Here’s a typical perspective from an American Jewish Democrat:
This is a wonderful opportunity to take action to support refugees and asylum seekers. People seeking asylum are being turned away at borders around the world. Take this time to support refugees by fostering a welcoming environment. #WelcomeWithDignityhttps://t.co/dIOMVImG5q
The guy who gets a paycheck from the Anti-Defamation League wants to fill the United States and other countries “around the world” with any person on Planet Earth who is capable of spinning an asylum yarn, e.g., “I was afraid of my spouse” or “there was a criminal gang in my neighborhood” or “I identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+ and my native country does not support Rainbow Flagism.”
But how is this perspective consistent with the State of Israel continuing as a Jewish state? There are 5.3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. All of them could make credible asylum claims, e.g., “I am 2SLGBTQQIA+ and Wikipedia says that therefore my situation is ‘precarious’.” (“Gaza, however, still follows the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance, No.74 of 1936, which outlaws same-sex acts between men, with the current punishment being up to 10 years in prison.”) Or “I am fearful that the Israeli military will blow up my apartment building in case they suspect that Hamas is using it for offensive purposes.”
Arabs are already 20 percent of Israelis. After the 5 million Palestinians settle in Israel as asylees, plus additional asylum-seekers from other Muslim countries as necessary, the Muslim population will outnumber the Jewish population and Muslim Israelis can vote to establish an Islamic government within Israel, either expelling the Jews or keeping them around as tax-paying Dhimmi.
There must be mental gymnastics that I am missing that enable these migrant-supporting Jews to, without being obvious hypocrites, oppose the migration of Muslims, including Palestinians, into Israel. But I can’t figure out what it would be! If a person says that any Muslim is entitled to cross the U.S. border and apply for asylum, how can he/she/ze/they be opposed to a Muslim crossing the Israeli border and applying for asylum?
In case the above tweet is memory-holed, a screen shot is below. Separately, note that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is mentioned. Anger regarding this taxpayer-supported enterprise was cited by Gregory Bowers as his motivation for shooting Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 (“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”). This was predicted years earlier by a friend who is an Orthodox Jew (working class white males in the U.S. becoming Jew-haters as a consequence of HIAS and other prominent Jewish-led efforts to increase low-skill migration into the U.S.).
Across the globe, 32.5 million refugees are seeking safety, many of them adults in search of work. At the same time, severe labor shortages in the United States and many other high-income countries have left businesses clamoring for workers.
The United States can help address both problems (and more) through bipartisan immigration reform — and states can be part of new solutions with innovative ideas that could act as the foundation for immigration federalism.
Creating a pathway for individuals to live and work in Iowa and other states would ease the burden on America’s asylum system.
One of the pillars of modern elite thinking is that, instead of being organized by cultural affinity, a cohesive human society can be built by assembling people who did not like wherever it was that they were previously. That’s the basis of open borders for asylum-seekers. Native-born American taxpayers will fund apartments (in a building owned by a member of the elite!) for (1) person who says that he/she/ze/they was at risk of being killed by a gang in El Salvador and speaks only Spanish, (2) someone who says that he/she/ze/they was a domestic violence victim in Haiti and speaks only Creole, (3) a migrant who says that he/she/ze/they was a victim in Syria and speaks only Arabic, and (4) a former police officer from Somalia (based on occupation, automatically eligible for asylum?) who speaks only Somali. Though they share no common language, these four folks can bond over… something. Thus, a thriving neighborhood is born. (Maybe they bond over their shared hatred for life in the respective countries of their birth?)
What’s new from the New York Times is the suggestion that these migrants get allocated by a central bureaucracy of elites to states in which there are (elite-owned) businesses whose offered wages are insufficient to attract native-born workers and existing immigrants. So not only will an asylum-seeker be in a country that he/she/ze/they may not have wanted to live in, but the asylum-seeker will be in a state that he/she/ze/they did not want to live in. (Remember that asylum-seekers are “fleeing” from somewhere. They’re involuntarily in the U.S. because this is the only place that they can be safe. It may be that the asylum-seeker dislikes and disagrees with everything about American culture and values, but the alternative was death.)
(Why will they be welfare-dependent? If they’re in a low-skill low-wage job, especially if they have children, even working 40 hours per week they will be eligible for means-tested programs such as public housing, Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP/EBT), and Obamaphone.)
It’s been two months since Sam Bankman-Fried returned to the U.S. (BBC). How is my prediction that Joe Biden will appoint him as U.S. Treasury Secretary and that he will be confirmed by Senate Democrats looking? Any other news from this cryptocurrency trailblazer?
Most of the $121 million in real estate that Mr. Bankman-Fried and his Stanford professor parents owned is within gated communities, according to my friends in Nassau, but they did drive me, in January, to see the police station and courthouse:
The locals say that the prison where our future Treasury Secretary was held is not worth the 20-minute drive for a photo. “All that you can see is a wall with a sign.”
A story from our former suburb of Boston… (not quoting it because it would be tough to read in italics)
Sally is the mother of four kids – lives in Chelsea. She is beautiful and speaks well but cannot read and has a 2nd grade education. Her husband, small gentleman with a major speech issues, hit her over the head with a hammer when her boyfriend came over to the house. The father went to jail. There was a lot of stress in the house. Both parents during the pandemic lost one of two jobs. The father was experiencing major mental health issues. The kids were “learning at home” The kids at the time where 3, 8, 10 and 11…..learning? How? Both parents were working their one job and desperately trying to find a second job. The father worked for 18 years at Bed Bath and Beyond making $15.50 an hour. The mother continues to work at Whole Foods making $17 an hour. Because the father is in jail the mother is responsible for all the bills which she cannot handle. Feb 1 she was evicted and went to stay in a hotel because all shelters were filled. She and the kids will stay there until housing becomes available- maybe 2 years? There is nowhere to cook or do laundry. The father is in jail and has been for three years without bail or a trial. Just another day at work. What is [South Sudanese Enrichment for Families]’s response? We are writing letters to the fathers’ public defender to try to get him a trial and bail in March. We have facilitated the father instead of the Nashua Street Jail to be at the Recovery Center in Worcester. He gets therapy and tutoring. A volunteer is working with the mother to try to have some stability in their life. Many Sudanese are helping getting the kids to school etc. We have another woman with two kids going into a shelter in March and we have one child taken away from her mother. Very very sad. Two Sudanese families are going to take the child in. …. We have 8 families that are in our Financial Fitness Program where we assess where they are financially and what they need to do to meet their financial goals. There is a waiting list. We are getting there ……all with your help. Thank you…the need is huge.
(Although my heart is warmed by the above, I’m confused by the story. The mom of 4 had a boyfriend (perfect adaption of a migrant to the American lifestyle, despite having only a 2nd grade education!) and the father went to jail. But also the story implies that the father was at home during the coronapanic lockdowns in Maskachusetts. Yet he has been “in jail” for three years and the lockdown began three years ago. Maybe the boyfriend is the new “father” who has the Bed Bath & Beyond job and was at home during the lockdowns and pretend-learn-from-home-scheme? Also, why do the nonprofit say-gooders (maybe even do-gooders?) want to get the hammer-wielding father out of jail? So that he can attack the mom with a hammer again? So that he can copy the undocumented immigrant David DePape and attack Paul Pelosi? Isn’t jail the safest place for anyone who cannot be trusted with a hammer?)
We identified 78 relevant studies. They took place in low-, middle-, and high-income countries worldwide: in hospitals, schools, homes, offices, childcare centres, and communities during non-epidemic influenza periods, the global H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, epidemic influenza seasons up to 2016, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified five ongoing, unpublished studies; two of them evaluate masks in COVID-19.
Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (9 studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 13,919 people).
Compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (5 studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (5 studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (3 studies; 7799 people).
The masked faithful who’ve continued with their rituals after the Covidcrats rescinded their orders requiring masks (illegal in Florida!) say that they’re Following the Science. So we might expect a dramatic change to the slope of the de-masking curve now that this utterly reliable organization has come down with its verdict.
What have you seen out there in the wild? It’s tough for me to observe any changes here in Florida due to the small sample size (a handful of old/sick-looking people are sometimes observed in masks). I have queried mask believers in Massachusetts and California and they say that they are not going to change their behavior in response to the Cochrane article. Part of their justification is that they believe themselves to be vastly superior to the average person, including the health care workers in some of the studies underneath the Cochrane analysis, in competence, diligence, and consistency. Masks will fail for the incompetent rabble, but not for them.
Some excerpts from a Maskachusetts mask-believer:
Stupid people will do stupid things. Incompetent people will muddy the signals for otherwise potentially beneficial countermeasures. And your governor is still a douchebag, even if it is true that the Black History AP course [sic; the correct title is “AP African American STUDIES” (not “history”)] was politically motivated. Also, plain water and hand rubbing was shown by the CDC to be effective in getting virus particles off your hands.
(Hatred of Ron DeSantis is “Carthago delenda est!” for Democrats? I never mentioned Ron D when asking him how the Cochrane study would affect his behavior.)
The description from the publisher is presumably exciting for today’s customers:
Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan’s army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.
The book does not deliver on this promise. Bombay is not described as doing anything remarkable other than being a loyal assistant to Richard Burton and Speke. Burton remains the most interesting and impressive character in the drama and it is astonishing what he and Speke were willing to endure to pick up a scrap of knowledge and obtain some fame. They spent most of their time on the expedition suffering from tropical diseases far worse than Covid.
The discovery part of the discovery proves to be somewhat underwhelming. The Black and Arab merchants of East Africa already knew about the rift lakes, including Lake Victoria. As Burton and Speke were “exploring” they were able to exchange letters with Europeans on the coast. They would simply send a letter with a slave or goods caravan and wait for a reply to arrive with a caravan bringing imports from the coast. This is not the exploration of an Amundsen or Shackleton in Antarctica!
Compared to the Blacks and Arabs who lived full time in the region, what was different about Burton and Speke was that they cared about the hydrology of the region, not just making some money by trading goods and/or slaves. The Arab merchants knew about Lake Victoria, for example, but were not curious regarding where the water ultimately ended up. They wanted to sell goods from the coast on the shores and perhaps bring back some slaves. The exploration challenge in River of Doubt was much tougher.
Here are a few of my own snapshots from Zanzibar (2007):
One thing that we learned during our December trip to Death Valley was that nobody else comes to Death Valley in December. “I would have thought that this would be the most popular time of year,” I said to a National Park Service manager, “given that one can hike around in comfortable temperatures and barely have to carry water.” He responded that summer was actually the busiest: “We get a lot of Americans driving through and checking us off their bucket list, but also Europeans who come here for heat tourism.” Heat tourism? “They don’t have deserts or extreme heat in Europe so they come here to experience 120 or 130 degrees.”
We did the Artists Drive loop, Natural Bridge trail, and Badwater lowest point from about 9:30 am to 12:30 pm.
After lunch, it was time for Golden Canyon Trail.
The next day we drove to Stovepipe Wells, a desolate and crummy place to stay compared to Furnace Creek, stopping first at the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes:
After breakfast (masked restaurant staff and unmasked customers), we hit Mosaic Canyon.
We had lunch at the Ranch at Death Valley steak house. Once again, the servers were masked while customers were not. Also, curiously for California, the establishment seemed to be celebrating gun violence.
I’m not surprised by the passion for masks given that we were in California, but I am surprised that people who are sufficiently concerned about Covid to wear a mask didn’t take the opportunity, at some point during the past three years, to change careers into a job that doesn’t involve contact with hundreds of infested-by-viruses humans every day.
The Inn at Death Valley has nicer public areas, but the Ranch at Death Valley has some brand new standalone cottages.
After some time at the pool we went to Zabriskie Point for sunset, along with every other tourist.
Some fun with Apple’s panorama software:
We ate most of our meals at the Inn at Death Valley, just up the hill from the golf course/Ranch. Food and service seemed to be better.
After two days and three nights, it was time to head back through Pahrump to Las Vegas. We did not stop at Sheri’s Ranch for lunch with Hunter Biden, however, because we wanted to visit the Mob Museum before checking into the Cosmopolitan and walking to Din Tai Fung for dinner before Cirque du Soleil’s Mad Apple. The show was funny in addition to being awe-inspiring. Din Tai Fung made me weep for the paucity of good Chinese food in South Florida. What must we promise to the Taiwanese to get a branch here in Jupiter?
Before we left Death Valley, though, we stopped at Zabriskie Point for some pictures in the morning light.
One more panorama:
It was a great trip and one of the few times in recent memory that I was in a U.S. National Park and not jammed into a Manhattan-style crowd.
We are regularly informed by politicians and their media allies that the United States is the best and richest country in the world and that Americans have never been richer. And nobody is richer in the U.S. than the federal government, which can and does literally print money (soon to mint a $1 trillion coin because the best way to address a financial problem is never to work harder or spend less?). Here are photos from Death Valley National Park, owned by the federal government, from December 2022:
What was built as a wheelchair-accessible path will no longer work for our disabled brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters because the pavement is so deteriorated. How about at the local airport? A core mission of the federal government is making sure that U.S. airports are functional and this one is actually owned by the Feds.
The runway at Furnace Creek Airport, L06, is described as being “In Failed Condition”. The aspiration for the airport, lowest in North America at 210 feet below sea level, is greatly reduced from 1954, when it had a jet-capable 5,500′ runway. Airnav says “UP TO 4 INCH SALT HEAVE ARND RWY CRACKS. COULD DMG ACFT WITH WHEEL FAIRINGS OR CAUSE A POTENTIAL TO BLOW OUT A TIRE.” The National Park Service, whose job it might be to keep this airport in decent condition, says “poor condition; numerous cracks, bumps, ruts, and areas of crumbling asphalt over the entire length of the runway. Consider treating like a gravel/unpaved surface, and use caution at takeoff and landing.”
Pilots in California and Nevada used to meet at this airport to socialize and play a round of golf. Now it is useless except to helicopters and maybe a few taildraggers with tundra tires.
How can we square the myth (we’re richer, smarter, and better than ever) with these facts on the ground of infrastructure that we were once rich enough to create but are no longer rich enough to maintain?
The news is not all bad if you’re a member of the laptop class in Death Valley. Not only did the working class have to pay $7,500 toward your electric car (plus any wealth transfers ordered by a state), but the working class also has to buy you free electricity in Death Valley at public chargers (we plugged in our rented BMW hybrid). The working class member’s gas-powered dinosaur must be filled at $5/gallon within the park:
Friends on Facebook are still expressing their fears regarding the recent Chinese balloon overflight and thanking the Vanquisher of Corn Pop for saving them from this unarmed threat, which was neutralized by a $1 billion F-22 (cost estimated at $700 million per plane in pre-Biden money). Top Gun 1 had the F-14. Top Gun 2 had the F-18. How about a Top Gun 3 with Tom Cruise in an F-35 versus a fleet of unarmed Chinese balloons?
Some of the latest slow movers were shot out of the sky over Canada. Every contemporary movie needs some Black and Brown characters, e.g., as brilliant scientists who design equipment to track and kill the slow-moving menaces. Combining the two preceding sentences, the obvious choice to portray the Black and Brown characters is Justin Trudeau (he already has the costumes and makeup).
Speaking of Tom Cruise, here is the Church of Scientology’s cruise ship, Freewinds, docked in Aruba:
Of course, I am now telling everyone that this was our ship and that we spent sea days being audited, getting clear, and learning more about Xenu (the last part is sort of true; Royal Caribbean’s Vision of the Seas has a Zumba class led by the vivacious Peruvian cruise director Mey).
I arrived at my old apartment to find that the AirBnB guests agree with the Covidcrats that marijuana is essential:
Not wanting to live on hemp protein, I went to the local market and found that prices had gone up 50 percent compared to pre-Biden times. There was a discussion about bags at the end of checkout and payment for two very heavy plastic bags (in Florida there is no discussion and purchased items are placed into thin plastic bags). If memory serves, plastic bags were banned in many Maskachusetts towns in order to protect our beloved planet. In 2023, thanks to the evolution of the Science of grocery bags, we are informed that plastic bags are actually the superior environmental tree-saving choice:
After I ate an apple from this bag and tossed it into the trash, a neighbor scolded me and said that it was illegal to throw out anything that could instead be put into the brown bin provided by the city for compost-style refuse. I was later scolded at Target for buying Dobie scrub pads (“we don’t use that much plastic”).
According to the folks who say “housing is a human right,” the weather was perfect for outdoor living:
At least that’s my best inference from their behavior of not missing a step when walking by those whose shelter from the biting cold and dreary rain/snow is minimal. Outside the gleaming office tower where I was enslaved as a software expert witness (testifying at an arbitration prior to teaching at MIT):
The handful of people who come into work in this massive tower report that traffic is actually worse than pre-coronapanic. It takes 1.5 hours to drive in from Wellesley where it formerly took 1.25 hours. The righteous are #StoppingTheSpread and #HealingTheEarth by driving in their cars rather than taking the MBTA. Here is the empty Red Line at 9:37 am on a weekday:
Pre-coronapanic, it wouldn’t have been possible to go downtown from Harvard Square because the train would already have been jammed. Prior to 10 am, it was often necessary to go outbound to Alewife, where the train starts, in order to get a seat or a standing spot for the train into Boston.
Despite riding the T and being exposed to germs, I was able to stay healthy with daily marijuana deliveries, advertised on about half of the available spaces in Boston and Cambridge:
Outdoor masking was popular, though not universal due to the deplorable lack of a Science-informed outdoor mask mandate. My favorite, of course, being the combination of heavy beard and mask to block out an aerosol virus:
My friend who moved from the Boston suburbs to Houston disparaged everything in Maskachusetts as “dilapidated”. I wonder what he would say about this ancient Saab on a street of $1-2 million houses (themselves misshapen from 120 years of settling):
The streets and sidewalks right next to the world’s richest university were in pretty rough shape (everything that we touch day to day in Florida is in near-perfect condition due to being at most 20 years old) and the overhead wires certainly don’t add to the aesthetic appeal:
MIT reopened on December 1, 2022, but they still had the signs and machinery to exclude the potentially filthy unvaccinated:
And the Science of test-and-trace was alive and well:
Surely no virus is a match for our test kits and protocols.
Once inside the restricted-for-three-years halls, I discovered an arms race in Rainbow Flagism. Once a handful of offices on a corridor sported the “you are welcome here” sticker with all of the colors of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ rainbow, presumably everyone else had to sticker up or face the “Where’s your 2SLGBTQQIA+ sticker, sister?” question.
Now that schools are reopened, at least until the next lockdown that Science requires, what are kids learning? A friend invited me to a Shabbat dinner in Newton and a Jewish high school student who lives among Jews in Brookline attended. Although Israel wasn’t a discussion topic, somehow he pointed out that it was ironic that Jews left Germany for Israel because of the Nazis and now the Jews are doing to the Arabs what the Nazis did to the Jews. (Note that, in fact, the Jewish population of Israel is not primarily descended from German Jews. Most of the Jewish families in Israel came from nearby Muslim and Arab countries, generally driven from their homes in 1948 when Israel declared independence. The second-largest group of Jews within Israel came from Russia.)
Shops and offices in Cambridge still sometimes have the Signs of Science on the front doors:
City Hall celebrates 2SLGBTQQIA+ and reminds us that Black Lives Matter. What about other social justice causes?
We found most of the employees at Harvard Bookstore (not part of Harvard University) wearing comfortable cloth masks. What do people in Boston/Cambridge want to read?
In a previous post, I covered the lightning speed unionization-to-shutdown evolution of Darwin’s. The vacant store still has its Pride insignia:
The Uber ride back to the airport went past multiple marijuana stores and outdoor maskers on the way to the terminal, where a lot of children were carefully masked (in cloth) to protect them against an aerosol virus that kills mostly obese/sick humans at a median age of 80-82. The flight to DCA was slightly delayed due to de-icing being required, but (hemp fabric) hats off to the Logan crew for high efficiency in spraying and to ATC for getting the plane from the de-ice pad to the runway threshold quickly.
