid thing for the Russians to do, as an Su-27 is obviously a lot more expensive to replace (including the pilot) than an MQ-9 Reaper drone. For one thing, the MQ-9 is over 15 years old and we have more than 300 of them, so losing one isn’t going to deter the American military in the slightest. But they’re not building any more Su-27s (a 1980s Soviet attempt to rip off the F-14 Tomcat), and Russia only had some 100 of them when the war started. (No documented losses on Oryx as of this writing, but Russia became ultra-conservative about committing manned airpower to the arena after the opening phases of the war.)

Russia continues to be annoyed at NATO in general, and America in specific, using technologically superior surveillance and communications assets to effectively provide the entire killchain for Ukrainian forces. Indeed, it appears that those assets are far more effectively integrated into Ukrainian forces than Russian assets are integrated into their own military and/or Wagner Group.

I can understand their frustration, but directly attacking American assets (over international water or otherwise) is only going to make things much, much, much worse for them…

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 21 Comments »

Huge Brawl At Social Justice Warrior Middle School

March 13th, 2023

I was involved in the occasional fight in middle and high school, but it never involved more than one other person. When a fight broke out, a circle would gather to watch it, but it never occurred any of us to wade in and join the melee. Widespread brawls with multiple combatants just never happened.

Well, that was then, and this was now. Every year, people post videos of large brawls to social media, and not all of them of them happen at Waffle House. On March 8, a huge brawl broke out at EBR Readiness Alternative School in Baton Rouge, which happens to be a middle school.

How huge? 200 people (including parents) were involved, and multiple cars of policemen had to break up the fight:

I can honestly say that I never considered “brawling with police” to be a viable life strategy in middle school. (Or any time.)

I know very little about “Alternative” schools in Louisiana, but this one appears to be majority black.

Oh, they also practice “Social Emotional Learning.”

Remember, “Social Emotional Learning” is a codephrase for “Critical Race Theory.”

Yet more evidence that “social justice” (no matter the disguise) destroys the bonds that hold society together rather than strengthening them.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Crime, Uncategorized, video | 24 Comments »

SVB: “An Extinction Event For Startups”

March 12th, 2023

The more I hear about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse mentioned in Friday’s LinkSwarm, the worse it sounds.

I saw a snippet of Gary Tan, CEO of startup fund Y Combinator, talking about how bad it is. I can’t find a video of the full interview online, but evidently it was excerpted on Bannon’s War Room podcast and there’s a transcript.

[Interviewer]: How many of these startups that have been through Y Combinator, for example, have their cash tied up at Silicon Valley Bank? And over this weekend, I’m gonna try to figure out how they’re gonna make payroll next week. Do they have to go to investors and say, can you front me some cash so that we can stay alive?

[Tan]: We have funded about 3,000 active startups right now. I would guess that this affects more than 1,000 startups. And about a third of those startups will not be able to make payroll in the next 30 days in the current configuration. As of this morning, RIPLING, which many startups use to manage payroll and benefits, transfers were not being processed by SVB for payroll.

And so that’s a really existential threat for companies broadly. These are founders who are texting me and calling me saying, do I need to furlough my workers next week? Because I do not have other bank accounts, you know, a Google or a Facebook or even companies farther along with a Treasury Department. They’re going to be able to weather this, but if SVB is your only bank, it’s actually an existential risk. You’re going to go out of business if you can’t pay payroll. And that starts Monday.

That transcript also has this sobering figure: “97% of the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank. 97% are not insured by FDIC because they’re in accounts over $250,000. These company accounts that would be $169 billion.”

So what was Silicon Valley Bank doing rather than properly managing their risk profile? Banks have Chief Risk Officers whose job is to make sure their risk exposure ratios don’t get out of whack. Well, guess what? SVB didn’t have one for some nine months. “SVB’s former head of risk, Laura Izurieta, who formerly performed a similar role for Capital One, left the bank in April 2022. She wasn’t replaced until January 2023 when the bank hired Kim Olson, formerly of Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui.”

But don’t worry: SVB had CRO for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East who was entirely focused…on Social Justice and ESG.

Jay Ersapah, who acts as CRO for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and who describes herself as a ‘queer person of color from a working-class background’ – organized a host of LGBTQ initiatives including a month-long Pride campaign and implemented ‘safe space’ catch-ups for staff.

In a corporate video published just nine months ago, she said she ‘could not be prouder’ to work for SVB serving ‘underrepresented entrepreneurs.’

Professional network Outstanding listed Ersapah as a top 100 LGTBQ Future Leader.

‘Jay is a leading figure for the bank’s awareness activities including being a panelist at the SVB’s Global Pride townhall to share her experiences as a lesbian of color, moderating SVB’s EMEA Pride townhall and was instrumental in initiating the organization’s first ever global “safe space catch-up”, supporting employees in sharing their experiences of coming out,’ her bio on the Outstanding website states.

It adds that she is ‘allies’ with gay rights charity Stonewall and had authored numerous articles to promote LGBTQ awareness.

These included ‘Lesbian Visibility Day and Trans Awareness week.’

Separately she was also praised in a Facebook post by the group ‘Diversity Role Models,’ a charity which campaigns against homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in UK schools.

Being in Silicon Valley, I’m betting that the entire company was whole hog backing DEI, ESG, Transwhatever and the entire rainbow of victimhood identity politics acronyms.

In a strong economy, you can get away with a bit of shareholder-value-destroying, virtue-signaling luxury goods as long as your core business is strong. But with rising interest rates, Biden Inflation, the Biden Recession and the gale winds of deglobalization, taking your eye off the ball to focus on anti-reality SJW garbage is a recipe for disaster.

And all the startups that relied on SVB for their banking are well and truly screwed.

Update: Uncle Sugar is evidently going to make all depositors whole at both SVB and newly insolvent Signature Bank. This relatively early intervention may indeed be the best move to prevent bank runs at other institutions, and may reflect a change in philosophy since 2008. (It’s a thorny subject.) But it does make me think that a lot of well-connected depositors were screaming in the ears of Washington to be made whole at the taxpayer’s expense. What do you think the odds are that the same consideration wouldn’t be given to, say, a Texas bank that specialized in underwriting oil and gas ventures?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Democrats, Economics, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors | 15 Comments »

Why Silvergate Failed

March 11th, 2023

Yesterday’s LinkSwarm talked about the collapse of crypto-linked Silvergate bank.

Here’s hedge fudge manager/university professor Patrick Boyle goes into detail of just how it went down.

  • “Silvergate’s importance in the recent crypto boom is possibly best described by a now-deleted testimonial from the bank’s website: ‘Life as a crypto firm can be divided up into before Silvergate and after Silvergate.It’s hard to overstate how much it revolutionized banking for blockchain companies.’ The testimonial was written by a millennial who still lives in his parents’ basement playing video games and has had some recent run-ins with the law. His name is Sam Bankman Fried.”
  • “If we go back ten years, Silvergate was a small San Diego based real estate lender that transformed itself into the go-to bank for the crypto industry.”
  • “Silvergate invited in crypto entrepreneurs and asked them what problems they were trying to solve and how the bank could be helpful. After this, the bank transformed itself and grew rapidly. It went public in late 2019 at a share price of $13, and a year later the stock price had risen by 1,580% as it became a key interchange point between dollars and cryptocurrencies.”
  • “Major Silverlake clients included Paxos, bitFlyer, Kraken and also innovators in atonal rock music – Mars Junction…” [This is an inside joke. Mars Junction is the band of Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss, AKA the WInklevoss Twins of Facebook investing controversy] “…who also had some involvement in the Crypto industry. FTX and Alameda were also big customers.”
  • “The bank’s growth mirrored the growth of the crypto industry, and it declined alongside that industry too, announcing in a regulatory disclosure earlier this week that it plans to wind down operations in the face of ‘turmoil in digital currency markets.'”
  • Last week Silvergate had announced that they would be unable to file an annual report with the SEC on time due to a weakening in their capital position. They announced that they might be forced to close at that time, blaming growing problems, in part on pending investigations into their operations. The filing confirmed that Silvergate is being investigated by the US Department of Justice.”
  • “Customers rushed over the last few months to pull money out of Silvergate. In January they reported that customers had withdrawn more than $8 billion, forcing them to sell held-to-maturity assets to fund the run, accruing losses on the sale of those securities of $718 million dollars.”

  • Why was Silvergate so important in the world of crypto? Well, people who trade cryptocurrencies often want to use dollars to buy crypto, or they want to sell crypto and receive dollars and the dollar side of those transactions is where things get bogged down. If you are transferring large sums of money to buy crypto, you need to deal with the US banking system, who might ask you a lot of questions relating to anti money laundering regulations. Crypto people hate questions like this. Similarly, if you just sold some crypto and want to deposit the dollars you received, most banks will have a long list of questions about the source of your funds, and there is a really good chance that they will simply refuse to do the transaction. It is going to be a struggle for a US regulated financial institution to show their regulator that they have done enough due diligence to be sure that your funds are not the proceeds of crime. And the last thing a bank needs is to be accused of money laundering; they would rather just simply not deal with suspicious transactions.

  • “For this reason, stablecoins like Tether and Terra exist – or existed.” If you weren’t paying attention, the value of theoretically stable Terra crashed hard last year.
  • “If you can convert your dollars into crypto once, you can then buy stablecoins that are supposed to always be worth a dollar, and then instead of buying and selling crypto, with actual dollars you buy and sell crypto with dollar-denominated stablecoins, your money can stay ‘on chain.’ The problem with that, is that you have to trust the stablecoin issuers, and they, for some reason, don’t always seem trustworthy. They won’t really tell you where the money is.”
  • “They’ll sometimes announce that they are going to be audited by a top 12 auditor (I’m not really sure what a top 12 auditor is – but when you hear that – you know you are getting number 12 on the list), and you start to wonder if Friehling & Horowitz made that list.” Friehling & Horowitz were Bernie Madoff’s auditors.
  • “If you have deposited your dollars with a crypto exchange or a stablecoin provider, they still need to deposit them somewhere. They need a bank too. Now (of course), another way of dealing with this banking issue, might be to lie to your bank about what your account is being used for (SBF and the team at FTX did that), but the technical term for ‘lying to your bank’ is Bank Fraud (as Sam Bankman-Fried just found out) – and you can get in trouble for that.”
  • “There was significant demand for a “crypto friendly bank” and Silvergate was willing to fill that role, when no other bank was willing to take that risk. Silvergate weren’t just crypto friendly either, they built their own payments network called the Silvergate Exchange Network to (according to their marketing documents) enable the efficient movement of U.S. dollars between participants 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.”
  • “As you might imagine, Silvergate (being the only bank that would deal with them) attracted a lot of big crypto customers, as these customers were able to open up accounts without lying too much.”
  • “Silvergate dealt with most of the big players in the industry and they were an actual US regulated bank with excruciatingly detailed audited financial statements and capital regulation. This meant that your money was safe at Silvergate, unlike at the other venues we just went over.”
  • “The beauty of dealing with these crypto customers, crypto exchanges, [was] that because you don’t have any real competition in this space, you don’t really have to pay them any interest on their deposits. You could take the billions of dollars they deposit with you, put it all in treasuries, and you get to keep all of the interest. You’ll probably have to spend some of the profits on lawyers to keep the regulators at bay, but overall you might have a profitable business. But that’s boring right? And no one gets involved in crypto for a boring life…”
  • “They had a product called SEN Leverage direct lending, where they would lend people money collateralized with bitcoin. Exchanges could also borrow dollars collateralized with bitcoin for corporate treasury and other business purposes. In January, they announced that total SEN Leverage commitments were $1.1 billion dollars and that all of their SEN Leverage loans ‘continued to perform as expected, with no losses or forced liquidations.’ So, as crazy as that business might sound, it was not really the source of their problems.”
  • “As of September, 2022 their balance sheet showed about $11.4 billion of ‘securities,’ meaning bonds: Treasury securities, mortgage-backed securities, agency bonds and so on and $1.4 billion of ‘loans,’ meaning the Bitcoin loans and some other real-estate lending. They had $13.2 billion worth of deposits at the end of September, most of them being from crypto companies – so non-interest paying deposits, the best kind.”
  • “The problem for Silvergate was that when FTX was exposed as being insolvent, crypto investors were considerably less willing to leave their cash on exchanges.”
  • “They asked for their money back from the exchanges, meaning that the crypto companies had to ask for their money back from Silvergate, so Silvergate was faced with a good old fashioned bank run – driven not by a loss of faith in Silvergate, but by a loss of faith in crypto exchanges. By the end of December, noninterest bearing deposits at Silvergate fell from $13.2 billion dollars to just $3.9 billion dollars.” Yowzers! It’s hard to expect any bank to survive an outflow of 2/3rds of their deposits in such a short period of time.”
  • “There is a good chance that if you had an account at a crypto exchange, that exchange banked with Silvergate, and if you closed your account and cashed out, the cash came from a deposit at Silvergate.”
  • “There were other FTX related problems too. When prosecutors started looking into the collapse of FTX, their attention was drawn to their banker – Silvergate, for hosting accounts connected to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now, a big problem for Silvergate, was that – with their money all tied up in bonds or lent out, Silvergate had to come up with around 9 billion dollars to pay out these withdrawals.”
  • “Their accounts show that by the end of December they had sold half of their bonds and had controversially borrowed $4.3 billion from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, a government institution that is in place to give short-term secured loans to banks that have a short-term liquidity problem.” That, and the FTX connection, attracted the attention of Washington D.C.

  • In September Silvergate had shown 3.1 billion dollars’ worth of bonds as being “held to maturity” and 8.3 billion dollars’ worth of bonds as being available for sale. The difference between these two classifications (from an accounting perspective) is that the available for sale bonds have to be marked to market – or held on the books at their fair market value, while the “held to maturity” bonds could be marked at their cost price. By the end of December there were no “held to maturity” bonds left on the balance sheet, meaning that they had either been sold, or reclassified as available for sale. One way or another, interest rates had gone up a lot in 2022, and these bonds were worth a lot less than they were being carried on the balance sheet at.

    So they might have skated by if rising interest rates hadn’t wrecked their mark-to market.

  • The sale resulted in a loss of $751.4 million during the fourth quarter of 2022 and in addition, the company recorded a $134.5 million dollar impairment charge related to an estimated $1.7 billion dollars of securities it “expects to sell in the first quarter of 2023 to reduce borrowings.” This is because reclassifying some of the bonds to “available for sale” meant that they now had to be marked to market and that the loss had to be recognized under GAAP accounting rules. Silvergate also had to write down a $196 million dollar investment in “certain developed technology assets related to running a block-chain-based payment network” that it had bought in January 2022. So, all in, there was a net loss of over a billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2022.

  • “Bank capital requirements are ‘risk-based’ and need to be kept above 4% to be ‘adequately capitalized’ and above 5% to be considered ‘well capitalized.’ Different types of assets have different risk weights, and this is done to keep deposits safe.”
  • “A bank that makes a lot of mortgage and business loans might have a capital requirement of around 8%, and assets like bitcoin have a 100% capital requirement, meaning that a bank would need to have $100 of capital for every $100 of bitcoin on its books.”
  • “In September Silvergate was fine, as despite the Bitcoin loans, most of their money was in high quality bonds that had zero risk weights. But when their deposits went out the door and they had to sell assets and realize a billion-dollar net loss, they were left in a situation where an additional $19 million-dollar loss would but their capital below 5% and they would no longer be considered well capitalized.”
  • “Last week Silvergate announced that they had sold additional debt securities in January and February to repay the company’s outstanding advances from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco and that they ‘expect to record further losses related to the other-than-temporary impairment on the securities portfolio.’ These additional losses they said would ‘negatively impact the regulatory capital ratios of the company and could result in the bank being less than well-capitalized.” And that’s when Brunhilda strode on stage to give her farewell.
  • “This announcement caused the stock price to half that day and according to Bloomberg caused Coinbase, Galaxy, Paxos and other crypto firms to announce that they would stop accepting or initiating payments through Silvergate. These customers leaving were the final nail in the coffin, as they reduced deposits even further.”
  • “A bank run, on a real bank, caused by crypto related losses and crypto volatility.”
  • “Matt Levine at Bloomberg argues that one way to think about the rise and fall of Silvergate is that the crypto boom was at its heart a low-interest-rate phenomenon. People started speculating in crypto because interest rates were below the rate of inflation, and so Silvergate was hugely exposed to interest-rate risk simply because of its exposure to its crypto customers.”
  • “Rising interest rates caused the deposits to evaporate at the same time as the assets backing those deposits fell in value. Levine argues that (with hindsight), Silvergate’s risk management – a year ago – should have been laser-focused on the risk of rising interest rates crushing both its assets and its customers, and it should have hedged that risk one way or another.”

    • I know all this is long and a bit detailed and technical, but I wanted to point it out as an example of how a cascading chain of events (much like the Piper Alpha disaster) caused a failure, mainly how massive fraud on the basis of one crypto space player and rising interest rates ended up bankrupting a real bank in the real world.

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Economics, video | 7 Comments »

    Truckpocalypse Now

    March 9th, 2023

    As I’ve been expecting a glut of car inventory due to inflation, rising interest rates, and all the demand destruction of the Biden Recession, I’ve been paying more attention to the car market just in case dealers had to liquidate new cars at absolute fire sale prices and I could swoop in and take advantage. So far that hasn’t happened, and prices haven’t behaved the way I’ve expected. (Used care prices are rising because inventory is tight despite dealers overpaying in 2022?)

    But one thing I have noticed: Pickup truck prices have gotten absolutely insane.

    Pickups used to be the steady, dependable, unglamorous vehicles of ordinary blue collar Americans. Lately, car makers seem to have turned them into cash cows by pricing them like luxury goods for rich people.

    As the Ford F-series is the most popular pickup truck, I though I would look at the prices there. The average selling price for a 2023 Ford F-150 is an eye-watering $82,395. Given the rule of thumb that you should never pay more than a maximum of 35% of your yearly income for a new car, which means that buyers should be making $235,000 a year to afford a new F-150. That’s not “HVAC Repairman” money. Hell, it’s barely “guy who owns his own HVAC shop” money. And this despite Ford having such quality control problems that they’ve issued a slew of recalls.

    Assuming I was insane enough to buy a new Ford F-150 at the average selling price, and no down payment, I would be looking at $1,521 in monthly payments, or more than I was paying for my home mortgage until a few years ago. (Thanks to rising tax valuations and insurance, now it’s just a little more than that. My car has long been paid off.)

    Ford and other auto makers are pricing their traditional customers out of the market by making pickup trucks luxury goods. Just as in the 1970s, American car manufacturers are pricing themselves out of the market and are inviting foreign manufacturers to swoop in and snatch market share from them.

    Here Zach and Ray of Car Edge on how insane Ford’s pricing has gotten (and the F-150 is far from the only Ford vehicle that prices have soared on).

    “What the hell is wrong with you people?”

    “That’s not an average price for an average person!”

    “That’s just crazy! Those are crazy numbers.”

    Indeed.

    Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in Economics | 22 Comments »

    Joe Rogan and Michael Malice On The QAnon Shaman Revelations

    March 8th, 2023

    By now I assume that you’ve seen or read about Tucker Carlson’s piece on video footage that fatally undermines much of the Democratic Party’s “January 6th Insurrection” dogma.

    Instead of rehashing that (Tucker has a wee bit more media reach than I do), here’s a video of Joe Rogan and Michael Malice reviewing the footage.

    The biggest takeaway for me is that, while Rogan and Malice are not conservatives, they are far from people who unquestionably accept left-leaning media at face value. For them to be shocked at things that anyone who was paying attention knew no later than, oh, say, January 7, 2021, that there was no “insurrection” at the capital, just a half-assed riot, is actually somewhat surprising.

    The mainstream media lies about so many things, so much of the time, that it’s easy to believe one of their narratives about a situation you simply weren’t paying attention to at the time.

    Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom…and evidently truth as well.

    Tags: , , ,
    Posted in Media Watch, video | 6 Comments »

    Honest Trailers Slams Velma

    March 7th, 2023

    Do you think we’ve spent enough time crapping on how horrible Velma is?

    Nah.

    “That’s all just a framework for jokes that sound like an AI mixed Family Guy with bluecheck Twitter and somehow didn’t kill itself.”

    Another reason to slam it: HBO Max has renewed it for a second season, perhaps mistaking hate watching for actual interest…

    Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in Media Watch, video | 4 Comments »

    Texas A&M’s DEI: Ditching or Faking?

    March 6th, 2023

    There are conflicting reports on whether Texas A&M, as ordered by Governor Greg Abbott, are actually ending their raidcal leftwing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI, AKA critical race theory, AKA social justice), or just pretending.

    Officially, Texas A&M has ended DEI.

    The Texas A&M University System has moved to remove all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements from their employment and admissions practices, it said in a statement on its website.

    Chancellor John Sharp stated that after receiving a letter in February from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, he ordered a review of all DEI policies in the university system.

    “No university or agency in the A&M System will admit any student, nor hire any employee based on any factor other than merit,” said Sharp.

    A directive was sent to all university system agencies to limit employment and admissions to a cover letter, curriculum vitae, statements about research and teaching philosophies, and professional references.

    A memo obtained from Abbott’s office asserted that DEI policy “has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others.”

    The University of Texas (UT) System board chairman Kevin Eltife announced a pause on all DEI efforts during a board of regents meeting last week. The move was prompted by his comments about how “certain DEI efforts have strayed from the original intent.”

    Is there a reason to doubt the sincerity of this effort? Well, John Sharp is a Democrat, albeit one from an era (he was State Comptroller from 1991 through 1999) where there was still a conservative (or at least moderate) wing to the Texas Democratic Party.

    Second, over at Texas Scorecard, Scott Yenor is skeptical of A&M’s sincerity.

    “How Texas A&M Went Woke,” my report from the Claremont Institute, has prompted the Texas A&M administration to respond. First, A&M has reportedly hired someone to continue the process of scrubbing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies from its website. Second, A&M is circulating a memo charging that “misinformation” lies at “the foundation of the report.” A&M compares more than a dozen “Statements from Yenor” against “Facts from Texas A&M University.” But their “facts” are simply the evasions and obfuscations of a guilty party. Their rebuttal presents an object lesson in sophistry.

    One category of sophistry is refuting a charge not made. I contend that that A&M “has more DEI administrators than UT-Austin.” A&M responds that a comparison of “executive-level DEI operations” in central administration shows that A&M has fewer. I say A&M has more total DEI administrators; A&M says it has fewer central administrators. Both statements are true. A&M had many more lower-level DEI officials than UT at the time of the counting. I say that A&M created a diversity committee to consider removing statues on campus; A&M responds that no statues have been removed (yet!). Again, both statements are true. A&M has not refuted anything I said.

    Sometimes, they claim ignorance; A&M evidently has so many DEI programs that it can hardly keep track of them. One is the LEAD program, which trains department chairs in DEI ideology, among other things. A&M is “not aware of a training for department chairs called LEAD.” A snapshot from ADVANCE, the university’s faculty affairs website, shows that this program still exists under a different name.

    Another technique is to deny, deny, deny. A&M administrators describe their own ACES program, which is housed in the Office of Diversity. A&M often lauds ACES as a premier diversity program. It lists ACES in its evaluations of diversity programs. A&M now denies that ACES is “a diversity effort.” Who you gonna believe—A&M or your lying eyes?

    Sometimes A&M concedes that their DEI programs exist, but that they have discontinued them or that they will discontinue them.

    Snip.

    The university has announced in advance how it will get around the A&M system’s recently-announced ban on DEI statements.

    The legislature should defund DEI administrative offices in all Texas universities and colleges. All who are currently employed in such offices should be let go. This will make it clear that DEI is bad for one’s career in Texas higher ed. Second, the Texas legislature should adopt the Kalven Report as a vision for university professionalism. Politicized teaching and disciplines should be judged against the standards of the Kalven Report. If disciplines are so thoroughly infused with DEI ideology or any other leftist activism, the legislature should cease to fund them. Disciplines with DEI inscribed into their DNA should not receive public funds.

    Most importantly, the Board of Regents must take its job more seriously. It must issue directives to eradicate DEI from universities and then follow through with them by firing university presidents who openly defy the Board or obfuscate their DEI efforts. Personnel is policy. The Left has clamored for DEI practices for generations, and university presidents have responded by permitting the DEI bureaucracy to bloat. It is time for these university presidents to fear conservatives in the legislature more than they do the Left, and this can be done only when select university presidents are fired. If this Board of Regents will not do it, then it too must be released and replaced.

    I share Yenor’s skepticism. Those infected with social justice never give up pushing their radical ideology, administration directive or no administration directive. Laying off all DEI personnel is the only way to purge the infection.

    Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »