Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Focusing on race and racism just makes the problem worse. (true or false?)

September 17, 2021March 6, 2023 by philg

A friend who works at Mass General Brigham, the largest non-government employer in Maskachusetts, was told that he/she/ze/they (to protect this person’s identify, I won’t specify gender ID) must complete anti-racism training in order to keep his/her/zir/their job:

One or two questions in, he/she/ze/they found the following screen as part of a pre-training screening questionnaire:

Suppose that he/she/ze/they believes it is true that “Focusing on race and racism just makes the problem worse”? It turns out that this is not merely a Deplorable opinion, but is factually incorrect:

What if the Deplorable employee persists in this heretical incorrect belief? The software will not allow him/her/zim/them to proceed to the next question or the rest of the training. In other words, the employee will be fired from his/her/zir/their job if he/she/ze/they refuses to acknowledge that “Focusing on race and racism just makes the problem worse” is false.

Vaguely related… “More Medical Boards Warn Against Spreading COVID Vax Falsehoods” (MedPage Today):

The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) and American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) issued a joint statement Thursday supporting the Federation of State Medical Boards, which warned physicians in early August that their licenses could be taken away or otherwise sanctioned by state boards if they disseminated misinformation about the COVID vaccines.

Baron explained that pediatricians publicly saying that vaccines are unsafe for kids is one reason why the boards came together to issue this statement. “That’s a real problem,” he said.

A doctor could be excommunicated if he/she/ze/they doesn’t hide his/her/zir/their copies of English newspapers, e.g., “Teenage boys more at risk from vaccines than Covid” (Telegraph (UK)): “Young males are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems after being jabbed than be hospitalised from coronavirus, study finds”, and “Scientists not backing Covid jabs for 12 to 15-year-olds” (BBC, 9/3/2021).

Not only does a doctor have to follow science in order to keep his/her/zir/their job, but he/she/ze/they must follow American science rather than British science.

Update: My work-from-home friend was ultimately fired for refusing to accept the latest COVID-19 booster shot. See New York Times considers a forbidden point of view on diversity training.

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Waddling back to school: how much did we fatten up our kids via lockdown?

September 17, 2021September 17, 2021 by philg

Lockdowns and school closures were advertised as being for the protection of children (as are the current measures limiting kids’ activities). How did Americans do in terms of protecting children from a virus that attacks the fat? “Steep BMI Increase for Kids, Teens During the Pandemic — Largest increases were among children with overweight/obesity” (MedPage Today, 9/16/2021):

Kids and teens’ rate of body mass index (BMI) increase almost doubled during the pandemic compared with prior years, and the percentage with obesity also increased, researchers found.
Among those ages 2 to 19 years, the monthly BMI increase rose from 0.052 (January 2018-February 2020) to 0.100 (March 2020-November 2020), reported Samantha Lange, MPH, of the CDC, and colleagues.
Moreover, the estimated proportion of those with obesity rose from 19.3% in August 2019 to 22.4% in August 2020, the authors wrote in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Do the credentialed geniuses at the CDC recommend fully reopening activities for children, encouraging them to participate by not requiring masks, etc.? Of course not!

“These efforts could include screening for BMI, food security, and other social determinants of health by health care providers; increased access to evidence-based pediatric weight management programs and food assistance resources; and state, community, and school efforts to facilitate healthy eating, physical activity, and chronic disease prevention,” Lange and co-authors wrote.

Why let kids in the frozen Northeast do indoor sports without masks this winter when instead they could be encouraged to consume more services from “health care providers”?

their parents are also fat: “How Much Weight Did We Gain During Lockdowns? 2 Pounds a Month, Study Hints” (nytimes, March 22, 2021)

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Ring cameras sold out; collapse of civilization expected?

September 16, 2021September 15, 2021 by philg

We wanted to get a Ring camera for our apartment in Florida. The crime rate in this neighborhood is low, but we have our golden retriever to protect! How worried about crime are Americans? The Ring indoor cam is back-ordered 7-9 weeks:

No problem then. Just pay extra for the indoor/outdoor version:

Unless the apocalypse is nigh, why are security cameras sold out?

What home security cameras for impending collapse of Massachusetts? (April 2020)

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Should we start a matchmaking service between Afghan migrant men and daughters of the righteous?

September 16, 2021September 6, 2021 by philg

Photos below of a church in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the nation’s wealthiest neighborhoods (thank you, Big Government!). We learn the preferred pronouns of the minister. Also that Kara Scroggins prefers not to work in person. Worship is via Zoom and YouTube (but there will be growth in the spring and perhaps then, when all is well in the garden, in-person gatherings can resume after a two-year hiatus?

We also learn that the parishioners want us to welcome Afghan refugees, noting that Jesus him/her/zir/theirself was a child refugee (the gender ID of the historical Jesus is unknown; note that the refugee flight into Egypt is “regarded doubtfully by modern scholars”).

Most of the migrants from Afghanistan are men (source), presumably reasonably young and fit since they were the ones who made it to the airport (“Inside the Afghan Evacuation: Rogue Flights, Crowded Tents, Hope and Chaos” (NYT)). Unless these guys want to be celibate, they will need to marry:

Pre-marital sex is absolutely forbidden in Islam, no matter whether it is with a girl-friend or a prostitute. Pre-marital sex is fornication (zina).

They can’t marry Afghan migrant women because the migrant population is now overwhelmingly male. They can’t marry each other in a beautiful rainbow ceremony because homosexual acts are forbidden by Islamic law:

One way of fulfilling the sexual urge which is now becoming acceptable in the Western world is sexual relations between members of the same sex: homosexuality (which by definition includes lesbianism). By saying that it is becoming acceptable in liberal societies I do not mean to say that homosexuality is a 20th century phenomenon; no, not at all.
But there is one big difference between the past and the present: in the past, homosexuality was considered a perverted sexual behavior whereas now it is being labeled as ‘natural’ and as a result of ‘inborn tendency’!
So we see that as far as the Qur’an is concerned, homosexuality is an “indecency,” and that Allah had destroyed a whole nation because of this indecent sexual behavior.
In the Islamic legal system, homosexuality is a punishable crime against the laws of God. In the case of homosexuality between two males, the active partner is to be lashed a hundred times if he is unmarried and killed if he is married; whereas the passive partner is to be killed regardless of his marital status.

Under Islamic law, therefore, they will need to find people who identify as “women” to marry. A lack of integration of Afghanistan into the world air travel network might make it tough for single male refugees to exfiltrate women from the old country (as Syed Rizwan Farook did when he brought Tashfeen Malik over). The simplest solution, therefore, would be women who are already present in the U.S.

Afghan immigrants tend to be the lowest-income migrants in the U.S. (“Challenges to the economic integration of Afghan refugees in the U.S.”). American women are already rejecting median-income American men as not having sufficient income to be desirable (see “Are There Not Enough Men Worth Marrying?” Psychology Today, 9/10/2019; note that, in many states, having sex with an already-married high-income man pays better than a long-term marriage to a medium-income man, so marriage is not an economically rational strategy for a typical woman seeking to maximize her spending power). If native-born American men don’t earn enough for women to want to marry them, what hope is there for a low-skill Afghan migrant?

This is where there is opportunity for our new nonprofit organization. There are righteous Americans, e.g., the parishioners of the North Bethesda United Methodist Church, who say that they want to help Afghan migrants. Presumably, therefore, they’d be delighted to see their daughters going out on dates with, and ultimately marrying, the guys for whom they are praying. We can help facilitate. We could help the guys write their Tinder profiles. We could fund a speed dating night at the North Bethesda United Methodist Church for Afghan migrants and daughters of churchgoers. We could pay for first dates. We could offer to fund a trousseau of burqas for any American Christian woman who decides to marry a migrant and chooses to adhere to her husband’s family’s notions of feminine modesty. We could provide a bride price, using funds raised by Uber and other righteous organizations, in which the woman gets paid the difference between what her Afghan migrant husband earns and what she would have obtained in child support if she’d popped a Clomid and had sex with a married dentist.

Readers: What should this bridge between two cultures be called?

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Taking away guns from people who work in health care and/or for larger employers

September 15, 2021September 12, 2021 by philg

Dr. Joe Biden, M.D., Ph.D., has read all of the papers and looked at the data and made a science-informed decision to order anyone who wants to keep working in a Medicare/Medicaid-funded health care business (i.e., everyone in American health care) to get vaccinated against the coronavirus version that existed in December 2019. Unless they want to transition to the disability lifestyle (“my long COVID is acting up”), employees at companies with at least 100 employees will also have to get vaccinated against this two-year-old virus under OSHA emergency rules.

Via this order, COVID-19 will be in full retreat. What’s next for this selfless hero of public health? How about bold action against gun ownership? “‘Something has to be done’: After decades of near-silence from the CDC, the agency’s director is speaking up about gun violence” (CNN, August 28, 2021):

For the first time in decades, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the nation’s top public health agency — is speaking out forcefully about gun violence in America, calling it a “serious public health threat.”
“Something has to be done about this,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “Now is the time — it’s pedal to the metal time.”
This summer alone has seen a spree of gun injuries and deaths, and the weekends have been especially violent, with an average of 200 people killed and 472 injured by guns each weekend in the United States, not including suicides, according to an analysis done by the Gun Violence Archive for CNN. That’s nearly 3.4 people shot every hour every weekend.
In April, President Joe Biden said the country was facing “a gun violence public health epidemic,” but the CDC hasn’t said how it plans to address the epidemic until now.

(I trust and expect that the aforementioned weekend shooters were following all local mask mandates when on their sprees.)

If vaccines can be ordered by the President/Physician-in-Chief as a condition of employment, why not giving up gun ownership? If nobody with a job has a gun, then by definition there can’t be any workplace gun violence (examples: San Bernardino 2015 attack, in which 14 were killed and 22 injured; 2009 Fort Hood shooting, in which 13 were killed and 30 injured).

Just as President Biden’s order on vaccines won’t reach every American (since many of us wisely decided to choose disability or unwisely decided to work for a small company) and therefore won’t end the pandemic overnight, the above-proposed order from President Biden on gun violence won’t end all gun violence, but I hope that everyone can agree that it would be a positive step forward for our nation or, at least, that if President Biden has the authority to end anti-vax violence in the workplace then he has the authority to end gun violence in the workplace.

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Is high school LGBQTIA+-ism regional?

September 15, 2021September 15, 2021 by philg

Messages from a suburban Massachusetts friend to a group chat:

Philip, you were right to move out of here
I just got into my daughter’s phone to read what she and her friends are talking about
Friend: Guess what happened to day. G told me that M is bisexual and went on a date with R. G also said that she thought I was bisexual and had a crush on me in 6th grade
[Daughter]: No way. Not M. Can’t believe it.
Friend: Why is everyone bisexual now? We are literally the only ones left. I want more straight friends.
[Daughter]: Me too. Nothing against LGBTQ people, but they talk about being LGBTQ all the time.

Another participant pointed out that maybe the identification as LGBTQIA+ is helpful/necessary to get into elite colleges. He referenced Harvard Law School, at which 17 percent of students are LGBTQIA+:

(Exercise for readers: See if you can walk around the campus and identify the “47% students of color”!)

“More Harvard, Yale freshmen identify as LGBTQ than as conservative, surveys find” (NBC, 2018):

Approximately 20 percent of first-year students at Harvard and Yale identify as something other than heterosexual.

Unless fully 20 percent of high school students identify as “other than heterosexual,” being non-hetero is advantageous in being admitted to Harvard and Yale.

Back to the heroine of our story… The daughter in the above chat session attends a public high school in a prosperous, but not crazy rich, suburban Boston town.

[How about middle schoolers? A local 8th grader came home and said that she’d been assigned to interview a parent regarding their attitudes toward the rainbow religion. The father, despite being a passionate Trump-hater and reliable voter for Democrats, failed all five questions in the daughter’s estimation. She then reported his attitudes regarding the official government religion to a government employee. I noted that the government had previously used schoolchildren to rat out parents for using drugs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education#Use_of_children_as_informants ). The 8th grade girl’s take-away? “I think they’re trying to convince us to become gay because they’re always talking about how great it is.”]

Readers: Is the prevalence of high school students identifying as LGBTQIA+ a regional variable, as this father supposes? Would a young scholar in a suburb of Tampa, Albuquerque, or Chicago be just as likely to identify as LGBTQIA+ as his/her/zir/their counterpart in the Boston suburbs?

“Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics” (Psychological Perspectives, 2017): … we appear to be experiencing a significant psychic epidemic that is manifesting as children and young people coming to believe that they are the opposite sex, and in some cases taking drastic measures to change their bodies. Of particular concern to the author is the number of teens and tweens suddenly coming out as transgender without a prior history of discomfort with their sex. “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria” is a new presentation of a condition that has not been well studied. Reports online indicate that a young person’s coming out as transgender is often preceded by increased social media use and/or having one or more peers also come out as transgender. These factors suggest that social contagion may be contributing to the significant rise in the number of young people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria.

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California governor recall results: Now we know how many Americans love to be locked down?

September 15, 2021 by philg

When friends who don’t follow #Science (most have MDs and/or PhDs) ask why U.S. state governors (except for the infidels in South Dakota and Florida) have generally ordered lockdowns, masks, and other measures that were considered useless against respiratory viruses through 2019, my standard answer is “They’re politicians so the best answer is that they’re doing what voters want them to do. If governors order people to wrap a saliva-soaked bandana around their mouths as a disease preventive, we can infer that the majority of Americans want governors to order bandanas.” (A European friend: “The sheep demand a shepherd.”)

Is it fair to say that the result of the referendum on keeping lock-down-the-peasants-while-dining-with-friends Gavin Newsom (66 percent in favor) tells us the percentage of Americans who want and/or need governor-directed lockdowns?

“Gavin Newsom used threat of COVID, Larry Elder to defeat recall” (Sacramento Bee): His ads hammered home that Republicans seeking to replace him opposed vaccine requirements he imposed for school staff and health workers. He pointed out that they promised to rescind the mandates.
“Voters supported the California governor’s efforts to mitigate the pandemic, according to exit poll results.” (NBC): “We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines,” Newsom said in brief remarks at a news conference. “We said yes to ending his pandemic. We said yes to people’s right to vote without fear. We said yes to women’s constitutional right to decide.” But Newsom ended up making his support for mask and vaccine mandates the closing argument of his campaign, warning that a Republican replacement would undo his health restrictions if elected.

To extrapolate these numbers to the U.S., of course, we’d have to adjust for Democrat/Republican percentages. Presidents Biden and Harris won 63.5 percent of Californians’ votes in 2020. So we can presume that, in any given state, the percentage of people who want to be locked down is roughly 3 percentage points more than the percentage who voted for Biden/Harris.

(What have been the effects of California’s 1.5 years of lockdown, school closure, mask orders, etc.? On the leaderboard of states by COVID-19-tagged death rate, California has turned in a middling performance, with about 1,700 deaths per million (170). That’s a worse performance than “do almost nothing because the virus won’t care” Sweden (1,429 per million). Beach-closed schools-closed California has a 25 percent lower unadjusted-for-age death rate than no-mask-order, bars-open, indoor everything open, schools-open Florida, portrayed currently in the media as the Land of Certain COVID-19 Death (12/50 in the state-by-state ranking, with roughly 2,270 deaths per million). That’s success, right, since we’re measuring overall success of a society by a single number (COVID-19 death rate) and 1,700 is less than 2,270? Actually, if we look at the over-65 population that COVID-19 tends to kill, California has a higher death rate than Florida’s. California is one of the youngest states in the country, with just 14 percent of its population over 65. Florida is the second oldest (not in our Abacoa neighborhood though!), with 20.5 percent of the population over 65. But neither the governor nor the media is not going to perform this adjustment (nor adjust for opioid addiction, alcoholism, weight gain in quarantine, reduced life expectancy from reduced education, reduced life expectancy from long-term unemployment, etc.) and therefore Californians will continue to believe that their governor’s suspension of what had been their rights (e.g., to gather, to have children educated, to walk outside without a mask, to go to the beach or the park) “saved lives”.)

Los Angeles, end of February 2020, almost the last day when Californians were free to walk outside their apartments, unmasked, and go to school or work without checking to see what the governor might have ordered. This homeless encampment is across from the lavish new Federal courthouse. The prediction on February 28, 2020? “Good Things Are Coming!” (schools for city children closed on March 16, 2020 and didn’t full reopen until August 16, 2021).

And let’s not forget, in the Land of Big Hearts (TM), the homeless encampment across the street from the homeless encampment:

Readers: Can we agree that a vote for Newsom was a vote for lockdown?

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Disability lifestyle getting more attractive under Biden?

September 14, 2021September 10, 2021 by philg

I’m wondering if we should expect a massive increase in the number of Americans who transition to the disability lifestyle during the Biden administration.

Let’s consider today’s world of work. Unless remote, the worker will be exposed to variant coronavirus that laughs at our feeble vaccines. The worker may need to wear a mask for 8 hours per day. The worker will be forced to accept whatever injections Dr. Joe Biden, M.D., Ph.D. orders, according to “Sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans” (AP):

In his most forceful pandemic actions and words, President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered sweeping new federal vaccine requirements for as many as 100 million Americans — private-sector employees as well as health care workers and federal contractors — in an all-out effort to curb the surging COVID-19 delta variant.
Speaking at the White House, Biden sharply criticized the tens of millions of Americans who are not yet vaccinated, despite months of availability and incentives.
“We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” he said, all but biting off his words. The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are.”
The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.
Biden is also requiring vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government — with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.
Biden announced the new requirements in a Thursday afternoon address from the White House as part of a new “action plan” to address the latest rise in coronavirus cases and the stagnating pace of COVID-19 shots.

LCD or e-ink screen instead of grille for the front of electric cars?

September 14, 2021September 14, 2021 by philg

Electric cars don’t need a cooling airflow from the front, thus rendering grilles superfluous. The Tesla 3 has a flat nose and a slab where you’d expect the grille:

Some competitors have figured out more aesthetic solutions. The Kia EV6 replaces the traditional gasoline-car grille with… multiple grilles:

Here’s a Mercedes concept, suitable for Burning Man:

Could we find a more interesting use of this space? With an LCD or e-ink screen, the car could have different personalities at different times of day or for different drivers. The e-ink approach would consume much less battery power, of course.

A Maskachusetts driver could, for example, mirror the state-run highway signs that urge motorists to get vaccinated (but there are no vaccine clinics at the state-run highway rest stops). Alternatively, he/she/ze/they could turn the car nose into an extension of his/her/zir/their lawn. The nose display could read “Black Lives Matter” and then change automatically to “#StopAsianHate” if a gold Lexus were approaching. A Floridian, unable to choose among the 100+ specialty plates available, could rotate among the designs (no front license plate is actually required in Florida, but many of these are fun designs, especially if the mournful “save the…” messages were removed):

(Why do people want to concentrate on the negative? Wouldn’t it be just as effective to say “Celebrate Our Seas” as “Save Our Seas”? To say “Manatee Friends” rather than “Save the Manatee”? Why does the sea turtle plate need a written message at all? People who see the plate will be reminded that Florida is home to sea turtles and to respect their nesting sites.)

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Can the Taliban get Western do-gooders to fund their entire government?

September 14, 2021 by philg

“UN Afghanistan donor conference raises $1 billion with crisis looming” (DW):

The UN says humanitarian aid money would go to maintain medical services, the water supply and sanitation for millions of Afghans. Additionally, funding would support women and children and set up educational projects.

Forty government ministers, including German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, as well as dozens of government representatives are attending both in person and virtually.
The German foreign minister said it was up to the international community to “take responsibility” for the people in Afghanistan.

In other words, so long as the Talibans don’t make the mistake of allocating money to health care, clean water, sewage, education, or “women and children,” Westerners will fund all of these functions of the modern welfare state. The Taliban can spend 100 percent of tax revenue on their military, police, and other tools for remaining in power.

The population of Afghanistan doubled from 20 to 40 million while the country was getting U.S. cash infusions. Over the next 20 years, therefore, so long as the steady flow of German money continues, it seems reasonable to expect that the population will double again, to 80 million (current total fertility rate is 4.72 children per woman; compare to 1.84 in the U.S. (our population still grows steadily, however, due to low-skill immigration)). Afghanistan would then have about the same population as Germany and, essentially, every German would have a corresponding Afghan dependent. Assuming the German-funded schools for Afghanistan result in mass literacy, will it be time to set up a penpal program? (After 20 years of U.S. rule, the adult literacy rate in Afghanistan is 43 percent (CIA).)

Even if the Germans send all of their money to the Taliban, they’ll still have a beautiful beach to enjoy…. fleece jacket weather in August 2016, Warnemünde:

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