Bumperstickerology in South Florida

by philg

Neighbors in Maskachusetts were so passionate about political and social justice causes that they would run out of space on the liftgates of their cars and/or front lawn space in their 2-acre minimum zoned lot. I decided to do a survey of all back-of-vehicle messages, except for dealer advertising, in a single parking lot. A license plate frame that mentions a sports team counts. The lot in question is in Palm Beach Gardens at an 82-acre soccer, tennis, pickle ball, spray park, and playground facility that hosts after-school soccer (“Palm Beach Predators”).

Note the Jeep, above, that was purchased in Alexandria, Virginia. Even the Yet Bigger Government gravy train couldn’t keep this family from moving to the Sunshine State! Note also that “Just a Mom with Perseverance” does not refer to a family court plaintiff (see the last part of Self-criticism today: photographer asks museum to close his own show), but to the mother of a child participating in Perseverance Basketball, a local youth sports enterprise.

I’m not sure that this is included in the 82 acres, but the courts below are country club-quality clay.:

Readers: Is this a good way to measure the overall level of discontent in a community? If so, I think the Palm Beach County Floridians are pretty happy! According to what’s on their cars, their concerns are kids, kids’ sports, kids’ schools, Disney, and pro sports teams from the frozen post-industrial towns where they used to live.

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Finished the Philip Roth biography

by philg

I finished Philip Roth: The Biography and returned it to the Palm Beach County Library. Adding to what I wrote in my previous post on this massive book (Philip Roth biography: faith in psychotherapy), I am awed by how much work the guy was able to produce despite physical pain that necessitated a lot of opiate/opioid consumption (and that was in the old days, before every American needed a steady supply of opioids).

Roth’s last lover might have been Elizabeth Warren or perhaps one of her cousins:

… Back in May 2006 [when Roth was 73 years old]… helped him find the thirty-three-year-old Kaysie Wimberly [a pseudonym] … the two found each other refreshing and had a good time together. Roth called Kaysie by her childhood nickname, Little Feather (she was part Cherokee) …

As Roth gets older, the sex partners described in the book receive progressively more cash (but possibly this is due to inflation?) and assistance with their own literary careers. But they’re mostly sweet and loyal and many of them reappear when Roth is sick and/or dying. The decisions that Roth came to regret the most, and regarded as his worst choices, were two marriages (the first covered in the previous post). The second was to an actress and was also childless. From page 569:

“She’s behaved abominably about money and I’ve had to pay her off to get rid of her,” Roth wrote his old friend Charlotte Maurer. [a prenuptial agreement did not protect Roth, but resulted only in additional litigation regarding whether it was unconscionable] “She’s hysterical, irrational, deceitful, and, above and beyond everything else, a blameless victim responsible for nothing. The last finally got me down.” … In May, Roth composed the following directive: “To my executors and those planning my burial: It is my strong wish that Claire Bloom be barred from my funeral and from any memorial services arranged for me. All possible measures should be taken to enforce this.”

His ill-advised marriage to Ms. Bloom resulted in Roth’s being denied the Nobel Prize for Literature, according to the biographer and some of the sources. After securing her family court cash, Bloom had trashed Roth in a memoir and that “tainted” Roth’s reputation with various awards committees, including for the Nobel. When Bob Dylan won in 2016, Roth said “It’s okay, but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.”

[There is no Oxford comma in the name of this group; Peter and Paul are still alive. Roth’s perspective does not seem to have taken into account that Bloom might have earned the cash that she sought. Living with a somewhat disabled old guy who was on and off a ton of painkillers is no trip to Disney World. And Bloom had a daughter from one of her previous marriages. Stepkids are statistically a big source of conflict and, certainly, Bloom had not concealed the existence of this girl from Roth.]

If Roth was willing to give money to the girlfriends and hated giving money to his family court plaintiffs, he apparently loved helping friends in need. When Veronica Geng was poor, sick, and dying, for example, Roth paid her medical bills and whatever else she needed to be as comfortable as possible. Roth was an important friend and ally (before that word became limited to the 2SLGBTQQIA+) to writers trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

Roth was contemptuous of Twitter (“So everybody’s just shouting, right?”), but eventually adapted to email. He chose to end his life in 2018 rather than accept 3-6 months of additional “life” that would be spent mostly in a hospital bed.

What about his literary legacy? Roth occupies an incredible 9 volumes within the Library of America so we can’t rely on them to pick out the novels that are actually worth reading. Of the ones that I’ve read and can remember, I would pick American Pastoral as the best (a choice also for the great writers Richard Ford and Lorrie Moore and many others quoted in “What Is Philip Roth’s Best Book?” (NYT)). Some of the other serious writers talk about Sabbath’s Theater, Patrimony, The Human Stain, and Nemesis (I can vouch for the last two).

Related:

  • “Philip Roth Left More Than $2 Million to His Hometown Library in Newark, N.J.” (Wall Street Journal, 10/30/2019): Mr. Roth didn’t leave all of his estate to Newark entities; it couldn’t be learned exactly how he allocated the rest of his money. His will left all of his assets in a trust, which isn’t publicly available. The executor of his estate, Perley H. Grimes, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Roth did leave “a substantial amount” to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, said Joel Conarroe, a longtime friend of Mr. Roth and former president of the foundation, which had awarded Mr. Roth a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. The royalties from Mr. Roth’s book sales will go to the Guggenheim Foundation, said people with knowledge of Mr. Roth’s bequests. The twice-divorced Mr. Roth, who had no children and was predeceased by his parents and older brother Sandy, also left bequests to friends and other people in his life, friends said. Mr. Roth’s total estate is estimated at about $10 million, according to people with knowledge of his holdings. (Some words are more valuable than others; compare Roth’s lifetime earnings from scribbling to the $137 million that the former Tesla elevator operator who heard the n-word earned in one lawsuit.)
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Perfect illustration of risk compensation rendering COVID-19 vaccines ineffective

by philg

“Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature, by Stanford Medical School professor John P. A. Ioannidis) points out that our current crop of COVID-19 vaccines won’t slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection if humans who are vaccinated change their behavior as a result of having been vaccinated.

Tailor-made for Prof. Ioannidis: “Getting Back to Normal Is Only Possible Until You Test Positive” (The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal). Some relevant excerpts:

I was ultracareful for 18 months. Then I got COVID.

When I first received the invitation to the wedding where I would eventually get COVID, I was on the fence about attending at all. My best friend had gone through a tough divorce and was remarrying. I was thrilled for him. His wedding had been put off repeatedly because of COVID, and this was the couple’s second try at a real ceremony. As a bonus, the wedding would take place in New Orleans, where my friend lives. I hadn’t seen him since before the pandemic. New Orleans is a miraculous place, and my favorite city to visit in America. The notion of a trip there shone out of the fog and dreariness of this whole era of history.

The downside, of course, was the risk of exposure to COVID. Sure, I’m vaccinated—two shots of Pfizer—and the wedding’s other attendees would all be vaccinated too. But breakthrough cases happen, and we’d be in New Orleans in October, a place where cases were still high and vaccination was inconsistent. One could not expect to not get exposed to COVID.

But then I reasoned both with myself and with my wife. COVID was unlikely to kill me, a vaccinated 39-year-old endurance athlete. I would be fine, and even if I gave the coronavirus to any of my family members, they too would almost certainly be fine. My wife is vaccinated, and our young children’s risk of serious illness, while not nonexistent, is very low.

Filled with a surge of love for my friends and New Orleans and a sense that, you know what, I’m ready to nose out into a new tier of risk, I booked a flight; I’d be going solo.

As the day approached, my wife and I had not run through every scenario. I still was not precisely sure how the wedding would work, COVID-wise. My friend is a doctor, and I knew the crowd would mostly be New York and California people. There would be no anti-vaxxers among the guests, and the invitation said they’d follow the local public-health protocols.

If he/she/ze/they hadn’t gotten vaccinated, he/she/ze/they never would have gotten on the packed flights nor would he/she/ze/they have attended the wedding of the righteous (“no anti-vaxxers”) at which “at least a dozen people” contracted COVID-19. I myself exhibited the identical behavior. Not being a believer in the efficacy of facerags for the general public, I avoided getting on a commercial airline flight until after getting vaccinated (and the flights that I took ended up being packed and mostly unmasked).

Separately, the rest of the Atlantic article is a great reflection of Bay Area zeitgeist:

I spent hours in an N95 mask in the Las Vegas airport and on planes before arriving in Louisiana and heading to the welcome drinks.

My kids were so happy to see me, and after my negative result came back, to hug me. Was I actually safe? No, I knew I was not. I should have quarantined. But I had stuck my wife with the kids for four days, and I wanted to get back in the mix and help. That seemed like the right thing to do.

Moms are heroic on the one hand, but on the other hand it is unreasonable to expect a mom to be able to take care of two children for four days,

On Monday, I felt fine, but I took an antigen test anyway (negative). I scheduled a PCR test for the next day. By the time my appointment arrived, I’d started to have some postnasal drip and what felt like a possibly psychosomatic tickle in my throat. Tuesday night—four days after the wedding—my PCR result came back negative, and despite having what felt like a cold, I figured I was pretty close to being in the clear.

The next day, my symptoms were about the same. I did an intense Peloton workout and it felt fine, though maybe my legs were a little slow. I wasn’t eager to test again; a negative PCR test seemed good enough. But my wife heard me cough—one of only maybe 20 coughs throughout my whole sickness—and said, “Couldn’t you take another antigen test?”

I was on the phone with a young geographer, talking about doing research at Bay Area libraries, and kind of absentmindedly did the swabbing. When I looked down a few minutes later, I had tested positive. Maybe a false positive? I immediately took another antigen test and the little pink line was practically red, it was so dark. Wrapping up the call, I packed my things quickly, texted my wife the result, walked outside with an N95 mask on, and waited for all hell to break loose.

Like my dentist friends, he/she/ze/they has a whole closet full of N95 masks! Also note the persistence in test, test, testing until positivity is achieved!

But the real worst-case scenario was everything that happened to the people around me. My kids had to come out of school and isolate with my wife. A raft of tests had to be taken by everyone I’d had even limited contact with. (I was one of at least a dozen people at the wedding who got sick.) I had been with several older people, including my mother-in-law. For my wife and children, the tests went on for days and days, each one bringing a prospective new disaster and 10 to 14 more days of life disruption or worse.

But for me, the very worst part was my children. They knew, cognitively, that I was vaccinated and unlikely to get really sick. That said, COVID-19, for them, is a terrible thing. The past year and a half of their lives has been disrupted by this virus. They take precautions every single day not to have this happen.

Even the kids know that if you’re vaccinated it is safe to party! How old are these kids?

My nonbinary 8-year-old was so mad and maybe so scared that they could barely look at me. My 5-year-old daughter proved her status as the ultimate ride-or-die kid. She brought a chair down the street so she could sit 20 feet away from me outside in her mask, as I sat on the porch in an N95.

Five and eight and they are already experts on a disease that kills 82-year-olds.

Despite his/her/zir/their vaccine, the 39-year-old author gets about as sick as the sickest unvaccinated New Yorkers and Europeans whom I talked to back in spring 2020:

I felt pretty sick, like when you have a cold, but I’ve probably been sicker 15 times as an adult.

In other words, a bad cold/flu. The kicker, though, is that he/she/ze/they imagines that he/she/ze/they would have died without the sacrament of vaccination:

These vaccines are amazing. I was and am fine. [emphasis in original]

I understand that my scenario is far better than could or would have played out in a pre-vaccination world.

What about the people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, pre-vaccines, who never had any symptoms at all? (81 percent of cruise ship passengers who tested positive, for example; or at least one third, if you believe the other side of the #Science coin) They were and are fine. If the 39-year-old endurance athlete author was seriously ill despite vaccination, shouldn’t he/she/ze/they actually suspect that his/her/zir/their vaccine was, at best, laughed at and ignored by the virus?

Readers: I hope that you enjoy the Thanksgiving flights and gatherings that you probably wouldn’t have risked if you hadn’t been vaccinated!

Practical Take-aways: (1) Don’t get more COVID-19 tests than you have to! With current test tech, regardless of what’s in your body, you will eventually test positive; (2) if you don’t want to get COVID-19, stay home (or move to Florida, currently the nation’s lowest-risk state, and stay outdoors!).

Recent group chat exchange:

  • friend 1: So i am in Poland and i got the f***ing flu. Have been coughing for 10 days. Question: Since everyone is in masks, how do I get the flu if masks work?
  • me: 10 days might just be cold, not flu
  • friend 1: And i didn’t have sex with any polish prostitutes
  • friend 2: YET
  • friend 1: Ok and cold is unaffected by masks? What is the science on that?
  • me: I think those who #FollowScience are ready for you! Coronavirus is spread by airborne particles, which is why we #MaskUpAndStopTheSpread On the other hand, every other disease is spread by surface contact, which is why kids still have colds
  • friend 1: I am so damn sick of all of it. Germany is on the rise despite compliance and FFP2 masks everywhere

Related:

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Karen orders two dozen beignets and a three-gallon Hurricane

by philg

One of the things that I have always appreciated about New Orleans is the city’s commitment to public health, e.g., ensuring that visitors are adequately hydrated (“This Trendy New Orleans Bar Serves Gigantic 3-Gallon “Hurricanes” Filled With Rum”) and provided with nutritious low-fat gluten-free vegan muffuletta sandwiches.

We told neighbors here in the Florida Free State about our plans for a family trip to New Orleans over the Thanksgiving school break (a whole week for young scholars in Florida). “You know that they’re checking vaccine cards before you can get into restaurants,” was the response. We had some trouble believing that New Orleans would follow San Francisco and New York, but our neighbors’ information was confirmed by “Vaccine mandate: Which places will require them; how will it be enforced?” (August 12, 2021):

New Orleans residents and out-of-towners will now require proof of vaccination to enter restaurants, bars, music venues and many more places.

In New Orleans, you’ll need proof of vaccine or a negative COVID-19 test to go to bars, restaurants, performance venues, stadiums and large outdoor events.

Proof of vaccine should be checked before individuals are allowed to enter the building. Businesses can use the LA Wallet App’s “VerifyYou Pro” function to scan patron’s digital vaccine cards.

Do I still need to wear a mask? Yes, the entire state of Louisiana is currently under a mask mandate and even with your proof of vaccine, you will be required to wear a mask while indoors.

That was August, in the midst of the southern “case” wave. What about now? “NOLA Bars and Restaurants Will Require Vaccine Proof for Entry Through Mardi Gras” (11/16/2021).

It is possible to do some sightseeing without showing papers. The art museum, for example, requires masks, but checks for vaccine status only if people want to get food. Nonetheless, the idea of showing papers several times per day turned out to be a deal-breaker for one member of our family: “Why don’t we just stay in our Florida bubble?”

Readers: What are your Thanksgiving plans?

(above photos: from LEGOLAND, Carlsbad, California, 2005)

Related:

  • “Florida Gov. DeSantis Signs Bills Limiting Vaccine Mandates Into Law” (NBC, 11/18): DeSantis signed the package of bills during a news conference at a car dealership in Brandon, Florida on Thursday. … “I think that Brandon, Florida is a great American city,” DeSantis said, as some in the crowd of about 250 supporters chanted “Let’s go Brandon.” … Additionally, it bars schools and governments in the state from having vaccine mandates and allows parents to sue schools with masking requirements. [See video below for the gal that Palm Beach County might not want to mess with.]
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Manufacturing a U.S. citizen in 9 months

by philg

The phenomenon of anchor babies merits a Wikipedia page: “a child born to a non-citizen mother in a country that has birthright citizenship which will therefore help the mother and other family members gain legal residency.” The term itself is hateful, according to the New York Times, and therefore used by haters such as Donald Trump (a 2015 article). Whatever these new U.S. citizens are called, it is popularly believed that the pregnant mom has to travel to the U.S., thus limiting production.

Would it be possible to produce an anchor baby remotely? The answer turns out to be “yes”.

While chatting recently with a European friend, I learned that many of the things that we cherish are illegal in Europe. Abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy, for example, is generally illegal in Germany. Surrogacy is illegal almost everywhere in Europe, but it is not illegal to write a check to the U.S. industrial-reproductive complex and produce a baby via surrogacy here in the U.S. The resulting birthright U.S. citizen will have European genetic parents and be entitled to a U.S. passport.

A combination of a 19th century rule regarding former slaves and 21st century reproductive technology!

Related (mostly showing that I am late to learn about this!):

  • Payment for surrogate mothers: “Per month of pregnancy the surrogate mother is receiving about $2800. … the woman who seeks to get paid for having an abortion gets paid at least $83,333 per month of pregnancy, 30X as much as the woman who gets paid for having a baby.” (the post is from 2014, so it doesn’t highlight that men are just as likely to get pregnant as women.
  • “Whoa, Baby! Why American Surrogates Are in Demand for Chinese Families” (Hollywood Reporter 2016): Of course, any baby born via surrogate in the U.S. has birthright citizenship. “The Chinese couples really like that because a lot of them want to come back and forth,” says Molly O’Brien, a fertility lawyer with offices in Torrance who frequently travels to China to participate in information sessions for would-be parents, often sponsored by doctors offices or assisted-reproduction agencies. “Maybe they eventually want that child to be able to go to college here.”
  • “Coming to U.S. for Baby, and Womb to Carry It” (NYT, 2014): “… the situation is quite different in Portugal — as it is in most of the world where the hiring of a woman to carry a child is forbidden.” (Note the hurtful assumption, in which a prospective pregnant person is presumed to identify as a “woman”)
  • “Made in America” (The New Republic, 2017): “For years, we’ve looked to China for cheap labor. Now Chinese couples are coming to the U.S. for a new form of outsourcing: hiring American women to produce babies.” (Note the hateful language, in which pregnant people are referred to as “women”)
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Irish Vaccine Samizdat

by philg

A friend in Ireland sent me this meme, which is widely circulating on WhatsApp:

This is a counterpoint to Irish media pieces such as “Ireland will face severe Covid lockdown if people behave irresponsibly, O’Dea says”. See also “Irish Deputy PM says the 5% of the nation’s unvaccinated population is causing a problem” (CNN).

What has Ireland gained for its 21 months of trench warfare against SARS-CoV-2? On April 28, 2020, the New York Times used Ireland as a reference point for Sweden’s COVID-19-tagged death rate and they were roughly equal. On the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard, Ireland now sits 9 places below give-the-finger-to-the-virus Sweden. For folks who measure a society’s success by the single number of cumulative COVID-19 death rate, this makes Ireland’s 21 months of living under restrictions well worth it. The trend, however, is for Ireland and Sweden to converge on this grim statistic.

(Unlike Facebook, WhatsApp doesn’t seem to correct COVID-19 wrongthink. The 94% vaccinated stat above might look like it needs correction, but I think that, like many other Europeans, the Irish measure vaccination rate by looking at the percentage of people who are eligible for a vaccine, not by looking at the percentage of all humans, including those too young to be eligible, for example.)

Is meme consistent with official data? From the Google:

Note that “Irish lockdown” is pretty much the opposite of a Maskachusetts lockdown. In Ireland, schools remained open and generally unmasked while adults could not travel more than 2 km from their houses (enforced with police checkpoints), could not gather and drink alcohol, etc. In Boston, on the other hand, the public schools were essentially closed for 18 months while watering holes for adults, alcohol stores, and marijuana shops remained open. Adults could drive 30 miles from their homes at any hour of the day or night to meet a new friend from Tinder.

Related:

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Using #Science to reason with vaccine-hesitant 5-11-year-olds

by philg

I’m not a regular Facebook user anymore, but an MIT friend shared a screen shot of his interaction with a desk job physician who went back into scrubs to do some COVID-19 vaccine injections on 5-11-year-olds (requiring the skills of a veterinary technician, a dog breeder, and/or, according to a medical school professor friend, “a janitor”). This is in a rich white part of the U.S.

A discussion ensued:

  • Equestrian mom (profile w kid and horse pictures, but no husband): Thank you for your service!
  • New York mom: Can you pin down some of the ridiculous anti vaxx adults and stab them?
  • Various: #Grateful #ThankYou #You’veGotThis
  • Lady whose profile is packed with cats and “Love is Love” rainbow frames: My cousin’s kids screamed “like a slasher movie” he reported. Good luck!
  • Grey-haired lady with “Let’s Get Vaccinated/We Can Do This” Facebook portrait frame: Thank you, thank you thank you!
  • A mom: Brave man!
  • Male Karen: Just got my booster today at a drive thru. Easy peasey
  • Doc Friend (one who sees patients daily): Godspeed
  • The volunteer doc/original poster: 80% of the kids were easy. 15% were tough. 5% were seemingly impossible and put up a significant fight. The county would do well to have a private room or area to deal with those kids, rather than holding up everyone and creating a spectacle for those waiting.
  • MIT graduate (my friend): I would just reason with the kids and say if they don’t get the vaccine, they have a 1 in 20 million chance of dying from Covid.

(Is 1 in 20 million number correct? From the BBC (UK data are much better than U.S. data due to superior competence with electronic medical records over there):

Researchers estimate that 25 deaths in a population of some 12 million children in England gives a broad, overall mortality rate of 2 per million children.

Around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities

Though the overall risks were still low, children and young people who died were more likely to be over the age of 10 and of Black and Asian ethnicity.

Six had no underlying conditions recorded in the last five years – though researchers caution some illnesses may have been missed

So 1 in 20 million might be a reasonable lower-bound estimate for a typical rich white 8-year-old.)

Related:

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Transgender Awareness Week in our public schools

by philg

Today is the last day of Transgender Awareness Week: “a one-week celebration leading up to the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR), which memorializes victims of transphobic violence.”

A friend’s kids attend public school in a high-income North Shore Boston suburb. They’ve been receiving daily instruction regarding Transgender Awareness in their respective elementary and middle schools. One of the assignments is a take-home project. The middle school student is supposed to watch three school-selected videos with a parent or a sibling and then return to the (math) teacher with a report on his/her/zir/their reactions to the videos. The teacher can thus build up a file on how parents reacted to the following officially-chosen videos:

What about here in Florida? The Palm Beach County Public Schools:

2SLGBTQQIA+ has nothing to do with either religion or sex:

(Separately, in a defeat for #Science and despite having hired Elizabeth Holmes’s former law firm (David Boies was on her board and, according to Bad Blood, he and the firm were principal enablers of keeping the fraud quiet), Palm Beach County lost its legal dispute with the #Science-hating governor. Students are mask-free as of November 8 (but the library still requires masks).)

Readers: How did you celebrate?

Young Fiona can now breathe at school! Here she is talking to the Palm Beach County Covidcrats:

Related:

  • Regarding the Palm Beach County Schools asserting that tolerance/celebration of 2SLGBTQQIA+ is “not in conflict with any religious beliefs” (maybe they meant that it is not in conflict with their own religious beliefs, e.g., in Rainbow Flagism?)… “Can Islam Accommodate Homosexual Acts? Meditations on the Past Two Years” (Maydan): … nor has anyone argued that the canonical texts of Islam support anything other than specifically delineated sexual relationships that are all necessarily male-female. … Affirming the Quran as divine speech while concurrently accepting its alleged erroneousness on a subject so vital to the human experience in the modern world presents an untenable proposition for revisionist actors. In order to resolve tensions arising from these incompatible affirmations, it is the Quranic message that is overwritten in the name of sexual liberty. A Faustian bargain of epic proportions, the logical outcome of such a negotiation is a minimalist faith with no reference to the Quran as God’s inerrant word or the prophetic practice as representing the archetype of how to faithfully live that word. … It would seem we now have a workable sexual ethic that can be brought into conversation with Islamic sexual norms to then assert the licitness of same-sex relationships. However, the ethical and moral program upheld by Islam (which is, of course, the subject at hand) has never viewed consent as the sole criteria for sexual acts, and much that can be enacted consensually is indisputably prohibited. Zinā (fornication and adultery), for instance, is prohibited explicitly in the Quran irrespective of consent. Likewise with physical intimacy short of intercourse and seclusion between two marriageable persons (khalwa). Indeed, the elective agreement of two participating parties hardly counts when determining what is lawful and unlawful sexually in the Sharīʿa.
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Jimmy Carter and China’s offer of 10 million migrants

by philg

There was a period in the 1970s when China and the U.S. were expanding trade ties and a sticking point was a requirement that a county couldn’t get low tariffs (“most favored nation”) status unless it was fully open to emigration, a measure that was intended to pressure the Soviet Union.

During a conversation with President Jimmy Carter, however, Deng Xiaoping called the Americans’ bluff:

Vice Premier Deng: On the amendment supported by Senator Jackson, it really has nothing to do with China. The Jackson amendment demands that the Soviet Union allow free emigration. Would you like to import ten million Chinese?

The answer was “Uh, thanks, but no thanks”. The U.S. did not want the offered migrants and, according to the lecture series that I recently finished, the sticking point was removed and tariffs on Chinese products were reduced.

(See “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065” (Pew, 2015) for how the U.S. ended up bringing in 59 million migrants between 1965 and 2015.)

I was reminded of this when reading about the drama currently playing out in Europe. The European welfare states say that migration is a human right and also that every migrant who shows up has a right to housing, health care, food, etc. They also tell the native-born that low-skill migrants are making native-born vastly better off culturally and economically. But it is a different story when they’re offered some actual migrants… “Merkel appeals to Putin to intervene in Belarus border crisis” (Guardian):

In a phone call on a crisis that has escalated dramatically since Monday, when 1,000 people mainly from Iraqi Kurdistan arrived on the border, the German chancellor told Putin that the “use of migrants by the Belarusian regime was inhuman and unacceptable and asked [Putin] to influence the regime in Minsk”, according to the chancellor’s spokesperson, Steffen Seibert, who described the situation as “state-sanctioned human trafficking”.

The arrival of more than 1,000 people, many from Iraqi Kurdistan, at the Polish border on Monday brought the crisis to a head, with the EU accusing Belarus of a “hybrid attack”. Polish border guards said on Wednesday that two groups of several dozen people had breached the borders overnight. They were arrested and expelled, they said. Lithuanian border guards said they had prevented 281 attempts to cross the border illegally on Tuesday.

Charles Michel, the European Council president, said during a visit to Warsaw on Wednesday that Belarus’s actions were unacceptable. “Possible sanctions are on the table … and we want to make sure that we coordinate with all the member states in order to make the best possible choices and to identify what are the best possible tools in order to be effective. It must stop, this hybrid attack against the EU,” he said.

On Tuesday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said western countries including EU member states, and Nato, were the “root” of the crisis. “They were pushing for a western-style better life and democracy the way it is interpreted by the west,” he said, referring to US-led interventions and alleged western backing for the Arab spring.

Asked whether Germany would take in migrants unilaterally, Merkel’s spokesperson said the question was “irrelevant”.

Related:

  • “Blue States, You’re the Problem” (nytimes, 11/9/2021), in which they ask the same question that I often ask here on this blog: since there are no Republicans in the Bay Area, why don’t the rich Democrats there who say that they want to house the unhoused build some housing for the unhoused?
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Uncle Joe’s restaurant

by philg

On the way to a swamp wetlands boardwalk, we stopped at a strip mall and found Uncle Joe’s:

Here’s the menu:

Depending on who was reading the menu, the General Tao’s Chicken was either $1.85 trillion or “zero”.

(When Uncle Joe is not busy stirring the wok… September 24 Remarks by President Biden:

We talk about price tags. The — it is zero price tag on the debt. We’re paying — we’re going to pay for everything we spend. So they say it’s not — you know, people, understandably — “Well, you know, it started off at $6 trillion, now it’s $3.5 trillion. Now it’s — is it going to be $2.9? Is it…”

It’s going to be zero — zero. Because in the — in that plan that I put forward — and I said from the outset — I said, “I’m running to change the dynamic of how the economy grows.”

)

Another menu, from “Everything in the House Democrats’ Budget Bill” (NYT, 11/18):

Stepping back from this a bit, isn’t this another way to transfer money from hard-working childless Americans to those of us fortunate enough to have kids? A single drone worker in a city is not a “family” and won’t get anything out of the biggest block at top left. The drone probably will earn too much to qualify for any of the housing or health care subsidies. The drone already has a job and is already in the U.S., so won’t obviously benefit from the $133 billion spent on immigration. The drone doesn’t have $80,000 in state and local taxes to deduct (the Democrats’ new limit, up from Trump’s $10,000; average property tax rate in the U.S. is about 1.08 percent, so this new tax code will be perfect for anyone with a $7.4 million house).

How about the birdwatching from the boardwalk? It was actually better in the strip mall:

I think that the above bird is a Great Blue Heron who identifies as white. We saw some sandhill cranes on the highway just before turning into Grassy Waters Preserve. After a few minutes of strolling, we learned that immigration is detrimental to natives:

We also learned that birds and alligators do not show up when tourists want them to…

(I think the tricks for wildlife spotting in South Florida are (a) wait until mating season for animals that migrate from the north, and/or (b) wait until the mid-winter dry season when animals collect near the remaining water.)

Most bizarre thing about the boardwalk? Even in the shaded heavily wooded parts… no bugs!

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