Category: Biden/Harris

Could a Black judge have obtained consideration for the Supreme Court job by identifying as a woman?

by philg

I haven’t been following the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson (CNN) closely, but it seems that nobody could apply for the job unless he/she/ze/they identified as a “Black woman”. From state-sponsored NPR:

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The person I will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity. And that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court. It’s long overdue in my view.

A person who switches racial identity from white to Black may be condemned (see Nkechi Amare Diallo, formerly “Rachel Dolezal”), but we celebrate those who change gender identity from “man” to “woman” (see Rachel Levine, for example).

If a Black judge who previously identified as a “man” had, after Dr. Biden’s husband announced his hiring policy, said “I identify as a woman and am proud to be a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community”, would that judge then have become eligible for the Supreme Court position?

William Thomas, for example, who was nominated by President Obama (see “Rubio Withdraws Support for Gay Black Judge’s Nomination to the Federal Bench” (NYT)) and who continues to serve as a judge in a Florida state court. Judge Thomas was already identified by the newspaper of record as “Black” and, under our prevailing theories of gender, only Judge Thomas can pick his/her/zir/their gender ID. What would have stopped Judge Thomas from being considered for the Supreme Court job as a “Black woman”?

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GPS history from Joe Biden

by philg

From the State of the Union speech yesterday:

And fourth and last, let’s end cancer as we know it.

Cancer is the number-two cause of death in America, second only to heart disease.

Our goal is to cut cancer death rates by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years. And I think we can do better than that: turn cancers from death sentences into treatable diseases, more support for patients and families.

To get there, I call on Congress to fund what I called ARPA-H — (applause): Advanced — Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. Patterned after DARPA in the Defense Department, projects that led — in DARPA — to the Internet, GPS, and so much more that make our forces more safer and be able to wage war more — with more clarity.

Thanks to Facebook, we know that Gladys West, Ph.D. in Public Administration, invented GPS:

But did DARPA fund Dr. West, as Dr. Biden’s spouse told the American people last night? “GPS History, Chronology, and Budgets” says that it was the mainstream Department of Defense, lead by the U.S. Air Force:

Finally, in April 1973, the Deputy Secretary of Defense designated the Air Force as the lead agency to consolidate the various satellite navigation concepts into a single comprehensive DoD system to be known as the Defense Navigation Satellite System (DNSS). The new system was to be developed by a Joint Program Office (JPO) located at the Air Force’s Space and Missile Organization, with participation by all military services. Colonel Brad Parkinson, program director of the JPO, was directed to negotiate between the services to develop a DNSS concept that embraced the views and needs of all services.

(Let’s not forget Gee from World War II, a British predecessor to LORAN, which was itself the predecessor to satellite-based navigation systems. See “The Origins of GPS, and the Pioneers Who Launched the System” (GPS World) for some photos of the early developers (below) and confirmation that it was not DARPA that funded GPS.)

The audience is thrilled to imagine a new federal agency (ARPA-H). But we already have the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with an annual budget of $52 billion. If NIH is doing its job, why would a new agency be needed to fund medical research? After all, the ordinary Department of Defense, merely doing its job in the 1960s and 1970s, managed to get GPS off the ground (so to speak).

Readers who watched the speech (I merely skimmed the transcript): What was your impression of our 79-year-old Commander in Chief? (and was Uncle Joe merely reading from a teleprompter or did he have to think on his feet?)

An additional point that I noticed: the speech did not begin with a land acknowledgment and, indeed, there is nothing in the transcript about Native Americans. LGBTQ+ (but not 2SLGBTQQIA+?) Americans are mentioned. Transgender Americans are mentioned twice. Asian Americans will be protected. “Women” (an undefined category) are mentioned three times as victims requiring government assistance. “Veterans are the backbone and the spine of this country. They’re the best of us,” is just a portion of the attention devoted to veterans. But nothing about Native Americans, who are apparently at best second-rate (unless a Native American becomes a veteran).

Finally, Biden said “we must prepare for new [SARS-CoV-2] variants.” For those who believe that ordering the general public to wear masks is effective at stopping the spread of an aerosol respiratory virus, how is this statement consistent with what Biden’s fellow Democrats are doing, i.e., dropping their mask orders? And with Biden’s own statement in the same speech: “Under the new guidelines, most Americans in most of the country can now go mask free.” Wouldn’t the best way to prepare for new viral variants be keeping mask orders in place until there is a simple cure for COVID-19?

Loosely related… pictures of Americans who were involved in the early years of satellite-based radio navigation (from GPS World):

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Joe Biden thinks other people should hire Black managers

by philg

More Super Bowl questions….

First, in watching TV coverage of the event, did anyone see a spectator wearing a mask? The nearby schoolchildren were recently subjected to an escalation in their mask orders.

Also potentially of interest…. “Biden calls out lack of Black head coaches in NFL in Super Bowl interview” (NBC):

“It’s not a requirement of law, but it’s a requirement, I think, of just some generic decency,” the president told NBC News’ Lester Holt.

President Joe Biden called out the lack of Black head coaches in the NFL in an interview that aired during the Super Bowl, saying having diverse leaders in the league is a requirement of “generic decency.”

As NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell pointed out, Biden said in an interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, “they haven’t lived up to what they committed to and lived up to being open about hiring more minorities to run teams.”

“The whole idea that a league that is made up of so many athletes of color, as well as so diverse, that there’s not enough African American qualified coaches ‘to manage these NFL teams,’ it just seems to me that it’s a standard that they’d want to live up to,” he said. “It’s not a requirement of law, but it’s a requirement, I think, of just some generic decency.”

But how many Black cabinet secretaries has Joe Biden hired? He has hired some white-looking people who identify as “women” and at least one member white member of the “men who have sex with men” (the official CDC phrase) group, perhaps proving that white women and white 2SLGBTQQIA+ are the enemies of Black advancement in the Victimhood Olympics (if a company can get equal “diversity” credit for hiring a white woman as for hiring a Black man, essentially the white woman has grabbed the quota that had previously been reserved for Blacks).

A gallery of mostly white skin is available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet/ and it even includes a white person who was supposedly purged:

Here are some people who might identify as “white women”:

(Note that the former governor of a state famous for strip clubs and tattoo parlors is secretary of commerce.)

And now that Asians are considered victims…

Pew:

In 2019, there were 46.8 million people who self-identified as Black, making up roughly 14% of the country’s population. This marks a 29% increase since 2000, when there were roughly 36.2 million Black Americans.

If we assume that at least 20 million out of the 46.8 million identify as “women”, why can’t the entire cabinet be people who identify as Black women, a historically underrepresented group in the highest levels of American government? President Biden said “there’s not enough African American qualified coaches” was an unacceptable excuse for the NFL. Does Joe Biden expect us to believe that, with respect to cabinet jobs, there aren’t enough qualified candidates in a pool of 20 million?

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MIT spirit in Washington, D.C.

by philg

“‘I am deeply sorry for my conduct’: Biden’s top science adviser apologizes to staff” (Politico):

[MIT prof] Eric Lander, the president’s top science adviser and a member of his Cabinet, sent a Friday night email to his roughly 150-person staff apologizing for speaking to colleagues in a “disrespectful and demeaning way.”

“It’s my responsibility to set a respectful tone for our community. It’s clear that I have not lived up to this responsibility,” Lander wrote in an email provided to POLITICO. “This is not only wrong, but also inconsistent with our Safe and Respectful Workplace Policy. It is never acceptable for me to speak that way. I am deeply sorry for my conduct. I especially want to apologize to those of you who I treated poorly or were present at the time.”

Lander heads the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and is leading President Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot,” an initiative aimed at reducing cancer deaths that had its splashy launch event earlier this week.

The email appears to reference an investigation POLITICO has been conducting into Lander’s treatment of staff, which Lander acknowledges in his email. “I understand that some of you have been asked about this, and I thought it was important to write directly to you,” he wrote. “I also realize that my conduct reflects poorly on this Administration, and interferes with our work. I deeply regret that.”

Biden himself declared a zero-tolerance policy for improper conduct on the first day of his administration. He pledged that “if you are ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot. On the spot. No ifs, ands or buts.”

Lander pledges in his email that “[w]e will take concrete steps to promote a better workplace. We will schedule regular forums to check in with staff on how we are doing in creating and upholding a safe and respectful workplace. We will also ensure that every employee knows how to report conduct that concerns them.”

Lander is probably one of the nicer people at MIT (like being a dwarf among midgets, admittedly), so perhaps this shows that Science is something to follow every day while scientists are best restricted to their labs.

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The 6-year-old hater responds to an interview with a World War II veteran

by philg

Follow-up to The 6-year-old hater…

We took the kids to the National Navy SEAL Museum (a mask-free and indoor/outdoor experience, like most Florida experiences). The museum was showing an interview with a World War II veteran in his 90s. The 6-year-old asked “Is that Joe Biden?”

We learned that Anthony Fauci was a SEAL (“Using Science to Maximize Success”):

We did not enter the raffle to win a sniper rifle…

The Museum’s yard is filled with interesting boats, submarines, and a very-tough-visitors-welcome obstacle course:

Earlier in the day, we learned at the St. Lucie County Aquarium that high-fertility immigrants make life difficult for natives:

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Why is the conflict over Ukraine happening now?

by philg

Please forgive my ignorance of everything that happens beyond the borders of the U.S. (and/or beyond the borders of Palm Beach County), but I’m hoping that readers who follow matters international, especially those who live in Europe, can explain the Russia-Ukraine-NATO-US situation to me.

Why now? What has changed to create this conflict? Why wouldn’t it have happened in 2018, for example?

The New York Times assured us that Vladimir Putin controlled Donald Trump. From 2019, for example, “Donald Trump: The Russia File” (a consensus piece from the entire Editorial Board):

Standing on the White House lawn on Monday morning, his own government shut down around him, the president of the United States was asked by reporters if he was working for Russia.

He said that he was not. “Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it’s a disgrace that you even asked that question, because it’s a whole big fat hoax,” President Trump said.

Yet the reporters were right to ask, given Mr. Trump’s bizarre pattern of behavior toward a Russian regime that the Republican Party quite recently regarded as America’s chief rival. Indeed, it’s unnerving that more people — particularly in the leadership of the Republican Party — aren’t alarmed by Mr. Trump’s secretive communications with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and reliance on his word over the conclusions of American intelligence agencies.

Given the direct control of U.S. politics that U.S. media asserted that Russia was exercising from 2016 through 2020, if Putin wanted to do something in Ukraine without American interference, wouldn’t it have made sense to do it while a Russian puppet (Donald Trump) was in charge in D.C.?

Russia annexed Crimea during the Obama administration (Wikipedia) and took a lot of heat for that. Unless we/NATO/Europe has done something recently to antagonize Russia, wouldn’t it have made sense for Russia to do whatever it is doing now back in 2014 so that it would have had to suffer only one round of sanctions?

Finally, given that the U.S. is packed with immigrants from both Ukraine and Russia, I wonder what the consequences for this dispute will be here. Our corner of Florida in particular is home to both Ukrainians and Russians (many had been living in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, but moved when lockdowns and school closures were imposed). Can expats from Ukraine and Russia get along? I remember when Crimea was annexed, a Massachusetts immigrant from Crimea was vocal in support of Putin and the annexation (her father was a Russian military officer).

This is a big story in U.S. media recently and yet I have no idea what Americans are supposed to know about the situation.

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  • New York state public and welfare health spending compared to Russia’s military budget: How much is $88 billion? Mexico spends about $1050 per person on health care. That includes health care for the rich, middle class, and poor. Mexico’s population is roughly 130 million so this works out to about $136 billion. In other words, with only 20 million people, New York spends close to as much on public health and welfare health insurance as Mexico does to care for its entire population, including cosmetic surgery for the richest people in Polanco. (How are the results in the Mexican system? Mexican life expectancy is about one year less than American life expectancy.) Comparisons between coronavirus and war are common. What if we wanted to have a military force with supersonic fighter jets, nuclear-powered submarines, an aircraft carrier, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, nearly 1 million active-duty troops, and 2 million reservists? Somewhere around $70 billion is what Russia spends. In other words, New York state spends more for public health and welfare health care than Russia spends to fund what might be the world’s most powerful military (let’s hope that we never find out who is actually the strongest!).
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Did your free COVID tests arrive yet?

by philg

Who has received his/her/zir/their free-from-Joe-Biden COVID-19 tests? This handout seems like an ideal political strategy. People will be delighted to pay $40,000 per year in local, state, and federal taxes as long as they can get $40 (retail) in COVID tests “for free” from the benevolent pharaoh.

I’m wondering if the typical household receives these tests just as Omicron (“in retreat” due to muscular government efforts, not because of Farr’s law) has disappeared and, more importantly, if Americans will be told to discard these tests when the next wave hits because the tests won’t be sufficiently sensitive to whatever variant comes after Omicron.

Readers: What’s your prediction as to whether 90% of these tests ultimately are discarded?

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We voted for Pedro; did all of our wildest dreams come true?

by philg

Joe Biden’s campaign promises were similar to those of Pedro’s (“if you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true”) in Napoleon Dynamite.

It has been a year. How did Biden deliver on the promised dreams?

First, let’s check the promises on archive.org, 10/29/2020. It was a “Battle for the Soul of the Nation.” Do we have a better soul today?

Biden promised “leadership during the COVID-19 Pandemic”:

Biden knows how to mount an effective crisis response and elevate the voices of scientists, public health experts, and first responders because he has done it before.

We need a decisive public health response to curb the spread of this disease and provide treatment to those in need — as well as a decisive economic response that delivers real relief to American workers, families, and small businesses, and protects the economy as a whole.

More Americans have died with a COVID-19 tag during the Biden administration than during the Trump administration. Did the dead people die happier under Biden because they heard the voices of scientists before they died?

Then there was “Joe and Kamala’s Plan to Beat COVID-19”:

Fix Trump’s testing-and-tracing fiasco to ensure all Americans have access to regular, reliable, and free testing.

Double the number of drive-through testing sites.

Invest in next-generation testing, including at home tests and instant tests, so we can scale up our testing capacity by orders of magnitude.

Stand up a Pandemic Testing Board like Roosevelt’s War Production Board. It’s how we produced tanks, planes, uniforms, and supplies in record time, and it’s how we can produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.

Create the Nationwide Pandemic Dashboard that Americans can check in real-time to help them gauge whether local transmission is actively occurring in their zip codes. This information is critical to helping all individuals, but especially older Americans and others at high risk, understand what level of precaution to take.

Immediately restore our relationship with the World Health Organization, which — while not perfect — is essential to coordinating a global response during a pandemic.

By how many orders of magnitude was our testing capacity scaled up? Just two orders of magnitude (100X) or did Biden/Harris get us 10,000X the testing capacity that prevailed in the Dark Days of Donald?

And where did President Biden hide the promised “Nationwide Pandemic Dashboard”?

How about the economy? Did Biden promise the highest inflation since Jimmy Carter? Not according to Google. joebiden.com barely uses the word “inflation”. One thing that raging inflation will facilitate: Biden’s promise to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which will also be the price of a stick of chewing gum.

Foreign policy?

Biden will end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which have cost us untold blood and treasure. As he has long argued, Biden will bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan and narrowly focus our mission on Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And he will end our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Staying entrenched in unwinnable conflicts only drains our capacity to lead on other issues that require our attention, and it prevents us from rebuilding the other instruments of American power.

I’d say that President Biden delivered on this dream!

A taco shop at the Delray Beach Market:

Biden promised to discriminate in hiring on the basis of membership in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:

Biden will nominate and appoint federal officials and judges who represent the diversity of the American people, including LGBTQ+ people.

How many people who wouldn’t otherwise have qualified for high positions did Joe Biden appoint? And did they have to wear these socks in order to get hired? (also from Delray Beach)

On education:

The challenge facing our schools is unprecedented. President Trump has made it much worse. We had a window to get this right. And, Trump blew it. His administration failed to heed the experts and take the steps required to reduce infections in our communities. As a result, cases have exploded.

Joe Biden has a simple five-step roadmap to support local decision-making on reopening schools safely

Get the Virus Under Control:… Implement nationwide testing-and-tracing, including doubling the number of drive-through testing sites;

Where are these extra sites and how does one sign up for nationwide test and trace?

Readers, especially those who voted for Biden: did your dreams of what President Biden would do come true?

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Breaking bad habits for the New Year

by philg

Happy New Year to everyone!

What bad habits are you going to try to swear off for the New Year?

A recent conversation in the middle seat of the minivan:

  • 6-year-old: Dad, if you crack your knuckles you can’t have any ice cream for a month. I’m trying to stop your habitat [habit].
  • Me: Are you going to follow any rules, like brushing your teeth every night, or are you just going to make rules for adults?
  • 6-year-old: I’m just going to make rules for adults. I’m Joe Biden.
  • 8-year-old: If you’re Joe Biden, then give me money. I’m not working, so give me money. If you don’t give me money then you’re a fake Joe Biden.

Another fun conversation was in Naples, Florida, where we saw multiple Rolls-Royces and Ferraris every hour that we were downtown. This sparked a conversation regarding what were the world’s most expensive cars. The 8-year-old settled on a $28 million Rolls-Royce for himself. A short time later, we happened to see a Bentley and I pointed it out. The 8-year-old scoffed, “Those are common. A Bentley is for un-rich people.” (His first language is Russian (via mom and grandparents) so he didn’t have ready access to the English word “poor”.)

[Note that we haven’t attempted to persuade our kids of the merits of any particular politician, just answered their questions regarding why people might want to vote for Biden (“he promised to give people who don’t work extra money”) or Trump (“he promised to keep taxes and regulation low, which would be good for people who are trying to run small businesses”).]

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Uncle Joe’s restaurant

by philg

On the way to a swamp wetlands boardwalk, we stopped at a strip mall and found Uncle Joe’s:

Here’s the menu:

Depending on who was reading the menu, the General Tao’s Chicken was either $1.85 trillion or “zero”.

(When Uncle Joe is not busy stirring the wok… September 24 Remarks by President Biden:

We talk about price tags. The — it is zero price tag on the debt. We’re paying — we’re going to pay for everything we spend. So they say it’s not — you know, people, understandably — “Well, you know, it started off at $6 trillion, now it’s $3.5 trillion. Now it’s — is it going to be $2.9? Is it…”

It’s going to be zero — zero. Because in the — in that plan that I put forward — and I said from the outset — I said, “I’m running to change the dynamic of how the economy grows.”

)

Another menu, from “Everything in the House Democrats’ Budget Bill” (NYT, 11/18):

Stepping back from this a bit, isn’t this another way to transfer money from hard-working childless Americans to those of us fortunate enough to have kids? A single drone worker in a city is not a “family” and won’t get anything out of the biggest block at top left. The drone probably will earn too much to qualify for any of the housing or health care subsidies. The drone already has a job and is already in the U.S., so won’t obviously benefit from the $133 billion spent on immigration. The drone doesn’t have $80,000 in state and local taxes to deduct (the Democrats’ new limit, up from Trump’s $10,000; average property tax rate in the U.S. is about 1.08 percent, so this new tax code will be perfect for anyone with a $7.4 million house).

How about the birdwatching from the boardwalk? It was actually better in the strip mall:

I think that the above bird is a Great Blue Heron who identifies as white. We saw some sandhill cranes on the highway just before turning into Grassy Waters Preserve. After a few minutes of strolling, we learned that immigration is detrimental to natives:

We also learned that birds and alligators do not show up when tourists want them to…

(I think the tricks for wildlife spotting in South Florida are (a) wait until mating season for animals that migrate from the north, and/or (b) wait until the mid-winter dry season when animals collect near the remaining water.)

Most bizarre thing about the boardwalk? Even in the shaded heavily wooded parts… no bugs!

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