Government restart or Hamas deal will happen first?

by philg

It will be ironic if it turns out to be easier to negotiate a settlement between Israel and the Gazans (Hamas, UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, et al.) than it is to negotiate a settlement between Republicans and Democrats (a handful of Democrat Senators must agree to vote with Republicans in order to get to 60).

Separately, from the WSJ:

The militant group has told mediators it has reservations about some of the terms of the 20-point plan, including the stipulation that it disarm and destroy its weapons, a demand it has previously rejected. Hamas also says that releasing all 48 hostages within 72 hours, as laid out in the Trump plan, would be difficult because it has lost contact in recent weeks with some other militant groups holding a number of them, the mediators said.

We’ve been told that the Gazans are entirely without weapons. Israel has been waging a slow-motion genocide against a (growing) population of unarmed civilians. Now we’re told that a sticking point in peace negotiations is that the unarmed Gazans don’t want to give up their heavy weapons, rocket factories, rockets, etc.

We’ve also been told that Gazans are entirely peaceful humans. Perhaps 1 in 10,000 is a member of Hamas and this 0.01% of the population has been controlling the 99.99% and forcing them into a conflict with Israel that 99.99% of Gazans don’t want because they love and accept the state of Israel, according to the official narrative to date. Now we’re instead told that there are multiple “other militant groups” comprising peaceful unarmed Gazans.

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Desperate enough to rent a billboard…

by philg

… but not desperate enough to spend time with someone who doesn’t share her love for Kacklin’ Kamala.

New York Post:

What do we see at marrylisa.com?

  • 41 years old (also, “Wants marriage and kids within the next 2-3 years with the right man”?)
  • Loves cats!

Her “non-negotiable items” include the following:

  • Must be Democratic or liberal or left leaning politically.

Preferences for a mate:

  • 35-45. Flexible within a year or two at most.

One open question is why she insists on a single gender ID (“a man”). She’s a self-described Bay Area liberal. Why the heteronormativity? Second question: How is she going to produce “kids” (plural) starting at age 44?

In the background:

  • Lisa didn’t focus on dating in her 20’s and early 30’s – she prioritized finishing college, starting a career, learning new skills and working on personal development.

Let’s ignore the improper punctuation (should be “20s and early 30s”) and ask whether her life plan made sense. The New York Post article says that Lisa Catalano is “a vintage clothes retailer”. In other words, she could have the job that she has without ever having finished high school, much less having earned a college degree. So she spent the years in which she was most attractive as a mate, plus tons of tuition money and foregone income, to earn a degree that has no value to her at the moment. The result of this plan is that she’s out on Tinder at the age of a normal human grandmother.

Loosely related, “‘Men seem to make life for women worse’: single US women share the woes of dating in 2025” (Guardian):

By 2030, 45% of prime working age women in the US, defined as women aged between 25 and 44, will be single according to Census Bureau historical data and Morgan Stanley forecasts – the largest share in history.

Kellie, 43 [i.e., grandmother age], from Georgia, joined the substantial number of respondents who felt that social media narratives had made dating toxic and pitted men against women.

“I wish I could have met my person before the stupid gender wars, social media and red pill rhetoric that has ruined people’s view of dating and marriage,” she said.

Danielle, 29, a public relations professional from Tennessee, said her future partner would need to be “kind, thoughtful, emotionally available, considerate, reliable, and responsible”, but also “college educated”.

“I’m very disheartened by the shortage of quality men,” she added. “Men my age are less educated, their social skills are abysmal, and now they’re running into the arms of Trump and ‘incel’ forums.”

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Hollywood, Yale, and the United Nations adopt my downdraft paint booth classroom idea, five years later

by philg

Me, July 2020: Build downdraft paint booths for K-12 schools?

Why not a system for schools in which (a) each classroom has its own HVAC system, (b) there are 8-12 outlets in the ceiling, and (c) there are 8-12 exhaust outlets in the floor? For maximum safety, the system would have no recirculation.

Hollywood (and Racism League Yale) meets the United Nations, this month: “Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet calls for post-COVID mask mandate in impassioned UN speech” (Page Six):

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet made an impassioned speech at the United Nations on Tuesday.

The 19-year-old called for post-COVID mask mandates — while wearing one of her own — to combat “unmitigated infection and reinfection.”

The teen also advocated for “clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary … that tomorrow’s children don’t even know why we need it.”

The Yale University student wishes to “recognize filtered air as a human right, as intuitively as we do filtered water.”

She continued, “It is a neglect of the highest order to look children in the eyes and say, ‘We knew how to protect you and we didn’t do it. We have access to a technology to prevent airborne disease … and we refuse to use it.”

It’s never too late to be proved right!

Related:

  • Train Americans to use masks the way that surgeons do or restructure the physical environment? (May 28, 2020: “Take out half the shelves in a Target for example, so that people are naturally farther apart. With so many other retailers shutting down, there is plenty of mall space. … switch small retail to more like it was in the 18th century. Customer enters spacious front part of shop and asks for item. Shopkeeper goes into jammed back part shelves to retrieve requested item.”)
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White House plan to help Gazans prep for river-to-the-sea liberation

by philg

“Here Is the Full Text of the Gaza Plan Released by the White House” (NYT):

Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough. [Gazans can put 100% of their efforts into military activities because outside capital will fund repairs to all damage done during latest war.]

Once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life sentence prisoners plus 1700 Gazans who were detained after Oct. 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context. [The most experienced Gazan fighters will soon be back in the Gazan military.]

Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries. [The next attack against Israeli civilians can be a lot more brutal than the October 7th attack because amnesty will always be available.]

Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. At a minimum, aid quantities will be consistent with what was included in the Jan. 19, 2025, agreement regarding humanitarian aid, including rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads. [Gazans can put 100% of their efforts into military activities, have 8 children each, etc. because US and EU taxpayers will fund all of the essentials for daily life.]

A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries. [The Swiss, who last perpetrated a war against neighbors in 1815, are subject to a 39% tariff. Gazans who took and held hostages, on the other hand, will enjoy most favored nation status.]

The United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF) to immediately deploy in Gaza. The ISF will train and provide support to vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza, and will consult with Jordan and Egypt who have extensive experience in this field. This force will be the long-term internal security solution. The ISF will work with Israel and Egypt to help secure border areas, along with newly trained Palestinian police forces. [Gazans who killed and raped Israeli civilians will now be paid to carry guns around inside Gaza.]

Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. [Gazans can start wars and have a chance in each new war of winning some territory, but unlike for any other group of humans on this planet who’ve ever waged war, there is never a risk of losing any territory.]

Given that the above are the consequences of starting the October 7, 2023 war, why wouldn’t the Gazans rationally rearm and start another war a few years from now? The plan promises a continuation of a fully-funded lifestyle for Gazans: shelter, food, health care, education, etc. With US and EU taxpayers funding all of the day-to-day essentials, Gazans will be able to devote 100 percent of their productive efforts to rearming and planning their next attack.

Loosely related, here’s the kind of pot belly that a resident of Gaza can suffer from after two years of “starvation” and “famine” (Reuters, September 20, 2025):

Also in the NYT, “Tony Blair Emerges as Potential Figure in Postwar Gaza”:

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, has emerged as a potential figure in the reconstruction of Gaza.

He has been trying to build support for a plan that would create a Gaza International Transitional Authority, a U.N.-mandated administration that would include a multinational security force to stabilize the war-torn enclave. Now he has emerged as a candidate to head that authority.

Every group of Brown people, in other words, needs a white man as a leader.

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Will AI make conscientiousness and organization more or less valuable?

by philg

A human’s productivity is typically determined, to a large extent, by intelligence and conscientiousness. These are both heritable traits so there is a limit to how smart and conscientious a person is likely to become if his/her/zir/their biological parents weren’t smart and conscientious.

As we celebrate National Coffee Day today, I’m wondering if the conscientious aspect of productivity will be rendered more or less relevant by artificial intelligence and robotics. Consider a person prone to disorganization and procrastination, both behaviors negatively correlated with conscientiousness. Suppose that each of us is being followed everywhere by a humanoid robot. At any given moment, the robot reminds us what needs to be done. Even the spaciest among us will never space out and miss a videoconference because the robot will log us into it.

The flip side of this argument is that AI is a productivity amplifier and, therefore, the people who are currently unproductive will stay unproductive (100 times 0 is still 0) while the productive will become superheroes of output. Maybe a person with mediocre conscientiousness will be rendered more conscientious by the companion robot, but that person will still be left in the dust by the conscientious who’ve gotten even more of a boost from their companion robots.

Related:

  • “Heritability of the big five personality dimensions and their facets: a twin study” (classic 1996 paper finding 44% heritability for conscientiousness)
  • Wokipedia forced to admit that we’re not all born equal when it comes to IQ (but remember that in the Wokipedia world there is no correlation between race and IQ, only “high heritability of intelligence within races”)
  • average IQ in the US is declining (coinciding with soaring immigration from societies with low average IQ), thus making conscientiousness more important: academic paper (2023) from Intelligence (“A reverse Flynn effect was found for composite ability scores with large US adult sample from 2006 to 2018 and 2011 to 2018. Domain scores of matrix reasoning, letter and number series, verbal reasoning showed evidence of declining scores.”)
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Current stock market valuations explained

by philg

From Pedro Domingos, a CS prof at University of Washington, the best current explanation for stratospheric stock market valuations:

Oracle’s main business these days is promising vast amounts of cloud computing it doesn’t have to AI companies who don’t know how they’ll pay for it.

WSJ, a month ago:

The S&P 500 currently trades at 22.5 times its projected earnings over the next 12 months, compared with the average of 16.8 times since 2000. … The 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 accounted for 39.5% of its total value at the end of July, the most ever…

How badly beaten up did investors who bought into stocks at a high P/E ratio get? I asked Grok “Consider an investor who purchased the S&P 500 in February 2000. What annual return on investment would he or she have received through August 2025 vs. an investor who bought in August 2002 and held through August 2025?” and learned that the “Peak P/E ratio” investor (bought before the dotcom bubble burst) would have earned a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 6.3% vs 8.9% for an investor who bought at a more reasonable P/E ratio in August 2002. This difference is close to the difference between investing from 2002-2025 in wired U.S. (9%) vs. tired Europe (5.7%).

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Robot tugboats to repel Greta Thunberg’s selfie flotilla and similar?

by philg

Climate change no longer being an issue, apparently, Greta Thunberg and friends have spent the past month headed for a visit to the noble Gazans via diesel-powered flotilla (“Global Sumud Flotilla”). It’s a strange situation because the flotilla participants seem to have no respect for Palestinian religious and cultural norms, e.g., they permit females to roam the decks of their yachts without wearing hijab. The photo below could perhaps be a prostitute with two clients by Gazan standards:

Israel has established a blockade against its military enemy in Gaza and, therefore, under international law can repel (or sink, if necessary?) any ship that crosses the dashed red line below.

But Israel gets a lot of bad press when it uses standard military procedures. What about robot tugboats that could intercept the selfie yachts and push them out of blockade area? That would deny Greta Thunberg and other diesel-powered climate activists the photo opportunities that they seek. The flotilla folks claim that to be unarmed so they don’t have any means of destroying robot tugs. Robot tugs could be built in different sizes to match up to the different size yachts in the flotilla. They’re intercepting uncooperative vessels so should have a higher top speed than conventional tugboats. The Israelis could start with simple skiffs equipped with modern outboard engines. Since the skiff doesn’t have to hold any cargo or humans it could hold a tremendous amount of fuel for endurance. Surround the skiff with used car tires so as to get some extra points for recycling.

For maximum reliability with minimum fuel consumption and pollution, the Israelis could use Honda’s only V8 engine (350 hp; Mercury makes one with 600 hp if necessary):

Loosely related, Israel has invited the hostile vessels “to dock at the Ashkelon Marina and unload the aid there”, which would certainly be anticlimactic compared to a climate activists-v-robot interaction!

As of September 24, 2025, the yachts had survived 14 attacks by warships and warplanes, without sustaining any damage, and were using their inoperative radios to report a “communications jam” that has rendered their radios inoperative:

See also “Posing with Hamas chief, activist who’s joined Greta on Gaza ‘freedom flotilla'” (Daily Mail):

Grinning as he gives a Churchillian ‘victory’ sign, the spokesman for Greta Thunberg’s Gaza ‘freedom flotilla’ poses with a Hamas chief weeks before setting sail.

Wael Nawar was draped in a scarf emblazoned with the terror group’s emblem as he stood with other pro-Palestinian activists beside Youssef Hamdan, who runs Hamas’s North African operation, during a meeting at its Algerian headquarters in June.

Mr Nawar is listed alongside Swedish campaigner Ms Thunberg as part of the 13-strong ‘steering committee’ orchestrating the Global Sumud Flotilla, which left Spain last week to deliver food and medical aid to Gaza.

Another committee member, political activist Marouan Ben Guettaia, was also a guest of Hamdan a few days after and later posted a picture of the pair sitting in front of a Hamas flag.

A third committee member, Brazilian Thiago Avila, attended Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Beirut in February and praised him as an ‘inspiration’.

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Obtaining some public records in Brookline, Maskachusetts

by philg

“I tried to pry public records from Brookline schools. They stiff-armed me for months.” (Boston Globe, 9/21/2025):

The rub: Because of flaws in our state’s law, theory differs from practice. It takes just minutes to file a public records request, but as I painfully learned, to actually get a request fulfilled may require months upon months of follow-up; a nontrivial sum of money; a lawyer or two; and persistence verging on a pathological inability to let go.

Just after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the schools superintendent sent out two messages that sparked instant backlash. “As you are likely already aware, violence is escalating rapidly in Israel and Palestine,” began one note, sent to the entire school district community. Though the town includes large Jewish and Israeli populations, the note neither decried the Hamas atrocities nor expressed sympathy to the many affected local families. A separate note to staff recommended an undeniably slanted set of teaching resources. It included links to pro-Palestinian sources like Visualizing Palestine and Decolonize Palestine but no similarly pro-Israel sources to balance them, and nothing on Hamas.

(I’m not sure that it is reasonable to call the October 7, 2023 event “Hamas attacks” given that there were fighters from UNRWA and Palestinian Islamic Jihad involved, as well as “civilian” Gazans. By saying that it is only “Hamas” that wants to destroy the Zionist entity and achieve river-to-the-sea liberation the implication is that if the 6 or 7 remaining Hamas-affiliated Gazans were removed the Gazans would cheerfully accept the existence of Israel.)

On Oct. 16, 2023, when I filed my request, I figured I was just asking for a couple of days’ worth of one official’s emails on a specific topic. Type a few terms into a search bar and done, right?
Wrong. It took more than 18 months to get that modest request fulfilled, and I still don’t have one central document (but I’ve given up). It took enlisting pro bono lawyers; appeals to the supervisor of records, the state team that handles public records requests; countless nagging emails; two speeches and a half-dozen emails to the School Committee. … I refiled the request in May 2024. This time, when it was once again met with silence, I knew enough to appeal after 10 days to the supervisor of records. That office promptly ordered the town to respond.

In July 2024, the Brookline town counsel did send over a document. Only one, but still — a document!
Sadly, it was nothing but an email saying a draft of a Google Doc for the Oct. 7 messaging had been created. All names were blacked out, without the justifications for those redactions that are required by law. Also, I knew the superintendent had received many emails responding to his messages; our local Brookline News had even covered them. Where were they?

Stymied, I finally sought legal help through the Anti-Defamation League’s project on antisemitism in K-12 schools, and it provided two top-notch pro bono attorneys. In mid-December, I wrote to the town counsel conveying, for the first time in my life, the ultimate attention-grabber: “You’ll be hearing next from my lawyers.”

Soon came the count — the town counsel’s office had identified 368 potentially relevant emails — and the price tag: they estimated that at least 39 hours of staff time would be needed to process the emails, at a cost of $926.25.

In April and May of this year, the town counsel sent over four batches of repetitive, sometimes irrelevant emails, sprinkled with a few gems. Several indicated that two senior district staffers had led the drafting of the messages: a senior director of teaching and learning, and the director of the Office of Educational Equity.

Any Massachusetts taxpayer who wants to fund “education” instead of “educational equity” can move to Florida, I guess.

Here’s a page from the Decolonize Palestine site that the school bureaucrats wanted students to read:

In other words, we always must circle back to Queers for Palestine.

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Harvard Square: Queer Stoners for Palestine

by philg

A few photos from Harvard Square, August 2025…

Queers (“Lesbian Summer Camp”) and and “All Are Welcome” Rainbow Flag church:

A Harvard students-only dating app advertisement shows a happy couple that matched via the app:

Stoners (a healing recreational cannabis dispensary in the middle of Harvard Square):

For Palestine, a $7 million house whose fence is covered in “Genocide in Gaza” signage:

(Online property records indicate that the house is owned by two people who both have typically male first names.)

Speaking of “Free Palestine”, the riverside bike path in front of Harvard Business School:

The local high schoolers still walk past a homeless encampment and under a sacred Black Lives Matter banner to enter their temple of learning:

(Despite a death sentence, renowned graduate Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev remains alive and well and living comfortably at taxpayer expense, just as he did before bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013.)

Lots of people wear masks, indoors and out. The Staples that closed during coronapanic remains closed and the “social distancing” signs in its mini-mall are still there:

Remember that Long COVID “patients “survivors” are the real heroes:

I stopped into Harvard Bookstore to find an all-white/Asian staff and customer gathering. That’s not to say that Black Lives weren’t richly represented on the shelves, though:

What should one celebrate in a bookstore catering to an exclusively non-Black customer base? Black bookstores:

These photos were taken before Charlie Kirk got shot, but the Bookstore reminds us that if progressives don’t shoot and kill more Republicans, the still-living MAGA folks will “end democracy”:

Also, the “far right” control our elections, there is no need to follow orders from the Supreme Court (they hand out injustice, rather than justice), and the democracy that is about to be ended (or that has been ended?) was poisoned by racism:

Throughout all of this, remember that only a fool would believe that humans are divided into male and female:

When it is time to assign blame, though, it is easy to determine which humans can be classified as “men” (those who have imposed a patriarchy):

Back in Harvard Yard, the university advertises its now-free art museum (more than $50 billion accumulated so far at the “non-profit”) and shows a typical patron:

(I’ve never seen a Black visitor in this art museum.)

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Meet in Providence on Saturday or Sunday morning?

by philg

I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island this weekend and would be happy to meet up with readers! The plan is to attend WaterFire on Saturday night, but otherwise I’m fairly flexible. Sunday morning coffee downtown would work, for example. The weather forecast is great. Email philg@mit.edu if interested!

Here’s an image from September 8, 2018:

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