Author: philg

LBJ Library: remembering America’s most consequential president

by philg

It’s the 61st anniversary of Lyndon Johnson going all-in on the Vietnam War. Wikipedia:

On March 8, 1965, 3,500 troops went ashore near Da Nang, the first time U.S. combat forces had been sent to mainland Asia since the Korean War.

Last month, I visited the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin. One of the challenges was coordinating a meeting there with an Austin-based friend and not referring to it as the “LGBTQ Library”. LBJ is the author of the modern U.S.:

  • He opened the borders for the first time since 1924 by signing The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, ultimately driving the percentage of immigrants in the U.S. to an all-time high and with an explicit rejection of the idea that immigrants should share language, culture, or religion with existing Americans or with each other
  • Johnson created the first federal programs, Medicare and Medicaid, for which there is no Congressional control of spending. (I.e., spending expands according to how many medical procedures doctors and hospitals can dream up and bill for) These have grown into the largest federal spending programs, a “hold my beer” situation for those who asked “What could possibly cost more than running the U.S. military?” (nearly 90 million Americans are on Medicaid, originally characterized as a “safety net” program)
  • He signed the Gun Control Act of 1968, which dialed back Americans’ Second Amendment rights
  • Johnson set up food stamps (later “SNAP/EBT”)
  • He signed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, which created a bizarre patchwork of taxpayer-funded housing for some, but not all, Americans who met income criteria (apparently contrary to the 14th Amendment’s promise of Equal Protection; Person A gets a free apartment while Person B, identically situated, gets a place on a waiting list or is told that the waiting list is full (contrast to Medicaid and food stamps, in which every eligible person is treated equally).
  • Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, thus giving us NPR and PBS to sing the praises of all of the above

Most of the above Great Society legislation was opposed by Republicans, but didn’t seem crazy because it was done during a period when the U.S. was enjoying rapid economic growth. Had that rate of growth continued forever, the new programs might have been affordable.

(Note that Lyndon Johnson was the anti-Milton Friedman. Friedman said that one couldn’t have open borders and a welfare state. Johnson opened the borders and simultaneously dramatically expanded the welfare state.)

Approaching the library, one sees the effects of Johnson’s immigration policy. There is a sign encouraging people who don’t know enough English to understand the word “here” (a translation to “aqui” is required) to decide who will run roughly 40 percent of GDP (local, state, and federal governments):

If you love concrete you’ll love the architecture:

Johnson was an early adopter of technology, apparently. While he was serving in Congress, his wife purchased a radio station, which became fantastically more valuable due to favorable FCC rulings on what hours and power it could use and also due to advertisements placed on the radio station by businesses who wanted Representative Johnson to vote in particular ways. (“Johnson, Virtually Penniless in 1937, Left a Fortune Valued at $20‐Million” (NYT, 1973; that’s about $150 million in today’s mini-dollars)) This foray into government-regulated entrepreneurship and subsequent personal wealth isn’t highlighted at the library! Johnson campaigned by helicopter in 1948, a type of machine that wasn’t mass-produced until 1943:

The history wall gives equal weight to the Beatles playing on TV and to a U.S. President being shot and killed:

Who will agree with me that Johnson was the most consequential U.S. president? Even if he had done nothing other than open our borders, I think it is fair to say that Lyndon Johnson changed the U.S. more than any previous president. Some might cite Abraham Lincoln, but we could easily have ended up in an EU-type situation with our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in the Confederate States of America (which would have certainly abandoned slavery within a few years after 1865 since slavery was abolished nearly everywhere outside of the Arab/African world by 1888 (timeline)).

Still relevant, John Q. Public pays for whatever Lyndon Johnson dreamed up…

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New York Times Iran Vibe

by philg

It’s been a week since the U.S. attacked the peace-loving leaders of a peaceful Islamic theocracy. Let’s look at some of the wartime propaganda.

Sunday, March 1, a day after the hated dictator launched airstrikes while poolside in Palm Beach, the deaths of most of Iran’s senior leaders was just slightly more important than the second most important story: the Jeffrey Epstein saga. 93 million Iranians were without leadership for the first time since 1979, but also why didn’t the hundreds of U.S. government lawyers across multiple administrations manage to prosecute more of Jeffrey Epstein’s elite friends? (We know that it can’t be because it wasn’t actually criminal for Larry Summers to try to have sex with a 43-year-old or for Prince Andrew to be introduced to a 26-year-old female in a jurisdiction where the age of consent was 16.)

Today, the stories all seem to be reminding readers that Donald Trump is incompetent and mindlessly aggressive. Here’s part of the NYT front page in which Trump refuses to compromise while the Iranians are reasonable (apologizing):

CNN assembled PhD experts to do a “forensic analysis” and they concluded that war is damaging to infrastructure:

NYT, today, says that attacking Iran is pointless and, by implication, only a moron would order such an attack:

Also from today, the NYT says that only an incoherent (stupid) person would consider killing folks who chant “Death to America” while building nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles to deliver them to American cities:

The peaceful people of Lebanon, who declared war on the Zionist entity, never recognized the State of Israel, supported the October 7 attacks by Hamas (80%; 60% support among Lebanese Christians; 32% wanted to bravely attack Israel to help their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Gaza), and continue to fire projectiles at Israeli civilians are sadly forced to flee their homes because of Jewish aggression:

(The Israeli attacks on Beirut actually do confuse me. The Israelis told the Lebanese to evacuate and then bombed some empty buildings. How does that reduce Hezbollah’s ability to fight? The apartment buildings weren’t being used as forts.)

Another sympathy-provoking story from Lebanon. Merely because they declared war on their neighbor and refused to accept any peace treaty over a 75-year period, some Lebanese can’t sleep comfortably in their own beds:

Trump is far worse than Vladimir Putin (March 6): “Mr. Trump has demonstrated a willingness to disregard international norms and engage in foreign adventurism by fully exploiting Washington’s might.”

From March 3, perhaps it would make sense to prevent a nation of 93 million people from building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that could deliver them anywhere in the world, but not if 900 people are killed:

(Comparison to the Bad Old Days: The U.S. killed 100,000 residents of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 and rendered 1 million homeless.)

In a politically diverse discussion group on Facebook, a passionate Democrat posted about 20 times about rising oil prices. In other words, Donald Trump has now convinced Democrats to support Islamic theocracy and also cheap fossil fuels for maximizing climate change. (Greta Thunberg has similarly been posting in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran; you’d think that at least she’d be happy that oil prices are higher and, therefore, that consumption will be lower.)

My own social media post on how Donald Trump has caused suffering on the home front:

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University of Texas, Austin report

by philg

I visited University of Texas’s Austin campus last month. They seem to have about $10 billion in physical infrastructure, $20 billion in the bank, and the ability to tax 32 million people any time that they want more money. It is tough to understand how private universities, except for Harvard and the other Queers for Palestine League schools, can compete.

The buildings are beautiful and beautifully maintained.

First stop was the Ransom Center, home to a Gutenberg Bible and the Niépce Heliograph (1827), perhaps the earliest surviving photo. The special exhibit was of a collection of Saturday Night Live and related memorability from Lorne Michaels (a.k.a. “Lorne Lipowitz”):

In reviewing the memos among NBC network executives and producers, it is remarkable how many of them had Jewish last names. That era is apparently over. From “The Vanishing” (2023):

… a decade ago there were 22 Jews on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual list of the Top 50 Showrunners. In 2022, that’s down to 13. Other than the half-Jewish (and already famous) Maggie Gyllenhaal, you’d have to go back six years to find a single Jew on Variety’s annual list of 10 Directors to Watch.

Thanks to the odious new Hollywood house style that requires a detailed ethnic and racial classification at the top of all capsule biographies, we can see just how many self-identified Jews are in the Sundance writers and directors labs, or the NBC, Paramount, and Disney writers and apprenticeship programs—it is zero. It seems not being Jewish is actually a primary qualification. So much for Jewish control of Hollywood.

The school got some of Bill Gates’s money before it was all shipped to Africa (all without ever being taxed, since the appreciated stock was given to a tax-exempt foundation) and Sol LeWitt managed to harvest some of it.

I visited a friend on the faculty whose door is adorned with a diversity and inclusion sticker:

The publicly-funded school apparently sponsored a “Women and Gender Minorities in Computing Research Day”:

I don’t understand how this is possible at a taxpayer-funded school that is supposed to comply with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It wouldn’t be acceptable to have a “men-only” computer nerdism day, right?

I don’t understand why these ardent Democrats stay in Texas and pay taxes every day to a government whose principles, e.g., abortion care restrictions, they say they oppose. Maybe it would be a step down in status to take a job at a Cal State university, for example, but wouldn’t that be a moral upgrade?

Speaking of morals, an on-campus church reminds visitors that “atheist” and Rainbow Flag worship are part of a “Christian community”:

The haters across the street at the business school falsely claim that “The family is the foundation upon which the world of business is built, and it is a vital force in the local, state and national economy” and hatefully display an apparent cisgender heterosexual couple with their artisanally-produced child.

Speaking of false claims, folks at UT reject the false claim that SARS-CoV-2 has been defeated. Outdoor maskers was reasonably common:

The university includes its own art museum.

The restrooms are for “everyone”, but non-Latinos need not apply for inclusion in a significant-sized gallery:

It’s an established fact that Asian women are victimized be being “fetishized” and “undervalued”:

Black Americans are victims of “continued injustice and violence”:

(The King of Hate (Grok) says that more than 90 percent of the murderers of Black Americans are… Black Americans (source: FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program).)

The 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is victimized and “marginalized”. Sign: “Neel painted Bourdon and Battcock, two well-known New York art critics and a romantic couple at the time, in an era when very few people were openly gay in the United States.” In other words, they were hated so much that they were forced to make a living by getting checks from publishers for their opinions about art and they were denied the opportunity to work in a widget factory. According to Wikipedia, Gregory Battcock “was murdered at his vacation home in San Juan, Puerto Rico on December 25, 1980. The murder remains unsolved”. The marginalization of David Bourdon was so extreme that “he served as an editor at Life from 1966 to 1971, associate editor at Saturday Review from 1972 to 1974, senior editor at Geo from 1981 to 1983, and senior features editor at Vogue from 1983 to 1986. He was also The Village Voice’s art critic from 1964 to 1966 and 1974 to 1977.”

Migrants are celebrated with a larger-than-life statue: “Border Crossing is a tribute the artist’s grandfather and to the determination of the thousands of immigrants who have traveled across the southwestern border in search of a better life.” From the artist: “People talked about aliens as if they landed from outer space, as if they weren’t really people. I wanted to put a face on them: I wanted to humanize them” (isn’t it the very humanity of immigrants that makes them destructive to the American working class? Because they’re human they compete for housing, jobs, and welfare dollars)

University of Texas, Austin acknowledges that it is on stolen land, but refuses to give the land back and pay rent to the rightful indigenous owners who were “violently displaced”:

The “Oil Field Girls” who are “most likely working as prostitutes” (1940) seem to have dressed much more modestly than today’s Instagram creators!

For those who want to celebrate Maryland’s leading citizen, pupusas are available on campus:

(Kilmar Abrego Garcia claimed asylum on the basis that his mother’s pupusa recipe had resulted in gangs targeting him for death.)

Circling back to the first question… how does a private school of higher ed compete with University of Texas? The Gutenberg Bible alone might be worth $150 million.

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Why don’t heavy drinkers get Tesla FSD?

by philg

Here’s a bit of sad news from everyone’s favorite semiconductor physicist:

If Britney Spears had enough money to buy the depicted non-self-driving BMW why didn’t she instead choose a self-driving Tesla? In that case, there wouldn’t have been any possibility of the police noticing erratic driving. She might have been breaking the law and failing to be prudent, but she wouldn’t have been pulled over so long as the Tesla software wasn’t also impaired by alcohol.

Loosely related, Britney Spears’s tutorial on semiconductors:

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Brightline to Orlando review

by philg

Loyal readers may recall The Brightline experience (low-speed high-speed rail in Florida).

I recently took Brightline to Orlando. The West Palm Beach station is smaller than the one in Miami, but has better views.

The premium lounge is well-stocked with booze and food:

(Note cranes in background as West Palm Beach continues to be inflated with $billions.)

We hit 125 mph on the final stretch toward Orlando, the only completely new track on the route.

It’s not quite as comfortable as the Chinese high-speed rail, but there is much less jostling than on Amtrak Acela.

My meeting was for dinner at BACÁN, within the Lake Nona Wave Hotel.

The hotel is within a large business district that I had never heard of and that is the home of the Evil Empire (from a small airplane pilot’s point of view):

Would I take Brightline or Orlando again? It doesn’t make much sense for a family and takes longer than driving from Jupiter (partly because one has to drive south for 25 minutes to the station before heading north), but for a single traveler who will fly out of Orlando and then later return to a different airport it is awesome. It will make more sense if they can ever get a station built in Stuart, Florida, which is to our north.

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AI economy terminates as petrostate?

by philg

A friend owns a three-unit building in San Francisco (rents carefully controlled by qualified government officials!) and is concerned about the value of his place if AI eliminates most programming jobs. My response was to consider the extreme case that 100 percent of GDP is generated by AI and robots. In that case, the economy becomes like a petrostate, e.g., Kuwait. The efforts of human residents aren’t significant economically compared to oil flowing or NVIDIA chips cogitating. In petrostates, however, the rulers don’t expel most or all of the citizens (like Bhutan did!), but instead use whatever money isn’t stolen by elites to house and feed everyone. Thus, in the typical petrostate, real estate still has substantial value. “Maybe everyone in San Francisco will be on Section 8 and the rent will be paid by the government instead of individuals,” I said, “but you’ll still get rent.”

How will the government get revenue? Petrostates often nationalize the oil industry, as Venezuela did in 1976 and 2007 (Hugo Chavez for the win!). If most of the wealth and income of the U.S. ends up in the hands of the owners of NVIDIA, Anthropic, et al., the government can simply nationalize the top 20 most successful AI-related companies. (We can see a half measure of this right now with Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna proposing to harvest 5 percent of billionaire wealth every year.)

In other words, it doesn’t make sense to be an AI Doomer on economic grounds because being a citizen of a typical petrostate isn’t terrible (let’s ignore Venezuela for the moment!).

Let’s check in on a petrostate that has been shooting down U.S. fighter jets recently. Kuwait is rich, though not quite as rich per capita as it once was. It looks like they’ve grown the denominator via population growth and, thus, each individual’s share of the oil income has been reduced.

(Note that U.S. politicians, beginning with Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, have been working desperately to grow U.S. population via immigration, exactly the opposite of what makes sense if our destiny is that most wealth comes from something that functions like an oil well.)

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Austin, Texas barbecue and pinball updates

by philg

In our continued celebration of Women’s History Month, let’s look at two areas where Americans identifying as “women” have been trailblazers: barbecue and pinball machine design and engineering.

Loyal readers may remember Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours. We had a good meal at Terry Black’s on a recent visit to Austin, but it wasn’t as great as we remembered. We tried Loro, an Asian-inflected bbq place, and thought it was okay (great sides, though!). The new favorite: LeRoy and Lewis. This isn’t an adventurous choice since the place is Michelin-listed. By the late afternoon they’d run out of brisket, but I preferred their tri tip steak anyway. The Frito pie side is perfect if you haven’t joined Ozempic Nation yet.

In addition to improving our waistlines via at least one bbq meal per day, we improved our minds with pinball. The Austin Pinball Collective is an interesting group of enthusiasts who park their 85 machines in an office building and hold an open house every Saturday during which the rabble can pay $20 for unlimited play. Members remain responsible for maintaining the machines that they place into the location so I’m not sure that it qualifies as a big convenience upgrade compared to having a machine in one’s house. It would be a lot easier on the members if the collective hired a part-time or full-time tech for the machines.

At the collective, we learned that Texas is slowly catching up to Chicago as a pinball machine design and manufacturing center. There are currently three companies in Texas building machines and there was an example of each at the collective:

Barrels of Fun seems to be the most established of the three. Their Labyrinth machine is kind of fun, but their Dune machine is the most beautifully lit pinball machine that I’ve ever seen. (You can play Dune in Minneapolis at the all-white pinball bar that I visited (consistent with my general observation that there was no mixing among native-born white Minnesotans and the Somalis whom they claim to love).)

A pre-flipper Stock Market machine, a Mars machine in case Elon Musk drops in, and one for Muhammad Ali fans.

Our other brain-enhancing stop was at Pinballz (original location on Research Blvd.) to play Hercules, a massive Atari machine with a ball the size of a pool ball.

The game is indeed quite slow. Despite the ponderous size, the game isn’t very heavy and it is possible to move it enough to influence the ball’s trajectory. Comment from Pinside: “The novelty is cool, but wears off quickly, and then there is not much left. It’s like the woman with the big tatas but no personality. OK, maybe that’s a bad example, because that novelty doesn’t really wear off.”

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If attacking Iran is a disaster for the U.S., why is the stock market slightly up?

by philg

This is my last morning in Berkeley, California. Support for the Islamic Republic of Iran is almost universal here. Nearly everyone shares the New York Times perspective that Trump’s attack on the noble legitimate leaders of Iran was reckless and exposes the U.S. to risks almost as bad as climate change. Certainly there was no imminent threat from some guys chanting “Death to America” and working on nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles. At dinner last night I asked a local, “Have you checked the stock market? If we’re in serious trouble, the market should be down.” She replied that she hadn’t checked, but was sure that there had been a market crash.

The Google shows that the market is about where it was a week ago.

How about oil?

Anyone who loaded up on oil on Friday is up 10 percent, but with standard leverage of 10:1, the lucky (or well-informed) trader has doubled his/her/zir/their money.

Loosely related, a favorite tweet regarding the fighting in and around Iran:

What else are Bay Area lifelong Democrats excited about? One friend wasn’t interested in the Iran war because he’s working to stop the construction of roughly 180 units of affordable housing that would be 2 miles from his house. (I’m also against this, of course, but likely for different reasons. A limited supply of taxpayer-subsidized housing results in a violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. 180 people will enjoy low rents for brand new units. Perhaps 5,000 nearby people with exactly the same income will be forced to pay high market rents for crummy older apartments. In what world can this be considered “equal” treatment by the government?)

Another friend was passionate about not straying too far from the 4th Street restaurant where we’d dined. She believed that we would become victims of crime if we walked away from the brightly lit main blocks. I pointed out that it wasn’t a great advertisement for 70 years of lavishly funded progressive government if Berkeley, in fact, had dangerous neighborhoods. (My local friend says that she often sees broken glass in parking spaces, evidence of prior break-ins.)

Separately, check out the “Living Wage” bump of 6 percent over the menu prices for this kosher meal.

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How was the immigration of Ndiaga Diagne supposed to make Americans better off?

by philg

New York Post:

The gunman behind Austin’s possible terror-related mass shooting entered the US and cemented his legal immigration status under Democrat administrations — despite a growing criminal record.

Senegalese national Ndiaga Diagne, 53, arrived in America on March 13, 2000, on a B-2 tourist visa during the Clinton administration, a source familiar with his immigration history told The Post on Sunday.

Diagne — who killed two people and wounded 14 more during his rampage outside a Texas bar early Sunday — then became a lawful permanent resident on an IR-6 visa in June 2006 when he married a US citizen, the source said.

He then went on to lodge a string of other arrests in the Big Apple between 2008 and 2016 — but that didn’t stop him becoming a naturalized US citizen on April 5, 2013 — around the start of former President Barack Obama’s second term, sources said. Those three arrests are sealed, sources said.

Let’s supposed that Ndiaga Diagne had never donned his “Property of Allah” shirt and murdered/wounded people in Austin. In that ideal hypothetical world how was his permanent presence here in the U.S. going to make existing Americans better off? In other words, what is the rational basis for our legal immigration system?

(Maybe the answer can be found in Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?)

Related:

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Larry Summers: association with Jeffrey Epstein was a serious, but not urgent, problem

by philg

Larry Summers, veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, was also a bigshot at Harvard University. I wrote about the first time he got axed from a Harvard job in “Women in Science” (2006):

[Summers] claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

Summers is in the news again… “Summers To Resign From Teaching Appointments, Relinquish University Professorship Over Epstein Ties” (Harvard Crimson):

Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year….

Association with Jeffrey Epstein was sufficiently serious that Summers must resign, but not so urgent that the resignation can’t wait until June.

Only loosely related, since nobody cares… what exactly did Summers do with the arch criminal Epstein? ChatGPT:

newly released emails from the Jeffrey Epstein estate show that Larry Summers privately consulted Jeffrey Epstein about his pursuit of a romantic relationship with a younger woman he described in the emails as his “mentee.” In one exchange from late 2018 and early 2019, Epstein even referred to himself as Summers’s “wing man” while offering advice on how to communicate with this woman.

According to news reports about the email release, the woman in question was Keyu Jin, a well-known economist who at the time was a tenured professor at the London School of Economics and a Harvard graduate. She was in her early 40s (around 43) during the period these email exchanges took place.

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