Why does Kamala Harris laugh so often?

by philg

Here’s a video of Kamala Harris saying that she’ll agree to spend $trillions (debt that will eventually be paid back at least partially by taxes on Chinese immigrants? What role did they play in this drama?) in reparations to Americans who identify as descendants of former slaves:

The question for today is why she laughs after making this pledge. Slavery isn’t, I hope, a laughing matter, even though it ended more than 159 years ago here in the U.S. (it does continue in some countries, supposedly) Spending $trillions of money that will have to be earned via the sweat of others isn’t, one would think, a laughing matter. Forcing immigrants from China, Haiti, and Venezuela to pay extra taxes and receive fewer government services isn’t obviously a laughing matter.

Here’s one where she starts laughing at about 4:10 while discussing the policy with the most transformative effects on American society:

Here she is apparently laughing about the U.S. being defeated in Afghanistan:

(The Taliban could reasonably laugh about the inability of the U.S. to accomplish any of its goals after 20 years, but why the U.S. VP?)

This is the “joy” that Americans are being sold by the Democrats and their media allies? But what is joyful about U.S. politics? We have an economy that is less than half the size it needs to be for Americans to achieve their government spending goals (free unlimited health care for all, pimped-out housing as a human right, open borders and a cradle-to-grave multi-generational welfare state, etc.). So government is inevitably about saying “No, we can’t afford that right now,” even for Democrats. What child ever experienced joy at hearing a parent say “No, we can’t afford that trip to Disney World”?

Closing this out with Kamala Harris laughing about laughing…

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The Democrats of Wisconsin

by philg

If Oshkosh is a typical Wisconsin city, we can infer from the signage at the local office of the Democrats that Rainbow Flagism is their #1 concern. Photos from July:

What else did we find downtown? A person reduced to sleeping in a doorway:

I’m wondering if this is evidence for my theory that expressing support for 2SLGBTQQIA+ is popular because one need not reduce one’s personal standard of living in order to assist the purportedly unfortunate. See Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money? (In point of fact, we did not hear anyone expressing an anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ point of view during the entire week that we were in Oshkosh.)

This is one of the many luxuries of being a Democrat, I think. One can consider oneself an advocate for the unfortunate while walking past a homeless person on the way to the rainbow flag store.

Separately, here’s an article on the new passion among young educated Democrats in Wisconsin:

Students at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee joined the wave of protests occurring at campuses across the United States to support Palestinian liberation, speak out against Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 30,000 people and to urge their universities to cut ties with Israel.

Dahlia Saba, a member of UW-Madison’s Students for Justice in Palestine and a first-year graduate student at UW-Madison, said the protest aims to clearly communicate student demands to UW-Madison administrators. Those demands, posted on Instagram, include divestment from Israel, disclosing all investments by the UW Foundation and cutting ties with Israeli institutions.

Saba, who is Palestinian-American, said that she has been paying attention to the “huge injustices perpetrated against the Palestinian people” for much of her life. She said that she has family members who were recently evacuated from Gaza.

Samer Alatout, UW-Madison associate professor, said he was at the protest to support students and celebrate student movements. He said the actions represent a “sea change” and students were claiming a right to have a role in managing and governing the university, including its ethics.

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Enriched by immigration on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

by philg

Native Americans tried and failed to defend their borders back in the 15th and 16th centuries. The result has been a fall from 100% of the population to about 1% (enrolled members of various tribes; the number grows to between 2% and 3% if we count Elizabeth Warren-style self-identification as Native American). The drop in percentage from 100% down to 1% certainly cannot be characterized as a “replacement” and, thus, for those who follow Science it must be an enrichment.

Let’s see how immigrants have enriched Native Americans on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

In one part of Florida today, a high-skill immigrant launched a spacecraft to Jupiter (not Jupiter, Florida!):

For the Science-minded Native American, perhaps this can be viewed as compensation for the loss of sovereignty.

In our part of Florida, an immigrant attempted to deliver Uber Eats to my mom’s senior fortress, a 150-unit building whose front door is marked by a massive fountain, big American flag on a 40′ poll (Ta-Nehisi Coates won’t want to move in!), and circular driveway. The Uber driver was unable to speak English and I was unable to speak Spanish. The map showed that he got pretty close to the building, but never went into the main driveway or parking lot. He eventually dumped the bag on the curb and drove away after sending the following photo:

Because our Spanish-only speaker didn’t include any building in the background, this could easily be in Miami, for example. We walked all around the building and never did find it. “Jayson” is now available to deliver food to any Native American in Palm Beach County (0.1% of the total population according to Google’s giant AI brain and 0.6% of the population if you look at census.gov with your own feeble mind; the page does have a 0.1% figure, but that’s for “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone”).

Below, a member of the credentialed elite at the New York Times reminds JD Vance that only migrants such as Jayson can read blueprints, juggle Makita, and build us the houses that we desperately need in order to shelter… the next crop of 30 million undocumented migrants (2016 numbers from Yale). I would love to see the house that someone at Jayson’s skill level builds!

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One year until many of the world’s PCs can be taken over by a 10-year-old?

by philg

As the righteous in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, California, and Maskachusetts observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day and deplore the time when a hated Jew inflicted a Nakba on the entirely peaceful Native Americans, let’s look at the 21st century way to conquer a big part of the world.

From Microsoft, back in June:

I think this is because my desktop computer was running a CPU/chipset/motherboard configuration from 2015 that lacks some modern security features, such as a Trusted Platform Module.

I wonder if a lot of people won’t upgrade despite Microsoft’s threats. After all, improvements in computer hardware have slowed to a crawl (see GPU performance improvements since 2015 (and why not just use motherboard graphics?) in which we learn that the 2015 CPU had reasonable performance by 2022 standards. With Microsoft not bothering to continue with security updates and nearly every PC connected to the Internet, will a smart 10-year-old be able to take over a substantial fraction of the world’s computers? This is not an open-source computer program that folks other than Microsoft can debug and patch.

Circling back to Indigenous Peoples’ Day… remember that immigration wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to Native Americans, but Science proves that immigration will be the best thing that has ever happened to Native-Born Americans.

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Attempt to preserve democracy #3

by philg

October 12, 2024, roughly 8 pm Eastern Time: “Man arrested near Trump Coachella rally intended to kill former president, sheriff says” (Fox 11). By my account, that’s the third attempt by an American patriot to preserve our democracy (assuming that we accept Democrats’ characterization of Donald Trump and what will happen to us if he becomes president again).

October 13, 2024, 11:10 am Eastern Time, Kamala Harris warns of Donald Trump’s “dangerous agenda”:

Separately, has anyone seen anything from a leader within the Party of Science congratulating Elon Musk on what seems like a tremendous step forward for actual science? (I disagree with Mr. Musk regarding the merits of humans living on Mars, but it is valuable to be able to send heavy robot payloads into space and the Starship makes NASA’s ($40 billion in 2024 dollars?) SLS look pathetic.) If Democrats love to Follow the Science why aren’t they more jazzed up about Starship today than about Donald Trump’s agenda (the above tweet from Kamala Harris was sent just a few hours after the Starship booster was caught).

And from a guy that the U.S. government would really like to get hold of…

…. also from the Tesla fanboys:

(While trying to avoid extradition, Kim Dotcom manages to tweet his support for Hamas: regarding the “Gaza genocide” (exacerbated by simultaneous rapid population growth); accusing Israel of “indiscriminate mass murder”; a confident “proof” that Israel “Netanyahu can’t defeat Hamas in a ground battle” (Nov 19, 2023; maybe he was correct since Palestinians remain enthusiastic about continuing their war against Israel).)

Circling back to NASA (my first employer!)…

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Florida’s recovery from Hurricane Milton

by philg

Our brushed-by-Milton neighborhood in Palm Beach County is almost completely cleaned up. There were some tornadoes nearby that significantly damaged houses and I can’t figure out why. “NWS: EF3 tornado with winds of 140 mph tore through Avenir community in Palm Beach Gardens” (WPTV):

“Considerable structural damage … was observed on brand new, well-built homes and included segments of concrete block walls missing and large sections of roof removed,” the NWS said in a report released Thursday afternoon.

A house in this part of Florida is supposed to be built to handle 170 mph, I think (map). A house is a “Risk Category II” building. If the headline is correct and the tornado was blowing at only 140 mph, why was a house engineered to handle 170 mph damaged? Could it be that a rotating wind is more damaging than a relatively steady wind from one direction? Were the houses not built properly? Human engineers aren’t as smart as they claim to be? Here’s a picture from the Palm Beach Post of the Nature v. Human contest:

Here’s Ron DeSantis on Friday leading a 38-minute press conference (without teleprompter) on the clean-up challenges related to Hurricane Milton:

It seems as though flgov.com is updated regularly with summaries of challenges and achievements. Example from Oct 11: “In a multi-agency response, FWC [Fish and Wildlife] officers and partner agencies rescued and evacuated approximately 426 people and 45 pets from flood waters in a Clearwater apartment complex. FWC officers used a high-water swamp buggy, UTV, and shallow-draft vessels during the rescue effort.”

Less attention is paid to those who have endured some of the worst Milton-related suffering. I’m talking, of course, about private aircraft owners. It’s very expensive to build a hurricane-proof hangar and, consequently, the typical hangar hasn’t been built hurricane-proof (the latest building code likely requires them to be able to withstand at least a Category 4 hurricane, a lower wind standard than for houses because the theory is that nobody will be inside a hangar during a hurricane). The general aviation hangars at KSRQ and KSPG are apparently badly damaged. Sarasota. which previously had a 4-year waiting list for a hangar:

The St. Pete downtown airport (walking distance to some museums), which previously had a 10-year waiting list:

Florida officialdom doesn’t seem to credit FEMA with savings lives or property. This is consistent with friends in Maskachusetts deploring the Deplorables’ lack of respect and awe for the Great Father in Washington. The righteous of MA, NY, and CA are particularly upset that Republicans have spread misinformation, e.g., that FEMA has handed out about $640 million on sheltering migrants while native-born hurricane victims aren’t getting lavish aid. Prior to Milton, one Democrat mentioned on Facebook that Congress had appropriated $20 billion for Hurricane Helene victims (Congress is currently in recess; the Democrat-run New Republic says “Lawmakers left town last week without passing additional natural disaster funding, and approving additional money may prove tricky when they return.”). Multiple Democrats responded by heaping scorn on Trump supporters for being so easily gulled into believing the Fake News about FEMA spending money on migrants.

Where could the Deplorables have gotten this misinformation? Let’s check fema.gov:

Related:

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Power restoration after Hurricane Milton

by philg

Landfall: October 9, 2024 at 8:30 pm. Supposedly about 4 million customers lost power (source: Ron DeSantis press conference).

Mid-afternoon the next day:

Early evening:

The morning of the second day:

Apparently there was power at the big airport in Tampa because they resumed operations about 36 hours after the hurricane made landfall:

(Orlando had reopened a few hours earlier, so they too had power despite being in the middle of the Band of Destruction (TM).)

Afternoon of second day:

About 48 hours after the hurricane hit, the total customers out has declined from 3.4 million to 2 million:

The bad news is that restoration for some Floridians won’t be until 8 days after the hurricane made landfall. Here’s FPL’s estimate:

I’m not sure if people in neighborhoods with underground lines (like ours!) will get power sooner. Currently, 10 percent of FPL’s customers are out versus 17 percent for the state.

I can’t figure out why the customer numbers are so high. I thought that the transmission lines were designed to handle hurricane-force winds (and they were further beefed up after 2019; see Tough questions from reporters for Ron DeSantis). Maybe there are a lot of neighborhoods with above-ground powerlines for local distribution?

Strong independent female linewomen continued to work through the night, apparently…

2.5 days after landfall, it looks like Naples and Fort Myers are on their way back to normal while half of Tampa is dark. More than half of the Floridians who originally lost power now have it back (thanks once again to the efforts of linewomen who identify as female):

around lunch time…

Three days (72 hours) after landfall:

The pace of restoration seems to slowed down in the dark:

3.5 days after landfall:

Not a great situation in Tampa, with more than one third of customers without power. On the other hand, the total is down below 1 million compared to 4 million at the start.

Four days (96 hours) after landfall and about 500,000 customers are still out. More than 235,000 of them are Tampa Electric customers, which has only 840,000 total customers.

Florida Power and Light now says that they’ll have nearly everyone restored, even in directly hit Sarasota, by Tuesday night. (Also that they’ve thus far restored 90 percent of their affected customers, 1.8 million people who’d lost power at one point.) Speaking of FPL, if you were to watch their X feed you’d learn that electricity restoration is definitely not something that white males do:

And as of Tuesday at noon, FPL indeed had all but 38,000 customers back online. Tampa Electric (TECO) continued to be an outlier with 100,000 customers still dark.

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Are the world’s most accomplished people doomed to disappoint us when they offer political opinions?

by philg

It is conventional among Democrats to deplore Elon Musk’s refusal to change with the times and adopt the latest progressive dogma. And, indeed, despite Musk being objectively one of the world’s most accomplished people, the opinions that he expresses or retweets are conventional Republican points of view. He doesn’t, for example, suggest that the U.S. eliminate asylum and the rest of the programs that inspire migrants to come here (he supports milquetoast measures to return undocumented migration to pre-Biden/Harris levels). Nor does Musk agree with me that voting should be restricted to those who’ve worked for at least 8 years (W-2 or 1099), a return to the system of 200 years ago (men started working at 13 and started voting at 21), albeit tweaked for gender ID neutrality (don’t want to exclude 73 of the genders recognized by Science if people who identify with those 73 genders have experience working and paying taxes).

On the other side of the political spectrum, we have Yann LeCun. He’s a Turing Award winner who has been at the forefront of the machine learning craze (bubble?). His Twitter feed is indistinguishable from that of any other committed Democrat, e.g., blaming arch villain Donald Trump for the nation’s problems after a two-year period in which Democrats controlled Congress and the White House and, therefore, could pass any legislation that they deemed necessary. Example of one of the world’s most creative person’s tweets:

In other words, one of the world’s most accomplished people accepts the Democrat idea that the commander in chief of a $1 trillion/year military does not, without some further action of Congress, have the authority or ability to prevent random foreigners from crossing the U.S. border.

Speaking of creative, let’s look at Taylor Swift, the most accomplished person in the world of music (Though maybe we should give some credit to Itzhak Perlman, still performing from his wheelchair at age 79 (he was born in “Mandatory Palestine” and is older than the war that the Arabs declared on the new state of Israel).). Here’s part of her endorsement of Kamala Harris:

“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades,”

The specific causes that she cites are more or less the same that a Democrat who can’t carry a tune might cite, e.g., additional promotion of Rainbow Flagism and more widely available abortion care for pregnant people. As with the typical Democrat, she isn’t interested in hearing an opposing point of view (“comments on this post have been limited” (limited to none)).

Let’s finally look at J.K. Rowling, the greatest writer of the 21st century (measured by sales, at least). Her main expressed political belief is that person with XY chromosomes cannot claim to be a “woman”. While, of course, this is a denial of Science, it is also a common denial of Science. The originality of Harry Potter is not to be found in J.K. Rowling’s belief that a man cannot raise his/her hand and become a woman.

I’m wondering if hyper-accomplished people need to keep quiet on the subject of politics. It is tough to come up with a political idea that isn’t already held by a lot of mediocre people and, therefore, expressing a political idea will always reduce public awe of the hyper-accomplished person. (And it would be even worse if the hyper-accomplished celebrity uttered an original idea! Imagine the uproar if Elon Musk, for example, were to say that voting should be restricted to Americans who’ve paid at least $1 of income tax at some point in their lives. Or if Taylor Swift were to take progressive love for Palestine to its logical conclusion and say that Americans who identify as “women” should be forced to wear hijab, long skirts, and long sleeves because otherwise immigrants from Gaza will feel uncomfortable.)

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Did Doug Emhoff hit a woman with Hunter Biden’s laptop?

by philg

I don’t know if we’ll be without power and Internet due to Hurricane Milton so I’m scheduling this non-hurricane-related post in advance in order to deliver on my “posting every day” promise/threat.

A Deplorable posted “Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff ‘forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man’ in booze-fueled assault after date to star-studded gala” (Daily Mail) on Facebook with the comment “Another post election day story for the Times.” In fact, a Google search restricted to “site:nytimes.com” shows that the Newspaper of Record (TM) hasn’t seen fit to cover the story of this Democratic National Convention featured speaker slapping anyone.

In a separate discussion about this story, a Big Law partner (closeted Republican) wrote that all members of the Party of Independent Thought would transition from “Kamala is so brat because look at Doug” to “Doug has nothing to do with this election; he’s not running for anything”. Just a few hours later, his prophecy was confirmed when a Minneapolis Democrat in a discussion about the above story posted “Who is this guy? Is he running for something?”

New York Times, about 1.5 months ago:

Speaking of husbands, “Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away” (NYT):

Friends of both say the estrangement, set in motion by her parents’ split when Ms. Harris was a child, may have as much to do with traits father and daughter share as it does their decades of differences. … It upset Ms. Harris that her father did not attend Shyamala Harris’s funeral in 2009. … Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.”

Note that the New York Times covers a lawsuit with a plaintiff and a defendant as a mutual activity (“her parents’ split”). Reading between the lines, it looked like Kamala’s mom sued Kamala’s dad and won the winner-take-all fight that the California Family Court set up. And then Kamala was upset that her dad didn’t want to go to his plaintiff’s funeral. (We know a guy in Maskachusetts whose plaintiff died of cancer after winning the house, the kids, the cash, most of his income going forward, etc. On hearing the news, he was ready to throw a huge party to celebrate her death and the return of his kids not shed crocodile tears at the successful litigant’s funeral.

Addendum: We never did lose power thanks to the heroic engineering efforts of Florida Power and Light as well as the grid-hardening initiative approved by Ron DeSantis in 2019 over the objections of Democrats (see Tough questions from reporters for Ron DeSantis). In other hurricane news, combat veteran Tim Walz tells Floridians to evacuate at 6:32 pm, roughly two hours before landfall. This is apparently not the kind of “misinformation” that Democrats seek to outlaw and suppress, though it contradicts government advice to “shelter in place” once winds exceed 45-50 mph. The “mandatory” evacuation orders on the Florida west coast generally required evacuation by 9:00 am on Wednesday and officials told people who hadn’t evacuated to “shelter in place” after the winds picked up. From the war hero now fighting misinformation:

From the National Weather Service, 4.5 hours earlier (“It’s time to shelter-in-place”):

From Sarasota County, where Hurricane Milton hit:

An hour before Tim Walz suggested evacuation, the county was saying “shelter in place”:

The above tweets, combined, are good examples of the motivation for Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?

Related:

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Kamala Harris threatens and La Quinta responds

by philg

As Hurricane Milton “barreled” (the obligatory verb for an object moving at 5-10 mph) into Sarasota, Kamala Harris threatened merchants:

About 12 hours later, Orbitz is showing hotel rooms in Orlando for a stay beginning tonight at $122/nights. If you’re willing to stay at the La Quinta… $72/night. For those who want to be ready for Disney World’s reopening tomorrow, the on-property Swan hotel is $252/night. Perhaps Jussie Smollett reported having been overcharged?

What about a hotel in Miami, which was never forecast to be “barreled into”?

I won’t be staying in a hotel tonight because I need to get back up on a ladder. Like Jeffrey Epstein, these hurricane screens didn’t hang themselves and I fear that they won’t unhang themselves either. (The previous owners of our house invested in impact glass doors and windows, but the front door is an unusual shape and they left the original door in place. The wide Armor Screen covers an outdoor dining area that has a bug screen whose frame is hurricane-proof (supposedly) but whose screen material is sacrificial. My thought on the hurricane screen for that area was that we could use it to store all of our outdoor items in the event of a truly bad storm.)

It was mostly peaceful yesterday here in Jupiter (Palm Beach County). The schoolteachers were enjoying the start of their two-day taxpayer-funded holiday while everyone else worked (health care, retail, expert witness, etc.). There was a bit of rain and the wind picked up around 9 pm. There were a handful of tornadoes in SE Florida caused by Hurricane Milton, but none came into Jupiter itself (one was in Jupiter Farms, to our west, one in western Palm Beach Gardens in Avenir, and a sad one for aviators in Fort Pierce that deposited some airplanes outside the airport fence).

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