Massachusetts governor: the border should be open, but migrants should not come to Massachusetts

by philg

“As Massachusetts shelters fill to capacity, Maura Healey says there are ‘a lot of places in the country where people can go’” (Boston Herald):

With the state’s shelter system at or approaching maximum capacity, the governor is suggesting new migrants could consider settling somewhere other than Massachusetts after they cross the U.S. border.

According to Gov. Maura Healey, there are 40 to 50 new families arriving in the state every day and seeking state assistance with housing, and the influx of people to Massachusetts — many without lawful presence in the U.S. — has pushed the state’s shelter system close to its 7,500-family limit.

“We expect to reach it soon,” Healey told WCVB. “We’ve just reached capacity here in terms of the physical space where we can house people, the number of service providers who are out there to provide services, and also the funds to pay for this.”

Healey did not directly say what happens to a family seeking Emergency Assistance shelter after the cap is reached, though she said she hoped it didn’t come to unhoused people sleeping at Logan Airport or in emergency rooms. She also suggested that there are other options available to new U.S. arrivals.

“There are a lot of places in the country where people can go once they cross into the United States,” she said.

“Mass. AG Joins Lawsuit Challenging Trump’s Emergency Declaration At Southern Border” (state-sponsored WBUR, 2019):

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey on Wednesday joined 19 other states in challenging President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The suit claims the Trump administration’s use of the emergency declaration in this instance is unconstitutional and unlawful.

The states are asking a federal court to block the emergency declaration in order to prevent construction of a border wall and stop the diversion of federal funds to pay for Trump’s proposed wall.

“Healey Among AGs Suing Trump Administration Over ‘Public Charge’ Immigration Rule” (AP 2019):

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is among those in 13 states that have filed a lawsuit challenging a Trump administration rule that’ll allow immigration officials to deny green cards to migrants who use public assistance, including food stamps or housing vouchers.

Under new rules unveiled this week, Citizenship and Immigration Services will consider whether applicants have received public assistance among other factors such as education to determine whether to grant legal status.

The attorneys general argue the expansion will cause “irreparable harm” and deter noncitizens from seeking “essential” public assistance.

“Massachusetts Becomes the Second State to Sue Trump Over Muslim Ban” (Slate 2017):

Massachusetts will become the second state to sue the federal government over President Trump’s executive order barring immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. In a press conference on Boston’s Beacon Hill, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey declared the order “harmful, discriminatory, and unconstitutional” and announced that her office will join a suit filed Saturday night by the Massachusetts ACLU and immigration lawyers seeking to have the order overturned.

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Gun violence is a “public health crisis” and “urgent”, but Maskachusetts won’t pass a gun safety law this year

by philg

“Mass. Senate’s gun bill won’t bow until 2024, top Dem says” (MassLive.com, October 27, 2023):

The state Senate’s version of a much-anticipated gun violence reduction bill won’t make its debut until January — even as the chamber’s top leader has acknowledged “the true sense of urgency” around the issue.

That’s the word from Senate President Karen Spilka’s, D-Middlesex/Norfolk, office.

“It’s a very complex issue. The House struggled with it, they took their time as well,” Spilka said, according to Politico. “But we recognize the true sense of urgency here.”

The House passed its version of the bill after a marathon debate on Oct. 18, MassLive previously reported.

“Mass. House passes updated gun violence reform bill” (October 18, 2023) is the referenced story:

Since July 1, there have been 90 separate shootings in the Commonwealth, which have left 40 people dead and 86 injured, Day said.

“We are in the midst of a public health crisis and it is unrelenting,” he said. “‘Thoughts and prayers’ are not enough.”

The revised measure makes slight modifications to where people can carry firearms, expands the state’s assault weapons ban to include firearms developed after 2004, and aims to stem the flow of illegal firearms.

The bill also includes language that prohibits someone from bringing a gun into schools or government buildings and polling locations.

A major focus of the bill is also cracking down on “ghost guns” or untraceable firearms, by registering them with the state. As ghost guns are becoming more common Day said he hopes that serializing these firearms will help police trace where they are coming from and who’s putting them out on the street.

The updated legislation requires receivers – the part of the gun that contains the firing mechanism – to be serialized, but not the barrels or feeding device.

The House bill has been met with praise from gun safety advocates and lawmakers who’ve been pushing for the Legislature to act on Day’s bill since it was first proposed.

(It didn’t meet with praise from a gun enthusiast friend who still lives in Massachusetts. “I can possess normal magazines and ARs but won’t be able to carry magazines over 10 rounds. And they have to be stored at home both in a safe and also unloaded. And I will no longer be able to pick up my kids at school with a gun.” (I didn’t ask who needs to be shot in the pick-up line.))

So… politicians agree that we are in a crisis and there is urgency. It’s a one-party state so there is no political opposition to whatever Democrats might agree to do. People are dying and this new law will prevent those deaths. But there is no need for the Senate to act, e.g., simply approving the language already passed by the House, so that the new law can take effect.

And from the southeast part of the state…

And in the west-central part…

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The Elon Musk biography

by philg

I have begun to listen to Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. A few interesting points so far…

Musk, born in 1971, had three big passions in the early 1990s: electric cars, rockets to Mars, and solar power. Thus, he is today working on the same things that he thought were important when he was 20-22. The author explains that Musk’s interest in solar power was due to a belief that the world was going to run out of fossil fuel in the medium-term. In fact, oil production today is higher than it was in 1990 (source):

Musk didn’t count on fracking, apparently!

The book lays to rest the myth that Musk was born into wealth and privilege. His father had some fleeting financial success when Musk was young, but he had minimal resources by the time Musk needed seed capital.

All of Musk’s friends and family begged him not to marry Justine Musk (originally “Jennifer Wilson”; a friend is fond of saying that only women and insane people change their names). Musk’s mother said, “She has no redeeming feature.” Musk went ahead against this advice and the 6-year marriage produced 6 children (sadly, one died of SIDS after 10 weeks and one changed gender ID, which may be the motivation for Musk’s current opposition to elite ideology).

In a previous book, Isaacson wrongly credited Apple with the invention of the switched-mode power supply (“switching power supply”), which this history says is properly dated to the 1950s. Musk is plagued by confusing descriptions of tech challenges and inaccurate historical context. Isaacson describes the World Wide Web as having been opened up to commercial use in 1994-5 when, in fact, it was open to commercial use from its inception in late 1990. Isaacson also describes this period as one when venture capitalists were throwing huge money at any kind of dotcom startup, which a visit to Wikipedia would have shown did not happen until 1998 or 1999.

Isaacson wrongly credits Musk with having the idea to combine maps with business Yellow Pages-style information in a company that he co-founded, Zip2. Had Isaacson or the editor/publisher been willing to visit the Wikipedia page on geographic information systems, they would have discovered that this idea goes back to the 1960s (all of the Web-based mapping services are essentially Web front-ends to a GIS) and was widely available to consumers in 1994. “Navigating Automobiles By Computer” (NYT, February 8, 1994):

What do you add to a car after you’ve installed a CD player and a cellular telephone? A computerized navigation system, of course.

The new product, which will be announced today by Sony Mobile Electronics and Etak Inc., is designed especially for tourists, traveling salesmen and delivery people. It uses a network of satellites launched by the Pentagon, called the Global Positioning System, and a detailed road map, which includes street names, to display a car’s location on a 5-inch color computer screen. Push a button and little knife-and-fork symbols appear to designate the locations of nearby restaurants, with descriptions from a Fodor’s travel guide. Parks, shops, nightspots, museums and other attractions are also included.

A slightly simpler version called City Streets, also using Etak’s data, goes on sale this month for laptop computers. Sony’s version comes on two compact disks and covers only California, with more disks to come later; City Streets, produced by Road Scholar Software of Houston, covers 170 American cities and 80 more in Europe, but does not give advice on where to eat or visit.

General Motors and Zexel Inc. introduced a similar system early this year at the Detroit Auto Show as a $2,000 option on some Oldsmobiles. That system’s data base was more equivalent to the yellow pages than a travel guide.

Sony also plans a version that can be carried around, like a laptop. Road Scholar, meanwhile, suggests that its program could be useful in a desktop computer without the satellite data; it could be used, for example, to print customized maps to take along on a trip. In addition, if running on a laptop in a vehicle, it can keep a moment-by-moment log of where a vehicle has been, a feature that a delivery company might use.

Zip2 was founded by Elon and Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri in November 1995 (Wikipedia). That’s more than 1.5 years after the above NYT article. It’s ten years after Etak, which likely had all of these features in the 1980s (would require a bit of research to find out when Etak added a points of interest database, but I think that it was by 1988 or 1989 at the latest) but wasn’t available to every consumer as an off-the-shelf item.

This book will no doubt be referenced by historians and will be considered authoritative, well-researched, and fact-checked. Thus, it serves as a good example of how easily history can be rewritten. I recognize that the history of GIS is not as critical as, for example, the history of the state of Israel, but I think the same process can work to rewrite history on more important topics. American schoolkids, for example, are taught that American colonists were subject to a crushing tax burden, justifying rebellion, when, in fact, they paid some of the world’s lowest tax rates (about 2 percent of total income when residents of England were paying closer to 20 percent) and not a penny of tax revenue collected in the colonies was ever taken back to Britain (the country lost money on what would become the U.S., due to the expense of providing military protection from hostile Native Americans). Nobody challenges this victim narrative.

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Getting into an elite college via fencing

by philg

I was recently sentenced to being a spectator at the USA Fencing October North American Cup, held in Orlando’s convention center (America’s 2nd largest, after Chicago’s). In épée, one scores a point by touching one’s opponent anywhere. The tip of the sword responds to pressure. You could score a point by touching the ground or your own foot, for example. Each competitor’s épée is attached to a retractable wire tether. The competitors go back and forth on a conductive mat. If the sword tip is touched to the mat, that does not register a point (but touching just to the side of the mat, unless the ref notices, will score a point). If you think that your friend has just scored a point, having advanced dramatically with sword pointed at the opponent’s body, almost surely he/she/ze/they has just lost a point.

My friend refuses to accept the limitations of age and was mixing it up with college students. He was thus eliminated after a few hours. His main reason for traveling to Orlando, however, was for the kids, both in high school. The event was packed with Chinese- and Indian-American families anxious to get their cherished offspring into elite universities. What are their chances? “A boy needs to be ranked in the top 20 nationally to get into a decent college,” my friend said, “while a girl can get in by being anywhere in the top 40.” Why the difference? “A lot of colleges have women’s fencing programs, but not men’s. This is so that they can keep their Title IX balance when they have a football team, for example, for which only men are good enough.” He cited Tufts, Brown, and Cornell as examples of schools with no men’s fencing (a larger list). Here’s an excerpt of a federal form:

(Note the gender binarism on parade! Athletes count only if they identify as either “men” or “women”.)

Reflecting the sport’s center of gravity being in the Northeast, USA Fencing went all-in on forced masking and forced vaccination. They formerly required proof of Covid-19 vaccination and then proof of booster shots for the fit teenagers who were competing (at a time when the injections were not FDA-approved, but only emergency use authorized) and also for the middle aged parents who wanted to enter the venue as spectators. Everyone within the venue had to wear a basic mask and competitors had to wear masks under their fencing masks. Coronapanic was great for my friend’s kids. While their competitors lost a year due to fencing clubs being shut down, they were being trained in their 3-car garage by their dad, a world-class fencer in his youth. (Coronapanic also helped their relative academic ranking. Their education continued uninterrupted while comparatively poor kids in big Democrat-run cities lost 12-18 months.)

Despite masks now being optional, I was able to find an example of dressing to defend oneself against a virus armed with a sword:

Note that #Science told this fencer to wear a full beard in addition to the (now-voluntary) mask.

Although everyone at the competition whom I met resided in the U.S., those who were immigrants from foreign countries would usually have a country affiliation other than “USA” on their back, e.g., “MAR” for Morocco (Maroc). Players from The Country That Shall Not Be Named were required to sign papers denouncing Vladimir Putin and the Russian military in order to compete. They would then appear without a country affiliation on their backs.

Circling back to the college admissions angle, think about the parental investment required for this gambit: years of driving to a local fencing club several times per week and weekends devoted to competitions multiple states away. All in hopes that one’s son can reach the Top 20 or that one’s daughter can reach the Top 40. Note that a non-Asian athlete will usually have an advantage over an equally-ranked Asian fencer. Coaches have found that a lot of the pushed-hard-through-high-school Asian kids quit fencing early in their college careers, saying “my parents want me to focus on getting into medical school.” The non-Asians have been more likely to stick with the sport.

How about getting your flu and Covid-19 vaccines at the event? Nothing could have been easier. The event had been going for about 16 hours when I stopped to check. Given a crowd of people with a track record of doing absolutely anything that the government tells them to do, the pair below had injected… two people (one every 8 hours).

What else was happening? I stopped on the way up at Bok Tower Gardens, a truly magnificent

We were staying at the Hilton next to the convention center, so I took my friend, pumped full of Advil, to SeaWorld across the street as a cultural experience.

You can celebrate Pride together with Shamu:

SeaWorld reminds visitors that immigrant lionfish are “disruptive” and the term “non-native” is used in a pejorative manner.

(I’m not sure that it can be blamed on the mass immigration of lionfish, but Interstate 4 between Disney World and Orlando was subject to traffic jams at all hours of the day and night (e.g., at 10 pm). Congested as the roads are with 2.7 million people in the metro area, the population is expected to grow by 75 percent between now and 2060.)

I also took my fencing friend to Disney Springs. The M&M store:

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How long can Hamas keep its tunnels ventilated?

by philg

We’re informed that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) has, literally, tons of fuel. NBC:

As U.N. officials say hospitals in Gaza are running dangerously low on fuel, Hamas is maintaining a stockpile of more than 200,000 gallons of fuel for the rockets it fires into Israel and the generators that provide clean air and electricity to its network of underground tunnels, according to U.S. officials, current and former Israeli officials and academics.

How long will this last?

“We don’t know how much they have, and we definitely don’t know how much they need, because no one is sure to what extent this underground city goes,” said Elai Rettig, an assistant professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv who studies regional energy cooperation. “If it’s just for ventilation and basic communication, it will last for months.”

I wonder if these estimates are wrong. Hamas’s western allies have been demanding fuel deliveries ever since the battle began. Here’s one from the UN Secretary General, just four days after the Gazans’ mostly peaceful attack on Israelis:

Note that fuel is listed first, so we can infer that it is more important than food and water. A week after the latest round of fighting began, state-sponsored PBS wrote that hospitals were “desperately low on fuel”:

Medics in Gaza warned Sunday that thousands could die as hospitals packed with wounded people ran desperately low on fuel and basic supplies. … Hospitals in Gaza are expected to run out of generator fuel within two days,

Every few days we are informed that hospitals in Gaza are 1-2 days from running out of fuel.

Hamas supposedly keeps its fuel reserves directly underneath hospitals so that (1) the fuel will be safe from Israeli bombs, and (2) any fuel delivered to the hospital can be easily transferred into the tunnel ventilation reserve.

If Hamas truly had “months” of fuel, why would their allies be so interested in supplementing this supply? And why did the calls to send in fuel begin just a few days after the October 7 attacks? Is it possible that the “months” of fuel that the Islamic Resistance Movement was estimated to have is actually more like “a month”? Also, what if the IDF is able to clear one or two hospitals of civilians and destroy the Hamas fuel supplies underneath? The useful lifetime of the tunnels could be radically shortened.

American and British bombing of Germany wasn’t very efficient in slowing down Germany’s war-fighting capability. As many as 635,000 civilians in Germany were killed, for example, more than 55,000 RAF Bomber Command crewmembers, and 75 percent of the pre-P-51 American bomber crews were shot down or killed. Yet the initial effects on German war production were minimal. Monday morning quarterbacks have concluded that the Allies should have concentrated on bombing energy production, energy transportation, and electricity production facilities. In other words… fuel. If Israel can prevent Hamas from being resupplied, either directly or via hospitals and UN facilities, perhaps Hamas will be forced to fight in the open (or just melt into the civilian population and wait for Israel to leave).

Readers: What’s your guess as to when Hamas runs out of fuel to keep its tunnels ventilated? (“Never, because the United Nations and other allies will keep the fuel restocked” is an acceptable answer.)

Update: A November 6, 2023 video posted from Gaza shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and doctors in clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer.

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Predictions for what happens to Sam Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators?

by philg

Let’s see if I got the Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) trial right… All of the co-conspirators who enabled the fraud at FTX agreed to testify against SBF in exchange for reduced punishment. They all then testified that everything was SBF’s fault and they were helpless puppets (somehow incapable of quitting FTX or exposing the fraud before it got bigger). Now SBF has been found guilty and will be sentenced to up to 110 years in prison in March 2024.

CNN:

Over the four weeks of his trial, Bankman-Fried watched a parade of people he once considered his closest confidantes testify against him. They included friends from math camp and MIT who became his co-founders; and, critically, his ex-girlfriend and trusted business adviser, 28-year-old Caroline Ellison.

The most damning evidence against Bankman-Fried came from Ellison, who testified for the prosecution over three days.

As both the CEO of Alameda and Bankman-Fried’s romantic partner for two years, Ellison was uniquely positioned to comment on what was happening within the tight inner circle of Alameda and FTX executives, many of whom lived together in a $30 million luxury apartment in the Bahamas.

Ellison’s at times emotional testimony offered a narrative of events in which virtually every decision at both Alameda and FTX came down to Bankman-Fried, who founded and was the majority owner of both firms. A common refrain from Ellison, when asked who directed her to carry out various actions, criminal or otherwise, was a variation on the words “Sam did.”

From reading early reports on the meltdown, I got the impression that it was Ms. Ellison’s investment losses that had created the necessity for the fraud. Did that turn out to be false?

What happens to all of the co-conspirators, without whom SBF couldn’t have stolen a dime? Back in December, the New York Post predicted that Caroline Ellison might get off with probation.

This TechCrunch article is titled “Ex-SDNY prosecutor says Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh probably won’t get jail time”:

‘I’ve had cooperating witnesses who did get jail time, but it’s the exception not the rule.’

When Wang testified, prosecutors asked at the end of their examination how many years he was hoping to be sentenced. “Ideally hoping for no time,” he replied, which prompted some quiet laughter in the courtroom.

If this plays out as predicted, do we think it is fair? One altruist goes to prison for 100 years while co-conspirators who stole at least $millions for themselves are free to move on to the next scam? If SBF’s guilt had been challenging to establish, maybe this would make sense in some practical way, but it didn’t seem like a tough case for prosecutors to make.

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Hello Prenup web service vs. ChatGPT

by philg

A family member is soon to get married. The couple had decided that they wanted a prenuptial agreement. Both work, but there are differences between the two in terms of student loan debt, expected inheritance, and expected future income. They don’t have a lot of money right now and didn’t want to spend $20,000 on lawyers (maybe that was the pre-Biden number?) for both sides to draft what ultimately would turn out to be a fairly standard prenuptial agreement. I did some research and found Hello Prenup, a Boston-based startup that, for $600, will run Web-mediated negotiations between the two potential victims. The company’s About Us web page shows a Chief Diversity Officer’s dream team:

I decided that my wedding gift to the happy couple would be to pay Hello Prenup’s bill.

First, it is odd that this company was founded in Maskachusetts. The state’s family law renders prenuptial agreements potentially useless. Even if a prenup is fair when signed, a judge can invalidate it via a “second look test”, evaluating the fairness at the time of the divorce (the “divorce” happens at the very end of what might be years of litigation, so the prenup could become unfair merely because, for example, all of the assets of the couple had been handed over to attorneys). A prenup in Massachusetts is more likely to lead to an extra $300,000 in legal fees (one side challenges the prenup; the other side has to defend against that) than a substantial change to the plaintiff’s profits. (Remember that a judge can work around an alimony waiver by simply awarding more child support, for example, or a larger share of the property.)

I like the idea of the site because it gives people nudges to work together to get to a finished document. Unfortunately, the flexibility is limited. For example, the options for alimony are (a) complete waiver, (b) leave it up to state law, and (c) waiver if the divorce lawsuit is filed before N years have elapsed and state law otherwise. In a country where people love alimony (apparently, since we keep voting for politicians who preserve the institution) there is no option to build in alimony via a formula. Suppose, for example, you wanted a formulae, e.g., lower earner gets alimony X% of the difference in income for Y% of the years prior to the plaintiff filing the divorce lawsuit. This is not doable except via editing the Word document after it is generated. What if you wanted to agree that if one spouse quits his/her/zir/their job to take care of kids for more than 2 years then the other spouse would pay 40 months of alimony in the amount of 50 percent of after-tax income? Not doable. (Remember that alimony is now tax-free to the recipient and not deductible for the payor, so old formulas based on pre-tax income would leave the payor destitute. The law changed starting in 2019 after the IRS noticed that alimony recipients were defrauding the U.S. Treasury on a regular basis by not reporting alimony received as income (payors, of course, were still deducting it).)

Hello Prenup doesn’t seem to contain enough education regarding what it takes to make a prenup valid. After using the service, the happy couple to whom I gifted the service wasn’t aware that sloppiness in disclosing existing assets could be an easy route of attack for a divorce plaintiff trying to invalidate a prenup.

Nit: Hello Prenup does a poor job generating Microsoft Word documents. It doesn’t use “keep with next” for section headings, for example.

It’s an interesting idea to interview each engaged person separately via the Web, but I’m not sure that the $600 service produces a better result than sitting down together at a single PC and using the forms that come with the $29 Nolo Press’s book on prenuptial agreements or by using various other free or low-cost forms from services such as Rocket Lawyer.

Maybe the answer is that Hello Prenup doesn’t have enough AI? I gave the following prompt to ChatGPT (GPT-4):

Give me an example prenuptial agreement between Robert and William. Robert is a 60-year-old Medicaid dentist earning $1 million per year while William is an unemployed 20-year-old. They plan to have children.

The result was a recipe for epic litigation. For example, “In the event of a divorce, Robert agrees to provide spousal support to William for a period to be determined, taking into consideration the length of the marriage and William’s employment status.” So the attorneys on both sides will argue in front of a judge what the appropriate period of alimony should be? They can also argue how long the marriage was (it can take 2-3 years for a divorce lawsuit to get to final judgment; does the “length of the marriage” include this period of litigation or not?).

ChatGPT also included the seemingly reasonable boilerplate “This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the state in which the Parties reside.”

Does that mean the state in which the Parties reside at the time the prenup is signed? The state in which the Parties reside at the time that one sues the other? What if they don’t live in the same state either at the time of signing or at the time the lawsuit is filed? Hello Prenup generates agreements that are specific as to which state’s laws govern.

So… Hello Prenup has some deficiencies, but nothing like GPT-4’s!

If you’re considering getting married, don’t be distracted by foreign wars. Remember that, depending on the state where you choose to reside, you could be embroiled in a far more upsetting and personally costly war of your own in family court. A prenup offers a small degree of protection against this, though not against the most upsetting and expensive parts of a typical divorce lawsuit. The typical U.S. state sets up a winner-take-all battle between the two parents for who will (1) get to spend time with what used to be joint children, and (2) who will therefore get the river of cash that is associated with those children (“child support”; the flip side of this is “who will be forced to disgorge the river of cash while seldom seeing the children”). It is far more protective to move to a state such as Nevada that defaults to 50/50 shared parenting and limits child support profits than it is to work on and sign a piece of paper. For the typical married-with-kids person, it is far more dangerous to live in Maskachusetts or New York with an “ironclad prenup” than it is to live in a shared parenting state with child support profit limits with no prenup.

[Update: A friend provided the same prompt to GPT-4 today and it came up with a different clause for governing law…

Maybe ChatGPT has been going to law school?]

Related:

  • Real World Divorce, especially chapters 5 and 7 regarding what can be the subject of litigation
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Why won’t the people who say that Israel is committing genocide go to Gaza and fight?

by philg

It has become standard among American and European progressives to refer to the Israel military operation in response to the October 7, 2023 attacks by the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) as “genocide.” We can see the same term used in a comment on a post in this blog.

Let’s assume that the progressives are correct, ignoring the fact that the population of Gaza today is 3X what it was in 1990 (typically a “genocide” involves a population reduction, not a population explosion). Given that assumption, these folks say have identified an ongoing genocide. Why won’t they take meaningful action to stop the genocide?

If brave, they could go to Gaza and pick up a rifle (or a shotgun?) and fight alongside the Islamic Resistance Movement and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. If cowardly, they could advocate for the U.S. military and NATO to go in and destroy Israel or, at least, the Israeli military. Instead, however, they’ve decided to be idle bystanders while a genocide is perpetrated. They’ll perhaps post on Twitter or Facebook or occasionally attend a protest demonstration. “Dozens of students stage walk out at Harvard in solidarity with Palestinians” (CBS):

The Harvard students said Palestinians are facing genocide and they wanted to show their support. They’re calling on the university’s administration to address the conflict.

They’re young and healthy, but they won’t fight against genocide. Instead, they want to send meek Harvard administrators to do battle against the IDF.

Also, high school students in Democrat-run Philadelphia:

Hundreds of Philadelphia high school students walked out of school Friday to march around City Hall in support of Palestinians.

“This is not a war. This is a genocide,” Nora, a student in the School District of Philadelphia who helped organize the action, said of the ongoing Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, even in places where Palestinians were told to seek safety. “The goals of today’s protests are … to get justice, and to fight back, and to use our voices.”

Hamas has soldiers who are the same age as American high schoolers (Daily Mail). These Philadelphians say that they want to “fight back”. Why doesn’t that include volunteering in the real fight against genocide?

Across the pond… “200 Bristol students join pro-Palestine demonstration outside Bristol Uni’s Senate House”:

A student-led pro-Palestinian protest broke out today in front of Senate House, with members calling for the end of the “Israeli Apartheid” and accusing the Israeli state of “ethnic cleansing and genocide”.

Members of the Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS), the student wing of a national Marxist organisation, led the protest with banners and speeches in solidarity with Palestinians.

Chants of “free Palestine” and “in our thousands and in our millions, we are all Palestinians” could be heard during the 45 minute protest.

If they’re healthy enough to go to university and they’ve identified “ethnic cleansing and genocide”, why aren’t they volunteering to put a stop to these crimes against humanity?

Here’s a tweet from Cori Bush, who represents St. Louis in the U.S. House:

Israel is guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “slaughtering” civilians, presumably with no military justification or rationale (unlike the U.S., which always protected civilians). Israel is committing “atrocities”. Does she advocate sending in the Marines to stop the Israelis? No. Airstrikes on every Israeli military base? No. Cori Bush suggests only that we cut off foreign aid to Israel, which can’t possibly deliver the hoped-for victory to the Islamic Resistance Movement or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even after shutting down for coronapanic and spending a ton of money on early Covid-19 vaccination (end result: a higher excess death rate than Sweden’s) Israel has a GDP of about $500 billion per year.

Related:

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Halloween in Florida

by philg

Due to the crowds drawn by our neighbor’s fantastic pirate house, we ran out of candy last year after giving out 1,500 pieces. This year, the stock is 2,000 pieces (thanks, Costco). Here are a few photos around the neighborhood:

We need this costume (at a neighbor’s party):

Johnny Depp is attacked by a more aggressive foe than Amber Heard:

I love this house:

Forecast for trick-or-treating here in Jupiter is 79 degrees and clear.

One of the nice things about Florida is the geographical and psychological distance from upsetting world events. No matter how upsetting the headlines, people here recognize that (a) they’re not important or powerful enough to change anything, and (b) their own life is mostly unaffected. A typical Floridian’s mood is not controlled by the media.

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Will the Gaza tunnel network prove to be Hamas’s Maginot Line?

by philg

An Israel-supporting friend was expressing gloom about the latest battle in the 75-year Arab-Israeli war. He cited an article by an armchair warrior about the IDF’s track record of failure in ground offenses:

Despite three weeks of bombing and 17 years of siege, Israel has been unable to curb Hamas’s ability to launch missiles deep within Israel. Israel lacks strategic depth, being one of the smallest countries in the region and with hostile or cold neighbors on all sides. It has nine power stations, out of which the second largest has been damaged by Hamas rockets.

Israel has not won a major ground campaign since the Battle of Jenin refugee camp in 2002. In 2006, Israel failed to advance four kilometers from Israel into Lebanon to capture the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil. It even failed to fully capture Maroun El-Ras, a small village two kilometers from the border. There was much handwringing in Israel over the lessons of the 2006 Lebanon War, with many recommendations supposedly implemented by the IDF. This, however, did not change the fact that Israel was barely able to enter Gaza City’s Shujaiyya neighborhood in 2014, despite overwhelming firepower. Israel has not attempted a major ground incursion since then.

The article describes the tunnels built by Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and the Party of Allah (“Hezbollah”) as strengths for Israel’s opponents. I wonder if these could instead be weaknesses (I wondered about this before in Can Israel find all of Hamas’s tunnels with ground-penetrating radar? And then what?) The tunnels are surely strong against any foreseen threat, but perhaps the IDF can come up with some unforeseen threats to the tunnels, e.g., against their ventilation systems or by using smarter radar and well-drilling equipment to insert explosives. In this case, the tunnels would become the Maginot Line, Jihad Edition. Built by the French, the Maginot Line is famous as an example of flawed military thinking. The Germans wouldn’t be able to go through it, so they wouldn’t be able to invade France. In 1940, however, the Germans simply drove around the line.

[Note that Wikipedia says that the real-world Maginot Line was not the Maginot Line of metaphor and the French were not as incompetent as we like to think:

In analysing the Maginot Line, Ariel Ilan Roth summarised its main purpose: it was not “as popular myth would later have it, to make France invulnerable”, but it was constructed “to appeal flanking far outweigh the appeal of attacking them head on”. … before construction in October 1927, the Superior Council of War adopted the final design for the line and identified that one of the main missions would be to deter a German cross-border assault with only minimal force to allow “the army time to mobilise.” In addition, the French envisioned that the Germans would conduct a repeat of their First World War battle plan to flank the defences and drew up their overall strategy with that in mind.

In other words, the line perhaps did function as designed.]

This is not to say that the Islamic Resistance Movement, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Party of Allah are doomed to defeat (I’m not confident in my armchair strategy skills). I’m just questioning whether the tunnels will prove to be a source of significant strength. Consider that if the battle goes on long enough and the West doesn’t resupply Hamas with fuel as a “humanitarian” effort, Hamas could simply run out of the fuel that it needs to generate electricity to ventilate the tunnels. A tunnel without ventilation has no military value. (See Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea)

[On the third hand, maybe the Islamic Resistance Movement and friends did not expect to use the tunnels during an Israeli ground offensive. In that case, the tunnels would be exactly like the real Maginot Line.]

Separately, my friend is a loyal California Democrat who has spent two years expressing hatred for Ron DeSantis, the one presidential candidate who says flatly “no” to interfering with Israel’s military efforts and also “no” to accepting Gazans as immigrants to the U.S.:

Like my other California Democrat friends with advanced degrees and elite jobs, he enjoys pointing out how stupid working-class Americans are for voting Republican. They’re “voting against their own interest”, he has said. He, by contrast, has supported (a) increased immigration of Muslims, (b) the election of progressives such as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib to Congress, and (c) the defeat of Ron DeSantis, who has proved to be the most unequivocal supporter of Israel.

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