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

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

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?

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?

Related:

  • “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?

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?

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?

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.

See also

What is there to like about any of the above?

Let’s consider disability lifestyle enhancements during the Biden administration.

First, it should be much easier to qualify: “Biden says ‘long Covid’ could qualify as a disability under federal law” (NBC). Here’s a list of long COVID symptoms from Mayo:

  • Fatigue
  • Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
  • Cough
  • Joint pain
  • Chest pain
  • Memory, concentration or sleep problems
  • Muscle pain or headache
  • Fast or pounding heartbeat
  • Loss of smell or taste
  • Depression or anxiety
  • Fever
  • Dizziness when you stand
  • Worsened symptoms after physical or mental activities

I.e., a pretty good summary of how I feel every morning while attempting to get out of bed. Is there anyone over age 40 who wouldn’t qualify as a long COVID sufferer?

Once your claim for disability due to long COVID is accepted, you don’t have to pay back those student loans that have been overwhelming your finances (NYT: “$10 Billion in Student Debt Erased Under Biden, but Calls Grow for More”).

Need to fatten up so that COVID-19 can get a good grip on your body? “Biden Administration Prompts Largest Permanent Increase in Food Stamps” (NYT): “Under rules to be announced on Monday and put in place in October, average benefits will rise more than 25 percent from prepandemic levels.” (See also “Swipe Yo EBT”) Most folks on disability should also qualify for SNAP/EBT, right?

(Separately, have we noticed COVID Karens displaying thinner/fitter bodies compared to 1.5 years ago and compared to their COVID-ignoring Deplorable counterparts? If people are more worried about COVID, shouldn’t they have been exercising a lot more over the past 1.5 years compared to people who weren’t afraid to resume their lives?)

What if you want to move into a $1 million apartment in Cambridge or San Francisco and pay a means-tested $200/month including utilities (set as a fraction of whatever you get from SSDI)? In the bad old days there was a long waiting list for taxpayer-subsidized housing. Maybe not anymore, though! “Biden Administration Proposes $318 Billion for Affordable Housing in American Jobs Plan” (June 1, 2021)

Other than qualifying for disability, how could a working age American escape being hassled by all of these new requirements and simultaneously avoid the risks of contracting COVID-19? A purely remote job sounds like a possible solution, but the government and employer can presumably still impose requirements as a condition of continued employment (anti-racism training, sexual harassment training, vaccine requirements, etc.), just as Rutgers constructively expelled an unvaccinated student who was taking classes from home.

Related:

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

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?

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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Best way to invest in Sweden?

by philg

As readers may have noticed, I’m a contrarian when it comes to COVID-19 (along with the 60,000 physicians and PhDs who’ve signed the Great Barrington Declaration). To me, the untested “experiment” is locking a country down and closing schools in hopes of winning a war against a respiratory virus. It is not an “experiment” to stay open, as Sweden did (and as the W.H.O. recommended through 2019), and continue to educate children, continue to go to work, continue to hit the gym, continue to socialize with friends and family, etc. I don’t think the U.S., for example, will be better off as a result of shutting down, closing schools, buying and wearing cloth masks that have been shown to be worthless, etc. I do think the Swedes will prosper in the long run due to superior mental health, a focus on something other than COVID-19, their kids having an extra year of in-person school compared to kids in U.S. cities, etc. I want to invest in Sweden with a 10-20-year horizon.

(Based on our devotion to the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, we could still be fighting the COVID-19 war 10-20 years from now! Even if we aren’t, the misallocation of $trillions from the past 1.5 years, e.g., paying people to stay home for 1.5 years ($800 billion just from federal tax dollars), giving $3,600/year extra per child to successful child support plaintiffs, funding highway repairs in the least efficient states (the new “infrastructure” bill, which builds infrastructure everywhere other than in the states that actually need it due to growing population?), etc., will be a comparative drag on the U.S. economy.)

What’s the best way to invest in Sweden? My usual preference is for common stocks, but apparently a lot of these can’t be purchased in the U.S. There is an ETF that tracks the Swedish market: EWD from iShares. The dividend yield is medium (just under 3%), which I hope means that capital appreciation is expected. Somehow, 77 percent of the yield is classified as “qualified” (I’d thought that this was for U.S. stocks) and therefore subject to a lower federal tax rate (if the Democrats are successful with their latest federal tax increase, the result will be a dividend tax rate of about 50 percent for Californians (fed+state) and this will be on top of higher corporate taxes (i.e., something like 75% of a company’s profits that would have belonged to shareholders will instead go to pay taxes); things are a little less grim for residents of Florida).

The big negative of this iShares fund is a 0.51 percent management fee. They’re just trying to track the index, so it is unclear what you’re paying them for (how hard is it to buy and hold 53 stocks?). The fee for the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF is 0.03 percent, which is also the fee for the corresponding iShares S&P 500 ETF.

The big negative of Sweden as an investment, if you’ve been reading this blog, is that I don’t believe the prevailing American dogma that low-skill migrants make a country richer (if they did, Canada and European nations would be vying for and paying for the opportunity to fly low-skill migrants from our southern border to their respective countries). At 25 percent, Sweden has, I think, the highest percentage of immigrants or children of two immigrant parents, of any country in Europe. If these folks prefer not to work, that could be a drag on the Swedish economy (via welfare costs) for the next 100 years. See “‘New Swedes’ left out as economy powers through pandemic” (Reuters, March 17, 2021):

Sweden has powered through the COVID-19 crisis with an economy set to regain its pre-pandemic size by late-2021, but a surge in unemployment among its foreign-born citizens risks exacerbating social divisions for years to come.

Ajlan came to Sweden as a 17-year-old from Baghdad in 1993. Despite graduating with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Lund University – one of the country’s best schools – he only found work as a taxi driver.

A rigid labour market and a lack of low-skilled jobs means Sweden has been poor at integrating waves of immigrants, or “new Swedes”, since the 1970s – a social and economic divide that has been widened further.

Unemployment among foreign-born workers stood at 18% in the fourth quarter of last year, up 3.5 percentage points from a year earlier, according to Statistics Office data. For people born in Sweden, it was 4.1%, up just 1 percentage point.

Immigration has been running at high levels for the past two decades in Sweden, with a record 163,000 asylum seekers arriving in the country of 10 million in 2015.

The government has launched a raft of measures – some of which predate the pandemic – aimed at getting people into work, including subsidized employment, tax breaks for employers, on-the-job training schemes and its “knowledge-lift” programme that offers study opportunities for the unemployed.

In other words, the Swedes don’t have any better idea of what to do with low-skill migrants than we do. They’re on the same “provide free housing, free health care, free food, and then ask people nicely if they would like to work” plan (maybe the Swedes don’t offer an Obamaphone, but mobile phone service in Europe is much cheaper than in what we call our competitive market).

On the third hand, the U.S. and all of Europe are going to be packed with low-skill migrants for the foreseeable future. The only way to short the idea of a migrant-packed welfare state is to invest in Asian countries that are closed to low-skill immigration and that, in any case, don’t offer the multiple generations of free housing, health care, and food that the U.S. offers and that some European countries offer (albeit at a less generous level; see Hartz IV in Germany, of which 55 percent of the recipients are migrants or children of migrants: “According to the Federal Employment Agency … this was due to the migrants lacking either employable skills or knowledge of the language”).

Vaguely related… the Volvo-driving migrants arrive in Stockholm on the ferry from Finland (2016):

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Good news for dogs: Tesla 3 dominates Hyundai, Audi, and Polestar

by philg

“Hyundai Ioniq 5 vs Q4 e-Tron vs Polestar 2 vs Model 3 group test (2021) review” (Car, an English magazine) says that the Hyundai is huge and maybe better for carrying adults in the back seat. Also, the Hyundai has tremendous style and cleverness. But the suspension isn’t adequate for the massive weight and the (“Long Range”) Tesla has better range than any of the competitors. What did more than 100 years of history do for Audi? Got them into last place! The Chinese/Swedish Polestar was “let down by ride, packaging, range”.

The Tesla 3 turned out to be the best all-around car, though they didn’t have the Mustang Mach-E to compare to. This is Car and Driver‘s favorite, but it lacks dog mode so I think a Tesla 3 would be way better for Florida, even if you don’t have a dog.

How is it possible that the experienced car manufacturers cannot knock Tesla out of first place when it comes to building a car? I’m amazed by this every day! (For haters who say that electric cars are bad, I guess the argument is that the Honda Accord is still a way better car than the Tesla 3 and therefore Tesla is not in first place.)

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Coronalogic in Palm Beach County

by philg

Mostly-Democrat Palm Beach County was one of the local governments ready to fight the governor’s “no mask orders in schools” order (a.k.a. “parental choice order”) with every last dollar of residents’ money. See “Palm Beach County public schools set to hire elite law firm to defend mask mandate” (Palm Beach Post, August 31, 2021), for example:

With the legal battle over masks in schools heating up, Palm Beach County public schools are hiring a high-profile law firm to advise them on their mask mandate and, if needed, defend it in court.

School board members are expected Wednesday to approve spending up to $50,000 for advice and legal representation from the national law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

The vote comes five days a Tallahassee judge ruled Gov. Ron DeSantis exceeded his authority by ordering school boards last month not to impose mask mandates on campus. DeSantis said he will appeal the decision.

Where else on this blog might you have seen mention of Boies Schiller Flexner? They were the law firm that enabled Elizabeth Holmes to silence potential whistleblowers. From Evaluating trustworthiness; lessons from Theranos (based on reading the fascinating book Bad Blood):

Background: Roger Parloff, legal affairs reporter for Fortune, was intrigued by a story about Theranos hiring David Boies to sue a guy who had a patent that they would have needed to license if the blood testing machines had actually worked. Boies was given a fat slice of Theranos equity and a board seat in exchange for doing the company’s legal bidding. The author describes the lawsuit as entirely meritless, alleging that the inventor had somehow gotten hold of proprietary Theranos info because his son was a partner at the same huge law firm that had filed some patents for Theranos. The inventor spent $2 million on legal defense before caving in. (The big multi-office law firm’s records manager investigated the allegation and couldn’t find anything to suggest that the son/partner had ever accessed any Theranos-related information or even knew at the relevant time that the company was a client.)

So… the county is prepared to lose state funding (but they’ll get it all back from Uncle Joe: “Biden Administration Says Federal Funds Can Cover Florida School Board Salaries If DeSantis Defunds Them Over Mask Mandates” (Forbes); how are Presidents Biden and Harris able to write checks for this without Congressional funding?). And the county will happily hire a law firm that enabled one of of America’s most prominent criminal defendants, with its lead name partner actually serving on her corporate board and the firm hoping to benefit from the fraud by holding shares. All of this to ensure that when children sit together in a classroom, kept separated by however many feet the CDC recommends, they are wearing some sort of mask.

Suppose that the kids in the class decide to go to an after-school basketball program run by a different branch of the same enterprise (Palm Beach County). They will then meet on an indoor court and be close enough to actually touch each other, without any masks on. They’ll be breathing much more forcefully, of course, on the basketball court than in the classroom.

I would expect variation in coronapanic level and faith in masks from state to state and from county to county, but I didn’t expect to find this much variation in coronascience between two departments of the same county government!

(Separately, our neighborhood is packed with kids. As soon as they’re out of school, the masks come off and they play with each other outdoors in direct physical contact with no masks. They are also observed to visit each other’s homes and socialize without masks. So even if the county itself didn’t run mask-free kid gatherings, the young people and their parents would do this. Thus, it is a mystery to me how the masks-in-school plan was supposed to be effective.)

Related:

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