Portugal Diary 5 (Belmonte, Vale do Côa, Amarante)

by philg

Instead of taking the Google Maps route on blind faith, we asked locals how to get out of the Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela. This took us through Belmonte, which we discovered was home to a Jewish museum and also a church on a traditional route to Santiago de Compostela.

Belmonte has an otter sculpture and a variety of memorials to Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467-1520) who was born in the town and went on to become “the first human in history to ever be on four continents”. He is credited as the European discoverer of Brazil.

The museum is small, but provides a good overview of Judaism and how it was vaguely continued after the Inquisition:

There’s the inevitable castle in this hilltop town and also a church that has been turned into a museum regarding the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela:

I’m surprised that Sixt was so passionate about charging us for a minor scratch. They should celebrate any time that a foreigner returns a diesel-powered car that hasn’t been destroyed via filling it with gasoline. Here’s what the clueless English speaker might see at a pump:

“gasóleo” is diesel and “gasolina” is gasoline. The letter codes are also important. “B7” is diesel, though we were advised not to use the cheaper “simple” version because it can clog injectors over the long run (I paid up for the premium gas to keep Sixt’s cars in top condition and they certainly didn’t act grateful!).

Somehow we got onto the highway without misfueling the already-shaky Mercedes and made it to our next stop: Parque Arqueológico do Vale do Côa, a UNESCO World Heritage site discovered only in the 1990s. Book in advance if you want to do the English-language Jeep tour and see the Stone Age rock carvings in situ. The museum has a good restaurant and a great location, with the opportunity to take stairs all the way down into the deep valley cut by the Douro.

We probably should have figured out some wineries to visit near this museum, some of which looked spectacular from the road, and stayed overnight, but we’d already reserved a hotel in the small town of Amarante, about two hours west.

Amarante has some nice churches and a museum devoted to local hero Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, a painter who might have become the Portuguese Picasso if he hadn’t died at age 30 from the 1918 flu. It was mostly a nice place to relax and enjoy the small town Portugal lifestyle.

The town has a clean hot springs pool facility (call to reserve; they speak English), but is mostly famous for cookies that Bruno would love (these are traditional fertility-related, not modern 2SLGBTQQIA+ symbols):

Here’s the view from our AirBnb (two nights):

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The Day of the Jackal updated for the 2024 attempt to kill Donald Trump

by philg

The Day of the Jackal is a famous 1971 novel about a rifle expert who tries to kill Charles de Gaulle (he needn’t have bothered, presumably, since France would soon destroy itself via low-skill immigration).

*** spoiler alert: stop here if you’re planning to read the book or watch the movie; otherwise scroll below the cover ***

Wikipedia: “… hire a professional mercenary from outside the organisation … the Jackal’s exhaustive preparations for the forthcoming project. … he commissions a master gunsmith to build him a special suppressed sniper rifle of extreme slimness with a small supply of mercury-tipped explosive bullets. … his first shot misses by a fraction of an inch when the President unexpectedly leans forward to kiss the cheeks of the veteran he is honouring”

What would be the appropriate title for a book about the $3 billion/year U.S. Secret Service attempting to protect Donald Trump from a teenage assassin in 2024? The book would focus on Kimberly Cheatle and other senior bureaucrats establishing sloped roof policies and then keeping their jobs until a fat retirement pension begins to flow. How about The Day of the Jackasses?

Google Gemini’s image generator is back (some cognitive decline issues?):

ChatGPT:

Looks like book jacket designers will still have jobs for a while…

Related… a friend asked an aviation group if anyone wanted to donate items for a non-profit org auction. My response: “I will donate a year of protection from the $3 billion/year Secret Service. Also, a concrete bunker in which to hide during that year.”

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A quiet escape from the Maskachusetts Millionaires Tax

by philg

The peasants revolted in 2022 by updating the Massachusetts constitution so that a progressive income tax rate system could be introduced in the progressive state. The higher 9 percent rate initially applies only to those who earn at least $1 million per year so it is the “Millionaires Tax”. Here’s a recent Wall Street Journal article about some unreasonably rich douches seeking to unload their $16 million 13,550-square-foot house.

Here’s the quiet escape part, buried towards the end:

They recently purchased a home in Vero Beach, Fla., and they also have homes in New York City and Marion, Mass.

I’m going to guess that they end up spending at least 183 days per year in Vero Beach!

What kind of person lives in a 13,550-square-foot house spewing energy out of four walls and a roof in the midst of what Democrats tell us is a “climate crisis” and an “existential threat to humanity”? A big donor to progressive causes! The New York Post has an article about the owners Lawrence Rand and Tiina Smith showing up at a fundraiser for a “left-wing” group that is also funded by George Soros.

Related… a tweet from the union that represents America’s smartest and best-educated workers:

(the first time that anyone had to pay the new Maskachusetts tax was April 15, 2024, so I’m not sure why a higher-than-expected revenue in Year 1 of the new tax “proves wrong” those who said that the rich would move; packing up and moving might take a few years to organize; the one thing that I think the above AAUP post proves is that very few university professors expect to earn over $1 million in 2024 dollars)

A report from Boston University (April 2024) says the following:

MA rate of outmigration is rising rapidly, impacting population, size and workforce composition

Growing exodus of prime age workforce and higher income earners

Higher income earners are leaving MA with over half earning 1.3 to over 2.6 time the state average

Over the last decade, the Top-5 destinations have remained consistent: Florida, New Hampshire, Maine, North Carolina and Texas

Southern states are gaining the lions share of adjusted gross income

Florida gained $1.77 billion (42% [of the adjusted gross income that fled])

The BU nerds didn’t point out that migrants living in public housing are likely going to call Maskachusetts home forever!

(The BU analysis purports to have a number for outmigration in 2023, but I don’t see how this could be reliable. My understanding is that IRS data is the gold standard and the latest IRS data covers 2022 (see this recent WSJ article, for example; “Florida gained about twice as much income in 2022 from other states as it did in 2019”).)

I propose that we check back in 2028 to see what has happened with high-income Massachusetts residents during 2023-2026 (using IRS data). My theory is that it takes 2-3 years for a rich person to move. A peasant can throw the contents of his/her/zir/their 1BR apartment into a U-Haul and drive to a 1BR apartment in another state within a few months of deciding to move. The rich person, on the other hand, may have a lot of connections to unwind and might need to wait for a suitable house to be built in the destination state.

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How were you CrowdStruck yesterday?

by philg

I felt sorry for myself on Thursday because Spirit was four hours late FLL to ORD (impressive considering that they had no mechanical or weather problems). On Friday, however, CrowdStrike managed to disable the entire U.S. airline industry. Can we agree that there should be a new word in English: CrowdStruck, meaning a systemic meltdown caused by a diversity, equity, and inclusion-oriented enterprise? From CrowdStrike’s web site:

It seems fair to say that they achieved their goal of “challenging the status quo” (the status quo being servers that had been up and running for years).

Considering that the U.S. Secret Service was apparently more focused on DEI than on keeping Donald Trump alive, the word could be used in the following sentence: “Donald Trump might need a new ear after being CrowdStruck in Pennsylvania.” (Loosely related… I received the photo below from a deeply closeted Trump-supporting academic.)

Readers: Please share your stories about being CrowdStruck in the comments. How did you experience the meltdown of IT services (except for Elon Musk’s X!).

My own CrowdStruck experience was limited to not being able to check in at the Doubletree here in Milwaukee. They couldn’t make keys for any new guests all day and had to send employees up to open doors for any guest who wanted to get into a room. They finally got their systems back by around 9 pm and will spend the weekend catching up.

Speaking of Milwaukee, here are some of the billboards that the righteous paid for on a highway leading into town:

The Third Ward and some other parts of town that we’ve seen so far are quite pleasant. I can understand why some Chicagoans are considering fleeing here (though I can’t understand why or how they’d stay through the winter!).

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Online passport renewal takes longer than mail-in

by philg

My U.S. passport expires in September so I’ve been looking at renewal options.

The State Department has an online renewal system that they’re offering to a limited number of lucky taxpayers every day. I was excited about this because it doesn’t require mailing in the old passport. I would thus be able to keep using my old passport while waiting for the new one. That assumption turned out to be incorrect:

Only slightly discouraged, I thought “well, at least it will be quicker because the mailing time will be cut out.” That was also wrong, wrong, wrong:

An online application will result in one’s current passport being immediately invalidated and the new one not being sent out for up to 8 weeks. A mail-in application, on the other hand, can result in a new passport after about 3 weeks (if one pays for “expedited” service).

Given that our borders are effectively open to anyone without documents who wants to collect four generations of welfare, I can’t figure out why the Feds persist in pretending that the border is tightly controlled and, therefore, that taxpayers must jump through hoops to keep their documents current. A friend’s U.S.-born wife couldn’t get on a plane to Ireland, for example, because her passport was a few months out of date. When we returned from Portugal to the Newark Airport, they CBP has 2-3 officers processing passports from multiple jumbo jets, thus resulting in an epic line. It would have been faster to fly into Mexico and walk across the border. During the hour-ish wait (my Global Entry status wasn’t useful due to the fact that we had the kids with us and they’re not set up on the program), I wondered why the U.S. checks commercial airline passengers with U.S. passports. The passports were checked three times prior to departure by different groups of qualified personnel in Portugal working in three different parts of the airport (front counter check-in; immigration border; gate). Why couldn’t we just be waved in? Why is it a problem to admit a U.S. passport holder whose passport was just checked and stamped by a Portuguese immigration officer? If there is some additional information they want they could ask the airline to collect it or ask the Portuguese to collect it (at a tiny fraction of the cost of paying a U.S. government worker).

I’m also wondering about the simpler question of why, if the process is entirely online and they don’t want the old passport mailed in, there must be a gap in passport availability. Why would it complicate matters for the government to allow the use of the old passport through about 90 days after the issuance of the new one? (this would account for a taxpayer leaving on an extended trip just before the new passport arrives)

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California’s next senator says Donald Trump will undermine the very foundation of our democracy

by philg

In Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? I highlighted the apparent contradiction between saying that Donald Trump will end American democracy and also that one is praying for Donald Trump’s long life and good health.

“Schiff Calls on Biden to Drop Out of Presidential Race” (NYT, July 17) quotes the person who is 99% likely to win the California Senate race (since he/she/ze/they already won the Democrat nomination and California is controlled by one party):

Representative Adam Schiff of California said on Wednesday that President Biden should end his campaign, restarting a drip of opposition within the Democratic Party that had paused after the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend.

Mr. Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, and his lifetime of service as a senator, a vice president and now as president has made our country better,” Mr. Schiff, who is running for Senate, said in a statement to The Los Angeles Times. But, he said, “A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”

Let’s ignore the curious situation of the party elites, who were in daily contact with Joe Biden, telling the peasants to vote for Biden just a few months ago and now saying that the will of those who voted in the Democrat primaries should be disregarded. I want to focus on the “undermine the very foundation of our democracy” statement. I think that’s pretty much the same allegation as “Trump will end American democracy” since, once undermined, democracy must necessarily topple.

Why wouldn’t this statement by Mx. Schiff, if believed, justify violence against Donald Trump? Schiff presents Americans with a choice between potentially becoming slaves/subjects (no more democracy) and eliminating the identified cause of future slavery.

Separately, here’s Mx. Schiff, a few days earlier, wishing that the person who will “undermine the very foundation of our democracy” recovers swiftly:

Separately, it looks as though Democrats will do a COVID-safe “virtual roll call” for the formal nomination of Biden as their candidate in November 2024 (see below). That’s certainly consistent with their support for lockdowns and public school closures!

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John Deere promises to continue discriminating by skin color and gender ID

by philg

Here’s a post that is being celebrated by Deplorables as evidence that Social Justice is under pressure in Corporate America:

If you read to the bottom however, the company promises to “continue to track and advance the diversity of our organization”. Isn’t that a promise to continue discriminating by skin color and gender ID? If they don’t discriminate how are they going to “advance” diversity?

Here’s another story where you need to read beyond the headline… “Microsoft laid off a DEI team, and its lead wrote an internal email blasting how DEI is ‘no longer business critical'” (Business Insider). In fact, the article body quotes Microsoft saying the opposite:

“Our D&I commitments remain unchanged,” a Microsoft spokesperson, Jeff Jones, said in a statement. “Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering and we are holding firm on our expectations, prioritizing accountability, and continuing to focus on this work.”

In case the above tweet is memory-holed:

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I got $100 for my Tesla Solar Roof and the lawyers got $1.5 million

by philg

During coronapanic I decided to save our beloved planet by paying $71,533 for a Tesla Solar Roof to sit on top of our house in Maskachusetts and provide backup power for the week or so per year that we would typically lose power. About six months later, Tesla told me that the price would be changed to $84,137 (see Tesla Solar Roof (the price is not the price)) and about six months after that they offered to install the roof for $71,533 as originally contemplated (by which point we had sold the house and escaped to the Florida Free State).

In retrospect, considering the raging changes in price that were happening in 2021 (not to be confused with “inflation”, which is a figment of conservatives’ imaginations), I’m surprised that the price bump was so small.

Apparently, there was a class action lawsuit around this debacle. Without having taken any action or signing up for anything, just this month I received a check for $100 for my role in the small drama. What did the lawyers get? $1.5 million.

I actually wish that Tesla would make a Spanish barrel tile version of its roof and then we could re-roof in Florida with their product. I’m not sure that it would be worth paying for their batteries, though, given that we lose power only for a few minutes per year. Maybe the batteries would be great during a once-every-20-years major hurricane, but $20,000 for batteries could buy a lot of hotel nights in Orlando.

(Solar gear on top of a Florida roof is an idea that frightens roofing professionals.)

Spend the $100 on a trip to Titusville, Florida to watch a SpaceX rocket launch? Or how about one of these EMF-blocking hats so that I can stop lining my own hats with aluminum foil (not a “tin foil” hat liner because those are for the paranoid)? Facebook’s AI correctly discerned that I would be a likely customer for this product, named after pioneering Scientist Michelle Faraday (maybe a “no brain fog” hat should actually be named “the Dr. Jill Biden, Ed. D. hat”?):

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What would the Secret Service have done differently if they’d wanted a random kid to shoot and kill Donald Trump?

by philg

We’ve been getting some details about the face-off between the arch criminal below and the $3 billion/year Secret Service.

Wikipedia says that the building from which Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at Mr. Trump was identified as an ideal location for an assassin, that police snipers were sitting inside the building eating donuts and drinking coffee rather than risk falling off a mostly-flat roof, that law enforcement ignored the crowd’s attempts to warn them of Mr. Crooks’s activities, and that Crooks’s use of a rangefinder wasn’t considered sufficiently suspicious for anyone to take action. The state of knowledge as of July 16, 2024:

According to WPXI, Crooks was photographed twice by security officers prior to the shooting. Prior to 5:45 p.m. EDT, a police officer saw Crooks on the ground and reported him, with a photograph, as a suspicious person. An officer searched for Crooks but did not find him. Multiple local law enforcement officers identified Crooks and believed that he might have been acting suspiciously near the event’s magnetometers; they expressed their suspicions over the radio, and their radio communications were available to the Secret Service.[38] At 5:45 p.m., a member of the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit (ESU) tactical team saw Crooks on a roof, notified other security services, and photographed Crooks.[47] According to Forbes, in one of the two cases of Crooks being photographed, the police officer who photographed Crooks saw him “‘scoping out’ the roof and carrying a range finder”.[43] Reports indicated that several bystanders also witnessed a man carrying a rifle on the rooftop and alerted the police about him nearly a minute and a half before shots were fired at Trump.[48][49] A Butler Township police officer attempted to climb to the roof of the building in search of Crooks, hoisted by another officer. Crooks spotted the officer while the officer’s hands were clinging to the edge of the roof and aimed his rifle at the officer, at which point the officer let go, falling 8 feet (2.4 m) to the ground and severely injuring his ankle. Crooks undertook the assassination attempt immediately following the confrontation with the officer.

My question for today is “Suppose that the Secret Service and local law enforcement actually wanted a random kid to be able to shoot and kill Donald Trump. What would they have done differently?” Short of actually handing out rifles, scopes, and ammo, how would it have been possible for the Secret Service and police to facilitate what young Mr. Crooks was trying to do?

Note that the Secret Service was supposedly at its most vigilant last weekend. “U.S. Detected Iranian Plot to Kill Trump Separate From Last Weekend’s Shooting” (NYT):

U.S. intelligence agencies were tracking what they considered a potential Iranian assassination plot against former President Donald J. Trump in the weeks before a gunman opened fire last weekend, several officials said on Tuesday, but they added that they did not believe the threat was related to the shooting that wounded Mr. Trump.

The intelligence had prompted the Secret Service to enhance security for the former president before his outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, officials said. Yet whatever additional measures were taken did not stop a 20-year-old local man from clambering on top of a nearby warehouse roof to shoot at Mr. Trump, grazing his right ear and coming close to killing him.

American progressives now agree with Iran on both (a) Palestine, and (b) the importance of getting rid of Donald Trump?

Separately, at least according to Joe Biden and/or his minders, here are some of the threats that Mr. Crooks came close to eliminating:

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Why don’t cars monitor 12V battery condition and suggest replacement before failure to start?

by philg

I’m not sure what caused our rented-from-Sixt Mercedes E 300de to fail and refuse to start even with a jump, but I am suspecting 12V battery health. The battery measured 12V on the tow truck guy’s multimeter, which sounds good for a 12V battery, but the chart below (source) says 12.4 is more of a practical resting minimum:

Today’s question is why cars don’t all come standard with battery health warnings, similar to the warnings regarding when it is time to change the oil.

  1. The car knows the battery voltage before start and after engine/generator shutdown.
  2. The car knows how long the last trip was (i.e., duration of most recent charge).
  3. The car knows how long it was sitting since the last trip (i.e., expected voltage drop from self-discharge).
  4. The car knows roughly how hot it has been (maybe use the temperature at startup for this and apply it to the sitting period and, if refinement is desired, tweak for the time of day).

If the car sees consistently lower-than-expected voltages, shouldn’t it flash a “replace battery ASAP” message to the owner?

Bosch seems to have a product that tries to do this, but I haven’t seen it in action:

I’m not sure why the Bosch hardware is needed when the car already has voltage and outside temperature sensors, plus a clock.

Our dead Mercedes displayed a “low battery” warning, but only after the total failure. It also said “towing not permitted” (what is the alternative if the car won’t start?) and “See Owner’s Manual” (we weren’t supplied with one):

Ford says that an owner should come to the dealership after he/she/ze/they “Constantly experience charging or electrical system problems” or “Experience trouble or difficulty getting your engine to start”. Why is this the best that modern electronics and software can do?

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