Egypt builds the wall

by philg

“Egypt is building a new walled buffer zone more than 2 miles wide on Gaza border, satellite images show” (CNN):

Egypt is building a massive miles-wide buffer zone and wall along its border with southern Gaza, new satellite images show, as fears grow over Israel’s planned ground offensive in Rafah where more than half of Gaza’s population is sheltering.

The images, taken in the past five days by Maxar Technologies, show a significant section of Egyptian territory between a roadway and the Gaza border has been bulldozed.

If the buffer zone — which stretches from the end of the Gaza border to the Mediterranean Sea — is completed, it will completely engulf the Egyptian-Rafah border crossing complex.

At the actual border, multiple cranes can be seen laying sections of wall.

Additional satellite imagery reviewed by CNN shows that bulldozers arrived on site on February 3, and the initial excavation of the buffer zone began on February 6.

If Joe Biden wants to boost his/her/zir/their reelection chances, perhaps he/she/ze/they should hire the Egyptians to secure the U.S. border (though, actually, Mexicans could probably do a great job as well if we paid them instead of expecting them to work for free on our behalf after we created an attractive nuisance by offering four generations of taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, smartphone, and broadband to anyone willing to cross from Mexico).

(Using a range of pronouns above because it is unclear that Joe Biden remembers his/her/zir/their gender ID.)

Same story in the New York Times:

Is it fair to say that there are more unauthorized crossings of the U.S. border every day (at least 10,000) than there are of the Egypt-Gaza border in an entire year?

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Should Israel hire mercenaries from Nepal to deal with armed Palestinians?

by philg

A Ukrainian friend shared “Russia has recruited as many as 15,000 Nepalis to fight its war. Many returned traumatized. Some never came back” (CNN):

He is one of as many as 15,000 Nepali men to have joined the Russian military, multiple sources have told CNN, after the Russian government last year announced a lucrative package for foreign fighters to join the country’s military.

The package included at least $2,000 salary a month and a fast-tracked process to obtain a Russian passport. Nepal’s passport is ranked one of the worst in the world for global mobility, below North Korea, according to an index created by global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners, and the Himalayan nation is among the world’s poorest, with a per capita GDP of $1,336 for 2022, according to World Bank data.

Israelis have gotten a huge amount of bad press for fighting against the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other armed groups within Gaza. Critics say that Israeli soldiers have killed too high a ratio of civilians to soldiers (how anyone can know this is beyond me, given that the Hamas-run health authorities in Gaza do not distinguish between civilian and combatant “martyrs”).

What if the noble Palestinians weren’t being attacked by the evil First World Israeli soldiers (most of whom are Jews, though some of whom are Arabs/Muslims)? Suppose that it was a “brown people” v. “brown people” fight. Wouldn’t white progressives who support Hamas have a lot more difficulty criticizing the non-Hamas side?

The Israelis could easily afford to outbid the Russians, paying $4,000 per month, for example, and the noble Gazans do not seem to be as fearsome opponents as the Ukrainians so it would be a safer job.

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Subscribe to Rachel Dolezal’s OnlyFans channel?

by philg

Happy Valentine’s Day! If we intersect love and romance with the regular content of this blog… we get “Rachel Dolezal Is An OnlyFans Model & Teaching At A School After Pretending To Be Black To Run NAACP Chapter” (Outkick):

Former disgraced NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal, who pretended to be black to get her job after being born to white parents, is now a NSFW OnlyFans model who has picked up another job working at an elementary school in Arizona.

Dolezal, who changed her name to Nkechi Diallo (West African translation = “gift of god”) back in 2017, is listed under Sunrise Drive Elementary School payroll records as an after-school instructor …

Between her school job and the OnlyFans career where a September post got 122 ‘Likes’ from paying subscribers (122 x $10 = $1,220 per month which means she’s probably making more than that) seems to be going pretty well for the woman who made headlines around the world as the fake black woman running an NAACP chapter.

Readers: Who wants to take the hit and subscribe to Nkechi Diallo’s OnlyFans channel?

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The Heat Stroke World Cup (TM) in Miami 2026?

by philg

The mostly corruption-free folks at FIFA say that seven World Cup 2026 matches will be played in Miami (source):

How will this work given that the World Cup is set for JULY? All the games will be at night? They’ll accept a 70 percent player attribution rate due to heat stroke? My bet is that the games are scheduled for 8 pm in Europe, which means 2 pm in Miami. This will maximize TV viewership.

(Miami isn’t actually hotter than many northern cities in July, but the humidity is reliably close to 100 percent. In fact, the New York Times says that Floridians are constantly on the verge of “extreme danger”. See Floridians brave Extreme Danger heat levels (July 2023), for example. And, as a loyal follower of The Science, I wouldn’t pay to sit outdoors on a summer afternoon in Miami and watch soccer, Taylor Swift, or anything else that people pay big $$ to watch. The Formula 1 spectators apparently don’t care. The Miami race is held in May during the hottest hours of the day and sells out.)

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The Biden Administration cutoff of UNRWA, as reported by state-sponsored media

by philg

“Biden administration to restore $235m in US aid to Palestinians” (BBC, 2021):

US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to provide $235m (£171m) of aid to Palestinians, restoring part of the assistance cut by Donald Trump.

“UNRWA loses funding after charges that some employees took part in Hamas attack” (state-sponsored NPR, January 29, 2024):

The U.S. and more than a dozen other donors have now paused funding for the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, or UNRWA. The U.N. says the agency could run out of money within weeks. NPR’s Michele Kelemen reports that the U.N. has been facing allegations that some of its employees were involved in the October 7 attack on Israel.

Congressional Research Service, February 2, 2024:

The US fiscal year starts on October 1, almost the same date as the glorious October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation. So the U.S. has provided $121 million to UNRWA since the attack and withheld $300,000. This 0.25% reduction in funding (or failure to increase funding by 0.25%?) is what state-sponsored National Public Radio characterizes as a “funding pause”.

In other journalistic success stories, we can look at a New York Times headline, “Tesla Recalls About 2.2 Million Electric Vehicles Over Warning Light Font Size”:

Tesla is recalling about 2.2 million vehicles because the font on the warning lights panel was too small to comply with safety standards, U.S. regulators said on Friday.

“Warning lights with a smaller font size can make critical safety information on the instrument panel difficult to read, increasing the risk of a crash,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a notice.

The recall is one of several that Tesla has made in recent years, a setback for the company, the dominant maker of electric vehicles in the United States.

It’s “a setback for the company” to bring 2.2 million cars in for service? The font size tweak was done in one of the standard over-the-air software updates, a fact that is buried by the New York Times in a subhead and never explained in the article.

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For whom do we root in the Super Bowl? A Pfizer COVID vaccine shill or a whole city of coerced vaccination, forced masking, and school closure?

by philg

Today is the Super Bowl. On one side we have junk vaccine profiteer Travis Kelce, paid a reported $20 million to promote Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines (recently shown to have zero effect on death rate among those who’ve previously made it through a SARS-CoV-2 infection; see “Effectiveness of a fourth SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose in previously infected individuals from Austria”). On the other side we have a team from San Francisco, renowned for its muscular 1.5-year public school closures, forced masking, coerced vaccinations (meekly accepted by everyone except In-N-Out), etc.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” Arnie Wensinger, [In-N-Out’s] chief legal and business officer, said in a statement. “It is unreasonable, invasive and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not.”

Our neighborhood is having a party on the green where the kids play every afternoon. The HOA will run a couple of cables from the clubhouse/gym and project the game on an inflatable outdoor screen.

For whom should an anti-coronapanic and anti-Covidcrat American root?

Related:

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The social justice of fitness, according to Apple

by philg

We got a free Apple Fitness+ subscription with our nearly $40,000/year family health insurance policy (the cheapest that we could find for a small LLC that covers Cleveland Clinic, Mayo, and U. Miami; see Shopping for health insurance on healthcare.gov).

We can celebrate Black History Month as we walk (with a Black Lab, ideally? Or do all Labs matter?). And Apple reminds us that drag performance is not just for storytime at the local public library. (Also note that the “drag performer” whose job is to be an imposter pretending to be female talks about “managing imposter syndrome”. Is it a “syndrome” if you get paid to do it? Does Tom Cruise have “imposter syndrome” because he is merely a pilot but pretended to be a Navy fighter pilot in two paid performances?)

Speaking of social justice, here is a Maskachusetts Congresswoman talking about the unconscionable corporate greed of Walgreens layered on top of a video of a Walgreens being looted by noble Americans.

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Covidcrats’ war on poor children, quantified

by philg

The New York Times has a story on how the coronapanic shutdowns set American K-12 students back (which is the same as killing them, by COVID standards, since people with less education tend to live shorter lives and any shortening of a life can be considered a “COVID death”). Of course, the headline is about the “surprising rebound” (every action taken by a Covidcrat was actually beneficial when viewed in the proper light).

The article has a side note that the recovery in reading ability has been weaker and then proceeds to present charts only on math test scores, where the “rebound” has been stronger. Your kids’ rebound energy may vary, depending on family wealth (like life expectancy, correlated with education). The poor kids were destroyed:

So the poor kids are now likely to have both intensified poverty and intensified ignorance as factors in shortening their lives (plus the Biden-era flood of migrants, who are correlated with unemployment and incarceration for the low-skilled native-born).

The NYT journalists and editors don’t mention what happened in the one state where school closure was limited by the governor to about 3 months: Florida. Digging into their cited data source, characterized as a “national study” and with analysis “led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard”, it appears that Florida was ignored by the academic worthies (maybe anti-Science DeSantis suppressed data?).

Sweden recently showed a decline in PISA scores, suggesting that keeping schools open is just as bad for kids as closing them.

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Vaccines so good you should do everything that you did before vaccines became available

by philg

January 30, 2024 memo from my mom’s retirement community “wellness coordinator”:

I am sorry to report that we are seeing an increase in the number of Covid cases here at [the home for elderly Democrats in Bethesda, Maryland]. Over the last 3 days we have 11 new cases.
I ask that you try to distance at meals as much as possible, even avoiding larger table settings. I am recommending that Residents/Guests wear a mask in the hallways and other common areas. I see many residents not wearing masks throughout the community, I cannot make anyone take these precautions, but I highly recommend them:
Resume Social Distancing
Wash hands often
Wear masks in common area
The clinic continues to do Rapid Covid testing. If you think you have been exposed or develop symptoms such as headache, nasal or chest congestion, sore throat, or body aches please come and get tested.

Everyone in the building is a Democrat (they all made money via the expansion of the federal government, either as government workers, lobbyists, contractors to the government, lawyers specializing in navigating regulations, etc.) so they’ve all had the maximum number of COVID-19 shots and boosters (not to mention one or two previous cases of COVID-19). In this highly vaccinated and boosted community, what are they told to do? Everything that they were told to do in 2020, before vaccines or boosters were available!

Separately, Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend wants you to get injected with high-quality Pfizer products:

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Microsoft keyboards back from the dead

by philg

For those of us whose hands and brains are accustomed to the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard, which was discontinued in 2023, it looks as though there is hope. Microsoft has apparently made a deal with Incase, an established computer accessory company, to revive the Microsoft keyboard line (presumably coming out of the same factory in China).

If only Google would do this with Picasa! Open source it so that someone else can take care of the former customers.

The Microsoft product page is still live:

An Amazon seller has a used one for $369:

I paid $111 for this in March 2021. Adjusted for Bidenflation at the official rate, that’s supposedly about $130 today.

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