This ridiculous section of an as yet undated Harris speech (or appearance, or nervous breakdown) would have once fallen into the Ethics Alarms Julie Principle category. Yes, yes, we all know that the Vice President is a babbling idiot, and there’s no point in pouncing on every time she proves it; after all, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. That, however, was before the Democratic Party, in its desperation after being caught deceiving the American people (with the aid of its propaganda organs, the biased and unethical news media) that President Biden wasn’t teetering on the brink of total senility, decided to make Kamala its nominee for President while bypassing primaries, debates, voting, competition—you know, that whole democracy thingy they claim to be protecting.
Now, however, the various emerging examples of Harris talking off the top of what we generously call “her head” becomes suddenly relevant, and not to be ignored out of pity and kindness. As I wrote in installment #1 of “This is Kamala Harris” last week…
“Evidence like this will be buried, ignored, or denied by the mainstream media, just like Hunter Biden’s laptop, until enough Americans have been deceived to put Harris in the White House….Harris’s distorted values, cracked logic, obnoxious character and arrogance are all intolerable, and most normal people will see that, if they only are allowed to read, watch and hear. “
Why is this particularly ludicrous example of Kamala being Kamala (I know, we have been told that using her first name is sexist and racist. Bite me.) significant? Several reasons, including the fact that almost all the major news sources now know about it but have refused to mention it, just as they continue to hide the substance of Harris’s extreme policy positions. Yet if Joe Biden, at least once the order had gone out to bring him down, had babbled like this the MSM might well have cited it as more proof that there were squirrels in his attic, metaphorically speaking or in actuality. And in contrast, as we all know and as I wrote in the earlier post, “each word out of Donald Trump’s ever-open mouth will be spun and fact-checked to put him in the worst light possible.”
Among the other reasons the video is significant:
- It doesn’t matter that Harris doesn’t comprehend “the cloud” and can’t explain it. She doesn’t have to know how it works. What matters is that she would be so foolish as to pretend to know what she was talking about when she obviously did not. She is a phony, a fraud, a fake down to her shoes. This is a problem for someone aspiring to lead the United States of America in a position of trust. She behaves this way because her entire career has been one of illusion and pretense, though usually not quite so blatant.
- Harris suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect: she is too dumb to know how dumb she is. Her grinning willingness to utter such garbage in a public forum proves it. This is also a serious problem. Large, complex nations with important obligations to its citizens and the world cannot risk being led by stupid people who think they are smart. The Founders, sexist and racist elitists though they were, assumed that this republic’s elected officials and representatives would be among the best and the brightest, not the mediocre and the dimmest.
- She apparently thinks that the America people are so naive, gullible and stupid themselves that she can get away with bluffing her way through a description of technology that has no relationship to reality. Like all those who try to fool all of the people all of the time, she is a grifter—and the news media is her accessory.
I searched my memory banks to see if I could recall an example of another Presidential candidate saying something in public quite this moronic. Ronald Reagan saying that trees cause pollution? No, inartful but not completely wrong. Jimmy Carter saying that he asked little Amy for guidance on nuclear policy? Nah, Jimmy was making that up. Ford saying that Poland was not behind the Iron Curtain? Just a brain fart.
No, the only candidate I can think of who has said anything nearly this ridiculous, other than Harris herself, is her opponent, Donald Trump.
That, however, is a topic for another day…
Ethics Alarms 
This is a very similar situation to what we have with President Biden. VP Harris is the student walking down the junior-high hallway completely oblivious to the “kick me” sign on her back.
Some malevolent hireling will pull her aside before speaking on cloud computing and quietly tell her, “You need to understand that it’s called “cloud storage” because there are aircraft flying, and they fly twenty-four hours a day except for when they refuel, that carry that data – and it could be photos, but also spreadsheets, and even movies – around in the sky, up where the clouds are. And you can access those things right from the airplane down to your local computer. The plane doesn’t even have to land and you can get it. That’s why it’s called “cloud computing”.
Ugh…I needed one more set of quotes at the end there. Sorry about that.
I immediately thought of “The internet is a series of tubes” and how much ridicule that prompted by the MSM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
Don’t tell anybody, but we do use “tunnels” and “pipes”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_protocol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix)
If you ever used a VPN…..
As a life-long I.T. professional with most of my experience being in the arena of networking, I can confidently say that the “series of tubes” metaphor is actually quite accurate and pertinent, especially in the context of when it was first used.
–Dwayne
This might help the VP’s condition:
Thanks for that, Joel. And a perfect send-up of those ubiquitous drug commercials. Whatever happened to physicians being up to date on current pharmacology rather than patients saying, “Hey Doc. I was watching the Golf Channel the other day and there was an ad for some drug that might treat my dread disease that’s about to kill me. Have you heard of it? You know, since you’re a highly trained specialist, and all that?”
Wow what a fucking IDIOT! This should definitely be on the front page of the NYT. I can see the damning headline now “Kamala, once Indiana but now Black, attempts to describe cloud storage in 21 second clip the illuminati doesn’t want you to see!”
This then leaves the world is in shock to learn politicians aren’t great science communicators.
This is worse than when Trump said we could possibly cure Covid, sorry Wuhan virus (those damn Chinese, by letting light inside the body.
I don’t think the, “pivot to Trump and say he’s worse” directive is going to work.
If you have a point to make, make it. A little sarcasm is Ok and acceptable—that comment isn’t. Do better.
You missed the marching orders.
You are supposed to claim that trump said to inject bleach to cure Covid.
i remember him saying the thing about letting light in because he’s way more ignorant than Harris
JB
Final warning. On the Wuhan virus, everyone was ignorant, and Trump’s musings about possible treatments don’t prove relative ignorance. Shining light in the body would be about as effective as the CDC’s “social distancing”—that is, not at all. One more substance free declaration that X is smarter than Y and I’m triggering the Stupidity Rule.
Pandering to Black Lives Matter, Harris declared in PRINT in 2020 that Emmett Till, Rodney King, George Floyd, Kalief Browder, Jordan Davis, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Philando Castille, Ezell Ford, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Freddie Grey were all the same to her: victims of racism. You can’t get more ignorant than that—or, in the alternative, more dishonest.
Final warning regarding what? I was responding to someone else.
Oh also wanted to comment…
No, Trump saying “let light inside the body” to get rid of Covid was gibberish, whereas every child knows that you can get sick from being close to someone. So I don’t get your point even comparing the two ideas since they’re diametrically opposed to each other.
Jim B
Okay, I’m making a call: you’re too dumb to comment here. Please feel free to read the posts and commentary; you might learn something. But 7th grade level observations like this one just wastes everyone’s time and raises my blood pressure.
Hey, if you’re 14 years old or so, don’t get discouraged. This is just a bit over your head now. If you’re 36…well, bless your heart. Bye.
ALERT! “JB” is hereby banned, as you can tell from by comment above. I’m invoking the rarely used EA Stupidity Rule.
Yeah, imagine if he had asked if maybe doctors could use flesh-burning lasers for surgery, or something like rock-crushing sound waves to break up internal concretions! Asking questions, what a maroon!
Don’t complain about the ‘light inside the body’ remark. I worked on a project like that as a postdoc. Phototherapy is an actual research area for cancer treatment, etc.
Okay, I’m gonna toss the challenge flag here so we can have this play reviewed.
Does anyone have a link to that appearance that includes broader context for what she said here? I absolutely agree that the clip provided is nonsensical and doesn’t speak well for her. On the other hand, I’m willing to see if there’s more going on here that changes this from an inartful description to one that actually doesn’t make her sound so stupid. Taking short snippets out of context is something the MSM does all the time.
See: Trump, Donald J., “Very Fine People” and the Covington School kids.
And while we’re at it, stop making me defend Kamala Harris.
How hard is it to simply say the cloud is nothing more than sending your private info over the Internet to private data storage firms. Your data is still in your laptop which is a physical place just as the hard drives that constitute the cloud.
It’s impossible for a dumb person who believes he/she can forge a word path through any subject. It would have been far better if she said, “I don’t have a good idea of what cloud computing is, and neither does a significant percentage of people who actually use it regularly. They just know it works…like me.”
What will happen when she tries to have a discussion on the risks of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East?
(oversized mouth + lack of knowledge) – discernment = trouble.
Way too hard when you’re dumber than a box of rocks, Chris.
I don’t think the, “pivot to Trump and say he’s worse” directive is going to work.
First Woman District Attorney | Kamala Harris | Talks at Google
Here you go: https://youtu.be/aJllQ9d3pYM?si=64sH4jxCtPAWeEak
Around 33:53 mark. It seems to be the clip is somewhat out of context if you watch the whole thing.
Yes that adds context but she is flat out wrong about the cloud not being a physical place. She is suggesting that the data is in the ether.
The issue of privacy regarding personal data in the “cloud” is no different than being locked in your house that cannot be seen from the street. Storing data in the cloud is predicated on the exact same expectation of privacy. Storing digital documents on a cloud server is no different than having your attorney or doctor keep personal information about you in their files or hard drives.
Harris is conflating cloud storage with personal data users of free services give voluntarily to app providers, travel agents, search engines that monitor your activities etc. If you take advantage of Microsoft cloud free storage you give them a license to use images or other info royalty free. I don’t consider these services true cloud services they are merely avenues to collect potentially marketable info about you.
“Yes that adds context but she is flat out wrong about the cloud not being a physical place. “
I know! Everything up to the last sentence was defensible. She could claim that the information was over our heads could be defended as figurative language to explain why it is the “cloud.” Then, she said it was not a physical place and that just ruined her whole comment.
-Jut
I replied with the original video but my comment isn’t appearing.
First Woman District Attorney | Kamala Harris | Talks at Google
Maybe Jack can retrieve it.
The video is from 2010
Here is the original video – second attempt. From 2010
The clip starts about the 33:50 mark
https://youtu.be/aJllQ9d3pYM?si=1euClHIR_JL9OHsK
So she was just talking about cloud storage in relation to the law. the full clip just makes her seem more competent
She’s also way more intelligent and articulate than Trump in general
JB
Ding! Ding! Ding! JB gets another treat from his handlers at the DNC for pushing the “Yeah, but Trump is worse!” button!
Well he is! Since we only have two choices, trying to make Harris look dumb is a waste of time when Trump is way worse.
If you want to attack Harris and say she shouldn’t be president, you should point out things where she is the weaker candidate vs Trump, not the better candidate.
JB
I have no idea what you just wrote. Final chance: make a substantive argument, not just a seat of your pants opinion, don’t comment, or be banned from commenting. “I like Harris better than Trump” is not an ethics argument. Again: Do better.
Moreover, the post wasn’t about Trump. I have plenty of posts about Trump. The point was and is that people who blather on about what they know nothing about are high risks to elect to high office, and that this video is an aexample. It was not and is not an invitation to say “But what about Trump! Clear?
It better be.
I watched the full video and she is articulate and intelligent throughout. She’s talking about how tech intersects with the law. Nothing she said was wrong, just not that articulate I guess? This 21 second clip does nothing to prove your point that she’s a risk to high office.
JB
YOU felt she was articulate and intelligent. That’s nice. And I salute you for watching the whole hour. You obviously have different standards of articulate and intelligent: I find her, always, facile, smug, and pedestrian when she isn’t outright wrong.
I just picked a random section (because my sock drawer needs attention) and heard her talk about her plan to stop recidivism, without the plan ever explaining a specific way recidivism would be reduced by her plan. And, of course, there is no such plan, and reducing recidivism is like reducing world hunger. This is woke fantasy land. Released prisoners commit crimes again for the same reason they committed them in the first place: they are poor, they are usually not very bright, they are sociopaths, they were not raised in stable environments, and they do what they do. No program is going to address any of those problems except with a small minority who happen to be smart, motivated, and have the tools of responsible citizenship already. That puffery wasn’t “intelligent.” It was standard politician double-talk, with no more substance that “we’re going to make American great again!” Please tell me that didn’t impress you.
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Talking point chucker! Do not engage!
Here ya go!
JB
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-kamala-d-harris-releases-“back-track-–-los-angeles”-report
Here YOU go. California released in Feb. the grand reduction in recidivism from 2017-2018 to 2018-2019: 2.7%, to 42%. This is after Harris had become a Senator, so the “program” had been in place for a while. The national average in the US per year is 43%. In other words, this expensive, government program accomplished nothing beyond normal yearly fluctuation but produced a swell press release. Over a 10 year period, about 80% of released prisoners end up back in the system, and it has always been thus. But it’s a great campaign talking point for starry eyed, naive voters.
I’m not sure your analysis is correct: In 2021, a Stanford Public Policy study commissioned by the Corrections Department found that Male Community Reentry Program participants who were there for at least nine months saw their likelihood of re-arrest decrease by 13% and their likelihood of reconviction drop by 11%.
Seems like a great program that’s working
Wow, are you gullible. From the report, which is, remember, a single study that has not been confirmed by any similar research: “These analyses are limited in their ability to address potential bias resulting from selection out of treatment due to offenders returning to prison from MCRP as opposed to completing the program as intended and exiting to the community from MCRP. These results are additionally limited in their ability to detect significant effects due to the small numbers of observed offenders who participated for each number of months in the model.”
And it only measured recidivism one year out. Taken together, all of that means that there is no conclusive evidence that the program works at all.
Aren’t you the one making the claim it wasn’t effective? If we can’t make any solid conclusions then you shouldn’t be saying it wasn’t effective with such gusto.
JB
I’m posting this as a reply to JB at the risk of it coming in after he’s banned, but I felt I needed to point out the continual tactic going on here. It is practically the same with every single one of these liberal commenters: continually shift the burden of proof onto the opposition. You’ll notice that Jack made the claim that there was no evidence that Harris’ recidivism program was effective. JB did make the rare move of offering proof, but when Jack reasonably pointed out all the ways in which the study failed to show effectiveness of the program, JB immediately shifted the burden back onto Jack. Jack never said the program wasn’t effective: he said there was no evidence. The evidence proposed thus far does not show the program was effective. Yet JB takes the tactic of trying to get Jack to further defend, when it was JB who presented the risible study to defend HIS assertion.
I’m also continually flabbergasted at these commenters inability to let a topic die. Either they feel the need to get the last word in on everything, or they feel they cannot let go of a topic until they get their adversaries to concede a point, no matter how small or inane that point might be. My reaction to their terrier-like worrying the argument to death is to wonder how on earth they have the time to just keep posting and posting ad nauseam. OB thinks they must be paid to sit around and trash any opposition statements, but for the time being I’ve not seen any concrete evidence to support that conclusion. Yet again, how on earth can they spend so much time being so combative? Are they doing this at work and neglecting their jobs?
You just got in under the wire!
For Ryan:
https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/sealioning-the-fastest-way-to-shut-down-dialogue/
Typical of sealions to beat that dead horse. Anything is better than actually addressing substantive points.
It doesn’t change the fact that she described what she obviously knew nothing about, and did so in a way that would make any current 10 year old laugh out loud. Neither Harris nor Trump could be described as “articulate,” nor would I regard taht statement by Harris as evidence of any impressive level of intelligence. Intelligent people don’t talk to tech types about technology they don’t understand.
Trump,meanwhile, is a classic example of how the concept of “intelligence” is far more complex than we tend to admit. I’ve seen and heard Trump do some things that I would call brilliant and inspired; also idiotic and outrageous. If Harris has ever done or said anything brilliant or inspired, I missed it.
In fairness, Jack, I think her comments on this video are far more intelligible than stuff she has said in the last 4 years. Here is Kamala on the release of the hostages:
“This is just an extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy and strengthening alliances,”
In the video, she is just talking, but she never sounds so stupid as when she is trying to sound profound.
I don’t know if Trump ever tries to sound profound; he always sounds like he is selling something, with all the puffery that goes with a sales pitch.
-Jut
–
Do you think the context makes that description of the cloud storage any less terrible?
Perhaps it is a “little” less terrible; after all, it is from 2010 which is 14 years ago and cloud computing wasn’t prolific at that time.
I’m not trying to defend Kamala; I just happened to be able to find the full video and people can judge for themselves.
Very useful. If a seven year-old comment by the GOP VP is going to get two weeks of intense coverage, an old Harris interview is fair game as well—especially since she refused to be interviewed now.
Well, to help them judge for themselves, even Harris’s legal explanation is pathetic. The law of searches and seizures has pretty easily negotiated technological changes: wire taps are not anticipated in the 4th Amendment, but they have been subject to it for a long, long time. Nor is it helpful to call the 4th Amendment a “law.” Nobody is ever arrested or prosecuted for violating the 4th. The government can be sued for breaching it. The Bill of Rights is a restriction on government power: an amendment specifies rights. Her description would make a good law school exam question: what’s wrong with Harris’s explanation of the 4th Amendment as it applies to computer-stored information? Nor was her copyright example coherent. If you copied Moby Dick by hand in 1890 and published it yourself, it would still be a copyright violation, yet nothing had been physically removed.
This was a woman showing why she flunked the bar exam to non-lawyers not sophisticated enough to know what pablum they were getting.
Did she flunk the bar exam?
I disagree with you on the copyright issue. I think her point was that it used to be that theft involved taking something from someone and depriving them of it, like taking your copy of Moby Dick. But then we came up with “intellectual property” that made a property interest out of an intellectual exercise.
FYI: it appears the first copyright law appears to have been written in 1710: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
And, one might recall that, in the second volume of Don Quixote, Quixote complains about people who had been writing false tales about him (or something to that effect). Cervantes was pissed that people were using his character for their own writings. That would not happen these days because we have made such activities a theft of sorts.
-Jut
But Jut, her claim that “now” people can take intellectual property without the creator losing physical possession of it was true even for Cervantes!
But for Cervantes, he lost nothing because he had no “copy right.” We now recognize the right that we did not before. Before, it was not a “theft.” It was only a theft if you stole my copy of Don Quixote.
Maybe I am giving her too much credit, but that is how I interpreted what she was getting at.
-Jut
Or I’m not giving her enough credit. That’s a horrible thought…
Yet cloud computing hasn’t changed in any substantial way in those same 14 years either. So in that sense, “It’s from 2010” doesn’t really hold up as a defense.
It’s no different than if someone from the 1940’s similarly botched an explanation of how electricity works.
–Dwayne
No. See my remark in response to context. She actually stated that your data is not in a physical location. This means it is in the ether.
All data is stored on some electronic device. Does she not know what data centers do? For gods sake, Ashburn Va was one of the biggest locations for data centers in the east in 2010.
Listening to the context, I am less critical of her.
She was talking about the 4th Amendment and what could be seized in the home. In a roundabout way, she talked about how your data is not just in your laptop.
This is kind of important because some of these tech companies happily respond to government subpoenas to get your information.
And, she made the point that lawyers and judges don’t always understand how the technology works, a point Jack makes regularly.
-Jut
Before I saw the whole video, I wondered, “What possible context could mae that description of cloud storage any less idiotic?” All I could think of was, “Here’s how someone who doesn’t understand the interne thinks cloud storage works…” seeing the context didn’t change my assessment.
But as a general ethics proposition, I agree with your point.
Her attendance at Google headquarters 15 years ago is now making the rounds as well. As you can imagine, it’s not good.
Why is referring to Kamala Harris by her first name a problem? We talk all the time about Joe, or usually SloJo. I mean the only reason we say Trump, not Donald in my house is because Donald either refers to a good electrician or a funny duck, neither of whom should be weighed down by Donald Trump on the cognitive dissonance scale. This doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s deemed to be disrespectful of a woman, Sarah. It’s like patting her on the head and saying, “Nice little girl.” I think that’s the objection, but it’s not really explained because there’s a counter current. (Frankly, I wish people would call her “Harris.” She’s in the big leagues now. She wants to be one of the boys.) But there’s also a big lefty push to call her by her first name because we’re all supposed to be “besties,” and she’s supposed to be the mother we all need, according to Drew Barrymore, or some other washed up former child actor. You know, like Hillary Clinton was just “Hillary” to all the cool kids. If you call her Kamala, you’re with her and you’re in the know. Wink Wink. Calling her by her first name is supposed to remind you how wonderful and exotic she is.
Maybe she should go by Kamala Brown!
Of course, Hillary’s campaign logo just said “Hillary.”
No one ever seemed to think anything of calling me Sarah, or having me call them Scott, Steve, Bob, David, Jimmy, or Josh when I worked in industry. How is this even a thing? If she goes by Kamala, then call her Kamala. If she goes by Kate, call her Kate. If she likes “hey you” fine. Heck, if she prefers, I’ll even call her late for dinner. This makes NO sense!
Indeed, it seems utterly fraudulent or yet another example of “heads I win tails you lose” double standards by Democrats. Google tells me it is wrong to call Kamala by her first name, but they make no sense either.
I think I’m pretty much in agreement with our host’s typical take. “Bite me indeed!”
Sara, I think the dust-up of what the presumptive Democratic Nominee should be called is a conscious distraction. The more time spent on meaningless topics like this, the less time spent on substantive issues.
Why bother talking about plans to reduce inflation, stem the border incursion by illegals, aid to Ukraine and Israel, and the record-high US debt-to-GDP ratio?
I’m sorry, I refuse to believe anyone is that stupid. She just appears drunk to me. In fact, her speech and mannerisms often appear to be that of a drunk person. Of course, it could be some kind of prescription medication as well.
In other, possibly related, news, Kim Cheatle apparently had standing orders that all illegal drugs found by the Secret Service in the White House and other residences of the first family would just be destroyed and not reported. The cocaine reported was because it was an officer not from a protection detail who didn’t know any better.
Hah! YouTube terminated the account of the person that posted the Harris cloud- computing video. Gee, I wonder why that happened…