New York-based journalists identify the world’s best soccer player

by philg

“She Was the World’s Best Player. Now She Won’t Play Soccer Again.” (WSJ, January 19, 2024):

The Wall Street Journal reporter and editors determined that this player was, prior to the unfortunate injury, a better player than Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. Here’s the reporter’s biography:

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Socialists run out of other people’s hospital beds in Massachusetts

by philg

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” said Margaret Thatcher. She didn’t count on the U.S. Congress and Federal Reserve being willing to print however much was deemed necessary to achieve the ruling party’s goals.

One thing that the technocrats couldn’t print, however, is hospital beds. With just a trickle of undocumented immigrants over the past couple of years (compared to the flood that Texas has received), it seems that Massachusetts is running out of health care system capacity.

“‘Capacity disaster’: Mass. General Hospital says it needs more beds to combat ‘unprecedented crisis’” (Boston News 25):

Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced Friday that it has been dealing with an ongoing “capacity disaster” and that it’s in desperate need of more beds to help combat the “unprecedented crisis.”

The hospital has been operating every day for the past 16 months in “Code Help” or “Capacity Disaster” status, despite the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic being a thing of the past, a spokesperson for the medical center said.

According to the hospital, “Code Help” occurs when inpatient beds and monitored hallway stretchers are full, and “Capacity Disaster” is triggered when the emergency department is full, all hallway stretchers are being used, and there are more than 45 inpatients boarding in the emergency department awaiting a hospital bed.

What do the technocrats have to say about this kind of situation? It can all be fixed with a technocratic solution. “How to keep people out of the emergency room; Help for immigrants in arranging primary care visits leads to substantial drop in ER visits and costs, a new study shows.” (MIT News, 9/23/2023):

“This program is fairly low-touch and minimalist, yet it had a meaningful effect,” says MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results.

Separately, as the authors note in the paper, extending formal health insurance to undocumented immigrants “remains politically untenable” for the most part. On the other hand, jurisdictions might examine if other approaches increase care while, in this case, lowering emergency room traffic.

“There’s this tendency with health care to think that if you give people health insurance, you’re done,” Gruber says. “This study is saying the right system combines insurance as financial protection with other kinds of [tools].” He adds: “There is just huge potential to use data and science to get people to where they need to be in terms of getting the most efficient care.”

With data and science, all problems can be solved!

From the hospital itself…

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Donald Trump is the best of the worst of us

by philg

Although I thought that he needed a more optimistic and unrealistic message for Americans if he were to have any hope of prevailing in a general election, I am shocked that Ron DeSantis is now out:

Republicans are objectively terrible human beings and even the best Republican is inferior to the worst Democrat. Nonetheless, there are approximately 100 million Republicans in the U.S. (population 336 million plus, perhaps, another 10-20 million uncounted undocumented), 74 million of whom turned out to vote for Mr. Deplorable in 2020.

If Nikki Haley continues to underperform, are we forced to conclude that Donald Trump is the best person out of 100 million Americans? That’s sobering!

Is it now time to stop paying attention to Election 2024? Trump couldn’t beat the aging fossil Biden and the sexual opportunist Harris in 2020. Given that Americans are now drunk on student loan forgiveness, weekly abortion care, and other cornerstones of Biden/Harris policy, how could Trump possibly prevail? Is the path to victory Joe Biden dropping dead from old age between now and November and Trump runs against Kamala Harris?

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Claudine Gay won’t be hired by any state-run university in Florida

by philg

It’s a good thing that Claudine Gay has a paycheck-for-life from Harvard…. “Florida’s State Board of Education passes rule to ‘permanently prohibit’ DEI at public colleges” (WPTV):

The board said the rule prohibits Florida College System institutions from using state or federal funds to administer programs that “categorize individuals based on race or sex for the purpose of differential or preferential treatment.”

Targeting DEI has been a key talking point of Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s education department during his second term in office.

How many people will lose their Victimhood Industry jobs?

The governor also asked Florida’s public colleges and universities in 2023 to report how much money they are spending on DEI. He later said they self-reported at least $34 million.

If we assume a fully loaded cost of $200,000 per year per bureaucrat, that’s 170 DEI experts who will now be looking for jobs in more righteous states.

Who doesn’t like a race-neutral environment?

Meanwhile, Black leaders have pushed back on the initiatives to limit DEI at state colleges, saying DeSantis is playing politics in his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination.

Some students have expressed worries that campuses across the state won’t be as welcoming to minorities in light of the changes.

A statement against racial equality from “Equality Florida”:

“There’s no surprise today that the State Board of Education, a board that has been a rubber stamp for Governor Ron DeSantis’s agenda of censorship and surveillance, moved forward with another sweepingly broad rule that abolishes diversity and inclusion programs in the Florida College System. The Board’s rules go well beyond what’s required by Governor DeSantis’s already extreme SB 266, handcuffing state colleges from using any state-funded resources on diversity programs that help recruit talented faculty, support students with unique needs, and help Florida’s colleges compete for national research and funding. This is a brazenly political attack on Florida’s colleges, and all minorities in Florida, and is one more way state agencies have been weaponized to support Governor DeSantis’s failing political ambitions. Shame on the State Board of Education for passing rules that weaken and threaten Florida’s colleges in service to one more manufactured culture war.”

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How are Democrats able to see the border as closed when migrants continue to stream in?

by philg

It’s the third anniversary of the Greatest Administration in American history. From a conservative point of view, a defining feature of the Biden administration has been rapid acceleration of population growth via low-skill immigration (native-born Americans aren’t being replaced; it is just that the immigrant percentage of the population is at an all-time high). What do Democrats perceive?

Republicans and Democrats these days often seem to express agreement on philosophy but then disagree on facts. With respect to coronapanic, for example, Americans from both parties agree that schools for 10-year-olds shouldn’t be closed when a virus is circulating that kills people at a median age of 82. The disagreement on the school front is now around a fact: Were any American public schools closed in 2020-2021? Democrats say “No. All schools were open all the time.” while Republicans say that big urban school districts, e.g., NYC, Boston, SF, LA, et al., were closed for 12-18 months (and various suburban districts were either closed or half-open on an ineffective “hybrid” schedule).

A similar disagreement seems to be happening right now with the border. Here’s a tweet from the Democrats and my reply:

The U.S. has never enjoyed better border security, as far as the Democrats are concerned. Having seen videos of people walking through the fence and seen statistics on roughly 2.5 million encounters with migrants per year (on the U.S. side of the border, meaning that people got here somehow!), I ask whether the Biden administration has simply decided to leave the border open. Democrats respond that the border isn’t open:

It’s a conspiracy spread by Fox, in fact, that there is any openness to the U.S. border.

The question for today is how Democrats sustain their belief in the fact of a closed border with official U.S. government statistics on the hundreds of thousands of migrants who come through the closed border every month.

Background from Fox:

The Haitian man first arrived at a port of entry in Brownsville, TX in December 2022, where he was deemed inadmissible & released into the U.S. with a future court date.
In September 2023, Boston police arrested him for rape and indecent assault and battery on a disabled person. ICE filed a detainer request with local authorities in Dorchester, seeking his custody, but the request was ignored, and the alleged rapist was released into the community in November. ICE found & rearrested him a little over a week ago.

The Haitian gentleman was “inadmissible” and therefore was admitted. Paging Dr. Orwell?

The Daily Mail features photos of migrants who’ve somehow appeared on the U.S. side of what is, from a Democrat point of view, an entirely closed border:

CNN shows “More than 1,000 migrants wait in line to be processed by US Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico on December 18 in Eagle Pass, Texas.”:

From the a righteous perspective, anything in CNN is true, no? How is a border through which more than 1,000 people cross in one day in one location not “open”?

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Who can explain Donald Trump’s popularity in the current election?

by philg

Iowa Republicans love Donald Trump, it seems, slightly more than two seemingly far more plausible candidates combined (Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis). Who can explain to me why this incredibly old guy is more successful with voters than Haley and DeSantis?

In some poll data from Iowa, it looks as though oldsters are the ones who love Trump. Just as here in Florida, it is the young people who love DeSantis the most:

Trump had a few successes before coronapanic overwhelmed his younger self, but what exactly did he accomplish that so many Republicans want him back?

(I haven’t been following the debates, etc., too carefully. Has anything happened that should alter my opinion that, though DeSantis is more aligned with my smaller-government political philosophy Haley is more likely to win a general election? (Americans overall seem to want a planned economy.))

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Harvard Bookstore

by philg

When they’re not plagiarizing from mediocrities, what do the world’s smartest people read? A few recent snapshots from the Harvard Bookstore…

Featured for youngsters, stories by trans and nonbinary authors:

For those preparing for the next pro-Hamas rally in Harvard Square, a tale of victimization at the hands of the cruel Israelis:

The #2 bestseller in the store covers the entire history of Jewish cruelty in a noble indigenous people’s homeland:

Let’s not forget that American democracy is imperiled if Americans are allowed to vote for Republicans:

Considering moving to Canada (never Mexico) if a Republican wins in 2024?

And the #6 bestseller, described on Amazon:

Now an acclaimed live-action Netflix series!

Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. The bestselling LGBTQ+ graphic novel about life, love, and everything that happens in between: this is the fifth volume of the much-loved HEARTSTOPPER series, featuring gorgeous two-color artwork.

Nick and Charlie are in love. They’ve finally said those three little words, and Charlie has almost persuaded his mum to let him sleep over at Nick’s house. He wants to take their relationship to the next level… but can he find the confidence he needs? And with Nick going off to university next year, is everything about to change?

Part of an Amazon review:

It seems that with volume 5 of this book (and the novella that came out earlier this year) we’ve reached a point in the storyline where the entire book seems to solely be focused on the main characters having sex. Much of the dialogue is discussing it and obsessing over the event to come. There isn’t a lot of content here. A few paragraphs of written material bulked out by very simple drawings. The basic premise is that the two characters better take things to the next level or they will break up when one goes to college. This culminates in a multi page wordless sex scene near the end. Admittedly it is incredibly tame by adult standards, but it is absolutely not something a young girl needs to be gifted by her father.

(He was happy to buy the first four books, though?)

Finally, everyone in Massachusetts can agree that the state belongs to the indigenous, but nobody will give the land back!

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MIT Hallway Signage

by philg

My dream was to come back from a week in the Land of Science with pictures of all of the “Free Palestine” signs covering the Harvard and MIT campuses. Sadly, however, what I mostly got from the masked followers of Science was a horrible cough/flu. Below are a few photos from the MIT hallways. First, the anti-colonial one:

No plans to give Maskachusetts back to the rightful owners and pay rent, apparently.

Sam Bankman-Fried is indirectly celebrated in the Effective Altruism sign below.

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What stops Yemenis from coming through the southern border to attack Americans at home?

by philg

From “Houthis Vow to Respond After U.S. Leads Strikes in Yemen” (NYT):

What stops everyone in the above photo from coming across the southern border and delivering their response to U.S. aggression here on American soil? They should immediately qualify for asylum merely by saying “I didn’t support the Houthis and they were targeting me”. Who here in the U.S. can distinguish a Houthi-supporting Yemeni from a Yemeni who doesn’t support the Houthi government?

If we’re going to have an open southern border, should we try to get along with everyone worldwide?

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Pinballnomics: How long did it take for the Limited Edition Jaws machine to sell out?

by philg

In October 2022, the James Bond 007 LE pinball machine from Stern sold out in about 45 seconds.

Let’s take the pulse of the economy by looking at Stern’s latest release: Jaws. Just after 1:00 pm on January 4, 2024:

By 1:05 pm:

It’s possible that it sold out prior to 1:05 because with the James Bond machine people reported adding it to their carts and being unable to check out.

The Jaws machine is actually cheaper than Bond was: $12,999 in 2022 dollars versus $12,999 in 2024 dollars. Bond might be considered a more desirable theme, but Jaws was designed by superstar Keith Elwin, the genius behind Godzilla (#1 on Pinside’s Top 100).

Sadly, we’re gonna need a bigger family room if we are ever to enjoy Jaws at home.

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