Lebanon takes a victimhood master class from Hamas

by philg

Palestinians have run a master class in victimhood since October 8, 2023. Westerners accept that there has been a “genocide” in a part of the world whose population is growing. The Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) has demonstrated that it is possible to convince Westerners that civilians have been targeted and massacred merely by setting up a “health ministry” that will release a death toll without distinguishing between soldiers and civilians. (It is unclear why there would be an actual health ministry in a Palestinian area given that taxpayers in the US and EU fund all health care for Palestinians via UNRWA.) A Westerner will read that 41,000 noble Gazans have been killed by the evil Israelis and his/her/zir/their brain processes that as “41,000 civilians suffered the unjust fate of being killed”.

It seems now that the Lebanese, who declared war on Israel in 1948 and never accepted a peace treaty nor recognized the state of Israel, have learned from the masters. “Israel pounds Lebanon, pressuring Hezbollah after killing its leader” (Reuters, September 29):

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said more than 1,000 Lebanese were killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks, without saying how many were civilians. The government said a million people – a fifth of the population – had fled their homes.

The noble Lebanese suffered a pager/walkie-talkie attack on September 17-18, 2024 and, therefore, the “two week” period above includes people who were killed or wounded by their Hezbollah-purchased devices.

Separately, the article is interesting for portraying the Lebanese as united behind Hezbollah:

“We lost the leader who gave us all the strength and faith that we, this small country that we love, could turn it into a paradise,” said Lebanese Christian woman Sophia Blanche Rouillard, carrying a black flag to work in Beirut.

“You won’t be able to destroy us, whatever you do, however much you bomb, however much you displace people – we will stay here. We won’t leave. This is our country and we’re staying,” said Francoise Azori, a Beirut resident jogging through the area.

And it looks like the Lebanese are on track for the fully funded lifestyle that Palestinians have enjoyed for 76 years:

The U.N. World Food Programme said it had launched an emergency operation to provide food for those affected by the conflict.

(Everyone in Lebanon has been “affected by the conflict” (that Lebanon started in 1948) and, therefore, everyone in Lebanon is entitled to free food paid for by US/EU taxpayers. Note that about 10 percent of the Lebanese population is already registered with UNRWA as “Palestinian refugees” and, therefore, already getting free food, housing, health care, education, etc.)

If we follow the dogma of revealed preference, it seems that being at war with Israel and receiving international aid is preferred to being at peace with Israel and having to go to work every day.

Here’s some 2019 propaganda from the U.S. State Department:

Since 2007, the United States has provided nearly $5 billion in assistance, investing in the development of Lebanon’s sovereignty and stability through economic growth, education, poverty alleviation, refugee and humanitarian assistance, and local level public service provision. American assistance spans military, internal security, demining, justice, education, public services and economic growth.

“In few places in the world can we so positively help to build institutions,” said Michelle Ward, management officer at Embassy Beirut. “In Lebanon, we have a real opportunity to partner with the Lebanese on development, defense and diplomatic engagements.”

Lebanese public awareness of U.S. government assistance is perhaps greatest regarding support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) where the U.S. government has invested more than $2.29 billion since 2005, training more than 32,000 LAF soldiers in the U.S. and Lebanon. The LAF has developed its role as a broad, cross-sectarian and nationally unifying force able to protect against external and internal threats. Lebanon is the only government in the region to have defeated the Islamic State group of Iraq and the Levant unassisted.

The Lebanese have $500 million/year of military assistance from the United Nations (previous post) and, apparently, billions of pre-Biden dollars from the U.S. for military assistance. Yet the Germans say “The Lebanese state lacks power to contain the escalating conflict between Hezbollah and Israel unfolding on its territory. Its army is notoriously weak too.” This is especially perplexing given that we know that diversity is the sure path to strength. With a diverse mixture of Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shiite Muslims, plus all of that cash from the US and help from the UN, why isn’t the Lebanese state one of the world’s strongest? The Germans say that assembling people who don’t share a common religion is a huge mistake in Lebanon (but it is a great idea in Germany?):

This weakness has historical roots. “Lebanon was founded in the early 20th century as a state of Christian Maronites in alliance with the French as a protecting power,” says Markus Schneider, who heads the Friedrich-Ebert foundation’s regional project for peace and security in the Middle East in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

“The birth defect was that it included large areas of non-Maronite populations from the outset,” Schneider told DW. “Confessionalism was a compromise in order to integrate other sections of the population. This however prevented the emergence of a strong nation state.”

This confessional structure became further entrenched in the Lebanese civil war that erupted in 1975, pitting the country’s three largest denominations — Shiites, Sunnis and Maronite Christians — against each other. After the end of the civil war in 1990, a system was established to better balance the interests of the individual confessional groups.

The term “confessional” here means “a group of people with similar religious beliefs”. Lebanon cannot have “a strong nation state” because it is a mixture Christians and Muslims. European nations and the U.S., however, will become far stronger as Christians and Muslims are mixed.

The Lebanese government hasn’t been entirely ineffective. It managed to order and enforce a Science-inspired lockdown on October 2, 2020:

Lebanon Followed the Science and had 416 excess deaths per 100,000 population from 2020-2021. Sweden deplorably rejected the Science and had 91 excess deaths per 100,000 during the same period. (Lancet) (For comparison, the Science followers of New York State suffered from 205 excess deaths per 100,000.)

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Should my friend apply to a Massachusetts town for permission to turn his house into a for-profit migrant shelter?

by philg

A friend owns a 6,000-square-foot house in our former suburb of Lincoln, Maskachusetts. Loyal readers might remember the 2019 post Harvard graduate discovers that the suburbs are packed with narrow-minded white heterosexuals:

The old white guy who led the First Parish church in our suburban town, a union of Congregational and Unitarian, retired. The Millionaires for Obama on the church hiring committee found Manish Mishra-Marzetti, a young Indian-American (Indian from India, not Indian like Elizabeth Warren) to become the new minister (in 2015). He, his husband, and their two adopted kids (characterized as “African American” in the video link below) moved into our midst.

On paper, at least, this guy is exactly the kind of person that the residents say that they want to assist and/or get to know better. He’s the child of immigrants. His skin is nearly as dark as a Virginia Democrat headed out for a party. He identifies as LGBTQIA. He organized trips to our southern border to assist migrants. He sermonized against the evils of Trump and Trump supporters.

I don’t think that I’ve written about it here, but some years ago there was a non-profit org that applied for zoning permission to turn a house in the town into a halfway house for, I think, mentally disabled adults. The halfway house would receive massive amounts of state funding for each person served. Democrats on the town discussion list went nuts. Each email started with praise for the idea of this kind of taxpayer-funded service and ended with the thought that it would make a lot more sense to operate such a house in some other town or city within Maskachusetts. If memory serves, the righteous managed to kill the proposal despite some sort of state law that ostensibly neuters local opposition.

My friend has a love of irony and he’ll soon be moving out of this house and into a tax-free Deplorable-rich state. Before he goes, though, I suggested that he have some fun by applying for zoning permission to operate a state-funded for-profit migrant shelter. His house would become home to four families of enrichers. As there is just one kitchen, the migrants would receive professionally cooked meals prepared in the central kitchen by paid staff. The migrants are undocumented and may not be able to get driver’s licenses and the town isn’t walkable. Thus, transportation would be provided by volunteers and also a paid service. Residents of Lincoln claim that they love Black people (cue the BLM signs on nearly every lawn that lasted at least until progressives transitioned to Queers for Palestine). Telegraph that the residents will be exclusively Haitian by including Haitian Creole-speaking wellness coaches and yoga instructors in the budget and asking the town for permission to have a 2’x4′ English/Haitian Creole sign in front.

Readers: What else could be added to this proposal to make it more expensive to taxpayers (yet still plausible and in line with what Maskachusetts taxpayers are currently paying for sheltered migrants) and more objectionable to the townsfolk who are the first to say that they love and support migrants and People of Color?

Based on “Massachusetts spending over $15k per month per family on migrant housing and transportation” (Fall River Reporter), my friend’s Lincoln Migrant Shelter would enjoy revenue of $60,000 per month ($720,000/year). Let’s assume that property tax is $30,000/year and two full-time people can do driving, shopping, cooking, and cleaning ($200,000/year). USDA says that the monthly cost of food on a “liberal plan” is about $400 per person so that’s another $60,000ish for the groceries (assume four “families” = 12 people). If we figure $40,000/year for maintenance and insurance, that’s about $400,000/year in gross profit for the enterprise. That’s a 20 percent return on investment if the house is worth $2 million.

Related:

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Florida after Hurricane Helene

by philg

It looks as though Florida is more or less cleaned up after Hurricane Helene. All schools were open as of yesterday:

The hurricane made landfall on September 26 and power was almost completely restored by September 30:

As of today, approximately 23,000 of Florida’s 11.4 million electricity customers are out:

I’m in Fort Worth, Texas right now as part of a software/electronics/avionics expert witness project so I haven’t been carefully following hurricane clean-up outside of Florida. The New York Times gives the impression that nothing bad has happened to anyone in North Carolina, for example. The current front page is all about the bad things that the prophets of the NYT expect Donald Trump to do if a second Nakba should occur:

(Note that the Biden-Harris-Whoever-Is-Actually-Running-Things administration recently prosecuted and imprisoned a Republican for a troll tweet that Democrats should vote by SMS. Harvard Law Review: “That Mackey’s primitive meme — sandwiched between thousands of his other tweets — could have fooled American voters into believing that the 2016 election allowed voting by text does indeed strain belief.” See also “Man Who Spread Misinformation on Trump’s Behalf Sentenced to 7 Months” (NYT). Reason notes that the Biden-Harris-Whoever criminal justice apparatus used its discretion to refrain from prosecuting a Democrat for similar behavior and that the law used to imprison the Republican was passed in 1870 “to deter the Ku Klux Klan from trying to prevent black people from voting”.)

The next section down is about how Trump is bad while Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney are good:

If the NYT is our guide, as I hope that it is for all of us, nothing newsworthy is going on with respect to Hurricane Helene damage either in Florida or anywhere else.

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Why doesn’t the U.S. try to buy migrants from Europe?

by philg

We are informed that low-skill migrants make the native-born richer and that, therefore, a country’s borders should be mostly open (albeit never described as “open borders” because that is hate speech/conspiracy theory). We also informed that Europeans don’t want to be rich… ”Europe Grasps for Ways to Stop the Migrant Surge” (WSJ):

The biggest swing in sentiment has been in Germany, long a proponent of generous policies toward refugees. Pressure has been building in recent years as the nation absorbed millions of immigrants, weighing on the welfare system and municipal services. Migration was a key theme in Sunday’s closely watched regional election in Brandenburg, where the governing Social Democrats narrowly beat the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.

Last week, the coalition government in Berlin reintroduced limited border checks to all neighboring countries, after a knife attack in late August by a failed asylum seeker killed three people in the city of Solingen during a festival to celebrate its 650th anniversary. The attacker was a 26-year-old Syrian with links to Islamic State who had evaded deportation for more than a year after losing his asylum case.

Since the pandemic ended, governments across the continent have struggled to cope with rising numbers of asylum seekers and are grasping for ways to stem the flow, from curbing taxpayer-funded benefits to asylum seekers to striking deals with non-EU countries to temporarily or permanently house would-be refugees.

Last year, a near-record 1.14 million people filed asylum claims in Europe, the highest number since the height of the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, when more than a million Syrians fleeing that country’s civil war entered the bloc.

An extra 1.14 million/ asylum seekers per year would moderately enrich the United States, both culturally and economically. In the pre-Biden years, we were enriched by approximately 22 million undocumented immigrants (Yale 2018) and at least another 10 million have come across the border during the Dr. Jill Biden-Kamala Harris administration.

For nearly everything else that has value in this world there is some kind of market. There is “a bid”, in other words, as the Wall Streeters say. Why hasn’t the U.S. bid to take all of the migrants that Europeans don’t want? We are told that migrants are precious. Why aren’t we offering, for example, to pay Germany $100,000 per migrant and also to pay each migrant $100,000 as a “welcome to America bonus” (on top of the means-tested public housing, means-tested health insurance, SNAP/EBT (“food stamps”), and Obamaphone to which migrants will be entitled)? And if we did offer $200,000 (total) per migrant, wouldn’t we expect to face competition from other countries that seek to be enriched?

Separately, here’s a Reuters story on a beachhead in Africa that Spain continues to hold (why?). My favorite line is “Moroccan nationals detained during the crossings are immediately sent back to Morocco unless they are underage or seeking asylum, [Cristina Perez, the Spanish government’s representative in Ceuta] said.” Unless the migrants are remarkably unintelligent, why wouldn’t they all claim to fall into one of these categories? Like the U.S. system, the European immigration system seems to be premised on the assumption that humans never lie.

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Why can’t supervisors and replacement workers unload container ships during the longshoremen’s strike?

by philg

When the typical business is hit by a strike it is able to continue operating at a reduced capacity via the use of supervisors and/or replacement workers (airlines are an exception due to FAA regulations; see “Unions and Airlines”). Why are Atlantic and Gulf Coast U.S. ports completely shut down by the International Longshoremen’s Association strike for a 77 percent wage increase to compensate them for the inflation that the Biden-Harris administration says does not exist (CBS; 77 percent is pretty close to the rise in the cost of buying a house during the Biden-Harris years, considering the increase in price and the increase in mortgage rates).

The port operators have offered a 50 percent wage increase to compensate workers for non-existent inflation and the strike relates to the 77 v. 50 number.

Today’s question is why ports are shut down. Managers aren’t part of a union. Why can’t the management/supervisory staff at the ports operate the cranes and unload container ships at a reduced rate compared to if a full staff were available? Continued operations at a reduced capacity is what happened after Ronald Reagan fired America’s striking unionized air traffic controllers (state-sponsored NPR).

Historically, American employers had the right to hire permanent replacement workers for striking union workers, though the Biden-Harris administration is trying to eliminate that right (source (2023)):

The law of the land for the last 60 years has permitted employers to permanently replace employees engaged in an economic strike, providing employers with the right to hire workers to continue business operations in response to a union’s use of its most potent economic weapon. In its decision in Hot Shoppes, Inc., 146 NLRB 802 (1964),the Board held that employers may lawfully hire permanent replacements and that this action is not inherently destructive of the right to strike under the National Labor Relations Act (“Act”), making the employer’s motive for hiring the replacements immaterial. Accordingly, an employer does not need to prove it had a business necessity when hiring permanent replacements or that the employer’s ability to continue operations during a strike required the hiring of the replacements. Rather, the GC has the burden of proving the employer violated the Act by permanently replacing strikers because of an “independent unlawful purpose.”

Even if Biden-Harris makes it illegal for the ports to hire permanent replacements, why can’t the ports operate with temporary replacements? The container cranes are highly automated, which has, in fact, been a big motivation for fighting between unions and management (the “workers” aren’t actually required for the “work” because robots do a better job at running the cranes).

It looks like ports are mostly automated in other parts of the world, e.g., China, Europe, and Central America (source):

But the U.S. does have some ports that you’d think could be operated by managers. From the same article:

Currently, only four out of 360 commercial ports in the U.S. have at least semi-automated terminals: Los Angeles, Long Beach, New York & New Jersey and Virginia.

Why wouldn’t NY/NJ and Virginia be up and running with managers staring at the monitors while the computers do all the real work?

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Checking on the Snowflake stock price

by philg

On April 1, 2021 I began questioning the value of Snowflake (SNOW) stock relative to Oracle (ORCL). I did a follow-up two years ago, How is Snowflake stock doing?:

SNOW is down nearly 30 percent while the S&P 500, thanks to Joe Biden’s careful stewardship of the U.S. economy, is down 10 percent (but actually that 10 percent over 1.5 years is more like 25 percent once inflation is factored in, a stunning loss of wealth for Americans).

In April 2021, SNOW was valued at roughly 30 percent of the value of Oracle (ORCL), the backbone of business data processing. What is the company’s market cap today, as a percentage of Oracle’s market cap? SNOW is worth $54 billion. Oracle is worth $165 billion. So I think the philip.greenspun.com fact checking department must rate my April 2021 claim as #False. SNOW turned out to be a loser for an investor, but not because 30 percent of Oracle’s valuation was absurd.

Let’s try to figure out how an investor who shorted SNOW on April 1, 2021 to buy ORCL would have done. It’s a touch tricky because Oracle has paid investors a dividend of $1.28-$1.60 per year during this period while Snowflake hasn’t paid dividends (the company has been losing money every quarter so where would the funds for a dividend come from?). It seems that Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance have been stripped of features so I can’t figure out how to get a custom-date-range chart out of either. If we look at the five-year chart on Google, though, we can see that Snowflake has gone down from $236 to about $111 (Sept 26 price) while Oracle has more than doubled (in nominal dollars) from $72 to $168. In other words, Oracle stock has kept pace with inflation in the cost of buying a house (house prices up 50 percent and mortgage rates up to the point that a monthly mortgage payment has roughly doubled) while Snowflake stock, um, hasn’t.

Since there is more to corporate life than delivering profits to shareholders, let’s also check in on “Snowflake’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion” (from the apparently white male CEO):

“While diversity, equity and inclusion has long been a focus for Snowflake, we are committed to doing more. We have the responsibility to lead, and we will do so. Snowflake, under my personal leadership, will undertake a comprehensive review across our company of all of our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to help ensure that we are taking appropriate steps. We have a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion council at Snowflake, and I am proud of the work they have done.”

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are not causes — they are important pillars that are central in what we do as a company. This important effort continues, and we will do our part to lead.”

So… Snowflake is a leader in diversity, but was not a great stock to buy if you wanted to preserve your purchasing power.

For completeness, let’s also look at the S&P 500 on the five-year chart:

The S&P 500 has gone up from about 4,000 on April 1, 2021 to 5,750 today. In other words, someone who bought and held the S&P 500 would have experienced an erosion of purchasing power during this period (up in nominal dollars; down in real dollars adjusted for the cost of buying a house). The erosion is more severe when one considers that the S&P 500 investor owes capital gains taxes (24 percent federal plus up to 13.3 percent California state tax) on what are entirely fictitious gains (due solely to inflation).

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Fifth anniversary of Kamala Harris defending freedom of speech

by philg

Five years ago, today:

In case the above is memory-holed, an image version:

(Professor Saad corrected his typo (“FREE societies”) in a follow-up, so this also reminds me that it has been two years since Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Where’s the Edit button for replies?)

Some other comments from fall 2019:

  • You running for President of China?
  • Sorry you don’t like the constitution. Maybe you should run for leader of a different country.
  • Thank god this hysterical candidate who tramples on the constitution will never be President.
  • Democrats want to ban all speech they disagree with. Bunch of fascists. Good luck keeping the 1st amendment if Dems ever get full power.
  • So you are against the 1st amendment?
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Who is the fink in Lebanon? And why didn’t Hezbollah leaders leave their bunker after the apartment buildings were cleared?

by philg

Hezbollah has been having some difficulties lately in Lebanon, a country that should be a near-ideal host for an anti-Israel organization (almost as good an ideological fit as within Harvard University, Columbia, Dearborn, Michigan, or Minneapolis). Lebanon declared war on Israel in 1948, never accepted a peace treaty (unlike Egypt and Jordan), and never recognized the state of Israel. 80 percent of Lebanese polled were happy about the October 7 attack by Hamas, UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Israel. In theory, almost everyone in Lebanon hates Israel and Israelis and wants to stay at war with Israel. Yet… someone inside Lebanon has apparently been feeding helpful information to the IDF. Without finks inside Lebanon, how is Israel able to identify Hezbollah-affiliated structures suitable for its precision bombs? Are the informers Lebanese Christians (a shrinking minority, gradually being replaced by Palestinian immigrants)? Lebanese Sunni Muslims who don’t want to be ruled by the Shiites within Hezbollah? Junior Hezbollah members who want all of the senior leadership to be killed so that they can advance within the org chart?

The second big question… Israel recently blew up an underground bunker in which Hassan Nasrallah and colleagues were working. The bunker was underneath six substantial size apartment buildings in a neighborhood where, supposedly, everyone loves and supports Hezbollah. The apartment buildings were destroyed, yet hardly any residents were killed. Supposedly, the building residents were told to evacuate just prior to the 2,000 lb. bombs being dropped. If true, why didn’t the Hezbollah commanders underneath the apartments learn that everyone was fleeing and go somewhere else? (as Hamas has apparently done in Gaza) Did they overestimate the survivability of their bunker?

A related question is what happens to Hezbollah now. The organization has the support of the United Nations. Here’s the Secretary General saying that Israel needs to give Hezbollah time to regroup and rebuild:

Hezbollah also has the support of whoever is running the United States (Kamala Harris and Joe Biden?). Here’s the official whitehouse.gov statement, a couple of days before Mr. Nasrallah met his 72 virgins, in which the Biden-Harris administration officially called for a 21-day ceasefire during which Hezbollah could regroup and rearm:

we call for an immediate 21 day ceasefire across the Lebanon-Israel border to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement

“diplomatic settlement” presumably meant that Hezbollah would remain in power indefinitely. Are there any rival Lebanese groups, e.g., organized by Sunnis or Christians, that are powerful enough to disarm Hezbollah and take over governance of southern Lebanon (where the $500 million/year UNIFIL in theory guarantees that no organization like Hezbollah can thrive)?

Here are the locals mourning a lesser Hezbollah leader early this month (source):

Photos like these, in which the entire neighborhood turns out to support Hezbollah, leads me to the final question of this post… why doesn’t Israel simply destroy all of Dahiyeh, the portion of Beirut from which Hezbollah draws its support? Lebanon is in a declared state of war with Israel so it wouldn’t be a violation of any “international law” to bomb part of Lebanon (just as, apparently, nobody at the UN ever said that it violated any law for the Lebanese to be firing rockets and missiles at Israel for the past year). If the neighborhood that is the core of Hezbollah support were gone, the folks who live there would have to resettle in parts of Lebanon where overt support for Hezbollah might not be as popular.

On the intersection between Hezbollah and Kamala Harris:

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Birthday Reflections

by philg

I’m 61 today, a stereotypical age for a 1950s father to drop dead from a heart attack (that would have been attributed to the stresses of work, adult female supervision, concerns around children, etc.). This post is to reflect on things that I’ve learned in the past year.

From Fort Worth… it turns out that “Brazilian Sugar” is not a doughnut flavor:

From moving my 90-year-old mom out of independent living in Bethesda, Maryland to assisted living here in Jupiter, Florida… nothing in the United States is set up conveniently for old people. Financial services and government agencies require old people people to be competent with smartphones and/or web sites. Being an Internet/email user exposes old people to every kind of fraud (much worse since the lockdowns because old people have been more isolated and, therefore, easier to exploit). We need new structures, such as banking, credit card, and brokerage accounts that can be set up so that a second person’s authorization is required for transactions above a certain size.

From being almost at the end of Year 2 of ChatGPT… LLMs aren’t useful yet for making daily life go more smoothly. LLMs haven’t reduced traffic jams in the U.S. or airline delays and cancellations. LLMs haven’t made it easier to prepare dinner or clean up the house. Maybe LLMs are a game-changer for students assigned to write essays and programmers assigned to write boring code (especially on new-to-them platforms; maybe this explains “Tech Jobs Have Dried Up—and Aren’t Coming Back Soon” (WSJ)), but they haven’t meaningfully touched even a lot of enterprises that are primarily about information processing. For example, I’m an expert witness in an avionics-related case right now. There are more than 25 lawyers and paralegals on each side. Much of what is being done is, in theory, the kind of work that an LLM could do well, e.g., find a relevant document quickly, assemble relevant case law for a dispute that the judge has to settle, etc. Yet no use of LLMs is made at trial.

From Tequesta Indian Village Peace Mound Park, a bit of high ground in the otherwise uninhabitable Everglades that was inhabited prior to the Europeans draining the swamp… a parent was done with his/her/zir/their job when a child turned 13 and heaven was a swamp:

A few things that I’m glad to have done during the year…

  • spend three weeks exploring central and northern Portugal (plus Santiago de Compostela)
  • attend a Formula 1 event in person (not worth a huge amount of time, effort, and money, but the Miami event is well-organized)
  • made it to Oshkosh, as usual
  • saw the second total eclipse of my life
  • take a child on her first visit to the Kennedy Space Center and her first rocket launch
  • get my mother and some of her grandchildren together every 2-3 nights
  • made it to Boston to teach

How am I spending the day? Sadly, there won’t be the kind of theme party that Talulah Riley organized for Elon Musk (source):

For his forty-second birthday, in June 2013, Talulah [Riley] rented an ersatz castle in Tarrytown, New York, just north of New York City, and invited forty friends. The theme this time was Japanese steampunk, and Musk and the other men were dressed as samurai warriors. There was a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, which had been rewritten slightly to feature Musk as the Japanese emperor, and a demonstration by a knife-thrower.

The morning was spent in a 20-year-old Cirrus SR20 with no air conditioning and an intermittent ALT1 failure (a problem that three different Cirrus Service Centers haven’t been able to resolve in nearly two years; this was the first failure after a mid-summer circuit breaker replacement). My 9-year-old copilot suggested Chick-fil-A for lunch. Then we visited my mom. Exciting plans for the rest of the day: Zoom for an expert witness matter; dinner near PBI; pick up the kids’ other grandma at PBI; cake with my mom in her senior fortress.

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Hurricane Helene Holiday…

by philg

…. for the schoolteachers here in Palm Beach County. The forecast called for some rain, winds of about 20 knots, and for the storm to track off Florida’s west coast (i.e., “the other coast”) and then, in a move sure to delight Democrats, directly over Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee (Greta Thunberg may have moved on to Queers for Palestine, but the Wrath of Climate Change God is still just).

With all of the spinning air there was a tornado watch, but that could be a reason to keep schools open. For many teachers and children, school is a far safer place to be during a tornado than home, especially if the home was built prior to the statewide Florida Building Code of 2002.

Every business was open, except for a few restaurants with primarily outdoor seating. We did not lose power even for one second (thanks to the grid hardening initiative approved by Governor DeSantis in 2019 and opposed by Democrats?).

A few palm trees shed fronds in our neighborhood, but this won’t damage even a parked car. It is nothing like being in the Northeast where an oak tree can destroy a house due to the weight being substantially near the top of the tree. (A friend’s house in the Boston suburbs was recently assaulted by an oak tree (fell down on a calm wind day). The removal of the tree via crane cost over $5,000 and only now is he beginning to contemplate roof, window, and siding repairs.)

The event was an interesting study in media-driven fear. A dozen friends and relatives called to see if we had survived the apocalypse. They knew that we lived on the east coast of Florida and that the hurricane had traveled off the west coast, but the media reports that they’d consumed made it sound as though most of Florida was threatened/trashed.

Related… if Americans vote correctly in November, Naples, Sanibel Island, Sarasota, and Palm Beach will be on track for extra federal taxpayer assistance. After Hurricane Ian trashed wealthy west coast barrier island beachfront property in 2022… “VP Harris slammed for saying Hurricane Ian aid will be ‘based on equity’” (New York Post):

Vice President Harris came in for a torrent of criticism after telling an audience that “communities of color” would be first in line for relief in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Ian.

“We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity,” she said during a discussion with Priyanka Chopra at the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum on Friday.

“If we want people to be in an equal place sometimes we need to take into account those disparities and do that work,” she added.

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