Secretary Miguel Cardona on Twitter - "Teachers know what is best for their kids because they are with them every day. We must trust teachers."
Brit Hume on Twitter - ""their kids" Good lord."
We're still told that it's a myth that the left is anti-family
Mass absences break out at London schools as Pride flag flies - "More than 400 pupils at one of London’s largest elementary schools – about one-third of the entire headcount – stayed home Wednesday, on a day when the rainbow flag flew across the school district as the area public board saluted International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. Just three months ago, a similar mass absence broke out at Eagle Heights elementary school as it marked Rainbow Day, a designated day to celebrate diversity and inclusion... Unusually high absence levels were also reported at some other elementary schools... The board similarly said very little last February, despite repeatedly being asked, in the aftermath of what appeared to be a large move by parents to keep their kids home from Eagle Heights as the school celebrated Rainbow Day, which is all about diversity and inclusion. Roughly one-third of the kids were no-shows that day at the diverse school that includes pupils from many cultures and many of the Muslim faith. Sources have suggested many Muslim families at the school, on Oxford Street near the city’s largest mosque, deliberately chose to keep their kids home to avoid Rainbow Day... The London Muslim Mosque did not respond to a request for comment... “I guess it’s the parents’ choice, but it’s very unfortunate,” said Tami Murray, president of the umbrella group Oxford County Pride. “In a time where the same group (Muslims) has been quite marginalized, you would think that minorities and marginalized groups would unite and support each other”... On Feb. 10, Rainbow Day at the school, about 400 pupils stayed home — an eyebrow-raising absence level to many in education circles. Many of the children were from Muslim families... In the fallout, the president of the local wing of the public elementary school teachers’ union suggested the board needs to have “courageous conversations” with the Muslim community."
Damn white people!
When you politicise schools and only those who are politically immune can fight back
Opinion | The New Racism Won’t Solve the Old Racism - The New York Times - "Lori Lightfoot announced that, for her second anniversary as Chicago’s first openly gay, Black female mayor, she would give one-on-one interviews only to “POC reporters,” referring to “people of color,” on the grounds that she wanted to push for equity in the composition of the overwhelmingly white City Hall press corps. It took Gregory Pratt, a Latino reporter for The Chicago Tribune, to call her out for the misuse of power. Politicians, he wrote in a tweet, “don’t get to choose who covers them.” Pratt had been granted his interview request with Lightfoot but canceled on principle. This month, two Jewish clinicians at Stanford filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that one of the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs pressured them to attend a “racially segregated ‘whiteness accountability’ affinity group, which was created for ‘staff who hold privilege via white identity.’” “No affinity group was created for persons of Jewish ancestral identity. As a result, there is no ‘space’ in the D.E.I. program for Jewish staff members to safely express their lived Jewish experience,” read an overview of the complaint filed by the Brandeis Center. Also this month, a federal judge, Marcia Morales Howard, temporarily blocked a $4 billion Biden administration program to provide debt relief to “socially disadvantaged farmers” — provided the farmers were from racial minorities — even as she acknowledged the Department of Agriculture’s ugly history of racially discriminatory practices. “Socially disadvantaged farmers,” the judge noted, could get 120 percent debt relief under the program, even if they were “not remotely in danger of foreclosure.” Meanwhile, “a small white farmer who is on the brink of foreclosure can do nothing"... advocates of equity do two things that offend ordinary sensibilities — one of them sly, the other blunt. Editors’ Picks How the Arts Can Benefit Your Mental Health (No Talent Required) Dave Matthews Band’s Grown-Up View of Love and Dread New York’s Newest Wedding Hot Spot Is … Roosevelt Island? Sly is the redefinition of the word “equity,” which in common English means the quality of being fair and impartial, to mean something closer to the opposite: the quality of being anything but impartial to achieve a desired, supposedly fairer result. And blunt is the racial preference, the explicit segregation, the insulting assumption-making and the overall intellectual sophistry that is antiracist ideology in action... All this would have been too obvious for words until just a few years ago. The new dispensation in which racism is justified in the name of antiracism, discrimination in the service of equality, and favoritism for the sake of an even playing field, is exactly as Orwellian as it sounds. It may find purchase in the usual institutional and political progressive circles, but it’s not a good way to win converts when most of us believe that the promise of America lies in escaping the narrow prisms of race and identity, not being permanently trapped by them. Thoughtful liberals who think this is much ado about nothing should spend some time pondering how perfectly people like Lightfoot are now playing into right-wing stereotypes. They should also spend time wondering whether the ideal for which they have long fought — a society that, if not colorblind, can at least see past color — is being jeopardized by progressives who apparently can see only color."
From 2021. Liberals now think colourblindness is racist, so
Opinion | Race Manners: Which Black People Should I Believe? - The New York Times - "remember that the public conversations you’re hearing are often shaped by power dynamics in the media. So there’s a lot of money to be made and fame to be had for Black people who are willing to be anti-Black scolds, giving voice to the racist views of the white people who offer them platforms. Keep in mind that the people who work in media have incentives as well as personal agendas that can inform which Black people they choose to elevate. Rather than treating all opinions as equally worthy and getting stuck, you can take a look at the available data. Your instinct to trust a group to advocate for themselves is right, so you should consider what most members of that group say they want. For example, a large majority of Black people are in favor of reparations, so it might make sense to defer to them. The question of police reform is a little trickier. Outside of the wide consensus that it’s needed, there are varying views on how to get there, and the idea of defunding the police is an emerging policy proposal, not a divide based on decades of political difference. So that’s where you need to do your research and decide what you think is effective policy to reach a shared goal of a less racist country."
Clearly there's no money to be made and fame to be had in anti-white racism, and we must ignore the fact that more black people want more police than black people who want reparations, because data is only important when it helps liberal causes
Charges dismissed in nursing home assault - ""He shouldn't be in prison," Marty Hayden said about his son Jadon, now 22, who had been facing multiple charges including assault for the May 2020 beating of Norman Bledsoe inside a nursing home on Detroit's west side. The charges against Jadon Hayden were dismissed after he was found incompetent. Hayden now resides in a psychiatric hospital in the Kalamazoo area where he cannot come and go. Marty Hayden said if his son had been convicted and sent to prison, it would have only worsened his mental health issues."
Weird. The media tell us that mental health is only an issue where the criminal is white
Not just black and white: peer victimization and the intersectionality of school diversity and race - "Although bullying is a prevalent issue in the United States, limited research has explored the impact of school diversity on types of bullying behavior. This study explores the relationship between school diversity, student race, and bullying within the school context. The participants were African American and Caucasian middle school students (n = 4,581; 53.4% female). Among the participants, 89.4% were Caucasian and 10.6% were African American. The research questions examined the relationship between school diversity, student race and bullying behaviors, specifically race-based victimization. The findings suggested that Caucasian middle school students experience more bullying than African American students generally, and specifically when minorities in school settings. Caucasian students also experienced almost three times the amount of race-based victimization than African American students when school diversity was held constant. Interestingly, African American students experienced twice the amount of race-based victimization than Caucasian students when in settings with more students of color. The present study provides insight into bullying behaviors across different contexts for different races and highlights the need to further investigate interactions between personal and environmental factors on the bulling experiences of youth."
Damn white supremacy! Clearly white students facing three times as much bullying as black students is because the former are racist and the latter are just resisting their bigotry. Anyone suggesting that black people are more racist than white people is a Nazi
Who is Angela Harrell? Heckler and Koch woke tweets controversy explained amid online backlash - "Heckler and Koch expressed their support towards Miller Lite by sharing that they refuse to use “bunnies” to sell beer or guns. It seems like the organization was referring to women. They went on to defend their statement in another tweet by stating that “objectifying women was never a good marketing strategy.” They also added: “As an actual woman typing this, I’ll use more words for you to comprehend: using bunnies to sell products is trash marketing. Supporting women by not doing this is good.” In another deleted tweet Heckler and Koch gave props to Miller Lite for using “actual women” in their campaigns... After coming immensely close to cancellation, the organization apologized for their actions by tweeting a picture that read that they do not “engage in identity politics.” They went on to add that- “a police was violated. Changes were made.”"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "A Wesleyan sorority announced a new diversity chair and a more woke agenda. When one of the members anonymously criticized the effort as being divisive and unhelpful, she was declared a heretic that must be excommunicated from the fold. The anonymous woman they were targeting was one of the sorority’s few women of color who they managed to make feel unwelcome because she had a different viewpoint than the predominantly white membership."
This sorority accused a sister of racism after she anonymously criticized its woke agenda. Then they learned she’s not white.
Britney Griner will protest during the national anthem all season (2020)
Brittney Griner Reveals Emotions of Hearing National Anthem in WNBA Return (2023) - "Griner explained that she felt many emotions while hearing the national anthem before the preseason game in a way that she didn’t feel prior to her experience in Russia. “Hearing the national anthem, it definitely hit different,” Griner said, via CNN. “It’s like when you go for the Olympics, you’re sitting there, about to get gold put on your neck, the flags are going up and the anthem is playing, it just hits different. … Being here today … it means a lot.”"
Prison service says to drop the phrase 'ex-con' and call them 'persons with lived experience' - "Civil servants at the Prison Service headquarters have also instructed warders to drop the phrase 'ex-con' for former prisoners - and refer to them as 'persons with lived experience' or 'prison leavers'. The edict has left staff shaking their heads – at a time when jails are suffering from record overcrowding and their colleagues are leaving in droves... Another prisons source said: 'This is real nanny state stuff. Yet again, do-gooding civil servants are spending their working hours trying to manipulate the English language to fit their personal world view, rather than concentrating on things that really matter. 'While they are sending out diktats about 'persons with lived experience', the jails are full to bursting, prison officers are leaving in droves and crime is at a record high.'... the Prison Service published guidance on how inmates should be described. It was issued after the then Justice Secretary, Sir Robert Buckland, expressed his frustration at the Prison Service referring to inmates as 'residents'. The guidance adopted 'prisoners' or 'offenders' and said terms such as 'residents' and 'service users' should not be used. A source close to Sir Robert said at the time: 'This isn't the first time we've found this kind of drivel circulating around civil servants at the department. 'Prisons are places where we lock up ruthless criminals who have ruined people's lives but there is a blob in the department who act like they're running a north London playgroup.'"
Seattle Firefighters Now Drilled on Ibram Kendi Before Promotion to Top Jobs - "Of all the jobs in a standard fire department, a lieutenant’s is among the most difficult. When a fire truck approaches a blaze, the lieutenant decides how to tackle it—what windows to breach, which floors to prioritize, and how best to deploy the truck’s three or four firefighters against a shifting, inanimate enemy. To see if they’re up to snuff, most departments administer a written test, typically multiple-choice, to prospective lieutenants. Candidates must score above a cut-off to be considered for the job, with higher scores increasing the odds of promotion. The exam, which covers a litany of topics from building construction to medical techniques, is designed to ensure that the people making life-and-death decisions know the bare minimum to make them well. So firefighters in Seattle, Washington, were surprised when their department’s lieutenant exam focused almost as much on social justice as on firefighting. The test, which has both written and oral components, is based on a list of texts assigned by the Seattle Department of Human Resources—including, as of this year, How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and Both Sides of the Fire Lane: Memoirs of a Transgender Firefighter by Bobbie Scopa... Along with A Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias and Fighting Fire, a memoir by a female firefighter, the books about race and gender span over 800 pages—a large fraction of the total study material. "This stuff has nothing to do with firefighting," said Wayne Johnson, a retired Seattle firefighter who helped write some of the city’s promotional tests. "It has everything to do with social engineering." The exam is part of a much larger effort to diversify a department that, as Seattle fire chief Harold Scoggins lamented last year, is "overwhelmingly" white men. Those efforts, critics say, have made the promotion process more about ideology and less about merit, politicizing a public service where competence can mean the difference between life and death. In fact, in 2021, local officials including Scoggins commissioned a report on diversity in the fire service. One of its recommendations: avoid tests that "rely heavily on knowledge of firefighting." "[T]ests that focus on how well applicants know the system and the job tend to favor those who make up the overwhelming majority of the fire service workforce, white men," the report says. "Questions that ask more about the candidate’s character and values, rather than knowing the ins and outs of the job, can be beneficial in advancing more women and people of color."... An upcoming test for fireboat engineers, who operate the pumps and nozzles used to douse coastal fires, will quiz candidates on Robin DiAngelo’s Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, according to the exam bibliography. The fire captains exam likewise assigns DiAngelo’s book—along with handouts on the "structural interplay between all oppressions"—while the exam for battalion chiefs assigns the 2021 report on fire service diversity... Seattle’s tests are an outlier. In most cities, even Democratic strongholds like Boston and New Haven, written fire exams test only tactical knowledge. But in Seattle, where Scoggins himself helped protesters seal off the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in the wake of George Floyd’s death, promotions hinge on mastering these ideological tomes. Firefighters who sat for the 2021 lieutenant's exam said How To Be an Antiracist was an integral part of it, while basics like fire behavior took a back seat. "If I had only read that one book, I would have done really well," said Andy Pittman, a former member of the Seattle Fire Department. "What we should be studying—high rise fires, water supply—wasn’t emphasized as heavily."... Beyond raising questions about competence, former department members say, the ideological screening has worsened a staffing crisis caused by the city’s vaccine mandate, which put nearly 80 firefighters—almost a tenth of the department—out of work. At a time when the city desperately needs first responders, the fire service has grown more hostile to the sort of people who typically join it: big, burly men whose politics tend to be to the right of the average Seattle bureaucrat... The written tests are overseen by Seattle’s Public Safety Exams Administrator, Yoshiko Grace Matsui, who ensures that "civil service processes are equitable," according to her LinkedIn page. She did not respond to a request for comment. The emphasis on equity has even bled into physical evaluations. When women fail the Candidate Physical Assessment Test—a standardized fitness exam all recruits must pass—the department has been known to offer them an immediate do-over, said Josh Gibbs, a former member of the department’s special operations team. Men, on the other hand, must wait until the next testing cycle. Instructors have also been barred from gauging recruits’ readiness with tests more difficult than the standard assessment, said Ann-Maree Tedaldi, the department’s former fitness coordinator, again due to equity concerns. "I was personally told I could not do any physical fitness testing to see where people were at or help them improve," Tedaldi said, "because the tests might be biased against certain populations." The result, she added, was a high rate of attrition among new recruits, who found that the city’s training program—one of the best in the state—was much more physically demanding than the basic fitness exam. That in turn perpetuated the department’s staffing shortfall, which has at times forced units to stop operating. The blunder reflects what Collins says is the fundamental design flaw in the city’s social engineering schemes: "Mother Nature," he quipped, "is not an equal opportunity employer.""
K-12 curriculum 'socially engineering' millions into enraged young 'social justice warriors,' parents warn - "A curriculum developed under Yale Medical School is using emotional persuasion tactics to trigger children attending thousands of public schools to become angry about social justice causes and aid them in developing an "intersectional identity," parents worry. Fox News Digital reviewed the tightly guarded curriculum, created by the Center for Emotional Intelligence at the medical school's Child Study Center... The lessons probed deeply and, oftentimes intrusively, into the student's emotions, personal relationships, traumas, beliefs and triggers. "Conversations around triggers and Meta-Moments are an excellent way to discuss power and privilege in who, in our society, is required to regulate more strictly in public spaces. Consider examining stereotypes in the context of emotional regulation as they relate to race, gender, sexuality, religion, and other forms of difference," the curriculum said... The curriculum encouraged kids to "see red" on their "mood meters," to be enraged by social justice issues and said educators should bring inflammatory images into classroom to cultivate the rage among their students... "They're there intentionally triggering these kids emotionally." "The educator essentially gets to define what is just and unjust based on the cultural bias of the day and without regard to any family or student values or beliefs," the parent added. Another parent told Fox News the curriculum was a clear and "subversive attempt to socially engineer our children, to create them into social justice warriors." In 2019, Yale launched "RULER for All," the new K-12 curriculum embedded with "culturally responsive pedagogy," which some critics argue is code for critical race theory. Over 2,500 schools adopted the curriculum as of 2020. New York City's Department of Education uses Yale's curriculum as does Rhode Island and Connecticut, who have adopted its courses for its staff and/or students... At the same time, the curriculum said students should feel like they were responsible for the emotional safety of others, including in cases of microaggressions... A critic of SEL, Lisa Logan, told Fox News Digital that she believes it is a "tool for social engineering." "With SEL, you have an educational program stepping into what usually is the parental role of molding and shaping a child's character. It's important to ask, then, who gets to decide what these subjective skills they are teaching…. and what are they using the data they're collecting to assess these skills for?" she said. "When all of the answers to these questions get decided by entities with a specific political agenda, SEL becomes less about character education and more about ‘people fixing’ to create compliant citizens who are influenced to think, feel and act a certain way through the indoctrination techniques practiced through SEL.""
Opinion | Raquel Evita Saraswati and the racial impostor problem - The Washington Post - "It seems as if every few years, the world learns about a White woman who spent at least a good portion of her career pretending to be someone from a different racial background. The latest: a woman known as Raquel Evita Saraswati, who last month resigned from her position as chief equity, inclusion and culture officer of the American Friends Service Committee, an advocacy organization based in Philadelphia. Saraswati has been described as a Muslim activist and has encouraged people to believe that she was of Latina, South Asian and Arab descent... Saraswati’s mother, Carol Perone, said Raquel had been born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel. “I don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing,” Perone said, adding: “I’m as white as the driven snow and so is she.” The Daily Mail published a gallery of photographs depicting the transformation of Saraswati’s appearance from childhood into adulthood. According to people I spoke with who were close to the situation, Saraswati had over the years represented herself as various versions of “Brown” ethnicities, including Pakistani, North African and Lebanese... There’s much to interrogate about how and why White women deploy racial cosplay — and get away with it. “Perhaps it is a twisted attempt to be seen and heard — even to misbehave — by defying expectations of ‘good’ white girls and women,” sociology professor Robyn Autry wrote in 2020. Fundamentally, one reason White women can even think to do this is that non-White cultures, physical features and clothing styles are frequently seen as ripe for appropriation, things to be tried on and discarded as if they were costumes on sale at Party City. I’ve also written before about how colorism comes into play — how White, White-passing or ethnically ambiguous women ascend to positions of power more often than other, darker-skinned women. Saraswati’s case, however, goes beyond one woman’s decision to misrepresent herself personally and professionally. Saraswati appears to have exploited the political pendulum swing from the rampant Islamophobia of the post-9/11 era into the late 2010s, to the progressive diversity and inclusion wave of today... That Saraswati seems to have shifted from being a token Muslim of color in right-wing spaces to a token Muslim of color in left-wing spaces is proof of just how much White power structures blindly rely on superficial “representation.” Ever since colonial times, White people have embraced individual members of oppressed groups willing to validate the beliefs and policies that prop up White power structures.
Damn white privilege!
Weird. How come the Washington Post doesn't know that everything the Daily Mail publishes is a lie and cannot be trusted? It's odd that the media has no media literacy
Odd how they don't point out how other white women pretending to be minorities also benefit(ed) personally and professionally, but that would be too much of an admission that victim culture is a thing
I like the tacit admission that left wing anti-racism and progressive politics in general are white power structures. Too bad they can't take the final logical step
Why calls to label white supremacists terrorists could backfire on their targets instead | The Star - "White supremacists terrorize people, but consider the terrorist label through another lens. Whom will it actually penalize? Harsha Walia is executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. Voicing what she called “an unpopular opinion” on Twitter, she said: “Let me be clear that calling for the expansion (of terrorism designation) to white supremacists won’t work.” Walia, who has long been a community organizer supporting migrant communities and Indigenous land defenders, called laws around terrorism designation “fundamentally regressive,” and said, “I know anti-terror legal infrastructure is rotten by design.” That infrastructure includes tighter border controls in the name of national security. Traditionally, that has led to racial profiling at the borders, targeted at non-white people, especially those perceived as Muslims. Treating them as suspicious outsiders then leads to increased surveillance, which requires funding, which means increasing police budgets. The alienation legitimizes societal debates around criminalizing aspects of these “outsiders’” cultures, with policies such as banning articles of clothing (looking at you, Quebec) and legal tools such as security certificates to detain and deport foreigners and permanent residents the country deems a security threat. In a violation of the basic principles of justice, the government can deem someone suspicious based on secret evidence that even the accused cannot access. Detainees in Canada have been stuck in legal limbo for years... Even if our security agencies were equipped to do so, even if they were fine impartial defenders of public security who could identify domestic terrorists by sight, putting the shoe on the other foot is not the solution. We can’t claim to seek a world of dignified equality and actively seek to expand oppressive policies that will surely boomerang. The “global war on terror and its ongoing aftermath must be dismantled, not bolstered,” Walia said. Calling white supremacists terrorists and inviting stronger anti-terrorism measures will also likely criminalize legitimate protesters by turning them even more easily into peace disturbers and security threats. “On the contrary, if we call them white supremacists, naming their movement as what it is, it demands a solution specific to that problem,” tweeted Lea Kayali, a digital communications manager at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Truth-telling. Reparations. Facing our history as a nation founded on white supremacy and dismantling it bit by bit.”"
From January 2021. Too bad the convoy protest response didn't learn
When the ACLU proclaims that they want to dismantle the USA... we'll still be told that liberals don't hate their countries
HANSON: How much ruin do we have left? | Toronto Sun - "As Americans know from their own illustrious history, any nation’s well-being hinges on only a few factors. Its prosperity, freedom and overall stability depend on its constitutional and political stability. A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military. Perhaps most important is a first-rate inductive educational system. Of course, nothing is possible without general social calm (often dependent on a reverence for the past) and secure borders. The ability to produce or easily acquire food, fuel and key natural resources ensures a nation’s independence and autonomy. Unfortunately, in the last few months, all of those centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have been put into doubt. The challenge is not just enemies abroad such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The greater problem lies within us, as we erode the inherited and acquired strengths that made us singular, both materially and spiritually. We are now witnessing a concentrated effort to alter the constitutional order and centuries of custom and tradition. The left believes that’s the only way it can retain its transient power, given the unpopularity of most of its current agenda. A nation’s institutions are its bedrock. Yet, the Electoral College and the Constitution’s emphasis on individual states establishing voting laws are under assault. Already gone is the 176-year-old tradition of a pivotal November Election Day. The 152-year-old nine-member Supreme Court, the 184-year-old Senate filibuster and the 62-year-old idea of a 50-state union are all being targeted by the New Democratic Party. Given that the last presidential election was hotly contested, that Democratic congressional majorities are minuscule and that the Supreme Court is unsympathetic, the left seeks to change the rules to stay in power rather than adjust its unpopular policies. We are running up vast multitrillion-dollar annual deficits as we race to a $30 trillion national debt. More worrisome, our elites justify the spending with sophistries about debt being irrelevant, or inflation and stagflation being relics of the past – even as prices are now soaring. After costly strategic stagnation in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, our military is now turning on its own. Some of the politicized top brass seem more worried about the politics of their own soldiers than the dangers of foreign militaries. Our public schools and colleges are systematically downplaying meritocratic curricula and substituting ideological, racial and cultural litmus tests. Admissions now often hinge as much on race, gender and ethnicity as on quantifiable achievement. The First Amendment and Fifth Amendment, covering free speech and due process, have vanished from most college campuses. The year 2020 saw the most destructive riots in American history. Yet very few of the looters, arsonists and rioters were ever indicted. Most were never arrested. Whether government arrests violent protesters or those assembling en masse and breaking quarantines is contingent on their ideology. Private monopolies that control most of the written communications of Americans censor expression entirely on the basis of politics. Modern Jacobins seek to erase our founding in 1776. Mobs tear down statues and deface monuments with impunity. There is no consistent rhyme or reason to why the names of schools, institutions and streets are erased overnight – except the relative dangers of a nihilistic electronic mob. Our officials at the Justice Department and the United Nations either will not or cannot defend the history and reputation of their own homeland. Record natural gas and oil production has been giving the public affordable heating, cooling and transportation. Self-sufficiency in energy made the United States exempt from worries over Middle Eastern wars and foreign oil embargos. The more we produced our own natural gas, the cleaner became our air and the smaller our collective carbon footprint. Yet in just 100 days, energy prices have soared. The Joe Biden administration has canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and limited energy leasing on federal lands, threatening to all but end our gas and oil independence in just a few years. In the drought-stricken West, key irrigation water is still being diverted from farms to the ocean. Billions of dollars in farm aid are doled out on the basis of race. And promised new regulations and estate taxes may well kill off what’s left of family farms."