Category: Journalism

Don’t kill your enemies if you want to win a war (NYT)

by philg

Curtis LeMay: “I’ll tell you what war is about, you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting”

New York Times, regarding the untimely death of Ali Larijani, the guy who’d been running Iran: “Israel’s Killing of Ali Larijani Could Allow Military to Tighten Grip on Iran … had a reputation for acting as a bridge between hard-line figures in the armed forces and more moderate political factions”.

If that wasn’t clear enough for communicating how foolhardy the idea of killing the enemy is as a warfighting technique, the NYT ran a second article explaining that killing the enemy “can backfire” (i.e., will backfire).

(The Iranians retaliated per usual by launching missiles at civilians in Tel Aviv. One odd feature of this war is that the Iranians complain that it is against the laws of war when the U.S. kills some civilians by mistake while at the same time the Iranians mostly attack civilian targets, e.g., in Israel or the Gulf Arab states. Similarly, folks in the West don’t complain that Iran attacks civilians, but point out that if we were to shut down Iran’s weapons factories by disabling oil production and electric power generation that would be a war crime because civilians also benefit from oil sales and electric power.)

The New York Times doesn’t explain its rationale for why killing the enemy is a sure way to lose a war, but maybe it follows logically from Islam being the Religion of Peace. If Muslims are by definition peaceful then killing a Muslim such as Ali Larijani reduces the amount of peace in the world.

A good companion piece, from state-sponsored PBS: don’t be concerned about the four Islamic jihads waged domestically in the first two weeks of March (Ayman Mohamad Ghazali trying to kill 140 preschoolers in Michigan, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh killing Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shah, an Army helicopter pilot, in Virginia, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi throwing bombs in Manhattan, and Ndiaga Diagne killing Texans). Islamophobia is the real problem here in the U.S.

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We are being absolutely crushed by Iran (NYT)

by philg

Let’s have a look at the New York Times right now. Every story on the front page seems to be about a failure of U.S. military. Russia is winning. We stole some oil tankers and that’s actually costing us money instead of making us money. Missiles are falling in northern Israel. Maybe we’re firing some missiles at Iran from Bahrain, but they certainly aren’t hitting anything. We’re suffering an “oil shock” like in the bad days of the 1970s.

Let’s compare to a random day in the middle of our involvement in World War II. The British-spec’d P-51 hadn’t come into action yet so we were losing B-17 bombers and crews at a ridiculous rate. Nonetheless, the focus of the stories was on the enemy’s losses, not our own.

This is the first time that I can remember when more than half of Americans seem to be invested in the idea that the U.S. is doomed to lose a war.

(I personally believe that our best option for winning is to use bombs to (1) disable Iran’s oil production and export infrastructure, and (2) disable Iran’s electricity generation. Without money from selling oil, the Islamic Republic won’t be able to do too much that we don’t like. Without electric power, Iran won’t be able to produce a lot of sophisticated weapons. (Yes, they can use generators for some stuff, but that’s not the same as plugging a massive factory into the power grid.))

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New York Times Iran Vibe

by philg

It’s been a week since the U.S. attacked the peace-loving leaders of a peaceful Islamic theocracy. Let’s look at some of the wartime propaganda.

Sunday, March 1, a day after the hated dictator launched airstrikes while poolside in Palm Beach, the deaths of most of Iran’s senior leaders was just slightly more important than the second most important story: the Jeffrey Epstein saga. 93 million Iranians were without leadership for the first time since 1979, but also why didn’t the hundreds of U.S. government lawyers across multiple administrations manage to prosecute more of Jeffrey Epstein’s elite friends? (We know that it can’t be because it wasn’t actually criminal for Larry Summers to try to have sex with a 43-year-old or for Prince Andrew to be introduced to a 26-year-old female in a jurisdiction where the age of consent was 16.)

Today, the stories all seem to be reminding readers that Donald Trump is incompetent and mindlessly aggressive. Here’s part of the NYT front page in which Trump refuses to compromise while the Iranians are reasonable (apologizing):

CNN assembled PhD experts to do a “forensic analysis” and they concluded that war is damaging to infrastructure:

NYT, today, says that attacking Iran is pointless and, by implication, only a moron would order such an attack:

Also from today, the NYT says that only an incoherent (stupid) person would consider killing folks who chant “Death to America” while building nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles to deliver them to American cities:

The peaceful people of Lebanon, who declared war on the Zionist entity, never recognized the State of Israel, supported the October 7 attacks by Hamas (80%; 60% support among Lebanese Christians; 32% wanted to bravely attack Israel to help their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Gaza), and continue to fire projectiles at Israeli civilians are sadly forced to flee their homes because of Jewish aggression:

(The Israeli attacks on Beirut actually do confuse me. The Israelis told the Lebanese to evacuate and then bombed some empty buildings. How does that reduce Hezbollah’s ability to fight? The apartment buildings weren’t being used as forts.)

Another sympathy-provoking story from Lebanon. Merely because they declared war on their neighbor and refused to accept any peace treaty over a 75-year period, some Lebanese can’t sleep comfortably in their own beds:

Trump is far worse than Vladimir Putin (March 6): “Mr. Trump has demonstrated a willingness to disregard international norms and engage in foreign adventurism by fully exploiting Washington’s might.”

From March 3, perhaps it would make sense to prevent a nation of 93 million people from building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that could deliver them anywhere in the world, but not if 900 people are killed:

(Comparison to the Bad Old Days: The U.S. killed 100,000 residents of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 and rendered 1 million homeless.)

In a politically diverse discussion group on Facebook, a passionate Democrat posted about 20 times about rising oil prices. In other words, Donald Trump has now convinced Democrats to support Islamic theocracy and also cheap fossil fuels for maximizing climate change. (Greta Thunberg has similarly been posting in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran; you’d think that at least she’d be happy that oil prices are higher and, therefore, that consumption will be lower.)

My own social media post on how Donald Trump has caused suffering on the home front:

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TSA employees working without pay

by philg

The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 guarantees 100 percent pay for federal workers who either (1) show up to work during a “shutdown”, (2) relax at home during a “shutdown” as blessed non-essentials, or (3) vacation in Europe during a “shutdown” without using any vacation days (again, limited to those who can get classified as non-essential).

How does the New York Times characterize the potentially-slightly-delayed paychecks of TSA employees (funding ran out a week ago)? “T.S.A. Workers Brace for Another Shutdown They Didn’t Cause”:

Lawmakers left town this week without a deal to fund the department over a disagreement about reining in the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration enforcement tactics. Most of the hardships faced by employees — who are working without pay — will go unnoticed by the public with a few possible exceptions, including the people who check IDs, scan baggage and complete other security tasks at U.S. airports.

Officers are frustrated that they have to pay the price for a political fight that has nothing to do with them. It’s even worse this time, because they have to work without pay while immigration officers will continue to be paid through a separate fund.

Nowhere do the journalists mention that TSA employees are guaranteed to receive 100-percent pay so long as the U.S. government is able to print money.

Here’s another fun one… “With Latest Rollback, the U.S. Essentially Has No Clean-Car Rules” NYT, February 16, 2026):

The momentous end to the federal government’s legal authority to fight climate change makes it official.

The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.

That’s the practical result of the Trump administration’s yearlong parade of regulatory rollbacks, capped on Thursday by its killing of the “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases because of the threat to human health.

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups.

With no emissions standards, then, it would be legal for Toyota, GM, and Ford to stop including catalytic converters ($300-$1,500?) with their new vehicles? Here’s part of what ChatGPT said regarding the greenhouse gas limits that are potentially gone and the “no emission standards of any meaning” world described in the New York Times…

——————-

If greenhouse-gas (GHG) limits on cars were removed in the U.S., a substantial set of non-GHG emissions regulations would still remain. These target pollutants that directly harm human health and local air quality rather than global climate.

Below is a structured breakdown of what would still be regulated.

1) Criteria Air Pollutants (Clean Air Act “criteria pollutants”)

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA regulates tailpipe emissions that contribute to smog, soot, and toxic exposure.

Key regulated pollutants from light-duty vehicles

  • Nitrogen oxides (NOₓ)
    • Major driver of ground-level ozone (smog)
    • Causes respiratory illness, asthma exacerbation
  • Non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) / Volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
    • React with NOₓ to form ozone
    • Includes unburned fuel vapors
  • Carbon monoxide (CO)
    • Interferes with oxygen transport in blood
    • Acute toxicity risk in urban corridors
  • Particulate matter (PM / PM₂.₅ / PM₁₀)
    • Soot from combustion (especially gasoline direct injection and diesels)
    • Linked to cardiovascular and lung disease

These limits are embedded in EPA Tier 3 standards (phased in from model years 2017–2025).

2) Air Toxics (Hazardous Air Pollutants)

Vehicles are also regulated for toxic compounds under the Clean Air Act’s Mobile Source Air Toxics (MSAT) program.

Key examples:

  • Benzene – carcinogenic fuel component
  • Formaldehyde – respiratory irritant, carcinogen
  • Acetaldehyde
  • 1,3-Butadiene
  • Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)

Regulation occurs via:

  • Tailpipe limits
  • Fuel composition controls
  • Evaporative emissions standards

3) Evaporative Emissions

Even when parked, cars emit fuel vapors. These rules would remain:

Regulated sources

  • Fuel tank permeation
  • Hose and seal leakage
  • Refueling vapor loss

Controls required

  • Charcoal canisters (evaporative capture)
  • Onboard Refueling Vapor Recovery (ORVR)
  • Low-permeation fuel systems

These standards are especially important in hot climates (e.g., Florida, Arizona).

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In Mr. Biden’s Neighborhood only one of your next-door neighbors is a violent criminal

by philg

Mostly 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:

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White people who live in all-white neighborhoods say that Scott Adams was racist

by philg

A moment of gratitude for Scott Adams. He worked hard to share his thoughts and knowledge (freely) on X even though he didn’t need the cash or any additional fame. What do we have from the folks who charge money for their thoughts and often-incorrect knowledge? “Scott Adams, Whose ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip Mocked Clueless Bosses, Dies at 68” (WSJ) is typical:

Cartoonist lost much of his platform in 2023 after remarks that were considered racist

On his “Real Coffee” podcast in 2023, discussing a poll that found only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “it’s OK to be white,” he said the data provided evidence that Black people were a hate group. “I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams said. … Adams responded on his website that he was “speaking hyperbolically.” He already had alienated some of his fans by supporting Donald Trump.

(The WSJ implies that it might be possible to support Donald Trump without being a racist?)

Hmm… the Wall Street Journal editors and journalists say that it’s “racist” to suggest that white people might want to exert some effort or pay some money (equivalent to exerting more effort in the workplace) in order to avoid being among Black people. Can anyone think of a white WSJ editor or journalist who lives in a neighborhood that is at least 30 percent Black? If not, isn’t the WSJ staff actually doing what Scott Adams was merely suggesting as a talking point?

Here’s the executive team at the WSJ after boldly opposing Adams’s hypothetical advice:

And the folks from whom you’re getting the opinion that Scott Adams was an outlier racist:

(See also Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate, regarding Apple and Tim Cook)

Here’s an Adams strip that encapsulates Bill Burr’s thoughts regarding Steve Jobs:

And one that is ancient yet remarkably still relevant for another few months (until the next release of Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT?):

R.I.P.

Related, the conversation with a Maskachusetts resident in an all-white town within The Florida insurance bubble seems to be deflating:

So you didn’t avoid Blacks, you just avoided looking at any houses in places where Blacks live. You paid about 3X per square foot to live in [nearly-all-white town], which is 0.5% Black and is inconvenient, rather than in Brockton, which is 50% Black and blessed with many walkable neighborhoods.

Related:

NYT on Scott Adams (“racist”):

NYT on Joseph Stalin (“rose from oppression”):

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Wall Street Journal celebrates an all-male gay throuple

by philg

A 2023 post, No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage (2015), linked to a Wall Street Journal article about the beauty of a three-female throuple: “How Instagram’s Favorite Therapist Makes Her Throuple Relationship Work”. From 2025, “One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation?”

Good clean fun:

The men contracted with interior designer Jennifer Kole of Jenami Designs for a design fee of around $405,000, including furnishings. The en-suite bathroom has a 7-foot-by-4.5-foot shower with multiple shower heads, plus a free-standing soaking tub, ensuring no one is left waiting their turn.

Product designers are also exploring intimacy through form. New York-based furniture designer Kouros Maghsoudi created a sculptural bed called Hug, designed to comfortably accommodate up to three partners.

Should everyone join in this trend?

Real-estate agents are noticing more throuples and polycules buying homes together, often with everyone’s name on the deed. “Monogamy in this economy?” says Kathy “Kiki” Sloan, an employing broker with Property Dominator in Denver. She has seen a steady uptick in multipartner buyers treating shared ownership as both a romantic and financial move. Her advice: Get the paperwork sorted early. It should include a cohabitation plan and, ideally, an estate plan. Wendy Newman, a California-based real-estate agent with Wesely & Associates, adds that polyamorous families have been buying homes together for decades, but today more are “out” from the start and set up ownership structures that support everyone. Flexible layouts, with extra rooms, double primary bedrooms, accessory dwelling units and adaptable spaces are increasingly popular, she says.

One thing that I haven’t seen in the WSJ: a celebration of the normalcy of mixed-sex polygamy. Three women: good/wholesome/normal. Three men: good/wholesome/normal. One man and two women: no representation. I asked ChatGPT to write a story in the WSJ style:

In a fictional suburban vignette that reads like a zoning-board case study, an American-born Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed finds his tidy life colliding with global custom.
His wife, Donna Jones, a blonde convert to Islam, embraces the faith with a zeal that extends beyond the couple’s split-level home.
After a family decision made oceans away, she sponsors the arrival of a second wife from Somalia, turning belief into blueprints.
Suddenly the household needs more than harmony; it needs square footage.
An architect is hired to add bedrooms, rework entrances, and persuade the local code book to tolerate an unconventional floor plan.
Neighbors whisper, contractors measure, and the mortgage grows, a familiar American story with unfamiliar terms.
For Mr. Mohammed, born here and fluent in the rhythms of suburbia, the expansion tests the elastic limits of assimilation.
For Ms. Jones, the renovation is a practical expression of conviction, drywall standing in for doctrine.
The second wife’s arrival brings cultural translation alongside luggage, as daily routines are renegotiated room by room.
In this imagined tale, the clash is less about faith than about permits, proving that in America even private lives must pass inspection.

Note that it completely fails in the task in the first sentence. The WSJ news story disclaims itself as “fictional” when we know that everything in the WSJ is factual. Let’s see if Grok does better.

In the quiet suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota, Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed, a 42-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Minneapolis, has quietly become a case study in the evolving boundaries of American family life. Mr. Mohammed, a successful logistics manager, married Donna Jones, a blonde former Lutheran schoolteacher who converted to Islam in 2015, in a ceremony that drew little attention at the time. Last year, Mr. Mohammed traveled to Somalia and returned with a second wife, Fatima Hassan, 29, who holds a valid spousal visa under U.S. immigration law. The couple’s three-bedroom colonial home, purchased in 2018, soon proved too small for the expanded household, which now includes four children from Mr. Mohammed’s marriages. Local architect Sarah Kline was hired to design a $320,000 addition featuring a separate wing with its own entrance, kitchenette, and private bedroom suite for Ms. Hassan, preserving what the family describes as “cultural harmony” while respecting the existing household’s privacy. Ms. Jones, who works part-time as a Quran tutor, told neighbors the arrangement reflects “mutual respect and shared faith,” though she acknowledged the adjustment has been challenging. The project has drawn scrutiny from the city’s zoning board, which approved the addition after confirming it complies with local building codes, but some residents have quietly expressed unease about polygamy’s presence in their community. Legal experts note that while polygamous marriages are not recognized for civil purposes in the U.S., the arrangement remains lawful as long as only one union is registered with the state. Mr. Mohammed declined to comment for this article, citing a desire to keep his family’s private life out of the public eye. The addition, expected to be completed next spring, stands as a tangible symbol of how immigration, faith, and personal choice are reshaping the American suburban landscape in unexpected ways.

Note that the story becomes primarily about the narrow-mindedness of non-Muslim Americans and the scourge of Islamophobia. The prompt didn’t say anything about neighbors being upset:

Write a 10-sentence article in Wall Street Journal style about American-born Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed married to a blonde convert to Islam, Donna Jones, who brings a second wife over from Somalia and an architect has to expand their house to accommodate the new wife.

Related:

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Stocks for the long run and money illusion

by philg

“Bank of America Shares Finally Recover From 2008 Financial Crisis” (Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2025):

Bank of America notched a symbolic win Friday when its stock traded higher than $55.08, a level not seen for America’s second biggest bank since before the 2008 financial crisis.

Like other banks that were damaged during the crisis, Bank of America has struggled to get its stock price back to the highs seen when George W. Bush was still president. Citigroup shares also haven’t recovered to their past high of around $530 in 2007.

Bank of America’s previous closing high was $54.90 on Nov. 20, 2006.

Perhaps a cautionary tale for those who are buying into the AI bubble!

Nowhere in the article: any inflation adjustment. It thus becomes a good example of money illusion. The WSJ is supposed to be by and for people who are sophisticated about money. That a stock today trades higher in nominal dollars than it did in 2006 is meaningless given the reduction in value of the dollar. $54.90 in November 2006, adjusted for official CPI, is equivalent to $88.49 today. An investor who bought BofA stock in 2006, in other words, has lost nearly 40 percent of his/her/zir/their money.

(Adding insult to injury, if the stock keeps going up and the investor sells at only a 20 percent loss then the IRS will be there to collect 23.8 percent of an illusory “gain” (an increase in the nominal price) and a state such as California will collect an additional 13.3 percent (9 percent in Maskachusetts).)

Reporter biography: “Alexander Saeedy … is a graduate of Yale University, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in History.”

Also in journalism, the New York Times displays a sampling of what it says are photos from Emmanuel Goldstein’s laptop (“Democrats Release Photos Showing Epstein Ties to Powerful Men”: “The 92 photos, selected by Democrats on the Oversight Committee from a trove of 95,000 images in Mr. Epstein’s email account and on one of his laptops”):

Three-fourths of the sample images include Donald Trump so a reasonable reader would infer that 75 percent of the images released (or maybe 75 percent of the 95,000 total?) included Donald Trump. Buried lower in the article: “The series of photos does include three images of Mr. Trump”. In other words, the representative 4-image sample of the 92 images chosen by the NYT contains 3 out of 3 Trump-related images.

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Unprovoked genocide against the Uyghurs

by philg

I’m reading House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. I’ll try to cover the book’s main subject in a later post, but this one is about the use of propaganda.

The author:

Eva Dou covers technology policy for The Washington Post. A Detroit native, she previously spent around a decade covering international politics and technology for the Post and the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, Seoul and Taipei. She is currently based in Washington D.C.

In other words, the author is embedded in U.S. corporate media. What does she have to say about our rivals in China?

By late 2017, there were growing signs that something was very wrong in China’s far-west Xinjiang region. Guards with machine guns manned checkpoints in and out of cities; travelers had to have their faces scanned and walk through full-body scanners. On the streets, pedestrians were stopped by police at random to have their phones checked for illegal political or religious content. Gas stations were barricaded and ringed with razor wire as a precaution against bombings. Officials warned that even modest expressions of Islamic faith, such as growing a beard or wearing a headscarf, would be scrutinized as potential signs of extremism. And a growing number of people—especially members of the Uyghur ethnic minority—were being hauled off without trial to prisonlike sites called “reeducation centers.” Estimates of how many people were detained (in either short-term or long-term detention) ranged from the hundreds of thousands to more than a million. Reports of torture, abuse, and deaths trickled out. Under the banner of counterterrorism, Xinjiang had become the world’s most repressive high-tech surveillance state. And Huawei had helped build it. The company’s next-generation fast networks, facial-recognition algorithms, and high-definition cameras had all combined to build an invisible net of enormous scale. Huawei was not the only tech company to sell surveillance gear into Xinjiang. But it was certainly among the major suppliers. In Xinjiang, and across the nation, Huawei was hawking a fulsome portfolio of advanced surveillance technologies, built in cooperation with hundreds of startups and other partner companies. There were smart glasses that police could wear on patrol to scan crowds for faces on a watch list. There were high-definition police body cams that streamed live to a big screen back at the command center. There was a listening device that could monitor and analyze conversations within a ten-meter radius outdoors, day and night. There were biometric scanners that picked up iris patterns in the eyes, which could be used to identify a person, similarly to fingerprints. There was a voiceprint database to match voices on audio recordings against known individuals. These gadgets were often marketed under the brands of Huawei’s partner companies, with Huawei satisfied to take a low-key role.

The Chinese, in other words, engaged in unprovoked aggression against the Uyghurs purely because of prejudice against “Islamic faith” and “ethnic minorities”. This was done “under the banner of counterterrorism”, but the author doesn’t mention any terrorist incidents in which Uyghurs might have been involved. What does American-produced AI have to say?

Various incidents described by Chinese authorities as terrorist attacks or riots by Uyghur separatists have occurred in China, particularly in the Xinjiang region, over the past few decades. 

“Major incidents often cited include:

  • July 2009 Ürümqi riots: Ethnic violence in the capital of Xinjiang resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 people, mostly Han Chinese civilians.
  • March 2014 Kunming railway station attack: A group of knife-wielding assailants attacked civilians, killing 31 people and injuring 141 others. This attack occurred outside of the Xinjiang region.
  • April 2014 Ürümqi train station attack: A knife attack and suicide bombing killed three people and injured 79.
  • May 2014 Ürümqi street market attack: Two vehicles were driven into a market and explosives thrown at shoppers, resulting in 43 deaths and over 90 injuries, making it one of the deadliest attacks in the conflict.

The Chinese government has consistently attributed these events to Uyghur separatist and extremist groups, notably the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP).”

I find it interesting how the official “Chinese bad; Islam is the Religion of Peace” line can be subtly supported even by a book about a telco supplier. (Note that the above passage, read by a skeptical person, actually calls into doubt the Biden administration’s “genocide” accusation. If the Chinese government were simply killing most or all Uyghurs they wouldn’t need to bother with high tech surveillance.)

(Of course, the Chinese response to jihad was quite different from what the U.S. has done, e.g., the deaths on 9/11 motivated us to open the borders to a vastly larger group of Muslim immigrants, the 2016 jihad of second-generation Afghan-American Omar Mateen motivated us to bring in Rahmanullah Lakanwal, one of his wives, and four of his kids.)

Related:

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Today is your chance to join the cognitive super-elite

by philg

Below, New York City’s intellectual elites admit that they’re not capable of setting an oven to 325, sticking a $20 supermarket special turkey in, and walking away for a few hours. These are the folks whose advice we’re supposed to follow on complex economic, scientific, medical, and political topics. Wall Street Journal:

If you picked up a 99 cent/lb. turkey at Costco (below, from Stuart, Florida) or an 84 cent/lb. turkey at Walmart and managed to get it into the oven that therefore makes you one of the cognitive super-elite.

How about the intellectual elites at Harvard and MIT? Maybe they are more capable than New York elites? The answer seems to be “Yes… at setting their houses on fire.” Recent email from the City of Cambridge:

My technique, which I hope won’t burn down our concrete house with tile roof:

  • steam roast at 275 for about one hour on maximum steam (to prevent the finished product from drying out)
  • roast at 325 with light steam until internal temperature hits 125 (another 45 minutes or so if it’s a small turkey)
  • roast at 400 with no steam to crisp the skin until internal temp hits 165

Here’s our oven: LG WSEP4727F. This doesn’t produce anywhere near as much steam as the KitchenAid range that we once had (plumbed to the sink), but I think the steam does help prevent dry-out and the oven has a much larger cavity for turkey roasting and all other purposes than, for example, Miele ovens that are 5X the cost and literally half the internal size. Unlike the KitchenAid, which ran flawlessly from 2015 through coronapanic in Maskachusetts, the LG’s steam pump failed after just one use. After months of phone calls (cue the person in India who asks, after being told the model number and that it is a wall oven, whether it is gas or electric) and multiple house calls we finally got the necessary parts replaced and the steam feature has worked ever since that replacement.

So… happy Thanksgiving to everyone, especially to the undocumented migrants who enrich us with their multicultural Thanksgiving traditions from around the world.

(I would be delighted to get comments from anyone who does any steam cooking today and hear what was done and how it worked out!)

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