High hopes for Kamala Harris

by philg

Our hotel in Bowling Green, Kentucky had a stack of the WKU student newspapers. From “A ‘monumental moment’: What a Kamala Harris vice presidency means for young POC”:

Americans have been governed by a white executive since 1789 when George Washington and John Adams assumed the presidency and vice presidency. It wasn’t until Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 that representation truly began to change.

“Kamala Harris being the first African-American Asian woman vice president is life-changing for so many girls including myself,” freshman journalism and broadcasting major Brianna Cooks said. “Growing up as a girl and in the minority race I never saw someone on TV or in a position of authority that I could look up to. Kamala Harris gives me encouragement and hopefully other young girls of color and other races.”

Harris is next in line for the presidency, and that is a symbol of hope for many women of color. “Now we have someone to look up to and we know that if she did it we can too,” Cooks said.

All of our problems are solved? Maybe not. From Chicago (stopped for fuel and shut down to let the 48-knot surface winds move off the Great Plains):

And from Bethesda, Maryland on the way back:

“BLM is the minimum,” which means that our neighbors are actually weak. “Black Lives are Needed,” which means that the Chinese are finished. Should we short the SSE Composite? (Sad: flight instructors are classified as “essential” yet we are not thanked.)

Related:

  • Election 2008 Prediction: Obama wins by 5 percent; we will all be depressed (from December 2007: “People assume that all of their problems can be blamed on George W. Bush personally. When the hated King Bush II has been back to Texas for a year and the beloved Obama has been in office for a year, people will look around for a quick status check. They will still be stuck in horrific traffic. They will still be paying insane prices for crummy housing in bleak, lonely communities. Their children will be getting a terrible education at the local public school, perhaps developing to about 15 percent of their potential. If in a hip urban area, criminals will still be smashing their car windows and taking their GPS. They will realize that virtually none of the things that are unpleasant about their life have anything to do with the federal government, except for the war in Iraq, which a quick check of the headlines will reveal that we are still losing.”)

9 thoughts on “High hopes for Kamala Harris”

  1. Imagine if Elizabeth Warren was the vice-president, then we would have had the first native American as VP, the true landlord of this land that we are occupying. The USA would have been a proud nation to have a first native American as president.

    Sadly, software engineers, IT workers, iPhone makers, to name some, are also left out from being thanked. I wonder how long Americans would last without a smart phone and the internet in the age of lockdown before rioting or committing suicide. My guess is 5 days.

  2. The first Native American vice president was Charles Curtis a member of the Kaw Nation and vice president to Herbert Hoover.

  3. > All of our problems are solved?

    At least we can pretend they are! I just downloaded the latest version of Photoshop 2021. It’s astonishing. You can change the expression on people’s faces with a few mouse clicks. Turn that frown upside down! Change the skin tone, get rid of the acne, and then make them look like Rembrandt painted them. (Well, maybe not Rembrandt. His portraits were a little gloomy.) We’re moving into a world of advanced, continuous reality engineering that anyone with an IQ of 95 can accomplish.

    What does it matter who you really are when your avatar can appear to be anyone you want?

    https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/whats-new/2021.html#NeuralFilters

    • Just for fun, I took a screenshot of the very concerned young woman from the Penn State sexual assault training video ( https://youtu.be/uaYDq4qhK-8 ) and applied some neural filters.

      I made her happier and less surprised, added some makeup from a model, and thickened her hair a little, etc. It was a low-res image to begin with so the quality isn’t that great. The Cloud laid on the mascara a little too thick and unevenly, probably because the source image didn’t have much resolution, but you can see what the neural filters can do.

      They also seem to take quite a bit of processing power on the local machine despite being “done in the cloud.” So everyone who uses them frequently will need fast machines, but things are getting better with technology all the time.

      https://i.ibb.co/5GS0vL4/BEHAPPY2.jpg

    • Sirs,

      You are stealing our schtick. It is nice to be remembered.

      Philg, please bring back the foto funnies. They were the whole reason we published the magazine.

      Sincerely,

      The former editors of the National Lampoon

    • @Doug Kenney:

      Sir,

      Thank you for your contributions to the American sense of humor. It’s very sad indeed that so few people have one today.

      At least it wasn’t as esoteric and boring as Google DeepMind solving the Protein Folding Problem.

      “In 1969 Cyrus Levinthal noted that it would take longer than the age of the known universe to enumerate all possible configurations of a typical protein by brute force calculation – Levinthal estimated 10^300 possible conformations for a typical protein. Yet in nature, proteins fold spontaneously, some within milliseconds – a dichotomy sometimes referred to as Levinthal’s paradox.”

      https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal%27s_paradox

      So maybe things are getting better all the time with technology, at least if you’re a computational biologist. Humorists are struggling.

  6. Conservatives should love Kamala. She covered for the absolutely corrupt Orange County Sheriffs and district attorney regarding massive systemic civil rights violations and perjury when she was Attorney general of CA.

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