Maskachusetts Democrats try to understand their new neighbors

A Massachusetts Democrat’s Facebook post earlier this month (the woman who’d repeatedly expressed alarm regarding climate change was about to board a transoceanic flight, apparently; she’d also previously posted in favor of masks and was about to share a confined space with more than 300 potentially infected humans):

Some comments from fellow Democrats:

  • Migrant crisis [it is a “crisis” when the U.S. is being enriched at a faster pace than under the hated dictator Trump]
  • More mistreatment of immigrants. … [and then after a rare hater who snuck into the exchange points out that “They came here illegally”] Artificially preventing the incorporation of this latest wave of Americans into our fully American diaspora, as is the obviously racist purpose of this outrageous policy we are here witnessing, fully ignores the hard won history of all our (?) ancestors who have, and will continue, to make this nation a better (not worse) place because of their efforts, and abilities. If that’s “mansplaining” then please understand the actual truth delivered by this enlightened man! … I am, however, most interested in the opponents of Democracy, itself, and how they must be squirming in regards to the overwhelming election of Mexico’s first female president, who also happens to be its first Jewish president
  • [response to the above] super exciting to see her elected! She is also an ecologist!! This can only be good for Mexico and the world.
  • shameful
  • Wow. I didn’t know about this. How awful for these families!

For reference, the new president of Mexico, referred to above:

Related:

  • “Worried about coronavirus while having sex? Wear a mask, says a new study” (CNN, June 2020, about a study done in Massachusetts (at Harvard Medical School!)): “…it appears that all forms of in-person sexual contact carry risk for transmission of the virus,” said Dr. Jack Turban, study lead author and resident at Harvard Medical School, where he studies the mental health of transgender youth.
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Ideas for fun family activities in Wisconsin before or after EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”)?

The plan for this year is to fly commercial into ORD (nonstop from PBI), rent a car, and do some stuff before or after EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). We have some constraints…

  • one family member is 8 years old and, therefore, lacks an adult level of patience
  • one family member lacks a Democrat adult level of tolerance for crime and disorder and, therefore, refuses to set foot in Chicago (my default choice, e.g., Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium)
  • one family member objects to long drives so we don’t want to go too far off route (it’s about 2.5 hours from ORD to Oshkosh if one proceeds direct (through Milwaukee) and 3.25 hours through Madison, WI)
  • everyone in the family likes the outdoors
  • the before/after time will be on weekends, when some things might be closed

One of my early ideas was Devil’s Lake State Park, SW of Oshkosh. However, the same government that informs us that we’re doomed without population growth via open borders also tells us that one must get to this park at dawn in order to be allowed in:

Are the Wisconsin Dells and Baraboo plausible outdoor destinations that are also practical on weekends given the rapidly growing population of our country and constant number of nice places to visit?

What about Milwaukee? I know the art museum (good for 1.5 hours max with our kids). There is a Harley-Davidson museum (do they sell “Better Your Sister in a Whorehouse than Your Brother on a Honda” T-shirts? If not, I question the authenticity). The city will be somewhat jammed on the weekend after Oshkosh due to an airshow(!) so we’d see Milwaukee on the way in. Perhaps the Pabst Mansion as well as the museums? How is the “Historic Third Ward”?

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Could climate change trash the States of Righteousness before it destroys Florida?

Democrats love contemplating the destruction of Florida almost as much as they love reflecting on Donald Trump’s crimes and convictions.

The Democrat dream begins with a rejection of Science, i.e., saying that climate change has already resulted in more frequent and more intense hurricanes. “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century” (Nature magazine, 2021; by geoscientists from NOAA and Princeton) looks at data from 1851-2019 and concludes the opposite:

To evaluate past changes in frequency, we have here developed a homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851–2019. We find that recorded century-scale increases in Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency, and associated decrease in USA hurricanes strike fraction, are consistent with changes in observing practices and not likely a true climate trend. After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.

One of the most consistent expectations from projected future global warming is that there should be an increase in TC intensity, such that the fraction of [major hurricanes] MH to [Atlantic hurricanes] HU increases … there are no significant increases in either basin-wide HU or MH frequency, or in the MH/HU ratio for the Atlantic basin between 1878 and 2019 (when the U.S. Signal Corps started tracking NA HUs … The homogenized basin-wide HU and MH record does not show strong evidence of a century-scale increase in either MH frequency or MH/HU ratio associated with the century-scale, greenhouse-gas-induced warming of the planet. …Caution should be taken in connecting recent changes in Atlantic hurricane activity to the century-scale warming of our planet.

Suppose that progressives are correct and the NOAA/Princeton geoscience nerds are wrong. Let’s assume that there will be more hurricanes and that each hurricane will be more intense than in the past. Is it guaranteed that these intensified and more frequent hurricanes will hit the Deplorables in Florida? Let’s go back to Nature magazine. “Poleward expansion of tropical cyclone latitudes in warming climates” (2021):

Tropical cyclones (TCs, also known as hurricanes and typhoons) generally form at low latitudes with access to the warm waters of the tropical oceans, but far enough off the equator to allow planetary rotation to cause aggregating convection to spin up into coherent vortices. Yet, current prognostic frameworks for TC latitudes make contradictory predictions for climate change. Simulations of past warm climates, such as the Eocene and Pliocene, show that TCs can form and intensify at higher latitudes than of those during pre-industrial conditions. Observations and model projections for the twenty-first century indicate that TCs may again migrate poleward in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, which poses profound risks to the planet’s most populous regions. Previous studies largely neglected the complex processes that occur at temporal and spatial scales of individual storms as these are poorly resolved in numerical models. Here we review this mesoscale physics in the context of responses to climate warming of the Hadley circulation, jet streams and Intertropical Convergence Zone. We conclude that twenty-first century TCs will most probably occupy a broader range of latitudes than those of the past 3 million years as low-latitude genesis will be supplemented with increasing mid-latitude TC favourability, although precise estimates for future migration remain beyond current methodologies.

As decoded for the public in an AP News article, “Climate change could bring more storms like Hurricane Lee to New England”:

One recent study found climate change could result in hurricanes expanding their reach more often into mid-latitude regions, which includes New York, Boston and even Beijing. Factors in this, the study found, are the warmer sea surface temperatures in these regions and the shifting and weakening of the jet streams — strong bands of air currents that encircle the planet in both hemispheres.

“These jet stream changes combined with the warmer ocean temperatures are making the mid latitude more favorable to hurricanes,” Joshua Studholme, a Yale University physicist and lead author on the study. “Ultimately meaning that these regions are likely to see more storm formation, intensification and persistence.”

Another study simulated tropical cyclone tracks from pre-industrial times, modern times and a future with higher emissions. It found that hurricanes will move north and east in the Atlantic. It also found hurricanes would track closer to the coasts including Boston, New York and Norfolk, Virginia and more likely to form along the Southeast coast, giving New Englanders less time to prepare.

In other words, if the dire predictions of the climate alarmists come true the result could be hurricanes redirected from the 20-year-old concrete houses of South Florida to the 150-year-old wooden houses of New England.

Perhaps some of this punishment of the virtuous has already happened. Scientific American, which endorsed climate warrior Joe Biden, says “Extreme Heat Threatens Student Health in Schools without Air-Conditioning”:

Yet as extreme heat affects more students and disrupts more school days, government spending to keep kids cool remains woefully inadequate, experts say, allowing an underreported health crisis to fester in school districts across the country.

One school in Rhode Island “had components of their operating HVAC systems that were nearly 100 years old,” the GAO stated. Yet few local school boards in financially strapped districts can afford to upgrade old mechanical systems.

The same is true for a school in Natick, Mass., a 36,000-person city 22 miles west of Boston, where “staff and students have suffered heat stroke and other heat-related illness due to the lack of centralized air-conditioning during high degree days,” according to a summary of the $2 million grant.

Guess where schools already have A/C… Florida! In fact, some Florida schools have fully air conditioned field houses (WPTV) to support athletic training in mid-August, the beginning of the school year here:

Circling back to hurricanes… if the NOAA and Princeton eggheads cited above are wrong, it is possible that Floridians accustomed to a hurricane every 30 years might have to endure one every 20 years and that their impact windows, impact garage doors, and 160 mph-rated roofs would therefore get tested more frequently. But if the Yale egghead cited above is correct, the folks who have been gleefully contemplating Florida’s suffering will fare worse given that their communities were never designed to withstand hurricanes.

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Hunter Biden can be imprisoned for 25 years?

Bom dia from the mostly-gun-free capital of Portugal! Checking in on U.S. news, I noticed the following…

“Hunter Biden guilty of felony gun charges, faces 25 years in prison” (New York Post, so we know that it is true):

a federal jury found him guilty of three counts related to lying about his drug use in order to buy a gun … making a false statement in the purchase of a firearm, making a false statement related to information required to be kept by a federally licensed firearms dealer, and possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of or addict to a controlled substance. … Hallie testified about finding the gun inside Hunter’s Ford Raptor pickup on Oct. 23, 2018 — 11 days after he bought it — and throwing the weapon away in a panic at a Wilmington grocery store.

So Hunter Biden had a gun for 11 days, but didn’t use it in any way as far as we know and now he can be put in the slammer for about 100 times as long as a typical San Francisco career criminal? (See below for what happens to a criminal in San Francisco who actually shoots and kills someone.) Were his statements knowingly false? If you ask a typical addict “are you addicted?” the person will respond “I can quit at any time.” That would be his/her/zir/their truth and not a lie.

I think the answer is “the judge won’t impose the maximum sentence”, but why should an individual human be given the discretion to imprison an important contemporary artist for what would essentially be the entire rest of his life?

Related:

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Why can’t we tell Gmail to delete messages from specified senders after 30 days?

After nearly 20 years, my Gmail inbox is cluttered with over 90 GB of crud, including more than 48,000 unread messages.

The majority of my non-spam email messages are irrelevant after a certain number of days, e.g., calendar notifications from Google Calendar, USPS “what’s going to be in your mailbox today”, “daily news summary” from a newspaper. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any convenient way to tell Gmail to delete messages from a particular sender after between 1 and 30 days. Isn’t this an obvious feature to have added? I recognize that Google is in the business of selling storage plans, but on the other hand keeping thousands of TB of useless timed-out alerts in persistent storage doesn’t seem like the best business to be in. If Google wants people to burn through their storage tiers and pay more, why not have this kind of feature and simply lower the thresholds in GB?

If Google’s Gemini is so smart, in fact, why isn’t it smart enough to offer an auto-delete after a certain number of days for emails such as the one below?

How many people want to save checked bag tracking information for years?

Since the human programmers at Gmail didn’t think to add this feature, I guess this post then boils down to “Why isn’t AI smart enough to clear completely useless email messages out of our inboxes?”

A few other ideas that would help us clear out our inboxes…

  • a one-button “delete everything from this sender”
  • a system smart enough to delete every post-purchase follow-up survey (buying online is no longer efficient because there will be 5+ emails after every purchase asking the consumer to rate his/her/zir/their purchase); see below for a survey that United sent me after my first post-coronapanic commercial airline trip (I never opened it)
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Should automakers offer a factory Palestinian flag paint scheme?

Parked in front of the Embassy Suites RDU for the entire evening of May 29:

It occurred to me that this demonstration of solidarity with Hamas (see Talking with a pro-Hamas college student for how the folks who say that they’re only “pro-Palestinian” actually do expect and seek long-term Hamas rule) would be more effect if (a) done 24/7, and (b) done in paint rather than via a draped flag.

How about a car company that already caters to progressives, e.g., Subaru, offering a factory Palestinian flag paint scheme? It might also be popular with Muslim-Americans.

Separately, I’ve been listening to parts of Robin Williams: When the Laughter Stops (included with an Audible subscription). The 2014 book quotes Williams as being interested in world peace, but asking “How do you create a Palestinian homeland when there’s a large amount of Palestinians who want to obliterate Israel?” (the “large amount” has been quantified as 85 percent support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad in a 2023 poll)

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Israeli hostage rescue mission was exactly what Igor Sikorsky wanted

CNN shows some video of Israelis who’d been unwilling guests of the Palestinians getting into a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. Sikorsky first flew this machine in 1964.

This is exactly what Igor Sikorsky talked about: “If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that’s just about all. But a direct lift aircraft could come in and save his life.” (Noa Argamani did not identify as a “man”, of course, but the Sikorsky quote predates our world of verbose explicit gender inclusions.)

The big mystery is why there were any deaths or injuries on either side of this event. We are informed that Palestinians are unarmed and entirely peaceful. Picking up these four guests of the Gazans, therefore, shouldn’t have involved more violence than an Uber pickup from the Apple Store in Newport Beach, California. If Palestinians weren’t shooting at the IDF with weapons that they don’t have, why was there shooting? Were IDF soldiers shooting at each other?

From the Guardian:

We are told that the Gazans, as well as many of the righteous in Europe and the U.S., object to the events surrounding the departure of their hostages. Maybe the Palestinians should have taken only Americans hostage because the U.S. certainly hasn’t threatened to use military force to get back the U.S. citizens held hostage by the Gazans (supposedly 5 living and 3 dead bodies currently). In fact, Joe Biden has done more to bolster the Hamas/UNRWA/Palestinian Islamic Jihad war effort than anyone. A continued supply of US-funded aid keeps Palestinian fighters funded (since the “aid” is immediately confiscated by the legitimate elected government of Gaza (i.e., Hamas) and then sold in the marketplace). Joe Biden has also been instrumental in hamstringing the Israeli military operation.

A smaller mystery is why Noa Argamani wasn’t released in November 2023 when Hamas agreed to release women and children civilian hostages in exchange for Israel releasing captured and convicted Palestinian fighters. Noa Argamani wasn’t serving in the Israel military. She seems to have identified as a woman. Is the answer that Hamas wasn’t actually holding her hostage, but some other group of Palestinians was?

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Target this Pride

How is everyone’s Pride Month going?

I visited Target near the Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina) airport last month. What are they offering this Pride? My favorite item was this doormat, eminently suitable for a hangar door or for an FBO to place at the bottom of airstairs:

Who could possibly argue against the interior of an aircraft or hangar being a “space space”?

Compared to last year in Montana, Target was not promoting Pride wear in kid/toddler sizes. Adult XS was the smallest that I saw.

I noticed quite a few shoppers who appeared to be observant Muslims, e.g., women who were completely covered in accordance with Islamic law and tradition. If Target wants to be respectful to migrants and Muslims, which I am sure that they do, is a big celebration of 2SLBTQQIA+ lifestyle the way to make observant Muslims feel comfortable bringing their children into the store?

Returning to the merchandise… my favorite shirt was the Love is Love shirt, but I don’t see that on the front page of Target’s LGBTQIA+ Shop (not 2SLGBTQQIA+?):

If we dig deeper, though, I think this might be it:

Perfect for walking the golden retriever!

Meanwhile, across the pond Marks and Spencer may be welcoming observant Muslims with the LGBT sandwich (seems to have been introduced in 2019 and it is unclear whether they’ll still selling it in 2024):

I would love to see a 2SLGBTQQIA+ sandwich. What would we need to add?

  • 2S = two slices of bread
  • QQ = Quinoa and Quark (the German cheese/yogurt/whatever)
  • I = Iberico (Spanish ham)
  • A = Arugula (always good to have more greens)
  • + = Black Pepper

Related:

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Only rich young people are caring

Which young Americans care enough about their fellow humans (or at least those oppressed by Jews) to camp out in support of Hamas? The rich. From “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” (Washington Monthly):

Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.

By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools.

Whatever the cause, the pattern is clear: Pro-Palestinian protests are overwhelmingly an elite college phenomenon.

A couple of charts from the article:

(Why would it be accurate to characterize these as “pro-Hamas” protests? See Talking with a pro-Hamas college student for how the expectation among the protesters is that their success will enable Hamas to rule Gaza for the foreseeable future.)

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