What will change in San Francisco with Chesa Boudin gone?

by philg

Happy 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 comments

Maskachusetts hosts multiple Covid super-spreader events while forcing kids to wear masks in schools

by philg

President 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:

Full post, including comments

Ice cream cake for Juneteenth (White Savior Day)

by philg

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:

Full post, including comments

Another day and another scam in the American health care system

by philg

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:

  • “A $20,243 bike crash: Zuckerberg hospital’s aggressive tactics leave patients with big bills” (Vox): Paramedics took her to the emergency room at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where doctors X-rayed her arm and took a CT scan of her brain and spine. She left with her arm in a splint, on pain medication, and with a recommendation to follow up with an orthopedist. … A few months later, Dang got a bill for $24,074.50. Premera Blue Cross, her health insurer, would only cover $3,830.79 of that — an amount that it thought was fair for the services provided. That left Dang with $20,243.71 to pay, which the hospital threatened to send to collections in mid-December.
Full post, including comments

Sheryl Sandberg’s departure from Meta/Facebook as explained by NYT and New York Post

by philg

“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”:

Departing 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.

Full post, including comments

Meet in San Diego tomorrow or this weekend?

by philg

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 comments

Could our epic deficits drive inflation no matter how high the Fed raises rates?

by philg

Americans 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:

  • “President Biden orders 100-percent federal reimbursement for city’s Covid hotels” (January 22, 2021), in which taxpayers in Louisiana and Mississippi were forced to pay for San Francisco’s generosity in providing 2+ years of hotel rooms for the unhoused. If there is a housing “emergency” declared due to an interest rate rise, presumably the same executive order mechanism could be used to increase the federal deficit by spending on hotels.
  • The $12 sandwich here in San Diego is temporarily $14 (up 17%):
  • Below, sign at a South Florida car dealer, June 9, 2022
Full post, including comments

A foreigner forgets to ask for asylum and is deported

by philg

“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 comments

Great Replacement Theory in the New York Times

by philg

From 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!

Full post, including comments

The communal apartment comes to the U.S.

by philg

Comparisons of the current U.S. system of transferism to “Communism” don’t make sense to me. In the Soviet Union under “Communism” everyone had to work, the very opposite of the American system in which tens of millions of able-bodied people are relieved of the need to work either by having sex with an already married person (“child support”), a quickie marriage to a high-income person (“alimony” and/or “Amber Heard”), or via taxpayer-funded housing, taxpayer-funded health care (Medicaid), taxpayer-funded food (SNAP/EBT), taxpayer-funded smartphone (Obamaphone), and, recently added, taxpayer-funded broadband for the Xbox. Any non-disabled adult in the Soviet Union who tried to sit at home collecting child support, alimony, or government-provided services would have been labeled a “parasite” and subject to a range of punishments.

But a signature feature of the Soviet system seems to be becoming more widespread in the U.S.: the communal apartment. “Their Solution to the Housing Crisis? Living With Strangers.” (NYT, June 1):

Two facts are painfully clear to New Yorkers: The rent is too high, and it keeps getting higher. With the median one-bedroom apartment hovering around $3,500 a month, New York’s rents are officially among the most expensive in the country. Between 2009 and 2018, the city added 500,000 jobs but only 100,000 new housing units. The profound shortage in rental units has forced the city’s residents to figure out their own ways to live affordably.

Ingrid Sletten, 68, was paired with Stacey Stormo, 37, through a nonprofit that helps older adults find roommates. They share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx and each pay $750.

Halima Muhammad, Sukanya Prasad, Ashleigh Genus and Prisca Hoffstaetter share a spacious four-bedroom apartment together on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Two of the roommates pay about $950 a month (and have their own bathrooms), while the other two pay about $890.

Rina Sah and her husband, Ajit Kumar Sah, share their two-bedroom apartment in Elmhurst, Queens, with Babita Khanal, whom they found through a Facebook group for the Nepali community in New York. Babita pays them $900 a month, lowering the couple’s share to only $1,200.

Kazi, Amzad, Eliyas and a fourth roommate are all recent Bangladeshi immigrants who share a basement apartment in East New York, Brooklyn. They pay a combined $1,600 and live two to a bedroom.

Alexandra Marzella has lived with more than 90 people over the last decade in a six-bedroom loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her five current roommates also share the space with her 2-year-old daughter, Earth, who was born in the apartment’s bathtub in 2020. Each roommate pays between $1,000 and $1,300 in rent each month, including utilities.

Things must be easier up in the frozen north, right? Maybe not… “Asylum Seekers Overwhelm Shelters In Portland, Maine” (ZeroHedge):

Guthrie, a hands-on, frontline worker in the effort to feed, clothe, and house a continuous flow of foreign nationals arriving in Portland by airplane or bus from the U.S. southern border, told The Epoch Times, “Our family shelter facilities, our warming room, and even area hotel space is at capacity. We have maxed out our community resources.

The Portland Family Shelter is a complex of four rented buildings in various states of renovation located in the heart of downtown.

Some of the structures are gradually being converted into small apartments where up to four families will share a single kitchen and bathroom.

To accommodate the stream of new arrivals, the family shelter program has in recent months placed 309 families (1,091 people) in eight hotels located in five neighboring municipalities spread over three counties of southeastern Maine’s prime tourist and vacation region.

The vast majority of the new arrivals at the family shelter in Portland have come from Angola and the Congo in Africa, with some coming from Haiti in the Caribbean.

“A new arrival tells Border Patrol ‘I am here to seek asylum. If I go back home, I will be killed. I fear for my life.’ That’s the difference between an asylum seeker and an immigrant,” he said.

Those three short sentences guarantee a person’s admission for a lengthy stay in the United States as his or her claim [why only two gender IDs for migrants?] is adjudicated.

Most are given cell phones.

The shelter provides families with three meals a day, prepared off-site by “community partners.”

According to Guthrie, the cost per motel room is between $250 and $350 dollars per night and rising as the tourist season begins.

“Pregnancy is the families’ most urgent medical concern, and their most pressing medical need is OBGYN (obstetrics and gynecology) care,” he said.

Speaking through an interpreter provided by the shelter, and in the presence of shelter director Guthrie, Samantha, a young Angolan woman with a 10-month-old baby on her hip and a toddler in tow, was not shy about sharing her dissatisfaction.

“We endured a seven-month journey to come to this! We are not happy. Conditions are not good! We really need help.”

When asked if she felt welcome, Samantha said with a look of disbelief, “No! I do not feel welcome. Look at us. We are outside.”

Landry, a housepainter and electrician’s helper, brought his wife Sylvie, two-year-old daughter, and 12-month-old son to Portland from the Congo. … Sylvie said, “We came from Texas unprepared for this Maine weather. I am not happy for how I am living here. I don’t feel welcome!”

Climate change can’t happen soon enough for these folks! (Free housing, health care, smartphone, and three meals per day cooked by paid do-gooders isn’t enough to make people “feel welcome” given typical Maine weather.)

Housing is fundamental. So maybe it is fair to say that the U.S. is becoming “Communist” at least with respect to communal apartments.

Related:

  • “How Refugees Transformed a Dying Rust Belt Town” (NYT, June 3, 2022); after all of the employable native-born residents flee the city’s high taxes, incompetent government, and spectacular public employee pension obligations, Utica, NY imports replacements who come with Federal tax dollars attached. (This is not, however, evidence that the disproved Great Replacement Theory is in any way correct.)
  • “She sought an affordable housing voucher in 1993. This Chicago alderman just reached the top of the waitlist.” (Chicago Tribune, June 7, 2022) “In one of the richest cities in the world, we ain’t got a money issue. There’s no political will to make sure people are housed,” Taylor said. … At the end of 2021, there were 170,000 families on waitlists for public housing and project-based housing, … Aguilar said that wait times can range from six months to 25 years. Most properties on a CHA website show expected wait times of 10 years or more. … “CHA currently has 47,000 Housing Choice Vouchers that it receives from the federal government. The number allotted has not increased in many years,” he said. New families will receive vouchers when families currently in the program stop using them.
  • Regarding Chicago… “This Land Was Promised for Housing. Instead It’s Going to a Pro Soccer Team Owned by a Billionaire.” (ProPublica): More than 30,000 people wait for homes from the Chicago Housing Authority. Meanwhile, a site that’s gone undeveloped for two decades is set to become a Chicago Fire practice facility.
Full post, including comments