Just watched movie Conclave about choosing a Pope. The bad guys are the conservatives who say that male Catholics shouldn’t go to the bathhouse and have sex with five different guys every night. What the movie calls “liberal” cardinals are heroes. They suggest continuing a program of throwing out everything that was sacred to Catholics in the 19th century. The best of the cardinals, who ultimately wins, is a hermaphrodite. He/she says “I am as God made me” and claims that being a hermaphrodite makes him/her a way better Pope. The movie’s villain is a cardinal who wants Muslims out of Italy, partly due to the potential for jihad, and points out that Muslims don’t tolerate the presence of Christians in Muslim countries.
“By losing its faith, Europe has also lost its reason to be. It is experiencing a lethal decline and is becoming a new civilization, one that is cut off from its Christian roots.”
“All migrants who arrive in Europe are penniless, without work, without dignity,” Sarah reportedly said. “This is what the Church wants? The Church cannot cooperate with this new form of slavery that has become mass migration.”
“If truth no longer exists, if everything is relative, then man becomes a slave to his passions.”
Sarah argued that gender ideology is an affront to God’s creation and cannot fundamentally change whether a person is male or female in “The Day is Now Far Spent.”
Should there be an “irrelevant” choice for people who’ve been in heterosexual marriages for longer than 4 years? Psychology Today:
What’s more, we found that marital satisfaction for both husband and wife deteriorated in step with the wife’s loss of sexual desire. (The husband’s sexual desire was irrelevant to anybody’s marital happiness.) Might wives lose sexual desire because the marriage is turning bad? No: Time-lag analyses indicated that her loss of desire came first, leading to lower satisfaction later. Early levels of (dis)satisfaction did not predict how rapidly the wives lost interest in sex. … Crucially, it was not due to childbirth. Becoming parents made the mismatch worse, as in steeper declines in wives’ sexual desire. … A possible explanation that fits our data is that female sexual desire increases during the brief phase of passionate love. Nature may have arranged that as a way of encouraging the man to make a long-term commitment.
We can also see how the American Medical Association thinks about race, the default for which is “any” (the racial equivalent of “pangender”? Why isn’t it “panracial”?):
1.4 billion people in China, a country with 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, are lumped together as “Chinese”. For cousins of Elizabeth Warren, i.e., the 3,000ish enrolled Chinooks, there are five categories:
For all the talk about artificial intelligence upending the world, its economic effects remain uncertain. But Institute Professor and 2024 Nobel winner Daron Acemoglu has some insights.
Despite some predictions that AI will double US GDP growth, Acemoglu expects it to increase GDP by 1.1% to 1.6% over the next 10 years, with a roughly 0.05% annual gain in productivity. This assessment is based on recent estimates of how many jobs are affected—but his view is that the effect will be targeted.
The full paper is available for download as a PDF.
The news gets better:
“We’re still going to have journalists [especially in Gaza where food, health care, education, and shelter are all paid for by US/EU taxpayers via UNRWA?], we’re still going to have financial analysts, we’re still going to have HR employees,” he says. “It’s going to impact a bunch of office jobs that are about data summary, visual matching, pattern recognition, etc. And those are essentially about 5% of the economy.”
If “artificial intelligence” includes self-driving, I’m not sure that the effects on the economy will be small. As of 2016, supposedly about 3 percent of jobs were for drivers per se (CNBC). As anyone who has taken an Uber or Lyft can attest, many of these folks speak no English. If their driving jobs disappear, at least some percentage of them will be on track for the lifetime full welfare lifestyle (public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone).
Related: Mindy the Crippler is preparing for the stock market panic when people realize that AI is fizzling…
Our local (Jupiter, FL) CVS adapts to RFK, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again program. You no longer have to buy three huge bags of Twizzlers to get a discount, as one did under the Biden administration. “Must buy 2”:
Admission: Our 11-year-old was home sick with a cold (a ridiculous situation in Florida!) and requested Kit Kats so I bought him some.
Related:
COVID-19 state of emergency ending? (March 2023, when Biden was considering winding down the COVID-19 emergency in May 2023, a CVS in Maskachusetts incentivizes buying Cadbury candy eggs in quantity 10 and washing them down with 36 cans of Coke)
A few photos from the Palm Beach Gardens (Florida) Barnes & Noble…
The secret to American female happiness is more focus on the self:
A book for ICE employees tasked with picking MS-13 members out of the crowd of 30+ million undocumented Americans:
A book by an Egyptian who wrote “a heartsick breakup letter with the West” but won’t leave the U.S. and return to Egypt (he says that he wants to help Gazans, bombarded for no reason and through no fault of their own (according to the book jacket), but won’t go back to his native Egypt and cut some holes in the border fence to help his Gazan brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters escape?).
A Facebook friend and social acquaintance from my Cambridge days, Lisa Randall, penned an article for the Boston Globe about how working class federal taxpayers should be forced to keep feeding a rich university in a rich state:
the Trump administration has done what has seldom been done before: unified the faculty behind a common, unwavering defense of academic freedom and their unrelenting belief in the value of universities, particularly their own.
(Remember that part of “academic freedom” is the freedom to use the peasants’ tax dollars to run racially segregated theaters, e.g., from 2021:
She posted a link to the article on Facebook. One of her friends, apparently a Deplorable, said “Not one penny of my tax$ for a $50B endowment woke factory thanks”. I trotted out my standard line about how it was unclear why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems”, would want or accept any federal money. Shouldn’t Harvard want to fund itself via donations from the rich and from state taxes and see federal money spent at universities that are in poorer-than-average states, e.g., in Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi (stats on median household income by state; DC at the very top, of course, and Maskachusetts and New Jersey right underneath due to Medicare/Medicaid buying pharma and the Department of Education subsidizing universities)? I cited this 2016 piece from the Harvard Gazette, which calls itself “the official news website for Harvard University”.
The responses from her friends opened an interesting window into how academic elites think:
I was called “the dullest knife in the block” for thinking that an article in the Harvard Gazette by a “Harvard Staff Writer” and containing a series intro likely written by an editor was in any way related to an official Harvard position. It was an mere “opinion” piece and represented only the opinion of that one writer. (Which would mean that Harvard officially thinks that inequality is good? Or Harvard doesn’t think inequality is bad?)
Research grants should be allocated by merit and not by geography or wealth. An unstated assumption seemed to be that a Harvard lab couldn’t move if Harvard failed to secure private/state funding to replace the federal funding. Although it is, in fact, common for entire labs to move when a professor moves for whatever reason, the Harvard folks couldn’t imagine anyone leaving Harvard to follow the money. Our neighborhood here in Florida actually is periodically a destination for a moved lab, e.g., this neuroscience lab that moved in 2023 from University of California. Florida State University beat MIT in a competition to host the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in 1990 and the New York Times said FSU was “expected to draw scientists in biology, physics and engineering from all over the world”. Another NYT article said “M.I.T. felt that it deserved the project”. Today, the Chief Scientist down at FSU’s lab is Laura H. Greene while the hidebound MIT magnet lab is run by a white male, Robert Griffin.
A giant-brained Ph.D. participant from California disputed that Michigan was any poorer than Maskachusetts (Wokipedia says that MA median household income is nearly 50 percent higher than in MI). For those who only fly over the Midwest, it’s apparently plausible that the Rust Belt state and its biggest city of Detroit are both in prime fiscal condition.
The idea that the peasants of Michigan would benefit if $2 billion/year in federal money were redirected to, for example, University of Michigan from Harvard was questioned. Nobody but me was able to see that Michigan would be better off it were able to collect state income tax, property tax, and sales tax from the people paid by the $2 billion/year in grants. Nor that when those researchers went out to local retailers that the state would once again be able to collect more tax revenue as the retailers staffed up. (They would probably argue that the move of Citadel from Chicago to Miami didn’t hurt Chicago and didn’t help Miami (the Miami HQ for Citadel is expected to cost “$1 billion-plus” (translation: $2 billion?); imagine the cost for the building permit on this 54-story tower!).)
Here’s the HTML title tag for the Harvard Gazette:
<title>Harvard Gazette – Official news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and research — Harvard Gazette</title>
and here’s how it is rendered by Google when one searches:
Maybe the courts will block Donald Trump’s attempt to redirect the working class’s tax dollars to universities other than Harvard and similar. But if Trump does succeed, I think the elite schools and their elite graduates will be completely blindsided. Even after being told by the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re violating the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of race (especially against Asians), these schools imagine themselves to have gotten rich by being more virtuous than anyone else. A few fun points from the Boston Globe article…
We wouldn’t understand DNA if the working class didn’t fund Harvard:
The nature of DNA was discovered by an X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, who was doing pure research to understand its molecular structure. Under the current funding crisis, Franklin might well have been laid off before making her groundbreaking discovery that accounts for much of modern medical research.
It is unclear how Rosalind Franklin, a British Jew working in pre-Islamic Britain with funding from a private company (Wokipedia says Turner & Newall), would have been disadvantaged by a change in where U.S. taxpayer money is spent.
The subtitle of the article is an interesting window into how elites think: “What happens when research is fully privatized?” There hasn’t been any proposal from the Trump dictatorship, or indeed anyone in Washington, D.C., to “fully privatize” research funding. The current dictatorship merely wants to take away money from the Queers for Palestine League schools that fail to comply with the dictator’s reading of the U.S. Constitution. Presumably the money taken away from Harvard would then be spent at schools that don’t engage in race discrimination, don’t support Hamas, etc. See, for example, “University of Florida denies appeal of pro-Palestinian student protester’s suspension” and “Protesters handcuffed, arrested at FSU amid nationwide demonstrations against Israel-Hamas War”.
Part of an i-Ready assignment for our third grader in the Palm Beach County Schools:
This is a description of a real-world endeavor that is also valorized by CBS:
“When we actually got into the classroom, the books were just mainly about white boys and dogs,” Dias said. … She started a book drive. The idea was simple, but ambitious – to collect 1,000 books about black girls. … The books began arriving and stacking up. By the time “CBS This Morning” visited, Marley had collected close to 1,300 books. Marley’s favorite among them is “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson.
Woodson – who won both the prestigious Newbery Award and a National Book Award for “Brown Girl Dreaming” – knows the importance of identifying with characters in a book.
“Seeing a story on a page about a black child written by a black author not only legitimizes your own existence in the world, because you’re a part of something else. ‘Look, I’m here in this book,'” Woodson said.
Maybe one of today’s third graders will grow up to run a taxpayer-funded public library with books that are segregated according to the race and gender ID of the protagonist. #IHaveADream
Happy National Odometer Day to those who celebrate…
By taking a car to the dealer three times, I learned how white women with Long COVID feel. After every visit, the dealer said “Your AC is working perfectly.” On the fourth visit, the diagnosis was “There is no refrigerant in your system. It all leaked out from a failed receiver drier.” Because of Climate Change, I had no idea what a receiver drier was. From the Interweb:
1.They act as a temporary storage container for oil and refrigerant when neither are needed for system operation (such as during periods of low cooling demand). This is the “receiver” function of the receiver drier. 2.Most receiver driers contain a filter that can trap debris that may be inside the A/C system. 3.Receiver driers contain a material called desiccant. The desiccant is used to absorb moisture that may have gotten inside the A/C system during manufacture, assembly, or service. Moisture can get into the A/C components from humidity in the air. This is the “drier” function of the receiver drier.
It turns out that this is a $28.44 authentic General Motors part, including dealer markup. The total repair bill was nearly 46X this amount, however, at $1,297.34. I have to believe that this is some kind of record.
(Fortunately, the entire cost was covered by a $2,600 GM Protection Plan that I had purchased after hearing frightening tales of $25,000+ transmission replacements. The 2022 Chevrolet has only about 7,000 miles on it and will be covered by this extended warranty until it is 11 years old.)
It is a little tough to understand how the labor added up to $1,057.50. The shop’s nominal rate is $225/hr so that would be 4.7 hours of labor happening between the 7:45 am dropoff and 10:53 am “your car is washed and ready” pickup. Perhaps, though, this also includes some diagnosis time from Service Visit #4? Friends who’ve been getting Toyota and Audi repairs in Maskachusetts and Florida have reported some huge labor estimates/charges relative to the flat rate labor hours found with a Google search and/or the actual time the car spent in the shop. Dealers seem to be quoting and getting fixed prices that work out to $300-400/hr. for their labor. I wonder if car care has become like human care: you’ll pay a way higher price if you don’t have insurance and, therefore, it makes sense to buy “insurance” even when you don’t need the insurance part of the insurance (i.e., to shift the risk). Or just buy a high-quality Georgia-built Kia with its 5-year bumper-to-bumper warranty and 10-year powertrain warranty (Kia achieves its superb quality without the benefit of union workers).
Separately, let’s raise a glass of DOT 3 brake fluid to our 2021 Honda Odyssey (built in Alabama by non-union workers who rejected a UAW organization effort). After 4.5 years and 50,000 miles it has suffered exactly 0 failures of any kind. (The only expenses have been for maintenance items, such as oil changes, wiper blades, battery, tires, and brakes.) Due to the miracle of Bidenflation, the minivan is currently selling, in nominal dollars, for almost exactly what we paid for it (survey of similar-mileage Odysseys offered by dealers).
I found an Android phone on the sidewalk today. It wasn’t password-protected so I figured it would be easy to find the owner by calling some of his/her/zir/their contacts. This proved more challenging than expected because the entire interface was in Korean. I returned the last five phone calls and nobody answered. Digging into the text messages, however, I found one that contained a “Happy Mother’s Day” meme. I called the associated number and reached the phone owner’s daughter.
What did the rest of you do for moms? (Keep in mind that, according to one of America’s leading intellectuals, depicted below along with the person who helped prepare the family home for Kwanzaa every December 25, “mom” can be interpreted as “mothers, stepmoms, grandmothers, godmothers, aunties, and all the women in our lives who love, raise, and guide us.” A blind person’s Labrador retriever would be included, I think, since the Canine-American “guides us”.)
Today I am thinking of my mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and the many lessons she taught me. I am so proud to be her daughter.
Happy Mother's Day to the mothers, stepmoms, grandmothers, godmothers, aunties, and all the women in our lives who love, raise, and guide us. pic.twitter.com/lcTNSkmr7B
What’s a good gift for a mom? How about this translation of some of the works of Confucius, famous for telling us that we need to show filial piety? I’m not sure why it makes sense to pay $35,000 for a stupid white person’s translation of a smart Chinese person’s teachings. Who cares if Joshua Marshman was the first to do a translation back in 1809? Is there any reason to believe that it is better than a modern translation? The photos below are from Raptis, a shop in Palm Beach, Florida.
Here’s another book from the same store, a copy of Ulysses for $300,000. The price might sound unreasonable until you reflect that it would probably take the rest of anyone’s life to get through the tedious work.
