Taking A Leaf Out Of Anti-Litter Campaigns – ‘Take Your Trash Home With You’

The US is revoking the visas of all South Sudanese passport-holders and will stop any more of its citizens entering the country. The Department of State said South Sudan was “taking advantage of the United States” by failing to comply with US efforts to return people to the east African country, adding that the measures would come into effect immediately. “Every country must accept the return of its citizens in a timely manner when another country, including the United States, seeks to remove them,” it said.

Yes, but they don't, so it's about time someone forced them to. 

“All visa appointments are cancelled, no new visas will be issued, no existing visas will be effective, and hence NO ONE from South Sudan will be entering the United States on a visa until this matter is resolved,” he said in a social media post.

And will America be poorer for it? 

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said Washington would “be prepared to “review these actions when South Sudan is in full cooperation”.

Heh! Your move, South Sudan! 

They Really Don’t Like It Up ‘Em, Do They?

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in federally assisted programs or activities. The education department’s “Dear Colleagues” letter redefines the central targets of Title VI to centrally include supposed discrimination against whites.

There's nothing 'supposed' about it though. And the progressives won't give up that easily. 

US history shows that slavery was a central factor in US wealth. The US was built on Indigenous genocide and colonialism, as seizing Indigenous land was one of the reasons for seeking independence from England and is, in any case, foundational to the country’s formation. Structural racism also persists; for example, cities are segregated because of structural injustice in housing and mortgage law. The ways in which the US was built on racism, against Black Americans and Indigenous Americans, is central both to the study of its history and its present structure. If Americans do not have an understanding of this topic, they will not be well informed.

And by 'understanding' they don't mean what normal humans would know anout history, they aren't interested in simple 'understanding', indoctrination is the aim of their game. 

The “more extreme practices at a university” that “could create a hostile environment under Title VI” include “pressuring them to participate in protests or take certain positions on racially charged issues”.

But reason, rationality and morality are sources of “pressure”. How does one distinguish the pressure placed on people by moral arguments for racially charged issues from other kinds of pressure?

In other words, if you aren't protesting about nonsensical 'discrimination', you've no heart. They aren't trying to say that progressives are more intelligent than everyone else, they are trying to say they are simply more moral than anyonr else. 

As I have long warned, the media have been useful dupes for fascism. After years and years of vilifying academia, first by raising hysteria about “wokeness” and too little free speech (about eg race), and then by raising hysteria about too much free speech (about Israel), the mainstream media has smoothly paved the path for educational authoritarianism. No one should be surprised by its arrival.

You used the media when it suited you - now it's dancing to someone else's tune, you're raging. Maybe the issue isn't the media. Maybe it's you.  

More, Faster, Donald!

The Trump administration can for now continue its mass firings of federal employees, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, rejecting a bid by a group of labor unions to halt Donald Trump’s dramatic downsizing of the roughly 2.3 million-strong federal workforce. The ruling by the US district judge Christopher Cooper in Washington DC federal court is temporary while the litigation plays out.

But it is a win for the Trump administration as it seeks to purge the federal workforce and slash what it deems wasteful and fraudulent government spending.

Oh, how we so desperately need a UK version of DOGE...

In a statement released last Wednesday, NTEU president Doreen Greenwald said: “We will not stand idly by while this administration takes illegal actions that will harm citizens, federal employees and the economy.”

She went on to add: “All of these orders are further evidence that this administration is motivated not by efficiency, but by cruelty and a total disregard for the government services that will be lost.”

If they can be 'lost' so easily, they weren't worth having in the first place. That's rather the point. 

Everyone Else Is A Realist, Love...

Someone struggles with reality...

I have spent most of the last week on Zoom calls with accountants in New York, trying to figure out the personal finance implications of moving to the UK – lugging dual citizenship behind me. (Short version: they’re not good.) Since these conversations deal with economic outcomes it has felt, as a matter of form, necessary to mention that given the US just elected a maniac, at some level – don’t we think? – all bets are off. Joking not-joking: we can talk about pensions or college savings until the cows come home but really, why aren’t we screaming? A remark that has elicited, to a man, either blank looks or cheerful entreaties not to be so alarmist.

I'd entreat you to get psychiatric help, personally... 

The spectacle of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, co-hosts of the fiercely anti-Trump MSNBC show Morning Joe, beetling down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the president-elect as fast as their little legs could carry them, was presented by the pair as a necessary piece of journalistic engagement.

It's their job, of course they will want to do that. Not everyone has the luxury of acting like a spoiled child and refusing to do something they find distateful. 

Under the auspices of pragmatic engagement, or “holding Trump to account”, or the reasonable accommodation of a new American reality, there is the usual sucking up to money and power. Despite Trump’s conviction that the entire mainstream media is against him, it seems unlikely that he will be sitting alone in a ballroom at the White House Correspondents’ dinner next April while the US news media takes a stand.

And it’s true: sulking or ranting does nothing.

I wouldn't say that. It clearly gets you a column in the 'Guardian'...