Why didn’t Joe Biden visit his granddaughter in Arkansas for Thanksgiving?

by philg

Joe Biden spent Thanksgiving connecting with the American working class and hearing about their struggles in an economy ravaged by inflation. “Biden, family hit Nantucket stores for some holiday shopping” (AP):

Biden, his wife, Jill, and daughter Ashley went from store to store on Main Street in downtown Nantucket, lingering at Polo Ralph Lauren, Murray’s Toggery Shop and The Black Dog, among other establishments.

The president’s son Hunter and his wife, Melissa, were also shopping with their 2-year-old son, Beau.

The real story is about the Second Wannsee Conference, chaired by a Mexican-American and a Black poet:

As Biden went from store to store, a reporter asked what he thought about a dinner meeting former President Donald Trump recently had at his Florida home with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist. Both of Trump’s dinner guests have expressed anti-semitic views. Trump has said he did not know anything about Fuentes’ background.

(the first Wannsee Conference happened in 1942, the year that the Vanquisher of Corn Pop was born)

I’m curious as to why President Biden didn’t go to Arkansas, home to the nation’s greatest American art museum, to visit his granddaughter Navy Joan, daughter of retired stripper Lunden Roberts, whose family court career gives men roughly 5 million good reasons to study Ye’s early work carefully:

Like Nantucket, Arkansas is home to some of our working class brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters.

Entering “lunden roberts” and “navy joan” in the New York Times search engine yields no results. So I am apparently the only person in the U.S. who wonders why Joe Biden’s granddaughter does not get to meet her famous grandfather.

Photos from a January 2019 visit to Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas:

A 2SLGBTQQIA+ painting from 1885:

Bentonville’s Elizabeth Warren museum predicted the exodus from Twitter:

It would have been nice if this had been our rental car:

There’s also the Walmart Museum, in which we learn that Sam Walton’s twin passions were computers and flying light aircraft!

Ice cream was available at pre-Jimmy Carter prices:

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When will the Ministry of Truth get to work?

by philg

It has been a month since Elon Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter. Changes are happening at a fast pace, potentially proving SR-71 pilot Paul Crickmore’s point “You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3.”

According to President Biden, this is a platform for lies. FoxBusiness:

President Biden mentioned Elon Musk and Twitter during a fundraiser Friday night …

“Elon Musk goes out and buys an outlet that sends — that spews lies all across the world,” Biden remarked. “There are no editors anymore in America. There are no editors.”

The president seemed to suggest there was no longer any moderation on Twitter, a claim echoed by several others on the platform who are also critical of Musk.

“How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake? What is at stake? So there’s a lot going on, a lot going on. But we have an enormous opportunity, enormous opportunity,” Biden added.

Biden’s comments soon after a White House tweet bragging about the Social Security cost-of-living increase was flagged by Twitter for lacking “context.” The White House later deleted the tweet.

If there are lies there must also be truth, right? Here are some lies that ultimately resulted in Marjorie Taylor Greene being “permanently suspended” from Twitter:

The Truth at the time (August 2021) was that vaccines do prevent infection and spread of COVID-19. As of November 5, 2022, the above tweet remained inaccessible via a search for “the fda should not approve the covid vaccines (from:mtgreenee)”. Twitter returned the following screen:

For those who sought to read something critical of the Federal government, in other words, Twitter reminded them to cease their thoughtcrime and read only official Federal government sites.

I guess it was fair to say that there was a Ministry of Truth operating within Twitter in August 2021 and even earlier this month.

But if Joe Biden and the rest of the U.S. government want Twitter to prevent lies from being published, does it makes sense for each social media platform to decide what is a lie and what is the truth? Advertisers are supposedly demanding that Twitter eliminate lies from its platform (yet the cash-seeking Democrat running against Ron DeSantis was allowed to lie with impunity; see Twitter won’t suspend a politician who lies to get money?), but how can they have confidence unless Twitter follows an official source of truth and flags anything that contradicts that source? We don’t want Facebook and Twitter to have different concepts of lie vs. truth, do we?

Related:

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Evolution of Jewish victimhood 1947-2022

by philg

“Trump hosted Holocaust denier at Mar-a-Lago estate during visit with Kanye West, a week after announcing 2024 run” (CNN, today):

Former President Donald Trump hosted White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago estate this week, demonstrating his continued willingness to associate with figures who have well-publicized antisemitic views as he embarks on another White House run.

West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, posted a video Thursday on Twitter in which he claimed that Trump “is really impressed with Fuentes,” who has repeatedly made antisemitic and racist comments as chronicled by the Anti-Defamation League.

(Why isn’t it forbidden deadnaming to refer to Ye as “Kanye West”?)

I had to visit Wikipedia to figure out who Nick Fuentes was, i.e., a young Mexican-American who has already been unpersoned by nearly all (Jewish-controlled?) media. Readers: Had you heard about Nick Fuentes before this week?

Here are some typical tweets on the subject of Trump’s dinner table:

I’m not sure that I love the evolution of Jewish victimhood over the past 75 years. In 1948, we fought against the regular militaries of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Today our enemy is an individual 24-year-old incel. If we extrapolate out another 10 years, is it reasonable to predict that all Jews worldwide can be taken out by a pet rabbit and we need all of the goyim to rally around us and protect us from that rabbit?

Separately, if indeed it is true that Nick Fuentes is a Holocaust skeptic, why isn’t it reasonable for a 24-year-old to question the Holocaust? Much of what he has been exposed to in U.S. media during his lifetime has proved to be lies. Why is it obvious that on this one subject the New York Times happens to be telling the truth? (Note that the Holocaust was not considered an important subject by the NYT in the 1940s.)

Finally, what is the evidence that Fuentes hates Jews for being Jewish. Maybe he hates the Democrat political program and knows that the majority of secular American Jews have adopted this program as their replacement religion. Is Fuentes on record as saying that he hates Jewish conservatives?

Update: If the pool at Mar-A-Lago were renamed “Wannsee” we could say that a Mexican-American and a Black poet chaired the Second Wannsee Conference.

Related:

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Long COVID and California Worker’s Compensation

by philg

I was chatting with a guy who works at a Los Angeles-based manufacturer about the challenge of building back up to full production. “One issue is that if you got COVID at any time during the past two and a half years,” he said, “California assumes that you got it at work. Then if you say that you have Long COVID you will get years of Worker’s Compensation payments. Especially older workers were prone to making Long COVID Worker’s Comp claims. and, if you add up their Social Security, Worker’s Comp, and 401k, it wouldn’t make any sense for them to return to the factory.”

Fact check: this law firm says “with COVID-19, there is a rebuttable presumption of a workplace connection. An employer has the burden of proving that a claimant was not exposed to COVID-19 in the relation to their employment.”

Let’s look at the California labor force participation rate. California has one of the nation’s youngest populations (one reason the COVID-tagged death rate was lower than in some other states) and we’d therefore expect the labor force participation rate to be higher than the U.S. average. Yet it isn’t:

We see participation rising as women entered the labor market (70s and 80s) and then falling as women were offered the opportunity to earn cash via divorce litigation or simply having sex with a married dentist (state child support formulas guaranteeing profits were introduced around 1990; history and also “Divorce laws and the economic behavior of married couples” (Voena 2016)). Then we see the downward trend from all of the enhancements to the welfare state that started in 2009 (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession for how Americans could find themselves in a higher-than-100-percent tax bracket as a consequence of means-tested programs, including mortgage relief). And right now we are bumping along at 62 percent in one of the best labor markets for workers in history. That’s the same as the national rate despite California being 1.5 years younger (median) than the U.S. overall.

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If student loan forgiveness is illegal, can it still be accomplished via an infinite payment pause?

by philg

Continuing with our Thanksgiving theme, we can give thanks to the most generous members of our society. The most praiseworthy generosity is, of course, giving away money that other people earned. If we accept that stealing a neighbor’s car and donating it to charity makes me a more charitable person, Washington, D.C., is home to the world’s most generous humans. As we try to chew our dried leftover turkey, let’s look at a notable example of generosity from the central planners… “Biden extends student loan payment pause as debt relief plan remains on hold” (NBC):

The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it would extend the payment pause on federal student loans, as President Joe Biden’s debt cancellation plan remains blocked in court.

The payment pause, which was previously set to expire in January, will be extended until June 30 or until the litigation is resolved — whichever comes first. If the litigation has not been resolved by June 30, payments will resume 60 days after that.

“I’m completely confident that my plan is legal,” Biden said in a video announcement. “But it isn’t fair to ask tens of millions of borrowers eligible for relief to resume their student debt payments while the courts consider the lawsuit.”

Federal student loan holders have not been required to make payments since March 2020, when President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act, which paused payments through September 2020 and stopped interest from accruing to alleviate the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

In theory it is Congress that sets the budget. So it might be illegal for a president to forgive loans, such that the borrowers don’t have to pay for their gender studies degrees and the cost can instead be shifted onto the working class. And, since Congress can spend money and transfer costs from the working class to the laptop class, the original payment/interest pause in 2020 was definitely legal. But maybe it is also legal for a charitable president with a big heart to keep extending the pauses via executive order. The loan isn’t “forgiven” (illegal unless Congress does it and more accurately described as “transferred to the working class”), but it never has to be paid so long as a great humanitarian/philanthropist is in the White House. The original value of the loan eventually becomes insignificant due to inflation.

Related:

  • “Student Loan Pause Could Cost $275 Billion” (CRB): The pause costs over $5 billion per month and extending it through the end of 2024 would cost at least $120 billion. This would bring the total cost since Spring of 2020 to $275 billion. This represents about 70 percent of the cost of the President’s announced debt cancellation plan and is higher than the ten-year cost of President Biden’s proposal to double the maximum Pell Grant by 2029.
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Ice Cube evaluates the Science

by philg

Back in the 20th century, a Ph.D. physicist in our lab at MIT introduced all of us to his favorite musical artists. Ice Cube was high on the list, especially for Death Certificate.

We can give thanks today for Ice Cube’s thoughtful analysis of the Covid vaccine Science. From the New York Post:

Last year, it was reported that Cube left the cast of Sony’s ”Oh Hell No“ after refusing the COVID-19 vaccine shot.

“I turned down a movie because I didn’t want to get the motherf–king jab,” Cube said on the podcast. “I turned down $9 million. I didn’t want get the jab. F–k that jab. F–k y’all for trying to make me get it. I don’t know how Hollywood feels about me right now.”

“Those motherf—ers didn’t give it to me because I wouldn’t get the shot. I didn’t turn it down. They just wouldn’t give it to me,” his expletive-filled rant continued. “The covid shot, the jab … I didn’t need it. I didn’t catch that shit at all. Nothing. F–k them. I didn’t need that s–t.”

Happy Thanksgiving Day to everyone! I trust and hope that all of you are following this MSNBC physician’s advice to refrain from gathering and instead sit alone watching Netflix (especially House of Cards featuring Kevin Spacey?):

Related:

  • Rammstein, another physics favorite (but they’re German so they can’t be included in our celebration of stealing a continent from the Native Americans)
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If rich countries pay poor countries for climate change victimization, must poor countries pay rich countries for science and engineering?

by philg

Poor countries are the victims of rich countries, according to the Newspaper of the Righteous, and should get paid for their victimization. “Calls for Climate Reparations Reach Boiling Point in Glasgow Talks” (NYT, November 11):

For decades, vulnerable countries and activist groups have demanded that rich polluter countries pay for irreparable damage from climate change. This year, there may be a breakthrough.

What is owed to countries least responsible for the problem of global warming but most harmed by its effects — and by whom?

Year after year, calls have steadily grown louder for industrialized nations responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions already heating up the planet to own up to the problem — and pay for the damage.

This year, demands for redress have sharpened as climate justice has become a rallying cry, not just from countries in the global south, like Mr. Huq’s, but from a broad range of activists, especially young people, in the United States and Europe.

How much are we talking?

Estimates of the amount of money required to address loss and damage varies widely, from roughly $300 to $600 billion a year by 2030.

Less than the elites steal from the American working class every year via low-skill immigration! (Harvard study: $500 billion/year from the working class to the elites in pre-Biden money)

There’s additional scrutiny on the United States, in part because of its outsized role as history’s biggest polluter, but also because of the stated commitments of the Biden administration to climate justice.

The journalist and editors at the New York Times do not quote anyone who has an argument against paying. Is that because no argument can be made?

It’s Thanksgiving week. What about the fact that non-Western countries have gotten Western science (not Science in the form of cloth masks and vaccines that don’t prevent infection or transmission, but science as taught prior to 2020) for free? Shouldn’t these non-Western countries give thanks for Western science and engineering and maybe even give money (as an offset) for Western science and engineering?

How much are Michelle Faraday‘s descriptions of electrical phenomena worth? For a poor country that wishes to set up a power grid, what are Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s Equations worth? For people in poor countries who don’t want to die from infection, how much value did they receive from being handed the work of Louise Pasteur? If they want to get from place to place without having to build roads, aren’t they getting a lot of value from Katharine Wright‘s invention of the first practical flying machine? (assembled and piloted by her brothers) If they enjoy communicating and being entertained, they’re getting value from Wilma Shockley‘s invention of the transistor, no? If they don’t want to starve to death, they need the fertilizers that are made via the process that chemists Frida Haber and Carla Bosch developed.

It doesn’t make sense to start money flowing until both credits and debits have been tallied, does it? If we did that accounting, wouldn’t we likely find that poor countries were getting a lot more than $600 billion in value from Western science and engineering? World GDP is roughly $100 trillion.

Here are some October 2022 photos from Westminster Abbey. Important English and Scottish scientists, including Isabelle Newton, either get a tomb or a memorial or both.

Let’s not forget the monuments to British colonialism and an author whose low opinion of Jews is amply confirmed by Sam Bankman-Fried:

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Is Sam Bankman-Fried the Zillow of Crypto?

by philg

Zillow managed to lose nearly $1 billion buying and flipping houses during the most dramatic real estate inflation in the history of the United States. They could have bought houses at random and made money, at least in nominal dollars, yet they managed to lose.

MIT alum and major Joe Biden donor Sam Bankman-Fried managed to lose his own money and also money that he stole from depositors in the crypto marketplace. But how? His trading operation, Alameda Research, was started in November 2017. Bitcoin was about $7,000 back then. Today, however, Bitcoin is quoted at over 16,000 Bidies. Adjusted for inflation, perhaps this is not a great return but it looks good in nominal dollars at least.

How did a guy celebrated as a genius by Sequoia Capital and the rest of the Silicon Valley smart set manage to lose money while operating in a strong tailwind? Is it like the Florida real estate boom of the mid-1920s in which people who’d been successful kept doubling down and, therefore, the recent dip in crypto prices caused losses far greater than what had been earned on the way up?

Let’s look at what was motivating this rare genius. “How the newest megadonor wants to change Washington” (Politico, August 4, 2022):

… part of life as Sam Bankman-Fried is about embracing paradoxes. The 30-year-old, who has amassed an estimated $20 billion fortune over the last four years through cryptocurrency, drives a hybrid Toyota Corolla.

He was also one of just a handful of donors who spent $10 million-plus backing President Joe Biden in 2020, and in the last year, he’s hired a network of political operatives and spent tens of millions more shaping Democratic House primaries. It was a shocking wave of spending that looked like it could remake the Democratic Party bench in Washington, candidate by candidate. Looking ahead to the 2024 election, he has said he could spend anywhere from $100 million to $1 billion.

… Bankman-Fried has what it takes to be the biggest donor in politics — an eleven-figure bank account he’s committed to giving away before he dies…

Looks like he followed through on that last commitment. What was his main political objective? More and better coronapanic:

In politics, that’s led Sam Bankman-Fried to dual objectives. There’s the one he has talked about most: preventing the next pandemic, which he fears could be more lethal than Covid-19 and would pose a huge threat to humanity, an obsession for effective altruists.

But if he needed only $1 billion to deliver a Democrat-ruled paradise to Americans and that was his main objective, why did he keep placing risky bets? He already passed the $1 billion mark a long time ago, right?

Maybe it was his parents who were motivating him to bet big and steal big? His dad is a Trump-hating Stanford Law professor, Joe Bankman. Mom is Barbara Fried, another Stanford Law professor, who was a leader of a Silicon Valley PAC funneling money to Democrats (Vox). Perhaps the parents said that they needed $10 billion to prevent Republicans from exercising any political power in the U.S. going forward? (plus another $300 million for vacation houses in the Bahamas to be owned by mom and dad that would also be nice enough to host Bill and Hillary Clinton)

Maybe it was about J.K. Rowling and the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community? “Sam Bankman-Fried shifts blame for FTX collapse to ex-girlfriend’s crypto firm” (New York Post, 11/17/2022):

Disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried unleashed a wild, wide-ranging interview in which he appeared to shift blame for the collapse of his company FTX to the trading firm run by his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison.

Bankman-Fried is under intense pressure to address his decision to funnel $10 billion in FTX client funds to prop up Alameda Research, where Ellison — a 28-year-old, professed “Harry Potter” enthusiast who has tweeted about taking amphetamines — served as CEO.

Of that money, at least $1 billion in customer funds is still missing.

The company ran its own cryptocurrency, i.e., Ponzi scheme, in which the bits that they pulled out of their servers’ butts were worth more than $2 billion (CNBC). So we need to try to understand how Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison managed to lose at least $2 billion.

How did these two lose so much money? The modern equivalent of CDOs?

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Will David DePape be deported to Canada?

by philg

Happy Thanksgiving week everyone! Except for Canadians, who celebrated on October 10. Speaking of Canadians, what’s the plan for David DePape, the undocumented immigrant who attacked Paul Pelosi? Will he be deported to Canada after completing a prison sentence?

From https://www.speaker.gov/issues/immigration-reform, November 5, 2022:

Our nation’s immigrants are the constant reinvigoration of America. Each wave of newcomers brings their patriotism, bravery and determination to succeed to our shores – and in doing so, makes America more American. As students and servicemembers, entrepreneurs and public servants, parents and neighbors, these new Americans affirm our country’s fundamental, founding truth: that in diversity, lies strength.

Yet President Trump and Congressional Republicans continue to push a hateful, harmful anti-immigrant agenda that instills fear in our communities and weakens our country. Instead of respecting the hard-working men and women who want to contribute to our nation, Republicans are trying to make American taxpayers pay for an immoral, ineffective and expensive border wall. At the same time, the Trump Administration is unleashing a cruel deportation force that is tearing apart families across America.

It’s interesting that Trump was still president, as far as Pelosi’s official web site was concerned, nearly two years after leaving office. Separately, since Nancy Pelosi assures us that immigrants are superior overall to native-born Americans, what did David DePape do prior to the unfortunate incident of October 28, 2022 to exhibit “patriotism, bravery and determination to succeed”?

What are we thankful for this year? I’m thankful that I don’t live in San Francisco where even the elite are not safe in their homes and where children of the non-elite are always one Scientist’s email away from having their schools closed.

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Did Twitter manage to fill its diversity quotas via the recent mass layoffs?

by philg

In a document written, I think, well before the Elon Musk takeover, Twitter wanted to hit the following quotas:

(Grammar police: Not “WHOM you work with?”)

They already had 46 percent “women”.

So they just needed to fire men and non-binary workers in order to achieve the 2025 dream in 2022. (Note that the quota of 50% for “women” necessarily meant that “men” would be less than half of the workforce because at least some of the workers would identify with the other 72 gender IDs recognized by Science.)

I wonder what Twitter meant for “At least a quarter of our US Tweepforce will be under-represented populations”. Would “over 60” be “under-represented”? How about 2SLGBTQQIA+? Members of the LGBTQIA+ were 13.5 percent of the workers before Black Friday:

If LGBTQIA+ qualifies as “under-represented”, Twitter could have filled its 25% quota simply by firing only workers who admitted to cisgender heterosexuality.

Who wants to guess what the diversity stats will look like the next time they’re released? (Or maybe part of Dark Elon’s plan was to fire the people who prepare these stats?)

Speaking of quotas, the United Nations is working toward a quota of 0% for the killing of journalists identifying as “women” (alternatively, a quota of 100% for the killing of journalists identifying with gender IDs other than “women”).

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