An Opera Superstar and a Progressive go into a Bar…

by philg

Checking a couple of recent news stories…

“Placido Domingo’s name comes up in Argentina sex sect probe” (state-sponsored PBS)

Opera star Placido Domingo’s name has appeared in an investigation of a sect-like organization in Argentina that also had U.S. offices and whose leaders have been charged with crimes, including sexual exploitation.

Domingo, the Spanish opera singer who has faced accusations of sexual harassment from numerous women over the past three years, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Argentina case.

“Placido didn’t commit a crime, nor is he part of the organization, but rather he was a consumer of prostitution,” said a law enforcement official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the investigation continues. Prostitution is not illegal in Argentina.

The article says that “children or teenagers … were sexually exploited”. Placido Domingo is, thus, a child molester? The specific person who visited the opera star in his hotel room is named: Susana Mendelievich. How old is this teenager? In 1990, she was old enough to play the piano (source). Operawire reports that she is today 75 years old.

The great opera star, in other words, is accused of paying for sex with a 75-year-old.

“Social Media Was a C.E.O.’s Bullhorn, and How He Lured Women” (New York Times):

Kacie Margis [27 years old], a model and artist, first learned about Dan Price in 2020 the way many people do: through social media posts that celebrated his progressive politics.

Five years earlier, Mr. Price had propelled himself to an unlikely position for the head of a 110-person payment processing company when he told his employees that he was raising their minimum pay to $70,000. His announcement was covered by The New York Times and NBC News. Esquire did a photo shoot. He made appearances on “The Daily Show” and at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

On Monday, the police in Palm Springs, Calif., said they had referred Ms. Margis’s case to local prosecutors, recommending a charge of rape of a drugged victim.

What harmful drugs did the Progressive icon employ in his nefarious scheme? For those who had the patience to read another 7 screens of text:

Ms. Margis returned to Room 423, where she took a cannabis edible to counter insomnia, something she’s regularly done since being at the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. Mr. Price returned and tried to initiate sex.

I’m wondering if this is at odds with Science. Marijuana is such an important booster of overall health that marijuana stores were “essential” and, at least in California, Illinois, and Maskachusetts, remained open on every day that public schools were closed. This is a Scientific fact and it is reflected in Science-guided policies designed and imposed by politicians and officials who Follow the Science. But, simultaneously, a different branch of the same Science-following government considers healing cannabis to be drug that leaves a person mentally and physically incapacitated, unable to resist a sexual assault.

Moving on to one of the other victims… Serena Jowers, also mentioned in the article as having provided sex to the Progressive CEO without an explicit fee being charged:

Unless we want to say that, just as being elderly makes a person better suited to being President of the United States being elderly makes a person better at having sex, it seems that sending out a handful of Progressive tweets yields a superior return in the sexual marketplace than a lifetime spent honing one’s craft as an opera singer.

Full post, including comments

Pride Month in Denver

by philg

Working through my backlog of summer photos, I stopped off in Denver during Pride Month. In traveling from California to Colorado, both states in which people say that they Follow Science, hardly anyone was wearing a mask:

I stayed in Arvada, which is 90 percent white and 0.9 percent African American according to Wikipedia. Nonetheless, a sign downtown informed me that this was a “Community of Color”

Someone with a commitment to social justice and an air rifle may have developed this sign starting from “Community Banks of Colorado”. Hanging a rainbow flag was popular in a variety of locations around Denver (also the rugged Toyota just for fun!):

Considering that half of the nation says it wants to stop the spread of COVID-19, the airport seemed to be at or beyond its design capacity:

As United Airlines was rapidly consuming Jet A, the company reminded me that we should all travel by sailboat as Greta Thunberg does:

Following a mask-free flight between the Science strongholds of Denver and Atlanta, I learned that some people are concerned enough about aerosol COVID-19 to wear a surgical mask, but not concerned enough to avoid the crowded airport or the Chick fil-A line:

Having the Garmin Pilot app running while on a commercial airliner yields some unsettling messages:

Full post, including comments

San Diego trip report

by philg

Digging through the summer photo backlog, a report on a June trip to San Diego where I slaved away as an expert witness on a software case in federal court (the jury stuck around to be interviewed by the attorneys after the trial and said that they understood and enjoyed my testimony!).

The local public library sends travelers off from FLL with free music and movies:

If you don’t download these on the airport WiFi, JetBlue will prepare you for California’s state religion on the flight out with movies classified as “Pride Picks”:

I saw more homeless people, pit bulls, homeless people with pit bulls, pit bull poop, and trash in the street in my first two days in San Diego than during nearly a year in the West Palm-FLL-Miami area. Here are a couple of sidewalk-dwellers just steps from where the laptop class enjoys $50/person meals:

San Diego presents a huge challenge to those who believe that a market economy is efficient. There are gleaming new skyscrapers next to lots used for surface parking or other low-value activities. If the land isn’t valuable, why would people build up 15 or 20 stories? If the land is valuable, why is so much of it still not developed in any significant way?

Whatever the real estate values might be, one great thing about California is the Chinese food. While waiting for a table at the San Diego outpost of Din Tai Fung, we learned that Lucid has dog mode:

The shopping mall reminded us to observe Rainbow Flagism:

Back downtown, the official city art shows Mexican-Americans taking the bus while rich white people yacht in the background:

My favorite images from the trip depict a debate between saving Mother Earth via light rail or via battery-electric vehicles that turned violent:

I suspect that the Tesla 3 in the image was rented to the driver for $390 per week by Uber, as was a Tesla 3 in which I rode (“horrifyingly bumpy and uncomfortable compared to the Hyundai Sonata I was in yesterday,” I wrote to a friend at the time). The drive says that he must do 30 trips per week in order to keep the car and that this corresponds to 1.5 days of Ubering. I posted about this on Facebook, which helpfully added some editorial content of its own: “Explore Climate Science Info”. In the same vein, Google ran a big animation for Juneteenth:

Californians did manage to steal some great land from the Native Americans and Mexicans. Here’s some topiary:

Old Town featured a CDC reference work on how to prevent an aerosol respiratory virus with a cloth mask:

Compared to southeast Florida, it was much more common to see fully covered women:

Aside from observant Muslims, it was rare to see someone following the Science by wearing a mask, despite a raging COVID-19 epidemic at the time. A jammed street fair, with no masks:

It was outdoors, though, right? In my courthouse experience, only one juror and one chubby clerk wore masks. The guards in the lobby were unmasked. The judge was unmasked. More or less everyone in the building was unmasked. These folks will say that they’re preventing COVID-19 from spreading by behaving in a more scientific manner than residents of Florida, but I couldn’t figure out what they were doing differently.

Circling back to the observant Muslims depicted above… they were just a few steps from an official city-flown rainbow flag:

If they were to need to transact some business at the bank they would have to walk under the sacred symbol of Rainbow Flagism:

I recommend the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park:

But of course my favorite tourist attractive was the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier launched just as World War II was over. The ship is now a museum and Navy veterans, including aircrew, give fascinating lectures on how everything works.

San Diego is a great place to spend 7-10 days as a tourist, hitting all of the museums and parks while enjoying great weather and great food. If one were to live there, however, the contradictions would eventually begin to rankle. Why are there so many unhoused people if rich Californians say that they want to provide housing to the unhoused? Why isn’t there enough civic spirit and agreement that people will get organized to pick up trash and dog poop in their city? (Florida has almost no litter by comparison and dog pick-up bag dispensers are common anywhere that people want dog owners to clean up.) If California wants to welcome millions of migrants from conservative societies, which Californians say that they do, how does it make sense to have Rainbow Flagism as the state religion?

Full post, including comments

COVID-19 stimulus spending would have funded 16.6 million middle class children from age 0 to 18

by philg

Today’s inflation news… “It Now Costs $300,000 to Raise a Child” (Wall Street Journal):

The cost of raising a child through high school has risen to more than $300,000 because of inflation that is running close to a four-decade high, according to a Brookings Institution estimate.

It determined that a married, middle-income couple with two children would spend $310,605—or an average of $18,271 a year—to raise their younger child born in 2015 through age 17. The calculation uses an earlier government estimate as a baseline, with adjustments for inflation trends.

Let’s combine that with “Where $5 Trillion in Pandemic Stimulus Money Went” (Pravda, May 11):

Stimulus bills approved by Congress beginning in 2020 unleashed the largest flood of federal money into the United States economy in recorded history. Roughly $5 trillion went to households, mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, airlines, hospitals, local governments, schools and other institutions around the country grappling with the blow inflicted by Covid-19.

Even at today’s inflated costs, therefore, if we hadn’t decided to spend all of our current and future savings on coronapanic we could have fully funded 16.6 million children in middle class families, a group that doesn’t tend to have children. This chart from 2019 shows that low-income Americans, who get taxpayer-funded housing sized for whatever families they choose to create, and high-income Americans, who are rich enough to buy family-sized houses, are the ones that have kids:

That’s considering only direct federal spending. Can we guess that at least another $5 trillion was spent and/or sacrificed via state governors’ lockdown orders? Now we’re up to being able to fund 33+ million middle class kids. There are only about 70 million children at all income levels in the U.S. right now. Roughly half of school kids are poor enough to get free or reduced-price lunch (NCES) and, therefore, presumably are entitled to other programs that used to be called “welfare”. So the coronapanic spending, at both state and federal levels, would have been enough to fund 100 percent of American children, for their entire childhood, whose childhoods are not already being funded by taxpayers.

Related:

  • “Scandal-hit Hunter Biden ‘agreed to pay baby mama $2.5 million” (The Sun, October 2020) shows that the stripper-turned-family-court-plaintiff, even if she failed to invest the $2.5 million in an inflation-protecting manner, will still get a $2.2 million profit off Joe Biden’s granddaughter (when will this kid be invited to the White House? Grandpa is not getting any younger or more energetic!)
  • “Prosecutors Struggle to Catch Up to a Tidal Wave of Pandemic Fraud” (NYT): “… one of the largest frauds in American history, with billions of dollars stolen by thousands of people … In one instance, 29 states paid unemployment benefits to the same person. … Another individual got 10 loans for 10 nonexistent bathroom-renovation businesses, using the email address of a burrito shop.”
Full post, including comments

I need to get COVID-19 within the next three weeks (the government tests arrived today)

by philg

On May 1, 2022 I ordered my “free” (i.e., taxpayer-funded) COVID-19 tests. They arrived in today’s mail. They expire 22 days from now, on September 9, 2022.

For these to be useful, in other words, I need to copy the Pfizer CEO and add COVID-19 to my vaccinated-and-boosted body… within the next three weeks.

Related:

Full post, including comments

We’re Pregnant

by philg

My favorite group on Facebook is the Golden Retriever Club. The gift that keeps on giving recently yielded a linguistic innovation. You know how people who are not, in fact, pregnant people will say “We’re pregnant” when a household member is a pregnant person? Here’s the natural extension…

Another example of why Mindy the Crippler and I love this group:

And here’s a story about the SWAT team:

Separately, a native German speaker got in trouble with the moderators for using the word “bitch” (literal translation from the German) to describe a canine identifying as female. Speaking of pregnancy and Europe, a friend over in that correctly governed part of the world informed me of the recent birth of a daughter. My immediate response regarding the 6-week-old was to ask, “Has she received her first COVID-19 vaccination yet?”

Full post, including comments

Liz Cheney gives the finger to her constituents

by philg

The elite-born Liz Cheney purportedly represents the interests of voters in Wyoming. Back in July, she stated that investigating the January 6 insurrection might be “the most important thing I ever do” and, therefore, was presumably devoting maximum effort to this project.

Her non-elite constituents, however, by voting her out of office (66% to 29%! the elites are surely sorry that they neglected to take away the Deplorables’ right to vote!), have now told her that this is not something that they want her to do. What’s the former VP daughter’s response? “‘Now the real work begins’: Liz Cheney lost her election but vows to dig deeper into the Jan. 6 mission.” (NYT, August 17).

Ms. Cheney vowed to use her post on the House committee investigating Jan. 6 to continue prosecuting the public case against former President Donald J. Trump.

“This primary election is over,” she told her supporters Tuesday night. “But now the real work begins.”

Ms. Cheney, a Republican who is vice chair of the committee, quickly converted her campaign committee into a leadership political action committee called the Great Task, a sign that she plans to take her fight against Mr. Trump to new levels. But she also plans to dig deeper into her mission with the Jan. 6 committee, which could continue its work until the end of the year.

Also from Pravda, “After Loss, Cheney Begins Difficult Mission of Thwarting Trump”:

Liz Cheney is clear about her goal, but the path is murky: A presidential run is possible, she acknowledged, and she has a new political outfit aimed at the former president and his 2020 election lies.

Hours after her landslide loss, Representative Liz Cheney wasted no time Wednesday taking her first steps toward what she says is now her singular goal: blocking Donald J. Trump from returning to power.

The person who represents the voters of Wyoming has a “singular goal” that is actually at odds with what those voters want?

Ms. Cheney announced that her newly rebranded political organization, the Great Task, would be dedicated to mobilizing opposition to Mr. Trump.

(What if Trump gets killed by COVID-19 next week? Liz Cheney will have to disband the Great Task because it will be #MissionAccomplished?)

Is this a breakdown of representative government? It is almost as though a politician from Massachusetts were to say “lockdowns, school closures, vaccine papers checks, and forced masking are bad ideas when faced with an aerosol respiratory virus that has the ability to evolve” or “smoking marijuana daily might not be good for your health.”

Also, considering the 66%/29% defeat, has an incumbent ever lost by this kind of margin (37 points) before? For reference, AOC, the Democrats’ thought leader, beat an incumbent by 57%/43% (14 points) in 2018.

Related:

  • Recently celebrated by Progressives, Liz Cheney’s high position was condemned as an example of nepotism by Nobel laurate Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “The Sons Also Rise” (2002). “America, we all know, is the land of opportunity. Your success in life depends on your ability and drive, not on who your father was. … Talk to Elizabeth Cheney, who holds a specially created State Department job, or her husband, chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget.”
  • “Liz Cheney’s biggest donors come from Texas and California” (Washington Examiner): “Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) far outraised her primary opponent … Cheney raised over $15 million in her reelection bid, with nearly $1 million coming from Texas and another $1.4 million from California, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. That makes the two states her highest contributors, raising only $386,000 from donors in Wyoming. … Comparatively, Hageman raised $940,000 from Wyoming residents.”
Full post, including comments

New York Times hires a grandmother-age writer to expound on casual sex

by philg

“I Still Believe in the Power of Sexual Freedom” (New York Times, August 16):

At the tail end of 2016, I ended an eight-year relationship about six years too late. Our marriage was modern and progressive by most standards: We experimented with nonmonogamy; my partner did more laundry than I did. And yet I found myself unable to admit a simple fact: Our sex, it turned out, was bad.

Women’s right to sexual satisfaction is taken as much more of a given

How did I find myself in a marriage filled with bad sex? I was as equipped as anyone could be to seek out real erotic freedom, and yet I still spent my high school and college years feeling uncertain about how to do so. I idolized Samantha from “Sex and the City,” and I also wished my sex was more meaningful. I wanted sex to be meaningful, but I was also turned off by the whole heterosexual dance in which women demand commitment in exchange for sex and men acquiesce. I was turned off by the dance, and yet I clung to the cultural validation offered to married heterosexual couples, staying way too long at the expense of my own happiness.

When I left my marriage … to pursue my true desires, …

I do believe that reaching for more sexual freedom, not less — the freedom to have whatever kind of sex we want, including, yes, casual sex and choking sex and porny sex — is still the only way we can hope to solve the problems of our current sexual landscape.

(NYT: To be “modern and progressive”, a marriage requires that any man involved do most of the laundry while the woman is out having sex with her friends and this arrangement continues until the woman files her divorce lawsuit.)

Wikipedia says that the author, Nona Willis Aronowitz, is 38 years old. In other words, a grandmother for all but a handful of the 300,000 years of human history. And the NYT has enlisted this grandmother-age individual to write about casual sex.

This is not to say that I think there should be an age limit for Tinder and Grindr users. I’m merely surprised that there is a mass market of people who want to read about the sexual exploits of humans who are best suited, biologically, to be grandparents.

Very loosely related… the local Walmart and Hershey’s invite us to celebrate anyone who shows up using “she” as a pronoun. This would, presumably, include elderly Tinder users.

Related:

  • Christmas Cake, a Japanese term for “A woman 26 years+ who is considered to be past her prime, undesirable, used goods and/or no good.”
Full post, including comments

A friend’s teenager learns about the American legal system

by philg

A recent chat group discussion:

  • [18-year-old son] got off his second speeding ticket. Had an attorney. His friend has two tickets and got off neither. He learned a valuable lesson. That the Justice system is best if you have money.
  • That lesson does not apply in family court.

Noted.

Full post, including comments

How will Earth’s climate be affected by the Inflation Reduction Act?

by philg

“Biden signs sweeping climate, health care, tax bill into law” (state-sponsored NPR):

President Biden signed Democrats’ hallmark spending bill into law on Tuesday…

The sweeping bill allocates more than $300 billion to be invested in energy and climate reform. It’s the largest federal clean energy investment in U.S. history, although it falls short of what progressive Democrats and climate activists had originally called for.

“This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever — ever — and is going to allow us to boldly take additional steps toward meeting my climate goals,” Biden said.

It includes $60 billion for boosting renewable energy infrastructure in manufacturing, like solar panels and wind turbines, and includes tax credits for electric vehicles and measures to make homes more energy efficient.

Democrats say the bill will lower greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, based on 2005 levels, by the end of the decade, which falls short of Biden’s original goal.

It looks like we’ve already cut emissions a bit via the miracle of sending all of our manufacturing to Mexico and China (epa.gov):

By 2030, thanks to just $300 billion in spending (less than a month of coronapanic spending? less than the total fraud that Americans perpetrated against the U.S. Treasury in obtaining COVID-tagged funds?), the U.S. economy will be reconfigured to push only about 4 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere rather than today’s 6 gigatons.

Here’s a question… how will this change the Earth’s climate? Can beachfront property owners now rest easy (and maybe send thank-you cards to working class taxpayers in the Midwest who funded the protection of their $20 million houses)?

Climate modelers love to model. Did anyone in the climate-industrial complex plug Joe Biden’s clean new USA into a model and figure out whether Houston becomes a pleasant place to spend summers?

Full post, including comments