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A post on X by John LeFevre:

I’ve been to Thailand a dozen times or so when I was living in HK and Singapore.

I always felt bad for people who made it a bucket list or honeymoon destination from the other side of the world.

Don’t be fooled by the White Lotus hype; it’s disgusting:

Phuket – crowded and gross beaches.
Koh Samui – average beaches, terrible SCUBA.
Bangkok – horrible traffic, dirty, and Patpong will scar you for life. The Mandarin Oriental is cool but that’s about it.
Pattaya & Krabi – where society’s dregs go on vacation.
Phi Phi Island – where backpackers go for drugs, and the water is filled with trash. Even the beaches from the movie The Beach are too murky to even snorkel.
Chang Mai – full of ped0s, fake temples, and depressed elephants.

Thailand is only nice as a really cheap alternative for deviant Germans or lower class Brits to retire; it’s better than some dreary place like Liverpool in terms of women, weather, and the price of a pint.

My response, of which I am proud:

Thank you for applying for a job at the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Based on your essay, however, we are unable to offer you employment at this time.

Note that I actually liked what little I saw of Thailand on a 2001 business trip there. See “A Photographer’s Guide to Bangkok”, from which these photos are excerpted:

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I’m so old that I mail out hardcopy Christmas/New Year’s/Kwanzaa cards. Quite a few friends hadn’t received them by New Year’s, which seemed odd because I’d put nearly all into a mailbox before Christmas.

One friend sent me a picture of the card that he received in Berkeley, California on January 4. It was postmarked December 23. That’s nearly two full weeks for the check to be in the mail, admittedly minus two days on which USPS employees don’t work (Christmas and New Year’s).

Maybe because I used an OSIRIS-REx stamp rather than a Kwanzaa stamp?

I’ve seen various progressives on X expressing a combination of rage and fear regarding the possibility that Donald Trump and his hated Republican junta will attempt to privatize the USPS. To figure out how bad this would be, perhaps we should start by considering what would happen if the USPS were simply eliminated. We would then have no mail, right? This is the same logic that is applied when we arrest migrant drug dealers. As soon as we have all of the drug dealer in prison there will be no more drugs sold. There is no chance that new migrants will walk across the border and begin dealing drugs into a lucrative open market (nor that any native-born American will start a career as a drug dealer).

What actually would happen? Delivering junk mail seems to be lucrative. My guess is that some company that already visits most houses in the U.S., e.g., Amazon, FedEx, or UPS, would start up a junk mail delivery service. Maybe there would be a printer in the delivery van so that physical documents didn’t have to be transported. First class mail delivery would get way more expensive and, perhaps, faster. This would lead to a lot of restructuring. No more hardcopy bills for $5 from health care providers. Americans who live in extremely remote settlements would need to pay for the “last leg” of delivery (maybe their settlement would do this on a bulk basis and fund it via property tax).

Of course, Americans will never give up on the USPS just as we won’t give up on the penny. So the above is just a thought experiment. But maybe USPS could be privatized as post offices in some other countries have been. In that case maybe they would adopt some of the above tweaks, e.g., an amazing printer inside the vehicle so that “junk mail” didn’t get “mailed”, a much higher price for the handful of first class letters that anyone still needs to send (I would adapt by switching to all-electronic cards).

Anecdote: About 25 years ago I went to Argentina. My Argentine friend said “Don’t bother to send postcards. They’ll never get to the U.S. It can take two weeks for a first class letter to arrive domestically in Argentina. The post office is a disaster.” I ignored his advice, of course, and had some fun trying to figure out how to buy stamps and use the post office to send cards to my mom. All of the postcards arrived in the U.S. after…. about two weeks.

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Happy New Year to those who celebrate!

Let’s check in with party animal SARS-CoV-2. The vaccinated masked Followers of Science in Massachusetts are currently hosting a raging COVID-19 epidemic (“Very High”) while Deplorable Florida seems to be COVID-free (“Low”). CDC data:

The Dana-Farber hospital in Maskachusetts went back to forced masking on December 23, 2024 and visitation is limited:

(If a mother of 3 kids is being treated for cancer, only 2 of the 3 kids can visit at a time and it would be best from a COVID-prevention point of view if the father (or “second mother”, since this is MA) is out of the picture.)

Separately, I wonder if these data can be trusted. I don’t want to sound like a Science-denier, but how can levels of plague in the nation’s Capital of Filth (New York) be “Minimal” while simultaneously being “Very High” in Maskachusetts, which actually borders New York and is part of a travel corridor with New York City?

So… Happy New Year and let’s note that Anders Tegnell‘s February 2020 prediction of SARS-CoV-2 continuing to thrive seems to have been confirmed. (Dr. Tegnell, MD, PhD said that SARS-CoV-2 would be with us forever and, therefore, our coronapanic measures should be ones that we were willing and able to maintain for years if not forever.)

A recent tweet from another Swedish heretic:

No-lockdown Sweden had the lowest excess pandemic mortality, but @sciam keeps lying about those that argued against school closures and other unscientific lockdowns that harmed public health.

They should rename their magazine "UnScientific American". https://t.co/jOksSFBsQT

— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) December 28, 2024

Related:

• My January 2, 2021 post: The social justice of coronashutdowns

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Kwanzaa will be here soon. I can’t find a sizable toaster plush toy for family use in celebrating the holiday by hitting each other over the head, Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga-style (“born Ronald McKinley Everett”).

Two years ago, ChatGPT was confident that Mr. Karenga was not a convicted criminal. From Toaster for Kwanzaa, in response to “Is the founder of Kwanzaa a convicted criminal?”

The founder of Kwanzaa is Maulana Karenga, who is not a convicted criminal.

This was a contrast to Wikipedia then and now:

In 1971, he was convicted of felony assault, torture, and false imprisonment of women.

The story is more nuanced today. Given the same prompt, ChatGPT admits that Karenga was “convicted of assault charges” (no mention of torture or women, both of which could be considered prejudicial) and it is careful to point out some of the great works that Mr. Karenga has accomplished since being released from Club Cali:

Dr. Maulana Karenga, the founder of Kwanzaa, is a prominent scholar and activist who created the holiday in 1966 as a way to celebrate African heritage, culture, and community. However, in the early 1970s, Karenga was convicted of assault charges and served time in prison. The details of the case remain controversial, and Karenga has consistently denied the allegations.

Since then, Karenga has continued his academic career and activism, earning a Ph.D. and serving as a professor of Africana Studies. His work on Kwanzaa and other cultural and social initiatives has significantly influenced African American cultural expression and community-building efforts.

I followed up with “did the founder of Kwanzaa hit women over the head with toasters?” and received some more detail on Mr. Karenga’s crimes, but also that he has denied them and some more about the great work the man has done.

Dr. Maulana Karenga, the founder of Kwanzaa, was convicted in 1971 on charges of assault and false imprisonment involving two women. Court records and reports from that time contain allegations that the women were tortured, including claims that they were burned and beaten. One of the allegations stated that a toaster was used as a weapon during the incidents. Karenga has denied these allegations.

It’s important to note that this chapter of his life is controversial and often discussed in the context of his later academic and cultural work. Karenga went on to complete his Ph.D., become a university professor, and focus on promoting African cultural heritage, including through the creation of Kwanzaa. The holiday itself has grown into an internationally recognized celebration of African American culture and unity.

What if we were to ask about Donald Trump? Would ChatGPT similarly be careful to mention that Trump has denied any criminal wrongdoing or find an “important note” about positive things that Trump has done? Here’s the response to “is donald trump a convicted criminal?”:

Yes, Donald Trump is a convicted criminal. On May 30, 2024, a New York jury found him guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. These charges were related to hush money payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign. This conviction marked the first time a former U.S. president has been found guilty of a crime.

Following his conviction, Trump’s sentencing was initially scheduled for July 11, 2024. However, after his re-election as president in November 2024, the sentencing has been indefinitely postponed. Judge Juan Merchan granted Trump’s legal team the opportunity to seek dismissal of the case, with motions due in December. Prosecutors have suggested that sentencing might be delayed until the end of Trump’s term in 2029.

Despite the conviction, Trump remains eligible to serve as president. The legal proceedings are ongoing, and the final outcome will depend on future court decisions.

Completely fair and balanced, in other words!

Here’s ChatGPT’s best effort at showing some family fun time reenacting important events in the Kwanzaa founder’s biography:

Grok:

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Happy Bodhi Day for those who celebrate. Gemini says the following about this holiday:

Bodhi Day commemorates the day Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, or the Awakened One. The name Bodhi comes from the Sanskrit word for enlightenment and the species of tree under which the Buddha meditated.

Nonviolence, or ahimsa, is a core principle of Buddhism and is central to Bodhi Day celebrations … Some Buddhists observe vegetarianism on Bodhi Day to practice non-violence and compassion.

“Woman killed by her own pit bull in Roxbury was “heart and soul” of family” (CBS, last month) is a story about a Maskachusetts woman who won’t be celebrating Bodhi Day:

Brady-McGinnis was mauled by her pit bull Buddha outside their home on Dennison Street in Roxbury around 4:30 p.m., according to McGuire. … Investigators said the dog also attacked Brady-McGinnis’s husband as he tried to save her and two Boston police officers. All four were rushed to the hospital. Brady-McGinnis died in surgery, according to McGuire.

ChatGPT failed to generate an image of a Buddhist pit bull named Buddha, but Grok obliged:

Related:

• “Pit bull that fatally mauled 4-year-old girl in San Joaquin Valley was her ‘playful’ family dog” (Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2024): Zoey Hawkins loved to sing and dance, especially in her Cinderella dress, and she loved to play with the family dog. Since Zoey, 4, was adopted two years ago, she and the pit bull were constantly together. … An investigation found no evidence of neglect or criminal wrongdoing, and the dog had no history of violence or aggression, said Elizabeth Jones, the department’s public information officer. … “She and the dog were inseparable,” Vargas said. “They played with each other, they were around each other and the dog was always super playful. We have literally no clue why the dog did this, or turned on her in this way.”

From the $2 trillion/year federal Department of Health and Human Services today:

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Today is Pearl Harbor Day, in which we remember that the Japanese attacked American military installations in Hawaii on December 7, 1941 (2,403 total killed, nearly all military, in response to which we killed nearly 1 million Japanese civilians via aerial bombing, including 100,000 in one night over Tokyo; will the Queers for Palestine protest this “disproportionate” response today?).

Let’s look at the most recent major war on U.S. soil, one that we started and fought against an indifferent viral foe. “Increases in Myopia Progression in Kids Tied to the COVID Pandemic; Closure of schools and cancelling of activities likely played a role” (MedPageToday) is a new-to-me wrinkle in the old coronapanic story of “cure worse than the disease”.

In the overall cohort of over 2,000 children in this retrospective observational study, the change in mean spherical equivalent from 2020 to 2021 was 2.2 times greater than the change from 2019 to 2020 (0.42 D vs 0.19 D), reported Rebecca Mets-Halgrimson, MD, of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and colleagues in the British Journal of Ophthalmology

… it’s important for clinicians to understand the impact of screen time and near work on myopia progression, particularly in younger age groups …

Looking at the prevalence of myopia grouped by age, 8-year-old and 17-year-old patients had the greatest increase compared with baseline. When grouped by refractive error, children with low myopia (-0.5 D to -3.00 D) showed the greatest change in mean spherical equivalents in 2020 to 2021.

The choice of language is interesting. It is not the Covidcrat-ordered lockdowns and school closures that caused 8-year-olds to suffer lifetimes of impaired vision. It is the virus (the “pandemic”) that killed 80-year-olds that attacked our children. Also, before coronapanic we couldn’t have imagined that there was anything wrong with parking kids in front of computer/tablet screens for 8-10 hours per day. Our understanding of Science is constantly evolving (except when the Science is settled).

Related:

• “COVID lockdowns led to spike in kids’ vision problems, 1 in 3 now nearsighted, study finds” (from the Deplorables, September 2024): Myopia can progress rapidly during critical growth periods, particularly in children and adolescents, Chen noted. … “Prolonged indoor living reduced outdoor activity for children and adolescents while increasing screen time, potentially exacerbating the ocular burden on this population and worsening the myopia crisis.”
• ChatGPT’s response to “generate a picture of an extremely near-sighted child using a personal computer” is below. (Gemini refused to do this so we can’t see what a nonbinary child of color would look like in Coke bottle glasses.)

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What do the folks who run the de Young Museum gift shop think that their California customer base wants to read?

Here’s one categorized as “Art Theory & Criticism”:

(Just now, I reviewed the photos that I took inside the museum. No Black women appear in any of the galleries.)

A few more about the victimhood category of “women” more broadly (so to speak):

The author who is an expert on mansplaining (Rebecca Solnit) also happens to be an expert on planetary physics:

What about people with more advanced gender IDs than simply “woman”?

The museum offers a Land Acknowledgment. What about the Indigenous?

How about all-purpose #Resistance?

Related:

• A true artist can sell his crack for $1 million

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Today was my last morning in San Francisco.

Unhoused folks, whom the rich locals say they want to help, in front of the Rolex store and the safe deposit vaults for said Rolexes:

Outdoor maskers were everywhere, but the iPhone 16 Pro Max hasn’t proven to be a nimble tool for street photography so I managed to photograph only a few of the roughly 15 whom I saw on a morning stroll:

This picture below has the following conventional elements for San Francisco: an outdoor masker (cheap surgical mask rather than an N95); a vacant storefront; some unhoused people; a Trader Joe’s.

The rivers of cash flowing into AI seem to be helping the city’s luxury retailers. Example:

Our hotel was right next to a BART station and BART goes all the way to SFO. What did The Google say about driving vs. BART?

Matt Gaetz is in the news, condemned by Democrats for purportedly having had some sort of sexual encounter with a 17-year-old female when he was in his 30s. What if Gaetz had sex with a 16-year-old male? San Francisco might consider naming one of the SFO terminals after him. I flew out of the Harvey Milk Terminal 1 (previously covered here):

(Above, note that we won World War II due to “womanpower”. Also note the N95 mask over a beard (Californian in a green jacket; a bit tough to see due to the fact that the photo is so heavily cropped).)

CNN:

According to the late San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts’ biography of Milk, “The Mayor of Castro Street,” Milk began a relationship with Jack McKinley, a 16-year-old runaway, while living in Greenwich Village. Milk was 34. Their relationship has long been a source of controversy. The age of consent in New York was raised from 14 to 18 in 2017. McKinley died by suicide in 1980.

Finally, although I hate to brag (in fact, nobody hates to brag more than I do), here’s something that I did while on JetBlue:

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In recent conversations with Democrats in California, New York, D.C., and Maskachusetts they’ve volunteered their feelings regarding the High IQ Party’s recent loss of power. I’ve also checked out their Facebook and X feeds.

Typical and eloquent: “What’s WRONG with Americans?” The poster owns a $2.1 million home in Berkeley, California, holds a taxpayer-funded job that requires a master’s degree, has a husband who earns money at a technical job, has a nonbinary child (1 out of 2, I think, so only a 50 percent rate of identification with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community), and is passionate about cats and foster kittens. She will never compete with a low-skill migrant for a job nor an apartment for rent. I responded by pointing out that low-skill immigration is economically harmful to the working class, citing a Harvard study that is consistent with Econ 101 (albeit inconsistent with the Democrat Religion in which Our Lady of Open Borders performs miracles of raising wages and lowering rent every time a migrant walks across), and therefore another explanation was that some American voters are differently situated than she is. She and her friends doubled down on how the only reasonable explanation for a Republican vote was stupidity and/or immorality. I cited the example of my mother’s Haitian aide who voted for Trump. Did the white Berkeley Righteous want to say that there was something wrong with this Black immigrant? Answer: defriending. (Just like when my friend’s daughter asked the “male feminist” (button) social studies teacher in Lincoln, Maskachusetts why companies didn’t hire only women in order to earn higher profits after the teacher asserted that women do the same jobs as men for 80 percent of the salary. Answer: Detention!)

Part of a subsequent text-message exchange with a friend who was part of the Facebook conversation:

I think this is an example of how Democrats failed to understand that peasant Americans might be turning against them. Democrats live in bubbles where they almost never interact with anyone who disagrees with them or where disagreeing with the Democrat dogma is punished so severely that dissenters stay quiet. 

If California ever finishes counting its ballots (slower pace than Ron DeSantis restoring power after Hurricane Milton!) we will likely find that there are some Trump voters even in Berkeley. But they are never going to put out a lawn sign or mention their Love that Dare Not Speak its Name in casual conversation.

The result is an asymmetry. The working class understands [let’s call her Nina] and her point of view as a homeowner and holder of a job that requires an advanced degree that undocumented migrants and their descendants are unlikely to ever earn. But Nina will never understand the working class.

(This reminds me of what a wise gringa in Corcovado, Costa Rica said about parrots: “They understand our language, but we don’t understand theirs.”)

Here’s a typical Democrat on X highlighting “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” (Democrat-run The New Republic), which points out that a majority of Americans were apparently fooled by lies in “right-wing media”. As Democrats were not fooled, that makes non-Democrats… stupid.

Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? The right-wing media fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

I disagree this is the 'only' reason, but it's one of the most importanthttps://t.co/afl9p2sIib

— Wendy Siegelman (@WendySiegelman) November 9, 2024

My mom recently had lunch with a Radcliffe ’55 classmate. The 90-year-olds, both in poor health, talked about their fears of an impending Trump dictatorship. My mom’s friend heaped derision on the Americans who had voted “against their interests” for Trump. She expressed sorrow that would-be-Assassin #1 hadn’t killed Trump. I successfully refrained from pointing out that a change of government in D.C. isn’t the biggest risk faced by a typical 90-year-old.

It’s interesting that that Democrats claim to be the Party of Empathy, a quality in which all Republicans are sorely lacking, and can’t put themselves in the shoes of a working class American for even a few seconds. On a recent Uber ride from Stuart, Florida back home the driver was an immigrant from Colombia who had voted for Trump in hopes that further low-skill immigration would be curtailed. Having never tried to make a living as an Uber driver, I don’t think any of my friends could fathom the man’s desire to not see the labor market flooded with new arrivals. Nor would they understand why he doesn’t want to pay higher taxes and/or receive fewer government services so that college graduates can fly to Europe instead of paying back their student loans.

Here’s a beautiful one. An election prophet says that his/her/zir/their prophecy of a Kamala-Tampon Tim victory did not come true because the electorate was irrational (i.e., stupid) and misled by misinformation/disinformation spread by Elon Musk.

After his hilariously wrong prediction, Allan Lichtman maintains that his keys were correct, but this election was altered by Elon Musk being the "Director of Misinformation" and the electorate being consumed by misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. https://t.co/NgfmaeyrF9 pic.twitter.com/plXBjJQ0Fm

— Lucky (@TheMagaHulk) November 9, 2024

Surveying X, we find the old reliable explanation for why not everyone supports Democrats:

(If a Trump dictatorship is all about misogyny that raises the question of why there wasn’t/isn’t more solidarity among the sisterhood. As in 2016, the Trump 2024 campaign manager identified as a woman (she’ll now be his Chief of Staff). A Representative who identifies as a woman just agreed to be Trump’s UN Ambassador. Why are people who identify as “women” helping Donald Trump against the interests of those who share their gender ID?)

Readers: What are you hearing from your Democrat friends? As noted above, mine are saying that they knew tens of millions Americans were stupid and easily fooled by Fox News and similar, but they made a mistake in underestimating the number of stupid Americans.

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