I’ve got two quick bits of business to start with. First, OJ Simpson continues to be dead, and rumors that he was related to me have been definitively disproven. Just FYI.
Second is a language note that has been irritating me: If you use the word “journey” around me, you’d better be Vasco da Gama, Magellan or Columbus. Or possibly a fan of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
Otherwise, knock it off. In just the last 24 hours I have either heard or read people talking about “my vegan journey,” “our crypto investment journey,” and “my gender awareness journey.” (I’m guessing the last one took you around the Cape of Good Hope, and then way out past the Cape of Good Sense?) (Ending in the Cape of Good Lord! You Cut That Off?!)
And then I came across a story about an in-house Microsoft pro-DEI propaganda video called, “Work in Progress: Our Diversity and Inclusion Journey.” And that was too depressing for me to investigate any further.
On the bright side, I am SO glad I don’t work at Microsoft.
Okay, with those irritations out of the way, I’m going to focus on the sunny side today. Because even with the many things going wrong in the country, good things are happening, too.
For example, even the uber-woke Google has shown some backbone, and fired some insubordinate workers who were offended because the company was providing a cloud service called Nimbus to the Israeli government and military.
The workers had been protesting, interrupting meetings with shouts and inane chants for months, “demand[ing] that Google stop providing material support to genocide” by killing Nimbus. On Wednesday, they took it up a notch, occupying company offices in NY and CA in a disruptive 10-hour sit-in.
My first instinct was that Google would likely “pull an NBC” and capitulate to the a-holes. (Just as the intolerant MSM workers were able to force their putative bosses to fire Ronna Romney six minutes after they hired her.)
But no! Google warned the protestors to quit it, and when they didn’t, Google had a handful of them arrested for trespassing and then fired 28 of them. It’s a Ramadan miracle!
The resulting social media tantrum thrown by the fired workers was a heart-warming laugh riot, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the employer-employee relationship in grown-up land. Their statement began, “This evening, Google indiscriminately fired 28 workers.”
Look up “indiscriminate,” you children, because this wasn’t that. They have almost 200,000 employees, and they fired the 28 biggest a-holes among them. That’s some fine-tuned discrimination right there!
The best part was when they whined that their “flagrant” firing was “a clear indication” that Google valued the $1.2 billion contract more than its malcontent workers.
Ya think? Let’s see. Hang on a second while I get my scales-of-justice decision-making tool out…
Okay. On one side, put 28 entitled brats who are a constant source of dissension and stress in the office. Now on the other side put $1.2 BILLION DOLLARS! …. Calculating… carry the 2… calculating…
Annnnndddddd…
You’re gone! Don’t let the door hit you on the burka on your way out, and as they say in Gaza, Fa’aq Mabhouh!
And it’s not just Google, and Vanderbilt, and the Bakersfield city council that’s laying some smack-down on arrogant lefty dimwits.
Even the Ivy League is providing some good news, as when Columbia warned over 100 pro-Hamas anti-Semite student protestors who had set up tents on the school lawn that if they didn’t remove the tents and disperse, they’d be arrested.
Then, when the students didn’t do that… they were arrested!
Unexpectedly! (But in a very good way.)
The NY cops rounded them up, cuffed them, loaded them onto corrections buses and took them downtown to be charged. There’s also talk of suspension! Tragically, no taser therapy was administered, but still: file this under “things I never thought I’d see.”
To provide a little sweet schadenfreude glaze (mmm, schadenfreude glaze!) on this delicious story, Ilhan Omar’s daughter was there, and was arrested too!
I didn’t know Omar had a daughter. Her name is Isra Hirsi, and my second thought about her was the hope that she’s not as obnoxious as her mom. (My first thought? “Please God, don’t let her dad be her uncle!”)
But she’s apparently cut from the same cloth as Jack Petocz, the Vanderbilt narcissist I wrote about last week. Just as he whined about being expelled “for fighting for marginalized people” and “protesting the genocide (sic) in Palestine (sic),” Hirsi complained that she has been suspended “for standing in solidarity with Palestinians (sic) facing a genocide (sic).”
She has a Soviet hammer and sickle on her X account, too. So she’s several different kinds of dumb. She also has a biographical sketch that reads like self-aggrandizing self-parody:
“Isra Hirsi has been organizing for justice and equity since she was 14, bringing national attention to climate change before she graduated high school.”
Got that? You may have thought that the non-stop yammering about climate change has been coming from every self-involved doom scroller in the country for the last 30 years, but it turns out it’s all the fault of this one insufferable teenager in Minnesota!
Isra, if you wanted to bring national attention to an issue that was being overlooked, why didn’t you raise our awareness of the prevalence of incest and immigration fraud in the Somali ingrate community?
Her bio goes on, and I bet you can guess where it ends up. “Finding her voice (ugh!), embracing her purpose, and carrying years of experience as a leading Black (don’t forget the capital letter!) youth in the climate activism arena at such a young age has been…” wait for it, CO nation… “a difficult journey…”
Aagghhhh! I’m out! I hope she gets 5-7 in Rikers for aggravated virtue signaling.
But the cherry on top of this masterpiece of an optimistic column comes to us from another unlikely place: Harvard University! You may remember the school from that time when their President and their top DEI official both got caught plagiarizing their butts off, but now they’ve actually done something smart.
They’ve re-instituted the requirement for applicants to submit standardized test scores. This requirement was dropped by many Ivy League schools in recent years, many of them blaming covid. Which made no sense.
But everyone on the left was blaming covid for everything.
Joe Biden has lost the ability to walk, and speak coherently? Covid! Whoopi Goldberg is gaining weight and losing IQ? Covid! Liz Warren’s DNA has mutated to mysteriously wipe out all trace of her Native American ancestry? Covid!
(#wemustneverstopmockingher)
But the real reason to get rid of standardized tests was that some minorities do great on tests (Asians, Indians from India) and others do badly (Hispanics and blacks). So obviously the tests are racist and white supremacist, or Asian-supremacist, or Hindu-supremacist, or something.
The dirty little secret in academia is that the tests pretty accurately reflect the level of student preparedness to succeed at a high-level university. Which means that the tests accurately predicted that under-prepared minority students who did poorly on the tests would do poorly in college.
Unexpectedly!
Which led in turn to the incredibly moronic – and un-sayable in public – premise behind dropping standardized tests in the first place: These tests reveal that many students will fail at Harvard. So the tests must be killed, so that we can admit them, so they can then fail at Harvard. (And then we’ll blame racism. Or patriarchy. Or covid.)
This phenomenon also explains, IMHO, why MIT reversed itself and required tests again two years earlier than the Ivies did: when your focus is on rigorous STEM coursework – where everything has to work and be accurate – it’s much harder to hide very bad student performance than it is in Grievance Studies programs, where everything is stupid, dysfunctional, and false.
So sure, higher education has a ton of flaws, and needs systemic reform. [This is where, if my column had a soundtrack, you’d noticing the consistent rising volume of the strings asserting themselves…] But for today, I’m going to take this victory, and I’m going to celebrate it.
Because I’m an Ameri-CAN, not an Ameri-can’t, and I’m a cautious optimist, dammit! In fact, like many Martins before me, I’m a dreamer! [Now the brass has joined in, along with the woodwinds…]
And I have a dream, today!
I have a dream that our politicians – just like our college students and my two (relatively) little children – will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin or the juiciness of their booties (her words, not mine), but by their intellect, their work ethic, and the content of their character!
Can I get an amen?
Now get out there and crush the weekend, CO nation! Because you’re not on some simpering “journey” – you’ve already arrived!
And don’t forget…
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 