Author: philg

End-stage American Judaism is Rainbow Flagism?

by philg

A year ago: Santiago de Compostela and End Stage Christianity (the holiest city in Europe covered in the sacred Rainbow Flag).

Tonight, an event to which I was invited by email:

Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County warmly invites you to the Inaugural Community-Wide Pride Shabbat, a joyous celebration of Jewish values.

Here’s the page header:

In order to dispel any rumors that children are the targets of Pride events, kids 10 and younger are encouraged to attend via a fee waiver.

Let’s circle back to “a joyous celebration of Jewish values”. Unless End-stage American Judaism is Rainbow Flagism, what is the “Jewish value” within the World of Pride?

See also “The Bible on Homosexual Behavior”, 2015, by a Catholic scholar, on Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. And here’s Google AI on the intersection between Jewcraft and transgenderism:

In Orthodox Judaism, gender reassignment surgery is generally not permitted, as it is interpreted to be a violation of the laws against castration and alteration of the body. Leviticus 22:24, which prohibits offering sacrifices with “anything which is mauled, crushed, torn or cut,” is extended to cover human castration. Additionally, Leviticus 19:28 prohibits making “gashes in your flesh for the dead or incise any marks on yourselves,” which is interpreted as a prohibition against altering the body.

(Leviticus is generally understood by Jews to forbid tattoos, e.g., the noble Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s full set of not-in-any-way-linked-to-MS-13 hand and arm tattoos.)

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If Congress repealed the Refugee Act of 1980 would the fight over migrants between the Trump administration and the court system end?

by philg

The court system has been obstructing the Trump administration’s attempts to deport various classes of undocumented migrants who are here in the U.S. One might imagine that making a deportation decision would be a simple process. A migrant who lacks either a visa or a green card is ineligible for U.S. residence and, therefore, he/she/ze/they can be deported. Because, however, any migrant is entitled to make an asylum claim, e.g., as Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia did in 2019 (eight years after illegally entering the U.S.). At that point, some folks reasonably argue that “due process” requires U.S. government workers to determine whether the tale told by the asylum-seeker is true (see Federal government weighs in on a 15-year-old pupusa dispute (Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia)). It’s unclear why anyone thinks truth determination is possible. Only one side of the story is available, i.e., from the migrant who stands to gain four generations of a work-optional lifestyle (entitlement to public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone). It’s an absurd farce in which the winners are those with the best acting skills, but it’s guaranteed to be an expensive farce with hundreds or thousands of hours invested by lawyers on all sides (government, migrant, judges) for each migrant whose status is determined. Other than high fees, the one thing all of these lawyers will have in common: none will have any clue about what actually happened on the other side of the world 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago.

(Another farcical element is that nothing stops a Salvadoran from claiming that El Salvador, 20X safer than Baltimore or Washington, D.C., is too dangerous and that therefore he needs to live right here in the country where most of the most violent Salvadorans now reside.)

How did we get to the point that every migrant who strolls across the border can impose a $1 million cost in legal fees on the U.S. taxpayer? Professor of Constitutional Law Dr. ChatGPT, JD, PhD explains that we can thank the noblest of all U.S. Presidents, Jimmy Carter:

The premise of the asylum framework seems to be that Earth is generally too dangerous to be occupied by humans with the exception of the United States, which is the only safe place. World population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion people and 4.4 billion in 1980. Today, despite the fact that almost every country is officially deemed too dangerous to inhabit, the human population is somewhere between 8 and 10 billion (nobody knows).

Republicans have control of Congress right now. Instead of these constant fights with the courts regarding whether anyone can be deported, wouldn’t it make more sense for Trump to ask Congress to repeal the Refugee Act of 1980 and pass a new law that says “The United States does not offer temporary or permanent residence on the basis of an asylum claim and, in fact, does not offer asylum. It is a shame that various countries at various times have problems, but Americans hope that people who live in those countries will cooperate to work out their problems.” Asylum-seekers wouldn’t be disadvantaged by such a change because anyone who wants to seek asylum can do so in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, etc.

Loosely related… (source)

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Racial equity in the world of IDs

by philg

The credentialed white elites of the Northeast used to say that Black people weren’t smart enough to get ID. Now, after remarkable progress toward racial equity, they’re saying that it is they themselves who aren’t smart enough. REAL-ID will supposedly be required soon for getting through TSA. Maskachusetts began issuing REAL-ID in March 2018 (source). Folks in MA agree that Floridians are stupid and that Florida doesn’t run its state government properly, which is perhaps why Florida wasn’t able to begin issuing REAL-ID until January 1, 2010 (i.e., more than 8 years prior to MA; source):

I can’t figure out why physical ID cards are required. Wouldn’t it make more sense to do retina scans and have your ID looked up based on that? I don’t see why this is different, from a privacy perspective, than forcing people to get a picture taken and a plastic card issue. Is it that, in theory, the government could scan our retinas from a distance and track everyone who walks around a city? Privacy-oriented folks could simply wear mirrored glasses.

Some data from “Real ID deadline is weeks away and most states aren’t fully compliant yet” (CBS):

As of last week, New Jersey had the lowest compliance rate in the nation — just 17% of its state-issued IDs are Real IDs. Pennsylvania reported 26%, while Washington and Maine tell CBS News they are at 27% compliance. New York reports 43% compliance, and California has reached nearly 55% compliance. [Maskachusetts was at 57%]

For comparison, the CBS article notes that Florida is “virtually 100% compliant” and Texas is at 98% (both scores achieved without either state taxing personal income).

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Should Donald Trump get an award for Earth Day?

by philg

Happy Earth Day to those who celebrate…

I’m wondering if Donald Trump should get the top award this year for environmentalism. Nothing accelerates climate change faster than moving a person from a low-carbon-output society (e.g., Haiti, 0.3 tons per person annually) to a high-carbon-output society (e.g., the U.S., 14 tons per person annually). Thus, by opening the U.S. border, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did more to accelerate climate change than anyone in the modern era. Donald Trump, by contrast, has done more to prevent climate change than anyone (WSJ):

Similarly, although I am not personally a fan of Trump’s recent tariff efforts (even the immensely capable of Germans had trouble fighting on all fronts simultaneously; I think that perhaps Trump would have been more successful fighting one country at a time), it is unarguable that higher tariffs serve as a consumption tax and thus preserve the Earth’s resources, reduce CO2 output, etc. If doomsayers are correct and the U.S. is headed for recession/depression as a consequence of the tariffs, that’s even better for the environment.

So… here’s to Donald Trump, the World’s Greatest Environmentalist!

In other news, Bernie Sanders and AOC were apparently observing Earth Day from FL410 in a Canadian-made Challenger 604 private jet:

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Lunch with an aircraft mechanic in a rich Boston suburb

by philg

I invited an aircraft mechanic friend to meet me in Lincoln, Maskachusetts, a center of righteousness, for lunch. We sat at the bar so that he could watch the end of the F1 race in Bahrain. Towards the end of the experience, he said “I really like our waitress. If you brought her home and found out that she had a penis would you run away or just say, ‘Well, it’s 2025’?”

Loosely related, while walking around the Allston-Brighton area of Boston after dinners, I learned that even in a one-party state, people can disagree. Should there be a class war first or does the war against Israel take priority? Bostonians do seem to agree on the need to stock up on marijuana, and backup marijuana, before going to war:

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Where will Palestinian and other migrants who’ve settled in Vatican City move now that Pope Francis has died?

by philg

Pope Francis was celebrated by U.S. media primarily for two positions:

  • it is immoral for a country to refuse to accept welfare-dependent migrants
  • the fighting in Gaza is the only war to which anyone need pay attention and Israel is the evil aggressor behind the fighting (although any Pope is infallible, Israelis would probably take issue with this and point out that Arabs started the overall war in 1948 and the Gazans started the most recent battles by invading Israel and taking civilians hostage on October 7, 2023)

Presumably the Vatican, therefore, under Pope Francis’s direction, took in at least thousands of migrants with a special emphasis on Palestinians (built up with Chinese-style apartment blocks, Vatican City’s 121 acres should be able to hold at least 50,000 cherished migrants). Where will these folks go now that Pope Francis is gone and his replacement might not share Francis’s love for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad?

The Catholic Church did not take sides in World War II (i.e., it was neutral regarding the policies and actions of Nazi Germany), but Pope Francis was quick to weigh in the Hamas side of the recent fighting in Gaza. Example from state-sponsored NPR:

See also this January 2025 Catholic World Report:

In a decree issued last month by the Holy See, the monetary sanctions and prison sentences for those who violate the strict security regulations of Vatican City have been considerably increased.

The document, signed by Cardinal Fernando Vérguez Alzaga, president of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, provides for monetary fines ranging from 10,000 to 25,000 euros (about $10,200 to $25,700) and prison sentences ranging from one to four years.

These fines will apply especially to those who enter by means of violence, threats, or deception, bypassing border controls or security systems. In addition, those who enter with expired permits or do not meet the established requirements will receive administrative sanctions ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 euros (about $2,060 to $5,145).

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Tesla hatred and thinking literally

by philg

A friend’s sister lives in a rich all-white all-Democrat suburb of Chicago. Her Tesla was parked at the top of her driveway and she found the following note on it:

A dispute among white Democrats regarding 50 shades of righteousness was, of course, gold from my point of view and I immediately deployed it on X and Facebook. I assumed that a quiet claim of authorship would be understood as ironic given (1) the expressed desire of the author to remain anonymous (“signed, your neighbor”), (2) the legible and, therefore, likely feminine handwriting, (3) the inconsistency with viewpoint-diverse Florida, and (4) the inconsistency with the rest of my social media and Web output. Of course, I was wrong!

Here’s part of a post from a university professor turned Facebook executive turned venture capitalist:

Concerning an example of a Tesla being “keyed” as an act of protest, and the owner understandably complaining about it:
I’m sorry this happened to you. It’s regrettable. I think it’s immoral and antisocial, in the ways you do.
But I do think the issue here is whether the conditions obtain to make it justified, rather than merely the structural claim that it’s wrong because it’s property destruction.
If the KKK were active in town and terrorizing and killing people with impunity, symbolic property rights infringement as a social retaliation would be regarded as understandable by many people.
There are of course many reasons to object to even that. It’s unlawful. It’s vigilante justice. It can be seen as socially destabilizing. So there are people who will say it’s never ok.
But many people think that unlawful civil disobedience is OK when the injustice issue is sufficient to warrant what they regard as a proportional response.  There’s a strong history of this in America. We like “law and order” but if we think the law is unjustly favoring the wrong order, we sometimes accept the moral appropriateness of unlawful behavior.
So I think if you want to object to this, it needs to be met at that level. And I must say that folks who own these vehicles who are upset about these events, do not seem to be acknowledging that and engaging with it as such. At least not that I’ve seen on social media.

When someone puts this much thought into the nuance of keying a Tesla (“civil disobedience” for Democrat A to damage Democrat B’s car), it is time to spring into action.

On the theory that the most believable lies contain some element of truth, much of my reply is true. There is a board-certified emergency medicine doc who shares an alley with us (access to garages in our neighborhood is via alley so that houses don’t have ugly garage doors in front). He is married (being divorced in our part of Florida, due to a feminism deficit, lacks prestige). He does have a Model Y from a couple of years ago and, in fact, recently said that the car made it from Gainesville to our neighborhood via self-driving without a single intervention (3.5 hours).

Despite the elements of truth, it didn’t occur to me that the thoughtful Facebooker wouldn’t see the attempt at humor. He has some familiarity with my failure to conform to righteous political dogma, for one thing. His response:

I think what you did is exactly the right kind of response. You aren’t trying to upset someone or retaliate against them with violence or property destruction, or some other sort of harm, lawful or not. Your interpreting their car is potentially problematic and you’re explaining to them why and mentioning the broader context. I think that even somebody who disagrees with your views should find that admirable.
Maybe somebody should create flyers with different interesting points on them and master distribute them to protesters and encourage them to leave them on cars instead do destruction.

The flyers could have a URL where the specific issue is being discussed and requested the person who owns the car participate.

A female Deplorable attacked me in the same thread and I admitted that the note was authentic, but my authorship wasn’t. That prompted the thoughtful original author to ask

So you didn’t write this note? But you left it for your neighbor? Or not even that?

When I confirmed that I was not the heroine behind the note, he added

Many of the things that I’ve seen you post on make you seem not just like somebody who disagrees with me politically but like a very mean spirited or unkind person. I was pleasantly surprised by this, but I can see now that actually you think that graciousness is worth mocking.

So… he is a kind person willing to look at the positive aspects of keying someone’s Tesla while I am an unkind person for mocking anti-Tesla hysteria among those who, just months ago, were saying that everyone should drive a Tesla in order to stave off a climate emergency.

Much the same thing happened on X. In response to a Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (99% as progressive as Queers for Palestine?)…

Some responses…

Sad that a professor at MIT and Harvard is so blissfully unaware as to think this is the first time an election has been bought. The naïveté is stunning.

(The guy clicked through to my profile, upgraded me from humble “teacher” to august “professor”, and didn’t learn enough from the context of my other posts to realize that this was a joke.)

From a “data scientist”:

You’re actually a retard aren’t you?

60,000 views and seemingly hardly anyone cottoned on to the claim of authorship being a joke.

Let me close this out with a photo from Sun ‘n Fun (Lakeland, Florida), in which a Tesla uses camouflage to hide from visiting progressives.

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Our Easter Experience

by philg

About half of the people we encountered today (in the neighborhood, at the Norton Museum of Art, at Tropical Smokehouse) wished us a “Happy Easter”. It wasn’t so happy for the turkey whose breast I roasted in the LG steam oven (not very steamy, actually), but the kids enjoyed their Thanksgiving-inspired Easter dinner.

A Louise Nevelson is one of the highlights of the sculpture garden for me.

Back in the neighborhood (let’s hope that our kids don’t demand this level of signage!):

Easter should be more important than Christmas, I think, even for non-Christians, and yet a lot more effort is made to communicate the Christmas story.

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Is the government keeping Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s pupusa recipe secret?

by philg

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the noblest, most valuable, and most important resident of Maryland, made a pupusa-based asylum claim in 2019 (AP):

Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, according to court documents filed in U.S. immigration court in 2019. His father was a former police officer. His mother, Cecilia, sold pupusas, the nation’s signature dish of flat tortilla pouches that hold steaming blends of cheese, beans or pork.

The entire family, including his two sisters and brother, ran the business from home, court records state. Abrego Garcia’s job was buying ingredients and making deliveries with his older brother, Cesar.

“Everyone in the town knew to get their pupusas from ‘Pupuseria Cecilia,’” his lawyers wrote.

A local gang, Barrio 18, began extorting the family for “rent money” and threatened to kill Cesar — or force him into their gang — if they weren’t paid, court documents state. The family complied but eventually sent Cesar to the U.S.

The vast U.S. immigration bureaucracy found the pupusa story credible. The home-based business made such great pupusas that it was ripe for extortion by a powerful gang. Presumably, no judge would have made this finding without having seen the recipe for the Abrego Garcia pupusas. Yet, as with the JFK assassination investigation files, there has been a massive coverup and the pupusa recipe hasn’t been released. Why not a Freedom of Information Act request to ICE to get the recipe so that every American who is passionate about due process can make pupusas every night until Mr. Abrego Garcia is free.

Here’s a Maryland Senator, Mr. Abrego Garcia, an interpreter, I think (why bother to learn English if you’re in the U.S. for only 15 years?), and margaritas (from X):

In the meantime, we have ChatGPT:

Here’s a basic pupusa recipe — traditional Salvadoran stuffed corn cakes — with just a few ingredients:

Ingredients:

For the dough:

  • 2 cups masa harina (corn flour, such as Maseca)
  • 1½ to 2 cups warm water
  • ½ tsp salt

Common fillings:

  • 1 cup shredded mozzarella (or Salvadoran quesillo if available)
  • Optional: refried beans, cooked pork (chicharrón), or loroco (a Central American edible flower)

Instructions:

  1. Make the dough:
    • In a large bowl, mix masa harina with salt.
    • Slowly add warm water and knead until you get a soft, pliable dough that doesn’t crack or stick to your hands. Let it rest for 10 minutes.
  2. Prepare fillings:
    • Mix cheese with beans or pork if using.
    • Divide the filling into about 6–8 portions.
  3. Form the pupusas:
    • Wet your hands and divide the dough into 6–8 equal balls.
    • Flatten a ball into a 4-inch disc, place a spoonful of filling in the center, then pinch the dough closed around it.
    • Flatten it gently into a thick disc, about 4–5 inches wide.
  4. Cook:
    • Heat a lightly oiled skillet or griddle over medium heat.
    • Cook each pupusa for about 2–3 minutes per side, until golden and slightly blistered.
  5. Serve:
    • Serve hot with curtido (a lightly fermented cabbage slaw) and tomato salsa.
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Five-year anniversary of California filling its skate parks with sand

by philg

It’s the fifth anniversary of #Science in California filling skate parks with sand. The video of Venice Beach below, from ABC, is good because it also shows that the beach itself has been closed (part of the “Safer at Home” orders:

Same thing happened in San Clemented, California a few days earlier (Fox News).

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