The High IQ Party (TM) processes their loss (conclusion: Americans are even dumber than Democrats imagined)

by philg

In recent conversations with Democrats in California, New York, D.C., and Maskachusetts they’ve volunteered their feelings regarding the High IQ Party’s recent loss of power. I’ve also checked out their Facebook and X feeds.

Typical and eloquent: “What’s WRONG with Americans?” The poster owns a $2.1 million home in Berkeley, California, holds a taxpayer-funded job that requires a master’s degree, has a husband who earns money at a technical job, has a nonbinary child (1 out of 2, I think, so only a 50 percent rate of identification with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community), and is passionate about cats and foster kittens. She will never compete with a low-skill migrant for a job nor an apartment for rent. I responded by pointing out that low-skill immigration is economically harmful to the working class, citing a Harvard study that is consistent with Econ 101 (albeit inconsistent with the Democrat Religion in which Our Lady of Open Borders performs miracles of raising wages and lowering rent every time a migrant walks across), and therefore another explanation was that some American voters are differently situated than she is. She and her friends doubled down on how the only reasonable explanation for a Republican vote was stupidity and/or immorality. I cited the example of my mother’s Haitian aide who voted for Trump. Did the white Berkeley Righteous want to say that there was something wrong with this Black immigrant? Answer: defriending. (Just like when my friend’s daughter asked the “male feminist” (button) social studies teacher in Lincoln, Maskachusetts why companies didn’t hire only women in order to earn higher profits after the teacher asserted that women do the same jobs as men for 80 percent of the salary. Answer: Detention!)

Part of a subsequent text-message exchange with a friend who was part of the Facebook conversation:

I think this is an example of how Democrats failed to understand that peasant Americans might be turning against them. Democrats live in bubbles where they almost never interact with anyone who disagrees with them or where disagreeing with the Democrat dogma is punished so severely that dissenters stay quiet. 

If California ever finishes counting its ballots (slower pace than Ron DeSantis restoring power after Hurricane Milton!) we will likely find that there are some Trump voters even in Berkeley. But they are never going to put out a lawn sign or mention their Love that Dare Not Speak its Name in casual conversation.

The result is an asymmetry. The working class understands [let’s call her Nina] and her point of view as a homeowner and holder of a job that requires an advanced degree that undocumented migrants and their descendants are unlikely to ever earn. But Nina will never understand the working class.

(This reminds me of what a wise gringa in Corcovado, Costa Rica said about parrots: “They understand our language, but we don’t understand theirs.”)

Here’s a typical Democrat on X highlighting “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” (Democrat-run The New Republic), which points out that a majority of Americans were apparently fooled by lies in “right-wing media”. As Democrats were not fooled, that makes non-Democrats… stupid.

My mom recently had lunch with a Radcliffe ’55 classmate. The 90-year-olds, both in poor health, talked about their fears of an impending Trump dictatorship. My mom’s friend heaped derision on the Americans who had voted “against their interests” for Trump. She expressed sorrow that would-be-Assassin #1 hadn’t killed Trump. I successfully refrained from pointing out that a change of government in D.C. isn’t the biggest risk faced by a typical 90-year-old.

It’s interesting that that Democrats claim to be the Party of Empathy, a quality in which all Republicans are sorely lacking, and can’t put themselves in the shoes of a working class American for even a few seconds. On a recent Uber ride from Stuart, Florida back home the driver was an immigrant from Colombia who had voted for Trump in hopes that further low-skill immigration would be curtailed. Having never tried to make a living as an Uber driver, I don’t think any of my friends could fathom the man’s desire to not see the labor market flooded with new arrivals. Nor would they understand why he doesn’t want to pay higher taxes and/or receive fewer government services so that college graduates can fly to Europe instead of paying back their student loans.

Here’s a beautiful one. An election prophet says that his/her/zir/their prophecy of a Kamala-Tampon Tim victory did not come true because the electorate was irrational (i.e., stupid) and misled by misinformation/disinformation spread by Elon Musk.

Surveying X, we find the old reliable explanation for why not everyone supports Democrats:

(If a Trump dictatorship is all about misogyny that raises the question of why there wasn’t/isn’t more solidarity among the sisterhood. As in 2016, the Trump 2024 campaign manager identified as a woman (she’ll now be his Chief of Staff). A Representative who identifies as a woman just agreed to be Trump’s UN Ambassador. Why are people who identify as “women” helping Donald Trump against the interests of those who share their gender ID?)

Readers: What are you hearing from your Democrat friends? As noted above, mine are saying that they knew tens of millions Americans were stupid and easily fooled by Fox News and similar, but they made a mistake in underestimating the number of stupid Americans.

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The dual fantasy worlds of Republicans and Democrats

by philg

As we celebrate National Pickle Day, let’s look at a 63-year-old Democrat who expects, absent dramatic birth control measures, to become pregnant and crave pickles and ice cream. In the video below, she discusses a first person possibility of being a customer for IVF and abortion care as well:

Julia Louis-Dreyfus has reached the age of a great-grandmother in most human societies, but imagines that she could get pregnant and give birth (the Guinness Book of World Records age for this feat is 59) and also that someone other than a gerontologist is interested in her reproductive system. (The post and video above originally a tweet on JL-D’s official X account, but apparently it was deleted or restricted so that only non-Deplorables/non-Garbage can see it.)

What’s the corresponding fantasy world for Republicans? Deporting undocumented criminals:

“There’s about 4.5 million who would be the first priority for that, people who’ve already committed crimes,” Johnson (R-La.) said Thursday. “They’re in the system now [for] shoplifting, or whatever it is … or [having] done things that are untoward or unlawful.”

This politician imagines that there is a country (or countries) out there, other than the U.S., that is dumb enough to take in 4.5 million folks who’ve been adjudicated criminals. Note that criminality is heritable, so if a country takes in a criminal it will be on track to have additional criminals in the future. (Also remember that nobody can agree on how many of the undocumented are currently enriching us with their presence: “Yale Study Finds Twice as Many Undocumented Immigrants as Previous Estimates” (2018); the estimate of 11 million seems to have been in use by mainstream media for 20+ years, even as the same publications report on floods of new arrivals.)

I think the 63-year-old’s fear of getting pregnant and not being able to secure abortion care might be more reasonable than the Republican expectation of being able to dump migrant criminals on some other nation!

So the good news is that the two parties will be back to governing soon, now that the election drama is mostly over. The bad news is that both parties seem to be living in fantasy worlds of their own creation!

In case the above Instagram post is memory-holed…

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Parachute and rocket replacement option for Cirrus owners who love Disney and Harry Potter

by philg

It’s the 13th of the month so let’s talk about some equipment that you’d have to be unlikely to need…

Cirrus airplanes need new rockets and parachutes every 10 years whether they’ve been living on the ramp in Texas or coddled in a climate-controlled hangar. The typical service center can’t do this work. In the southeast, the conventional choice has been to take the airplane to Atlanta where a couple of highly regarded shops have extensive experience with CAPS replacement (see DLK/Avias and Romanair, for example). This post is about a potentially more convenient/fun option: the Cirrus-owned factory service center in Orlando, Florida (Kissimmee, actually; KISM).

Our SR20-G2 is coming up on its 20th anniversary and, thus, without a new parachute/rocket it would have become illegal to fly starting in January 2025 (maybe all private planes will become illegal to fly in Jan 2025 if my Democrat friends were correct in predicting a dictatorship if Donald Trump were elected; a dictator wouldn’t want people flying around VFR, certainly, with no government tracking).

One advantage for the factory shop is that they may have the inside track on getting the rockets and ‘chutes. Others have reported planes being grounded for 6 months as these parts failed to arrive sooner than 9 months after being ordered. Assuming that Cirrus does eventually sort out its supply chain, a persistent advantage for the Orlando shop is that it is in Orlando. A Cirrus owner can load up his/her/zir/their family and arrive in Kissimmee on Monday, visit Disney, Universal, the cathedral, etc., and fly away on Friday (I arrived on Monday at noon and the plane was completed on Thursday).

Note that Cirrus offers a ferry pilot service if you want the plane picked up or dropped off, but they have very few pilots who are qualified to fly the old Avidyne planes.

The factory service center is mostly there for Vision Jet owners, I think, and it is tough to get an estimate and make a reservation (there is a “concierge” who never seems to be available), but once organized and confirmed everything is jet-smooth. Enterprise rental car is there on the field at Signature so it is easy to do a one-way car rental if you’re based elsewhere within Florida and don’t need a week of Orlando.

What about the price? It seems to be roughly the same as having the work done at an independent service center with CAPS authorization, i.e., about $20,000 (it was $12,000 ten years ago). Speaking of our inflation-free economy, when the Cirrus maintenance manager mentioned proudly that the company was spending $15 million on an under-construction facility at the airport, I responded “That sounds great, but $15 million might soon be the price of a Diet Coke.”

I enjoyed spending Christmas (on November 9, 2024) at Disney Springs as part of my Cirrus retrieval experience:

Kissimmee itself is famous for understatement and elegance:

(See also Kissimmee’s Monument of States)

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Why isn’t the Ring camera smart enough to notice that a garage door has been left open?

by philg

We live in the glorious age of AI. Here in our concrete block hurricane-resistant fortress we have a Ring camera in the back of the garage pointed at the door. It’s called “Garage” in the Ring app. Why isn’t it smart enough to wake up once every 30 minutes and, if appropriate, notify us that the garage door has been left open for half an hour? That doesn’t seem like a huge ask of our future robot overlords.

There’s an “AI” company here in Palm Beach County called Levatas that claims to be able to do stuff like this. Amazon/Ring presumably also has plenty of smart programmers. They claim to have delivered AI recently. Why haven’t they done the basics?

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Stuart Air Show 2024

by philg

In honor of Veterans Day, a few snapshots from this year’s Stuart (Florida) Air Show…

First, let’s see what can be done with the latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max. The “5X” lens (120mm-equivalent) works out reasonably well for very large aircraft and for formation/smoke displays:

Things quickly get pixelated with cropping:

How about using the Canon 800/11 lens profiled previously here for air show work? Here’s the heritage flight:

Maybe one of the positive things that will come out of the Election 2024 Nakba is that Donald Trump will bring back the A-10 Warthog:

Mike Goulian (yellow) and his former protégé Rob Holland (red/Black) were there. The 800mm lens is actually too short for these tiny planes unless one gets (white?) privileged access to a press stand. Heavily cropped:

Every glider needs two jet engines, according to Bob Carlton (the “Foxjet” pilot):

Getting back to the machines that impress everyone except the Houthis… the F-22 (see this lecture about F-22 fly-by-wire from our MIT class).

How about a show version of the F-16?

(If Greta Thunberg hadn’t been busy with a Queers for Palestine rally she would have no doubt objected both to the gratuitous waste of Jet A fuel and the fact that the F-16 is the workhorse of Israel’s air force.)

How about some relics of the old days when the objective in war was to actually win? P-51, T-28, and MiG 17:

Let’s finish with Nathan Hammond, whose night airshow performance is always the highlight of Oshkosh, and Bill Stein:

The Stuart airport (KSUA) is about to get a huge boost from the Trump Dictatorship v2.0. Any time that Trump spends at Mar-a-Lago the PBI airport will become painful to use. The (fuel-selling) FBOs at PBI will be as angry on January 20, 2025 as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

Separately, seeing all of this military hardware makes me wonder what our military is for. If our borders our open then any enemy can order its troops to walk across our southern border and then attack the U.S. from the inside. That said, I am impressed with the bravery of every veteran who has flown a military aircraft, in which there are usually plenty of ways to get killed without enemy involvement.

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California vote counting vs. Florida post-hurricane power restoration

by philg

It’s five full days (about 120 hours) after the Election 2024 Nakba. The folks in California who say that they know how governments should operate have counted 72 percent of their presidential ballots (New York Times):

Let’s compare this to the numbers in Power restoration after Hurricane Milton. Recall that Milton was a Category 3 storm that hit Sarasota, St. Pete, and Tampa, knocking out power to 4 million “customers” (a household of 3 people would be just one customer). I didn’t stay organized to capture a number for how many were still out exactly five days after the hurricane made landfall, but four days afterward roughly 500,000 customers were still out, which means that more than 87 percent had been restored. Six days following landfall, roughly 190,000 customers were out from the original 4 million affected.

So.. Ron DeSantis-led Florida restored power after a Category 3 hurricane at a much faster pace than California has been able to count votes. (Florida also did count votes, but there aren’t any interesting statistics from that process because it took just a few hours.)

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The fascist dictatorship looms, but Democrats expect to overpower it in 2026

by philg

Friends on Facebook who have posted for 6-9 months about how the election of Trump v2.0 would mean the end of American democracy are now posting about how they expect to retake the U.S. in 2026 and 2028 via selecting candidates who aren’t as brain dead as Biden-Harris-Walz.

The mind of the typical Democrat seems to be summed up in this tweet from Kerry Kennedy, sibling of the traitor RFK, Jr.:

Yesterday was a bad day for our country, for our democracy, for our economy, for our party, for our family, and for ourselves. I’ve lived through 15 presidential elections, and this is not different because it is amplified or more extreme, but because it is fundamentally different. We are facing an incoming president and administration that have developed multiple, detailed plans for a fascist takeover of every department of the federal government. … But I’ve felt beat down before. And despite all of this, I’m confident we will survive. … We have two years until midterms, when we can make a comeback.

Donald Trump will be a dictator. As commander of the U.S. military, the FBI, etc. he will have practical powers to implement a police state that previous dictators worldwide could never have dreamed of. Yet at the same time, there is no doubt that free and fair elections will be held in 2026 and 2028 during which time Democrats can regain power.

(Separately, Democrats tell us that intelligence, conscientiousness, and criminality aren’t heritable. Thus, there is no reason to expect children of the unsuccessful to be unsuccessful themselves and any lack of success must be attributed to racism, xenophobia, etc. At the same time, political wisdom is heritable, which is why we should listen to advice from children of famous Democrats.)

Speaking of the Democrat mind, let’s check out what their thought leaders have had to say. AOC in 2021 wanted to “end minority rule … end the filibuster, expand the court” to “protect our democracy”:

Here’s one from Ilhan Omar in which she would “save our democracy” by abolishing the filibuster and also making sure that whoever won the popular vote would be the new dictator:

CNN on the popular vote:

Rashida Tlaib agreed that the minority party in the Senate should be stripped of all power and whoever happens to be in the White House should appoint 4,8,12, or however many more additional Supreme Court Justices are necessary for Justice:

Will these wise females, all of whom were wisely reelected by their constituents, spend 2025 working toward expanding the Supreme Court and abolishing the filibuster?

How about the “thought followers”, i.e., my friends in the Northeast and California who do and think whatever the New York Times tells them (e.g., “Biden is not senile”; “be enthusiastic for Kamala now”). One Trump alarmist said that the peasants should now “organize” (how many dictatorships have been overturned by a peasant rebellion?). A Manhattan-based doomsayer:

Which brings us to 2016, the last time I felt the way I feel this morning. Nearly all the polls predicted Hillary Clinton would beat Trump to become the first woman president. … hopefully the Democrats will analyze and learn something from this experience and put forth stronger candidates in the future.

The people who said that 2024 would be the last election in the U.S. if Trump were elected now say that they’ll offer “stronger candidates in the future”. Stronger candidates for what? Student council presidency? HOA board membership? The smartest people in America told us that there wouldn’t be additional elections for the House, Senate, or White House in the event of a Nakba (Trump victory).

Related:

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Getting into law school: Go to the most grade-inflated college you can find and cram constantly for the LSAT

by philg

College application season is upon us. A tip from a brilliant young litigator with whom I recently worked (as a software expert witness, not in the law mines themselves!)… “Rankings of law schools look at undergraduate GPA and median LSAT score and, therefore, law school admissions look at the applicant’s GPA and LSAT score.” What’s his practical advice? “They don’t adjust the GPA for how rigorous your undergrad school was. You’re better off going to community college or majoring in ‘studies’ at Harvard than going through an undergrad program where you’d have some chance of getting a B.”

If the undergrad program is so undemanding that straight As are guaranteed, how should the prospective lawyer spend his/her/zir/their time? Cramming for the LSATs! Imagine working with those prep books and prep classes starting the summer before freshman year of undergraduate!

Despite the young lawyer’s mention of Harvard, it turns out to be only America’s #3 college for grade inflation. The school with the highest average GPA is Brown. (source) Of course, for either school the 18-year-old should be sure to pack a keffiyeh and Queers for Palestine banner (also useful once the scholar arrives at the elite law school; see the recent Instagram post by Berkeley Law students regarding the “Palestinian Genocide” (exacerbated by one of the world’s highest rates of population growth)).

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Escape jury duty with a positive COVID test result?

by philg

I recently testified as an expert witness at a trial where the judge told prospective jurors to expect 4-6 weeks of service during which they’d be hearing about dull technical subjects. One lady mentioned a vacation that she’d booked and paid for prior to being summoned. She had receipts for her airline tickets. I was 100 percent sure that she’d be excused. Of course, I was dead wrong. Speaking of dead, though, what stops a juror from developing COVID after a few days of what promises to be an interminable trial? If the court (a government agency) adheres to the CDC religion (from another government agency) and allows the juror to stay home for five days, he/she/ze/they misses five days of testimony and therefore must be excused in favor of an alternate. After the five days of quarantine-at-home are over, the juror embarks on the paid-for-and-planned vacation.

From a malingerer’s point of view, the era of coronapanic is an ideal one (for jury duty and anything else, e.g., the in-laws’ in-laws’ wedding). He/she/ze/they can say “I drove to CVS, donned a sacred Fauci-approved mask, bought an at-home test kit, used it in my car in the parking lot, noted the positive result, and threw out the contaminated materials in the CVS sidewalk trash can so as not to bring a biohazard home.” The surveillance video, if pulled, and credit card records would confirm the story. If an investigator camps outside the purported COVID victim’s house and makes a video of the victim being apparently healthy that only reinforces the #AbudanceOfCaution displayed by the juror.

Given how easy it is to spin this kind of yarn, how is it possible to keep a jury together for more than a week or so? If your answer is “most people are honest,” I invite you to look at the $123 billion in coronapanic fraud that was taken out of taxpayers’ pockets (state-sponsored PBS). One attorney with whom I spoke says that juries stay together week after week because they develop the same kind of bond as soldiers in a war or disaster victims.

Note that, in the below graphic from the Church of Fauci, “your symptoms are getting better” is entirely subjective and impossible for anyone else to falsify (fatigue and headache, for example, are on the official CDC list of COVID symptoms).

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My mom’s aide ain’t Black and ain’t an immigrant

by philg

I decided to conduct a Scientific poll this evening around our kitchen table. My mom is 90 and came over from assisted living accompanied by an aide. The aide is an immigrant from Haiti via the Dominican Republic. She probably gets paid about $20/hour and lives in the Democrat stronghold of West Palm Beach, Florida (our own town of Jupiter is, unfortunately, majority-Deplorable/garbage). So that the kids might be exposed to a diversity of political opinions, I asked her if she was eligible to vote and, if so, for whom she had voted and if she was happy with the election outcome. “I voted for Trump,” she said. “Harris didn’t do or say anything in the last four years while she was in office.” In other words, by Biden/Democrat standards this Haitian-born lady ain’t Black and ain’t an immigrant.

There’s more bad news… she has a high-school-age son… who is a Trump supporter as well. Could it be that elite Democrats picked such a bad candidate that their choice has caused a Long Republicanism disease among young people?

How about the unionized public school teachers? I would expect them to be reliable Democrat voters. They’re supposed to reveal their personal political views, but our 5th grader suspects at least some of harboring sentiments in favor of smaller government(!) and Donald Trump.

My post-election Facebook post (if only they had a “defriend count” on a per-post basis!):

How much truth is there in the therapy/pacifier angle? “Harvard Professors Cancel Classes as Students Feel Blue After Trump Win” (Crimson):

At 7 a.m. on Wednesday, Sophia R. Mammucari ’28 woke up to a phone call from her mom — and the news that Donald Trump had been officially reelected.

“I still had some hope that she was going to win by a small amount. And then I woke up this morning, and that’s not what happened,” Mammucari said. “I probably cried for like an hour.”

Economics lecturer Maxim Boycko wrote in a Wednesday email to students in Economics 1010a: “Intermediate Microeconomics” that the course’s typical in-class quizzes would be optional.

“As we recover from the eventful election night and process the implications of Trump’s victory, please know that class will proceed as usual today, except that classroom quizzes will not be for credit,” Boycko wrote. “Feel free to take time off if needed.”

“At an Upper West Side synagogue, Jews gather to ‘sit shiva’ following Trump’s win” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency):

Congregants at the Upper West Side synagogue B’nai Jeshurun had gathered for a post-election prayer service on Wednesday night, but the congregation’s senior rabbi, Roly Matalon, understood that they had really come together for a different kind of Jewish gathering.

“We’re sitting shiva,” Matalon said to a crowd of about 100, including both members and guests. “Sitting shiva with a sense of loss, of grief.”

The synagogue characterizes itself as “inclusive”. In theory, they’re not “Reform”, but they seem to have two females who call themselves “Rabbis”, one of whom is the author of Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay. (Would one good reason for a Muslim feminist to “stay” Muslim be that leaving Islam is punishable by death?)

Related:

  • In case someone is looking at this 10 years from now… “Biden: ‘If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black’” (CNN)
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