Uh, I thought it was just Ol’ Dependables who’d gone senile down there

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Here’s what knotted Elmer Fudd’s knickers:

Because it's a grift, nothing less, nothing more

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Univ. of Michigan Spent $250 Million on DEI: 'It’s like giving a bunch of 6-year-olds Tasers'

John Sexton, HotAir

The University of Michigan has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on the promotion of DEI over the past decade, building the largest DEI bureaucracy at any school in the country. So what has it gotten for all of that investment? Not much according to a lengthy report by Nicholas Confessore. What it has produced is a campus overrun with DEI language.

Leaders of the University of Michigan, one of America’s most prestigious public universities, like to say that their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is inseparable from the pursuit of academic excellence. Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies. Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”...

A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.

Given the amount invested, DEI should have blossomed into its final utopian form at UMichigan, but that hasn't happened. On the contrary, students say the climate on campus has become less positive.

Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

So what has all the funding the the hiring of DEI administrators produced? Grievances. Lots of grievances and lots of ways to pursue those grievances.

Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself. “D.E.I. here is absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design,” said Mark Bernstein, a lawyer and a Democrat who sits on the university’s Board of Regents. “But it’s so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability in a lot of ways.”...

In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period.

Case in point, a professor at the school named Eric Fretz was called out by one of his students after he admitted in advance that he was from a different generation and asked students to hold him accountable on how he used examples in class.

Lily Cesario, then a student in his class, felt differently. His disclaimer “raised a red flag for me,” she wrote in an email to Fretz. In a subsequent meeting, according to a written account Fretz later submitted to school officials, Cesario told Fretz he had wrongly asked women in the class to educate their professor about sexism and had failed to fully acknowledge his privilege.

Afterward, in the class’s unofficial group chat, Cesario asked other students if they found Fretz’s statement “problematic,” according to screenshots I viewed. “He’s going out of his way to be inclusive,” one replied. Others liked his humility. In a subsequent email, Cesario told Fretz she was dropping his course. His disclaimer was “extremely disrespectful and ignorant of the struggles that women and girls continue to face on a daily basis,” his behavior “inseparably ingrained within a larger culture of harm that exists on this campus and within the wider world.” She then filed a Title IX complaint...

Though the Title IX office found no grounds for punishment, Fretz remains stung. “It’s this gotcha culture they have created on campus,” he told me, adding: “It’s like giving a bunch of 6-year-olds Tasers.”

…..

Junk science posing as a new religion:

Some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training. The notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the microaggressions literature, however, judged it “without adequate scientific basis.”

Things aren't looking good for the former owner of 373 Taconic Road; if residents up there don't start behaving themselves, Rogues Hill Road is going to lose its title in favor of Taconic UPDATED

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Ho Wan Kwok and the temple of doom

Exiled Chinese billionaire with CT ties faces decades in prison for defrauding investors of millions

A federal judge has agreed to delay the sentencing of Miles Guo, an exiled Chinese billionaire and Greenwich resident convicted of defrauding investors of millions.

Guo, also known as Guo Wengui and referred to in his indictment as Ho Wan Kwok, was found guilty in July on nine counts, including racketeering conspiracy. He was scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 9, but United States District Judge Analisa Torres agreed last week to postpone the sentencing to Jan. 6, 2025. 

The judge's order requires the government and Guo's attorneys to submit sentencing filings in December. In the government's case, Torres said prosecutors must also provide the names of any victims who wish to be heard at sentencing. 

I mentioned that the Taconic house sold by his Trustee in Bankruptcy four days ago for $7.250 million, but for a full history of Mr. Ho’s troubled past, I refer you to an even earlier article I posted here in 2023.

UPDATE:

A friend who knows (a lot) about this kind of thing writes:

That Chinese guy on Stanwich? He had an apt in The Sherry Netherland ….

Get this, the guy who owned the apartment below was absolutely, positively connected to the USA govt. I forget how. Or, when. Or, in what capacity. But, spy wouldn't surprise me.

Did you know the fire that destroyed Guo's apartment ignited after he had left, and while the FBI was still there?

The significance of which is -- to me -- when the Fire Dept hosed down Guo's apt, they also soaked everything in the apt below, presumably including evidence against Guo. (If, in fact, the guy on 17 was collecting evidence. And, who the hell knows?) Maybe that's all just a coincidence.

Or not. Curious, in any event.

RELATED:

This is the Democrats’ proposed administration, and 50% of the country doesn’t care.;

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This is the person Tim Walz brought in to guide the education of his state’s children”

And …

And this is Kamalla’s own pick to help shape her new, “moderate”energy policy:

Kamala Harris's Far-Left 'Climate Engagement Director' Accuses Oil and Gas Workers of Committing 'Ecoterrorism,' Weaponizing 'White Supremacy' and 'Toxic Patriarchy'

Camila Thorndike called fossil fuel industry a 'death cult' that weaponizes 'white supremacy'

Least surprising headline of the day (so far)

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run away!

Ex-Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries, business associates arrested in sex-trafficking probe

Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was arrested Tuesday as part of a sex trafficking investigation.

The disgraced fashion giant boss was nabbed in West Palm Beach, Florida, while two of his business associates, Matthew Smith and James Jacobson, were also arrested in the case, sources confirmed to The Post.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn were set to hold a news conference later Tuesday to announce the charges in the sex trafficking and interstate prostitution case – including the “former CEO of a major company.”

The arrests come roughly a year after the FBI started probing claims Jeffries allegedly orchestrated elaborate sex events to exploit and sexually abuse young male models during his 22-year tenure at the brand.

This is what passes for modern journalism these days

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There’s no fooling the heirs of Woodward and Bernstein : “81 percent likely that this is AI-generated”

Verified photos of the former president at the football game on Sunday night show him in a suite at Acrisure Stadium in Pittsburgh, wearing a blue suit and a red tie.

However, the image posted on Truth Social depicts Trump on a football field wearing a jersey for the Pittsburgh Steelers — there is no evidence this ever occurred.

Trump's torso and arms also appear to have been altered to appear more muscular than they do in other photos and videos of Trump in sportswear, such as those posted by Trump Golf's Instagram account in July.

According to an image detector search through 'Is It AI?' the photo is 81 percent likely to be constructed by AI.

Another AI image detector site, AIimagedetector.org, also concluded that the picture was likely AI-generated, stating the picture is approximately 30 percent human and nearly 70 percent AI-generated.

Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign for comment via email outside of business hours, as well as to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

And this is the farce face of modern journalism: Meet NYU graduate Maya Mehtara, proving that Kamalla is not the only half-Indian idiot wandering America. Mind you, no word on the heritage of the editor who approved this piece of sh*t ground-breaking investigative reporting, assuming Newsweek still employs such.

“The force of moronism is strong with this one.”

Still more fried liberals shots

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(Amazing Photoshop — someone put smiles on the FBI agents faces*, I’m impressed)

Andin the news ….

*(Original photo)