Category: Politics

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).

Related:

• What do public school systems run by EdDs get us for more than 3 percent of GDP? From the Obama administration’s U.S. Department of Education: “the United States has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the world. Among students who do complete high school and go on to college, nearly half require remedial courses, and nearly half never graduate.”
• Dr. Bill Cosby, EdD’s doctoral dissertation (will our media refer “Dr. Cosby” going forward?)
• Germans are better at most stuff: Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr.-Ing. E.h. Dr. h.c. Dieter Spath of the Universität Stuttgart

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

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

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

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

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

And from Bethesda, Maryland on the way back:

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

Related:

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

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?

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.”)