Author: philg

Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa thought: How Donald Trump can bring our divided nation together

by philg

2024 will be remembered, I think, as one of the best years ever for progressive Jewish American Democrats. Last month’s election could have been improved, of course, but the pain of that loss is more than made up for the fact that Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are almost perfectly aligned this year. The first full day of Hanukkah is December 26, which is also when the Harris family traditionally lit the first candle of the kinara during the 1960s when it became one of the first adopters of Maulana Karenga‘s new holiday (like Donald Trump, Professor Dr. Karenga, Ph.D. beat more women than Doug Emhoff. Because of prejudice against the Black man, however, Karenga was imprisoned for kidnapping and torturing women rather than being elevated to the Presidency).

How about a Christmas wish that Donald Trump will begin the healing process for our divided nation by bringing Kamala Harris into his administration as Kwanzaa Czar? Other than Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga (born Ronald McKinley Everett), there doesn’t seem to be anyone better qualified.

What about a job for Doug Emhoff? Claiming to be a victim of domestic violence is one way for a migrant to obtain asylum here in the U.S. (see “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies” (Politico, 2021)). Mx. Emhoff could be an asylum court administrative judge evaluating tales of who slapped whom in the privacy of a home 8,000 miles away.

Finally, let’s remember how much seemingly different groups of people actually have in common. The following diagram should be helpful and inspiring:

In case the above tweet is memory-holed:

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Merry Christmas from Abacoa

by philg

Merry Christmas from Abacoa, our MacArthur Foundation-developed corner of Jupiter, Florida.

My soulmate:

What if HOA rules won’t let you fly an Israeli flag (American flags only, though an exception was granted for a sacred Rainbow Flag during Pride prior to the Prideful homeowner who ultimately chose to move to the San Francisco Bay Area)? Use Christmas lights to turn the house into an Israeli flag:

At the Dakota rental complex:

Abacoa is adjacent to Jupiter Heights, which lacks an HOA. Thus, there is no limit to Deplorability:

What the yard looks like this time of year without decoration:

But everything is better with lights!

So… I hope that everyone has a great Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I plan to cook GE Monogram range convection oven turkey since the LG steam oven bit the dust after one use.

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Could one make a turkey deep-fryer powered by a Tesla charging cable?

by philg

As readers who love pigs get ready to shop and cook for something other than ham to serve for Christmas/Kwanzaa… Here’s what happens when elite New Englanders try to play Redneck for a Day and deep-fry a turkey (ABC):

WESTON, Conn (WPIX) – A home in Connecticut was destroyed over the Thanksgiving holiday due to a turkey frying mishap, local officials confirmed.

The home, located in Weston, caught fire Thursday afternoon after its residents attempted to fry the turkey in their garage, a preliminary investigation revealed.

No injuries were reported. But the home — which has an estimated value of over $4 million dollars, according to listing sites Redfin and Zillow — was quickly engulfed in flames.

Fire departments from the nearby towns of Westport, Wilton, Redding, West Redding, Georgetown, and Easton responded to the place. Crews battled the fire for over 16 hours, according to the Weston department.

The house — which features 11 bedrooms and 9.5 baths, per online listing data — has since been deemed “uninhabitable,” the department said.

Plainly oil, open flame, and elite New Englander is a flammable combination. Did it have to happen this way? The typical elite American has a charging cable at home for his/her/zir/their Tesla. Why not an electric deep fryer powered by this cable? The standard Tesla “Wall Connector” seems to deliver about 11,500 watts of power. That’s nominally about 40,000 BTU, but electric coils around a pot should be 2X as efficient as a gas burner underneath so that’s like an 80,000 BTU gas burner. A standard turkey fryer from Bass Pro Shops has only a 38,000 BTU burner and is theoretically sufficient for an 18 lb. turkey.

Designing and manufacturing this shouldn’t be too expensive by Tesla owner standards. A regular electric deep fryer is about $130. To this, the manufacturer of the “Turksla Deep Fryer” need only add some of the electric car charging protocol electronics and software so that it looks like a car to the charger. Maybe this is tough because Tesla keeps its protocols secret? But on the other hand, Tesla home chargers supposedly support other brands of cars that use industry standards.

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When will there be a refugee swap between Europe and Syria as a result of the change in Syrian government?

by philg

Roughly 20 percent of Syrians now live in Europe (Politico), about 4.5 million people plus their descendants. They were entitled to EU residence based on a fear of persecution by the Assad regime, which has now been replaced by the other side (“another side”?). Will there now be a refugee swap? Everyone who was targeted by Assad can now safely return to Syria. Everything who was on Assad’s side will need to seek asylum in the European welfare system. When does the swap happen?

BBC:

Ten men, mostly Syrian refugees, have been found guilty over the gang rape of a woman outside a German nightclub.

The 2018 attack in the city of Freiburg fuelled anti-foreigner sentiment, with protests by the far right.

The lead defendant was sentenced to five and a half years for the attack – which lasted for more than two hours – while seven others received sentences of up to four years.

The victim, who was 18 at the time, had her drink spiked before being attacked in bushes outside the venue.

Eight of the men on trial were refugees from Syria, while the other three came from Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany.

From The Critic, 2024:

The Germany-wide statistics on sexual violence were also sobering. An internal study by the German federal law enforcement agency, leaked to a Zurich newspaper, revealed that asylum-seekers have committed some 7,000 sexual assaults (ranging from groping to gang-rape ) between 2015 and 2023. Although they make up only 2.5 per cent of the population, asylum-seekers made up 13.1 per cent of all sexual-assault suspects in 2021.

Same question about the U.S., though on a smaller scale. We have at least 100,000 Syrians and their children who were granted the right to live in the U.S. because of a fear of persecution by the Assad regime. Do they now go back to Syria so that their places in the U.S. can be taken by Assad loyalists? We are informed that the U.S. does not have unlimited capacity for hosting refugees. If so, shouldn’t all of our refugees be those who are actually at risk in their home nations?

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Come to MIT January 7-9 for our ground school?

by philg

Folks: I hope that you’re almost finished decorating for Kwanzukkuh (Kwanzaa and Hanukkah overlap this year). If you know anyone crazy enough to want (1) to learn to fly, and (2) to be in Boston, Maskachusetts in January, our MIT Private Pilot ground school class is free and open to the public. It’s a for-credit aeronautical engineering dept. class, but anyone can join and get a sign-off from me (an FAA-certificated instructor) to take the knowledge test. Imagine being able to say “I went to MIT and didn’t join Queers for Palestine” or, even better, “I went to MIT and did join Queers for Palestine.”

It’s an all-day every-day class for three days. Here’s the schedule from a year ago:

Thanks to the Boston Covidcrats calling in an airstrike on their own position with the lockdowns of 2020-2022 and not as many hotels being used for migrant housing as in NYC, hotel rooms aren’t priced at crazy levels.

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ChatGPT tries to figure out time zones

by philg

Here’s an interesting failure of ChatGPT 4o, asked “Would I get more jetlag flying from Fairbanks to Seoul or flying from New York to Seoul?”

Seoul is, of course, only 6 hours away from Fairbanks, but the International Date Line is crossed. ChatGPT did not reconsider its answer when I followed up with “Isn’t Fairbanks closer to Seoul than New York is?” but it did when I asked “Isn’t the 18-hour time difference that you mention actually a 6-hour time difference, but in the opposite direction?”

(Who wants to join me and some friends in Fairbanks, Feb 20-26? Email me if interested. We’re hoping to see the Northern Lights! Happy first day of winter, by the way. If you’re in Florida, a trip to Fairbanks might be the best way to experience a true winter…)

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Competition from non-natives

by philg

“Invasive Ecological Threat” (Florida Weekly, November 21, 2024):

A new invasive seagrass has been spotted off the waters of South Florida and scientists are working to see what danger it could pose for native seagrass and the plants, fish and marine animals they support.

The seagrass, called Halophila stipulacea, was discovered in a marina on Key Biscayne in Biscayne Bay. This is the first time it has been identified off the coast of the continental United States. The non-native species could be a threat, depending on whether or not the newcomer will compete with and displace our native seagrass species, said Justin Campbell, Florida International University marine scientist.

The invasive seagrass came from around the Red Sea and the Suez Canal area and is native to the Western Indian Ocean, Campbell said. It crossed the ocean, probably as part of boat passage from the Mediterranean, he said. It showed up in the Caribbean on the island of Granada around 2002. By 2017, it had spread to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. “And then now, very recently, it has showed up on our doorstep here in Florida,” Campbell said.

The invasive species doesn’t look like our native seagrass, which has long leaves and tall, grass-like canopies. The invasive species has short, tiny leaves, he said. Scientists believe it has been spreading through a process of fragmentation or asexual reproduction. The species fragments very easily, meaning that small pieces can break off, Campbell said. “Those small fragments have the capacity to float for a week, ten days, and then potentially resettle in a new area and start growing again.” It’s essentially a clone of the parent fragment, he said.

“It’s really hard to predict what the consequences of this is going to be,” said James Fourqurean, a co-author of the research paper and director of the Coastlines and Oceans Division in FIU’s Institute of Environment. “This is a species that can spread incredibly rapidly. The meadows that were just discovered this summer (in the bay) are too large to have grown in a single year. So we know that it’s been here for multiple years already,” he said. The invasive seagrass will eventually spread even to the Gulf of Mexico, though not directly from Biscayne Bay, he said. “There’s no biological reason that it won’t grow all around the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “It’ll get there. It’s just a matter of time.”

Noted.

Related:

  • “Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History” (New York Times, Dec 11, 2024): Under President Biden, more than two million immigrants per year have entered, government data shows. The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data. Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people. [There’s a chart showing that 190,000 net immigrants/year arrived in the 1850s compared to more than 2 million/year during Biden-Harris, but the bars are as a percentage of population so it doesn’t look like 10X the rate.]
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9 years of shear bliss from the Japanese

by philg

If you’re looking for Kwanzaa gift ideas, here are the Shun kitchen shears, about $55:

We recently had to toss a pair of Wusthof shears that had gone ridiculously dull. I tried sharpening them with a simple honing steel and it didn’t help. The typical commercial sharpening service won’t handle scissors. I don’t have a sharpening stone. (Maybe some of you all know whether it is practical to sharpen shears like the above? If so, what’s the technique and equipment required?) Despite the fancy German brand name, I think that these were #FakeWusthof made-in-China and cheap ($25 on the Web right now).

I discovered via some Amazon order research that our still-sharp Shun shears celebrated their 9th anniversary of domestic abuse (put in dishwasher for sterilization after cutting meat, for example). They’ve never been sharpened and are still highly effective. The screwdriver blades on the back of the handles are a fun idea, but we have never used them.

I’m not sure if there is a reasonable option for America First enthusiasts. Is there any U.S. company that can compete with the Japanese, Swiss (Kuhn Rikon), or Germans (not the fake Germans in China who made our recently tossed “Wusthof” shears) in standard knives and scissors?

Related:

Update: I bought the more expensive Shun shears and they’re heavier. It’s unclear if they’re better but at least now we have a second pair to use if the first is being sterilized in the multi-hour dishwasher (thanks, regulation!).

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Yale Alumni Magazine reminds the faithful of the first glorious fight against apartheid

by philg

The Yale Alumni Magazine arrived in our mailbox with a cover reminding the Righteous that Yale students were on the Right Side of History (TM) against the “other apartheid regime” (i.e., not Israel) back in the 1980s:

The article, titled “The shanties on the plaza”, never explicitly mentions the noble Palestinians nor the modern apartheid state of Israel, but the parallels are pretty obvious and I think we can all agree on who was in the right back then.

What about the Extremely Unrighteous? From December 2:

The incoming dictator threatened the entirely peaceful hostage-holding Gazans with “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.” Considering what we did to Tokyo (100,000 civilians killed in one night), Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I’m not sure how this promise could be fulfilled.

Related:

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The $420,000 stone courthouse in our inflation-free society

by philg

Today the Federal Reserve technocrats depressed investors by saying that interest rates won’t be lowered all that much in 2025 (unsaid: Congress won’t put down the deficit spending crack pipe and, thus, inflation is inevitable). Mary C. Daly, last seen addressing the diversity crisis at the San Francisco Fed and ensuring the stability and longevity of Silicon Valley Bank, voted with the rest of the governors to cut interest rates by 0.25%. The lone dissenter to the cut was from the Rust Belt: Beth M. Hammack, head of the Cleveland Fed (formerly at Goldman). Let’s follow Ms. Hammack going forward and see if she’s right about the inflation that the government and media assure us does not exist.

(A friend asked why the stock market was down today. She’s a physician and had interpreted the news from the Fed meeting as a prediction that the U.S. economy was going into a slump. My response: “Fed said it would have to keep interest rates high. Congress wont stop deficit spending. So the only way to tame inflation is high rates, which means stocks need high yields to compete w bonds. If a stock pays a fixed dividend it can only generate a higher yield by falling in price. Remember if you can buy a bond yielding 6% you need to buy a stock at a price where you’re sure you’ll get at least 8% return.” Curiously, the Wall Street Journal had a headline about the Dow Industrials (below) rather than the S&P 500.)

Speaking of non-existent inflation, I went to a museum today in Colorado Springs. It is inside a massive 1903 courthouse that is three stories high with a clock tower reaching skyward beyond. The volunteer at the front desk told me that it cost $420,000 to build.

It was replaced in the 1970s by a monster-sized concrete “judicial center” across the street:

What was inside the museum? An art exhibition in which paintings from any artist with a connection to the region were welcome… so long as the artist identified as “female”:

Some important history for fans of the Elvira’s House of Horrors pinball machine (#9-ranked on Pinside):

A reminder that SARS-CoV-2 was not the first pathogen to realize what fat targets humans living in cities presented…. (Colorado Springs was a cure destination for tuberculosis sufferers.)

The glorious history of test equipment… (HP had a division here making oscilloscopes, spun off and spun off and now “Keysight”)

It seems as though taxpayers got a good return on their $420,000 investment.

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