Envy of success

A nice looking couple from a wealthy background get married but they reveal too much of their privileged background in the wedding announcement.  In an envious world I suppose that was crass but they were just doing what was normal for them.  And why should they hide their background? Their announcement has however attracted much criticism

Envious people could perhaps reflect on John F. Kennedy Jr., a very privileged person  who married a privileged lady, Carolyn Bessette.  They became the focus of society attention, including being invited to the White House by Bill Clinton. So they surpassed the couple below in social success.  But, like many of his class, Kennedy owned a light plane that he liked to fly. On  July 16, 1999, Kennedy crashed it, killing both of them.  Carolyn was only 33 at the time.  Light planes are always dangerous and Kennedy was probably coked up when he crashed it so "privilege" is not always what it seems, is it?

Imagine the distress of Carolyn's parents -- to have seen their beautiful daughter taken to the heights of social eminence, only to die young without even leaving the consolation of a child

THERE’S a specific type of upper class New Yorker who gets their wedding announced in the New York Times. They’re usually white, blonde, Ivy League educated and very, very rich.

Grace Hays Holcomb du Pont and Conor Jackson Sutherland — yep, those are their real names — fit those criteria perfectly. She’s a teacher and he’s an investment banker.

They were married on Saturday and their hilariously obnoxious and out of touch wedding announcement in the Times went viral on the weekend.

“Nothing at all elitist about them. Just your average Americans, offspring of ordinary hardworking billionaires, falling in love and deciding to walk through life hand-in-hand together,” wrote one Facebook commenter.

Another declared it, “The greatest white person wedding announcement of all time.”

The announcement:

Grace du Pont, Conor Sutherland



Grace Hays Holcomb du Pont was married Sept. 30 to Conor Jackson Sutherland in Manhattan. The Rev. J. Donald Waring performed the ceremony at Grace Episcopal Church. The bride and groom both graduated from Princeton, she cum laude and he magna cum laude.

Mrs. Sutherland, 26, was until Thursday at Achievement First Apollo Middle School, a charter school in Brooklyn, where she worked on special projects as a member of the operations team. From 2012 to 2014, she taught sixth-grade science with Teach for America at Ranson Middle School in Charlotte, N.C. She also received a master’s degree in teaching from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

She is a daughter of Jean Young du Pont and Pierre S. du Pont V of Tarrytown, N.Y. The bride’s father is a partner, in Manhattan, at HPM Partners, an investment and wealth management firm. Her mother was until 2016 the president and chief executive of the Garden Conservancy, an organization in Garrison, N.Y., and is now a legal, strategic and development consultant. The bride is a descendant of Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, the founder of what is now known as the DuPont Company. She is also a granddaughter of Pierre S. du Pont IV of Rockland, Del., who was the governor of Delaware from 1977 to 1985, and is a great-great-granddaughter of Llewellyn Powers, who was the governor of Maine from 1897 to 1901.

Mr. Sutherland, 30, helps buy, manage and sell companies in the portfolio at Apollo Global Management, an investment firm in Manhattan.

He is the son of Denise Jackson Sutherland of Glen Cove, N.Y., and the late Donald J. Sutherland. His mother was a principal dancer with the Joffrey Ballet in Manhattan from 1969 to 1986, and served from 1987 to 2014 as a trustee of the Professional Children’s School in New York. His father was the founder and chief executive of Quincy Partners, a leveraged buyout firm that was in Glen Head, N.Y.

The couple dated at Princeton, but had met a few years earlier, in 2007, in North Haven, Me., when Ms. du Pont offered a ride to Mr. Sutherland and a friend, whom Ms. du Pont knew. The two men had just moored their sailboat and were preparing for a long row back to the dock, whereas she was piloting her family’s motorized tender. They took the ride.

SOURCE

Some wisdom from ancient times summarizes the matter: "Envy not the glory and riches of a sinner: for thou knowest not what his ruin shall be". (Sirach 9:16, Douay)

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Trump and the Pax Americana

Tom Switzer

After July's G20 summit in Hamburg, the ABC's Chris Uhlmann remarked that President Trump cast an "uneasy, lonely, awkward figure" who had "pressed fast forward on the decline of the United States as the global leader." The television clip went viral online. But was Uhlmann right?

It is certainly true Donald Trump has unnerved many people around the world. His strident 'America First' campaign rhetoric, taken together with his decisions to withdraw the U.S. from both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accords, raised doubts about the Pax Americana. The U.S. is also bogged down in a crisis of confidence, exacerbated by its toxic polarisation and hyper-partisan political culture.

But it is also true Trump has reaffirmed the security alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia in Asia, Israel and the Saudi-led Sunni Gulf states in the Middle East and -- albeit grudgingly -- NATO in Europe. So much for withdrawing the U.S. from the world. Nor has he imposed the 45% tariffs on China or 30% tariffs on Mexico that would have pushed the global economy into recession.

Although the U.S. will not command the kind of strategic and economic pre-eminence it has held since the 1940s -- a trend  Richard Nixon recognised as early as the early 1970s -- America will remain the most powerful state in the world for the foreseeable future.

America has the largest and the most technologically superior military in the world. It has the most diverse and technologically advanced economy. Global tech platforms, such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, are used by more than a billion people. All dominate their respective markets; all are American.

America is demographically vibrant: its fertility rates surpass those of its competitors Japan, Europe and China. It has transformed itself into an energy superpower: the shale gas 'fracking' revolution means energy self-sufficiency and independence.

To be sure, a clash is taking place between Trump (who is apparently attacking the liberal international order) and U.S. foreign-policy elites (who champion American global leadership). In the meantime, as the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer has argued, this produces an American foreign policy that is discombobulated and hard to understand. That unnerves allies.

If the U.S. is committed to keeping in check a rising China -- the only true rising hegemon capable of destabilising regional order and American primacy -- it needs a president who is thinking strategically and working closely with regional allies. But that is not happening, because Trump is widely perceived as a loose cannon and strikingly ignorant of the world -- a potentially deadly combination.

SOURCE

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The Leftmedia Love Affair With Totalitarianism

The New York Times is praising Mao Zedong for his "progress" with feminism, while ignoring his genocide.

One of the greatest benefits of living in the U.S. is the constitutional protections of individual rights and freedoms that all Americans enjoy. But it is precisely those individual rights and freedoms that place limits on officials within government. The Left views such limits to government as socially problematic rather than beneficial. Witness the growing sentiment among college and university students who are actively questioning the value of freedom of speech — not only questioning it, but even calling for it to be prevented, with violence if necessary. For these social “justice” crusaders, individual freedom should always be subservient to collectivist “progressive” values.

It is in such a climate as this that one of the primary Demo/MSM propaganda fronts, The New York Times, is promoting communism (overtly this time), in a series of praise articles including, “When Communism Inspired Americans,” “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism” and “The Little Red Book for Children.” This series, highlighting the “glory days” of communism, omits references to the countless millions of civilian men, women and children who were murdered or starved under these regimes.

The latest entry in this series purports to portray how women fared under Red China’s communist regime, asserting, “The communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big.” When it was not slaughtering them and their children, that is. It praises China’s former totalitarian strongman Mao Zedong for his efforts in promoting feminism. The author, Helen Gao, is an American of Chinese descent, and she writes glowingly of her grandmother’s opportunity to work as a journalist during the early days of the “People’s” Republic. A brief side note here. To have been a journalist at that time in China, Gao’s grandmother would have been obligated to spout Communist Party propaganda without freedom of the press protections Gao herself enjoys here in the good old U.S.A. But we digress.

Seeking to somehow dispel the obvious objections readers might raise regarding her willingness to praise the vision and efforts of a murderous tyrant responsible for the deaths of 45 million of his own people, Gao quotes her grandmother’s saying, “The communists did many terrible things, but they made women’s lives much better.” There — problem solved. Noting the absurdity, one humorist responded, “NYT next week: For all its flaws, Hitler’s Nazi movement brought healthy vegetarian meal planning to the Reich.” Except, of course, the NYT doesn’t like to highlight that the Nazis were also socialists.

Notably, this latest example of the NYT’s communist dezinformatsiya campaign comes in the midst of nuclear threats from Red China’s nuclear puppet — NoKo’s communist nut Kim Jong-un. Move on, nothing to see here!

SOURCE

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DOJ files suit against company for allegedly not hiring Americans

The Department of Justice announced Thursday it has filed a lawsuit against a Colorado corporation for allegedly discriminating against U.S. workers.

The complaint alleges that in 2016, Crop Production discriminated against at least three United States citizens by refusing to employ them as seasonal technicians in El Campo, Texas, because Crop Production preferred to hire temporary foreign workers under the H-2A visa program.

“In the spirit of President Trump’s Executive Order on Buy American and Hire American, the Department of Justice will not tolerate employers who discriminate against U.S. workers because of a desire to hire temporary foreign visa holders,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “…

Where there is a job available, U.S. workers should have a chance at it before we bring in workers from abroad.”

This is the first complaint filed stemming from the “Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative,” which was launched on March 1.

A Civil Rights Division official told Fox News that since the initiative’s launch, the division has opened 29 investigations of “potential discrimination against U.S. workers based on a hiring preference for foreign visa workers.”

DOJ officials also told Fox News the department has reached at least one settlement with a company discriminating against U.S. workers in favor of foreign visa workers, and distributed over $100,000.

SOURCE

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