Month: July 2024

How can a country have a right to bear arms and also an open border?

by philg

“5,000 Miles, 8 Countries: The Path to the U.S. Through One Family’s Eyes” (New York Times, July 8, 2024) gives readers some details on the process by which the U.S. is enriched culturally and economically:

Mr. Aguilar embodied that paradox. He set off for the United States with a turbulent past as a soldier, police officer and bodyguard in Venezuela, and after a prison stint that could derail his chances of securing asylum.

Using a mobile app that the Biden administration has relied on to curb illegal crossings, the family had secured a coveted appointment to enter the United States legally the next day — the first step for many migrants seeking asylum.

The undocumented turn out to have…. documents:

After entering so many countries illegally, the family’s final border crossing was to be entirely lawful. But that did little to ease their nerves as federal officers began to check their passports, take fingerprints and photographs, and swab their cheeks for DNA.

Here’s the core of the story for today’s question:

Mr. Aguilar was part of a SWAT-like unit that specialized in taking down organized crime when, as a 21-year-old police officer, he was arrested and charged in 2010 with abusing his authority.

Venezuelan prosecutors accused him of participating in an armed shakedown of someone who owed his friend money. The friend and Mr. Aguilar, said to be carrying another officer’s gun, were accused of holding several people at gunpoint and stealing money and bottles of whiskey. Mr. Aguilar was charged with aggravated robbery, extortion and embezzlement, according to the few court documents available online.

Mr. Aguilar says Venezuelan prosecutors distorted the charges and that he and his friend weren’t violent [other than holding people at gunpoint?]. In court documents, he portrayed himself as accompanying his friend for backup. He eventually served two years in prison, he said.

At the U.S. border, background checks did not appear to turn up Mr. Aguilar’s criminal past. The family was released on parole — a status that allows migrants without visas to live and work in the country as their asylum cases wind through the courts.

Mr. Aguilar’s first court appearance before an immigration judge is scheduled for April 2025. He doesn’t know how he intends to deal with his past: The government can bar asylum for people convicted of serious crimes, and Mr. Aguilar would have to disclose his record on his asylum application.

The U.S. doesn’t have electronic access to records of criminal convictions in countries around the world. Thus, there is no way for the U.S. to exclude convicted criminals from the open border/asylum system. The NYT describes a New American (“Bidenmerican”?) who probably shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun, having previously been convicted of a “gun crime”, and for whom there will be no practical obstacle to legal gun ownership (except maybe the US immigration bureaucrats will read the New York Times and learn about Mr. Aguilar’s colorful past?).

That’s the big question for today, especially for the gun nut readers (you know who you are!). How can the Second Amendment survive the importation of over 100 million who’ve been selected for nothing other than a willingness to walk over the southern border (59 million arrived between 1965 and 2015 (Pew))? Reasonable people won’t want immigrants with criminal backgrounds owning guns. Democrats, at least, won’t want immigrants treated differently than native-born Americans. Why wouldn’t a majority of Americans come to agree that, therefore, no private citizen should be allowed to own a gun?

The article has some other interesting items:

Mr. Aguilar left Venezuela about six years ago, part of a flight of more than seven million people who have escaped a once-wealthy country where the economy collapsed and crime skyrocketed under President Nicolás Maduro.

Three years later, Mr. Aguilar found himself in Chile, where he sparked a romance with Ms. Ortega, who is also Venezuelan, and they blended their families. Ms. Ortega left behind a 13-year-old daughter in Ecuador because she was too sick to travel.

Both of the adults whom Joe Biden invited in have a history of splitting up with their co-parents. I wonder if Ms. Ortega’s former co-parent would have predicted this continuation of Venezuela’s rich baseball tradition…

But the parents were still stressing about their future, and their relationship continued to fray. One night in mid-April, Ms. Ortega grabbed a baseball bat and swung at Mr. Aguilar, hitting his hands. She said it happened in the heat of the moment. Mr. Aguilar was not injured and did not hit back.

She was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, and a protective order was issued to keep Ms. Ortega away from Mr. Aguilar. He lost his carpentry job, and the family was forced from the [free nonprofit-provided] house. Mr. Aguilar was placed in a shelter for domestic violence victims with his children, Samuel and Hayli; Ms. Ortega was set up elsewhere with Josué, her son.

Now the U.S. taxpayer was supporting two households.

In early March, the family received more welcome news: Ms. Ortega was pregnant.

In 18 years, therefore, both parents will be entitled to green cards and, eventually, citizenship. (Today’s anchor baby, on turning 18, has the right to obtain permanent residence for his/her/zir/their parents.)

Related…

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How did people react to your COVID goggles yesterday?

by philg

I’m assuming that everyone here follows the Science and that, therefore, everyone wore goggles yesterday to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Dr. Fauci’s recommendation of taking this common sense precaution against the depredations of SARS-CoV-2 and also to fight the current COVID wave. “California is still getting crushed by COVID. When will it end?” (SFGate, yesterday, regarding the punishment of the righteous):

COVID-19 has raged through California over the past few months, and with cases still headed skyward, the virus shows no signs of retreating.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Golden State, along with Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii, is now the most afflicted region in the U.S. Wastewater data, which is often used to help predict future surges, also reveals that several Bay Area cities like San Francisco and San Jose are grappling with “high” Sars-Cov-2 levels compared with other regions.

“It’s very strange that the West Coast continues to be high,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at UC San Francisco, told SFGATE.

The last part is my favorite. Like Job, the California righteous can’t figure out why their god doesn’t love them. Later on, the Sacrament of Paxlovid is pushed. Here’s a perspective from the other side of San Francisco:

“Fauci urges Americans to wear goggles for added COVID-19 protection” (New York Post, July 30, 2024):

Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that people wear goggles or face shields as an added measure of protection against contracting the coronavirus, according to a report.

“If you have goggles or an eye shield, you should use it,” Fauci, 79, the top US infectious disease expert, told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton on Wednesday.

When asked if eye protection will become a formal recommendation at some point, he said, “It might, if you really want perfect protection of the mucosal surfaces.”

Fauci, a member of the White House pandemic task force and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained the rationale for the measure.

(This is also a reminder that Ron DeSantis would have been the right choice for those who don’t want to be governed by public health bureaucrats optimizing for exactly one variable. As DeSantis put it, Donald Trump turned over the U.S. government to be run by Anthony Fauci.)

How did people react when they saw you yesterday in your COVID goggles? Separately, here’s COVID-safe aviation from the EAA Museum in Oshkosh:

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NYT: Man of peace killed in Tehran by Israel

by philg

“A Top Hamas Leader Is Killed in Iran” (NYT):

Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior Hamas leaders, was assassinated in Iran, the country’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and Hamas said on Wednesday, a severe blow to the Palestinian group that threatens to engulf the region in further conflict.

Without this mostly peaceful man there could be “further conflict”, say the experts at the New York Times. If Ismail Haniyeh had lived there would be peace for our time.

The man was a “leader”. He was “a key figure in … negotiations” (i.e., a negotiator and certainly not someone we might expect to endorse violence). According to the New York Times, he was a nonviolent person killed by a violent nation.

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Book about the world’s most successful art thieves

by philg

Let me recommend The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, a book about a French couple who stole roughly $2 billion (in pre-Biden dollars). Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus hit smaller museums over a 7-year period and hauled everything back to their apartment to enjoy. Since they didn’t try to sell anything, they were tough to catch, but of course they eventually were which is why we have the book (guess which one went to prison and which one successfully escaped by claiming to have been a victim under the control of the other).

Here’s the kind of thing that they might have stolen. I saw it at the North Carolina Museum of Art while I was reading the book and thought that it would look great in the glass display cabinet of any Indiana Jones fan:

(Raleigh-Durham has become an Islamic area, but the museum has a sizable collection of Judaica.)

Breitweiser had a Swiss Army knife and Anne-Catherine had a huge purse. This was sufficient equipment for all of the thefts (which occurred perhaps just a few years before it would have been straightforward to attach an RFID tag to everything in a museum and then put sensors at all of the exits).

Breitweiser points out that art in a museum, rather than a private home, is unnatural:

He takes only works that stir him emotionally, and seldom the most valuable piece in a place. He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art. They’re often crowded and noisy, with limited visiting hours and uncomfortable seats, offering no calm place to reflect or recline. Guided tour groups armed with selfie-stick shanks seem to rumble through rooms like chain gangs. Everything you want to do in the presence of a compelling piece is forbidden in a museum, says Breitwieser. What you first want to do, he advises, is relax, pillowed in a sofa or armchair. Sip a drink, if you desire. Eat a snack. Reach out and caress the work whenever you wish. Then you’ll see art in a new way.

The scale and pace of the thefts:

In the spring and summer of 1995, only a year after their first museum theft together, Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine find an incredible rhythm. They steal at a pace as fast as any known art-crime spree has been committed, outside of wartime. They hop between Switzerland and France, trying to keep at least an hour’s drive, and preferably two or three, between any places they hit. Even if they have to visit a couple of spots, museums are everywhere in Europe. And about three out of every four weekends, they successfully steal—a seventeenth-century oil painting of a war scene, an engraved battle-ax, a decorative hatchet, another crossbow. A sixteenth-century portrait of a bearded man. A floral-patterned serving dish. A brass pharmacy scale with little brass weights.

My favorite individual theft described in the book is a crime within a crime:

“Thief!” A word that no thief ever wants to hear shouted at him—shrieked—cuts through the bubbly conversations of the art-buying crowd at the European Fine Art Fair in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht. “Thief!” Even though he’s not stealing at the moment, Breitwieser flinches before realizing that the shouts are not directed at him. He watches as security officers rumble down the carpeted lane between booths. Heads in the exhibition hall turn. A thudding tackle and muffled blows bring even the owners out of their lounge-like areas. Richard Green, the iconic London dealer who is always granted prime placement at the fair, looks on, cigar in his mouth, as the thief is subdued and escorted away, the stolen item recovered. Entertainment over, Green returns to his stand, Renaissance oils arranged on pedestals, prices climbing from a million dollars. The dealer then discovers that one of his pedestals has a large empty space. Breitwieser’s giddy thought, as he and Anne-Catherine pull out of the parking lot a few minutes later, is that his car is currently worth more than the Lamborghinis they pass, if you include the souvenir in their trunk. The frame’s still attached, despite his stealing requirement; freak situations have their own set of rules. The artwork, an innovative 1676 unstill still life by Jan van Kessel the Elder, butterflies flitting around a bouquet of flowers, had hooked Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine from the art-show aisle, well outside Green’s booth. He’d never seen anything like it. The colors were incandescent. The work reeled them into the booth, through a mirage of shimmering hues that seemed impossible until they realized, up close, that the piece had been painted on a thin sheet of copper.

The European Fine Art Fair is a good place to covet items, though not to steal. The security unit is professional, with some undercover, Breitwieser says. Also, a potential deal breaker for Breitwieser, attendees are often searched at the exit, sales documents required. The copper painting sang to him and Green’s comeuppance felt ordained, but attempting a theft with almost zero chance of success is only the act of a fool. Providentially, a fool appeared as if on cue. With two piercing shouts, the fair shifted. The booths nearly emptied as the rubbernecking crested. Breitwieser was as surprised as anyone. Yet in the commotion that followed, he ascended into a sort of art-stealing nirvana, seemingly able to visualize the whole crime from above. The guards at the exit, he intuited, would abandon their post to assist the arrest. He’d bet a prison term on it.

The book says that there are roughly 50,000 art thefts per year, worldwide, with a total value in the single-digit $billions.

If you’d wondered about the veracity of Les Miserables…

In Switzerland, the guards had called him “Mr. Breitwieser.” In France, they shout his inmate number.

Within months of his arrest, the girlfriend has moved on. She’s pregnant with another man’s child and testifies against Breitwieser:

Anne-Catherine, dressed in a long black skirt, is called to testify after his mother, and she doubles down on total denial. She testifies, in a timid voice that Breitwieser says he’s never before heard, that she had not noticed any Renaissance works in the attic. She wasn’t present on his road trips. She never saw any art in his car. The two of them barely dated, she says. They were more like acquaintances. “He scared me,” says Anne-Catherine. Every day she was with him, she felt like his hostage. “He tormented me.”

(The hostage drove away from the apartment most mornings in a car and returned in the evening.)

More: Read The Art Thief.

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Hanna Reitsch’s kamikaze dream

by philg

A third post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg.

The Germans were great at innovation, but the Allies built so many old tech bombers and escort fighters that it was tough for the Germans to exploit their innovations. Regarding 1943:

The Peenemünde facility had been established in the 1930s by Wernher von Braun. A political conformist brought up with right-wing, nationalist values, Braun had joined the Party in 1937, and the SS three years later. After graduating with degrees in mechanical engineering and applied physics, he persuaded the military to fund a development centre at Peenemünde: a location his mother had recommended, knowing it from her husband’s duck-shooting holidays.*

By April 1943 the threat of V-weapons had been prioritized [by the English], and the ‘Bodyline’ organization was convened to develop a response. Peenemünde was now identified as the principal research facility. Working in shifts around the clock, and largely sustained by Spam sandwiches and coffee, Constance Babington Smith’s team was on alert to look out for anything ‘queer’ that might be a long-range gun, a remotely controlled rocket aircraft, or ‘some sort of tube … out of which a rocket could be squirted’.

Peenemünde was [raided in August 1943] with wave after wave of bombers passing over the site without any aerial counter-attack. … British Bomber Command had sent a massive assault force of 597 aircraft to drop between 1,500 and 2,000 tons of high explosives on Peenemünde in Operation Hydra. This was almost the entire bomber fleet – an enormous risk for one mission. Surprise was paramount to mitigate that risk. Once fed and briefed, the RAF pilots had been sworn to secrecy and locked into their hangars. Regular bombing raids on Berlin had been undertaken in the weeks before, in the hope that the Germans would assume this was still the target. A ‘spoof attack’ on the capital by British Mosquitoes was also planned; and fine strips of metal ‘window’ were dropped to blind the German radar.

Five days before Christmas [1943], the US Eighth Air Force started to bomb the V-1 launch sites in northern France, to prevent a winter attack. Eventually they would obliterate every one. ‘The first round of the battle against the flying bomb was an overwhelming victory for the Allies,’ Babington Smith wrote with some flourish.

Without the P-51 Mustang to provide long-range escort, these types of raids required incredible bravery. Forty British aircraft were shot down after the Germans figured out what was going on and sent fighters from Berlin. The bombings made the typical German understand that continued armed conflict wasn’t going to be effective. Hanna came to the same conclusion, but responded differently:

… as the aerial bombing of Germany intensified, civilian morale plummeted and the regime had to apply increasing oppression and compulsion to maintain order. Over the course of 1943, the German courts passed more than a hundred death sentences every week on citizens deemed guilty of defeatism or sabotage.

Unlike Melitta, Hanna had never doubted the aims of the Nazi regime. Even she, however, had now lost faith in the promised certain victory. ‘One after another, towns and cities were crumpling under the Allied air attacks,’ she wrote. ‘The transport system and the production centres were being systematically destroyed … the death toll continually mounted.’

Hanna knew that the precision of these air attacks was critical to the success of her plan. Melitta’s work with dive-sights and dive-bombing techniques had greatly improved accuracy, but Hanna had something more radical in mind. She wanted pilots, potentially including herself, to guide their missiles right down to the point of impact – without pulling out. With shipping targets, one paper outlined, ‘the plane was expected to shatter upon impact with the water, killing the pilot instantly and allowing the bomb to tear loose from the plane to continue under the keel of the vessel, where it would explode’.9 Although the pilots ‘would be volunteering for certain death’, Hanna added, ‘it would be no task for mere dare-devils … nor for blind fanatics, nor for the disenchanted and the life-weary who might see here a chance to make a theatrical exit …’ What was needed, she felt, were measured and honourable men, ‘ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved’.

Why everyone needs a marketing expert:

[Hanna] named the fledgling plan ‘Operation Suicide’.

It seems that having a wife and kids drove at least some men to think of suicide…

Nevertheless, as word of Hanna’s proposed suicide squadron spread, she began to receive discreet enquiries from other zealous pilots, enthused by the thought of sacrificing their lives for Hitler’s Germany. Encouraged, Hanna sought out more volunteers. ‘We found them everywhere,’ she wrote with satisfaction. Most ‘were married and fathers of families and were robust, uncomplicated individuals. As they saw it, the sacrifice of their lives would be as nothing compared with the millions, both soldiers and civilians, who would die if the war was allowed to continue.’

Adolf Hitler was a moderate compared to Hanna Reitsch and pointed out that “There was no precedent in German history and the German public would not stand for it.” Hanna eventually wore him down, however, and she was allowed to work on her pet project. The suicide machine was going to be an air-launched V-1:

Various test and training versions of the manned V-1 had now been developed. Some had twin seats and dual controls for instructor and student, while others were single-seaters. Most had power units and all had landing skids, but landing even an unarmed V-1 remained extremely hazardous. ‘Pilots of an average ability could never be certain of surviving the attempt,’ Hanna wrote bluntly.

By the time that Hanna and Skorzeny reached Rechlin, a prototype V-1 was already ‘nestled’, as Skorzeny described it, under the wing of a Heinkel He 111 bomber, ready for take-off. All went well as the Heinkel lifted from the ground and began its ascent. When the V-1 pilot detached his machine from the bomber, Hanna watched it ‘drop away … like some small, swift bird’. The V-1 flew at twice the speed of its Heinkel mother-plane, tearing away through the sky. After a few wide circles it began a smooth descent. Suddenly the pilot lost control. Moments later the V-1 crashed to earth, its point of impact marked by ‘a column of black smoke rising in the summer air’. While most of the observers still stood watching in horror, Skorzeny impatiently called for another test pilot, before striding off. ‘Always a gentleman …’ Hanna later defended him: Skorzeny ‘demanded more from himself than from his men … [and] won the hearts of the soldiers committed to his care’. Incredibly, although badly injured, the V-1 pilot had survived. The crash was blamed on manual error. A second attempt, the next day, brought a similar result. According to Skorzeny, when the Air Ministry ordered an end to the programme, Hanna ‘could scarcely hold back her tears’.

Hanna persuaded the SS hero Skorzeny to let her fly the machine herself:

Despite her rubber-lined leather helmet, Hanna must have been deafened by the noise of the Heinkel’s engine and the battering of the slipstream on the V-1 as she was dragged into the air. Nevertheless, her release was perfect. As the V-1 engine began to stutter, Hanna dropped from her host and pushed the tiny missile to its cruising speed of around 375 mph. ‘The handling of the machine and its beautiful circles soon showed what an amazing pilot this girl was,’ Skorzeny noted in admiration. Nevertheless he still broke into a cold sweat as Hanna brought the V-1 spiralling down. Since the missile was not designed to land, once the engine cut out she found it cumbersome, gliding down steeply, ‘like a piano’. Moments later she managed a fast but smooth touchdown on her skids, blowing up clouds of dust across the tarmac. ‘Nothing wrong with it at all,’ she proudly told the engineers who rushed up to meet her. Milch reportedly ‘turned pale’ when told of the unauthorized test but, as Skorzeny emphasized, ‘both the idea and the machine had been vindicated’. ‘Passed without incident,’ Hanna recorded simply in her flight report. She and Skorzeny were jubilant, and the project was given clearance to proceed.

The Normandy invasion rendered the project moot because Germany needed all of her pilots for defense.

The Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg:

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Returning to the U.S. from Portugal

by philg

That last of a multi-part series on our three-week June 2024 trip to Portugal (Lisbon and points north)…

The Porto airport is gleaming and quite efficient. Our passports were checked once during luggage check-in, once at an immigration barrier set up on the way to the gates that serve non-EU destinations, and once more at the gate. Except for the final check at the gate, this was all done without a wait on a Friday before a 9:00 am flight (might not have gone as well on a Sunday when the British are returning from their weekend escapes).

The check-in counters still have their Plexiglas coronapanic barriers and, as in Get Smart, humans respond in the predictable way of leaning to one side of it so that they’re able to hear each other:

To my delight, I found a handful of Scientists in the terminal, voluntarily packing themselves into 100-percent full airliners while relying on 3-cent masks to prevent becoming infected with a deadly aerosol virus. Here’s one in University of Virginia Statistics logo wear:

(And he/she/ze/they is wearing a murse?)

Here are a couple more:

The reintegration into a Rainbow-first society begins as soon as a passengers steps onto the United flight. The seatback video screen promotes exactly one class of movies to a passenger who doesn’t touch the screen and search by category:

The Out and Proud collection is all about “modern love”, so the child who views the screen might reasonably infer that a non-LGBTQ+ situation represented “obsolete love”. We landed and were greeted by a “masks mandatory” sign:

After nearly a one-hour wait to clear immigration, it was time for the kids to get a refresher on America’s state religion:

(As noted in a previous post, given that our passports were examined three times prior to departure by qualified Portuguese personnel, why can’t the U.S. just wave in anyone holding up a U.S. passport? That’s how it is done when people disembark a cruise ship in Miami. The U.S. immigration bureaucrats feel comfortable, apparently, relying on Royal Caribbean’s ability to keep track of passengers and their passports.)

We went to a secret restaurant in Newark that is reserved for at least moderately frequent United flyers. I told the kids to go into a public restaurant and tell the staff “We don’t want to eat here. We want to eat somewhere secret.” Everything was going smoothly until they noticed the CNN screen with the word “Trump” continuously displayed (see Do CNN viewers think that Donald Trump is a god? but it also might have been because we landed a day after the first Biden-Trump debate of the 2024 election). The 10-year-old asked me who I thought would win the election. I said that Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice among the Republicans and that it was impossible for me to predict how other Americans might vote, but Biden’s promises of student loan forgiveness and other free stuff was going to be very popular with many voters. (Whenever politics comes up, I remind them that people who situated differently will rationally vote differently and that, for example, their unionized public school teachers are almost certainly going to vote for Biden and they should respect that.) As I hadn’t sufficiently condemned Donald Trump, a couple of elite New Yorkers at a nearby table stepped in to tell the kids that Donald Trump was a convicted felon and that his crimes were too disgusting for them to even hear about (what is the right age for a child to learn about the world’s oldest profession and Donald Trump’s alleged customer status?) and that he was “a racist”. So the kids ended up learning quite a bit about the elite Democrat political faith just while changing planes (even the simplest mask can prevent respiratory virus infection; the Rainbow Flag worship, and the blind rage regarding Donald Trump).

Our Honda Odyssey was waiting for us in the PBI garage (somewhat more expensive than an Uber round-trip, but worth it, I felt, for the shade (our car would otherwise have been on the street or in our driveway)) and, unlike the Sixt rental Mercedes, started right up despite having sat for three weeks.

We got to the house around midnight Portugal time (same as London), but discovered that the upstairs A/C system had shut down. It had been professionally serviced three months earlier, but there was what looked like white jello growing in the condensate drain. I borrowed my engineer neighbor’s Shop Vac with custom PVC connector and managed to clear the clog. The next day… a second air handler shut down with the same issue. I vacuumed out all three lines (significant gunk and water from each) and scheduled an appointment with the professionals… I think what needs to be done in a compressed air/CO2/nitrogen blowout starting at the air handler every 3 months. Plus maybe an IV drip.

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Portugal Diary 7 (Ponte de Lima, Braga, and Porto)

by philg

Ponte de Lima is on the way back from Santiago de Compostela. It’s notable for being one of the oldest towns in Portugal (the bridge goes back to Roman times, for example) and also for being one of the flattest that I found. If you’re tired of having to walk up and down hills just to go to the supermarket, this might be a worthy base of operations. Here’s what it looks like from across the Roman/Medieval eponymous bridge:

The town is part of the coastal Camino from Porto to Santiago de Compostela:

It looks like one can walk (or maybe also bike?) about 70 km on a trail along the riverbank. I found a sign indicating that the north bank path abeam the town was at km 21 of an “ecovia”:

The town has a lot of the usual good stuff of a Portuguese town, including an attractive main square and what looked like a lot of good restaurants. They were running, across the river, an international garden festival, and there was some sort of celebration (on a Monday afternoon) that required a marching band in town.

Speaking of town festivals, we arrived in Braga, Portugal’s 7th largest city, for the end of the annual São João de Braga festival. This has been going on for about 900 years, ever since the establishment of a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist.

The town has a famous cathedral, inside which I found some of the statues that had been carried in processions:

Braga’s star attraction is a 15-minute drive from the center: Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Maybe it is my Jewish heritage, but I can’t figure out why a place would be named for “Good Jesus”. There is no Catholic group that believes in a “Bad Jesus”, right? You’ll want to park at (or Uber to) the top and walk down the stairs, then take the water-counterbalance-driven funicular up.

Side chapels as you walk down the stairs depict events towards the end of Jesus’s life:

There is a beautiful garden above the sanctuary. Just walk uphill.

Braga is nice, but it wasn’t our favorite overnight stop. The pedestrian streets downtown would be great for meeting up with friends and hanging out, but we didn’t have any friends. Braga does have what I think is a private celebration of progressive causes, e.g., Interseccionalidade and Free Palestine:

After two nights in town, we drove out via a beautiful McDonald’s that was absolutely empty for breakfast (possibly just a single lady working). The Portuguese have yet to adopt American breakfast customs, apparently.

We returned out rental Mercedes at Sixt by the Porto airport (mournful saga) and Ubered to downtown. Maybe we’d been spoiled by our time in the Portuguese mountains, but the old town seemed absolutely overrun with tourists. Here’s the train station with its famous tile art:

Would you like to go to a bookstore that inspired J.K. Rowling? Here’s what Livraria Lello looks like inside (Wikipedia):

You’ll need to pay between 8 and 45 euros online, however, and then wait in line for a while before you can begin your shopping process. Here’s what the line looked at around noon on a weekday:

Note that the infamous TERF herself says that she never went to this bookstore, but is someone who denies the miracle of gender transformation a credible source on any subject?

There’s an important church nearby. Here’s the line to get into that one…

Keep in mind that we were there in June and the peak tourist season is July-August. Locals said that the crowds would get much much worse. We found a good escape in the Serralves Foundation, a huge hilly garden (walk down; elevator up) with a contemporary art museum in a residential area. Once you’re there, it is a 30-minute walk or quick Uber ride to the mouth of the Douro River. This is a high quality beach by European standards, though the water is much too rough and/or cold by Florida standards.

We finished our trip with the classic Francesinha dish:

We could have had a second one for breakfast at the airport (well, maybe they don’t serve it all day, despite the name):

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Housing is a human right, but California’s homeless will soon lose their tents

by philg

Exactly one year ago, I proposed an Oshkosh to San Francisco Tent Truck that would help those experiencing homelessness in a state where everyone with political power agrees that housing is a human right.

This year, Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order encouraging California cities to clear homeless encampments. It is unclear where unhoused Californians will go. The order merely suggests “Contacting of service providers to request outreach services for persons experiencing homelessness at the encampment.” That’s not a guarantee of shelter, certainly. CNN:

Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the parent organization of the Housing is a Human Right initiative, accused Newsom of “criminalizing poverty” and “doubling down on failed policies.”

“Governor Newsom, where do you expect people to go? This is a shameful moment in California history,” Weinstein said in a statement Thursday.

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, called Newsom’s executive order “a punch in the gut.”

She said there are already thousands of people on a waitlist for housing, and all shelter beds in San Francisco are already full. Roughly 8,000 people are homeless every night in the city, which has 3,300 occupied shelter beds, Friedenbach told CNN.

The actual order:

Some Oshkosh tenting action…

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A modern marriage and child-rearing story

by philg

“A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave” (The Free Press) is worth reading for the window that it provides into modern American marriage.

We consider ourselves smarter and more evolved than people in the past, but the story starts with a successful 33-year-old man deciding to reject 10,000+ years of human convention and marry a woman old enough to be a grandmother:

Catherine Youssef met Allan Kassenoff in New York City in 2005. He was an upstart, 33-year-old patent litigator; she was an associate at his law firm, four years his senior, and had already served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

She would start trying to have her first child, in other words, in her late 30s.

After they got married, Catherine wanted kids “ASAP,” Allan told me; she wanted to do IVF straight away, he said, before they’d even started trying naturally. He wanted to have kids, but he also wanted to at least try to get pregnant without medical intervention, given the expense of IVF—but Allan caved, he said, because Catherine, who was nearing 40, was so adamant. Allan says they underwent several rounds of IVF, estimating that in total the couple spent upward of $200,000 on fertility treatments.

Then, less than two years into their marriage, Catherine was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer and received treatment. According to her therapy records, which Catherine shared with her suicide note, she later told a therapist that Allan “showed that he was not good at handling stress” during this time.

While she recovered, the Kassenoffs decided to adopt. They contacted an adoption attorney, who matched them with a woman in Florida who was pregnant but unable to look after a baby; in July 2009, the Kassenoffs became parents to Ally, who was delivered to them straight from the hospital where she was born.

Soon thereafter, Allan says Catherine wanted to try IVF again—and threatened to do it “with or without me.”

He went along with it, but told me he was “nervous, because of how bad our relationship was.” He didn’t think bringing another child into the family was “the best thing in the world.”

This time, the IVF worked: less than a year after she adopted Ally, Catherine got pregnant. The Kassenoffs’ second daughter, Charley, was born in February 2011—and was quickly followed by a third, JoJo, in August 2013.

So… adoption throughout human history was mostly done in the context of strong family bonds, right? A man might adopt a nephew or niece or the children of a widow whom he married. Getting hold of a baby from a stranger 1,000 miles away is a new idea, I think. Obviously, IVF is also a relatively new idea.

I don’t want to spoil the article, but the mom in this story turns out to be unethical and takes tremendous risks. What job does she get?

But by March 2015 she was employed again, working for Governor Andrew Cuomo as a Special Counsel for Ethics, Risk, and Compliance.

The au pair turns out to have the clearest perspective on the situation:

Celine Dublanchet, who became the Kassenoffs’ au pair in October 2016, also made disturbing allegations about Catherine. According to court documents, Dublanchet said Catherine once locked Ally [the adopted child], then 7, in the basement by herself for two hours as a punishment, and on another occasion made Ally go outside alone after dark to “clean the garden” in the middle of winter.

Dublanchet claimed that Ally slept on a mattress on the floor in her room, while the other two children [the genetic offspring] slept in Catherine’s bed every night. Every morning, she told me, Ally had to make her mother’s bed.

“Ally was Cinderella,” Dublanchet later wrote to the court, “her two sisters Anastasia and Drizella, and Catherine the horrible stepmother.”

The wife seems to be aware of “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track” in family court:

After a trip to the hospital on May 11, 2019, Catherine texted a friend: “If I had a mark or a bruise or something, it would be easy.”

“You don’t need a bruise to divorce him,” the friend texted back.

“Just to get full custody,” Catherine replied.

On May 15, 2019—mere days after Catherine sent the text that began, “If I had a mark or a bruise”—Allan says his eldest daughter went to school and told her teachers that her dad had kicked her a couple of days earlier. The school immediately launched a Child Protective Services investigation.

The next morning, Saturday, May 18, Allan woke to an email from Catherine’s friend Wayne Baker, informing him that she had obtained an order of protection, barring Allan from contacting her or the kids. Allan says he believes the entire story about “the kick” was fabricated by Catherine, and she told Ally exactly what to say to school officials—all so that she could get custody of the kids.

When I asked Ally—now almost 15—about it, she supported Allan’s version of events, saying her dad had not kicked her; what she’d said to the school wasn’t true. “My mom told me to, like, always say bad stuff about my dad,” she told me.

The article provides a window into what it costs to settle the question of who gets the cash-yielding children in a U.S. family court (in a European country, the cost is often minimal because the law specifies a custody arrangement that is difficult to deviate from and child support profits are capped so there isn’t a huge financial incentive to get hold of the kids).

The judge also appointed psychologist Marc Abrams—who had worked in the Westchester County courts system for over two decades—to offer a neutral assessment of the parents and recommend a custody agreement. Though the report is confidential, Abrams revealed during a July 2020 temporary custody trial that he recommended Allan have sole custody of the kids—and that he believed Catherine had an “unspecified personality disorder.”

Catherine, along with two other women, filed complaints against Marc Abrams, the psychologist who recommended Allan have custody, alleging professional misconduct and inappropriate behavior toward women. Abrams denies these allegations, calling them and any others “defamatory.” After an investigation, the panel of court-approved mental health professionals removed him, meaning he could no longer provide court evaluations—a lucrative gig, with each case paying around $50,000.

That’s just for the psychologist. What about the divorce litigators? The article just says “after millions of dollars, and over 3,000 court filings, the divorce still hadn’t been finalized.” (The decision to get married also cost the man his $1 million/year job and career.)

For the full story, which has quite a few additional twists, read “A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave”.

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Santiago de Compostela and End Stage Christianity

by philg

Santiago de Compostela is the holiest Christian site in Europe, being the supposed burial place of St. James, and pilgrims have been walking there for more than 1,000 years. Suppose that a pilgrim spends a weeks or months walking from France or Portugal to this sacred site, what does the committed Christian find on entering the old city? An official rainbow crosswalk and streets covered in sacred Rainbow Flags:

Here’s a different crosswalk in which we can see the directional sign for the Camino and a Rainbow-enhanced crosswalk in the same frame (multiple pilgrimage routes enter the city at different points):

Suppose that the tired pilgrim wants to rest in a park and be fresh before transitioning (so to speak) over this sacred pavement?

The rested pilgrim will walk past a Queers for Palestine display after entering the city:

The Praza do Obradoiro, adjacent to the Cathedral, is the traditional gathering place for pilgrims. It has been decorated with two Joe Biden-style official trans-enhanced Rainbow Flags (the “True Flag”?):

What if the pilgrim wants some ideas from the city’s official tourist office, a few steps from the Cathedral?

Perhaps the Christian pilgrim is tired and needs refreshment? It will be served by someone in a sacred outfit:

Pilgrims can dine with an overhead canopy of Rainbow Flags:

If they have money left over, they can buy souvenirs:

A variety of stores practice Rainbow-first Retail:

(“Orgullo” means “Pride” in Spanish)

Can the pilgrim prepare for the rigors of Rainbow Flag worship while on the road? Absolutely! If the pilgrim happens to walk through Celanova, Spain, for example, he/she/ze/they will find that the former monastery is now a town hall and that a Rainbow Flag is larger and higher than any of the government flags (tough to see because it had been rolled up by the wind, but it is in the upper right corner):

There were rainbow flags in Ourense as well, but Pontevedra, Spain has gone a little farther with its town hall:

The transition from traditional Christian to Queers for Palestine is encapsulated neatly in Pontevedra in which pro-Palestinian graffiti is adjacent to a ruined monastery:

A clothing store in Pontevedra practices Rainbow-first Retail:

Based on the above, is it fair to conclude that the inevitable End Stage of European Christianity is Rainbow Flagism and/or Queers for Palestine? Spaniards were willing to fight for centuries to make the Iberian peninsula completely Christian. Now Spain is covered in the sacred symbols of Rainbow Flagism and is on track for a conversion to Islam via immigration demographics.

For readers who ask “Didn’t you take pictures of anything other than rainbow flags in Santiago de Compostela?” here are some photos inside the Cathedral (get there 45 minutes prior to a mass if you want a seat, even though there are at least four masses per day; no need to dress up because the masses accommodate pilgrims who might have arrived dusty):

Here’s the apparently-never-used front entrance:

Don’t skip the Cathedral Museum because it gives you the chance to look over the main square where the pilgrims gather underneath the Trans-enhanced Rainbow Flags. Try not to show up on a Sunday afternoon/Monday morning as I did because most of the museums are closed all day Monday and may close early on Sunday. I had especially wanted to go to the pilgrimage museum, but will have to some that for another Pride.

Here’s an image taken from a balcony that is accessible only from the Cathedral Museum:

Does it make sense to do the pilgrimage? I’m not sure if modern pilgrims have mental space to reflect the way that pilgrims did 1000, 500, or even 50 years ago. Why not? The smartphone. If you’re getting emails about bills, projects at your house, things happening at work, etc., you’re not in the same mental place as a Christian pilgrim was in the pre-smartphone era. One group that I met seemed to have combined some of the best of the old and new worlds. They signed up for a tour with Active Adventures and eight of them were guided and shuttled over a monthlong pilgrimage route in a little more than a week, starting in Bilbao. When the (French) Camino was an interesting and peaceful footpath they walked (8-10 miles per day). When the Camino coincided with a boring/busy road, they hopped a shuttle bus.

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