The media have embraced a dystopian vision by encouraging businesses to mandate vaccines as a prerequisite for employment. The woke company Delta Air Lines has reportedly caved to anti-freedom and un-American pressure from the left. Business Insider reported that Delta Air Lines “will mandate COVID-19 vaccines for new hires.” In addition, “the company may stop current staff members from working on international flights if they refuse a vaccine, its CEO [Ed Bastian] said.” Bastian reportedly told CNN May 13 that “‘[a]ny person joining Delta in the future, a future employee, we’re going to mandate they be vaccinated before they can sign up with the company.’” Delta’s decision followed weeks of a cacophony of media outlets propping up the idea that businesses either should or could force prospective employees to disclose their private medical histories as a condition of employment. Liberal CNBC Squawk Box co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin posted a pontificating tweet the morning of May 14, gloating about how he called for businesses to adopt dystopian medical policies since 2020.
Business
I ignored the story that Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a divorce. Their personal life holds no interest for me, although I care that Bill Gates is having an outsize say in both the climate change debate and in the response to COVID. His skills as a computer programmer and his genius as a shark, scooping up other people’s creations, do not make him qualified to weigh in on the climate or COVID. But as I said, his personal life was a “meh” — that is, right until the Wall Street Journal hinted that Bill Gates’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein led directly to his divorce. It’s been public information for a long time that Bill Gates met Epstein several times beginning in 2011. Even the New York Times, back in October 2019, reported on those meetings: Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who committed suicide in prison, managed to lure an astonishing array of rich, powerful and famous men into his orbit. Few, though, compared in prestige and power to the world’s second-richest person, a brilliant and intensely private luminary: Bill Gates. And unlike many others, Mr. Gates started the relationship after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.
The current train in the sky is only 60 of the 12,000 satellites that Musk has planned to launch. Together, they will form the Starlink satellite constellation.
Australia has canceled infrastructure projects that were meant to boost trade with Beijing. The move is a loss of face for Chinese President Xi Jinping — and could prompt other countries to back away from similar deals. The Australian government may have only halted a couple of small joint-infrastructure projects with China, but the response from Beijing to the decision was one of rage and threats. The Chinese Embassy in Canberra has called the halt “unreasonable and provocative” and vowed revenge. Canberra stepped in last year to pass a law that allows the federal government to overrule agreements made by Australian states with foreign countries. The decision followed deals signed by the state of Victoria in 2018 and 2019 to cooperate with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — often dubbed the New Silk Road — a massive infrastructure plan that aims to smooth trade links with dozens of countries. Foreign Minister Marise Payne said the deals were incompatible with Australia’s foreign policy and were not legally binding. The cancellation could also mean an end to further Sino-Australian cooperation in the fields of industrial production, biotechnology and agriculture.
The world’s biggest jeweller, Pandora, says it will no longer sell mined diamonds and will switch to exclusively laboratory-made diamonds. Concerns about the environment and working practices in the mining industry have led to growing demand for alternatives to mined diamonds. Pandora’s chief executive, Alexander Lacik, told the BBC the change was part of a broader sustainability drive. He said the firm was pursuing it because “it’s the right thing to do”. They are also cheaper: “We can essentially create the same outcome as nature has created, but at a very, very different price.” Mr Lacik explains they can be made for as little as “a third of what it is for something that we’ve dug up from the ground.”
Last week, Basecamp became the latest tech company to effectively ban employees from talking about politics at work. “Every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant,” Jason Fried, Basecamp’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post. “You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target.” “We make project management, team communication, and email software,” Fried wrote. “We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work.” According to reports, one-third of Basecamp’s 57 employees have since resigned, with some celebrating those who decided to leave the company.