A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
A friend here in San Diego characterized today as the “High Holidays” because it is both Pride Month and Juneteenth (observed by government workers).
Readers: Are you forced to work today or are you relaxing at home reflecting on the injustices experienced by slaves who were also members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community?
Full post, including commentsHappy Juneteeth, everyone! Last year, a reader pointed out that this is a holiday that celebrates white saviors so let’s look at Chesa Boudin, who became the ultimate white savior as the San Francisco District Attorney who wouldn’t prosecute anyone because prosecution is inherently racist. (Comment: “Juneteenth is the ultimate holiday for White Supremacy — it signals that blacks were incapable of independently securing their own freedom. They needed white men to fight other white men to free the hapless blacks from slavery.”)
California friends have been talking about “How San Francisco Became a Failed City” (Atlantic), timed to coincide with Chesa Boudin being recalled. Here are some excerpts from the article:
On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.
A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.
Do we blame Chesa Boudin, though? Why not the Covidcrats that mostly shut down the city with no plans for a restart? It wasn’t Chesa Boudin who made it illegal for a person to be an office worker or for a tourist business to operate. What do the health stats look like when a city follows Science?
San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID.
How about the stats on redistribution of wealth?
About 70 percent of shoplifting cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15 percent did.
Immigrants are working hard in San Francisco’s best-known retail sector:
[Chesa Boudin] has suggested that many drug dealers in San Francisco are themselves vulnerable and in need of protection. “A significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco—perhaps as many as half—are here from Honduras,” he said in a 2020 virtual town hall. “We need to be mindful about the impact our interventions have … Some of these young men have been trafficked here under pain of death. Some of them have had family members in Honduras who have been or will be harmed if they don’t continue to pay off the traffickers.”
The author, who is generally hostile to the direction that San Francisco has taken, follows this paragraph by stressing her agreement with the principle that all migrants must be cherished:
Of course there is good in what Boudin was trying to do. … No one wants immigrants’ relatives to be killed by MS-13.
Being 2SLGBTQQIA+ is not sufficient. A person must be 2SLGBTQQIA+ and of color in order to be selected:
One night in 2021, the [school board] meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee. Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white. “My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”
San Franciscans came up with a good name for the University of Xbox:
In February 2021, [school board] board members agreed that they would avoid the phrase learning loss to describe what was happening to kids locked out of their classrooms. Instead they would use the words learning change. Schools being shut just meant students were “having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” Gabriela López, a member of the board at the time, said. “They are learning more about their families and their cultures.” Framing this as some kind of “deficit” was wrong, the board argued.
New York City collapsed financially and from a quality of life point of view back in the 1970s. But Wall Street generated so much money that eventually NYC got it back together. The city government couldn’t waste every dime. San Francisco also has near-infinite money so presumably it should be able to recover from any missteps (even if the children who were denied a year of education will never fully recover from that).
What does the recovery look like, though? And what are our criteria for determining if a recovery has occurred? No more tents on the sidewalks? No more open-air drug markets?
My prediction is that the current residents of the city never recover from the mess that they’ve made for themselves. They never learn that all of the stuff they’re complaining about is actually stuff that they voted for. What happens is that they get replaced. Not only the Honduran drug dealers mentioned in the article move in, but also young nerds to slave away for the tech companies. The replacement process takes 7 years and then maybe it takes another 3 years for the city government to change. So the things that today’s white Progressives in SF complain about are mostly gone by 2032.
Readers: What do you predict?
(photo: Good Mong Kok Bakery, 2012)
Full post, including commentsPresident Biden still has the U.S. under a state of emergency due to COVID-19. Maskachusetts takes our Scientist leader and “the virus” seriously, as evidenced by the fact that students in the Boston Public Schools are forced to wear masks:
(Just be sure not to wear an N95 mask that might have some effect, says the above web page.)
On the other hand, COVID-19 is not so severe that it should prevent packing tens of thousands of people into an indoor basketball arena for the NBA final games. Nor should COVID-19 discourage Boston from hosting the U.S. Open golf tournament (this weekend, with 100,000+ people coming in at various times (mostly outdoors while spectating, but then indoors and unmasked for hotels, restaurants, parties, etc.)).
So…. COVID-19 in Maskachusetts is an “emergency” for K-12 students, which is why they must continue to wear masks. It’s also an “emergency” for 6-month-old babies, which is why they must be injected with an emergency use authorized “vaccine”. But it is not an emergency for adults, who may gather in enormous crowds without masks, gather unmasked in bars, gather unmasked in “essential” marijuana stores, meet via Tinder after consuming alcohol and marijuana, etc.
Related:
A Swiss friend got this together for Juneteenth last year:
Chocolate and vanilla together. A rainbow of sprinkles on top #BecausePrideMonth.
A comment from last year on Happy Juneteenth for government workers:
Juneteenth is the ultimate holiday for White Supremacy — it signals that blacks were incapable of independently securing their own freedom. They needed white men to fight other white men to free the hapless blacks from slavery. The account of Lincoln coming upon blacks worshipping him as he visited the just-conquered Richmond is embarrassing to read. He begged them to get off their knees, quit their unbecoming adulation, and conduct themselves as free men.
The darker the skin colour, the less woke the person. In the same vein, the whiter the crowd, the more woke the sentiment. Wokeness is a group dynamic, not an individual phenomena. Wokeness demands group support to maintain itself.
The commenter raises a good point. Instead of a holiday celebrating an achievement by a Black person or by Black people, the holiday celebrates the actions of literal white saviors (white folks who wanted to rule the entire North American continent and therefore did not want the South to secede). Should tomorrow be called White Savior Day?
Related:
Our health insurer just sent an Explanation of Benefits. I went to see a doctor and she billed the absurd $528 that would have been charged to the unfortunate uninsured victim. The insurance company knocked this down to $123.75 so they paid $43.75 and I paid the $80 copayment (on top of the $30,000 per year that we pay in premium).
Except for catastrophes, it seems that nobody would need health insurance if health insurance didn’t exist and providers had to charge a retail price that had some basis in market reality. The person who can afford the $80 co-pay can also afford $123.75.
Related:
“What Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ Has Meant to Women” (NYT):
On Wednesday, Ms. Sandberg announced that she was leaving her position as chief operating officer of Facebook’s parent company, Meta — the perch that made her one of the highest-profile women in American business. She had been in the job for five years when she published “Lean In,” and her singular role and success in Silicon Valley helped amplify the book’s message.
For many women “Lean In” has been a bible, a road map to corporate life. Many others have come to understand its limits, or to view it as a symbol of what is wrong with applying individual-focused solutions to the systemic issues holding back women in the workplace, especially women of color and low-income women.
But it was also eminently clear to many readers of “Lean In” that what had allowed Ms. Sandberg to ascend the corporate world’s ladder went far beyond sheer will. She was a white, Harvard-educated woman, months away from becoming one of the world’s youngest-ever billionaires.
“It’s hard for Black women to lean in when you’re not even in the room,” said Minda Harts, 40, a consultant and the author of “The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table.”
Last month, when a draft ruling revealed the Supreme Court’s intent to overturn Roe v. Wade, Ms. Sandberg put out a statement mourning the loss of women’s abortion access.
“This is a scary day for women all across our country,” Ms. Sandberg wrote on Facebook. “Every woman, no matter where she lives, must be free to choose whether and when she becomes a mother.”
In short, it’s all about skin color and abortion, according to the New York Times. What do the journalists at the New York Post have to say? “Meta investigated Sheryl Sandberg for using corporate resources to plan wedding: report”:
Full post, including commentsDeparting Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg announced her resignation from the tech giant during an ongoing probe into her alleged use of corporate resources to plan her wedding, according to a report Thursday.
I’m settling into San Diego to serve as a software expert witness at a trial here in federal court. Would anyone like to get together for coffee? If so, comment here or email philg@mit.edu.
Separately, within only a few hours of walking around I was able to get images of all three pillars of 21st century California: the unhoused, marijuana, and the gender-neutral restroom.
Separately, I can’t figure out how real estate works in California. Downtown San Diego alternates between 15-20-story high modern buildings (real estate is valuable) and surface parking lots, auto repair shops, and vacant land (real estate is not valuable). You don’t see this kind of schizophrenia in Manhattan or Boston.
Full post, including commentsAmericans are obsessively following the Federal Reserve’s interest rate adjustments in hopes of figuring out if the future will be inflation, recession, or some combination (stagflation). “Fed likely to boost interest rates by three-quarters of a point this week” (CNBC) is an example.
What if nobody other than the government borrowed money for any reason and, therefore, the Fed’s interest rate became irrelevant to ordinary subjects. Could we still have inflation? Two economists say “yes” in “The Real Cause Of Inflation Is Insane Deficit Spending” (February 2022):
But proponents of MMT do get one thing correct — the Fed can create money to service the debt and avoid a default. But in real terms, meaning adjusting for inflation, this assertion is false. Creating money to service the debt devalues the currency. Investors then receive a lower real return on their holdings of federal debt.
(see also this 1983 paper from the Minneapolis Fed)
In the old days, inflation came down when the Fed raised rates. Therefore, unless our deficits are larger than in the old days, the interest rate hikes should work to tame inflation (maybe by damaging the economy). “U.S. deficit will shrink to $1T this year before soaring, federal forecasters say” (Politico):
While the nation’s shortfall has substantially declined following last year’s $2.8 trillion deficit, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the gap between spending and revenue will grow starting in 2024, reaching more than 6 percent of GDP a decade from now. The U.S. has only run greater deficits than that six times since 1946, CBO noted.
We’re actually in uncharted territory when it comes to deficit spending.
Another reason that inflation came down when the Fed raised rates is that people weren’t able to pay as much for houses, nearly always bought with borrowed money. But the current headline inflation rate has been cooked so that it doesn’t include the actual prices paid for houses or mortgages (those 1980s headlines were too alarming under the old formula!). The inflation rate won’t move until the fictitious “owners’ equivalent rent” changes.
Some prices that are part of the price index will obviously fall if the Fed causes a recession with high interest rates. Used cars, perhaps. But, given the huge deficits indulged in by Congress, will high rates and a recession be enough to push headline inflation down to the 2 percent level that the Fed claims to be targeting? Consider that if there is a recession, the welfare state will automatically kick in to increase spending on housing subsidies, taxpayer-funded health care (more people eligible for Medicaid), SNAP/EBT, Obamaphone, and free home broadband. Congress also likely won’t be able to resist massive new spending initiatives to combat the recession, just as they spent massively to combat the economic impact of the coronapanic shutdowns ordered by government.
Update, June 28: Economist answers my question about high interest rates and high deficits
Related:
“Australian traveller strip-searched, held in US prison and deported over little-known entry requirement” (Guardian):
An Australian traveller was denied entry to the US, cavity searched, sent to prison alongside criminals and subsequently deported 30 hours after arriving, due to a little-known entry requirement for the US.
The Victorian student Jack Dunn applied for a visa waiver for his trip to the US in May and planned to travel on to Mexico. He had been warned about the need to prove his plan to exit the US, but was unaware of the rule that requires those entering on the waiver to have booked either a return flight or onward travel to a country that does not border the US.
After arriving in Honolulu Dunn was refused entry to the US and detained at a federal prison until he could be put on a return flight to Australia.
Dunn, 23, had spent more than half a year saving for his trip, and by May had enough for a three- to four-month adventure. He planned to start in the US to see the NBA playoffs, then spend most of his trip backpacking across Mexico and South America.
After landing at 6am on 5 May, he was interrogated by a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer, who refused him entry after determining that he had not booked onward travel beyond Mexico.
He was put in an interrogation room with no wifi. Because he did not have a local sim card, had no access to the internet.
At one point, Dunn claims, an airline worker offered him his phone to book a flight from Mexico to a third country.
Dunn tried booking a flight to Panama, but did not have enough money in his debit card account, and as his own phone was not connected to the internet, he could not transfer money from his savings account, which held several thousand dollars. He then tried to book a cheaper flight to Guatemala, but the CBP officer re-entered the room and ordered the airline worker to take the phone back, Dunn claimed.
It’s a sad story because he would have been able to stay if he’d simply said “My parents are beating me up and I request asylum” or “there is a gang in my neighborhood that has targeted me for execution” (see “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies”: “Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew key rulings that his predecessor issued in 2018 limiting asylum for victims of domestic violence and gang threats.”).
What were the consequences of this failure to claim asylum?
Dunn said about six hours after landing he was handcuffed and taken to the Federal Detention Center in Honolulu, where he was told to strip naked and was twice searched under his scrotum and anus for contraband before being admitted.
Separately, I’m not sure why we need this rule. Since anyone can stay in the U.S. more or less indefinitely merely by saying “I don’t feel safe at home,” why are Australians whose trip terminates in Mexico or Canada a threat to our society?
Related:
Full post, including commentsFrom May: Is the New York Times the primary promoter of white replacement theory?
From June 6, a NYT article regarding migrants with a “high reproductive output”:
Lionfish are native to the Pacific and Indian oceans. But in the past few decades, the animal has established itself in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, where its invasive presence poses a serious threat to tropical Atlantic reefs and their associated habitats.
The effects are staggering. One study by scientists from Oregon State University found that, in only five weeks, a single lionfish reduced the juvenile fish in its feeding zone by 80 percent. And their reproductive output is remarkably high: Females can release around 25,000 eggs every few days. In some places, including the Bahamas, the density of lionfish may well be causing the most significant change to biodiversity of reef habitats since the dawn of industrialized fishing.
Noted!
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