Montreal, Marijuana, and Masks

This is a report on a Thanksgiving Week trip to Montreal. I arrived on a nonstop flight on Lynx after Nine minutes of Formula 1 glory at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Being a flight attendant on Lynx is a relaxing job because they don’t serve anything other than water. Seats don’t recline, so there are no passenger fights over space for the FAs to break up. I texted the sign to a friend and he responded “If Joe Biden had ridden Lynx he would say ‘I know how people in Gaza feel about food and water shortages because I spent a few hours on Lynx.'” (“Almost lost my Corvette”)

Once we arrived at CYUL, however, nobody was available to drive the “mobile lounge” out to where we were parked. The excuse was that it was raining. About 45 minutes after landing, we finally entered the terminal. Clearing immigration was quick, but it took another 30 minutes to get my suitcase (I had some actual suits as part of my software expert witness slavery so couldn’t do carry-on). After that, it was a 21-minute C$52 Uber ride to the downtown DoubleTree Hilton (there is a bus, but no train).

Considering that recreational marijuana has been legal in Canada since October 2018, a shocking difference between the Montreal highway and a Boston-area highway is the lack of marijuana billboards. This continued once on the city streets; there were no street-corner advertisements for weed delivery. I asked Professor ChatGPT about this:

In Canada, advertising marijuana is subject to strict regulations under the Cannabis Act, which came into effect on October 17, 2018. These regulations are designed to protect public health and safety, particularly to prevent young people and others who are vulnerable to cannabis-related harms from being encouraged to use cannabis. … The promotion of cannabis, cannabis accessories, or services related to cannabis is generally prohibited unless it is presented in a manner that cannot be seen by a young person. This means that many traditional forms of advertising, such as billboards or television commercials, are often not permissible.

The view from the 37th floor of the downtown tower where I was kept:

I escaped Dame Gothel for a Sunday morning walk around the city. Here’s La Joute, in front of the convention center:

A closer look:

I eventually made my way down to the science museum, where they also have a section on religion:

I’ll save the obligatory Notre-Dame pictures for later in this post.

Montreal is great for outdoor light displays and indoor shopping malls.

The Time Out Market has great food, a lively atmosphere, and four great-condition new Stern pinball machines. What’s not to love?

What about those who don’t have C$25 to spend on dinner at the market? It’s not San Francisco, but there are definitely encampments and homeless people in the city.

Although notable for churches, the city’s religious future seems Islamic. You might see a covered woman every minute or two when walking downtown. Arabic was a commonly overheard language. I wonder how long French can survive in Montreal. Spanish, Haitian Creole, Bangla, and Arabic were all languages that I heard. People with whom I spoke who’d immigrated 10 or more years ago said that they hadn’t learned to speak French and were not interested in learning.

Intersection of Islamic and Western culture: the Uber AI geniuses assign the pronoun “they” to a person named Mohammad:

It is unclear for how long the Rainbow Flag religion and Islam can coexist, but for now they seem to both be popular:

What about Christianity? I went into a few churches and saw only a handful of people doing anything related to this religion. Here’s Notre-Dame:

What about the temples of commerce? Montreal retail seems to have suffered much less from online competition than U.S. urban retail. Much to my delight, there were quite a few old-school camera shops and photo labs!

In addition to my brief stop at the contemporary art museum’s temporary space (see Pussy Riot in Montreal), I stopped into the main art museum. As in a US art museum, Kehinde Wiley is the first and most prominently displayed artist:

Another painting on the important subject of BLM (Beavers’ Lives Matter):

The old building from the new building…

Here’s the Jared Bowman Memorial Door:

Speaking of Capitol Hill, a Mountie meets Elizabeth Warren’s cousin (by David Garneau):

Visitors carefully study how to paint like a 3-year-old who got into all the Halloween candy:

No Greenspun trip report post-2020 is complete without masketology, right? When downtown, I saw someone in a mask roughly every two minutes (including outdoors; #BecauseScience). The people most likely to wear masks were young women, i.e., those whose risk of being injured or killed by COVID-19 is the lowest. Here’s one at CYUL:

After landing at PBI, a family on their way back to New York sports the “adults masked and kid unmasked so that the kid can get infected and then transmit it to the adults a few days later” technique.

That’s the news from Montreal!

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Claudine Gay and the other Ivy League super-elites

To show the world’s Jew-haters just how wrong they are about rich Wall Street Jewish speculators controlling everything from behind the scenes, some rich Wall Street Jewish speculators have forced out the president of University of Pennsylvania. “UPenn President Liz Magill has resigned, but antisemitism remains a problem on college campuses” (CNN):

Last week, Magill and her counterparts from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were called to testify in a hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Magill, along with Claudine Gay of Harvard University and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, gave widely criticized testimony, in which they failed to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews as explicitly against campus harassment and bullying codes.

Unable to imagine a job more secure than university bureaucrat, I was stunned by this development. I’m also dismayed because I don’t think that this will change anyone’s mind and, I guess, I’m a free-speech absolutist. If Liz Magill had straight-up told the politicians “I hate Jews, hope that more of them are killed, and hope that the Islamic Resistance Movement (‘Hamas’) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad achieve their long-sought river to the sea liberation even if they have to kill every Jew in Israel” I wouldn’t call for her resignation.

[Note that in the consequence-free world of non-profit orgs, “resigned” means “will collect a paycheck for rest of life”. Magill will be a tenured professor at the Penn Law school until she decides that she would rather get a pension check than a paycheck. She could be older than Joe Biden by the time she finally stops working at the university from which she reportedly “resigned”.]

Speaking of changing minds, here’s a November 9, 2023 email from President Claudine Gay (the African-American Studies expert elevated in 2022 to the top job so that she can direct Harvard’s crucial efforts to save humanity from climate change, SARS-CoV-2, and other scientific/tech-related hazards) to everyone even slightly affiliated with Harvard:

The subject line was “Combating Antisemitism”, but the body of the letter reminds us that “Islamophobia” is the real problem. That’s not the best part, however:

We will implement a robust program of education and training for students, faculty, and staff on antisemitism broadly and at Harvard specifically. As part of this program, we will provide education about the roots of certain rhetoric that has been heard on our campus in recent weeks, and its impact on Jewish members of our community, to help us all better recognize antisemitism in daily life and interrupt its harmful influence.

What I wrote to a Harvard professor friend at the time:

Imagine thinking that a Muslim student or staff member, outraged over what Britain and the UN did in 1947 and over what Israel has done every year from 1948 onward will be persuaded to see the Jew-loving light by some pabulum that Harvard spoons out. Egos big enough to assert that Israel doesn’t need nuclear weapons for its security because as soon as someone from Harvard with a giant brain speaks, all of the previously hostile Arabs and Iranians will say “Oh, the Nakba was actually a good thing.”

I have more respect for this Palestinian woman who says she is willing to sacrifice her 17 kids and 65 grandchildren to achieve Hamas’s goals.

(I disagree with the Palestinian grandmother’s goal, but at least she is not deluded about what is achievable as President Gay is.)

Is it unfair to hold college bureaucrats responsible for what students and staff say on campus? Elite American universities have controlled speech so tightly since 2016 that any statement heard on campus can be considered officially approved speech. Bureaucrats suppressed criticism of BLM, mask orders and school closures, forced vaccination. rainbow flag worship, etc. If they don’t suppress criticism of Jews and/or Israel then they actually are effectively endorsing it despite their born-again conversion to the Church of the First Amendment. Despite swimming in tax dollars and tax subsidies, private universities aren’t bound by the Bill of Rights. State universities, on the other hand, are subject to limits on what their DEI squads can suppress. You might hear something upsetting on the campus of University of Texas, but you don’t have to suffer with the knowledge that the upsetting idea was officially approved by the administration.

Loosely, related, “One Law Firm Prepared Both Penn and Harvard for Hearing on Antisemitism” (NYT) shows how out of touch American elites are with the peasantry:

Two of the school presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of Penn, prepared separately for the congressional testimony with teams from WilmerHale, according to two people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified because the preparation process is confidential.

WilmerHale also had a meeting with M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, one of the people said.

Lawyers for WilmerHale sat in the front row at the hearing on Tuesday. They included Alyssa DaCunha, who leads the firm’s congressional investigations and crisis management practices, and Felicia Ellsworth, the vice chair of the firm’s litigation and controversy department.

If these administrators had $100,000 of prep from an elite law firm, how could one (so far) have lost her job?

Let’s look at the WilmerHale web site:

We’re proud of how these efforts were reflected in our 2022 summer associate class: 60% women, 37% students of color and 14% LGBTQ. Our new hires are invited to join our affinity groups as soon as they arrive. We have five active affinity groups: Asian American Affinity Group, Black/African American Affinity Group, Latino Affinity Group, LGBTQ Affinity Group and Middle Eastern Affinity Group.

We support Practice Pro’s 1L Diversity Scholar Program, which provides coaching, training and recruiting opportunities for law students from underrepresented backgrounds.

They proudly trumpet their sorting of Americans by skin color, gender ID, 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle, etc. They disclose their practice of discriminating against white males (they have “recruiting opportunities for law students from underrepresented backgrounds”; i.e., white males cannot apply to these opportunities). Harvard, Penn, MIT, and WilmerHale are all so isolated from the peasants that they are unaware that anyone might oppose this kind of sorting. The same web page also proudly describes the firm’s suppression of thoughtcrime:

We support professional development and inclusion through… internal workshops that educate lawyers and staff about implicit bias, allyship and other topics, giving attendees the tools to interrogate their own assumptions and behavior

In other words, they teach employees that it is unacceptable to say anything critical of DEI.

Should we blame the university presidents and fire them? I blame the rich Jews instead! If they love Israel so much that they don’t want daily “river to the sea” demonstrations on campus, they should have been donating to universities in Israel where the money would actually make a difference (Israeli schools don’t have $50 billion in the bank, as Harvard does). If they don’t like officially approved hate speech they should have been donating to state universities here that are bound by the First Amendment and can’t approve any speech (a donation to a state university would also make a bigger difference than if given to an Ivy League school). On a broader basis, progressive Jews can also be considered responsible for the current political and social situation in the U.S. These folks worked hard starting in 1965 to fill the U.S. with Muslim immigrants, to increase the voting participation rates of young Americans and Americans of color, and to get Muslim women and women of color into Congress. Now it seems that these are precisely the groups that support the Palestinians against Israel. “Half of adults in new poll support Israel’s action in Gaza, 45 percent disapprove” (The Hill, November 30, 2023):

White adults were also more likely to back Israel’s moves compared to Americans of color, the poll found; 61 percent of white adults said they supported Israel’s response, while just 30 percent of people of color said the same.

Men were also more likely to voice their support for Israel than women, with 59 percent of men backing Israel in the war, compared to 44 percent of women. Thirty-seven percent of men and 52 percent of women said they disapproved of Israel’s military actions.

Sixty-four percent of adults aged 18-34 said they disapproved of Israel’s decisions in Gaza. Half of those aged 35-54, and 63 percent of those 55 and older, said they approved.

Progressive Jews who want to see Israel survive as a nation are hoist with their own petard. They’ve successfully transformed American society via immigration and American politics and now they want to suppress the manifestations of these transformations. I don’t see the point, though. A Jew-hater who has been temporarily silenced will still be a Jew-hater and, if present immigration and political trends continue, will be able to speak and act on that Jew-hatred soon enough.

The current progressive Jewish theory seems to be that Harvard, et al., are molding a Jew-hating society. What if it is progressives who created a Jew-hating younger generation and Harvard merely reflects a transformation that has already occurred (see the poll results above for the 18-34-year-olds). Universities cater to their audience and today’s audience is very different than the 1970s and 1980s audiences of which the angry donors were a part. (See, for example, “Majority of Americans 18-24 think Israel should ‘be ended and given to Hamas’” (New York Post, December 16, 2023): “Just 4% of Americans 65 and over said they felt Israel should be ended.”)

Related:

  • “The Vanishing: The erasure of Jews from American life” (Tablet, February 2023): just 4% of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish (compared to 21% of boomers). … Jews now number just 7% of Ivy League students, compared to 10% during the height of the antisemitic quotas … “The university has decided that DEI is the overarching principle of admissions,” one Hillel director told me. “There’s a general consensus that it’s more difficult for Jewish students to get into top tier schools.” … In New York—the seat of American Jewish political power—there are almost no Jews left in power. A decade ago the city had five Jewish congressmen, a Jewish mayor, two Jewish borough presidents, and 14 Jewish City Council members. Today just two congressmen and a single borough president remain.
  • White men correctly perceive American Jews as their enemies? (2019, noting the efforts that Jewish Democrats had made to transform society)
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Unlimited EV charging for $372 per year

Florida Power & Light is our remarkably entrepreneurial local electric utility. They may have purchased a mailing list of “total douches very likely to own a Tesla” because they recently sent me an email trying to sell an unlimited charge-at-home plan for EVs:

If they don’t need to pull a permit and run wires inside the garage, in other words, it is $372 per year for all of the electricity that you can fit into your Cybertruck or F150 Lightning. That’s an interesting way to help sell the idea of EVs.

This is on top of the somewhat fake SolarTogether program for virtue signalers who want to say that they’re using all solar power at home.

(Of course, I immediately signed up for SolarTogether. It’s a small price to pay for the virtue points!)

If we did have a Tesla and if we could fit it into our 2-car garage (mostly filled with bicycles, shelves, boxes, an heirloom sports car), I would definitely sign up for this new FPL scheme.

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CDC director highlights the success of a state that ignored CDC advice

From #Science itself:

If we accept the CDC’s premise that humans are in charge of viruses, the map demonstrates that Science-deniers Ron DeSantis (Yale/Harvard grad) and Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo (Harvard MD/PhD in Science Denial) are doing a great job in Florida! The people who did the opposite of what the CDC suggested are “doing the best” (if we accept the public health premise that COVID-19 infection/death rates are the appropriate measure of a society’s success).

How could the CDC’s social media nerds not have waited for these data to change before highlighting this map to hundreds of thousands of Americans?

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Proper burial for an aviator: Portal of the Folded Wings in Burbank

After a business trip to Pasadena, I caught a flight to Las Vegas (for 9 minutes of Formula 1) out of Burbank. On the way, I stopped at the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation. This 1924 structure is a fitting final destination for those who have tackled the challenges of flying. Here are some photos:

There is a Space Shuttle memorial in the front:

It’s California, so help yourself to whatever you want at CVS, Apple, or the Nike store, but don’t steal any flowers. That’s an actual “crime.”

Who are some of the people memorialized here?

John Moisant, who made it across the English Channel in a Blériot XI and died four months later on the site of the big New Orleans Airport shortly afterwards, and sister Matilde:

If you don’t mind your ashes being interred in a lockdown state, it looks as though there are still spaces available because folks who died recently are under the floor (I think):

I wonder if EAA could build something like this in Oshkosh. There is actually a cemetery right next to the airport:

Pricing at this cemetery is quite reasonable: $1,100 per plot.

If it’s just ashes, though, and a bronze plaque, maybe there could be a structure like this Portal almost anywhere within the annual EAA AirVenture event grounds or, perhaps, near the EAA Museum.

For aviators who did not appreciate lockdowns, perhaps there could be something like the Portal in the Florida Free State? Orlando has a rich aviation history, is 100′ above sea level in case Professor Dr. Greta #FreePalestine Thunberg, M.D., Ph.D. proves to be correct about future ocean height, and is a common destination for travelers who might wish to pay their respects to a departed aviator.

Who’s an expert on cemetery startups? If there are no full caskets/bodies, is it tough to get zoning approval? It could even be a monument with no ashes at all. Since the deceased were aviators, their ashes could be scattered in the air. Maybe airport management would then be happy to have it on airport grounds. Pay your respects, return your rental car, catch your flight out of MCO.

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Banner-towing of a Palestinian flag over Harvard for International Civil Aviation Day

Somewhat bizarrely, December 7, famous for Japanese naval aviation achievements in Hawaii, is also International Civil Aviation Day.

How was this day observed in Maskachusetts? “Plane flying banner with the Palestinian flag and the words ‘Harvard Hates Jews’ circles the Cambridge campus” (Daily Mail):

A plane with the banner ‘Harvard Hates Jews’ coupled with a Palestinian flag has been spotted circling Harvard University’s campus ahead of the first night of Chanukah.

Anonymous Jewish students were reportedly behind the stunt on Thursday – sending a message in response to Harvard President Claudine Gay’s contentious testimony in Congress.

The aerial campaign that made its rounds around Cambridge was initiated by a group called ‘Harvard with Hamas,’ as reported by the Boston Herald.

The message was meant to ‘respond to the runaway antisemitism on the campus and the shocking support for Hamas terrorism and rape obscenely vocalized by Harvard faculty and students following the Oct. 7th massacre in Israel,’ according to the group.

Gay and the presidents of UPenn and MIT were eviscerated for telling Congress on Tuesday that calls for the genocide of Jews do not violate their codes of conduct, causing ferocious backlash and calls for her to resign.

A Cessna 172?

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Why didn’t the CIA know about the October 7 attack by Gazans in advance?

Today is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an intelligence failure so spectacular that it has spawned what the righteous fondly refer to as “conspiracy theories,” e.g., that Roosevelt actually knew about the attack in advance. Certainly the U.S. did have enough warning to have launched fighter planes and manned antiaircraft guns (see “The Three Missed Tactical Warnings That Could Have Made a Difference at Pearl Harbor”), but radar alerts were ignored.

One parallel between Pearl Harbor and recent events is that the Japanese did not expect the U.S. to wage total war in response to the attack. There was supposed to be a negotiation, after which the Japanese government would remain in power and in a stronger position than before. One theory is that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) set up October 7 as a way to take Israeli soldiers hostage and then exchange them for Palestinians who had been convicted of stabbings, car bombings, shootings, etc. and sentenced to prison. However, ordinary civilian Gazans followed Hamas into Israel and, lacking the discipline of Hamas soldiers, proceeded to rape, maim, and kill as well as take civilians as hostages. As a result of the unplanned orgy of violence, Israel chose the unexpected (by Hamas) path of partial war (nothing like the brutality of what the U.S. did to the Japanese) with the goal of removing Hamas from its position as the legitimately elected government of Gaza.

Let’s go back to the intelligence failure aspect, however. The Central Intelligence Agency has over 21,000 employees (that Wikipedia knows about). The fighting after the October 7 attack motivated the U.S. to move an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean. Thus, even if the October 7 attack couldn’t have been stopped, it would have been valuable for the U.S. to know about it in advance. We pay about $100 billion per year for intelligence, central and otherwise. Why didn’t we have some agents and/or informants in Gaza who could have told CIA Langley (“George Bush Center for Intelligence”!) about the attack in advance?

From The Puzzler (2022, A.J. Jacobs):

In 1988, the CIA commissioned a Maryland-based artist named Jim Sanborn to create a sculpture for its expanding headquarters. The agency wanted to install some art that would be relevant to its mission of cracking secrets. Sanborn’s sculpture, Kryptos (Greek for “hidden”), was unveiled in 1990, located in a courtyard abutting the CIA cafeteria. Kryptos is a wavy wall of copper about twenty feet long and twelve feet high. Into the copper, Sanborn has carved about eighteen hundred seemingly random letters and four question marks. It’s a code, a secret message. No one knows the solution except Sanborn and possibly the former director of the CIA (Sanborn has hinted he didn’t tell the director everything). Thirty years later, the code has not been fully cracked—even by the CIA itself.

I ask Sanborn what it was like to create Kryptos. It wasn’t easy, he says. He had to get lessons in cryptology from a retiring CIA agent. And as for the sculpting itself, “I went through fifteen different assistants, nine hundred jigsaw blades, and twelve Bosch jigsaws over two and a half years,” Sanborn says.

From the CIA’s page:

Loosely related… “U.S. Navy Rescues Ship From Pirate Attack in Gulf of Aden” (New York Times):

The U.S. Navy intervened to stop the hijacking of a commercial cargo ship by pirates in the Gulf of Aden near Somalia on Sunday, after which two ballistic missiles were fired from Yemen toward the Navy destroyer that responded to the incident, the U.S. military said.

The ballistic missiles were fired from the part of Yemen controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, according to a statement released by U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the region. If the missiles were meant to hit the U.S.S. Mason, a Navy destroyer, they fell well short of the mark: They landed in the Gulf of Aden 10 nautical miles from the American ship.

From CNN… “Missiles fired from Yemen toward US warship that responded to attack on commercial tanker”:

Two ballistic missiles were fired from Houthi rebel-controlled Yemen toward a US warship in the Gulf of Aden, after the US Navy responded to a distress call from a commercial tanker that had been seized by armed individuals, the US military said Sunday. … The incident comes after Iran-backed Houthi forces launched numerous attacks against US interests in the region… Last week, the USS Thomas Hudner shot down multiple one-way attack drones launched from Yemen while it was patrolling in the Red Sea. On November 15, the Hudner also shot down a drone believed to have been heading toward the ship.

The “Houthi rebels” are the de facto government of Yemen right now, ruling over 80 percent of the population and controlling the capital city. We pay about $250 billion per year to keep the Navy and Marines going. Why aren’t the Houthis afraid that there will be some consequence to firing missiles at U.S. Navy ships? (For that matter, I guess, why didn’t the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) immediately release all American hostages that it grabbed on October 7, 2023 for fear of being attacked by the U.S. Navy?)

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The War in Gaza and the O.J. Simpson Bronco Chase

It has been two months since the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and various Gazan civilians invaded Israel. Ever since that October 7 attack, the Israeli military (“IDF”) has been pursuing the freedom fighters around Gaza without any dramatic successes. I wonder if this can be compared to the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase.

Unlike most countries, including the U.S., when Israel finds something or someone that it wants to destroy inside a building, it warns the people inside to get out. The result is that Israel blows up a lot of empty buildings. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and non-combatants who don’t want to be martrys are all gone by the time the bomb falls or the missile strikes. Maybe the next day, Israel finds out where Hamas’s soldiers are and the process is repeated without a single Hamas soldier being killed or taken prisoner. This leads to the question “What is the military value of destroying an empty building?”

Here are some possible answers:

  • the building contained important military equipment that would have taken more than a few hours to move
  • the building was on top of a tunnel entrance and collapsing it keeps the tunnel from being used
  • the building is next to a planned infantry/tank approach to another target and destroying it prevents freedom fighters from using the building as cover

I would love it if someone could explain which of the above is correct or if there is some other explanation.

This is not to say that I agree with Palestinians polled who believe that their victory over Israel is assured. I think it is possible that two months of small successes could eventually lead to an ultimate big success.

Separately, can someone explain this IDF video of a fight against Hamas/Islamic Jihad soldiers who were inside a couple of schools?

(As noted previously here, I disagree with the video’s reference to “terrorists” to refer to men who carry guns on behalf of the freely elected government of Gaza, even those men kill civilians whenever possible.)

All of the civilians moved out of this area weeks earlier, according to the video, so that’s what the soldiers believed. If you were on the ground and taking fire from a nearby building, wouldn’t you call in an airstrike or artillery strike against the building rather than risk your opponent having some successful shots? Why risk your life to save US/EU taxpayers from having to buy the Palestinians a new school? I don’t think that there is an argument that children would be disadvantaged by the destruction of an empty school building. There is no limit to the UNRWA aid guarantee and, therefore, a new building would be built in short order. Maybe the argument is that Israel doesn’t want to destroy UNRWA assets so as to maintain good relations with UNRWA, but to judge by Twitter the UNRWA folks already hate Israel and already say that Israel blows up their schools and other stuff “indiscriminately”. If there ever was a time for indiscriminately blowing up a building, when better than as the enemy is shooting at you from that building?

In yesterday’s New York Times:

The explanation for the fighting, as opposed to just bombing, doesn’t seem to apply to the school situation:

Hamas fighters are embedded in the strip’s densely packed buildings and hidden in an expansive network of underground tunnels, making close-quarters fighting unavoidable, Israeli officials said.

I still can’t figure out why the tunnels weren’t all located with ground-penetrating radar and then destroyed weeks ago (see Will the Gaza tunnel network prove to be Hamas’s Maginot Line?).

The Wall Street Journal implies that the O.J. chase will come to an end shortly.

Israeli forces closed in on southern Gaza’s largest city in what is becoming a decisive battle of the two-month-old war with Hamas.

Israeli forces moving into the militants’ stronghold of Khan Younis are entering a battleground of narrow streets packed with displaced Palestinians. In close-quarters combat, Hamas fighters there are defending their last major bastion in Gaza, home to its leader, Yahya Sinwar, and the location where Israel believes the group’s other leaders are hiding and holding hostages.

An Israeli victory in Khan Younis would likely corner remaining Hamas fighters in small areas in central Gaza and close to the Egyptian border, surrounded by Israeli troops. And it could heighten intense international pressure on Israel to end the war and seek a settlement that frees more than 100 hostages and ends Hamas’s rule in Gaza.

I don’t see why the fighters couldn’t go back to the north, but maybe the IDF has already spoiled the tunnels up there.

In favor of the WSJ’s theory that doom is at hand for Hamas is the intensified tweetstorm from Hamas allies calling for ceasefires. Doctors without Borders (MSF) is posting almost hourly (they have multiple accounts, one from each affiliate country) demands for Israel to surrender (i.e., a “ceasefire” in which Hamas remains in control of Gaza). My favorite MSF tweet is one in which they complain that the cars they left parked on the street were trashed when an Israeli tank column came through. They separately claimed that innocent children are being killed everywhere in Gaza, but their primary concern is for their own cars.

My response:

UNRWA tweets have gone from maximum hysteria to double secret maximum hysteria, each one yielding responses from Twitter users reminding them that one hostage says he was imprisoned by a UNRWA teacher. Example:

My assumption is that Hamas will just melt into the civilian population that overwhelmingly supports it and the war will fizzle out, but I’m usually wrong so maybe the WSJ is correct that there will be a dramatic event soon.

Update, December 7:

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Apple News+ and 30 percent inflation

Today is my last day of Apple News+, the cost of which was recently raised by 30 percent:

I’m not sure what justifies this increase. The major news organizations have mostly been harvesting outrage from Twitter, reposting information straight from the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), reporting on what other news outlets are saying, etc. Couldn’t ChatGPT do most of this? If so, news subscriptions should be getting cheaper, not more expensive. Maybe the 30 percent bump is consistent with media costs in what the media assures us is a mostly inflation-free environment? The latest union contract at the New York Times raised salaries by only 12.5 percent (NYT, May 23, 2023):

The New York Times reached a deal on Tuesday for a new contract with the union representing the majority of its newsroom employees, ending more than two years of contentious negotiations that included a 24-hour strike.

The agreement, if ratified, will give union members immediate salary increases of up to 12.5 percent to cover the last two years and 2023, and will raise the required minimum salary to $65,000, up from about $37,500. The previous contract expired in March 2021, and union members have not received contractual raises since 2020.

Under the contract, the median salary for reporters in the union would be about $160,000.

(The above raises a question: Why weren’t the progressive owners of the NYT willing to pay a fair wage? Why did it take two years of contention and a strike before the NYT agreed to what the union asked? Also, note that median full-time workers in the U.S. earn about $58,000 per year (BLS) and that includes government workers with their higher-than-private-sector wages. So even the lowliest journalist at the NYT is above the level of Americans identified as the principal financial losers from low-skill immigration (Harvard study) and, of course, being a native English speaker is a huge advantage in the journalism marketplace.)

Speaking of labor unrest, the progressives who scribble for the Washington Post are striking tomorrow because the DC insiders who manage the paper won’t pay them what they’re worth:

The newspaper’s editorial section says that unions are the best thing that ever happened to a company or a country. Example from September 3, 2023, “At last, a Labor Day when workers can celebrate their power”:

Young Americans are the country’s most pro-union generation. Labor has poll ratings most politicians only dream about, and the Biden administration is making workers’ pay, benefits and rights its calling card.

Lest anyone doubt where the administration stands, the Treasury Department released what it proudly called a “First-of-Its-Kind Report” on the economic value of organized labor. It found that unions raise the wages of their members by 10 to 15 percent, have “spillover effects” that benefit nonunion workers, “reduce race and gender wage gaps” and “boost businesses’ productivity.”

All this adds up to a large cultural shift, said Heidi Shierholz, president of the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute. The fact that unions are in the news again means it’s more likely that those who feel they are being treated unfairly “see a possible path to help remedy what’s going on in their own job.” This contrasts with recent decades when “unions were not being talked about at all.”

On this Labor Day, from the president on down, that’s no longer a problem.

Why won’t the paper take its own advice and give the union what it asks for?

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ChatGPT and the Art of Science

A friend of a friend had some fun with ChatGPT:

I hadn’t realized that ChatGPT had DALL-E capabilities built-in. Let’s see if we can get something to print to brighten Mindy the Crippler’s day:

(“cheerful scene”? Does the rabbit agree?)

What does ChatGPT think that an oppressed nerd on a coding plantation looks like?

What gender comes to ChatGPT’s mind for collecting garbage?

What gender does the fighting when liberation is required?

Who flies the Queen of the Skies?

(Note the racism and sexism that ChatGPT has uncovered. The noble Black male is a B747 captain, yet is denied the 4 stripes that white captains have. The captain who identifies as “female” is denied any stripes at all! These two also seem a little young to be associated with a plane that entered service in 1970.)

Can it build a viral meme?

Toucan Sam would say… “No”.

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