It’s been five years since the life of the greatest of all Americans was cut short and Tim Walz reminds us that we should “honor him”:
What have we actually done for Americans like George Floyd? The Boston Globe says that $1 billion was spent in Maskachusetts and there is nothing to show for it.
The most significant change to American society since May 2020 is that the borders were fully open for about four years, thus leading to a massive increase in low-skill immigration. In addition to at least 4 million green cards (permanent residence) issued (“legal immigrants”), there were approximately10 million undocumented migrants (combined total of more people than live in New York City and Los Angeles put together). “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER 2007):
For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points.
That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.
Readers: What are you doing to honor George Floyd today?
Related:
“How the Right Has Reshaped the Narrative Around George Floyd” (New York Times, May 24, 2025), which points out that it is a right-wing lie for anyone to say that George Floyd had a criminal record (the NYT certainly does not list any examples of crimes in which Mr. Floyd might have been involved)
Apple reminds us about the “sacred” nature of today:
Our AI Overlords at Meta want me to become Facebook friends with our son’s former kindergarten teacher. She works at an all-white private school in an all-white suburb of Boston. Here’s what her profile looked like in April 2025 (I did some blurring in Photoshop):
Masks are still relevant, but wearing them underneath one’s chin works just fine. Black Lives Matter remains a high-priority social justice cause among those who’ve chosen to live and work in Black-free parts of a notably white state.
We have tremendous inequality among U.S. states. Household income in California was $95,500 in 2023 dollars (Wokipedia) while Texas households enjoyed only $75,800 in income and in Mississippi the median household income was only $54,000. Who works to redress this inequality? Not the federal government, which keeps spending taxpayer money in the richest states, either directly (grants to universities, student loan subsidies, tuition subsidies) or indirectly (pharma and health care purchases).
But let’s consider Elon Musk. He has moved at least four companies from richer-than-average California to poorer-than-average Texas: Tesla, X, SpaceX, and The Boring Company. Is there anyone else alive who can be said to have done as much to reduce inequality among the states? If not, we must anoint Elon Musk as America’s Greatest Social Justice Warrior.
The company is also getting an injection of $17.3m (£13.4m) from the Texas government to develop the site, a grant that officials say is expected to create more than 400 jobs and $280m in capital investment in Bastrop.
Although I can’t blame Elon for taking the state’s money, that last bit is upsetting to me as a 14th Amendment Equal Protection purist. Why is it acceptable for a government (state, in this case) to favor one business with tax breaks while hitting smaller and less-connected businesses with the full force of taxation. I would like to see all of these state programs eliminated so that 2-person company is on a more level playing field with a 2,000-person company.
Flash back to 2024 when the Western Washington University Jewish Voice for Peace (unclear if there are any actual Jews involved in JVP; major funding is from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Lannan Foundation, neither of which seem to have any Jewish heritage) invited everyone who hates Israel and loves wearing masks (“required”) to a Seder starting at 5:30 pm (Jewish law says to start at 8:13 pm, sunset in Bellingham, Washington).
Readers: What are you doing for Passover this year? I’m going to join a medical school professor and his kids. Maybe masks will be required since, as an MD and PhD, he personifies The Science.
Happy International Women’s Day to those who celebrate.
A January 7, 2025 post from the suburb of Boston where we used to live:
History was made today in Lincoln. Town Clerk Valerie Fox swore in Sergeant Jennifer McNaught as the newest member of the department. Sgt. McNaught becomes the first woman supervisor in the department’s history.
More than 60 years after second wave feminism made it through the United States, the righteous progressive town finally appoints a female to a position of responsibility. Why admit being this late to the feminism party? (Also, if the town has been working for years on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Anti-Racism (“IDEA”, not the discredited “DEI”) why are both of the employees in the photo white? They wanted to hire some non-white people, but couldn’t find anyone qualified?)
Massachusetts progressives love to talk about how stupid, racist, and sexist folks in Alabama are, for example, yet Birmingham, Alabama appointed Annetta Nunn captain in 1995 (CBS) and police chief for the whole city in 2003. If we assume the “captain” job in Alabama is comparable to the “supervisor” job in Maskachusetts, it took the progressives of Lincoln, MA 30 years to catch up to the people whom they enjoy characterizing as primitive and prejudiced.
I’m listening to The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (“One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023”). The author was born in 1963, just as I was. Unlike me, he did not drop out of high school but, by contrast, was admitted to a highly selective Telluride Association Summer Seminar (not in Telluride, Colorado, but in Ithaca, NY and Baltimore, MD). The choices circa 1980:
Telluride was offering three seminars that summer, one on literature and revolution, one on the life of the American city, and the third on sociobiology,
I was curious to see if the program still existed. It does. The choices of topic for 2025: Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies.
Maybe the author would have benefitted from one of these programs. Here’s the beginning of a story of how he ends up in the hospital:’
Early in the second week, as Michael and I were cutting across the sweeping [New Rochelle, NY] high school grounds on our way home, talking about classes and the usual bullshit, I noticed a group of Black guys up ahead on the bank of the lake to my left. They seemed about our age, or a few grades older, but did not look like they had spent the day in school. Several were lounging against the low, thick branch of a weeping willow; others were horsing around, tagging each other and darting out of range; and one or two were sitting on the ground.
(There was no motivation for the subsequent attack and facial disfigurement other than the victim being white.)
Thanks to Alaska Airlines’s focus on DEI rather than on starting and/or completing flights, I had a multi-hour opportunity to inspect the gates and the art collection at FLL.
As we look back with nostalgia on Black History Month, here’s a Southwest gate:
Remember that 15 pieces of flair is the minimum:
How about art? Here’s an exhibit from someone who “has challenged societal barriers as an LGBTQ+ female artist”:
Note the featuring of Frida Kahlo, who broke through a lot of barriers by having sex with the married already-successful artist Diego Rivera, and Georgia O’Keefe, who broke through a lot of barriers by having sex with the already-married Alfred Stieglitz (more than 20 years older), an already-successful art dealer and photographer.
Intrigued by Southwest Airlines’s “I am Black 365 Days a Year” flair, I asked ChatGPT and Grok to make “I am Golden 365 Days of Year” signs. Both systems were provided with one of Southwest’s as an example. ChatGPT:
An organization is calling for a national boycott in the form of an “economic blackout” on Friday, urging Americans not to shop for 24 hours.
This movement, spearheaded by The People’s Union USA, a grassroots group, follows the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at several companies, including Target. The boycott coincides with protests against President Donald Trump’s plans to reduce the government workforce and mass firings at federal agencies.
I don’t know why retailers are the focus given that healthcare is nearly 20 percent of the GDP. Are these folks suggesting that Americans boycott getting their COVID boosters, flu shots, and healing marijuana? What about government? That’s a huge slice of the economy. Does the The People’s Union USA suggest that employers don’t send withheld taxes to the government today? Given that the federal government is now run by an illegitimate fascist dictator, i.e., Donald Trump, why would a righteous individual pay federal taxes on any day of the year? Surely a progressive wouldn’t want to advance Nazism by sending tens of thousands of dollars to a Nazi.
Speaking of Nazis… is the name racist? Why is a boycott a “BLACKout”? State-sponsored NPR reassures us:
What are you all doing to support this grassroots movement? As it happens, my first stop in the morning was Home Depot (Deplorable-founded) to pick up some parts for our electrician (see Electrifinflation).
Their commitments didn’t include committing to flying to Seattle from FLL on February 20, 2025 at 7:00 am. I got a text message from them about cancellation just as I was walking up to the gate shortly before 6:00 am. Note that their plan is a 30-hour delay (the substitute 3-leg flight is on February 21, a day later than the original 2-leg flight):
(A lot of other passengers got texts with the same itinerary and none of them complained to the gate agent because Alaska Airlines had wisely chosen not to send any personnel to the gate. Everyone gathered in a Fall of Saigon scene back at the ticket counter and then at a carousel to retrieve what would have been our checked bags.)
What was Alaska Airlines working on if not getting us to the destination that we’d paid for? The skin tone and gender ID of the pilots: “125 new students enrolled in the Ascend Pilot Academy (26% BIPOC, 36% Female). Surpassed commitment to increase Black female pilots at Air Group by nearly 33%.”
For those concerned about safety, the good news is that a DEI pilot hire can’t crash an airliner that never takes off.
My DEI day started hours earlier. If I’d wanted to do a slow three-leg trip to Fairbanks I could have done it starting at nearby PBI. Instead, I chose to fly from FLL, which is an hour’s drive away. Because it would be 4:15 am and I might want to snooze, I reserved “Uber Premier” at over $190 rather than Uber Comfort at $110. Initially a pavement-melting GMC Yukon was going to show up, but then either the driver canceled or Uber canceled him because he wasn’t expected to arrive by 4:15 am. A 2022 Tesla 3 was substituted. The driver was a nice guy and I learned a fair amount about Teslas (he’s test-driven the new Model 3 and says that it is noticeably quieter inside, the doors close more solidly, and FSD works great). However, I don’t think the Model 3 qualifies as “Premier”; it’s a “Comfort”-class car. Uber still charged the originally quoted $190+ price despite not delivering a “Premier” car. I’m surprised that they haven’t been sued for this by an energetic class action lawyer. Uber doesn’t have a customer service phone number (some sort of AI chatbot instead for questions about charges), which means Uber has pocketed the extra cash for all similar downgrades unless a customer has gone to the trouble of disputing the charge with his/her/zir/their credit card bank.
They weren’t committed to keeping the Uber Premier appointment that they’d made, but they say they are committed to “racial equity”.
Rationally I can accept that incompetence and indifference to the customer are both possible (even plausible given the concentration and lack of competition in both U.S. airlines and U.S. ride sharing) without a percentage of corporate focus being devoted to DEI. But it is tough to avoid the temptation to search for “Company X diversity” after a negative customer experience. That makes me a hater?
Our mole inside Queers-for-Palestine Brown University signed up for Linear Algebra and was sentenced to read “Mathematical Microaggressions” by a past president of the Mathematical Association of America, Francis Edward Su. He/she/ze/they starts off by relating his/her/zir/their own personal trauma:
Here are some example microaggressions in the math world:
Turning tricks is somehow bad:
Math will be improved with more diversity:
Here’s the organization’s current “Executive Director” (“president” wasn’t a sufficiently august title?):
They’re so certain that diversity improves mathematics that they hired one of the world’s whitest white guys to be their leader?
On March 16, 2021 a man killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, and injured one man in a shooting spree in Atlanta, Georgia. This violence has renewed broader calls to support our Asian and Asian American communities. The specifics of this tragic incident remind us that there are multiple layers of identity-based marginalization and hate related to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. One solidarity movement with the victims of the hate crime is #StopAsianHate. This is not a response to last Tuesday’s events, but to a broader arc of increased hate crime since the COVID-19 pandemic started.
In 2019, MAA launched the Inclusivity Award in recognition of the importance of its core value of Inclusivity and building a healthy, vibrant mathematical community where all are welcome and encouraged to flourish. The 2021 award winner is William (Bill) Hawkins, Jr.
UnderDr. Hawkins’s leadership, the SUMMA Office created an archival record of American PhDs in mathematics and mathematics education who are members of minority groups, initiated the Minority Chairs Breakfast annually, established the Tensor-SUMMA projects “to encourage the pursuit and enjoyment of mathematics by students who are members of groups historically underrepresented in the field of mathematics,” organized panels at JMM on issues that affected minority institutions or populations, published a poster on African and African-American Pioneers in Mathematics, and provided guidance to those who wanted to establish an intervention project.
“I am delighted to be able to recognize my friend and colleague, Bill Hawkins, with the 2021 Inclusivity Award,” said MAA Executive Director, Michael Pearson. “It has been my privilege to work with, and learn from, Bill during my tenure at MAA.”
Circling back to Clouseau, let’s hope that he can learn some linear algebra from YouTube while the Brown faculty teaches him about microaggressions (a $91,676/year experience for 2024-5).
