We are being absolutely crushed by Iran (NYT)

by philg

Let’s have a look at the New York Times right now. Every story on the front page seems to be about a failure of U.S. military. Russia is winning. We stole some oil tankers and that’s actually costing us money instead of making us money. Missiles are falling in northern Israel. Maybe we’re firing some missiles at Iran from Bahrain, but they certainly aren’t hitting anything. We’re suffering an “oil shock” like in the bad days of the 1970s.

Let’s compare to a random day in the middle of our involvement in World War II. The British-spec’d P-51 hadn’t come into action yet so we were losing B-17 bombers and crews at a ridiculous rate. Nonetheless, the focus of the stories was on the enemy’s losses, not our own.

This is the first time that I can remember when more than half of Americans seem to be invested in the idea that the U.S. is doomed to lose a war.

(I personally believe that our best option for winning is to use bombs to (1) disable Iran’s oil production and export infrastructure, and (2) disable Iran’s electricity generation. Without money from selling oil, the Islamic Republic won’t be able to do too much that we don’t like. Without electric power, Iran won’t be able to produce a lot of sophisticated weapons. (Yes, they can use generators for some stuff, but that’s not the same as plugging a massive factory into the power grid.))

Full post, including comments

Book about the Edmund Fitzgerald

by philg

It’s Friday the 13th, a notorious day for bad luck. Speaking of bad luck, let’s look at the 29 men who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975. They’re the subject of an interesting new book: Gales of November by John Bacon. Not exactly a spoiler: everyone dies, just as Gordon Lightfoot explained in his enduring hit song (from the book I learned that Lightfoot was an experienced recreational Great Lakes sailor).

Some things that I didn’t know:

  • it was the last trip of what was going to be the retirement year for the captain and many of his long-time partners amongst the crew
  • the captain was considered the best on the Great Lakes and had 45 years of experience
  • the weather was a 50-year event, perhaps, and not merely an ordinary “gale of November”

Perspective on the suffering of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims

Since almost everything in the news these days must be referenced to the Epstein Files…

The sinking was preventable, as we’ll see below, and quite a few mistakes were made.

Columbia offered some of the families the victims’ last paycheck ($568.25 for a deckhand) and $750 for the victim’s lost personal effects, an amount determined by their labor contract, but other families didn’t receive even those checks. When Columbia offered nothing else, the families had little recourse but to file wrongful death lawsuits, for which Columbia paid whatever the families’ individual attorneys could negotiate. Some families received about $35,000, or a little more than a year’s wages for a deckhand making overtime, and others marginally more.

The typical woman who alleged that she suffered by receiving cash, Gulfstream rides, free rent in Manhattan, luxury vacations, etc., in exchange for sex 10, 20, or 30 years earlier, was paid about $3.5 million from Epstein’s estate, a JP Morgan settlement fund, and a Deutsche Bank settlement fund. That’s 100X what an Edmund Fitzgerald crewmember’s survivors were paid. Thus, we can conclude that having sex on Jeffrey Epstein’s island was 100X worse than riding through 30-50′ waves for hours and ultimately being drowned in 42-degree water.

The bargain all the crewmen on the Fitzgerald had signed up for was a hard one, but straightforward: The work will be taxing, and you will miss most of your family’s best moments, but you will retire relatively young, with a good pension and nothing to do but hunt, fish, and play cards, pool, and golf. Best of all, you’ll have plenty of time and energy to spend with your grandchildren. The Fitzgerald’s twenty-nine crewmen and their families had all paid their deposits up front, but never got to enjoy the sweet side of the deal.

The Special Hazards of the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes can be more treacherous than the oceans. One reason is the distinct structure and frequency of the Great Lakes’ freshwater waves. In the oceans, salt weighs down the water, squashing the waves and spreading them out, so they typically form larger but smoother swells, similar to a roller coaster. On the Great Lakes there’s no salt to hold down the waves, so they rise more sharply and travel closer together, like jagged mountains of water coming at you in rapid succession. These waves don’t roll; they peak, crest, then crash down on whatever is unlucky enough to lie below them.

That’s another reason why Great Lakes waves are so steep and ragged and travel so fast. On the ocean the waves are usually about ten to sixteen seconds apart, so even a large container ship can fit between them. On Lake Superior the waves run four to eight seconds apart, which means that a seven-hundred-foot lake freighter can be riding atop two waves at once.

That problem produces more problems. On the Great Lakes a ship that long can impale its bow in one wave, which can lift it up thirty feet or more, while the ship’s stern can be simultaneously stuck in the wave coming right behind it, raising the ship’s back end in the air another thirty feet. That leaves its midsection, which could be loaded with 58 million pounds of iron ore—the equivalent of 4,200 adult elephants—suspended between the two waves, with nothing supporting it. That creates a phenomenon naval architects call “sagging,” in which the unsupported middle of the ship sags toward the water below it, exerting a tremendous strain on the hull.

After sagging between two waves, just seconds later the ship might face another threat: riding over the peak of a single colossal wave. This creates a condition known as “hogging,” the opposite of sagging, where the vessel drapes over the wave’s crest, with both the bow and stern drooping downward, again placing immense pressure on the center of the ship’s hull.

[Michigan Tech’s Guy] Meadows’s research shows that Lake Superior’s biggest storms occur every thirty years or so, but even in milder storms the waves on the Great Lakes can be alarming. In a pretty unremarkable 2020 storm, for example, two of their buoys anchored off Lake Superior’s southern shore, far from the path of Superior’s biggest waves, measured waves reaching 28.5 feet, almost as high as a three-story building.

If the biggest waves within a few minutes are at 30′, according to Guy Meadows, and they stay there for 24 hours, a ship should experience at least one 60′ wave (1 in 10,000).

Another bad feature of the Great Lakes is that it is easier for freshwater to freeze above the waterline on a ship than it is for saltwater to freeze, thus adding weight to a ship that is already in peril. A typical modern iron boat’s cargo of taconite also creates a hazard:

Because it’s two-thirds clay, a porous material, it can absorb up to 7 percent of its weight in water, and four times that can get trapped between the pellets when it’s piled high.

(i.e., the cargo hold can hold a lot of water weight that isn’t possible to pump out; separately, if you thought that math professors were useless, the book notes that U. Minnesota math prof Edward W. Davis is the person who figured out how to work with taconite, a low-grade iron ore)

Overloading as a Factor

Prior to the wreck of the Fitz, Great Lakes captains prided themselves on moving maximum tonnage per trip and per season. Everyone loaded up the ships to the painted Plimsoll line at which point the freeboard is the minimum required for safety. The Fitz was operated with far less freeboard than her original designers had intended:

Given how such incredibly small margins on the Plimsoll line could produce such prodigious gains, especially when multiplied by forty to fifty round trips each shipping season, the executives at Columbia Transportation must have been thrilled when the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), working with the Coast Guard, reduced everyone’s required freeboard in 1969, and again in 1971, and again in 1973. For the Fitzgerald, that meant the original requirement of 14 feet, 9.25 inches of freeboard when sailing in November had been reduced to 11 feet, 6 inches—a total drop of 39.25 inches, or more than a yard, in just a few years.

Captains would then use various techniques to add a few inches of cargo beyond even this reduced freeboard, described in a chapter titled “Cheating the Plimsoll Line”.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was loaded to the absolute maximum, and a little beyond, on what was supposed to be her last voyage of the season:

The loading speed was all the more impressive because the dockworkers had filled the Fitzgerald’s belly with 26,112 long tons of taconite—far from the staggering amounts the new thousand—footers were carrying, but a fitting finale to McSorley’s celebrated career. The load that day was almost 4,000 long tons more than the 22,509 the Fitzgerald needed to set the Great Lakes record on its very first run just seventeen years earlier, a testament to the extra 39.25 inches the Coast Guard had allowed the Fitzgerald to sink in the water since 1973—plus the crew’s ability to cheat a few more inches on the Plimsoll line. This was such a common practice it would have been more remarkable if the crew had not cheated on the Plimsoll Line. Even the crew’s families knew about it. “They were overweight because they wanted to break their own record,” says Blaine Wilhelm’s daughter, Heidi Brabon. “So they cheated.” But what was unusual, according to former Fitzgerald deckhand Terry Sullivan, was that she was carrying a full load so late in the season, when even the USCG rules start scaling back the limits. While the Fitzgerald might not have been cheating by much, on the grand scale, when you combine those extra inches, plus the 39.25 inches the Coast Guard had already granted the Fitzgerald two years earlier, and the fact that all ships were supposed to scale back their loads for the rougher fall weather, any reasonable analysis can draw only one conclusion: The Fitzgerald had loaded thousands of tons more than what her architects had designed her to carry.

Primitive weather forecasts and distributions of forecasts

One of the blessings of the semiconductor revolution kicked off by William Shockley and carried forward by Jack Kilby is that computers have gotten vastly more powerful, thus enabling weather forecasts to become more reliable even without any advances in our understanding of meteorology. The National Weather Service was consistently late and consistently underestimating the strength of the storm that would sink the Fitz.

That afternoon [Sunday, November 9, 1975] the National Weather Service had posted a “gale warning,” a level of caution the NWS had created after the 1913 Storm of the Century showed it needed intermediary warnings, not just hurricane alerts. A gale warning predicts winds blowing thirty-nine to fifty-four miles per hour. But the NWS projected the wind would barely reach the gale range, which meant about forty miles per hour.

By 7 p.m. the National Weather Service noticed the storm system that started out of California had reached Iowa, and was gaining speed. It issued a gale warning for all of Lake Superior, correcting its earlier prediction that the storm would slip just below the big lake. Now, the NWS meteorologists said, the storm would cut diagonally across Lake Superior, producing waves from five to ten feet. That might not sound like much, but because the Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard, ten-foot waves wouldn’t give the ship much margin for error.

Late Sunday night the National Weather Service revised its forecast again, now predicting that waves Monday morning would reach ten to fifteen feet high. At 2 a.m. the NWS escalated its gale warning to a storm warning, reserved for winds expected to reach fifty-five to seventy-three miles per hour—strong enough to tear off roofs, uproot large trees, and knock over people attempting to walk outside. But the reality on the water was already starting to outpace the NWS’s forecasts. Winds on Lake Superior had already surged past fifty-eight miles per hour, and were still accelerating. The storm was gaining power like a boulder thundering down a steep hill.

[at 4 pm on Monday, November 10] Captain Cooper, now running an hour behind the Fitzgerald, later reported waves “up to twenty-five feet” when the Anderson neared Caribou Island. Since the Fitzgerald was now about twenty-five miles and an hour and forty minutes beyond the coordinates whence the Anderson had made that report—that much closer to the safety of Whitefish Bay, but also the storm’s epicenter—the waves the Fitzgerald was now experiencing were probably worse than the twenty-five-footers the Anderson had reported. Because the Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard, and probably less by the hour due to its compounding problems, those waves would be more than enough to wash green water—entire waves, not just the spray—over the Fitzgerald’s deck.

The Fitz sank at about 7:10 pm.

Get-there-itis

Some captains put in at Thunder Bay after realizing that the storm was

Full post, including comments

Our war on Iran has been less destructive to Iran’s economy than the Biden-Harris administration was to the U.S. economy?

by philg

“In Tehran, hope for change turns to panic: ‘They are turning the country into ruins'” (NBC):

Prices on basic goods have ramped up about 10% since the war started, residents say.

In other words, all of the military might that we’ve thrown at Iran has done less damage to their economy than the Biden-Harris administration did to ours? See below, for the 21 percent inflation that working and saving Americans suffered.

(Why only “working and saving Americans”? The Americans who were wise enough to choose the welfare lifestyle of public housing, Medicaid, SNAP, and Obamaphone didn’t suffer since they received most of their spending power in kind rather than in cash and their SNAP benefits were automatically adjusted for inflation at official rates.)

Full post, including comments

Pahrump, Nevada report

by philg

My friend wanted to go to Death Valley so we landed at 74P, the Calvada Meadows Airport. A couple of enroute snapshots and then the PC-12 on the ramp, such as it is:

The runway is smooth, but narrow, and there is a fair amount of loose gravel on the ramp. Due to the 4,080′ length combined with hot+highish, very few jets could operate here. That said, it is much better than the National Park Service-maintained airports in Death Valley! (see Why do we have trouble maintaining infrastructure if we’re richer than ever? (Death Valley examples)) On the third hand, there is no security so it might be smarter to leave a high-end plane a KHND and do a bit of extra driving.

Enterprise in Pahrump is awesome and came out to fetch us far faster than the airport folks could bring over a fuel truck. Navigating to the most famous Pahrump establishments is challenging because Google Maps at first claims that they don’t exist:

If you need energy before meeting your friend Hunter at Sheri’s Ranch and want to celebrate Kilmar Abrego Garcia, stop at Tina’s Tamales for pupusas (“Abrego’s actual statutory withholding claim hinged on his claim his mother ran a successful pupusa business, which drew Barrio 18’s (criminal) attention”). It’s next door to Enterprise:

(the French bakery in town is also good, but is comically slow (30-45 minutes to make a sandwich) so don’t go there for anything unless it is premade or you’ve called ahead)

If you take the longer northern route to or from Las Vegas you’ll pass the Nevada Test Site for nuclear bombs (especially for “peaceful uses” of nuclear bombs, as demonstrated by the entirely peaceful Iranians, recently the victims of unprovoked aggression):

Related:

Full post, including comments

Why are Climate Change alarmists also Strait of Hormuz alarmists?

by philg

If you believe in climate change, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz is the best thing that ever happened to Mother Earth because it reduces fossil fuel supply and, thus, reduces CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel. Bizarrely, however, people and organizations who’ve been reliable climate change alarmists describe the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and the resultant obstruction of oil and gas exports, as a catastrophe. Example from today’s New York Times:

Here’s CNN. For a Follower of Science, the headline should be “Key method of destroying our planet shut down” and high oil prices should be welcomed as a spur to conservation. Instead, we learn that high oil prices should be “fixed” (i.e., oil should be cheap enough to burn in a profligate Earth-destroying CO2-emitting-as-fast-as-possible manner) by Trump and that the strait being closed is a bad thing.

An Obama-generation Democrat in 2022 says that he wants to make it illegal for people to purchase gasoline or, at least, the cars that burn gasoline. This will be an “important climate change policy”:

A few years later, Gavin Newsom is excoriating Trump for causing an increase in the price of the product that he thinks should be outlawed because use of that product is harmful:

Here’s a representative young Democrat saying, in July 2025, that we need to take climate change seriously:

Here is the climate change alarmist, less than a year later, saying that gas prices should be lower so that people can afford to buy and operate that 12 mpg SUV:

Full post, including comments

Should people prepare for the AI/Robotics Age by getting into public housing now?

by philg

TL;DR: An LLM might take your job but it can’t take your public housing entitlement.

Let’s suppose that the AI/Robotics revolution happens gradually enough that Americans don’t feel that a total revamp of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare state is required. Those employed as drivers, for example, get replaced over a 20-year period as vehicles that don’t have the requisite hardware for self-driving age out of the fleet. FAA regulation for supplemental type certificates remain so onerous that it is cheaper to pay two pilots on each flight than to retrofit an Airbus A320 or Boeing 787 for self-flying.

Let’s assume that AI/robotics renders only about half of the U.S. workforce unemployable (we’ll keep our high minimum wages so anyone with below-median skills, health, beauty, or strength won’t be able to work legally). That means there will be a gradual, but huge, increase in demand for taxpayer-funded housing (public housing or Section 8). Even before ChatGPT was launched (November 2022), there was already a long waiting list for a taxpayer-funded apartment and, oftentimes, the waiting list was so long that authorities closed. Here’s a March 4, 2026 snapshots from New York City’s taxpayer-subsidized housing web site:

The last window of application to be placed on a waitlist (not to get housing!) was almost two years ago. Nationwide, waiting times, for those who are fortunate enough to have gotten on the waitlist, are apparently typically between 2 and 10 years.

Is the smart move for a young person to get into the welfare system now while the waitlists are still no more longer than 10 years? He/she/ze/they can (1) refrain from work, (2) have a child, and/or (3) be diagnosed with a disability.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Starbucks billionaire advocates for higher tax rates and moves to Florida

by philg

Washington State moved to add to its portfolio of state income taxes yesterday by imposing a 9.9% tax on income over $1 million/year (“House passes millionaires tax 52-46 after day-long debate”). Also, yesterday, the Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz announced his move to Miami:

In 2022, Washington State imposed a 9.9% tax on the only income that a guy like Schultz is likely to have (capital gains). They also have a 35% death tax (estate tax). Moving to Florida will save Schultz and his wife more than $1 billion because the Florida income and estate tax rates are 0%.

Schultz says that he yearns to pay higher taxes:

(Taxing “all capital gains as [ordinary] income” would be truly epic given that capital “gains” aren’t calculated with respect to inflation, i.e., a person who sells a property or stock at a loss in real dollars may still owe capital gains tax due to the rise in nominal dollars.)

Also from 2019:

“I myself should be paying higher taxes — and all wealthy Americans should have to pay their fair share. I think we can all agree on that,” Schultz said at the university.

Maybe this is the explanation for why Howard Schultz won’t be joining Donald Trump in Palm Beach. From 2020:

“In my view, our choice this November is not just for one candidate over another,” Schultz wrote in a letter to supporters. “We are choosing to vote for the future of our republic.” Schultz went on to say, “What is at risk is democracy itself: Checks and balances. Rigorous debate. A free press. An acceptance of facts, not ‘alternate facts.’ Belief in science. Trust in the rule of law. A strong judicial system. Unity in preserving all of our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Taking aim at President Trump’s repeated attacks on voting by mail – which many Americans feel is a safer option due to health concerns over in-person voting at polling stations amid the coronavirus pandemic – Schultz stressed that it’s “essential that Americans turn out to vote, that every American is able to vote safely, whether by mail or in person, and that every vote is counted. It would be a grave miscalculation to think this election is secured for a Biden victory.”

He believes in Science, but voluntarily moves to a state that rejects Science and a city that rejected masks in favor of partying on?

Speaking of Science, what has the proud owner of a condo in a beachfront Four Seasons building (i.e., sea-level coastal exposure to Climate Change-caused hurricanes) said about Climate Change? In 2019, he said that he was “gravely concerned about our planet, climate change and things that we have to do” (though he wasn’t on board with Full AOC)

What does ChatGPT have to say about a guy who is moving within an easy drive of Alligator Alcatraz?

Schultz has also backed a legalization/citizenship approach on immigration. In his 2019 Purdue speech, summarized by GeekWire and OnTheIssues, he called for “common-sense immigration reform,” including “a path to citizenship for Dreamers” and broader legalization measures. Florida’s recent immigration policy has moved in the opposite direction: SB 1718 bars local funding for IDs for people without proof of lawful presence, invalidates certain out-of-state licenses issued to unauthorized immigrants, requires some hospitals to collect immigration-status information, and strengthens penalties tied to employing unauthorized workers.

What about the move to a state with the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection guarantee is taken seriously?

Schultz’s race- and DEI-oriented corporate activism is also hard to square with current Florida policy. His “Race Together” initiative and his broader view that companies should engage on racial issues fit poorly with Florida’s anti-DEI direction. Florida’s Board of Governors regulation now bars state universities from spending state or federal funds to “promote, support, or maintain” programs that advocate DEI or engage in “political or social activism,” and the regulation defines DEI in part by reference to classifications based on race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Florida law also restricts certain race- and sex-related instruction in education settings

Full post, including comments

Does Iran’s indifference to being bombed highlight how dangerous they would have been as a nuclear power?

by philg

The leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been indifferent to everything that the infidels have thrown at them. Their leaders have been killed. Their infrastructure is being degraded. New York Times:

Across Iran, more than 90 million people are trapped between two terrifying realities. American and Israeli leaders, whose bombs are razing ever more parts of their infrastructure, have called on Iranians to use this as an opportunity for liberation. And their rulers, determined to cling to power, have threatened more bloodshed against whoever dares answer that call.

A week after the U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mr. Trump expressed his desire to play a role in selecting the country’s new leader — perhaps from the very authoritarian system that he has urged Iranians to rise against. The authorities responded by appointing the dead leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, as the successor.

For days, American and Israeli bombardments have pulverized Iranian military, intelligence and police sites across the country. And yet, there is no clear indication of a collapse in the government’s deeply entrenched and ideologically motivated security forces.

Apparently, Iranian leaders don’t mind being martyred and they certainly don’t seem to care if their subjects suffer. Does this highlight how dangerous Iran would have been with nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles? (the NYT said it would take them about “a decade” to build a significant number of nukes plus delivery missiles) How do you deter a nuclear power if the rulers of that power don’t care what happens to themselves or the country that they’re ruling?

Loosely related…

Full post, including comments

Perfect photo for Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna’s “tax the rich” effort

by philg

The perfect photo for stoking envy among the peasants:

(It’s an Aston Martin V12 Vantage (10 mpg?) in front of a Pilatus PC-24 (not as spacious as a typical billionaire’s Gulfstream, but useful for getting into smaller airports) in front of an FBO called “Million Air”. Austin, Texas.)

Separately, it would be a lot simpler to tax billionaires if the federal government eliminated or capped charitable deductions and imposed a foreign remittance tax on nonprofit orgs. Currently Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffett’s fortunes, for example, can be entirely sheltered from income tax via the money going into the Gates Foundation. Then the Gates Foundation can export the money away from the U.S. economy for $20 (wire transfer fee) by sending it all to Africa. With a cap on charitable deductions, Bill Gates and his subordinate-turned-wife-turned-plaintiff would have had to pay 20 percent federal capital gains tax plus 3.8 percent Obamacare tax. Let’s assume an additional 25 percent tax on sending money to Africa. and the U.S. Treasury could have become fat and happy as a result of Bill Gates’s success with Microsoft. Billionaires, despite trying, haven’t figured out how become immortal. Thus, they’d all pay 40 percent at death via estate tax on any money that wasn’t given to a nonprofit. Eliminating charitable deductions or capping the deductibility at $1 million per lifetime could be called the Elvis Presley Spirit of Charity Act of 2026. That’s because Elvis didn’t write off his charitable contributions, saying “that would take away from the spirit of the gift.” The Bernie and Khanna “steal 5 percent every year” plan seems doomed to fail because if you accept their reasoning (billionaires are too rich and didn’t truly earn their wealth) then the rate should be much higher than 5 percent. By contrast, there is no obvious reason for unlimited charitable deductions, especially given how lavishly nonprofit orgs spend.

What does Million Air look like inside, you might ask?

(It would look better if a slob hadn’t left his jacket on the chair at right…. said slob being yours truly (it was down near freezing in the morning).)

Full post, including comments

Brave fighters against Islamophobia in New York prove law professor’s point

by philg

Yesterday, CBS ran a headline communicating to readers that the noble leader of NYC was attacked: “FBI launches terrorism investigation after homemade explosive device ignited outside of NYC Mayor Mamdani’s residence”. The article, however, tells a different story:

New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters on Saturday that an anti-Islam protest was organized by people associated with Jake Lang, a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter and far-right influencer. A group of counter-protesters, numbering more than 100, also gathered, and two young men from Pennsylvania, angered by the anti-Islam protest, brought the homemade bombs to the gathering, intending to cause harm, law enforcement sources told CBS News.

Videos showing the chaos from the protests, verified by the CBS News Confirmed team, show a man apparently yelling “Allahu Akbar” – or “God is Most Great” – just as a protester, identified as 18-year-old Emir Balat, of Pennsylvania, allegedly throws an “ignited device.”

Jake Lang falsely asserted that some percentage of Muslims living in a non-Muslim society would inevitably choose to wage jihad, as seen in the follow examples:

Thus far, the story seems to be that two Muslim-Americans, both children of immigrants, wanted to show how wrong Mr. Lang was regarding the above. They manufactured bombs and threw them at Mr. Lang and surrounding haters infected with irrational Islamophobia.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider this classic lecture by a law professor:

CNN: “two men arrested in connection with the device admitted to being inspired by ISIS”.

Since, as a practical matter, being a violent criminal isn’t against any New York State or City law, they could have been back out on the street already if they hadn’t talked about ISIS to the police. Instead of being free to work on their next jihad, therefore, they now face the potential of federal terrorism charges and actual prison time.

Lesson from the law prof: “Don’t Talk to the Police”!

Fakely related… (source)

Full post, including comments