Florida’s recovery from Hurricane Milton

by philg

Our brushed-by-Milton neighborhood in Palm Beach County is almost completely cleaned up. There were some tornadoes nearby that significantly damaged houses and I can’t figure out why. “NWS: EF3 tornado with winds of 140 mph tore through Avenir community in Palm Beach Gardens” (WPTV):

“Considerable structural damage … was observed on brand new, well-built homes and included segments of concrete block walls missing and large sections of roof removed,” the NWS said in a report released Thursday afternoon.

A house in this part of Florida is supposed to be built to handle 170 mph, I think (map). A house is a “Risk Category II” building. If the headline is correct and the tornado was blowing at only 140 mph, why was a house engineered to handle 170 mph damaged? Could it be that a rotating wind is more damaging than a relatively steady wind from one direction? Were the houses not built properly? Human engineers aren’t as smart as they claim to be? Here’s a picture from the Palm Beach Post of the Nature v. Human contest:

Here’s Ron DeSantis on Friday leading a 38-minute press conference (without teleprompter) on the clean-up challenges related to Hurricane Milton:

It seems as though flgov.com is updated regularly with summaries of challenges and achievements. Example from Oct 11: “In a multi-agency response, FWC [Fish and Wildlife] officers and partner agencies rescued and evacuated approximately 426 people and 45 pets from flood waters in a Clearwater apartment complex. FWC officers used a high-water swamp buggy, UTV, and shallow-draft vessels during the rescue effort.”

Less attention is paid to those who have endured some of the worst Milton-related suffering. I’m talking, of course, about private aircraft owners. It’s very expensive to build a hurricane-proof hangar and, consequently, the typical hangar hasn’t been built hurricane-proof (the latest building code likely requires them to be able to withstand at least a Category 4 hurricane, a lower wind standard than for houses because the theory is that nobody will be inside a hangar during a hurricane). The general aviation hangars at KSRQ and KSPG are apparently badly damaged. Sarasota. which previously had a 4-year waiting list for a hangar:

The St. Pete downtown airport (walking distance to some museums), which previously had a 10-year waiting list:

Florida officialdom doesn’t seem to credit FEMA with savings lives or property. This is consistent with friends in Maskachusetts deploring the Deplorables’ lack of respect and awe for the Great Father in Washington. The righteous of MA, NY, and CA are particularly upset that Republicans have spread misinformation, e.g., that FEMA has handed out about $640 million on sheltering migrants while native-born hurricane victims aren’t getting lavish aid. Prior to Milton, one Democrat mentioned on Facebook that Congress had appropriated $20 billion for Hurricane Helene victims (Congress is currently in recess; the Democrat-run New Republic says “Lawmakers left town last week without passing additional natural disaster funding, and approving additional money may prove tricky when they return.”). Multiple Democrats responded by heaping scorn on Trump supporters for being so easily gulled into believing the Fake News about FEMA spending money on migrants.

Where could the Deplorables have gotten this misinformation? Let’s check fema.gov:

Related:

Full post, including comments

Power restoration after Hurricane Milton

by philg

Landfall: October 9, 2024 at 8:30 pm. Supposedly about 4 million customers lost power (source: Ron DeSantis press conference).

Mid-afternoon the next day:

Early evening:

The morning of the second day:

Apparently there was power at the big airport in Tampa because they resumed operations about 36 hours after the hurricane made landfall:

(Orlando had reopened a few hours earlier, so they too had power despite being in the middle of the Band of Destruction (TM).)

Afternoon of second day:

About 48 hours after the hurricane hit, the total customers out has declined from 3.4 million to 2 million:

The bad news is that restoration for some Floridians won’t be until 8 days after the hurricane made landfall. Here’s FPL’s estimate:

I’m not sure if people in neighborhoods with underground lines (like ours!) will get power sooner. Currently, 10 percent of FPL’s customers are out versus 17 percent for the state.

I can’t figure out why the customer numbers are so high. I thought that the transmission lines were designed to handle hurricane-force winds (and they were further beefed up after 2019; see Tough questions from reporters for Ron DeSantis). Maybe there are a lot of neighborhoods with above-ground powerlines for local distribution?

Strong independent female linewomen continued to work through the night, apparently…

2.5 days after landfall, it looks like Naples and Fort Myers are on their way back to normal while half of Tampa is dark. More than half of the Floridians who originally lost power now have it back (thanks once again to the efforts of linewomen who identify as female):

around lunch time…

Three days (72 hours) after landfall:

The pace of restoration seems to slowed down in the dark:

3.5 days after landfall:

Not a great situation in Tampa, with more than one third of customers without power. On the other hand, the total is down below 1 million compared to 4 million at the start.

Four days (96 hours) after landfall and about 500,000 customers are still out. More than 235,000 of them are Tampa Electric customers, which has only 840,000 total customers.

Florida Power and Light now says that they’ll have nearly everyone restored, even in directly hit Sarasota, by Tuesday night. (Also that they’ve thus far restored 90 percent of their affected customers, 1.8 million people who’d lost power at one point.) Speaking of FPL, if you were to watch their X feed you’d learn that electricity restoration is definitely not something that white males do:

And as of Tuesday at noon, FPL indeed had all but 38,000 customers back online. Tampa Electric (TECO) continued to be an outlier with 100,000 customers still dark.

Full post, including comments

Are the world’s most accomplished people doomed to disappoint us when they offer political opinions?

by philg

It is conventional among Democrats to deplore Elon Musk’s refusal to change with the times and adopt the latest progressive dogma. And, indeed, despite Musk being objectively one of the world’s most accomplished people, the opinions that he expresses or retweets are conventional Republican points of view. He doesn’t, for example, suggest that the U.S. eliminate asylum and the rest of the programs that inspire migrants to come here (he supports milquetoast measures to return undocumented migration to pre-Biden/Harris levels). Nor does Musk agree with me that voting should be restricted to those who’ve worked for at least 8 years (W-2 or 1099), a return to the system of 200 years ago (men started working at 13 and started voting at 21), albeit tweaked for gender ID neutrality (don’t want to exclude 73 of the genders recognized by Science if people who identify with those 73 genders have experience working and paying taxes).

On the other side of the political spectrum, we have Yann LeCun. He’s a Turing Award winner who has been at the forefront of the machine learning craze (bubble?). His Twitter feed is indistinguishable from that of any other committed Democrat, e.g., blaming arch villain Donald Trump for the nation’s problems after a two-year period in which Democrats controlled Congress and the White House and, therefore, could pass any legislation that they deemed necessary. Example of one of the world’s most creative person’s tweets:

In other words, one of the world’s most accomplished people accepts the Democrat idea that the commander in chief of a $1 trillion/year military does not, without some further action of Congress, have the authority or ability to prevent random foreigners from crossing the U.S. border.

Speaking of creative, let’s look at Taylor Swift, the most accomplished person in the world of music (Though maybe we should give some credit to Itzhak Perlman, still performing from his wheelchair at age 79 (he was born in “Mandatory Palestine” and is older than the war that the Arabs declared on the new state of Israel).). Here’s part of her endorsement of Kamala Harris:

“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades,”

The specific causes that she cites are more or less the same that a Democrat who can’t carry a tune might cite, e.g., additional promotion of Rainbow Flagism and more widely available abortion care for pregnant people. As with the typical Democrat, she isn’t interested in hearing an opposing point of view (“comments on this post have been limited” (limited to none)).

Let’s finally look at J.K. Rowling, the greatest writer of the 21st century (measured by sales, at least). Her main expressed political belief is that person with XY chromosomes cannot claim to be a “woman”. While, of course, this is a denial of Science, it is also a common denial of Science. The originality of Harry Potter is not to be found in J.K. Rowling’s belief that a man cannot raise his/her hand and become a woman.

I’m wondering if hyper-accomplished people need to keep quiet on the subject of politics. It is tough to come up with a political idea that isn’t already held by a lot of mediocre people and, therefore, expressing a political idea will always reduce public awe of the hyper-accomplished person. (And it would be even worse if the hyper-accomplished celebrity uttered an original idea! Imagine the uproar if Elon Musk, for example, were to say that voting should be restricted to Americans who’ve paid at least $1 of income tax at some point in their lives. Or if Taylor Swift were to take progressive love for Palestine to its logical conclusion and say that Americans who identify as “women” should be forced to wear hijab, long skirts, and long sleeves because otherwise immigrants from Gaza will feel uncomfortable.)

Full post, including comments

Did Doug Emhoff hit a woman with Hunter Biden’s laptop?

by philg

I don’t know if we’ll be without power and Internet due to Hurricane Milton so I’m scheduling this non-hurricane-related post in advance in order to deliver on my “posting every day” promise/threat.

A Deplorable posted “Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff ‘forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man’ in booze-fueled assault after date to star-studded gala” (Daily Mail) on Facebook with the comment “Another post election day story for the Times.” In fact, a Google search restricted to “site:nytimes.com” shows that the Newspaper of Record (TM) hasn’t seen fit to cover the story of this Democratic National Convention featured speaker slapping anyone.

In a separate discussion about this story, a Big Law partner (closeted Republican) wrote that all members of the Party of Independent Thought would transition from “Kamala is so brat because look at Doug” to “Doug has nothing to do with this election; he’s not running for anything”. Just a few hours later, his prophecy was confirmed when a Minneapolis Democrat in a discussion about the above story posted “Who is this guy? Is he running for something?”

New York Times, about 1.5 months ago:

Speaking of husbands, “Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away” (NYT):

Friends of both say the estrangement, set in motion by her parents’ split when Ms. Harris was a child, may have as much to do with traits father and daughter share as it does their decades of differences. … It upset Ms. Harris that her father did not attend Shyamala Harris’s funeral in 2009. … Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.”

Note that the New York Times covers a lawsuit with a plaintiff and a defendant as a mutual activity (“her parents’ split”). Reading between the lines, it looked like Kamala’s mom sued Kamala’s dad and won the winner-take-all fight that the California Family Court set up. And then Kamala was upset that her dad didn’t want to go to his plaintiff’s funeral. (We know a guy in Maskachusetts whose plaintiff died of cancer after winning the house, the kids, the cash, most of his income going forward, etc. On hearing the news, he was ready to throw a huge party to celebrate her death and the return of his kids not shed crocodile tears at the successful litigant’s funeral.

Addendum: We never did lose power thanks to the heroic engineering efforts of Florida Power and Light as well as the grid-hardening initiative approved by Ron DeSantis in 2019 over the objections of Democrats (see Tough questions from reporters for Ron DeSantis). In other hurricane news, combat veteran Tim Walz tells Floridians to evacuate at 6:32 pm, roughly two hours before landfall. This is apparently not the kind of “misinformation” that Democrats seek to outlaw and suppress, though it contradicts government advice to “shelter in place” once winds exceed 45-50 mph. The “mandatory” evacuation orders on the Florida west coast generally required evacuation by 9:00 am on Wednesday and officials told people who hadn’t evacuated to “shelter in place” after the winds picked up. From the war hero now fighting misinformation:

From the National Weather Service, 4.5 hours earlier (“It’s time to shelter-in-place”):

From Sarasota County, where Hurricane Milton hit:

An hour before Tim Walz suggested evacuation, the county was saying “shelter in place”:

The above tweets, combined, are good examples of the motivation for Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Kamala Harris threatens and La Quinta responds

by philg

As Hurricane Milton “barreled” (the obligatory verb for an object moving at 5-10 mph) into Sarasota, Kamala Harris threatened merchants:

About 12 hours later, Orbitz is showing hotel rooms in Orlando for a stay beginning tonight at $122/nights. If you’re willing to stay at the La Quinta… $72/night. For those who want to be ready for Disney World’s reopening tomorrow, the on-property Swan hotel is $252/night. Perhaps Jussie Smollett reported having been overcharged?

What about a hotel in Miami, which was never forecast to be “barreled into”?

I won’t be staying in a hotel tonight because I need to get back up on a ladder. Like Jeffrey Epstein, these hurricane screens didn’t hang themselves and I fear that they won’t unhang themselves either. (The previous owners of our house invested in impact glass doors and windows, but the front door is an unusual shape and they left the original door in place. The wide Armor Screen covers an outdoor dining area that has a bug screen whose frame is hurricane-proof (supposedly) but whose screen material is sacrificial. My thought on the hurricane screen for that area was that we could use it to store all of our outdoor items in the event of a truly bad storm.)

It was mostly peaceful yesterday here in Jupiter (Palm Beach County). The schoolteachers were enjoying the start of their two-day taxpayer-funded holiday while everyone else worked (health care, retail, expert witness, etc.). There was a bit of rain and the wind picked up around 9 pm. There were a handful of tornadoes in SE Florida caused by Hurricane Milton, but none came into Jupiter itself (one was in Jupiter Farms, to our west, one in western Palm Beach Gardens in Avenir, and a sad one for aviators in Fort Pierce that deposited some airplanes outside the airport fence).

Full post, including comments

Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?

by philg

An American faced with hazardous weather who wants to know whether to evacuate his/her/zir/their house or apartment must first do a web search to find a site that maps flood or evacuation zones, typically A through E. Then the citizen, documented immigrant, temporary protected status migrant, or undocumented migrant must scour various state and county web sites to try to figure out what the latest evacuation orders are by city, county, or state. Here’s part of a story from our local newspaper:

There are many ways for the above process to go wrong. Why not a phone app that gets GPS data from the phone hardware and operating system and does all of the above work reliably? The server just needs to have a database of evacuation and flood zones and a canonical up to date list of evacuation orders. Why is it a human’s job to do something that can be done much more reliably by a computer?

For Floridians during hurricane season the app could run continuously in the background and send alerts as necessary.

One wrinkle is that people who live in mobile homes are often ordered to evacuate even if they aren’t in a surge-prone zone. The ideal app, therefore, would know about trailer parks and maybe get loaded with a database from Zillow or similar regarding the housing type at a given address.

What about people who aren’t competent users of smartphones? Nearly all of them have an app-capable TV and I think those TVs can and do run software when the TV appears to be off. Some code could be built into TVs to connect to the same server that the phone apps connect to. In the event of an applicable evacuation order, the TV would wake up and display/speak “Time to evacuate!”. This would be a little more complex to set up because TVs don’t include GPS receivers and the street address of the TV might have to be entered.

As an added bonus to this app infrastructure, a resident of the U.S. could register his/her/zir/their address and phone/email with the server. The server could then put the registrants into a geospatially indexed database and query to find those affected by a newly issued alert and then email/text the relevant subscribers: “If you’re at 1141 George Perry Floyd Memorial Boulevard right now, which you said was your home address, your county has issued an evacuation order covering your neighborhood. Click here for more information, including a list of county-run shelters.” No matter how fast the U.S. population grows via open borders the computational capability of server CPUs should grow yet faster and, therefore, it would never be impractical to issue personalized alerts to every resident of the U.S.

With all of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the federal government on disaster-related projects over the years, why hasn’t something like this been built by the government? Google, Apple, or Amazon could probably build it pretty easily given that those companies already know our addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. If the above capabilities were built into Android and iOS that would cover almost everyone. Maybe these big companies wouldn’t want to implement this capability, though, due to fear of liability in case they happen to miss an evacuation order. (Maybe they could be protected from liability as the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers were?)

Here’s a concrete example from Tampa (wiped out in 1848 and hit badly again in 1921), starting with the “evacuation zone map” for Hillsborough County:

The official evacuation order says “Hillsborough County has issued a mandatory evacuation order for Evacuation Zones A and B…”, but the the legend doesn’t mention “zones”. The legend refers to an “evacuation level” of either A or B:

If we look at a satellite view of the city we can see that a lot of people shouldn’t have to run away:

My favorite steakhouse, Bern’s, is in the center of the city and Zone C. Same deal for Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City. The art museum, on the other hand, is in Zone A. Need to go to the hijab store in Brandon, Florida (suburban Tampa)? That’s not in any evacuation zone (i.e., the hijab inventory should be safe). The Tampa Zoo, on the other hand, seems to be in Zone A, which is not great news for the animals. Busch Gardens is not in any evacuation zone. The big airport? Zone A.

During the Tampa evacuation it seems that some people ran away who didn’t need to and some people stayed despite an order to evacuate because they didn’t know what zone they were in. Once on the road, things got more chaotic with shelters that filled up and traffic jams. Officials were saying “You don’t have to go more than 10 or 20 miles”, but residents didn’t know which shelter was the most sensible destination so some folks might have driven 100+ miles away to a hotel or relative’s house. Ships always have muster stations so that people know where to go in the event that the whistle blows 7 times and then there is a long horn sound. Maybe the app could have a preplanned idea of which shelter people in which blocks of a city should go to first, adjusted for the pet ownership status of the app user (it’s more complex to evacuate with a pet than one might think; only some shelters are pet-friendly and the owner is required to have and bring a crate big enough for the pet and the owner can’t stay with the pet while in the shelter). This could be refined if information is received that a shelter is full and turning people away.

What about after the hurricane arrives? The app/server combo could send an SMS or push notification reminding people to put their phones into low-power mode. The software could then notify people when it was safe to return to their individual neighborhoods (this can be complicated after a hurricane because sometimes bridges to barrier islands are destroyed and/or roads are blocked by trees). Using data from poweroutage.us, the software could include SMS information about whether power was likely to be available at a user’s home (maybe someone would choose to remain with friends or relatives until power was likely back).

Separately, here were our neighbors’ Hurricane Milton preparations as of yesterday, which may or may not meet FEMA standards:

Related:

  • “NY governor slammed for saying black children don’t know what computers are” (BBC). If Democrats don’t think that Black people can use computers and Democrats run the U.S. (which they do right now), why hasn’t the above-described app already been built and released by FEMA?
  • “FEMA Scrambles to Confront Two Storms—and Misinformation” (WSJ): “Instead, federal officials’ efforts to save lives are being complicated by an unusual level of politically charged misinformation, which authorities say risks leading people to disregard evacuation orders…” (the authorities are sure that the problem is that Americans are allowed to speak their minds on Twitter and not that people in a country where IQ is falling might not have the brainpower and diligence to get through the multiple web sites that are required to make an evacuation decision. (If the “authorities” are correct maybe Twitter and Facebook need to be shut down any time that an emergency has been declared? If “misinformation” is killing people and saving lives from COVID-19 justified suspending the First Amendment right to assemble then surely it would make sense to suspend the First Amendment as a hurricane approaches the U.S.)
Full post, including comments

The smartest person in the world says that AI will end civilization within 20 years

by philg

I hope that we can all agree that whoever wins the Nobel Prize in physics is either the smartest person in the world or very close to having that distinction. This year’s smartest person is Geoffrey Hinton (WSJ):

A 2023 interview (Guardian):

Hinton has been fielding a new request to talk every two minutes since he spoke out on Monday about his fears that AI progress could lead to the end of civilisation within 20 years.

But when it comes to offering concrete advice, he is lost for words. “I’m not a policy guy,” he says. “I’m just someone who’s suddenly become aware that there’s a danger of something really bad happening. I wish I had a nice solution, like: ‘Just stop burning carbon, and you’ll be OK.’ But I can’t see a simple solution like that.”

In the past year, the rapid progress in AI models convinced Hinton to take seriously the threat that “digital intelligence” could one day supersede humanity’s.

“For the last 50 years, I’ve been trying to make computer models that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order to understand better how the brain is learning things. But very recently, I decided that maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain.

We’re doomed, in other words. In the meantime, though, we should vote for bigger government:

“I’m a socialist,” Hinton added. “I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good.

Let’s check in with our future AI overlord to see how the “new flagship model” does at arithmetic:

This calculation is explained confidently, but seems obviously wrong. The Biden-Harris administration gave away $170 billion in taxpayer funds to gender studies graduates and drop-outs (“student loan forgiveness”). At $1 million/day and zero interest it would take 170,000 days to pay off this single act of largesse. All that is required to do this in one’s head with middle school skilz is 170e9/1e6 and then 9-6=3 so we have 170e3. If we want to turn 170 thousand days into years we can see that works out to about 500 years because 170 can be approximated as 365/2.

So Hinton is saying that AI will go from not being able to do arithmetic or reason in orders of magnitude to destroying us all in 20 years.

Related…

Full post, including comments

The nation’s smartest voters (New Yorkers)

by philg

We are informed by New York-based media that New Yorkers are highly intelligent Followers of Science and that voters in Arkansas, for example, are stupid. Let’s check out their respective politicians. Arkansans have sent Tom Cotton to the House and now Senate in three elections. Here’s part of Cotton’s Wikipedia biography:

Cotton was accepted to Harvard College after graduating from high school in 1995. At Harvard, he majored in government and was a member of the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, often dissenting from the liberal majority. In articles, Cotton addressed what he saw as “sacred cows” such as affirmative action [He was an antiracist even in the 1990s!]. He graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in 1998 after only three years of study. Cotton’s senior thesis focused on The Federalist Papers.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Cotton spent one year as a law clerk for Judge Jerry Edwin Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

On January 11, 2005, Cotton enlisted in the United States Army. He entered Officer Candidate School (OCS) in March 2005 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June. He completed the U.S. Army Ranger Course, a 62-day small unit tactics and leadership program that earned him the Ranger tab, and Airborne School to earn the Parachutist Badge.

In May 2006, Cotton was deployed to Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) as a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division. In Iraq, he led a 41-man air assault infantry platoon in the 506th Infantry Regiment, and planned and performed daily combat patrols.

From October 2008 to July 2009, Cotton was deployed to eastern Afghanistan. He was assigned within the Train Advise Assist Command – East at its Gamberi forward operating base (FOB) in Laghman Province as the operations officer of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), where he planned daily counter-insurgency and reconstruction operations.

Cotton was honorably discharged in September 2009. During his time in the service, he completed two combat deployments overseas, was awarded a Bronze Star, two Army Commendation Medals, a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Ranger tab, an Afghanistan Campaign Medal, and an Iraq Campaign Medal.

Digression: What are the Iraqis doing now that Americans spent $trillions and tens of thousands of lives (in combat and back at home due to having spent all of that wealth; poverty kills just as surely as war) on “Operation Iraqi Freedom”? Chanting “Death to America”:

Let’s compare to the biographies and activities of the politicians and bureaucrats selected by the nation’s most intelligent people. First, there’s the New York City Lock Doc:

In conversations caught on hidden camera, New York City’s former COVID czar said that he’d organized a pair of sex parties in the second half of 2020, as New Yorkers coped with peak pandemic social isolation. “The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” Jay Varma told an undercover reporter with whom he thought he was on a date. In a video compiled from several recordings taken this summer, the onetime senior public-health adviser to city hall describes the two events that took place in August and November of 2020. He also talked about his work promoting vaccination in the city by making it “very uncomfortable” for those who wanted to avoid the shots.

And we also have Eric Adams:

Wikipedia says that Adams started his career as a gang member and collaborated with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (“Farrakhan has accused Jews of controlling large sections of the media, the US government and the global economy, regularly referring to these Jews as “Satanic”. He has repeatedly described Adolf Hitler as a ‘great man'”).

Finally, New Yorkers chose Yusef Salaam as a lawmaker on the New York City Council. He was accused of attacking the Central Park Jogger and eventually found to be innocent of rape. WSJ story by the prosecutor:

Although none of the others admitted joining in the rape of Trisha Meili, they admitted attacking male victims and a couple on a tandem bike, and each of them named some or all of the five as joining them. … Mr. Salaam took the stand at his trial, represented by a lawyer chosen and paid for by his mother, and testified that he had gone into the park carrying a 14-inch metal pipe—the same type of weapon that was used to bludgeon both a male schoolteacher and Ms. Meili. Mr. Reyes’s confession changed none of this. He admitted being the man whose DNA had been left in the jogger’s body and on her clothing, but the two juries that heard those facts knew the main assailant in the rape had not been caught. The five were charged as accomplices, as persons “acting in concert” with each other and with the then-unknown man who raped the jogger, not as those who actually performed the act. In their original confessions—later recanted—they admitted to grabbing her breasts and legs, and two of them admitted to climbing on top of her and simulating intercourse. Semen was found on the inside of their clothing, corroborating those confessions.

Mr. Reyes’s confession, DNA match and claim that he acted alone required that the rape charges against the five be vacated. I agreed with that decision, and still do. But the other charges, for crimes against other victims, should not have been vacated. Nothing Mr. Reyes said exonerated these five of those attacks. And there was certainly more than enough evidence to support those convictions of first-degree assault, robbery, riot and other charges.

Americans are supposed to follow their NY-based intellectual leaders when voting. But are the above gentlemen the kinds of people whom the average American wants to give authority to? (Especially important now that government is bigger and far more powerful than ever.)

Full post, including comments

Does Israel need a strategic bombing capability?

by philg

Today is the one-year anniversary of the fighting started by the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on October 7, 2023. The dragged-out low-intensity nature of of the battles over a 76-year period seem to show the potential for humanitarian aid to make wars last forever. See Florence Nightingale opposed the Red Cross:

How could anyone who sought to reduce human suffering want to make war less costly? By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable.

The Japanese and Germans didn’t get humanitarian aid in the early 1940s and they were quite happy to unconditionally surrender and not wage new wars against the people with whom they’d previously fought (at least so far). The majority of Palestinians polled, on the other hand, want to continue fighting Israel because, apparently, being at war with Israel isn’t an unsustainable lifestyle.

The desire among Palestinians to wage war isn’t new, of course. These are the folks who responded to Hamas’s promise to wage war by electing Hamas. What is new since October 7, 2023 is Israel being attacked by an enemy who is 1,000 miles away, i.e., Yemen. Israel has responded to Yemen’s missile attacks with a few feeble air raids, but the Yemenis aren’t discouraged. Israel doesn’t have the right aircraft to travel that kind of distance carrying enough bombs to change minds in Yemen or to destroy enough infrastructure that Iran can’t resupply Yemen with missiles.

(The Yemenis are another group of humans who can stay at war forever because all of their basic needs are met by international do-gooders. The UN feeds at least one third of Yemen (source) and the Yemenis have turned all of these external inputs into more Yemenis. The population was about 20 million when the civil war began in 2004 and today is estimated by the UN at close to 40 million.

US and EU taxpayers who have no children are always happy to work some extra hours to enable Yemenis to have one of the world’s highest rates of reproduction.)

The first question is whether strategic bombing is still practical in an age where missiles are, apparently, widely available. Could B-52s operate over Yemen, for example, with protection from fighters? If the answer is “yes”, wouldn’t it make sense for Israel to invest in a modern fleet of bombers?

I think it would be interesting to adapt the Airbus A380 to serve as a bomber. The B-52 isn’t any stronger in terms of handling g loads than an airliner. It carries just 70,000 lbs. of bombs and is a huge maintenance and fuel hog. The A380 can hold 330,000 lbs. of payload (the 747-8F can hold about 295,000 lbs.) and both aircraft can easily make the round trip from Israel to Yemen while fully loaded.

Since Israel doesn’t have $trillions to print and burn as the U.S. apparently does, perhaps the country could engineer an A380 or 747-8F to carry freight most of the time but be readily convertible to strategic bomber when it is time to eliminate Yemen’s military capabilities.

If the answer is that old-school bombers are too vulnerable to widely available missiles then perhaps Israel needs to figure out a way to deliver B-52 or Airbus A380 loads of explosives in some other way. But what would that be? Missiles that are launched from Israel? Missiles that are launched from a ship? Drone aircraft? (the Yemenis recently shot down a $30 million American MQ-9 Reaper (AP) so this doesn’t seem like a good approach unless the drones can be mass-produced at low cost)

Related:

  • “The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.” — Arthur Travers Harris, after people complained that the bombers he commanded had destroyed Dresden
Full post, including comments

Does Kamala Harris propose “Socialism” or “Xboxism”?

by philg

My response to an X user who wrote “Usually it’s an exaggeration to claim that the other side is lunatic socialism. With Kamala 2024 that’s become a reality we face.”:

I don’t think that it is fair to call Democrats “socialists”. Under Socialism, e.g., in the Soviet Union, able-bodied citizens were required to work or be guilty of the crime of “Parasitism”. There were no undocumented immigrants. Certainly, a Soviet family couldn’t spend four generations living in public housing, getting free health care via Medicaid, shopping for food with EBT, and chatting on an Obamaphone. Kamala Harris and friends propose a system in which half of a country works/commutes 60 hours/week so that the other half can relax and play Xbox. That’s not a political system contemplated by Marx or Lenin. Maybe it should be called Xboxism?

Note that the above idea isn’t original. “Transferism, Not Socialism, Is the Drug Americans Are Hooked On” (Foundation for Economic Education):

Transferism is a system in which one group of people forces a second group to pay for things that the people believe they, or some third group, should have. Transferism isn’t about controlling the means of production. It is about the forced redistribution of what’s produced.

I think Xboxism is an easier term to understand, though, because it captures what government policy enables. And now that we have open borders we need a term that covers a migrant family that arrives to take up the Maskachusetts offer of guaranteed shelter forever even if nobody ever tries to work but instead enjoys a life of permanent leisure.

Related:

Full post, including comments