Author: philg

Will the Iran situation persuade a few more Americans of the virtues of the 2nd Amendment?

by philg

The standard expression “You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out” could be adjusted for recent events in Iran, where a popular uprising doesn’t seem practical: “You can vote your way into Islamic Theocracy, but you have to shoot your way out”.

It seems that very few Iranians could shoot their way out even if motivated to do so. The Islamic Republic has a near-monopoly on gun ownership that is enforced by a Chicago or New York Democrat’s dream common sense gun control system:

The Islamic Republic purportedly has only about 20 percent support (poll), but could probably have stayed in power forever if not for its nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, Hezbollah, Houthi, and Hamas programs.

Could the divergence between what the Iranian people supposedly want (to the extent that can be measured accurately) and what the Iranian government does lead some Americans to reconsider their goals of eliminating private gun ownership in the U.S.?

(Note that I personally believe that Americans’ right to own guns will disappear within the next few decades, a casualty of our immigration system and the consequent creation of a society that is a random assemblage of humans without any common values. When shooting jihads such as Ndiaga Diagne‘s become weekly events, Americans will gladly surrender their rights in exchange for a perceived safety advantage, just as Americans meekly surrendered their First Amendment right to assemble during coronapanic.)

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The LaGuardia airplane-fire truck crash

by philg

Friends have been asking how the LaGuardia airplane-fire truck crash could have happened.

Before reviewing any audio, my first guess was “Might be a controller error. Clear plane to land and someone else clears fire truck across runway.” That shouldn’t happen in general. Even if there are multiple Tower frequencies, there is typically one controller who is solely responsible for a given runway. Based on news reports thus far, it looks like my first guess was partially correct, but it was the same person who cleared a plane to land and a fire truck to cross. Here’s the airport diagram:

The crash apparently occurred at the intersection of Runway 4 and taxiway Delta (D), marked with a red oval below. The plane was moving in the direction of the red arrow.

Note that a jet doesn’t try to land right at the beginning of the runway, but rather 1000′ down the runway (out of 7002′ total here). Because of inertia due to weight and the slow-ish spool-up time of a big jet engine, it’s tough to adjust approach angle/position near the ground in the event the wind changes. If the airplane is going to come up a little short, therefore, the 1000′ marker target enables the short landing to still happen on the runway surface. The airplane would have been rolling/braking for perhaps only 1500-2000′ before the crash.

ABC has a timeline:

Based on an air traffic control recording, the truck had requested permission and had been cleared by the air traffic controller to cross Runway 4 at taxiway Delta. Shortly after, the air traffic controller tells the vehicle to stop several times right before the collision.

“Stop, Truck 1. Stop,” the transmission says. The controller can then be heard frantically diverting an incoming aircraft from landing.

Michael McCormick is the former vice president of the FAA and was once in charge of all of the airspace in the Tri-State.

He wants to know how many people were in the control tower, because initially it sounds like one person could have been doing the work of two people.

“What we’ve heard from that control tape, is it’s the same voice that is clearing the aircraft to land and clearing the vehicles across the runway and a normal tower scenario it would be ground control working the surface traffic and tower control just working arrivals and departures,” McCormick said.

Michael McCormick sounds much more qualified than I, but I think that he is incorrect regarding what’s conventional for Tower vs. Ground responsibility. In my experience, any vehicle or aircraft that wants to cross an active runway usually deals with Tower, i.e., the same person on the same frequency. This is substantially safer than two people issuing instructions on two frequencies because it gives pilots the chance to hear that a vehicle has been cleared across the runway that they were expecting to use and also concentrates control into one brain rather than requiring coordination among multiple brains.

It’s super sad to reflect on the deaths and injuries caused by what seems to be human error, especially since there was no need for the humans in the fire truck to be on their own. An AI in the fire truck could have been monitoring both Tower and Ground frequencies and also looking around at vehicles and aircraft on the field. The AI could easily have said “Don’t move! There’s a plane landing!” to the truck driver who’d been cleared across.

Has anything like this happened to me, you might ask? Yes. I won’t rat out the airport and controller, but I was holding short of a runway at a towered general aviation airport with a fair amount of flight school traffic. Tower cleared me for takeoff. I looked left and noticed a piston-powered airplane on short final and decided not to move into the runway. At a normal taxi speed, I think that the landing aircraft might have gone past by the time I was in the middle of the runway, but it was surely a controller mistake (at the point that I was cleared for takeoff nobody could have had any idea how long it would take for the landing airplane to clear the runway).

(For what it’s worth, our AI overlord (ChatGPT) says “Runway = Tower’s jurisdiction … No one—aircraft or vehicle—may enter or cross a runway without: … Explicit clearance from Tower” and that only rarely might a Ground controller relay a Tower controller’s clearance to cross a runway.)

Don’t take this post as a criticism of LaGuardia ATC. In my experience, New York controllers in all positions are some of the best in the U.S. I’ve talked to LaGuardia Tower while flying a helicopter around the East River and while flying a CRJ into and out of LGA. One really can’t get better humans and, therefore, improved safety will come only from improved systems, such as AI assistance in ground vehicles and, maybe, an AI assistant in the Tower.

One big question: why didn’t the fire truck personnel notice the CRJ’s insanely bright landing lights or get warned by the runway status lights that are supposed to prevent runway incursions even when a human makes a mistake? Pilots are trained to look both ways when entering a taxiway or runway so presumably the airport fire truck drivers are too. According to the FAA, there should have been a “stop” indication to the fire truck that the runway was in use (another easy thing for an AI to warn out: “STOP! Look at the red lights!”):

It will certainly be worth investigating whether this failsafe system was operating correctly at the time of the accident and also what kind of training fire truck drivers receive. For pilots in a two-pilot crew, the captain (left seat) is supposed to look and say “clear left” while the first officer (right seat) is supposed to look and say “clear right” before making a turn.

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The latest Pixar movie (Hoppers) and The Population Bomb (by Paul Ehrlich)

by philg

We took the kids to see Hoppers, the latest Pixar movie. It has some spiritual similarities to The Population Bomb (1968), whose author recently died. Stanford University prof. and Ivy League graduate Paul R. Ehrlich was famously wrong about human population growth leading to famine within his lifetime, but Hoppers shows that his philosophy remains alive.

The movie opens with a noble Japanese-American girl visiting with her grandmother at a single-family house with immediate access to an unspoiled natural area (i.e., something that is impossible for the average person who lives in a heavily populated country). It is access to nature, we’re told, that enables a human to be calm (urban “teens” who can’t access nature, thus, are guaranteed to be violent).

Population pressure and growth, as Prof. Ehrlich described, drive the plot of the movie. The humans are working to take away all of the animals’ habitat, something that they might not have done if the U.S. had stopped growing after reaching 150 million circa 1950.

Was Ehrlich actually wrong? He did say that we might “stretch” and increase food production by trashing the Earth and that is kind of what we’ve done here in the U.S., e.g., heavily fertilizing the Midwest and dumping runoff into the Gulf of America, thus creating dead zones:

The Dead Zone develops, somewhat ironically, as a result of the nutrients that fuel the high productivity in the Gulf’s surface waters. As dead plant material falls from the surface through the water column deeper into the Gulf, bacteria consume it using oxygen. This lack of oxygen creates the Dead Zone in bottom waters on the Texas-Louisiana shelf throughout warm summer months. This occurs when there are fewer storms and strong winds to mix the warm, oxygenated surface waters and the cooler, deeper waters. At other times during the year, winds, weather fronts and storms in the area mix the water, replenishing the oxygen used by the bacteria in the deeper water.

Nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, are essential for an abundant food supply, but crops take up on average just 40% of the nitrogen that is applied each season. The excess can run off into waterways, leading to a high nutrient load in the Mississippi River. Many efforts are underway throughout the Corn Belt to improve fertilizer efficiency and increase adoption of practices like cover crops and buffer strips that protect water quality.

See Book that explores the biggest issue of our age for a discussion of the tension between those who think we need six Earths total for the current batch of humans and those who think we can innovate enough to use just one Earth.

How was the movie? The boys (10 and 12) didn’t love it. Maybe because they don’t identify as either female or Black, the only two kinds of humans who are smart enough to be scientists and engineers. There is, of course, one white male character and he occupies the environment-destroying villain role. The movie involves mobile robots that are created by the intelligent female scientists. Said robots have no apparent solar cells and yet never run out of power. Speaking of miracles, the population in the unnamed U.S. city (Pacific Northwest?) is booming, which is why the humans want to take all of the animals’ habitat. The humans come in a rainbow of skin colors, consistent with U.S. population growth being entirely driven by immigration. And yet… nobody in the movie speaks with a foreign accent.

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We’re now surrending to Iran?

by philg

A couple of days ago, Donald Trump said that we would start doing to Iran what FDR and Truman did to Germany and Japan, i.e., attack the electric power generation that allows an enemy nation to run its weapons industry. Today, however, we learn that the U.S. is actually planning to surrender to Iran. “Trump Says U.S. Will Postpone Strikes on Iranian Energy Infrastructure” (WSJ):

President Trump said the U.S. military would postpone strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days following “productive” talks between Washington and Tehran.

In a Truth Social post written in all caps, Trump said the two countries had “very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.” Trump said that based on those discussions, which he said would continue this week, he had asked the Pentagon to hold off on energy-related strikes that he had threatened. U.S. stock indexes jumped after markets opened and Brent crude futures dropped nearly 10%.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry denied Tehran was in talks with the U.S., according to state media, saying there was “no dialogue” with Washington.

Earlier, Iran threatened wider attacks on infrastructure—including fuel, tech and desalination facilities—used by the U.S. in the region if its energy sites were hit. Iran also warned it would lay mines across the entire Persian Gulf if its coasts or islands were attacked. The escalation of threats came after Trump demanded at the weekend that Iran fully open the Strait of Hormuz, saying in a social-media post late Saturday that the U.S. would “obliterate” Iranian power plants if the regime failed to act within 48 hours.

This wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve paid $1 trillion/year to run our military and also surrendered, but some of the above is confusing. We’ve been told that the Iranian navy was sunk and that we control the airspace over and around Iran. Boats capable of laying mines would seem to be too big to hide anywhere. How would the Iranians have the ability to “lay mines across the entire Persian Gulf” if our claims of having destroyed their navy are true? If there are a few small boats left, why can’t the planes and drones flying over the Iranian coastline find and destroy them?

There is also, of course, the obvious inconsistency of us saying that we’ve negotiated our surrender with the Iranian government and the government of Iran saying that the U.S. hasn’t yet surrendered to them.

Presumably any proposed agreement would (1) leave the current Islamic Republic officials in charge of Iran, just as they have been for 47 years, (2) leave Iran with its oil production infrastructure intact so that it can keep funding its weapons production, and (3) leave Iran with its electric power infrastructure intact so that it can keep running all of the weapons factories that it wants to run, including uranium enrichment, short-range ballistic missile (that can reach the Islamic Republic of London), and peaceful nuclear weapons factories. I can’t think of a way to summarize this other than “U.S. surrenders.” Maybe the Iranians will provide a paper promise not to build nuclear weapons or longer-range ballistic missiles, but what good would that be from a regime that has promised and sworn “Death to America”?

There is no way to learn about any U.S. military successes from reading our media (see We are being absolutely crushed by Iran (NYT)). The U.S. military itself doesn’t seem to have a lot of recent success to report. Here’s a tweet from last night that describes an attack from earlier in March:

If we are currently doing some damage to the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities shouldn’t CENTCOM be able to report more recent strikes?

Readers: What can we make of the above other than “U.S. surrenders”? And if we are forced to surrender, what is the point of paying $1 trillion/year for our military?

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Why do we pay for cable TV if all agree that it is a terrible value?

by philg

I’ve been trying to help our HOA (right there you can stop reading if you want to know the definition of a thankless effort) deal with our bulk cable TV contract and establish a bulk fiber Internet contract. I hit Consumer Reports for their survey of providers. For pure cable TV, here’s something remarkable: all of the companies are rated 1/5 for “value”. If we can all agree, which we apparently do, that cable/satellite TV is a terrible value, why do roughly 70 million of us subscribe?

(Bulk is much cheaper than retail, incidentally. We pay about $55/house per month for a decent slate of channels, 20 hours of DVR, up to three cable boxes per household, and Xfinity’s famously awesome customer service (rated 1/5).)

Conversation with Xfinity rep…

  • them: we are offering our Hybrid fiber-coaxial network in your neighborhood
  • me: if I’m using AOL dialup aren’t I on a “hybrid fiber” network? The computer that answers my 56K modem’s phone call is connected via fiber, right?

Readers: Anyone have experience with TV from FiberNow, Blue Stream, or Hotwire?

Note that the 1/5 value rating for cable TV isn’t because they surveyed 73,000 sourpusses. The same people rated their Internet providers at 4/5 or 5/5 for “value”:

How did Elon’s company do?

I’m not sure why Starlink was perceived to be mediocre in value. The only people who would buy it are those who can’t get fiber or good cable modem service, right? The alternative is LTE or smoke signals?

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Donald Trump’s lies regarding the range of Iranian missiles

by philg

Yesterday, the peaceful Islamic Republic lobbed a warhead 4,000 km (2,500 miles) from Iran to Diego Garcia (WSJ).

Let’s compare to “In Trump’s Case for War, a Series of False or Unproven Claims” (New York Times, last month; note that a “False Claim” might be construed by some people as “Lie”):

American and European government officials, international weapons monitoring groups and reports from American intelligence agencies give a far different picture of the urgency of the Iran threat than the one the White House has presented in recent days.

… in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made a new claim, saying Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”

The following day, Mr. Rubio repeated the president’s assertion about Iran’s work on intercontinental ballistic missiles, although he used different language about how quickly Iran could be capable of hitting the United States. While Mr. Trump said it would be “soon,” Mr. Rubio said it would be “one day.”

A report by the Defense Intelligence Agency last year concluded that Iran did not have ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States, and that it might take as long as a decade for it to have up to 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

… 16 years later, there is still no evidence that Iran has made its long-range missile program a top priority.

Instead, Iran has put far greater focus on building up its arsenal of short- and medium-range missiles, believing it could be the most effective deterrent against Israeli or American efforts to overthrow the government in Tehran.

“Trump Iranian missile claim unsupported by U.S. intelligence, say sources” (Reuters, last month):

The New York Times first reported that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.

Without providing evidence, Trump said that Tehran was beginning to rebuild the nuclear program that he claimed had been “obliterated” by U.S. airstrikes last June on three major sites involved with uranium enrichment.

In an interview with India Today TV released on Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied that Iran was expanding its missile capabilities. “We are not developing long range missiles. We have limited range to below 2000 kilometers intentionally,” he said. “We don’t want it to be a global threat. We only have (them) to defend ourselves. Our missiles build deterrence.”

Now that the Iranians actually do have missiles capable of reaching Paris and London, how long before (1) the French surrender, and (2) the Islamic Republic of the UK merges with the Islamic Republic of Iran to form the United Islamic Republic of Britain and Iran?

The map from a few days ago:

The map from today (Daily Mail):

I still can’t figure out why the U.S. hasn’t targeted Iran’s oil production and electric power plants. So long as Iran is exporting oil it can build new missile factories whenever it wants to and so long as Iran has electric power it can plug those new missile factories into the grid for 24×7 operation. If there isn’t a realistic possibility of a friendly government in Iran how can it make sense to leave the current government in control of a functional export economy?

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What do we tell the AI-fearful?

by philg

A lady here in Florida asked me to reassure her that AI wouldn’t kill all humans. “I’ve seen the movies about Skynet, so I know what could happen,” she said. I reflected that an AI fed on a diet of the New York Times and Greta Thunberg could easily come to the conclusion that humans were destroying the planet via CO2 emission and, therefore, the best course of action would be to kill all humans. She responded, “You’re not making me feel better.”

What is the correct answer? If AI is embedded in networked robots and at least one robot is walking near every group of humans, what stops the robots from killing us in a coordinated attack? Maybe the AI will study the Lebanese Civil War in which 150,000 people were killed by their neighbors due to “religious diversity” and say “I can do a more thorough job than the Lebanese did with their neighbors back in 1990.”

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Why don’t the Iranians run their government from hospitals?

by philg

Another day and another death among the officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran:

Why don’t the Iranians use the cheat code pioneered by the Gazans, i.e., run the government out of hospitals, which the Israelis wouldn’t attack from the air or via artillery? (there were some laborious ground operations in which IDF troops went in and tried to separate Gazans who supported Hamas from Gazans who were active fighters for Hamas)

There are some reports that the Iranians actually are using this cheat code, e.g., “IRGC commanders hold meetings in hospitals, sources say” (Iran International, February 21, 2026). If so, however, the practice hasn’t been sufficiently widespread to prevent a variety of top Iranian officials from being killed while outside of hospitals.

Evidence that Iran still has plenty of electricity and Internet connectivity…

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An F/A-18 pilot comments on the F-15s shot down by Kuwaitis

by philg

A friend last seen in Top Gun slows down to 25 mph (across Florida by EV) and Overheard at Oshkosh (“I’ve met 120 of the 30 people who flew in the first Top Gun movie.”), regarding the three F-15s shot down by a Kuwaiti crew in an F/A-18. (Not in quote style for readability)

[in response to how could it have happened] A large percentage of our jet losses in that region have been friendly fire. In fact I think nearly all except during the gulf war.

Tons of reasons it happens from the shooter side. From the aircraft side often the defensive systems may be off, and you are focused on getting in to land/deconflict in the terminal area. You don’t assume your own team is going to light you up.

In the recent destroyer shooting down a U.S. jet. Another jet was targeted and was in mostly disbelief assuming the missile was going after something else. So even if your RWR went off you might just assume it is aimed at something else you don’t see. Since the ships are certainly interrogating air targets with their radars and might shoot SMs, hopefully with a clear lane, while there are friendly planes up still.

[in response to a discussion of why some of the F-15 pilots were injured] Momentum mostly

First the seat fires and in a two seat model the other person will say eject 3 times then pull. You hope in that brief moment you get into the proper ejection position (lower legs back, thighs on seat, back against seat, shoulders square, head neutral and back). If not, anything out of place is going to have a large amount of acceleration very quickly which causes injuries (eg broken femur from the seat accelerating first then hitting your leg that wasn’t on the seat).

Then all of those out of place
Items, arms included have major flail damage risk. If it’s a controlled ejection because of a mechanical issue you can minimize the speed and angle for ejection. In this case not so much most likely. So your arm that may have been hanging off to the side now has the momentum issue and maybe hit something on the way out, and then may be exposed to 300 knots or more wind suddenly.

People commonly get knocked out but wake up in the chute. The rest of the other injuries are mostly from the ejection, the flail injuries, or a bad parachute landing fall.

[in response to a question about how it was possible for the Kuwaits to misidentify three F-15s at fairly close range] Could happen but yea something seems off here.

May have felt panic that 3x mig-29 or whatever he thought it was, was also breathing down their neck. I assume this was also after missiles landed or maybe nearly landed so tensions were already high.

I think this falls in the category of don’t attribute to malice what can be contributed to incompetence. My guess is basic human error/training/skill.

But I also don’t know the details. I assume by now people know most of what needs to be known. Either way that pilot is riding the bench for a while.

Would be interesting to understand if they were declared hostile and if so by who[m!]. The hostile declaration and what the positive ID requirements were would be interesting to know. I assume details will come out.

Loosely related….

Very loosely related (aviation and war)…

The above related to CNN’s coverage of some anti-Islamophobia activists in Manhattan:

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Rename Cesar Chavez schools and streets to honor Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei?

by philg

Cesar Chavez is in the news this week, e.g., “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years” (NYT) and now Democrat-run states such as California have tons of Cesar Chavez schools and streets to rename. ChatGPT estimates 43-45 public schools and as many as 100 streets are named after a vegetarian who died at age 66 of “natural causes” for which there is likely no ICD-10 code (maybe add W50.5 “sex with energetic teenagers” or W50.6 “sex with teens who volunteered to help a progressive cause”?).

What about renaming all of these schools and streets to honor a hero to modern-day Californians? Suppose there were a person heroically standing up to an illegal war, unafraid of death, and leading a society that is a City on a Hill to Californians? From March 1, 2026, Gavin Newsom characterizes the U.S. war on Iran as “illegal”:

From today, Gavin Newsom in his official capacity offers a hearty “Assalamualaikum, California!”:

A few months ago, a Hamas leader might have been the natural choice. However, except for occasional swipes at Israel for “genocide” or “apartheid“, the California righteous seem to have forgotten about their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in “Palestine”. The Islamic Republic of Iran is the model now and, certainly, nobody observes Ramadan more piously and peacefully than an Iranian ayatollah. Nobody stands up to Donald Trump’s aggression more bravely than an Iranian politician. The natural choices for new names, then, are “Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei High School”, “Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei Avenue”, and similar.

Separately, what did Cesar Chavez do, according to the NYT?

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, groping her breasts in the same office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said, and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was not old enough to consent.

The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.

One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.

Note that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tahrir al-Wasila wrote that it was acceptable for a middle-aged man to have sex with a 9-year-old, just as Muhammad did, within the context of a marriage (but younger than 9 years old is forbidden or, perhaps, 8 years and 9 months). Chavez, in other words, wouldn’t have been breaking the law in Iran so long as he married the girls described in the article. (“While marriageable age is defined at 13 years for girls and 15 years for boys, there is no specific age limit for marriage in Iran and marriage is possible at any age” says “The trend of girl child marriage in Iran based on national census data” (2020).)

Related:

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