☕️ NO SHEETZ ☙ Tuesday, April 23, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Liberals delirious over Trump Trial start; CNN runs a fair Trump trial op-ed; US terminator weapons; gas stations claps too softly; Supreme Court offers hope against DEI; Florida Man wins again; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! The roundup includes: Trump trial first day produces liberal delirium; CNN runs a fair Trump trial op-ed and makes history; New York Times puff piece reveals U.S. is making artificial intelligence that picks targets; gas station chain didn’t clap loudly enough and is now experiencing a disparate impact; great 9-0 Supreme Court decision offers hope for employees suffering reverse discrimination; and Florida Man again proves his worth.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Reuters ran a Trump trial summary story yesterday headlined, “On first day of Trump hush money trial, prosecutors say he corrupted 2016 election.” Following opening statements and the calling of the state’s first witness, liberal commentators were as overjoyed yesterday as Zelensky racing to the bank after getting his next big U.S. government check, and as deliriously excited as Joe Biden in a day care center suddenly realizing no one is watching him.

The prosecution’s opening statement revealed District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s trial strategy: he’s going wide, trying to camouflage his case’s biggest shortfall, which is that his whole ruckus is all just about the wording on some check notations. But not according to Bragg’s team, who claim it’s much bigger than that. “It was election fraud, pure and simple,” gushed prosecutor Matthew Colangelo in his opening statement, while the jurors listened intently.

Pure? Simple? Rubbish. Trump was never charged with election fraud. Not one single count.

But rather than fight about it, Trump’s lawyers seemed to lean into that claim, which is fair given there are no “election influencing” charges to worry about. “I have a spoiler alert,” attorney Todd Blanche advised the jury. “There is nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy.”

In this case, truth seems to be something nobody cares about. I complained yesterday that journalists seemed disinterested in whether the stories Trump was forced to buy were actually true or not. To its credit, in Reuters’s article, it referenced one alleged “story” that journalists ran to ground. His old doorman was peddling a story that Trump had a Hunter Biden-style love child.

And, guess what? Journalists figured out that story was fake, even though Trump is alleged to have paid thirty grand for an NDA anyway (allegedly via a friendly tabloid magazine):

The tabloid reached a similar deal to pay $30,000 to a doorman who was seeking to sell a story about Trump allegedly fathering a child out of wedlock, which turned out to be false, according to prosecutors.

How about that? It turned out to be false! So, when the only one of the several claimed stories was run to ground, it wasn’t true. In other words, Trump was blackmailed. But vexingly, media doesn’t care, and Alvin Bragg doesn’t care. The odious falsity of the doorman’s made-up love child story is irrelevant to them. Trump still mischaracterized the blackmail payment to the doorman.

Regardless of how they try to frame it, this case is only about how Trump worded the description of the payments in his own books.

🔥 I was not expecting fair treatment from CNN, so I was shocked to discover the platform actually ran an even-handed opinion piece, penned by its criminal defense attorney-slash-CNN analyst Joey Jackson and headlined, “Opinion: I’ve been a criminal attorney for decades. Here’s what I think about the case against Trump.” Nothing in the op-ed will surprise you, as informed and alert C&C readers, but if you needed a sane, left-leaning link to send a distressed relative, this will fill the bill.

A couple points in the op-ed stood out. First, Attorney Jackson described the Trump trial much as I have, contradicting Reuters’s overheated “corrupted election” headline:

More interesting was how the piece ended. The penultimate paragraph recognized the case’s historical nature; in other words, no prior political party was brainless enough to open the presidential prosecution Pandora’s box. To his credit Jackson decorated his words better than usual, but the legal analyst did his best parrot impression, reflexively offering the left’s singular, feeble excuse for its massive transgression of socio-political mores, uttering the oft-repeated liberal shibboleth “no one is above the law:”

“No one is above the law” is a neat concept, and not wrong, but the definitions seem to have strayed to some extent. Not to mention that democrats never before seemed particularly bound to the concept that “no one is above the law.” (Ahem, Hillary.) Mr. Jackson, again to his credit, generously invoked the Constitution’s presumption of innocence “even” for Trump, but most liberal commenters seem to think the slogan “no one is above the law” fully accounts for eight concurrent lawsuits and criminal prosecutions all exquisitely timed to interrupt Trump’s presidential campaign.

If history proves anything, it’s that when people repeat foolish sayings in haste, often later they have the opportunity to repent in leisure. Liberals’ love affair with reciting like talking dolls the mantra “no one is above the law” could easily boomerang. Hopefully when it does, it won’t boomerang on us all.

🚀 Many folks have complained recently about Israel’s use of AI to pick targets in Gaza. I mean, what could go wrong? Well, apparently angst toward Israel may be misplaced. They probably got it from us, since the U.S. developed that technology first. The New York Times yesterday ran a remarkable, non-paywalled story headlined, “In Ukraine, New American Technology Won the Day. Until It Got Overwhelmed.” Actually, Google did it. For nine million dollars.

Here’s how the genesis of our robot overlords was described in the article:

Six years ago, the Silicon Valley giant signed a small, $9 million contract to put the skills of a few of its most innovative developers to the task of building an artificial intelligence tool that would help the military detect potential targets on the battlefield using drone footage.

Apparently Google backed out of “Project Maven” after employees reacted with horror, but the Times assured readers that other unidentified contractors finished the project. They sent it to Ukraine, where Project Maven was an unmitigated disaster. The Russians handled the AI-based drones like childs play. But, despite its apparent failures, the Times still calls the Proxy War a technology “bonanza” for the military:

The American-made drones that were shipped into Ukraine last year were blown out of the sky with ease. But the war in Ukraine has, in the minds of many American officials, been a bonanza for the U.S. military, a testing ground for Project Maven and other rapidly evolving technologies.

It’s not too good for the Ukrainians that the Russians are blowing the Pentagon’s experimental high-tech toys right out of the sky. But I suppose it was nice of them to test this stuff out for us, so no Americans had to experience rapid unscheduled disassembly:

In the first year of the war, Russia barely used its electronic warfare capabilities. Today it has made full use of them, confusing the waves of drones the United States has helped provide. Even the fearsome HIMARS missiles that President Biden agonized over giving to Kyiv, which were supposed to make a huge difference on the battlefield, have been misdirected at times as the Russians learned how to interfere with guidance systems.

Don’t worry about Project Maven too much though. They’re still working on their electronic whiz kid:

Eric Schmidt, who spent 16 years as Google’s chief executive, is now drawing on lessons from Ukraine to develop a new generation of autonomous drones that could revolutionize warfare. Google’s exit, he said, may have slowed progress toward what the Pentagon now called “algorithmic warfare.” But “we just kept going.”

Mr. Schmidt began funding a different vision, one that is now, after the Ukraine experience, gaining adherents in the Pentagon: far more inexpensive, autonomous drones, which would launch in swarms and talk to each other even if they lost their connection to human operators on the ground.

Project Maven quickly became the standout success among the Pentagon’s many efforts to tiptoe into algorithmic warfare, and soon incorporated feeds from nearly two dozen other Defense Department programs and commercial sources into an unprecedented common operating picture for the U.S. military.

“There’s an awful lot of moral issues here,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledged.

You don’t say. The question is, exactly who is wrestling with all those moral issues? And do we get a say?

Isn’t it weird how quickly Congress can act to stop some kinds of threats, like TikTok, but it seems utterly powerless to stop government agencies from conducting gain of function virus research or stop the U.S. military from giving lethal-force decisionmaking power to computer chips made in China? Isn’t that weird?

🔥🔥 Things in this country are going to Sheetz. Fox News ran the story yesterday, headlined “Biden admin hits Sheetz convenience store chain with lawsuit, despite campaign stop.” The sub-headline added, “Sheetz is accused of violating civil rights law with its hiring practices.” Whatever they were doing must have been pretty bad. Right?

Literally one day after Biden stopped at the Pittsburgh Sheetz convenience store last week, the Department of Justice filed a federal complaint alleging that same family-owned chain discriminates against black folks because it requires a criminal background check in its hiring process.

These days, the EEOC refers to ex-convicts and felons as “justice-involved individuals.” I wish it were, but that is not a joke.

Public reaction has been mixed. First of all, most people do not resonate with the EEOC’s logic. According to the DOJ’s EEOC, since black folks are proportionately more likely than white people to have felony records, the background check requirement is de facto racism, even if Sheetz’s motives are pure, and even if their only goal is to hire better employees.  They call this kind of thing “disparate impact.”

EEOC attorney Debra M. Lawrence explained to the Associated Press why Sheetz’s actual motives don’t matter: “Federal law mandates that employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue," she said.

That’s not all. Even if Sheetz can prove it needs to put non-criminal employees in charge of handling cash, the 600-store chain will still not be out of the federal persecution woods. "Even when such necessity is proven, the practice remains unlawful if there is an alternative practice available that is comparably effective in achieving the employer’s goals but causes less discriminatory effect," DOJ Debra added.

Shop at Sheetz!

Second, social media was already exploding over the Sheetz story, thanks to a few viral videos suggesting that Biden did not receive a very warm welcome when he stopped there for a milkshake. Maybe if Sheetz had hired more convicts, Biden’s reception would have been a more heartwarming experience. You never know.

So the timing of the EEOC’s lawsuit seemed suspect, like it was payback by the Biden Campaign for Sheetz’s unenthusiasm, and perhaps a dark warning to other small businesses and convenience store chains, to clap harder whenever Biden stumbles along.

It reminds us of like those old Soviet stories about movie theater attendees standing and clapping for hours after the ending of a Stalin propaganda video, in sheer terror of being seen as the first one to stop.

According to the Fox article, Sheetz has been wrangling with the EEOC over this issue for eight years:

"Diversity and inclusion are essential parts of who we are. We take these allegations seriously," Sheetz spokesperson Nick Ruffner said, as reported by The Associated Press. "We have attempted to work with the EEOC for nearly eight years to find common ground and resolve this dispute."

The EEOC disparate impact trick isn’t new, and it hasn’t worked particularly well, not that previous failures are stopping them. According to an article in the New York Post, in 1989, the EEOC sued a Florida trucking company for refusing to hire a Hispanic applicant with multiple arrests and a prison term for larceny. But the federal judge (himself hispanic) scoffed, holding that “EEOC’s position that minorities should be held to lower standards is an insult to millions of honest Hispanics. Obviously a rule refusing honest employment to convicted applicants is going to have a disparate impact upon thieves.”

Perhaps the most ironic and hilarious part of this Sheetzy story is that the federal government — including the EEOC which is suing Sheetz for using criminal background checks in hiring — itself requires applicants to undergo criminal background checks:

It’s a two-tiered system of justice these days, and you and I — and Sheetz — are riding in coach class.

🔥 Speaking of a disparate impact, the Washington Post ran a quiet, murky story late last week headlined, “DEI ‘lives on’ after Supreme Court ruling, but critics see an opening.” The news was the Supreme Court issued a terrific but very obscure 9-0 opinion that corporate media wishes would sink into the Marianis trench.

Supreme Court sweeps up a 9-0 decision

On the surface, the Muldrow v. St. Louis decision looks fairly unremarkable.  A female St. Louis police sergeant alleged she was transferred to a less prominent job assignment because of her gender. The trouble with her case was her pay and benefits stayed the same, and the city argued she wasn’t harmed. But the Court unanimously agreed that even “small harms” — if tangible — are enough to support a Title VII claim for employment discrimination.

The liberals and conservatives on the Court probably agreed on the case’s conclusion for different reasons.

What has some DEI activists now wringing their hands is that pro-equality conservative lawfare groups hope to use the new decision to push back on Constitutionally repugnant anti-white discrimination. Disadvantaged white employees might now challenge so-called ‘affirmative action’ programs if they advantage minorities over white employees in even minor ways.

Examples might include things like mentoring opportunities open only to minority employees, or a meet-and-greet with executives excluding white folks, both of which may now be actionable under Muldrow’s new “some harms” standard.

The few mainstream articles reporting on the case bravely suggested that DEI activists aren’t worried because “well crafted” DEI programs will still survive constitutional scrutiny. But that’s the trick; employers must now be much more cautious about crafting policies having racially disparate advantages benefits.

No disparate impacts…

Maybe even better news was that Muldrow conceivably could lead to a real breakthrough in equality, and won’t become just another legal weapon. It could force employers to design even-handed programs that help faltering workers while respecting the rights of all, or maybe even get out of that line of work altogether.

🔥🔥 Finally, despite suffering lots of reputational insult, Florida Man once again proves he’s handy to have around, especially when alligators are terrorizing the neighborhood. Note his footwear.

CLIP: Florida Man tackles toothy problem (0:26).

Be Florida Man! Fear no small alligator. Carry duct tape at all times. Shoes optional.

And have a terrific Tuesday! Slay, or at least tape up your alligators today, and stroll back here tomorrow morning for the terrific midweek roundup.

We can’t do it without you. Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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