Diversity to cripple the US Navy. By Charles Murray.

“The US Navy recently announced that it would be lowering the cut-off score for the IQ test it administers to new recruits. There had been complaints about the fact that only 30% of blacks were passing. (The pass rate for whites was 70%.)”

For those of you who are not familiar with the Vietnam Era, this was tried by LBJ in 1966 with Project 100,000, which lowered the minimum required score for the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It was a disaster. The newly qualified soldiers were slow learners, routinely incompetent and undisciplined, and in combat were dangerous to themselves and their comrades. Their fatality rate was three times that of soldiers who met the previous qualification standard. …

That the Navy is doing it again after that experience, in an era when cognitive demands of military service are higher than they were 50 years ago, is gross negligence towards those who are already serving and damaging to national security.

Facts, schmacts. The US is in the grip of moral fever. Rod Dreher reports:

This week I had dinner in Budapest with a visiting academic, an American who lives in Europe. She’s a liberal, but we agreed on how bizarre our home country looks from overseas.

She talked about going back home to visit after a few years in Europe, and being gobsmacked by the obsessions of all her college friends: “It was all trans, trans, trans,” she said. Seriously, that’s all they wanted to talk about. Nothing about income inequality, nothing about war and peace, nothing about better health care — the kind of bread and butter issues that made her a Bernie Sanders supporter from abroad.

She explained that these were all left-wing, highly-educated white females. What startled her was not that they cared about trans issues, but that that was just about the only thing they cared about — even though none of them were queer. The empathy impulses were off the chart.

Competitive virtue signaling taken too far.