Is Being Saved By A "Diverse" Fireman Important?

Post below lifted from Discriminations. See the original for links

Last May the Justice Department sued New York City because its fire department was not suitably "diverse." The city replied that by the time of the suit the exam given to applicants had already changed. As the New York Post reports in this editorial, "no kidding." The latest test-takers were given questions such as:

"As a rookie firefighter, you are responsible for cleaning the kitchen. At the beginning of your shift, you find the kitchen area is a mess. And there is a bowl of chili spilled on the floor from the firefighters from the previous shift. The reason the kitchen was left in such a mess is due to the previous crew having gone out on a call to a fire during their dinner, and they are still actively fighting the fire. "Do you:

"1) Clean the mess up.

"2) Clean the mess up, but complain to anyone who will listen.

"3) Refuse to clean the mess up.

"4) Clean everything except the spilled chili.

"5) Wait for everyone from the previous shift to return, yell at them that they should have cleaned up the mess."

Candidates who took the exam were asked this question, and after each possible answer, instructed to put an "a" through "e" desirability rating - where "a" is "highly desirable" and "e" is "highly undesirable." Eighty-eight of the exam's 195 questions accepted multiple answers as correct. Five questions accepted three answers. Another accepted every answer.

Mayor Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Nick Scoppetta recently announced that 38% of those who passed the test this year are minorities, nearly three times the rate of those who passed the 2002 test. Given questions such as the one quoted above, I'm not sure how much progress this represents.



Joe McCarthy Freedom Fighter

As Evans found combing through Senate records, FBI files, State Department reports and the Venona transcripts that our government made of cables sent by the Soviet Union to its agents, Sen. McCarthy's suspicions were more than warranted.

A couple of years ago, I debated a professor from American University named John Doolittle who, prompted by me, admitted that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wisconsin (1909-1957), may have exposed some real communists working in the federal government. "But I saw the Edward R. Murrow broadcasts," Dr. Doolittle added. "He was a bad man."

Veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans, who has studied more of the government files from that era than Dr. Doolittle or his peers, or for that matter, Edward R. Murrow himself, have ever seen, reaches a different verdict. "Measured by the total record of his cases and political battles, McCarthy, whatever his faults, was a good man and true-better and truer by far than the tag teams of cover-up artists and backstage plotters who connived unceasingly to destroy him," Evans writes in his masterful book on the senator's life and times. "The truth he served, moreover, was of the greatest import-the exposure of people who meant to do us grievous harm, and of long standing indifference toward this menace by many at high official levels." "In so doing, he summoned the nation to a firm-willed resistance to the Communist challenge, both abroad and on the home front." Full disclosure: I am listed in the acknowledgements of the book.

Although perhaps not a cast of thousands, McCarthy's suspects easily numbered more than a hundred. As Evans found combing through Senate records, FBI files, State Department reports and the Venona transcripts that our government made of cables sent by the Soviet Union to its agents, Sen. McCarthy's suspicions were more than warranted. Moreover, many of these agents were in key policymaking posts and some remained there even as Sen. McCarthy was in the process of investigating them. Their subsequent exodus from the government that resulted from McCarthy's attentions gave them victim status but what of the actual victims of the policies that they put in place?

As Evans shows in Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, Taiwan and South Korea might owe their freedom to the brawling Irishman from Appleton, Wisconsin. Four weeks before Sen. McCarthy made his famed Wheeling, West Virginia speech in 1950, President Harry Truman's Secretary of State gave a lecture of his own at the National Press Club.

Senator McCarthy, of course, talked about security risks in the federal government focusing hard and heavy on the Far East Division at State while Dean Acheson wrote off Formosa and South Korea as beyond the sphere of American interests. Ultimately, the former revelation derailed the latter policy. For one thing, the United States entered the Korean War. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, more lethal plotting was derailed, Evans pointed out on The Right Hour with Paul Weyrich.

The "Old China Hands" whose suspect connections McCarthy exposed had already done their best to insure that communist rebel leader Mao Tse Tung bested Chinese leader Chiang Kai Shek on the mainland. Their enabling of the greatest mass murderer in 20th Century history was apparently not enough for the striped pants boys. The professional diplomats concocted schemes to overthrow Chiang in his Formosa retreat, as seen in now declassified documents Evans obtained. McCarthy suspect John Paton Davies helped plan this scheme. Nonetheless, other officials at State including future diplomat-in-chief Dean Rusk, showed great enthusiasm for it.

"Though this wasn't an assassination plot, per se, the likelihood that such a scheme would lead to the death of Chaing and those loyal to him was implicit and in keeping with the record of military risings elsewhere," Evans writes in Blacklisted By History. "(In which respect the obvious parallel would be the murder of South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, after a virtually identical U. S.-supported coup in November 1963 when Rusk was Secretary of State.)"

"They started on me with Diem, you remember," President Lyndon Baines Johnson told Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., recalling the words of the coup's advocates. "`He was corrupt and he ought to be killed,'" President Johnson remembered hearing when he was second in command to JFK. "So we killed him," LBJ recalled in that phone call to the Minnesota solon. "We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and assassinated him," World Net Daily reported the Texan saying. "Now, we've really had no political stability [in South Vietnam] since then," LBJ said on the tape of the phone call that WND obtained and quoted from.

The implication boggles the mind. Might South Vietnam be free today if the motley collection of liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans who people Blacklisted By History not undercut Sen. Joseph McCarthy?

Source



Freedom to believe

Post below lifted from Jammie Wearer. See the original for links

I have to agree with the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who suggests that "freedom to believe" is under threat in Britain because of Islamic hostility to conversion. Consider the example of a British imam's daughter who is now living in fear of her life under police protection after she received death threats from her family for converting to Christianity.

The young woman, aged 32, whose father is a Muslim imam in the north of England, has moved house 45 times to escape detection by her family since she became a Christian 15 years ago. Hannah, who uses a pseudonym to hide her identity, told The Times how she became a Christian after she ran away from home at 16 to escape an arranged marriage. The threats against her became more serious a month ago, prompting police to offer her protection in case of an attempt on her life.

Islam will not countenance any form of dissent. Those who choose of their own free will to leave Islam may well also leave this Earth prematurely if the more ardent advocates of the ROP get their hands on such "apostates". The reality is that Islam appears unable to adapt to the 21st century standards of tolerance and the treatment meted out to this lady is a disgrace.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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