The Dr. Jill Biden stories are preparing Americans for her rule?

A big selling point for the Democrats is the assertion that elite technocratic rule yields superior results compared to rule by ordinary folks. Democrats #FollowScience by citing experts with credentials while Republicans cite common sense. A Republican, for example, might remember “Rising Obesity in the United States Is a Public Health Crisis” (2018; “Obesity accounts for 18 percent of deaths among Americans ages 40 to 85…”) and conclude that denying children a year of gym class, making it illegal for kids to run around together, locking down adults next to their refrigerators (15 lb. weight gain typical), and shutting down activities that resulted in a few thousand steps per day of incidental walking would kill far more people than could conceivably be saved via a lockdown. The uncredentialed Republican wouldn’t need to try to run a calculation of lost life-years, but simply look around at obese neighbors and say “parking these folks next to the fridge for a year is the worst idea ever.”

The Ed.D that Jill Biden obtained is a credential “for certified teachers already possessing master’s degrees who seek to become administrators.” (maryville.edu) The master’s degrees themselves are worthless in terms of improving teaching ability and outcomes (Washington Monthly; Baltimore Sun; CPRE: “on average, master’s degrees in education bear no relation to student achievement”).

Why would Mx. Biden insist on being called “Dr.”? He/she/ze/they would not be referred to as Dr. under the conventional American newspaper style guide (MDs who support Donald Trump aren’t “Dr.” either; e.g., see this 2018 NYT article in which Ben Carson, MD, a neurosurgeon, is referred to as “Mr. Carson”).

What if the answer is that faithful Democrats are being prepared for Jill Biden’s rule? In order to be a legitimate ruler in Democrat voters’ eyes, she needs some sort of technocratic expertise and the Ed.D credential is a demonstration of that. “Smart enough to have sex with a married Congressman” is not an obvious qualification for managing a $5 trillion enterprise. With the EdD highlighted, American Democrats can feel comfortable being governed by a senile Joe Biden following Dr. Biden’s science-informed instructions. Joe won’t have to yield to President Harris, but can instead govern in the same sense that Woodrow Wilson governed following his stroke (see “When a secret president ran the country” (PBS)).

From March 2020, the factory of future primary care non-EdD “doctors” for the “underserved” (that’s what the M3s say that they’re planning to do; where the U.S. finds plastic surgeons and dermatologists is a mystery).

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Elites dine out in Los Angeles while schools for the non-elites are closed

“LA County Supervisor dines at restaurant hours after voting to ban outdoor dining” (Fox 11, LA):

Just hours after Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl voted to ban outdoor dining at L.A. County’s 31,000 restaurants over COVID-19 safety concerns, she visited a restaurant in Santa Monica, where she dined outdoors, FOX 11 has learned on Monday.

During Tuesday’s L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting, Kuehl referred to outside dining as “a most dangerous situation” over what she described as a risk of tables of unmasked patrons potentially exposing their servers to the coronavirus.

This is a serious health emergency and we must take it seriously,” Kuehl said.

“The servers are not protected from us, and they’re not protected from their other tables that they’re serving at that particular time, plus all the hours in which they’re working.”

Kuehl went on to vote in support of restricting outdoor dining in Los Angeles County, which passed by a 3-2 margin of the Board of Supervisors.

In other words, reasonable minds can differ on whether or not restaurant dining is permissible. Everyone can agree that public schools for children of the non-elite, closed since March, should remain closed. From the LAUSD site (retrieved 12/1):

As the level of the virus in the Los Angeles area remains widespread, state guidelines say schools cannot reopen at this time, and we will not reopen schools until it’s safe and appropriate to do so. We are preparing to serve students at schools as soon as it’s possible, in the safest way possible. Our plans include the highest standards for health, education and employee practices at schools.

Meanwhile, in Frogland… “Positive Test Rate of 11 Percent? France’s Schools Remain Open.” (NYT) How about in “give the finger to the virus” territory? From “Sweden has kept schools open during the pandemic despite spike in cases”:

I think it is good that they don’t wear face masks,” one mother tells FRANCE 24, as she leaves her children at school. “I think it is very important that they go to school, otherwise it would be very difficult for me to work.”

The teachers also believe it is very important to stay open, particularly for struggling students.

“They need a teacher in the same room as them to cheer them on and clarify things,” says Charlotte Hammarback, a teacher at the NYA Elementary School in Stockholm. “Most of the time these students will not ask for help, they will just sit and wait until someone comes up to them.”

No-mask Mom doesn’t #FollowScience!

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The stock market is up because Bigger Government is great for Big Business?

The stock market has been up lately, perhaps in response to the Biden-Harris electoral victory. I wonder if this makes sense. Democrats promise a bigger government. The companies that are well situated to harvest contracts, bailouts, etc. are the biggest American companies. Investors could expect a disaster for small business owners and the working class (i.e., the folks who voted for Trump), but that shouldn’t discourage them from buying stock in publicly traded companies (i.e., the biggest U.S. companies).

From “The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel” (New Republic):

It may turn out that Donald Trump was the one force keeping the Democratic Party together.

Trump didn’t sell out his supporters. In fact, his presidency saw something extraordinary, even if it was all but invisible from the country’s globalized cities: the first egalitarian boom since well back into the twentieth century. In 2019, the last non-Covid year, he presided over an average 3.7 percent unemployment rate and 4.7 percent wage growth among the lowest quartile of earners. All income brackets increased their take. That had happened in the last three Obama years, too. The difference is that in the Obama part of the boom, the income of the top decile rose by 20 percent, with tiny gains for other groups. In the Trump economy, the distribution was different. Net worth of the top 10 percent rose only marginally, while that of all other groups vaulted ahead. In 2019, the share of overall earnings going to the bottom 90 percent of earners rose for the first time in a decade.

The reasons for Trump’s success are not yet clear. They may well have involved his unorthodox policy choices: above all, limiting immigration.

So the good times for the elites might be even better soon! That’s a great reason to purchase stock in America’s largest companies owned by elites, managed by elites, and mostly employing the reasonably elite).

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Even a dead president needs prohibited airspace

President George H.W. Bush died two years. He left office more than 27 years ago. As far as pilots in New England are concerned, his most important legacy is Prohibited Area P-67, centered on the former/late president’s house in Kennebunkport, Maine:

It is thus illegal to zip up the coast at a low altitude, but why? To protect Barbara Bush, the former First Lady? She died in 2018 as well. Because George W. Bush occasionally goes up there? (But then why would it be necessary to “check NOTAMs daily for expansion”? Does a big TFR follow an ex-President?) Because the U.S. government is good at prohibiting things, but has no mechanism for de-prohibiting?

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High hopes for Kamala Harris

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.)

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  • 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.”)
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Thanksgiving in the Land of Liberty

A round-up of Thanksgiving policies in the Land of Liberty (TM), COVID-19 edition:

Feel better about paying $trillions for the military that protects us from losing our liberty to the Canadians or Mexicans!

An immigrant originally from Moscow: “I never imagined that one day people would have more freedom in Russia than in the U.S.”

If you’re a sports car enthusiast, this floor sign from the National Corvette Museum might be a good addition to your living room before the relatives show up…

(Photo taken on Monday. Hardly anyone was adhering to this rule. Just as the Swedish MD/PhDs predicted, once you tell humans that masks will protect them, they don’t worry about proximity to other humans.)

Readers: I hope that your turkey cooking goes well! Our dish towel:

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Social media will shift the age of the American electorate?

What happened with the age of the average American voter in 2020 versus 2016? Was it younger due to the hourly nagging of the typical young person by various social media platforms?

Separately, is it good or bad that the voting age skews younger? I spoke with a smart 13-year-old in a coastal elite school system. What had she learned from her immersion in an all-Democrat neighborhood (many government workers!) and from all-Democrat teachers? “I’m a Democrat because of the issues that are important to me.” Such as? “Like it is legal right now to kill LGBTQ people.” I.e., she will be voting Democrat to ensure the outlawing of murder.

(Of course, I couldn’t resist asking why there were any gay people left in the U.S. “The New York Times informs us that our country is packed with people who hate the LGBTQIA+. If it is legal to kill gay people, why wouldn’t these anti-gay Americans have killed all of them?”)

GermanL in a comment on an earlier post pointed us to Peter Schiff:

Even back then, everybody wasn’t voting. You had to be 21 to vote. That means you’re in the workforce for many, many years because people generally got out of school at 12 or 13. So you had been working for many years. In many cases, you had property qualifications, you had poll taxes, you had literary tests. There were all sorts of ways that they limited the suffrage, just so it wasn’t everybody voting because they recognized the damage that you could create when you turn elections into advanced auctions on the sale of stolen goods.

If social media is, in fact, a force for reducing the age of our electorate, what should we expect these young people to vote for? Free college tuition and student loan forgiveness?

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How could the U.S. election results ever be verified?

Trump and Biden are both claiming victory in the most recent election. I tend to believe Biden because this is consistent with my prediction regarding how a timid cower-in-place population would vote. But how could anyone be sure who is correct?

In most countries there is a national ID card system. Citizens show this ID in order to vote. There can be a record of which ID numbers went to the polls (or to an Internet e-voting service) in every district nationwide. With such a record, a 10-line computer program can verify that nobody voted twice, for example. (Start with Quicksort in Haskell!)

How can it work in the U.S.? Maybe we know that “Joe Smith” voted in both Florida and Pennsylvania, but how could we ever determine whether these two voters are the same person or two different people?

Also, with mail-in ballots, how do we know that they were filled out and sent back by people who were (a) alive, (b) actually resident in the state, and (c) not voting in any other state? (see “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” (NYT, 2012))

(The working class don’t seem to be convinced that the system cannot be manipulated by the elites. I was at an airport in New Hampshire recently talking to a mechanic. A military-schemed Sikorsky S-92 was departing. The mechanic said “That was probably Joe Biden dropping off another box of ballots.”)

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Time for graduate school in Trump hatred

If we regard the lead-up to the election as a Bachelor’s degree in Trump-hatred, can the post-election activity be thought of as grad school? From “Voting Trump Out is Not Enough,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (New Yorker):

Like tens of millions of Americans, I voted to end the miserable reign of Donald J. Trump, but we cannot perpetuate the election-year fiction that the deep and bewildering problems facing millions of people in this country will simply end with the Trump Administration. They are embedded in “the system,” in systemic racism, and the other social inequities that are the focus of continued activism and budding social movements. Viewing the solution to these problems as simply electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both underestimates the depth of the problems and trivializes the remedies necessary to undo the damage. That view may also confuse popular support for fundamental change, as evidenced by Trump’s one-term Presidency, with what the Democratic Party is willing or even able to deliver.

The hated dictator’s name appears more than 20 times in this article.

With Trump gone, it is apparently time to listen to the scientists who said that the shutdown would cost more lives than would be saved from Covid-19:

Today, in Philadelphia, where I live, there is not a single aspect of life that the pandemic has not upended, from work and school to housing and health care, pulling poor and working-class African-Americans, in particular, deeper into debt and despair. The uncertainty of the moment, let alone the future, feeds fear, frustration, hopelessness, and dread. In Philadelphia, shootings are on the rise, and the murder rate is growing. … African-Americans make up eighty-five per cent of the city’s shooting victims. Even before the pandemic, drug overdoses in Black Philadelphia were on the rise. In the first three months of shelter-in-place orders, a hundred and forty-seven Black residents died by accidental drug overdose, forty-seven per cent of drug deaths in the city. … Job losses have overwhelmingly affected low-wage, minority workers. Since May, as many as eight million people have been pushed into poverty, with Black families overrepresented among them. … Thousands of people have already been evicted during this crisis, and nearly one out of six renters have fallen behind on their rent. Nearly one in four renters who live with children report that they are not up-to-date with the rent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s unprecedented moratorium on evictions was too good to be true: the Trump Administration recently signalled to landlords that it would allow them to challenge the eligibility of tenants. This leaves the viability of the C.D.C. moratorium up to the discretion of individual judges, who may or may not honor it. Local organizers and activists have tried to fill the gap created by federal neglect with relentless mutual-aid organizing, but it is hardly sufficient.

Our cities are actually run by good people:

It is not a Trumpian slur to observe that many of the cities where Black suffering takes place are also governed by proud members of the Democratic Party. Instead, it illuminates the depth of the bipartisan failure to address the tangled roots of racism, poverty, and inequality.

But they have been let down by the U.S. economy, which is only about half as large as it needs to be to support the subsidies that low-skill and/or non-working Americans require:

In Philadelphia, which, ignobly, has among the highest proportion of poor residents of any big city in the country, thousands stand on the cusp of eviction. Twenty-two per cent of households in the city are severely cost-burdened, meaning that they are spending half or more of their income on housing costs, which is well above the national average. Before this downturn, sixty-one per cent of households headed by Black women in Philadelphia were spending at least thirty per cent of their income on rent, compared with fifty-three per cent of households headed by white women and forty-four per cent of households headed by white men.

(The author doesn’t mention this, but what will really help these folks is 45 million immigrants to compete with them in the rental market:

(from Migration Policy Institute). Econ 101 tells us that when demand is boosted by 45 million, prices for scarce rentals will inevitably fall.)

Not enough money is being diverted from rural America (i.e., the counties that voted Republican) to the cities (i.e., the counties that voted Democrat):

The likely gridlock in Congress next year will lead to more stagnation in local government, as communities become hamstrung by a lack of federal funding.

(I should do a separate blog post on this. I wonder if the reason that people in low-density parts of the U.S. vote for smaller government is that big government spends nearly all of its money in cities. Hospitals, federal buildings, central post offices, community centers, concert halls, courthouses, etc. all tend to be built in downtown areas. The bigger the government, the larger the transfer from rural counties to urban counties.)

The core problem is the existence of Republicans:

That conclusion may seem to be supported by the shocking fact that upward of seventy million people voted to reëlect the most corrupt, venal, and brazenly racist President in modern American history. … The insistence on unity between the two parties almost always comes at the expense of those whose needs are greatest. How would a Biden Administration incorporate the views of a Republican Party that has supported a white-supremacist President, voted for Trump’s plutocratic tax cuts, advocated for the separation of families at the border, and facilitated the heist of a Supreme Court seat in hopes of fulfilling the right’s fantasy of ending access to abortion and destroying any hint of government-backed health insurance? We were told that this Presidential race was the most consequential of our lifetimes, that it was a contest between democracy and budding fascism. Why would Biden welcome the foot soldiers of Trump’s authoritarian politics into his coalition?

And the struggle will continue even if Trump disappears in his Boeing 757, beyond the reach of even the most vindictive Democrats:

The need in this country dwarfs the best of what Biden has put on the table for changing our current condition. But the demonstrations of the summer, the ongoing campaigns for mutual aid, and the growing movement against evictions are demonstrable proof that power is not only generated in mainstream politics but can be garnered through collective organizing and acts of solidarity. They also foretell a future in which the country does not return to a long-forgotten normal but is animated by protests, strikes, occupations, and the ongoing struggle for food, medicine, care, housing, justice, and democracy.

One reason that I voted for Bernie Sanders (twice!) was his logical consistency. In my opinion, we shouldn’t run a country that says housing is a “right” and then provide subsidized housing to only one quarter of those who qualify. At the same time, building the 7 million additional low-income housing units that are required (NLIHC) will cost roughly $5 trillion. Not only don’t we have an extra $5 trillion lying around, but every year an additional million or so low-skill immigrants arrive whose correspondingly low income would entitle them to subsidized housing (i.e., even if we got 7 million new units built by the end of 2021, we’d still have a substantial shortfall).

The Democrats actually did have control of the Presidency and Congress in the first two years of the Obama Administration, right? And they couldn’t find enough money in the U.S. economy to achieve their policy goals? If the Democrats’ huge advantage in funding is sufficient to take control of the Senate via the Georgia runoff votes, will they be able to fund their dream programs in 2021 and 2022? Or will they discover that the U.S. economy has grown at a much slower per-capita rate than their dreams?

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