The organization that advocates for Black and Brown Americans couldn’t find a Black or Brown leader

“As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces” (New York Times, February 3, 2025):

“His attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t about a particular program or some acronym — they’re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly,” Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive, said during a call with civil rights leaders after Mr. Trump’s remarks. “But the message is the same, that women, ​Black and brown communities are inherently less capable, and if they hold positions of power or authority in government or business, it must be because the standards were lowered.​”

Let’s check out the person whose official job is saying that our Black and Brown brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters are amply qualified for any job…

My mother is white; my father is Chinese American

source: “Florida should respect all children, not repeat the tragedies of our past” (SPLC; Florida is to progressives as Carthage was to Romans? Maybe Democrats in Congress should start every morning with a group chant of Florida delenda est?)

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Should the U.S. military get some Robinson R44s to enable Black Hawk pilots to build time and experience?

One aspect of the DCA Black Hawk-CRJ tragedy that is notable to a civilian pilot is the low reported number of hours of both the pilot and instructor on board, i.e., 500 and 1,000. A civilian helicopter pilot won’t get anywhere near a turbine-powered helicopter until beyond the 1,000-hour mark and that turbine-powered helicopter will be a used single-engine sightseeing machine, not a $20 million Black Hawk in more-challenging air taxi service. The pilot-in-command with 500 hours had been a military aviator for 6 years, which meant that she was flying fewer than 100 hours per year, less than a lot of hobbyists.

The U.S. military seems to start with a “cost is no object” philosophy when it comes to aircraft, e.g., training new pilots in a $6 million (pre-Biden price) twin-engine Eurocopter rather than in a $400,000 (post-Biden price) single-engine Robinson. Once the magnificent machines are delivered, however, the military then seems to decide that they’re too expensive to fly casually. Why not a fleet of Robinson R44s or, if Avgas is too complicated to keep in inventory, turbine-powered Robinson R66s, that would enable Army helicopter pilots to get significant real experience flying helicopters? (Order the Robinsons without the optional SAS/Autopilot so that the Black Hawk pilots get comfortable flying without the crutch of stability augmentation. Don’t subject our military heroes to the challenge of keeping a Robinson R22 under control, though!)

On second thought, when the government operates aircraft it usually manages to spend vastly more than what civilian operators spend. So perhaps it would make more sense to give the military pilots a stipend to use at local flight schools where the retail rental price would be much lower than the military’s cost. Reuters points out that sending migrants via military planes costs perhaps 10X what it would cost to purchase economy-class tickets (even when the military operates the exact same type as an airline, the cost is vastly higher).

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Tom Brady goes to Heaven

A Berkeley-based Effective Altruist invested in Sam Bankman-Fried‘s FTX after seeing a promotion for it by Tom Brady. He/she/ze/they becomes angry and lets loose a 15′ alligator inside Brady’s Miami mansion. Brady, unfortunately, cannot be extracted from the beast’s stomach in time.

On arrival in Heaven, God gives Tom Brady a welcome tour and shows him to an already-furnished 2500-square-foot house with white picket fence. There are weather-faded Tampa Bay and New England Patriots flags on either side of the front walk. “Because of your distinguished career,” God says, “you won’t spend eternity in the high-rise apartment blocks like our standard live-gooders. After your third Super Bowl win in 2005 we prepared this single-family home just for you and the hottest subset of your ladyfriends who ultimately arrive. I made sure that Gisele Bündchen’s future home here is all the way on the other side of town.” As they walk around to the back of the house, Brady sees a Jeff Bezos-style mansion two blocks away. Brady and God move toward it. The sidewalks all around the mansion are painted in eternal red and gold. There is a 75′ car dealer-style flagpole in the front yard with a 20×30′ Chiefs flag flapping in a constant 10 mph local wind. The arrowhead-shaped pool has “KC” in red tile on the bottom.

A 7′-high Mahomes #15 jersey hangs above the front porch:

There’s a 15′-high solid gold sculpture of a football in the front yard with a KC logo on the side. There’s a car in the driveway whose body is shaped like a Chiefs helmet (they use Grok in Heaven because ChatGPT did a terrible job):

Every window on the second floor is filled with the display of a jersey of a player on the 2024-25 Kansas City Chiefs team. There’s a private 100-yard regulation football field behind the mansion with the KC logo in the middle and the lushest greenest grass Brady has ever seen. Assisted by cheerleaders, two retrievers who look just like goldens structurally are running around the field. One retriever’s fur is Pantone PMS 186 C to match Chiefs red and the other is Pantone PMS 1235 C to match Chiefs gold. Here’s the best that ChatGPT could do with the vision:

A motor yacht is docked on one side of the house, which has direct access to the Heavenly Lake:

Tom Brady looks back at his own modest house and says, “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I won 7 Super Bowls. Patrick Mahomes won only 3. Why will he get this mansion while I will spend eternity in a regular house?” God laughs and says “Sorry for the confusion, Tom, but that’s not Patrick Mahomes’s mansion. It’s my house.”

Readers: Are you watching the Super Bowl this evening? The 6:30 pm Eastern start time is relatively kid-friendly. The half time entertainer is Kendrick Lamar. Here are some excerpts from “Backseat Freestyle”, one of his big hits:

Uh, Martin had a dream
Martin had a dream
Kendrick have a dream
All my life I want money and power
Respect my mind or die from lead shower
I pray my dick get big as the Eiffel Tower
So I can f*ck the world for seventy-two hours
Goddamn I feel amazing, damn I’m in the matrix
My mind is living on cloud nine and this nine is never on vacation
Start up that Maserati and VROOM VROOM! I’m racing
Poppin’ pills in the lobby and I pray they don’t find her naked
And I pray you niggas is hatin’, shooters go after Judas
Jesus Christ if I live life on my knees, ain’t no need to do this
Park it in front of Lueders, next to that Church’s Chicken
All you pussies is losers, all my niggas is winners, screaming

Damn I got bitches, damn I got bitches
Damn I got bitches, wifey, girlfriend and mistress
All my life I want money and power
Respect my mind or nigga

I wonder if the Palm Beach County Public Schools would have any issues with our third grader coming in and singing the song that he learned during the Super Bowl…

Related:

  • a West Coast/Davos perspective on how to reverse Climate Change… “Bill Gates says he will never downsize from his mega-mansion with 24 bathrooms — despite being a single empty-nester” (New York Post)
  • “America Is Abandoning DEI. The NFL Remains All-In.” (Wall Street Journal, Feb 6, 2025): Everyone from the federal government to Fortune 500 companies is dialing back their diversity efforts. But America’s most popular sport is standing its ground. … “We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League, and we’re going to continue to do those efforts,” Goodell said. “We’re not in this because it’s a trend to get into it or a trend to get out of it.” … Yet the NFL is also facing a fresh bout of skepticism about the effectiveness of its own diversity efforts, including the Rooney Rule, a policy established in 2003 that now requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates for important jobs such as coach. [Ed: Who defines “minority”?]
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Aircraft paint scheme ideas

A follow-up to What I learned about aircraft paint at Oshkosh

Let’s start at the Okeechobee, Florida airport (KOBE):

This Skyhawk-with-Hawk might be the way to put a golden retriever on the side of a Cirrus (via wrap):

Back in Stuart, Florida (KSUA), a subtle design that whispers, “this Challenger 600 won’t be available for charter” (KR = Kid Rock, I think):

Shades of blue for a PC-12:

How about cars? Here’s a neighborhood mom’s ride:

Wouldn’t it look better with a light wrap of some kind on the sides?

Tough to think of a way to improve this Miami Dolphins fan’s truck in downtown Abacoa, but maybe an annual wrap with some information about the current or most recent season?

For those who want to save our planet without being associated with the Nazi Elon Musk, the Volkswagen ID.Buzz presents a broad canvas:

Ugly from any angle, if you ask me, and crying out for a wrap:

Once AI is doing all human work I think we’ll have a lot more time, energy, and money to wrap everything in custom designs.

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Trump listens to at least one African in shutting down USAID

Folks are upset that Trump and DOGE may shut down USAID and cut U.S. foreign aid spending (state-sponsored NPR). This is consistent with a classic 2005 interview “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”. Quotes below, but not in quote style for improved readability (my highlights in bold).

The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

SPIEGEL: … corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers …

Shikwati: … and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.

SPIEGEL: Would Africa actually be able to solve these problems on its own?

Shikwati: Of course. Hunger should not be a problem in most of the countries south of the Sahara. In addition, there are vast natural resources: oil, gold, diamonds. Africa is always only portrayed as a continent of suffering, but most figures are vastly exaggerated. In the industrial nations, there’s a sense that Africa would go under without development aid. But believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.

SPIEGEL: But AIDS didn’t exist at that time.

Shikwati: If one were to believe all the horrorifying reports, then all Kenyans should actually be dead by now. But now, tests are being carried out everywhere, and it turns out that the figures were vastly exaggerated. It’s not three million Kenyans that are infected. All of the sudden, it’s only about one million. Malaria is just as much of a problem, but people rarely talk about that.

SPIEGEL: And why’s that?

Shikwati: AIDS is big business, maybe Africa’s biggest business. There’s nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical.

Shikwati: Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They’re in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria’s textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.

Shikwati: … jobs that were created artificially in the first place and that distort reality. Jobs with foreign aid organizations are, of course, quite popular, and they can be very selective in choosing the best people. When an aid organization needs a driver, dozens apply for the job. And because it’s unacceptable that the aid worker’s chauffeur only speaks his own tribal language, an applicant is needed who also speaks English fluently — and, ideally, one who is also well mannered. So you end up with some African biochemist driving an aid worker around, distributing European food, and forcing local farmers out of their jobs. That’s just crazy!


A 2017 look at the interviewee:

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A visit to the house of a California “political moderate”

I recently visited friends who own 80 acres in Napa County, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. The wife describes herself as a “political moderate” and the husband as “apolitical”. Here’s a sticker on the front door:

Once inside, hanging on the wall:

The local gourmet establishment starts the unskilled at $23/hour:

I also stopped to visit a friend in San Anselmo, part of Marin County and home to a ketamine injection clinic and a $3 million house still sporting its “Harris for President” sign:

In between is 0Q3, the Sonoma Valley Airport:

$3 million (pre-Biden value?) P-51 Mustang and a 2700′ runway. Precision matters!

I stopped to take a quick walk around Berkeley with a friend. She assiduously locked her house and cautioned me to lock the rental car. I had observed at least one unhoused person at the entrance to her elite neighborhood. Here’s a sign at one of her neighbor’s houses:

At SFO, I discovered that a #Resister had protested the J6 insurrection by returning a rental car to Avis/Budget on the 4th anniversary of this greatest event in American history, but without the key (photo from January 27):

And, of course, there were the usual outdoor bearded maskers (SARS-CoV-2 is a deadly enemy of humans, especially the young and healthy, but not so deadly that you’d want to invest 50 cents in a razor and shave your beard like it says in the 3M instructions to do; nor would you want to drive 6 hours in a COVID-free private car to Los Angeles (where they were heading)):

SFO Terminal 2 features a 2011 fiber sculpture by Janet Echelman:

The work relates to a poem by Allen Ginsberg. Wokipedia:

In 1943, he discovered within himself “mountains of homosexuality.”

Therefore, this could be considered a 2SLGBTQQIA+ terminal to some extent, just like Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at SFO: the country’s best airport terminal for gay people…

(Separately, I know a lot of male pilots who have discovered mountains of homosexuality within themselves and, after a period of reflection, realized that the terrain was a ridge of lesbian mountains.)

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USAID pays an economist to learn Spanish…

Back around 1990, a federal government economist whom we knew applied for and obtained a job at USAID, currently in the news as a target for Elon Musk’s Efficiency Nazis (TM). USAID paid for a daily Spanish language class with a handful of other students and then, because he hadn’t developed the required proficiency in Spanish, USAID paid for one-on-one Spanish tutoring. (I remember this as 18 months of full-time pay with the sole goal of learning Spanish; he dug out his 1990 calendar and it shows just 6 months of language training while doing some other work for the agency (proof that every tale gets better with time?).)

USAID then deployed him… to Egypt.

The punchline to this story is that when we would laugh about the absurdity of taxpayers paying him to learn Spanish in prep for 3.5 years in Cairo, notoriously short on taco trucks, he would respond with a dry explanation that USAID had a foreign language proficiency requirement and it had to be met before anyone could be sent overseas and that there was no requirement that the language learn bear any relationship to the country of deployment. The whole episode seemed to make sense to him even if it seemed to the rest of us to involve a lot of costs and no benefit to taxpayers.

The costs of keeping a USAID employee in Egypt included at least the following:

  • paying a regular federal government salary
  • paying for housing in a high-end neighborhood of Cairo
  • paying for private English-language school for the kids
  • paying to ship a car over from the U.S. and then back, if desired
  • paying to fly food in from Philadelphia and Germany and then selling it at to the Americans in Cairo at whatever the average price was for the same item back in the U.S.

In other words, the cost was similar to what would be incurred for any other diplomat in the embassy.

He never told us that he had observed any benefit being delivered by the expenditure of USAID funds in Egypt, either to the average Egyptian or the average American.

From the Guardian:

From state-sponsored NPR:

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Could falling American IQ explain falling NAEP scores in public schools?

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are out and American public school students are doing worse than ever. “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows” (NYT):

In the latest release of federal test scores, educators had hoped to see widespread recovery from the learning loss incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Instead, the results, from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, tell a grim tale, especially in reading: The slide in achievement has only continued.

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic.

Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class. And while students at the top end of the academic distribution are performing similarly to students prepandemic, the drops remain pronounced for struggling students, despite a robust, bipartisan movement in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills.

“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

There is even worse news for this failing government-run enterprise (the per-state results don’t include private school kids, though the national results include some):

But the tumult of the new presidential administration may threaten that focus. The federal test scores began to circulate on the same day that many educators across the country fell into panic as they tried to discern how a White House freeze on some federal funding would affect local schools.

Our worst fear is that new bureaucrats might disrupt the proven-to-fail system.

I’ve surveyed a bunch of news articles about these scores and nobody seems to be willing to consider the possibility that a falling average IQ among Americans is primarily responsible for the drop in scores that are correlated with IQ. IQ is correlated with income and we have policies designed to ensure that America’s lowest income residents produce the most children (chart showing the effect of free family-sized housing for those who don’t work vs. brutal price competition for family-sized housing among the working- and middle-class (rich people can afford big houses so they have plenty of kids, but there aren’t too many rich people in the U.S. so the effect on demographics is small)):

In addition to encouraging our least productive and least conscientious natives to have more kids we’ve been aggressively importing humans from societies that have IQs lower than the previous U.S. average of 100. Examples, in alphabetical order (source):

  • Afghanistan: 82
  • Haiti: 81
  • Mexico: 88
  • “Palestine” (Rashida Tlaib): 78
  • Syria: 74
  • Somalia (Ilhan Omar): 68
  • Venezuela: 83

IQ depends partly on education and environment, so presumably a Somali who grows up in Minnesota will have a higher IQ than one who grew up in Somalia. On the other hand, IQ is heritable so the children of immigrants from low-IQ societies, who make up an ever-increasing percentage of American K-12 students, can’t be expected to reach the previous American average.

Put another way: Suppose that Americans had an explicit goal of reducing average IQ in the U.S. What would the government do differently from our welfare state and immigration policies of the last 30 years?

I’m not sure if lower IQ is a better explanation than screen time, coronapanic, and unionized teacher apathy, but it seems worth including on the list of possibilities. (Coronapanic doesn’t seem to be explanatory because #Science-denying states with 2-month school closures, e.g., Florida, experienced similar test score declines to states with #Science-informed 18-month school closures (a little complicated to compare data across years because Florida has a recently introduced lavish school choice program in which parents of any income level can get $8000/year to send a child to private school).) Perhaps we’re unfairly blaming school systems and teachers when the decline in output is attributable to the decline in input. As Harvard President-turned-Professor Claudine Gay originally noted, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”.

Related:

  • “Assessing the intellectual ability of asylum seekers” (Int J Dev Disabil. 2017): “there are theoretical reasons to suppose that if an individual comes to a developed country from a developing country, his/her measured IQ and true intellectual ability will increase. Both the individual’s health and diet may improve, they may be exposed to a more scientific/logical way of thinking (Flynn 2007) and they may get a better education. The evidence for whether this happens or does not happen is very scant.”
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San Francisco MOMA

A recent trip to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)….

They’ve gone big into Yayoi Kusama, still productive and creative at age 95.

Both of these works are from 2023! (Perhaps she had some help with the physical construction.)

The “Get in the Game” exhibit appears to be about sports, but a sign explains that it is actually about “gender” and “race”:

Frontiers of aeronautical engineering… a lead airplane from Anselm Kiefer:

Old-school Dan Flavin, made with simple fluorescent lights of color (these could be updated, perhaps, with LED bulbs so that different color patterns can be offered at different times of day):

The museum quotes Kerry James Marshall as wanting to see only pictures of Black people and then obliges with a show of Amy Sherald’s work, in which only Black people are depicted (even in San Francisco, nobody wants to see paintings of Taiwanese people fabbing the chips that hold up the SF AI economy? A Black person standing around is more valuable to Humanity than a TSMC employee making an Nvidia H100?).

Speaking of Black people who aren’t fabbing H100s… there is a huge lobby area devoted to Kara Walker’s work:

The major photograph show is devoted to pictures of Black people… by a white woman:

There’s a smaller show by a “woman of color” (from Peru) who “rewrites male-dominated history” by recreating Edward Weston’s photos using herself as a model:

Here is a Weston for comparison (Americans had better-defined waists back in 1936, apparently):

Exit through the gift shop, at which a complete home library may be purchased (or replace your worn copy of The Story of Art Without Men):

What do the streets outside look like after this $42 per person experience for Californians who say that they will pay any price and bear any burden to end homelessness?

Note that the museum and special exhibition admission is free for those who are beneficiaries of welfare programs such as MediCal and SNAP/EBT.

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Given how quickly Tesla and BYD were built, how could a Honda-Nissan merger ever make sense?

Honda is in talks to merge with or purchase Nissan. I can’t figure out the rationale. In the old days maybe you’d say that it takes a long time to build factories, establish dealer networks, etc. and, therefore, Nissan’s assets might be valuable. But Tesla and BYD started from nothing and quickly built factories, company-owned stores (better than dealers), engineering, and everything else necessary for being in the car business. In any case, Honda doesn’t have to start from scratch in the car business because it is already well-established in the car business. If Nissan has some good people, Honda could try to hire them away and set them up within their proven-to-be-profitable structure.

What do we see below that Honda doesn’t make or couldn’t make?

The $120,000+ Nissan GT-R is kind of fun, but only about 1,000 are built each year.

More generally, given what Tesla and BYD have accomplished why would a car company ever want to buy another car company?

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