Random Thoughts #70

Random Thoughts #70

Renaming stuff, illegal Koreans, the Fed nominee and genius quarterbacks

The president seems fond of renaming things. There is the Gulf of Mexico, now the Gulf of America. Let’s see how long that name change lasts once he leaves office. Now the Department of Defense is the Department of War. Why? Who knows? Again let’s see how long that name says around too. Renaming is a hassle and very costly. Defense (er, war) secretary Hegseth had the title on his door plaque changed. But that change must be made on everything throughout the Pentagon and the military. Seems like it will cost billions of dollars to effect the change throughout the over 700,000 (!) facilities Defense (er, war) has around the world. Are those billions coming out of the defense (er, war) budget that are slated for other stuff – like ammunition?

Trump is reverting back to the name that the Defense department had from the inception of the country until 1947 when Harry Truman renamed the department. What I don’t understand was Trump’s statement calling for the change. He said “We won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to DOD. So, we’re going Department of War.” What “woke” is he talking about? Harry Truman was “woke”?

Speaking of “woke” is Trump going to demand that we rename the black boxes in aircraft?

Did you see where Abrego Garcia’s lawyers claim that there are twenty two countries where he cannot be deported for fear for his life? Twenty-two? ICE was going to deport him to Uganda where he says he will be persecuted and tortured. Maybe he should seek refuge in Zohran Mamdani’s family compound. So ICE picked a country not on the list and is sending him to Eswatini. Yes that is a real country. What I want to know is whether Garcia will be incarcerated there.

When I saw news of the ICE raid at the Hyundai-LG plant in Georgia that arrested 475 illegals, I immediately thought that these must be Mexican construction workers. But no. They were South Koreans. The news reports were never clear what these workers were doing and how did they get here. Surely they did not come across the southern border. If they were flown here by Hyundai or LG, didn’t they have to have passports and visas to enter the country? Surely they weren’t all somehow spirited into the country without anyone knowing about it. Homeland Security said that the illegals had either crossed the border illegally, overstayed their visas, or arrived on visas that didn’t allow them to work. Duh. 

Well let’s eliminate the crossing the border illegally thing. Overstaying the visa excuse is a probability as is the “visas that didn’t allow them to work.” If the Koreans were here to supervise the construction of the plants or to train Americans in the use of the equipment – which I assume was Korean, why didn’t they get their visas renewed and/or why didn’t they have the appropriate visas? Some politicians are claiming that the Koreans were putting the Koreans to work in the plants rather than employing native American workers, saying that employing Koreans was cheaper than hiring Americans. But the Koreans are saying that they are not displacing Americans because there are no Americans to displace given the paucity of technically trained natives. If that were true, then wouldn’t Hyundai-LG seek to make these workers legal? It’s all very confusing.

Stephen Miran who Trump nominated to fill the remaining months of Fed governor Kugler’s term says that he will not resign from the Council of Economic Advisors. Rather he will take a leave. This makes a mockery of Fed independence and Miran saying that he will not be compromised is obviously lying. Does anyone really think that if he doesn’t do Trump’s bidding that he will get his old job back?

There is a superficially compelling article in the Wall Street Journal why boys are better at math than girls.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/do-sports-explain-the-math-gender-gap-eecb0dbe

Its all about sports and numbers. “The better one understands a sport, the greater one’s appreciation of its numbers. Statistics exist for each game—all derived by mathematical calculations. Football’s yards per play and points per game. Baseball’s batting and earned run averages. Basketball players’ points and rebounds per game. All these observations apply to other sports too.” Well there are very simple empirical tests to confirm or disconfirm this conjecture. First, do athletes have higher math scores than nonathletes? This should apply both to female athletes too. I know that the author will say that its not just the athletes he is talking about but that more boys follow sports than do girls. Yet a simple test would be to look at the math scores of girls who play sports versus girls who don’t. I don’t really anticipate that football players score higher on their math SATs but who knows? I would especially be interested in seeing the math scores of quarterbacks whose position is probably the most mentally demanding in all of sport.

Speaking of math, I was suspect that professional card players and gamblers are probably good at math.

If boys are better at math than girls then that’s damning with faint praise. Recall that most of my college seniors could not tell me what was 5 percent of $500.