A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate.
Here’s a photo from 2013 (Reagan National Airport): “You are the CSS to my HTML”.
This is the year that we say Happy 30th Anniversary to the CSS/HTML couple. CSS goes back to 1996 (first standardized) and HTML to 1990.
Full post, including commentsFrom 2019… Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?:
I’m wondering if LGBTQIA is the most popular social justice cause because there is no obvious connection between saying one is passionate about supporting LGBTQIA and having to donate money. If someone says “I care about the poor” and then buys a Tesla instead of a Honda Accord, a friend might ask “Why didn’t you give $70,000 to the poor and drive a Honda rather than your fancy Tesla?”
In the intervening seven years, Teslas have gotten cheaper so perhaps a better analogy is to the $10,000 European vacation. Certainly over those seven years, though, heterosexual Rainbow Flagism, i.e., the public celebration of homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. by white cisgender heterosexuals, has become even more common. Nominally Christian churches in majority-Democrat parts of the U.S. will usually have a rainbow flag even when their entire congregation is hetero. None of these churches have flags or signs out front saying “help the poor by giving them half of your income since you already live at least 2X as well as Americans in the 1950s”.
I wonder if we’re seeing the same phenomenon right now with respect to people indignantly condemning Jeffrey Epstein. Hardly any of these folks were important enough to be included in the Epstein Files and, therefore, they can’t have been personally offended by Epstein’s conduct. If we assume that Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea for “soliciting prostitution” wasn’t coerced by the threat of decades in prison, what has been established is that he had sex with a paid 16-year-old female roughly 20 years ago. (He is often referred to by the Two Minutes Haters as a “rapist” or “pedophile”, but he was never charged with rape, much less convicted of rape, and having sex with a 16-year-old is not an example of pedophilia as the term was previously used in English.)
The Two Minutes Haters often live within a short drive of places where teenage prostitution is going on right now. I’m in a politically diverse Facebook group with a Big Law partner (average partner at his firm earns about $1.5 million/year in post-Biden dollars) who posts daily about his sympathy for the Epstein victims. He lives in an elite neighborhood of Greater Los Angeles that is within a one-hour drive of the street that the New York Times recently identified as having a high-density of juvenile prostitutes:
Ana paced on the sidewalk at 68th and Figueroa, her front teeth missing and an ostomy bag taped down under her hot pink lingerie. … Ana was 19, but the girls on the street reminded her of herself and her sister when they were first put out on Figueroa for sex. She had been 13. Her sister, 11. … Ana had grown accustomed to the protocols of the Blade, a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street that had become one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States. … The Blade was an eight-minute drive from the University of Southern California … The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota.
My response to one of his recent demands for more action regarding the Epstein Files. I’ll call him “Hassan” since that’s the first name of one of the Somalis charged in the Minnesota welfare state frauds and we are informed that Somalis built the United States:
There are teenage prostitutes whom you can rescue tonight, Hassan. The New York Times tells you exactly where in Los Angeles to find them. I will send you $1,000, Hassan, if you will go to Figueroa St. tonight and take home one of the under-18 prostitutes and keep her safe in your guest rooms for at least one month. This is to offset the cost of her food (I know that it should be a lot less than $1,000 to feed a skinny kid, but I see you more as an Uber Eats kind of person than a competent chef).
His only response to this offer was to take issue with my criticism, admittedly unsupported, of his cooking abilities. A few hours later he was posting the assertion “Donald Trump was actively recruiting girls for Epstein”, apparently made by someone the FBI interviewed in 2021.
The easiest way for authorities to bring the criminal justice system down on men who have sex with “underage” women is to prosecute them for statutory. Then a jury doesn’t need to sort out whether providing a female with housing, private jet rides, clothing, jewelry, spending money, etc. is prostitution or just legal “dating” in our debauched country. The people who engage in the Two Minutes Hate regarding Epstein often live in states where sex with a 16-year-old might be perfectly legal because that’s the age of consent. Here’s my offer to one of the haters who sent me a stream of enraged X messages regarding my failure to unequivocally condemn Jeffrey Epstein:
If you want to work together to lobby the Massachusetts legislature to raise the age of consent in MA to 18, I will be happy to help with that.
He did not respond to this offer.
What we’re seeing is a huge group of Americans who don the mantle of righteous protectors of teenage females because they posted on social media about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, all of whom are now adults and nearly all of whom have been or are being paid $millions, i.e., more than the typical American female will earn in a lifetime of W-2 slavery. See “Jeffrey Epstein victims program shutting down with $121 million paid to abuse survivors” (ABC, 2021):
The Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, since launching last year, received approximately 225 applications from alleged victims from the United States and abroad. That astounding number was more than double the initial expectations of the fund’s administrator and advocates for the victims. … Of the 150 applicants deemed eligible for compensation, more than 92% accepted the offers. The awards were paid by the executors of Epstein’s estate, but the claims were evaluated independently “free from any interference or control” by the estate, said Jordana Feldman, the program’s designer and administrator.
(75 out of 225 applicants were considered to be obvious liars by the administrators and, therefore, not eligible?)
“Epstein survivors secure a $290 million settlement with JPMorgan Chase” (NPR, 2023):
The lawsuit is one of several targeting banks who serviced Epstein’s financial dealings for years, even after it emerged in 2006 that Epstein was using his wealth to exploit minors and young women. Last month, Deutsche Bank agreed to a $75 million settlement in a similar case.
News of the JPMorgan settlement emerged on Monday, the same day a federal judge granted class-action status to the lawsuit, saying the number of plaintiffs involved could be “well over 100 people.”
Let’s assume it is the same 150 people who will also share the JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank cash. That’s $486 million divided by 150 = $3.24 million on top of whatever Jeffrey Epstein paid them while they were spending time with him. A reasonable person could certainly argue that $3.24 million tax-free isn’t sufficient compensation but it is unarguably far more than the typical teen prostitute receives. Thus my confusion regarding why it’s considered righteous to dwell on Jeffrey Epstein’s victims of 20 years ago rather than try to rescue today’s teen prostitutes.
Maybe the best response is to offer anyone piling on condemnation of Epstein three options: (a) spend time and money rescuing today’s young female prostitutes, (b) spend time and money lobbying to raise the age of consent in every U.S. state and every country where it isn’t at least 18 (you could also argue for 27, at least for women, given recent outraged stories about Epstein and 26-year-old females (e.g., NYT)), (c) spend time and money on imposing alcohol prohibition within the U.S. (my standard proposal for improving a lot of stuff, including sexual behavior), or (d) spend money on a new fund that will give people who say that they were Epstein victims additional money. Perhaps the new fund could find the 75 women who were denied any compensation by the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program and give each of them $1 million?
Related:
Would it be possible to use AI to determine whether, as is commonly asserted these days, that Jeffrey Epstein was a rapist of 14-year-old girls?
ChatGPT says that it is fair to characterized Jeffrey Epstein as a “pedophile” because at least some women were under age 18. When asked about Mohammed and his marriage to Aisha, on the other hand, it turns out that the Prophet was not a “pedophile”:
Traditional Islamic hadith literature — especially reports in collections such as Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — state that:
These reports have been accepted as authentic by the majority of classical Sunni scholars for over a millennium.
…
The comparison is difficult because the contexts differ on multiple axes:
| Dimension | Muhammad | Epstein |
|---|---|---|
| Time period | 7th century | 20th–21st century |
| Cultural norms | Early marriage common | Sex with minors illegal & stigmatized |
| Evidence type | Religious texts & historical reports | Court records, testimony, indictments |
| Pattern alleged | Specific marriages | Large network of abuse |
| Legal framework | Pre-modern tribal law | Modern criminal law |
Because of this:
This doesn’t make moral evaluation impossible — but it makes clinical labeling across contexts methodologically unsound.
Full post, including commentsDear Readers: I’m headed to Austin and should be free on February 20. Would anyone like to meet up? Terry Black’s, perhaps? (see Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours) Email philg@mit.edu if interested.
Does anyone have a good idea for activities? I went to the city’s official events page and just one event is listed for February 20:
OUTsider is an Austin-based transmedia nonprofit that celebrates the bold originality and creative nonconformity of the LGBTQ+ communities through the presentation of provocative, overlooked and out-of-the-box film, dance, theater, performance art, music, writing and visual art. Through its annual festival and conference, OUTsider unites queer artists, audiences and scholars from around the globe to exchange ideas, ignite conversations, transcend boundaries and experience new pleasures through artistic discovery.
If Feb 20 doesn’t work, how about Feb 24 in Vegas? Please email philg@mit.edu!
Full post, including commentsMay 2017, Harvard Crimson:
Mark Zuckerberg’s Commencement address at Harvard
How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? … We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics.
(The last part is my favorite. In 2017 he predicted that the lavishly funded UN and WHO would, three years later, be able to prevent a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic via muscular action, Scientific interventions such as saliva-soaked face rags, etc.)
February 2026, WSJ:
Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are the latest California billionaires to buy a home in South Florida. … THE PRICE: While it isn’t clear exactly what Zuckerberg and Chan are paying for the nearly 2-acre property, local real-estate agents said it would likely trade for $150 million to $200 million. Last year, an undeveloped Indian Creek lot of roughly the same size sold for about $105 million.
A peasant to whom $200 million is real money might look at the contrast between the 2017 statement about climate panic (“destroy the planet”) and the 2026 sea level waterfront house purchase and shout out “Hypocrisy!”. But maybe instead it is time for a new level of envy. What if Mark Zuckerberg believes what he’s been saying about climate change and bought the house anyway? That’s the real estate equivalent of driving a $600,000 Ferrari Purosangue to an elementary school with two kids and a bag of drive-thru breakfasts in the back. The owner knows that the kids are doing $200,000 of damage to the interior and simply doesn’t care. Zuck expects the above house to be washed away in 5-10 years, in other words, and is indifferent to the consequent loss of $200 million.
Envy 101: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and pass them down to their kids and grandkids
Envy 303: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and treat them as disposable
Full post, including commentsAs noted in Reagan National Airport Black Hawk-CRJ crash, the easiest way to have prevented the January 2025 crash would have been to implemented congestion pricing on the highways around DC so that officials didn’t need helicopter taxi service to avoid the traffic jams that have been caused by dramatic population growth induced by spectacular growth in government spending (plus open borders?).
“The Last Flight of PAT 25 Two Army helicopter pilots went on an ill-conceived training mission. Within two hours, 67 people were dead.” (New York Magazine):
Black Hawks are typically flown by two pilots. The pilot in command, or PIC, sits in the right-hand seat. Tonight, that role was filled by 39-year-old chief warrant officer Andrew Eaves. Warrant officers rank between enlisted personnel and commissioned officers; it’s the warrant officers who carry out the lion’s share of a unit’s operational flying. When not flying VIPs, Eaves served as a flight instructor and a check pilot, providing periodic evaluation of the skills of other pilots. A native of Mississippi, he had 968 hours of flight experience and was considered a solid pilot by others in the unit.
In terms of flying hours, Mr. Eaves was at the same stage as a civilian helicopter pilot beginning a second year working as an instruction in little Robinsons, mostly going in circles around a training airport.
His mission was to give a check ride to Captain Rebecca Lobach, the pilot sitting in the left-hand seat. Lobach was a staff officer, meaning that her main role in the battalion was managerial. Nevertheless, she was expected to maintain her pilot qualifications and, to do so, had to undergo a number of annual proficiency checks. Tonight’s three-hour flight was intended to get Lobach her annual sign-off for basic flying skills and for the use of night-vision goggles, or NVGs. To accommodate that, the flight was taking off an hour and 20 minutes after sunset. …
Night-vision goggles have a narrow field of view, just 40 degrees compared to the 200-degree range of normal vision, which makes it harder for pilots to maintain full situational awareness. They have to pay attention to obstacles and other aircraft outside the window, and they also have to keep track of what the gauges on the panel in front them are saying: how fast they’re going, for instance, and how high. There’s a lot to process, and time is of the essence when you’re zooming along at 120 mph while lower than the tops of nearby buildings. To help with situational awareness, Eaves and Lobach were accompanied by a crew chief, Staff Sergeant Ryan O’Hara, sitting in a seat just behind the cockpit, where he would be able to help keep an eye out for trouble.
Lobach, 28, had been a pilot for four years. She’d been an ROTC cadet at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which she graduated from in 2019. Both her parents were doctors; she’d dreamed of a medical career but eventually realized that she couldn’t pursue one in the Army. According to her roommate, “She did not have a huge, massive passion” for aviation but chose it because it was the closest she could get to practicing medicine, under the circumstances. “She badly wanted to be a Black Hawk pilot because she wanted to be a medevac unit,” he told NTSB investigators. After she completed flight training at Fort Rucker, she was stationed at Fort Belvoir, where she joined the 12th Aviation Battalion and was put in charge of the oil-and-lubricants unit.
In addition to her official duties, Lobach served as a volunteer social liaison at the White House, where she regularly represented the Army at Medal of Honor ceremonies and state dinners. … She was planning to leave the service in 2027 and had already applied for medical school at Mount Sinai. Helicopter flying was not something she intended to pursue.
Though talented as a manager, she wasn’t much of a pilot. … One instructor described her skills as “well below average,” noting that she had “lots of difficulties in the aircraft.” Three years before, she’d failed the night-vision evaluation she was taking tonight. … It’s not uncommon for pilots to struggle during the early phase of their career. But Lobach’s development had been particularly slow. In her five years in the service, she had accumulated just 454 hours of flight time, and she wasn’t clocking more very quickly.
Captain Lobach had the same number of hours as a Big Tech engineer who flies recreationally for about three years and, based on the above, far less interest in becoming proficient. The small number of hours seems to be common within the Army:
Similar problems exist throughout Army aviation; the service has been having a hard time retaining its most experienced pilots and providing adequate flight time for those currently coming up through the ranks. Since 2011, the average number of hours flown per year by crewed Army aircraft has fallen from 302 to 198.
Here’s a confusing part. Maybe the issue was with the tail rotor rather than “a tail fin”?
As they passed over the Civil War battlefield of Thoroughfare Gap, an alarm called a master caution went off, indicating that a control system for a tail fin was malfunctioning. If the situation worsened and the surface became stuck, the helicopter could crash.
(This was unrelated to the crash as it happened an hour earlier and the system was “reset”.)
The conclusion of the article is bizarre. After writing about a person who wasn’t interested in aviation, the author concludes with a quote from the pilot-brother of one of the regional airline pilots who was killed by the Army crew’s incompetence:
He thinks that Lobach could have become a good pilot if they gave her another thousand hours of flying time. Instead, the Army withheld from her the training and flight time that she needed to fly safely and then required her to go fly anyway on a mission that was as ill-conceived as it was poorly executed.
The article is heartbreaking because there are thousands of superb civilian helicopter pilots who would have sacrificed almost anything to take Captain Lobach’s place behind the controls of a Blackhawk even without receiving her Army pay and benefits ($150,000/year if we include housing allowance and the actuarial value of the pension?). It’s understandable that the military is a bureaucracy, but after all of the selection hurdles how does it end up with pilots who don’t love to fly and live to fly?
“Bad Bunny uses Grammy Award win to protest ICE” (CNN, February 2026):
Accepting the award for best música urbana album, Bad Bunny began his speech saying, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE out!”
“How Bad Bunny Did It” (The Atlantic, February 2026):
Bad Bunny is articulating the surreal and sad feeling of seeing his homeland transformed by internet-supercharged globalization. The U.S. territory’s economy has long relied on tourism, but in recent years, a wave of laptop-toting mainlanders lured by the balmy climate and notoriously loose tax laws has driven rent increases and threatened to wash out the local identity. Bad Bunny’s new album, Bonilla wrote, is a “lament for a Puerto Rico slipping through our fingers: betrayed by its leaders; its neighborhoods displaced for luxury developments; its land sold to outsiders, subdivided by Airbnb and crypto schemes and repackaged as paradise for others.”
(The gringos at The Atlantic characterize Puerto Rico as having “notoriously loose tax laws”, but “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich” (GQ 2018) and other sources make it clear that Act 20 and Act 22 are, in fact, tightly specified.)
Separately, if you want to enjoy Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, but don’t understand el idioma de los conquistadores (or the way that Bad Bunny pronounces this language), here’s a recital in the English language:
The “We Accept EBT” sign on the set was a nice touch. It wasn’t inclusive, however, for viewers in Minnesota. Why not an additional “Waxaan aqbalnaa EBT” or “Halkan EBT waa laga aqbalaa” sign? (the majority of Somali-headed households are on SNAP)
In other NFL news, our home town of Jupiter, Florida was indirectly featured recently by Bill Belichick’s young associate:
Related:
Full post, including commentsCalifornians love to brag about how productive and rich they are. San Francisco should be the richest city in the world right now given that most of the AI companies have set up shop within the city limits and the founders/executives of these companies also live within city limits, e.g., Sam Altman (worth nearly $2 billion) That’s a tax base that municipal governments all around the world can only envy. We are informed that Democrats protect American workers’ interests and there are no Republicans who could potentially prevent San Francisco from taxing and spending.
Separately, we are informed that public employee unions would never use their power to exploit taxpayers by demanding above-market compensation. Our newspapers report as an established fact that unionized schoolteachers are “underpaid”.
This week, however, we learn that the elite Democrats who run San Francisco refuse to provide their public schoolteachers with the fair compensation that the union has requested, thus necessitating a strike. NYT:
On Monday morning, Cassondra Curiel, the president of the union, the United Educators of San Francisco, led a rally on the steps of Mission High School, where dozens of teachers, dressed in red, rattled tambourines and hoisted signs calling for higher wages. Some brought their children, who were out of school for the day.
One of my faith-based beliefs is that productive assets, such as a company that makes widgets, are more valuable than rocks or metal bars. This, of course, hasn’t been true lately. Here’s the price of gold over the period of Bidenflation (we’re still in the “Bidenflation” period even without Biden, since inflation is tough to tame once it gets going, e.g., because government is nearly half the economy and many government payments are automatically indexed to inflation):
On the other hand, the S&P 500 is also way up, especially the Big Tech/AI companies.
What does ChatGPT have to say? The S&P is worth 1.7X all of the above-ground gold:
How about 10 years ago when AI wasn’t functional and productivity gains from AI weren’t baked into investor expectations? The ratio was higher: 2.35X.
So the value of productive assets, which should be enhanced by AI, have actually fallen relative to an unproductive asset, whose value shouldn’t be directly affected by AI.
Does this mean that markets don’t think that AI is useful? Or perhaps they think that AI will make some companies more productive, but it will render so many humans useless that taxes on the productive to fund idle lifestyles for the useless will wipe out any economic gains? Or maybe there is a simpler explanation, e.g., people love gold.
Full post, including commentsMostly Peaceful Immigrants, Installment #6734… “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows” (CBS):
Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News. … Nearly 60% of ICE arrestees over the past year had criminal charges or convictions, the document indicates. But among that population, the majority of the criminal charges or convictions are not for violent crimes.
In other words, at least 1 out of 7 of the arrested migrants was a violent criminal (plus some additional migrants who are violent criminals, but had (1) never been arrested by the police, (2) never been charged with a violent crime by local prosecutors, and/or (3) been convicted of a violent crime only in their home country).
CBS spins this as evidence for the irrationality of Donald Trump’s deportation policies. But who would be enthusiastic living among the 400,000 noble enrichers who’ve been arrested? Imagine a realtor telling a potential house buyer, “only 1 out of 7 of your new neighbors will be violent criminals. So if there are two households of 4 people on either side of you, most likely you’ll have a next-door neighbor who is a violent criminal and 4 or 5 next-door neighbors who are non-violent criminals.”
A hater’s response to CBS on X:
Also in Journalism, the New York Times told us that we’re in a “climate emergency” and that Donald Trump was ending democracy. How do the journalists there prepare for these catastrophes? Are they digging tunnels in Nova Scotia and planning their escape before the Trump Dictatorship v2.0 closes the border? No. They spent at least an entire day digging up and watching 25 years worth of old halftime shows:
Some gratitude to the good people of Minneapolis. The city’s martyrs of ICE resistance, such as Alex Pretti and Renée Good, are apparently forgotten because Donald Trump briefly posted part of a “king of the jungle” video (apparently suppressed by the righteous who run YouTube, but available from the haters at X). Front page of the NYT today condemning Trump for his racism; nothing anywhere on the front page about Minneapolis, as if the sacrifices were for nothing:
I will celebrate Minneapolis, therefore, with a shout-out to SANUS, headquartered in suburban Minneapolis (a 3-minute drive from the Al-Amaan mosque). Mere hours before we were to our Super Bowl extravaganza guests are arriving, our four-year-old $900 Costco 86″ TV wouldn’t turn on. Thanks to the Sanus BLT3-B1 “tilt 4D” mount, however, I was able to pull the recalcitrant machine from the wall and use my Ph.D. in EECS skills to unplug it and plug it back in. The kids are watching the Puppy Bowl and, if the Costco gods are with us, the party will proceed as planned.
I suppose that we also have to celebrate our brothers and sisters in China (not too many binary-resisters there) for actually making the Sanus BLT3-B1 so that it cost $100 instead of $300.
(I do wish that ICE would detain and deport whoever made the Xfinity XG1v4 box, which I picked up because of its advertised 4K capability. It needs to be power-cycled almost every time that we want to use it and the boot-up process is almost 10 minutes.)
Let this be a cautionary tale for anyone who is considering a super-slim wall-hugging TV mount that requires professional skills and multiple humans to execute a dismount and reach-around. (I guess we could have accomplished the power-cycle via flipping breakers. I’ve never seen a behind-the-TV outlet that is associated with a convenient switch that could be used for a convenient power-cycle.)
Finally, maybe this is the time to start an extended warranty claim on the TV? It was a floor model at Costco and they threw in a five-year warranty from Allstate. The warranty was already used once to replace the TV’s main board, possibly a casualty of a lightning storm putting high voltage into the Xfinity cable (another good reason to go with a fiber connection if you’re lucky enough to live in a place where fiber is available).
From the masjid around the corner from Sanus, a Facebook post from one month after the Gazans’ peaceful October 7, 2023 excursion into Israel:
Allah is the All-Mighty, the Most Merciful, the One Who has the absolute ability to save the oppressed, inflict punishment on the criminals and stop the brutal massacre and genocide happening in Gaza.
It’s a challenging theological question. Allah is “All-Mighty, the Most Merciful” and with “the absolute ability to save the oppressed” (redundant with “All-Mighty”?). Yet the genocide happening in Gaza wasn’t stopped until the Gazans had suffered the loss of most of their military capability. Why did Allah wait two more years and, perhaps more importantly, not assist the Gazans in realizing their military goals, including the destruction of the Zionist entity and the establishment of Hamas rule from the river to the sea?
