As I read the CNBC story on the Oscars tonight, I knew I was in trouble when I encountered "made history" in the first sentence, followed shortly thereafter by "diversity," "notable firsts," "all-Black," "Asian descent," and "spirit of inclusion."
It would seem that, from here on out, when it comes to Oscar winners the first thing the media is going to gush about is not so much the film's merit but rather how much the project showed diversity and inclusion.
Even so, I am glad Nomadland won best picture. Frances McDormand was so goofily great in Fargo I can't imagine another actor doing it better. As for Nomadland, I haven't seen the movie but I did read Nomadland as an ebook from the LA Public Library and thought the concept was well-reported and the story nicely written.
In his show yesterday, Bill Maher ridiculed clueless Millennials for supporting communism (36% of people under 35, he said, want to give it a try). But when he tries to tell them that communism is a bad idea, he says, they tell him he is old and just doesn't get it. "No, I get it," he said. "The problem isn’t that I don’t get what you’re saying or that I’m old, the problem is your ideas are stupid.”
And Maher is right, I suspect, in thinking that many Millennials don't have any inkling what happens when communists take power. Jordan Peterson says that almost none of the students in his University of Toronto psychology classes have ever heard that 60-to-100 million people in Russia, China, and Cambodia lost their lives in disastrous communist attempts to change nature, reality and common sense. But that doesn't matter to social justice warriors, says Peterson. They are unfazed by the mountains of corpses and rivers of blood. They say if they were in charge, this time they'd do it right. "Yes," says Peterson. "And there would be someone standing behind you ready to shoot you the first time you tried to do something good."
I know that my younger relatives and friends already know these things. For Millennials whose high school or college teachers ignored such matters, or never knew of them themselves, here is a graph showing the world population growth rate over the last 60 years. Notice the startling 45% drop in the growth rate between 1958 and 1961. That was caused by China's Great Leap Forward in which 30 million people died.
When California Governor Gavin Newsom was first elected, environmental activists demanded that he ban fracking. At first, he demurred, telling them last September he didn't have the authority to take such a step but he would try to get such a bill passed by the California legislature. When that failed in the state senate due to opposition from unions and the oil industry, Newsom suddenly decided, Gee Whiz, I guess I have the authority after all. Beginning in 2024, his office announced yesterday, the state will stop issuing fracking permits and ban oil extraction entirely by 2045.
This isn't Newsom's first attempt to change California's energy mix. Previous efforts by him to shift from fossil fuels to non-renewables resulted in rolling blackouts all over the state last summer when California was hit by an intense heatwave. Newsom subsequently apologized for the blackouts, conceding that his administration hadn't adequately considered the consequences of moving away so fast from fossil fuels.
Yesterday was Derek Chauvin Day at the LA Times. By my count, the paper ran nine stories about the case, including one in the sports pages. Several of them, I regretted to see, carried express or implied threats to burn the country down if the jury got the verdict wrong.
That wasn't likely. Derek Chauvin was a cruel and callous guy who killed a terrified and helpless man by kneeling on his neck. If he spends the rest of his life in jail that won't be too long. But I also don't much care for threats to burn down America if the jury didn't vote right. Our modern legal system generally does the best that it can. Certainly, none of Chauvin's defense witnesses deserved to have their front doors smeared in pig's blood for testifying on his behalf.
According to a UCLA bioclimatologist quoted by a story in today's LA Times, California is currently in the middle of a 22-year-old "megadrought" as bad as any of the last millennium. I don't doubt it and neither do, I suspect, anyone else who watched forest fires burn down half the state last summer. What bugs me though is that, when reporters and public officials discuss what they regard as the real problem (the burning of fossil fuels and the carbon emissions that accompany it), they never mention the two best solutions.
One is safe, 4th generation, carbon-free, low-radioactive-by-product nuclear power and the other is population reduction. This country (and the world along with it) could implement these fixes right now, but decades-old myths and prejudices hold us back.
The only thing some people know about nuclear power these days is Jane Fonda and The China Syndrome. They don't seem to realize that Three-Mile Island was 40 years ago. Their former fears no longer apply. Some of these proposed nuclear power plants are so small you can build them en masse in factories and haul them around to where they might be needed on the backs of trailer trucks. Other new designs use low-pressure molten salts, which can't explode and thus don't need containment vessels. If they ever start to overheat, a passive salt plug melts and the radioactive material drains into an underground cooling pond, thus ending the possibility of a meltdown.
As for the contribution of a grossly out-of-control population driving carbon emissions, public officials are too terrified even to think about the subject alone in their study at 3 am, let alone talk about the subject in public. Forget Michael Mann's near-vertical CO2 hockey-stick graph, the real vertical graph is world population growth. But reporters, academics and public officials dare not mention this for fear someone will thereby conclude they are anti-immigration and thus racist.
It's a lose-lose situation. When it comes to nuclear energy and over-population our leaders need to be less critical of newer, safer technologies and less fearful of mentioning our out-of-control population. As Greta Thunberg might say, "How dare you! You weak-kneed politicians and activists, you have stolen our future!"
The LA Times carried an opinion piece on its editorial page today by a University of Indiana law professor who was complaining that billionaires like Elon Musk aren't paying their "fair share" of taxes. Musk is super rich but, since he only draws a comparatively small salary and keeps most of his wealth in Tesla stock, he doesn't pay that much in taxes. The professor's solution? Don't just tax his regular income. Tax what he would earn if he sold his Tessla stock.
This, I think, is a stunningly bad idea. The professor isn't mad about Musk's leading the extravagant lifestyle of the super-rich, because Musk is too busy working 80 hour weeks to lead the kind of lifestyle his great wealth might warrant. The good professor is mad because Musk could lead an extravagant lifestyle if he wanted to cash in his chips.
The professor and I part company here. I think Elon Musk is one of the few examples of what is right in America today. A few years ago when it wasn't yet clear that Tesla would make it, Musk was living in his Fremont plant, getting four hours sleep on the floor at night trying to iron out the bugs in the automated production line. We should be cheering that, not dreaming up new ways to tax money he hasn't even earned yet.
When the verdict in Derek Chauvin trial comes in, most likely this week, it could go three ways. I am making an off-the-top-of-my-head estimate that the likelihood of a murder or manslaughter conviction at 75%, a mistrial at 15%, and a not-guilty verdict at 10%. But what are the chances of a "mostly peaceful" riot irrespective of the verdict? Those, I think, have gotta be around 90%.
At least they didn't sue because the coffee was cold and the air conditioning was hot.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/2-passengers-sue-united-airlines-over-engine-explosion/ar-BB1fJrwH
I had trouble falling asleep last night so I watched the 1945 Rogers & Hammerstein musical "Carousel" on my cellphone at 5 am. The lyrics are a little more spicy than I remembered. Here is a young woman discussing her upcoming marriage to a herring fisherman, her beloved Mr. Snow:
He'll carry me cross the threshold
And I'll be as meek as a lamb.
Then he'll set me on my feet,
And I'll say kinda sweet,
"Well, Mister Snow, here I am."
Basically, she is saying, "Do with me what you will." Echoes of "Fifty Shades of Gray." This is more risque than I would have guessed for 1945.
Collision with asteroid to destroy all life on Earth. "Women and minorities hardest hit."
I see that Florida governor Ron DeSantis just issued an executive order banning Covid vaccine passports for people attending football games, eating out, or going to the movies. He says without such a ban Florida will end up with "two classes of citizens." He's right, the civic-minded and the willfully obtuse.
I was talking to an old friend from high school recently and he happened to mention in passing that the cost of electricity where I grew up in western Pennsylvania was currently 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. "Wow!" I thought. Here in Los Angeles, the cost is 21.9 cents.
This in turn got me thinking about the cost of driving an electric car versus a fuel-efficient car both in western Pennsylvania and LA.
If you drive a fuel-efficient, gasoline-powered car here in Los Angeles where regular unleaded runs $3.92/gallon, you can drive 35 miles on one gallon for a cost of 11 cents per mile. In Pennsylvania, where gas is only $2.70 per gallon, you can drive 35 miles for 7.7 cents per mile.
If you buy a Tessla with the 100 kwh long-range variant battery, here in Los Angeles you can drive 412 miles for $25.76 (this assumes a charging rate efficiency of 85%). This translates into a cost per mile of 6.2 cents. In Pennsylvania, it will only cost you $7.17 to recharge your Tesla. So the electrical cost per mile there is 1.7 cents per mile.
Conclusion: if all you look at are gas or electricity costs, the cheapest way to get around by far is in an electric car in Western Pennsylvania. And the most expensive way (6.5 times more expensive by the way) is in a gasoline car in Los Angeles.
The LA Times is at again. Yesterday it ran two stories on the front page of the California section claiming that President Trump's use of the words "China Virus" caused a young religiously conflicted incel by the name Robert Aaron Long to murder six Thai women in Atlanta and that this was the end result of a dangerous wave of anti-Asian hate sweeping the land.
This is not straightforward reporting. The writer, Brittny Mejia, apparently wants so much to blame the Thai sex worker killings on Trump's use of the words China virus she acts as if there were no connection between China and the 500,000 deaths we have suffered here from the Wuhan virus. I don't doubt that Trump's use of the words China Virus did contribute to anti-Asian sentiment in this country. But I am also sure that Trump's words pale into insignificance as motivation for anti-Asian feeling when compared to the overwhelmingly more significant fact that China blithely let three-quarters of a million people travel to this country at a time when it knew it had a fatal, infectious virus spiraling out of Wuhan. The Chinese government quite reasonably banned flights from Wuhan to other parts of China but did not stop flights from Wuhan to the United States. That's why people here were furious with China.
Also notice how the Times reporter, Brittny Mejia, conflates Thai with Chinese by calling them both Asian. This way she doesn't have to address why Long would kill Thai workers if his real beef was with China.
Presidents, of course, need to be careful in their use of language, given how many nutcases are loose in the land. But I also suspect Trump's use of the words China Virus added perhaps one inch to an Everest-sized mountain of resentment towards China for standing by while the virus escaped its land. It is also true, according to everything we know, that Long wasn't thinking of their ethnicity when he killed six women in Atlanta. He killed them (and two men) because he was a religious nut who saw the existence of sex workers as a threat to his deeply fragile self-esteem.
This is why Mejia's story, and another similar one about a Koreatown rally that appeared on the same page, makes people not trust the major media anymore. The media know that if you are going to postulate a wave of anti-Asian hysteria sweeping the land you need some extremely serious incidents to make the case. Mere instances of name-calling and jostling in the street aren't going to do it. That's why so many in the media have seized on the otherwise unrelated Atlanta sex murders as a way to prove their contention that America is racist to the core.
I am sure getting tired of reading day after day that the killings in Atlanta were the result of anti-Asian hate. The killer, Robert Aaron Long, was, by all accounts, obsessed with sex and religion, not by anti-Asian animus.
But the notion that white anti-Asian racism caused the attacks is too useful to leftist activists to discard. Instead, day after day the media keeps pushing the narrative that this massacre of six Asian women (and two non-Asian men) is proof, that America is an irredeemably racist county. In yesterday's edition, the LA Times ran a story by one of the paper's three columnists on its racism beat, asserting that this latest outrage in Atlanta has finally prompted the black and Asian communities to join forces to fight the never-ending plague of "white supremacy," a euphemism, as far as I can tell, for whites in general.
The notion that it is predominately whites who are committing these crimes against Asians is demonstrably not true. First of all, the incidence of anti-Asian incidents in this the time of Covid is still small. There were only seven hate crimes against Asians in Los Angeles in 2019. The number went up to 11 in 2020. This is distressing but it is still hardly a wave. Furthermore, of the people behind these anti-Asian attacks, whites weren't even a majority. According to the American Spectator, quoting Andrew Sullivan, 24% of violent attacks on Asians were committed by whites and 28% were committed by blacks. Since blacks make up only 13% of the US population this means that a given black is seven times more likely to attack an Asian than a white is.
In New York City last year, says Sullivan, police arrested 11 blacks for attacks on Asians but only two whites, and this despite the fact that the white population of the city is three times higher than the black one.
Conclusion: Yes, it is true. Asians are being attacked in greater numbers than before. But it isn't whites who are behind them.
As for LA Times columnist Erika Smith, she apparently knows full well who is most responsible as she says in her column it is time both to stop "focusing on individual perpetrators" and to quit "demanding more policing, more laws and more prosecutions." Instead, in a wonderful sleight of hand, she says we rather need to blame the real causes behind the attacks: "white supremacy, systemic racism and the social constructs that support them."
Right, the last thing we want to do is blame the people actually committing the crimes.
You hear weird stuff when you listen to podcasts in your room in the dark at 2 am. The UFO stuff I usually enjoy when it's not too far out. But this January 15 Radiolab podcast is definitely pushing the outer limits. According to their bubbly young reporter (I am sorry to say I could never catch her name), whenever the government wants to jazz up the economy (or otherwise help out people in need because of Covid) all it has to do is go to a room in the Fed, open a spreadsheet and create a couple of trillion dollars out of thin air.
Today's LA Times has seven stories on anti-Asian racism, including this front-page story which alleges, contrary to the evidence, that the Atlanta massage parlor killings were a manifestation of anti-Asian hate. Apparently not finding any recent serious anti-Asian crimes, for the second day in a row the Time's Gustavo Arellano reaches back many decades to find racist incidents to write about.
It is clear to me now why reporters are twisting the motivation behind Atlanta massage murders into anti-Asian racism. Up till now most of the incidents against Asians in the wake of the Wuhan-originated Covid epidemic have been stupid cat-calls or harassment in the street. Even so, the increase has hardly been a "wave," (hate crimes against Asians increased from 7 in Los Angeles in 2019 to 15 last year). But if you are sufficiently versed in sophistry you can repurpose the Atlanta sexual dementia murders into evidence of genocide, thus proving once again what an irredeemably racist country America is.
As far as I can tell the man who killed six Asian women and two men at three Atlanta massage parlors, Robert Aaron Long, was obsessed with sex, not race. Even so, the fact that the victims were Asian proved too tempting for some media commentators to resist, and they immediately linked the killings to racist attacks on Asian-Americans in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic. Many commentators repeatedly blamed the workers' deaths on former president Trump for his repeated references to the "China Virus." Basically, the commentators said, it was wildly racist for anyone to talk about a "China Virus," as, in their words, a virus is a virus is a virus and one's ethnicity has nothing to do with it.
That is true, but also beside the point. The virus started in Wuhan, China, perhaps in a life-animal outdoor food market and spread so fast in China that the government halted all flights from Wuhan to other parts of the country in an attempt to contain the spread. The one thing the Chinese government didn't do was stop flights from Wuhan to the United States especially LAX, which might be one reason why southern California has been hit so much harder than other parts of the country.
Given that, I can't see how anyone is wrong in calling the virus the Wuhan Virus. There is a long history in epidemiology in referring to viruses by the place where they began. Within the last week, I have read repeatedly about the South African variant, the Brazilian variant, the UK variant, and the California variant.
Are these racist too?
The answer is obviously not. The reason no one complains about them though is that they don't serve the left's contention that the U.S. is an irredeemably racist country. Yes, it is true that the dead workers were all Asian but all the happy ending massage parlors in my neck of Eagle Rock are Asian too. If all the massage parlors in Atlanta were Hungarian or Swedish I suspect Robert Aaron Long would have killed the workers there just as readily. Long was furious because these women worked in the sex trade, not because they came from Asia.
Glenn Loury in March 4th testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on why the government should not try to make sure that different racial groups have the same outcomes in every activity:
You hear weird stuff when you listen to podcasts in your room in the dark at 2 am. The UFO stuff I usually enjoy when it's not too far out. But this January 15 Radiolab podcast is definitely pushing the outer limits. According to their bubbly young reporter (I am sorry to say I could never catch her name), whenever the government wants to jazz up the economy (or otherwise help out people in need because of Covid) all it has to do is go to a room in the Fed, open a spreadsheet, a spreadsheet and create a couple of trillion dollars out of thin air.
Now this isn't borrowed money that will add to the national debt, says Radiolab, it is created money. There is a quirk in our laws that allows the Mint to create platinum coins in any denomination that it wants (trillions for example) and sell them to the Fed, which then creates the money in its computer spreadsheet so it can be used by central banks.
Now, won't this just create massive inflation, the Radiolab host asks the bubbly reporter, as they have in Venezuela (inflation of 300,000 to 400,000 percent with a single roll of toilet paper now costing as much as some people get from their monthly pension)?
Not necessarily, answers the reporter. The Fed created money out of thin air back in 2007 when we had the big mortgage crisis and the result was the US suffered no inflation at all. Inflation, the reporter quotes an economist as saying, is simply a matter of expectations. If people don't expect prices to increase they probably won't, especially if the new money is used simply to meet normal demands like rent, food, and small business payrolls.
Can this be true? When the government needs money to give to people who are hurting because of the Covid pandemic all it needs to do is get the Fed to go to its computer spreadsheet and type in say, two trillion, and the presses start printing checks and pretty soon $1400 arrives in the mail to tide us all over for the next six months?
Sounds wonderful. And also unbelievable. Life is not that easy. Inflation is out there waiting, if not staglation too. I wish it were otherwise but I can't help but feeling that six months or a year down the road the Jimmy Carter economy will stir in its coffin, climb out of its grave and stagger out of the cemetery to mug us in the streets.
I once read that 7% of the world's population would move to the United States if they could. If the world's population is currently about 8 billion, that would be adding 560 million people to the 330 million who already live here. That would give the US a population of 890 million.
Can we handle that many more people? I am not sure. It already takes me 45 minutes to get to the west side of Los Angeles and that is when the traffic is light. To visit certain parks here in California you have to make reservations a year in advance.
I know the counter-arguments for illegal immigration. People come here because they want to improve their lives. Or they come because they need asylum. If that is the case, why do we make them actually be present in the United States before granting them the benefits they would receive if they lived here? Is someone standing one foot south of our border with Mexico less deserving than someone standing one foot north?
If someone really wants to live in the United States but hasn't had the opportunity to cross the border yet, why don't we just mail him his benefits check early? That way he could have the economic advantages of living here without actually having to be physically present. He gets to enjoy the bosom of his family at home and I get to drive across Los Angeles without being stuck in traffic all the way.
I sometimes wonder if the editors at the LA Times read their own paper. The top story on the paper's front page today says that a new coronavirus strain that is sweeping California is not only more transmittable than the old strain but it is more deadly and resistant to the Covid-19 vaccine. In another month, a UC San Francisco researcher said, it will probably account for 90% of all new infections in the state.
But then you go to the front page of the California section and the lead story there is that blacks and Hispanics are getting vaccinated far less frequently than whites or Asians. Prior stories about this have suggested the reasons are institutional racism, long memories of Tuskegee, and lack of transportation to inoculation centers.
Well, cripes. If we are all being vaccinated for one version of Covid and all the new cases are from another vaccine-resistant strain, I wonder why anyone would even bother to worry about racial disparities in the vaccination rate. It's like that old joke about the two old ladies who went to dinner in the Catskills. "The food here is awful," said one. "Yes," said the other, "and the portions are so small."
In his Los Angeles Times column today, Gustavo Arellano says that the Biden administration will require the Citizenship and Immigration Service to start using "inclusive" language in its communications. The term "illegal alien" will be banned in favor of "undocumented noncitizen" or "undocumented individual." Apparently, the government doesn't want to cast any aspersions on people who jump to the head of the line because they place their needs above those who obey the country's immigration laws.
One observation though. Arellano ought to be careful though using a term like "illegal alien," which he says is no better than calling someone a "greaser" or a "wetback." A couple of weeks ago the New York Times fired its long-time science writer, Donald McNeil, for using the n-word in a discussion two years ago with students of whether one of their fellow students should be suspended for having used the term in a video when she was 12. Two weeks ago the Times fired McNeil after 150 of NcNeil's colleagues expressed outrage that McNeil would use the term for any reason, academic or not.
The staff of the Los Angeles Times, I suspect, is no less politically correct than that of the New York Times. The use of the "i... a..." word may soon be as indefensible at this paper as the n-word is at the New York Times.
What a surprise. Joe Biden plans to increase taxes. Well, that's what we voted for so that's what we'll get. Current plans are to tax the rich. Here in California, the top 1% of earners pay more in income taxes than the bottom 90%. So do we only tax the rich? As Margaret Thatcher used to say, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." If most of the people don't pay taxes they will just elect politicians who will increase taxes indefinitely. That never works. But if a tax increase is inevitable we at least need to counter the trend to make someone else pay. Yes, the rich will continue to pay the most. After all, they are the ones with all the money. But everyone has to pay something, as vanishingly small as that number might be.
An interview with the inestimable Jordan Peterson as he talks about everything from why children need to roleplay to the negative reaction he often gets from the media compared to the overwhelmingly positive reaction he gets from people in the street. When the woman veers into politics, as all Peterson's interviewers invariably do, the woman I think is astonished when Peterson explains that you can't explain western civilization as the oppression of women by men, that equality of outcome leads to mountains of bodies, that Marxism is just as bad as Nazism, and that Canada, while a great country, is by no means the last bastion of civilization, unless you are going to exclude Europe, Scandanavia, Australia and New Zealand.
