Dear Pete

Key Point. A man who asks little of himself, gives little of himself, gets little done, but surely is eloquent.
Dear Pete,
I would call you Secretary Pete, but I am thinking you’re already working your way to eliminate that obviously very sexist and unwoke word. I would call you Mayor Pete, but a mayor is supposed to provide public service to a city, and it’s been proven time and again you failed at that job and at deserving that designation. I would call you Captain Pete, but it’s well known that a captain is someone who takes full charge through challenges and opportunities, who steps up and says he is responsible and digs in to do something about it, who moves into action mode as soon as possible to implement the best situational mitigations, who determines causes and solutions and holds himself accountable to set them in motion, and responds to all who he commands and serves. Most important and last he takes accountability for completion and the effectiveness of outcome and learns about himself by it. So far I haven’t heard you take credit for anything so that’s a very strong indicator that you haven’t done anything. Raise your hand if you recognize yourself anywhere along in here, Pete.
We can all see you talk a good game. We can all see how the McKinsey consultant in you is accomplished at turning the phrase, Without a doubt in an administration that is superlative in pushing blame on others you are the consummate distributor of guilt. Using language that shows you grasp the issue as well as the big pic, that you seem to address the problem but using passive voice and indeterminate actors and actions, and creating an excellent executive summary and well-organized report on the situation with indexes and everything. Never mind actually coming up with steps to solve this whole mess and trying to do your best to help people out. Not incidentally, you’re also great at pointing the blame to the other people, like the ones that predated you by 5 years, the ones that allowed railroad accidents in the world in the first place, all the people who showed up that were unable to get to a satisfactory conclusion, and frankly just about anyone but you who ever said the words railroad train at all. In the excuse area you are almost as good as your boss (not quite but he has had a lot more practice).
So I guess I will just call you a smartass who fills a space. Oh! Everyone has now raised their hands for you.
Sincerely, Your Employer, A US Citizen Taxpayer
PS – Smart ass – both smart and an ass.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dissent with SCOTUS Affirmative Action Decision
[Associate Justice Jackson’s dissent followed SCOTUS 6-2 decision in favor of removing affirmative action as one plausible method for determining college entrance. Jackson recused from opinion on the case because she went to Harvard, which along with University of North Carolina were the two subject universities in the case. Still, she rendered an opinion in the dissent. The following is a restatement and in-line commentary on one part of the dissociated drivel she produced as a dissenting Associate Justice in this case. Her “dissenting opinion” consisted primarily of a short, biased, one-sided set of excerpts of history of treatment of Negroes in the South of the 19th century and blacks in the 20th century.
Embedded in the obviously slanted and sometimes misstated recount, Jackson invented two people attending UNC, one who perfectly had all the advantages Jackson could imagine accruing to one individual, and one who had perfectly all the disadvantages Jackson could so imagine. Calling this part of a legal opinion is farcical; it is more of a fictional short story constructed to bolster her opinion that there is some sort of systemic racism embedded in American society that guides the privilege of whites and is detrimental to blacks. Whether that is true or not, one would expect our highest judges to relate complete history, balanced accounts, and some sort of backing for each assertion. Instead, in many cases what we are treated with is in each and every example the villain is whiteness and the victim is a person of color. In each and every citation there is a

“We return to John and James now, with history in hand. It is hardly John’s fault that he is the seventh generation to graduate from UNC. UNC should permit him to honor that legacy. Neither, however, was it James’s (or his family’s) fault that he would be the first. And UNC ought to be able to consider why. Most likely, seven generations ago, when John’s family was building its knowledge base and wealth potential on the university’s campus, James’s family was enslaved and laboring in North Carolina’s fields. Six generations ago, the North Carolina “Redeemers” aimed to nullify the results of the Civil War through terror and violence, marauding in hopes of excluding all who looked like James from equal citizenship.

Five generations ago, the North Carolina RedShirts finished the job.
Four (and three) generations ago, Jim Crow was so entrenched in the State of North Carolina
that UNC “enforced its own Jim Crow regulations.”
73
Two generations ago, North Carolina’s Governor still railed against “‘integration for integration’s sake’”—and UNC Black enrollment was minuscule.
74
So, at bare minimum, one generation ago, James’s family was six generations be-hind because of their race, making John’s six generations ahead. These stories are not every student’s story. But they are many students’ stories. To demand that colleges ignore race in today’s admissions practices—and thus disregard the fact that racial disparities may have mattered for where some applicants find themselves today—is not only an affront to the dignity of those students for whom race matters.
75
It also condemns our society to never escape the past that explains
how and why
race matters to the very concept of who “merits” admission