“Inhuman treatment” of immigrants in the U.S.

Taxpayer-funded NPR:

Pope Leo XIV weighed in on U.S. politics, saying that Catholic politicians must be judged on the full range of their policy positions and suggesting that the country’s treatment of immigrants is “inhuman.”

“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” Pope Leo said. “And someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

Immigrants suffer “inhuman treatment” in the United States, according to this expert. Also, millions of humans voluntarily show up every year seeking this inhuman treatment. Center for Immigration Studies:

The government’s January 2025 Current Population Survey (CPS) shows the foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal together) hit 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025 — both new record highs.

(Note that the size of the “illegal population” is difficult to estimate and see also Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?)

Fans of logical conundrums may also appreciate this communication from someone on a selfie yacht who communicated that the Israeli Navy disabled his communications:

Loosely related, “Foreign Ministry: Flotilla to Gaza had no humanitarian supplies” (Jerusalem Post). In other words, the selfie yachts were literally carrying nothing more than selfie subjects.

Finally, nobody can accused JetBlue of treating immigrants inhumanely. From a recent flight, in which they invite customers to watch movies specifically related to Hispanic Heritage Month:

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María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize

Progressive friends who never previously mentioned María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician, now celebrate her winning a Nobel Peace Prize. I wonder how carefully they’ve researched this lady. First, let’s have a moment of silence for Hugo Chavez, whose premature death robbed him of the Nobel Peace Prize that was his due. Perhaps we can reflect on the words of Noam Chomsky when he met this lion of democracy and peace:”I write about peace and criticize the barriers to peace; that’s easy. What’s harder is to create a better world… and what’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created.”

(Collectively, of course, the Venezuelans created such a great world in Venezuela that the Biden-Harris administration decided that 100 percent of Venezuelans were eligible to live in the United States, thus enabling them to replicate their success on a larger scale.)

Let’s see how truly peaceful the heiress to Barack Obama’s Mantle of Peace truly is. An unbiased “news” article from America’s journalists at The Week:

… many have started to point out that the 58-year-old is a strong ally of Israel and openly backs the country’s decision to bomb the largely unarmed civilians of the Gaza Strip. While there is no known evidence to argue that she supported the one-sided attack on the Palestinian civilians, Machado is undoubtedly an ally of Benjamin Netanyahu. In the past, the centrist-right leader had even declared that if she gains power, she will restore diplomatic relations with Israel.

It’s a fact that Israel launched a “one-sided attack on the Palestinian civilians” and this fake Peace laureate somehow supports the attackers rather than the unarmed and Peaceful Gazans.

(The Week’s article is a little confusing, actually. The “civilians” of Gaza are “largely unarmed”. Does that mean that some civilians in Gaza are armed with rockets, machine guns, etc., but are still considered “civilians” because they don’t also have tanks?)

Related:

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Equal Protection Clause as implemented by the City of Cambridge (buy stuff from women)

Here’s a recent email from the City of Cambridge, a taxpayer-funded enterprise that in theory is bound by the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause:

Everyone is encouraged to join the celebration by supporting Cambridge women-owned businesses and other entrepreneurs during the month of October and beyond. To find women-owned businesses in your neighborhood, visit the online Cambridge Business Diversity Directory.

The full event page links to this directory, which says “The Directory aims to elevate businesses owned by women, people of color, veterans, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and individuals of Portuguese descent.” The event page also notes “These events recognize, support, and are inclusive for all who self-identify as women or with womanhood, including transgender, gender fluid, and non-binary persons.”

I can’t figure out how any of this is legal. What in the Constitution allows a city to favor citizens (and migrants!) of one gender ID out of the 74 recognized by Science? And what in the Constitution allows a city to prepare a business directory that excludes most companies owned by white males unless they swear that they’re 2SLGBTQQIA+?

Readers: What are you doing this month to increase your purchases from companies that are purportedly owned by “women” (however the term may be defined) and reduce your purchases whose owners have other gender IDs?

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Nobel-grade Science as a career

From the author of Chaos Monkeys:

My former PhD advisor got the Nobel Prize (John Clarke at Berkeley). It was without question the dullest work I’ve ever done in life and should have left earlier.

Related:

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Oregon governor’s primary qualification is lesbianism?

Oregon’s governor has been posting her opposition to the federal government’s plan to clean up mostly peaceful Portland, e.g., this tweet:

Not having previously heard of this person, I visited her official web site to learn something about her background:

On November 8, 2022, Tina Kotek made history along with Maura Healey of Massachusetts, becoming the first openly lesbian governors elected in American history.

Throughout Tina’s professional career as an advocate for those in need, she has carried the value of service instilled in her by her parents to get real results for Oregonians.

Tina’s grandparents came from Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century to find opportunity and a better life. Her parents were proud first-generation Americans. They believed in hard work, being informed citizens, and encouraging their children to follow their dreams.

Tina moved to Oregon from the East Coast in 1987, and fell in love with the beauty of the state and the openness of the people. She finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon, graduating without student debt because of a Pell grant, work study assistance, and affordable tuition.

Tina came out as a lesbian in her early twenties. While it wasn’t always easy, each experience coming out to others strengthened her resilience. While getting her graduate degree, Tina fought for and won domestic partnership rights for faculty and students at the University of Washington.

The word “lesbian” appears four times in this official biography, including in the very first sentence. The reader learns about the governor’s passion for lesbianism twice before learning anything about a job that the governor might have had prior to becoming governor (unless one considers “having sex with other women” to be a job?). In other words, the reader might reasonable infer that the governor’s primary qualification for being governor is lesbianism (or “identifying as a lesbian”).

From 2020 (AP), the mostly peaceful city:

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Reengineering science education to concentrate on the unknown

I recently finished Into the Impossible Volume 2: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: Lessons from Laureates to Concentrate Your Creativity and Ignite Your Career by Brian Keating. One of my favorite quotes from these interviews with Nobel laureates:

Donna Strickland: I think the biggest mistake we make in teaching, all the way up through undergrad, is teaching what science we already know. Science is not about knowing; it’s about figuring out how to ask the question why. It’s not about learning how everything else has already been done. That’s not to say we don’t need that, but we should instruct them to ask the right questions as opposed to knowing the answers. … As students, you’re always taught that you’re not going to succeed unless you know all the answers. The higher you go in science, the fewer answers there are. The goal is not to have the answers but, first, to be able to ask the right questions.

Especially now that Grok and ChatGPT know all of the answers, why not reengineer education around trying to answer new questions? Young people would still have to do the drudgery of learning the answers to old questions, of course, but they’d be doing that in the context of trying to make some progress on an unanswered question. The same thinking would enliven our nation’s science museums, most of which explicitly say “the Science is settled”.

I’m not sure that the book lives up to the “ignite your career” promise from the title, unless the strategy to “ignite your career in Science” is to quit and do medicine instead. Donna Strickland echoes what I wrote in “Women in Science” (2006; “This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.”):

Keating: What are your feelings on how the status of women has changed over your career, and where do you see it going?

Strickland: Well, it’s changed, but I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that physics itself is not appreciated highly by society. All these other issues, why they say women don’t want to do physics, would have been true in medicine as well—and yet now more women go into medicine than men. Parents still tell children that are good in science to become doctors. If you get paid well, society says, “We value this.” Physics is not one of those valued things; it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman…

Many of the interviewees point out that there is a huge overproduction of PhDs relative to the number of sought-after academic jobs and that the chance of career success is low. A book like this, in which Nobel laureates are interviewed, is almost the definition of sample bias. Undergrads at a Queers for Palestine League university fall prey to this as well. The freshman at MIT or Yale subconsciously absorbs that being a tenured biology professor at MIT or Yale is a typical outcome for someone with a biology PhD because tenured biology professors are the only PhD biologists that the freshman has encountered.

The book contains some information that is misleading, e.g.,

For example, even with a doubling of salary, you’re not likely to register a doubling in well-being. In fact, the effect of wealth has been shown to be nonlinear. Beyond a certain income threshold, happiness saturates, leading to a diminishment in returns beyond, according to Nobel Prize–winner Daniel Kahneman.

See “Money Buys Happiness, Even if You’re Already Rich” (Wall Street Journal 2024):

A 10% raise delivers a similar boost in satisfaction across income levels, research finds

A big raise provides significant boosts in happiness even at household incomes of $500,000, according to a new research report.

A wealth of research has long shown that more money makes a big difference to people with low pay, moving them from insecurity to stability. Above that level, the effect is often assumed to be much smaller.

But according to a paper by Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the bonuses and leaps in income high earners reap are so large that they keep adding to well-being in the same way that smaller pay bumps do at lower tiers of earnings.

So it’s true that a $1 raise doesn’t make a Wall Street hero significantly happier, but there isn’t a diminishing return to a 10 percent raise.

The book reminds us that academics all around the world love to see elites locking down the peasants. Tim Palmer, a senior citizen physicist in the UK, celebrates the fact that eventually the rulers of the UK locked down their young healthy subjects in an attempt to slow the spread of a disease that kills 80-year-olds:

Palmer: It’s a tough problem. As a scientist, we can’t make decisions. All I can do is lay out the signs as clearly as possible and hope the politicians get it. At least in the UK, politicians did get it eventually with COVID. They were slow on the uptake—and the science, of course, was pretty uncertain in the initial phase, largely because a lot of people were asymptomatic—but they did get it eventually.

Of course, the UK had a higher COVID-tagged death rate than do-almost-nothing Sweden and a higher rate of excess deaths compared to do-almost-nothing Sweden. The lockdowns in the UK were spectacular failures, in other words, by the advertised standards of the Covidcrats (minimize Covid-tagged deaths even if it drives up long-term deaths from other causes, such as unemployment, sedentary lockdown lifestyle, alcohol consumption, deferred health care, and lack of education) and yet the Nobel-winning genius considers the muscular Science-informed public policy to have been a success.

Let’s circle back to the issue of victimization by gender ID. Donna Strickland again:

The problem in the seventies, in my time, is that women were told we could do anything, but the men weren’t told you also have to do your share. When Maria Goeppert Mayer won her Nobel Prize [in 1963], the newspaper wrote, “San Diego housewife wins Nobel Prize.” Everybody said it’s OK that she’s doing science because she’s also doing all her women’s jobs too. Well, this is not possible. It’s not possible for us to be twice as much. We will have around-the-world gender equity when we also let men look after children and the elderly. It bothered me during COVID-19 that it was like, “Well, all the women have to lose their jobs because they’re the ones who look after kids and the elderly.” I don’t think women are more caring than men. That’s just as offensive as saying women aren’t as smart as men. If everybody did their share, then everybody could have an equal shot at it.

She doesn’t want “everybody to do their share” on construction sites, on Florida roofs in July, or on oil rigs, but rather wants men to relieve women of some onerous household chores, such as putting shirts into electric washing machines and dishes into automatic dishwashers. She is echoing Bill Burr on the subject of a job that can be done in one’s pajamas being the hardest job in the world:

Let’s close with a Nobel nerd’s prediction of where we end up relative to our AI overlords:

Geradus ’t Hooft: I expect there will be an intelligence so smart that Einstein, Feynman, and ’t Hooft would all look like primitive gorillas. The point is that all abilities of biological life forms can be copied by human engineers: we make houses taller than trees, dig holes deeper than moles can, we can fly faster and higher than birds, with much heavier machines, and so on. So why can we not produce brains that work better than the human brain? Well, biology took millions of years to create us; our machines are only a few centuries old, and we’ll get there and beyond. I do not quite follow the ideas AI engineers are using. I think it could be done better, but comparing the previously mentioned examples, people will make many different AI machines, each for their own particular purposes.

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The soybean crisis that has left soybean prices unchanged

“China’s Snub of U.S. Soybeans Is a Crisis for American Farmers” (New York Times, September 15):

On a windy September morning, Josh and Jordan Gackle huddled to discuss the looming crisis facing their North Dakota soybean farm.

For the first time in the history of their 76-year-old operation, their biggest customer — China — had stopped buying soybeans. Their 2,300-acre soybean farm is projected to lose $400,000 in 2025. Soybeans that would normally be harvested and exported to Asia are now set to pile up in large steel bins.

If we ask the Google for a quick summary of “soybean futures” we get the following chart that shows prices almost exactly where they were on January 1, 2025:

How can there be a “crisis” and at the same time an unchanged price? Is there some other soybean price index that should be considered?

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Two-year anniversary of the Gazans’ October 7 attacks

It’s been roughly two years, almost to the hour, since Gazans streamed across the border fence to rape, murder, and kidnap Israeli civilians (more than 800 murdered):

The Gazans also took hostage and/or murdered people from other countries, e.g., Thailand (which recognized a sovereign State of Palestine in 2012), killing at least 79 non-Israelis. Examples from the BBC:

We’re informed than the Gazans have had no food, no electricity, no shelter, and no Internet for two years. Here are some recent photos from UNRWA (all of the fighters and “civilians” who perpetrated the October 7 attacks were graduates of UNRWA schools and some UNRWA employees directly participated in murders and kidnapping) of children who haven’t had any food for two years:

They’re playing their violins, undamaged after what we’re told has been “carpet bombing”, and sitting/standing within an apparently undamaged school, after what we’re told has been specific targeting of schools (UN) by tanks, artillery, and 500 lb. bombs:

Instead of foraging for scarce food after two years of “famine”, the kids are encouraged to expend extra calories by running around (on a perfect-condition patio surrounded by perfect-condition walls?):

See also this video, posted September 20, 2025, of Gazans who’ve received “10 million health consultations” at the clinic, in which PCs are fully powered and everyone seems to be of normal weight.

The Japanese and Germans felt defeated towards the end of World War II and were in no mood to continue the war or start another one. Based on the photos, videos, and interviews coming out of Gaza, there is no indication of any Gazan believing that the Gazans have been defeated. The New York Times followed up with 100 out of the 700 Gazans they’ve interviewed since October 7, 2023. Not a single interviewee mentions wanting to abandon the goal of destroying the Zionist entity. Nobody wants to surrender, recognize Israel, or release hostages. What Gazans want, it seems, is a victory over Israel at a lower personal cost, e.g., via emigration to Europe or the U.S. and letting the Gazans who stay in Gaza carry on fighting.

The Hamas leadership, consistent with popular opinion surveys, explicitly says that everything since October 7 has gone better than planned (CNN):

The question for today is where we think the Gazans will be in two additional years. Let’s suppose that the answer to Government restart or Hamas deal will happen first? is “Hamas-Israel deal”. The fighting in Gaza ends tomorrow. What will the Gazans be doing two years from now? Will any still be living in tents? How many attacks will Gazans have perpetrated against Israeli civilians, e.g., by firing rockets? (The fighting can continue long after the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) signs a deal because the Hamas folks can legitimately say that they don’t control Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam; “has called upon Muslims to carry out lone wolf attacks against Israel”), Jaysh al-Ummah (“Jaysh al-Ummah has criticized Hamas as being too moderate and not focused enough on Islamist projects”), the Abdul al-Qadir al-Husseini Brigades, the Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade, or a rebooted Jund Ansar Allah.) What percent of Gazan GDP will be money extracted from U.S. taxpayers, who’ve historically been the biggest enablers of the Gazans’ military efforts (by being the biggest suppliers of cash to fund all of the basics, e.g., shelter, food, health care, education, etc., and thus enabling Gazans to spend up to 100 percent of their productive energies on preparing for a river-to-the-sea liberation)? Will the Gazans have launched another October 7-style attack? (my prediction: no, because it will take closer to 4-5 years to rearm and for the Israelis to become complacent)

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A visit to Providence, Rhode Island (Part 2)

I want our kids to appreciate Playstation 9 when they’re adults and, thus, I take them to art museums whenever we travel. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum is a decent-sized crowd-free museum in which the art can actually be appreciated. We learned that the ubiquitous Dale Chihuly is a RISD graduate and former teacher:

We also learned about queer knitting and queer resistance:

And that one could get academic credit for taking a course titled “Queer People/Places/Things”:

At the subscription library Providence Athenaeum we found a database #Resisting computerized management:

One lonely storefront clung to the five-year-old theory that Black Lives Matter:

All of the other churches and shops that we found with social justice messages were consistent with Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?

An Episcopal church associates the sacred Rainbow Flag with a quote from Jesus: “Love one another, as I have loved you.” Is the implication that Jesus went to the bathhouse regularly? If not, how is a practitioner of Rainbow Flagism loving his 25 or 50 new friends the way that Jesus loved people?

A United Church of Christ:

The First Baptist Church mixes Rainbow Flagism with cautionary words about the dictator in the White House: “Speech Remains Free When We Pay Attention”. The folks who supported forced vaccination and forced masking celebrate #BodilyFreedomForever:

Rainbow-first retail was on display in the 25-year-old Providence Place mall, now in receivership.

My favorite store, however, was Craftland (downtown; featured in the New York Times, as noted below):

(They admit that the land they’re on is stolen, but won’t pay rent to the Native Americans who are the rightful owners?)

And, of course, it all comes back to Queers for Palestine:

A few more photos of this shop’s windows:

Related:

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Immigrants don’t commit crime because criminals aren’t “immigrants”

State-sponsored NPR assures us that “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans, studies find”. The state-sponsored news organization in the UK demonstrates a brilliant method of proving this Scientific fact.

“What we know about synagogue attacker Jihad Al-Shamie” (BBC):

The Manchester synagogue attacker was Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent.

“Syrian descent”? Meaning that his ancestors came to England after the Second Crusade besieged Damascus? (before the country of “Syria” existed)

Al-Shamie, who lived in Prestwich, Manchester, is understood to have entered the UK as a young child and was granted British citizenship in 2006 when he was around the age of 16.

So… Jihad wasn’t born in the UK and then lived in the UK with a UK passport. The article never describes Jihad as an “immigrant” or uses the word “immigrant” or “migrant”. So, to the extent that stabbing and running over Jews on Yom Kippur are crimes in the UK there is no immigrant guilty of those crimes. Jihad was not an “immigrant.”

Separately, would it make sense to grant immediate British citizenship to anyone named “Jihad”?

Finally, how about a movement regarding this noble enricher who was unjustly killed by police with “His name was Jihad; Say His Name” signage? From Grace Lutheran Church in Wisconsin:

Tweak it to “Jihad Al-Shamie. Listen to his name. Say his name aloud. Hear yourself saying his name.” I asked Grok to work on this:

ChatGPT:

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