Situationism in the news thanks to the Berkeley professor who suggested moving out of the Bay Area as a dating strategy for heterosexual men

“UC Berkeley professor under fire for telling student to ‘get out’ of California’s Bay Area if they want a girlfriend” (New York Post):

“If you want a girlfriend, get out of the Bay Area. Almost everywhere else on the planet is better for that. I’m not kidding at all,” [Berkeley Computer Nerdism prof Jonathan Shewchuk] reportedly said, according to screenshots of the comment posted to social media.

“You’ll be shocked by the stark differences in behavior of women in places where women are plentiful versus their behavior within artillery distance of San Jose and San Francisco.”

The professor was highlighting Situationism:

… the theory that changes in human behavior are factors of the situation rather than the traits a person possesses. Behavior is believed to be influenced by external, situational factors rather than internal traits or motivations. Situationism therefore challenges the positions of trait theorists, such as Hans Eysenck or Raymond B. Cattell. This is an ongoing debate that has truth to both sides; psychologists are able to prove each of the view points through human experimentation.

The last part of the Wikipedia intro is interesting. It’s #Science and everyone collects a fat paycheck, mostly from taxpayers, but there are no answers!

CNN, 2015, “I have a fiancé, a girlfriend and two boyfriends”:

Miju Han lives in the Bay Area, works as a product manager and shares a charming apartment with her fiancé.

Here’s what makes her love story a bit different: She’s also in three other relationships. In addition to her fiancé, Han has been seeing a woman for two years (they recently said, “I love you”). She also dates two other men.

Han, 27, says she never quite colored inside the lines. She grew up in the South, was attracted to women and fascinated by programming. In 2010, she moved to the Bay Area and has since worked at several major tech companies.

Professor and Mrs. Shewchuk:

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Israel’s military strategy in Gaza compared to COVID lockdowns

When SARS-CoV-2 burst onto the world stage societies could choose whether to absorb the damage quickly or drag out the misery. Sweden, for example, chose a sharp spike in infections and deaths while attempting to isolate the oldest and most vulnerable. The typical western countries attempted to drag out what Angela Merkel said was inevitable (i.e., that almost everyone would eventually get COVID-19) via lockdowns, school closures, mask orders, etc. Although Sweden had the smallest percentage of “excess deaths” over the multiple years of coronapanic, the differences in COVID-tagged death rate weren’t huge (even here Sweden had a lower rate than many of the countries that chose lockdowns and compared to U.S. states that shut their schools and businesses (except for alcohol and marijuana!)).

For the nations and states that chose what seemed to be a more cautious and humane approach, the population’s misery extended for years. Public schools closed for 18 months in some big Democrat-run cities, for example. Increased alcoholism, drug abuse, withdrawal from the workforce (not “unemployment” since the Army of the Lockdowns was no longer seeking work), etc. The increased deaths from these factors, plus deferred health care and loss of education, will continue for decades.

I wonder if we can apply the same analysis to Israel’s counterattack in Gaza. The conventional military strategy for Israel would have been to begin bombing and shelling Gaza on October 8, 2023, giving priority to the targets of maximum military value but not worrying about collateral damage, and to have continued until either the Gazans succeeded in their goals of liberating Al-Quds and destroying the Zionist entity or chose to surrender unconditionally. There would be no phone calls in advance of bombing or shelling and both buildings and humans would be destroyed. The battles might have lasted a few weeks before one side decided that the price paid was too high and surrendered to the other. While it is clear that this standard strategy would have resulted in a higher number of deaths among Gazans in the first few weeks, it is unclear that this approach would have resulted in more deaths overall. If Gazans saw that an intolerable (to them) price was being paid, they might have surrendered after just a few days.

Whatever has happened in Gaza thus far, it hasn’t been bad enough to convince a significant number of Gazans that (a) the October 7 attack was a mistake, or (b) the goal of destroying Israel should be abandoned. A November poll showed strong support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as for the October 7 attacks. The idea of a two-state “solution” was rejected. More recent polls show similar resolve among Gazans. For example, this Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll from March 2024 found that support for the October 7 attacks is actually increasing among Gazans, the majority of whom believe that Hamas will rule Gaza indefinitely. The poll also found that Gazans don’t want to go to Egypt because they think they’re more likely to be shot and killed by the Egyptian army and police than by the IDF (i.e., they don’t believe that Egyptians subscribe to the “no human is illegal” axiom).

While progressives accuse Israel of “genocide”, the population of Gaza is likely larger today than it was on October 6 due to births at a rate of 66,000 per year:

Even if we limit to the period since October 7, Gazans have better access to health care than do working class Americans: 3.3 million health consultations for 2.3 million people in less than 6 months, just from the US-/EU-funded UNRWA (maybe some additional from private doctors).

So whatever the sacrifices that Gazans have made since October 7, they haven’t been severe enough to motivate the society to consider a change of objectives nor to think about surrendering. The result of this is that the active battles continue and the war that the Arabs started in 1948 will continue (Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties so they’re no longer involved in this war). So long as there are active battles, the lives of Gazans are significantly disrupted in terms of where people can live, whether children are in school, etc. Given that Palestinians will never have to work (US and EU taxpayers supply all of the essentials via UNRWA) this is of less practical relevance than it would be in almost any other society, but there is still a price to be paid for engaging in active battles. A non-working Palestinian with 10 children was likely better off on October 6 than today. The quality of the free food, health care, and education delivered by UNRWA was better on October 6 than today, for example.

What about the purported “famine”? The typical society that is starving will abandon its goals of military conquest in favor of food. If the Gazans are, in fact, starving, why don’t they want to surrender and give up on liberating Al-Quds? All of the videos and photos that I have seen on X decrying the “famine” show crowds of normal-weight humans. Pro-Hamas videographers have managed to find some unhealthy-looking children to feature, but they are always surrounded by healthy well-fed adults. Either the kids are suffering from a disease rather than malnutrition or we are forced to infer that Palestinian adults are feasting while letting their children starve. That’s the hardly the admirable behavior we’d expect from progressive role models and, from a liberal Democrat’s point of view, the builders of an ideal society.

Here’s an example from a UN official who highlights the purported starvation, asks for what Hamas wants (a ceasefire during which its soldiers can be resupplied), and doesn’t mention the hostages taken by Palestinians on October 7:

The video shows one youth who is indeed in an unfortunate condition, but everyone else in the video seems healthy and well-fed, even plump in some cases (tough to tell since the crowd scenes aren’t that clear and the women are covered in accordance with Islam).

Considering all of the above, I wonder if Israel’s attempts to be kind to Palestinians who support Hamas but who were not actively carrying guns for Hamas have actually turned out to be cruel. A lower body count sounds like a humane goal, but dragging out the active fighting inevitably means a delay in when rebuilding can begin and normal societal activities can resume.

Related:

  • (I wrote this post on March 23, so was not influenced by this March 25, 2024 interview with Donald Trump) “You have to finish up your war. To finish it up. You gotta get it done. And, I am sure you will do that. And we gotta get to peace, we can’t have this going on. And I will say, Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support, you have to finish up, you have to get the job done. And you have to get on to peace, to get on to a normal life for Israel, and for everybody else.”
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Key Bridge collapse and electric aircraft

Dali, the Singapore-flagged container ship that brought down Key Bridge in Baltimore, presumably had multiple redundant power systems, yet apparently suffered a total loss of power that may have contributed to the bridge strike:

Obviously this is a sad day for the families of those who perished in the collapse, but the accident raises a question regarding electric aircraft. Many of them can’t glide. Absent a Cirrus-style ballistic parachute, total loss of power means that everyone on board will die. The typical design has three independent electrical systems and the calculated chance of a total failure is 1 in 1 billion or less. Yet the same calculation was likely done for the Dali, a much more expensive machine, and total failure appears to have happened nonetheless.

I wonder if this worse-than-calculated performance favors winged designs such as Beta’s.

The “super drone”-style designs can’t autorotate as a helicopter can/must and they can’t glide on wings like an airplane because they don’t have wings.

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People who say that border walls are immoral and ineffective stack up shipping containers and razor wire

“Border walls don’t make us safer or stronger, says political scientist” (berkeley.edu, 2019): “[the partial border fence between the U.S. and Mexico is] not actually keeping immigrants out, but it has magnified the cost and peril for migrants on the one hand and created an enormous illegal smuggling industry on the other.”

Fast forward to January 2024 and the university-owned People’s Park in Berkeley, California, formerly a home for the unhoused, became home to a border wall of shipping containers and razor wire, with guards posted at all four corners. A photo from March 2024:

“UC Berkeley adds razor wire to part of People’s Park shipping container wall” (Berkeleyside, Janary 11, 2024):

UC Berkeley spokesperson Kyle Gibson said the “security wire” was installed on portions of the wall near buildings on the west side of the property, and would not fully encircle the site. Officials were concerned someone could scale those buildings, then have an easier time getting on top of the barrier that was constructed last week, Gibson said.

“It’s meant to prevent people from being able to easily climb on top of the containers,” he said. “It’s purely there for safety and security.”

The 160 double-stacked shipping containers, some of which have also been outfitted with security cameras and lights, are meant to secure the open space through construction of a 1,100-bed student and supportive housing complex now before the state Supreme Court.

In other words, the unhoused are making way for paying customers.

What are all the marks on the containers you might ask? Apparently, the containers were richly plastered in pro-Hamas signage until just a few days before I was there.

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God’s principal gifts to Americans: elderly Democrats

It’s Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week for observant Christians. In the old days, the majority of Americans believed that Jesus was God’s greatest gift to humanity. What or who has replaced Jesus? “Marilynne Robinson Considers Biden a Gift of God” (New York Times, February 15, 2024):

I’m less than a year younger than Joe Biden, so I believe utterly in his competence, his brilliance, his worldview. I really do. You have to live to be 80 to find this out: Anybody under 50 feels they’re in a position to condescend to you. You get boxed into this position where people who deal with you are making assumptions about your intellect. It’s very disturbing. Most people my age are just fine. What can I say? It’s a kind of good fortune that America is categorically incapable of accepting: that someone with a strong institutional memory, who knows how things are supposed to work, who was habituated to their appropriate functioning is president. I consider him a gift of God. All 81 years of him.

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Mar-a-Lago and the Palm Event

Despite not being a member of the Palm Beach elite or even elite-adjacent, I managed to bust into Mar-a-Lago recently for an annual event that benefits a local children’s charity, A Place of Hope. Why would anyone want to go to Mar-a-Lago? It’s a National Historic Landmark and important as an example of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. The centrality of this style of architecture to South Florida is explained in Bubble in the Sun book: even those with the best information can’t predict a crash and, in fact, our neighborhood within Abacoa is all Spanish Colonial Revival.

The most hated man in America appeared midway through the event to welcome the guests, praise the organization, praise the musical and theatrical talent, etc. Donald Trump was gracious and did not mention politics nor did he talk about himself. He had no teleprompter. Only a small percentage of the guests mentioned Donald Trump or seemed to have the November election on their minds, but there were exceptions. In the It’s Not a Cult Category:

(Is the “most hated man” appellation accurate? Far more people hate Trump than, for example, Jose Antonio Ibarra (the migrant arrested for the murder of Laken Riley).)

The Mar-a-Lago staff put on a copious buffet. I asked about a dozen of the workers how they liked working there and all were positive, with the exception of a seasonal worker from South Africa who was neutral.

Sadly, we didn’t get to go into the original main house, but some of the architectural details were interesting nonetheless:

What did people drive to the event? Ferrari was a common choice:

More unusual Ferraris were selected for display closer to the house rather than simply parked in the back yard. The silver Enzo below might be worth $4 million. (Remember that Democrats agreed that all of Mar-a-Lago was worth $18 million at his trial in New York, though now CNN’s experts say that it is worth “hundreds of millions”.)

For my friends who are Porsche fans, though it was much more an event for Ferrari nerds:

Rolls-Royce was well-represented. They love their colors:

People wouldn’t think less of you if you showed up in a humble Ford:

I had some difficulty connecting with the local Honda Odyssey owner’s club at the event, but it was a pleasant crowd of people and one in which trust prevails. I managed to lose my valet parking ticket and was able to pick up my car without being asked to prove my identity or association with the car (I knew where it was in the parking lot because I’d been taking photos).

Speaking of cars and Florida, I’ve had to replaced all four tires and the battery recently on the 3-year-old Odyssey. The summer-all-the-time weather is tough on both tires and batteries, apparently.

Related (on the subject of elites in and around Palm Beach)…

(This is the official airport management Twitter account.)

And regarding the challenge of maintenance:

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Why didn’t Vladimir Putin’s support for Hamas protect Russians from jihad?

A jihad was waged at a concert hall in suburban Moscow yesterday. It is tough even to imagine the grief of Russian families touched by this event. However, since I didn’t know any of them (as far as I am aware), a question worked its way from the back of my mind to the front…

“What we know about the attack on a Moscow concert hall” (BBC):

The Islamic State group (IS) has said four of its members carried out the attack.

Vladimir Putin has a supporter of the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”). France24 (December 2023) reported that Putin was trying to help Hamas win the ceasefire that it wanted to consolidate its rule over Gaza, re-arm and re-supply its soldiers, etc.:

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is among Israel’s loudest critics and has refused to denounce Hamas’s bloody October 7 attack. … Russia has officially backed calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza at the UN, while early in the war Putin accused Israel of contemplating tactics comparable to Nazi Germany’s brutal siege of what is now Saint Petersburg during World War II.

He’s on the “right side of history” from a progressive Democrat point of view, certainly, and, one might have imagined, from an Islamic point of view. Why does Islamic State not give some credit to a supporter of Islamic Resistance and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? At least refrain from attacking Russians until the battles that began in Gaza on October 7 are resolved?

A reminder of happier times…

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Worshiping the Rainbow Flag is a “Jewish value”

Recent email from the guardians of the Jewish faith in our corner of South Florida:

The organization’s web site says “Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County embraces a culture of diversity and inclusivity in accordance with our Jewish values”.

This is a little confusing because we are also informed that worship of the sacred Rainbow Flag necessarily leads to support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), which seeks to destroy the Zionist entity that is beloved by many Jews. See, for example, “Queer people organizing in solidarity with Palestine continues to grow”:

LGBTQIA+ solidarity with Palestinians has a long, rich history, and it’s growing despite years of Israeli pinkwashing”)

Queer Palestinian people have always been the leaders of their own resistance against Israeli apartheid, and non-Palestinian LGBTQIA+ people around the world have supported the call to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine for decades.

During the [January 6 Queers for Palestine event in Maskachusetts], Yaffa, queer Palestinian-American performance artist Juliet Olivier, and queer Palestinian-American author and activist Hannah Moushabeck spoke about how indigenous peoples around the world were queer before colonists brought homophobia to their societies and warned that bringing up transphobia in Palestine in response to “Free Palestine” is simply a distraction, much like any other answer to “Free Palestine” other than “yes.” They also noted that Palestinians don’t care if their oppressor can live as openly queer or not and that needing to meet basic needs like food, water, and shelter means that Palestinians cannot turn their attention to other needs like working for queer liberation.

It’s also confusing because it is unclear how the “G” part of 2SLGBTQQIA+ is “in accordance with Jewish values” if the Torah is part of “Jewish values” (“the biblical book of Leviticus, which prohibits sex between men” said the New York Times in 2018).

If we can solve this apparent conundrum I hope to see everyone at the parade on Sunday! (Why isn’t the parade during the sacred festival Pride Month of June? Unlike FIFA soccer, Pride isn’t a cause for which people want to die of heat stroke.)

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Science: there has never been a worse time to be 2SLGBTQQIA+ in the United States

A Scientific American article, as presented by Apple News:

There are “unprecedented threats” against American children who identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+ (I won’t hatefully exclude some categories, as the headline authors did by citing only “LGBTQ”). In other words, it was better to be gay in the 1950s or 1850s compared to now.

The article in Scientific American contains the “unprecedented threat” language in a subhead:

Families Find Ways to Protect Their LGBTQ Kids from Serious Harm—Physical and Mental—after a Flood of Discriminatory Laws

Hostility toward LGBTQ kids, enshrined in hundreds of new bills, has put families with such children under unprecedented threat, raising risks of suicide and physical attacks

Hate has spread beyond Florida and Texas:

She had moved her family three times over the past six years. Her house in New Hampshire was shot at—possibly by someone aiming at thce [sic] rainbow signs in her front yard. In 2022 she fled to Massachusetts, which seemed to be safer for her child, Grey, who is transgender. But whenever she hears the words “safe state,” a thought pops into her head: “Austria felt like a safe place in World War II, too.”

For the time being, Grey feels like they are in a good place mentally. (For their personal safety, the names of young people and their parents in this story have been changed.) They have found a community that sees them for who they are and a state that allows them to receive the gender-affirming care they need.

On a recent trip to Piedmont and Berkeley, California I was informed that there is more hate than ever in California and the U.S. generally and it is all the fault of Donald Trump, despite his departure from a position of power more than three years ago. I asked for how many more years Trump could be blamed, but received no answer.

How many of us are hated because of Donald Trump? At least 1 out of every 4 young Americans, according to Science:

Given the large number of young people who identify as LGBTQ—about 25 percent of high school students are not heterosexual, according to a 2021 survey…

Science says that states that reel in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ should expect to have a population in poor mental health, though this is not because of anything inherent to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle:

Compared with other kids their age, LGBTQ youths are at higher risk of numerous mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, substance abuse, self-harm and suicide. These health issues have been largely ascribed to minority stress, the consequences of social sources of tension that come with a marginalized identity. These stressors are not an innate part of an LGBTQ identity. Rather they emerge from experiencing repeated prejudice and powerlessness.

Here’s a strange one: a Floridian considering fleeing has “passports ready”. Where in the world is more friendly to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ than a Democrat-ruled U.S. state, such as California or Maskachusetts?

Another parent, a single father to a 12-year-old trans boy in Florida, says he can no longer protest anti-LGBTQ bills, because it raises risks of repercussions for his child. “You always balance out your ideals, your principles, your goals as a citizen with the needs of your family,” he says. He has developed an exit plan in case his home state becomes even more hostile. He has passports ready and is prepared to quit his teaching job and start his own company, moving to another state or abroad if necessary. Being able to think about leaving, a privilege he recognizes many parents do not have, has bolstered his mental health.

That said, even Maskachusetts isn’t safe, according to Science:

Yet even now, in an apparently safer place [Massachusetts], she and her husband still find themselves trying to protect Grey from the news, transphobic relatives and hostile people on the street. Recently the three of them went for a walk through their city. Tamara noticed that they had fallen into “bodyguard mode”: one parent in the front, one parent in the back and their only child in between.

Circling back to the original topic, is it Scientifically correct to say that hostility toward 2SLGBTQQIA+ ideas and people is “unprecedented”?

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Robot to rake and clean a Zen garden?

Happy First Day of Spring! If you’re in a northern lockdown state it is presumably time to think about gardening.

On a recent visit to Morikami, an enormous-by-Japanese-standards Japanese garden run by Palm Beach County (see Should Palm Beach be renamed Elba? for some background on the donor), it occurred to me that a great university robotics project would be an affordable machine that could maintain what stupid white people call a “Zen garden” (karesansui or “Japanese dry garden” is the correct term). It’s incredibly labor-intensive to pull out the leaves and re-rake the stones. Even in a country with open borders it would be very expensive to have a Zen garden at home that was maintained to a Japanese temple’s standard.

Here is a photo of the primary Morikami dry garden:

There are also some smaller areas and sections that use this material/technique:

The leaves need to be picked up a lot more frequently than the stones need to be re-raked, right? Does that mean that an aerial drone is required to pick up the leaves without disturbing the raking?

Using expensive industrial robots to rake the gravel has been done, but the video below shows them working in a leaf-free indoor environment:

What would it look like to build something that a consumer who wanted a backyard Zen garden could afford? With fat enough tires could the leaf removal be done without disturbing the raking? Or maybe if the raking is done by robot the right answer is to forget the drone and do a drive-around leaf removal and then re-rake every morning at 6 am.

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