Israel’s ponderous conventional military on October 7

This one goes into the Department of Important, but Depressing… I had been wondering why most of Israel’s attack helicopters, at least, weren’t on the scene on October 7 within an hour or two. (Though Wikipedia reminds us that an attack helicopter isn’t the best tool for an ambiguous situation:

In September 2015, an Egyptian Apache attacked a group of foreign tourists in the Western Desert, killing 12 people and injuring 10. The AH-64s fired at the civilians with rockets and 30mm machine guns for several hours, even though survivors said they waved the white flag. The Egyptian Interior Ministry stated that the group, whom were mistaken for militants, were in a restricted area. The tourists were reportedly accompanied by Egyptian police, and their vehicles were marked with logos of the tourist company.

The situation on Oct 7 was confusing because the invaders included armed men in an array of uniforms (including “no uniform”) and some “Gaza civilians” in civilian clothes).

Today’s New York Times also tries to figure out why the powerful IDF was so ponderous and ill-prepared for what in retrospect seems like an obvious hazard (the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad both having publicly proclaimed their intent to kill Israelis, take over Israel, etc.). “On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists made attacking Israel look easy.” (non-paywalled version, but the extensive videos from Hamas bodycams don’t work):

The full reasons behind the military’s slow response may take months to understand. The government has promised an inquiry. But a New York Times investigation found that Israel’s military was undermanned, out of position and so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for targeting information. Commandos rushed into battle armed only for brief combat. Helicopter pilots were ordered to look to news reports and Telegram channels to choose targets.

And perhaps most damning: The Israel Defense Forces did not even have a plan to respond to a large-scale Hamas attack on Israeli soil, according to current and former soldiers and officers. If such a plan existed on a shelf somewhere, the soldiers said, no one had trained on it and nobody followed it. The soldiers that day made it up as they went along.

Previously undisclosed documents reviewed by The Times show just how drastically the military misread the situation. Records from early in the day show that, even during the attack, the military still assessed that Hamas, at best, would be able to breach Israel’s border fence in just a few places. A separate intelligence document, prepared weeks later, shows that Hamas teams actually breached the fence in more than 30 locations and quickly moved deep into southern Israel.

Hamas fighters poured into Israel with heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, land mines and more. [corroborated by the fact that they managed to kill at least one tank crew] They were prepared to fight for days. Israeli commandos apparently believed they would be fighting for just hours; one said he set out that morning without his night-vision goggles.

The small size of the teams suggested that commanders fundamentally misunderstood the threat. Troops rolled out with pistols and assault rifles, enough to face a band of hostage-taking terrorists, but not to go into full-scale battle. … “The terrorists had a distinct tactical advantage in firepower,” said Yair Ansbacher, 40, a reservist in a counterterrorism unit who fought on Oct. 7. He and his colleagues mainly used pistols, assault rifles and sometimes sniper rifles, he said.

Davidi Ben Zion, 38, a major in the reserves, said reservists never trained to respond at a moment’s notice to an invasion. The training assumed that Israeli intelligence would learn of a looming invasion in advance, giving reservists time to prepare to deploy. “The procedure states that we have the battalion ready for combat in 24 hours,” he said. “There’s a checklist to authorize the distribution of everything. We practiced this for many years.”

Even at noon, according to another Southern Command official, officers there did not understand what was happening. They assessed that Hamas had sent about 200 gunmen into Israel. They were off by a factor of 10.

Are there any heroes?

With communication out of Re’im disrupted and military leaders in Tel Aviv struggling to understand the scope of the attack, Maglan turned to an unlikely source for information: Refael Hayun, a 40-year-old who lived with his parents in Netivot, about five miles from Gaza.

Mr. Hayun watched Hamas videos of the attack in real time on social media and relayed information to Maglan’s officers. He began fielding WhatsApp messages from people trying to save their children, friends and themselves.

“Hi Refael, we’re stuck in a trash container near the party location,” one message read. “Please come rescue us. We’re 16 people.”

Mr. Hayun relayed those locations to the commandos, but they did not grasp the enormity of the fight. One Maglan team killed several terrorists near a base in Zikim, just north of Gaza, but they didn’t realize until 11 a.m. that Hamas fighters had stormed Kfar Aza, where some of the worst fighting took place.

Maybe this is just in the nature of conventional militaries. They have the power to level cities, but, with the exception of responding to incoming aircraft (or rockets), are slow to get started. Sad, nonetheless.

Second Amendment fans here may be cheered to learn that the sluggish response of the IDF has motivated a lot of Israelis to apply for gun permits, though even trained IDF soldiers with military rifles were no match for the thousands of Hamas fighters with RPGs and true machine guns. From an Israeli friend:

on last Friday I went to renew my gun license. a normal procedure.

I was the oldest in the 24 people group – many of them were at the age of 25-35 and they went for their first time to the shooting range in order to appeal for a license.

I got 99 bullets into the center (one hit the target but was a bit aside 🙂 ) and then got 20 out of 20 in the final exam (you need to have 14 in the center in order to pass and all the rest in the target itself and not outside)

According to my Israeli friends, Arab citizens of Israel have been solid supporters of the IDF’s efforts in Gaza (i.e., a white progressive in California is far more supportive of the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) than an Islamic Arab citizen of Israel). If they want to join a well-organized militia against the next attack by Gazans they can apply for and receive a gun permit. However, military service is optional for Arab Israelis and most Arab citizens lack the necessary military experience to qualify for the permit.

The videos selected by the NYT show Gazans killing Israelis in cars, mostly with ordinary rifles (what Americans call “assault rifles”). If every driver had a Tavor in the trunk, perhaps at least some would have been able to pull over, use the car as cover, and make life difficult for the Gazans.

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The California Righteous prevent me from sharing fireworks porn

We’re gearing up for one of the three days per year when it is legal to terrify canines in Florida (July 4, Dec 31, Jan 1; contrast to up north: “All fireworks are illegal in Massachusetts for private residents”).

I posted the two pictures below from the Walmart here in Jupiter, Florida on Facebook with the caption “Safe and Sane’ way to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Florida.”:

The post was removed three days later by Facebook:

Taking a picture inside a Walmart is interpreted as an attempt to buy/trade/sell:

I requested a review and there is no way to tell them “I was not buying or selling anything”. Nor to enter any free text, explanation, or defense. Here are the options:

It looks like Facebook has amped up their moderation in general. Here’s something from earlier the same day:

I certainly don’t remember posting anything nude/sexual, not even pictures of brave Virginia Democrat Susanna Gibson. Facebook is where I post Florida beach scenes, pictures of the kids and Mindy the Crippler, etc. There doesn’t seem to be any way to figure out either the date of the offending nude/sexual post or the content. It’s a totalitarian system in which the accused is supposed to know his crime (updated to “his/her/zir/their crime”).

Here’s the rule:

Other than showing Mindy the Crippler’s naked body, I can’t imagine what they’re talking about.

My recent Facebook posts that haven’t been removed…

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Two ways of reading an article about Jeffrey Epstein

A recent Wall Street Journal article (non-paywall link):

The article sheds no light on how exactly this elite guy became elite, made money, etc. A guy goes from being the son of a gardener (Wikipedia) to being rich enough to operate a Gulfstream and nobody has any explanation for how it happened (based on my extensive research (i.e., reading the Wikipedia page), I’m guessing that he stole it from investors and clients).

What about those who are interested in learning about Mr. Epstein’s associates (customers?) in activities involving young women? They too will be disappointed. No names are named! The Wall Street Journal broke open the Theranos fraud, but they can’t find the name of even one person who was a customer of what we are told was a big prostitution operation.

Where does that leave us? With an interesting use of language and a demonstration of the different impressions that selective reading can produce.

Path 1 through the article:

… registered as a sex offender … soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution … federal sex-trafficking charges … groom a new generation of women to exploit … lured dozens of women … sexually exploited … coerced them to perform sex acts

Path 2:

… private jet … then in her 20s … New York townhouse … private jet to visit scientists, political leaders and tech-company founders … in exchange for money … private island … paid the women as if they were employees … If he thought their teeth were crooked or yellow, he sent them to Manhattan dentist Thomas Magnani for a consultation … units in an apartment building near his townhouse where he housed dozens of young women as well as prominent guests

The last part of Path 2 may explain why Mr. Epstein was so tightly connected to Democrats. He was providing health care and housing, the twin pillars of the Democrat project. (See “Billionaire sex offender Epstein gave heavily to Democrats, until he didn’t” (2018))

And, of course, Mr. Epstein’s actions may depend on the context…

Harvard said in a 2020 report that Epstein donated $9.1 million before 2008 and had visited the campus dozens of times after his conviction. It declined to comment further.

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Why isn’t Facebook’s software smart enough to add “you already have a friend with the same name” to scam friend requests?

One popular fraud technique on Facebook:

  • copy some public elements from a profile, e.g., Mahmud Mohammed Ahmed’s
  • create a fake account with the same name and profile image
  • make friend requests of the people who are friends with the real Mahmud Mohammed Ahmed

Quite a few people seem to accept these fake friend requests, not checking to see if they are already friends with Mahmud Mohammed Ahmed. Why isn’t the Facebook software so say “This may be from a fake account; you’re already friends with someone named Mahmud Mohammed Ahmed” and display the profile pictures side by side?

Speaking of profile pictures, why isn’t the Facebook fraud software smart enough to check new accounts to see if anyone by the same name has exactly the same profile images? Maybe there are multiple Mahmud Mohammed Ahmeds out of 8 billion humans, but what are the odds that they look exactly the same and have chosen to dress and pose in the same way for a photo?

It looks as though approximately 10 percent of people will fall for the above scam. Here’s a request from a month ago:

Here’s the real person:

The scammer got 35 friends out of 299.

It’s the third night of Kwanzaa. What do we find on Facebook? A “Professor at … Professor” who purportedly lives in Maryland, but whose profile image seems to be Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr. Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., Ph.D.‘s.

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No human is illegal, but some buses are

“In Bid to Slow Migrant Surge, Adams Restricts Bus Arrivals Into New York” (NYT):

Mayor Eric Adams placed limits for the first time on Wednesday on how migrants arrive in New York, pushing back against continuing efforts by the governor of Texas to send tens of thousands of asylum seekers to the city.

In an executive order, Mr. Adams required charter bus companies to provide 32 hours’ advance notice of the arrival of a busload of migrants in the city and limited the times of day at which migrants can be dropped off.

The change, a year and a half into a crisis that has consumed the Adams administration, comes after 14 busloads of migrants arrived from Texas in a single night last week, the highest total recorded since the spring of 2022.

“We cannot allow buses with people needing our help to arrive without warning at any hour of day and night,” Mr. Adams said during a virtual news conference with the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, and the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston. “To be clear, this is not stopping people from coming, but about ensuring the safety of migrants and making sure they can arrive in a coordinated and orderly way.”

Companies that violate the executive order face class B misdemeanor charges, which could result in three months in jail and a $500 fine for individuals and a $2,000 fine for corporations. Buses violating the order may also be seized by the Police Department.

Under the terms of the executive order, buses can unload migrants only between 8:30 a.m. and 12 p.m., Monday through Friday. People must be dropped off at a specified location in the Times Square area or another location that city officials approve.

We are informed that low-skill migrants make us richer, but the article says that 10 percent of Denver’s budget is now devoted to housing migrants.

After the City of Chicago recently instituted similar regulations on bus companies, Texas responded by sending buses to the suburbs of Chicago instead, according to Mr. Johnson.

The buses have been “literally dropping families off in the middle of nowhere,” sowing “an incredible amount of chaos,” he said.

It is unclear if Mr. Abbott will follow a similar playbook by sending buses to places outside New York City. A spokesman for Mr. Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If that happened, Mr. Goldfein said, “that would only highlight the recklessness and total disregard for the welfare of the people who are passengers on these buses.”

I continue to be fascinated by progressives who say that Texas is a place where nobody should live, e.g., because of restrictions on abortion care, and at the same time that migrants are harmed by being provided with free transportation to Massachusetts, New York, or Illinois. Isn’t it worth a few days of sleeping in a church basement in order to enjoy a lifetime of governance by Democrats rather than suffering tyrannical Republic rule?

The New York Times ends the article by referring to becoming wealthier and culturally richer as a “crisis”:

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Sterile gloves are as effective as masks

2015, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, “Unmasking the surgeons: the evidence base behind the use of facemasks in surgery”:

overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination

2023, Injury, “Risk of wound infection with use of sterile versus clean gloves in wound repair at the Emergency Department: A systematic review and meta-analysis”:

No evidence of additional protection against wound infections with the use of sterile gloves for wound repair in the ED compared to clean gloves was found.

Let’s ask Dr. ChatGPT:

Speaking of wounds, we can remember as we light the kinara this evening, for the second night of Kwanzaa the likely headwounds of the women who were hit on their heads with toasters by Professor Dr. Dr. Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., Ph.D., the creator of the holiday.

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Hierarchy of victimhood from the CDC

Our celebration of Kwanzaa and the work of Professor Dr. Dr. Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., Ph.D., with and without toasters, begins today…

A Libs of Tiktok Tweet includes the following photo of a poster in a public school in Nashville, Tennessee:

Note the hierarchy of victimhood: The undocumented (listed first) are more important than Black students. Muslims are more important than those who identify as LGBTQ. Almost everyone is more important than the disabled.

Also, why does the school commit to celebrating Latinx culture, but not Muslim culture? What is stopping the school from celebrating what happens in Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen?

Where does the money to research, develop, print, and post this hierarchy come from? Your federal tax dollars via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

Here’s the glsen.org web site:

It looks like it is mostly a 2SLGBTQQIA+ organization, yet somehow they’re experts on other victimhood categories such as “undocumented” and “Black”. Their Form 990 for 2021 shows that they’re getting about $8.5 million per year in grants, perhaps part of “CDC allocated $85 million for grants requiring schools to start student-led clubs supporting LGBT youth” (The Center Square, 2022).

What if one wanted a victimhood poster without the hierarchy? How about a motorized wheel of victimhood in which the groups are arranged around the circumference? If the wheel rotates once every 7 hours, for example, that will make sure that students don’t see the same victimhood group on top every morning. I tried having my favorite artist put this together:

I’m not sure where ChatGPT got these bizarre spellings. I think that I spelled everything correctly in my prompt:

[after asking for a circular poster] Please change the poster so that the labels are only the following: Black, LGBTQ, Undocumented Immigrant, Muslim, Latinx, female, disabled

Are we seeing the HAL 9000 glitching following some circuitry removal?

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A Golden Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all readers who celebrate and, for those who don’t, inspiration to get started celebrating…

This is “The Golden Retriever Family Christmas Tree” from the Danbury Mint. It is unclear when these were made, but the “mint” was in China according to this eBay ad. Via some research on archive.org, I found a 2006 web page offering a somewhat different version at $129.

I can’t figure out if the version at Mindy the Crippler’s vet is pre-2006 or post-2006.

Let’s hope that the Danbury Mint gets back into this important product area and that a Samoyed Christmas Tree centerpiece is an option as well.

Merry Christmas to everyone, especially the folks at archive.org!

A couple of images stolen from Facebook groups:

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If you strung your own Christmas lights, you were paid $6,000 after taxes

Merry Christmas Eve!

If you want to feel better about your economic situation, here is a crew stringing lights at a neighbor’s house:

“Is that the same company that strung lights for the HOA’s clubhouse?” I asked. “They told me that their minimum fee is $5,000.” The owner of the house responded, “We’re paying $6,000.”

So… if you strung your own lights this year, that’s like being paid $6,000 extra, after tax.

Merry Christmas, indeed!

Separately, how tough would it be to build a robot that could climb a tree trunk, secure the end of a light strand at the top, and then come down while wrapping the strand around the trunk? This is a common Christmas light display for cities, hotels, and houses. It is apparently an expensive job and, without a bucket truck, a risky one. Isn’t this ripe for automation and semi-autonomy?

If we can’t have robots to string our lights, how about reengineering the lights themselves so that we can get a higher return on investment from stringing them? Any given light string should have at least 10 different themes (light colors):

  1. Christmas (green and red)
  2. Thanksgiving (orange, red, and yellow?)
  3. Halloween (orange and purple)
  4. (for Californians and Ivy League students) #FreePalestine (white, green, red, black for the Palestine flag and/or spell out “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”)
  5. (for those practicing Jewcraft) Hanukkah (white and blue)
  6. Ramadan
  7. Eid al-Fitr
  8. Islamic New Year
  9. Holi (every color?)
  10. Chinese New Year (red, yellow, and green)

Loosely Related:

‘Cause I’m a redneck woman
I ain’t no high class broad
I’m just a product of my raising
I say, “hey ya’ll” and “yee-haw”
And I keep my Christmas lights on
On my front porch all year long

(“Redneck Woman”, by Gretchen Wilson and John Rich (not to be confused with abortion care and lockdown advocate Gretchen Whitmer!))

The final look of the professionally-lit house:

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Lockdown skepticism as the modern French Resistance

Vinay Prasad, the UCSF heretic against Faucism, recently posted the following on Twitter:

Heading back to SF from Wash U St Louis
It was great to give 4 talks over 2 days.

I hope to make at least 2 available on YouTube, & 3 on plenary session.

It was heartening to talk to so many sensible doctors. When it comes to COVID19 ppl stopped me in the halls to say…

Masking 2 year olds…
School closure…
Vaccine mandates for college kids…
Lockdowns…

were all illogical and horrific public health and they are glad I spoke up

Many agreed but the climate was too hostile for them to speak up

Is it fair to say that this is like the Resistance in France during World War II? Before 1945, nobody was a member and after 1945 it transpired that every French person had been a member of the Resistance?

(I had thought that support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) was the anti-Resistance in the sense that Palestinians polled prior to October 7 generally said that they supported Hamas, but after October 7 we were informed that no Palestinians supported Hamas. That’s still what one learns from the media and the typical Twitter feed, but, as noted in International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (and a poll result), Palestinians polled in November 2023 supported Hamas (75 percent) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (85 percent).)

Dr. Prasad is a vaccine believer: “People died by delaying the initial vaccine.” I think he means that people died because it took a few extra months to get the vaccine approved and distributed. That’s probably true for Israelis because if the vaccine been approved prior to the 2020 election, Trump would have been reelected and Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and various civilians likely wouldn’t have dared to kidnap, rape, and kill U.S. citizens for fear that the unhinged guy in the White House would push the button on them.

I still can’t figure out why we aren’t able to see the effects of the vaccine on a country-by-country basis, e.g., a lower excess death rate for a country that got vaccinated sooner. See Where is the population-wide evidence that COVID vaccines reduce COVID-tagged death rates? for a question that remains unanswered despite some studies within countries and the faith of otherwise reasonably skeptical people such as Dr. Prasad.

My own skepticism from three years ago… If COVID-19 vaccines weren’t tested on likely COVID-19 victims, how do we know that they will reduce COVID-19 deaths? (the kind of people whom SARS-CoV-2 had been killing were excluded from the vaccine trial):

Let’s have a look at the Moderna FDA paperwork. Only 3 people in the vaccine group, out of 15,208 total, died during the study (approximately 3 months; see pages 17 and 18), which tells you that Moderna picked a much healthier population with a much longer life expectancy than the kinds of people who have been tagged on death with COVID-19 positive test result. (If we assume that a typical COVID-19-tagged death is among those with a life expectancy of 4 years, we would have expected at least hundreds of deaths during a similar study of vaccination among people who really need the vaccination. Note that the Swedish data suggest that 4 years is an overestimate.)

Also three years old, but more fun… #MarkedSafe from Homemade Cookies and Crafts:

Dear Parents and Caregivers,

As we approach the December break, it is a time of year where many families and school staff like to give homemade baked goods and crafts as gifts of appreciation. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic we are going to respectfully ask to put a hold on this practice as a part of our ongoing efforts to keep everyone safe.

We have all worked hard to keep each other safe and to keep our schools open. We appreciate your willingness to find alternative ways to express your gratitude this year. A letter to the teacher with a specific thanks would be greatly appreciated!

(That was at a school for rich suburbanites. It was open with a mask order in force (later they added vaccine coercion). City school systems ostensibly serving the poor in Maskachusetts were still closed and would stay mostly closed until fall 2021.)

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