2SLGBTQQIA+ 2023 NYC

by philg

Checking in on the rainbow flag religion during a recent visit to one of its sacred places: New York City. The celebration begins at Newark Airport, Terminal C:

(Note the possibility that this reflects a charitable donation by the “All Gender” family, just as the “Dolby Family Terrace” is not a terrace in which surround sound occurs, but rather the result of a donation from the Dolby family.)

Here’s the gender non-conforming “family” depicted on the door of the All Gender Family Restroom:

(Apologies for the skewed photo, but I was rushing past!)

What if an out-of-towner wants to suit up in native garb? American Eagle is ready to supplyi:

Once in Greenwich Village, one finds a somewhat hateful display (trans-exclusionary?) on an old-school establishment:

The window decals raise a question… why don’t Deplorables get upset about Miller Lite if they objected to Bud Light’s waving of the rainbow flag?

Dia Chelsea invites everyone to use the Women’s room:

Billboards in various parts of the city remind New Yorkers that 2SLGBTQQIA+ combined with youth is hazardous:

(If the city has run out of space for the tens of thousands of asylum-seekers who’ve recently arrived, how are they ever going to provide homes for the “homeless youth” mentioned?)

We are informed that #NewYorkStrong may not be quite strong enough to handle Ibsen’s 1879 A Doll’s House (“This production contains themes that some people may find upsetting”). If a fainting couch is required, however, anyone may use the Women’s room:

Canines who rejected gender binarism and cisgender heterosexuality are catered to:

The Whitney museum has two single-user restrooms next to each other, but they’re labeled differently:

A typical restaurant downtown:

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Excess deaths by state map (for assessing coronapanic effectiveness)

by philg

I’ve long yearned for a state-by-state map that has similar “excess death” data to what Our World in Data delivers for countries (no-lockdown no-mask-order Swedes holding steady at 5%, substantially lower than the countries celebrated for their police- and military-enforced lockdowns).

Courtesy of heretic Stanford Medical School professor Jay Bhattacharya, I finally have one! It’s from the cheerfully named web site “US Mortality”. Here’s a link directly to the map:

In my opinion, the map tends to show that the Church of Sweden MD/PhDs were correct when they predicted, back in March 2020, that government policies in the West would have at best a small effect on total death rate. How does the map show this when different states are in different colors? SARS-CoV-2 likes to kill those of us who are carrying extra pounds. Here’s a CDC map of adult obesity:

(No data for Florida? You’d think those CDC folks would love to be on South Beach and Marco Island rating body shapes!)

To my eyes, the obesity map explains most of the pattern that we see in the excess deaths map. (You’d also want to look at percent of population over 65; a state that is all young people should have an extremely low rate of both COVID deaths and excess deaths.)

A few highlights…

California with its Science-following fully-masked schools-closed vaccine-papers-checking population suffered 22.4% excess deaths compared to 20.4% in Science-denying irresponsible Florida (inherently vulnerable due to 21% of population over 65). Considering how many Californians were paid to stay home (either working as members of the laptop class or not-working as members of the welfare class) and considering that Californians are slender (CDC map) and young (only 15% of population over 65), this might be the worst performance among all states. Colorado was a close second (slender, young, and a 22.8% excess death rate).

The geniuses at University of California, Berkeley celebrated Vermont, Alaska, and Maine as “the three most effective states in responding to the coronavirus pandemic last year”. How did the Scientific prediction from March 2021 work out? Without a city of substantial size, Vermont had 21.5% excess deaths, almost the same as New York (19.1%). Alaska was off-the-charts bad at 27.7%. Maine turned in a reasonable 16.3% performance, so long as you didn’t mind lockdowns, mask orders, school closures, and vaccine coercion (through May 13, 2022).

Kristi Noem was pilloried for refusing to follow Faucism in South Dakota, but her state had 17.1% excess deaths despite a high percentage of obese adults (see CDC map above).

Kentucky’s Democrat governor was celebrated for “halting the spread of COVID-19” while the Republican fool running Tennessee was slow to order lockdowns (The Guardian). Tennessee ended up with a lower excess death rate. (Possibly explained by a higher obesity rate.)

Not counting Hawaii, Maskachusetts and New Jersey had the lowest rates of excess deaths. Some of this is probably explained by the fact that people in MA and NJ are virtuously thin (CDC map). There are also a large percentage of laptop class folks in both states who were able to stay home in their suburban bunkers. But maybe I will be forced to admit that closing Boston schools for more than a year, ordering people to wear cloth face rags on quiet suburban streets, and demanding that children show their vaccine papers were effective measures!

(People who aren’t cisgender white heterosexuals might nonetheless want to avoid Massachusetts, home to “the country’s second-highest number of white supremacist propaganda incidents in 2022” (considering the small population of the state, this is off-the-charts bad per capita). “Hate in the Bay State: Extremism & Antisemitism in Massachusetts, 2021-2022” (ADL):

Amidst increasing nationwide threats to the LGBTQ+ community, Massachusetts has also witnessed a spike in anti-LGBTQ+ activity, including waves of harassment against Boston Children’s Hospital, drag performances and LGBTQ+ events. And as the numbers of antisemitic incidents continue to rise across the country, Massachusetts was no exception. According to ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, it was the sixth most affected state in the country in 2022.

Massachusetts saw a dramatic rise in antisemitic incidents, according to ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. In 2022, the number of incidents increased 41% over 2021 levels…

ADL documented 34 white supremacist events in the state in 2021 and 2022, including protests, meetings, flash demonstrations, banner drops and marches.

In 2022, ADL documented 465 instances of white supremacist propaganda distribution across the state, an increase of 71% from 2021 (272).

In May 2022, a student in Waltham brought a knife to school, threatened his Jewish classmates and held the knife to the throat of a Jewish classmate.

Since 2021, the Nationalist Social Club, also known as NSC-131, has grown rapidly to become one of New England’s most active white supremacist groups; their presence is particularly robust in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts is a hotbed for anti-LGBTQ+ extremism, which increased nationwide in 2022

Patriot Front is a Texas-based white supremacist group with members all over the country, but they have become increasingly active in Massachusetts because of the state’s ties to the founding of the United States.

The last point strikes me as odd. Wouldn’t the Patriot Front need to find enthusiastic supporters in a state in order to be “increasingly active”? The history of the state doesn’t seem relevant.

The mention of Waltham made me nostalgic. When we lived in adjacent Lincoln I used to offer neighbors whose lawns sported Black Lives Matter signs a free trip to Waltham in our minivan: “You can have a look at some actual Black people.” This did not make me as popular as I expected.)

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Any clarity on the Jordan Neely situation?

by philg

I got on the subway at the Broadway-Lafayette stop where Jordan Neely died (Wikipedia). At Houston and Broadway, a block west of the station:

Some photos the station (note the fancy new credit card reader that can collect a fare from a standard Visa card):

I’m wondering if there has been any clarity yet regarding what happened and whether Daniel Penny acted reasonably or criminally. It seemed as though there was a rush to judgment. For example, Ron DeSantis, 1,100 miles by road from the station:

Note that this was from his personal Twitter account, not the official Florida governor’s feed. I’m wondering how Mr. DeSantis can know whether Mr. Penny was indeed a “Good Samaritan”. He posted just 12 days after the death of Mr. Neely. (Also, why does he want to get involved in this? If New Yorkers are brawling on the subway, sometimes with fatal consequences, that’s actually helpful to Florida’s economy. If New York prosecutors are being unfair and unjust toward Mr. Penny that’s not a Florida problem that the Florida governor should be worried about. (If the Florida governor wanted to crusade against injustice there are plenty of places around the world that offer more compelling examples.))

What’s actually been learned in the three weeks since the unfortunate event?

Separately, when does the station get renamed to honor Jordan Neely’s memory? (Or, if not the station then perhaps the entire New York City Subway system?)

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Quality of life in New York City

by philg

I traveled to Manhattan and Brooklyn earlier this month for a family event (see Abortion care as a wedding gift?), my first trip to NYC since June 2021. This post is for young people thinking of settling in the city.

I stayed with friends who live in NYU faculty housing just south of Washington Square Park. Their neighborhood is literally trashed. A son who was home from college said “the neighborhood is so dirty and disorderly compared to when I was in high school that I barely recognize it.” His dad blames the in-street dining shacks that restaurants have constructed for (1) encouraging rats, and (2) making it tough for city workers to clean the streets. That can’t be the full explanation, however, because trash cans are overflowing and trash bags are everywhere. Somehow, NYC lost the art of picking up trash. We also saw a street sweeper go over a section of pavement that was littered with food wrappers and similar large objects and hardly any of the trash seemed to have been swept up. They need higher tech machines. Here are some photos:

Speaking of filth, the New Yorkers who claimed to be experts on avoiding infectious disease seem to be running quite a few establishments in which (1) people eat food with their hands, and (2) there is neither a restroom for customers nor a hand-washing sink. Example:

The hipster neighborhoods of Brooklyn were just as filthy. The Upper West Side, however, seemed like its old reasonably clean self and, of course, Central Park is easily accessible. (There may be some variation among neighborhoods depending on trash collection schedule, of course, but the Village seems to be filthy all the time.) Whichever neighborhood you choose, rest assured that you’ll be staying healthy by inhaling plenty of secondhand marijuana smoke. “They’re on every block,” said my hostess regarding the marijuana retailers. Here’s one where the Followers of Science can get their chart read as well:

Wherever you choose to live, don’t plan on straying too far from that neighborhood. The road network was gridlocked the entire time that I was there, with drive times within Manhattan at least 2X what they were in 1995 when I lived there. Uber prices are 2X what they were in 2019, perhaps partly due to drive times being so much longer. Uber was going to cost at least $100 to get from the Upper West Side to LaGuardia Airport. I managed to find a cab and it was $45 plus tip ($55 total). Google Maps-quoted walk-plus-subway times were nearly always shorter than Uber/taxi (even without any waiting), but the subway is not for everyone!

As my friends get older, they demonstrate more fully the wisdom of the authors of A Pattern Language, specifically the Four Story Limit chapter, in which the authors note “The higher people live off the ground, the more likely are they to suffer mental illness” and attributes this correlation to the effort required to leave the apartment if a long elevator ride is a prerequisite. Our house in Florida is all on the ground floor from the perspective of adults. We can be in and out of it all day and probably enter/exit at least 10 times on a typical day (maybe 15-20 if you count trips to the back yard). Friends in NY on the 9th or the 19th floor, on the other hand, need a good reason to leave the apartment and often don’t get out until noon or later. They’re incurring huge costs to live in a place where there are all kinds of activities all the time, but they’re not engaging in these activities because the hurdle to leave the apartment is too high.

Maybe there should be a rule: if you spend more than 75 percent of your waking hours in your apartment you should move out of NYC. Exceptions… you want to get paid for having sex or you enjoy smoking crack:

Related:

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Should everyone buy a home AED now that we’re all vaccinated?

by philg

Science proves that cardiac arrest cannot be caused by a COVID attempted vaccine. But Science also proves that we can never be killed by COVID-19 if we have been injected with at least 4 (or 5? or 6?) COVID shots. Therefore, we can move on to worrying about ways to die other than via SARS-CoV-2…. e.g., cardiac arrest!

A friend is a police officer and recently went through recurrent CPR training. Americans who get shot have a 90 percent survival rate, but those who suffer a sudden cardiac arrest survive only about 10 percent of the time. The automated external defibrillator (AED) is the key to survival, not CPR, according to the nurse who provided the training. Why not buy a home AED? They’re compact and available for as little as $700 “recertified”. The refurbished units are typically never-used machines that run out of their 4-year battery certification and the recertification process may be as simple as putting in a new battery.

Will the home AED definitely save you? The nurse training my friend explained that it probably won’t save a married man. “The wife would rather get the insurance money than provide resuscitation.”

“The AED in Resuscitation: It’s Not Just about the Shock” (2011):

Newer guidelines have simplified resuscitation and emphasized the importance of CPR in providing rapid and deep compressions with minimal interruptions; in fact, CPR should resume immediately after the shock given by the AED, without the delay entailed in checking for pulse or rhythm conversion.

Although CPR predated the development of the modern automated external defibrillator (AED), the technique seemed to be relegated to a lower priority after introduction of the modern AED. Recently, CPR has been increasingly recognized as a critical factor in treating cardiac arrest, in combination with the AED.

Readers: Do you have an AED in your house? If not, why not?

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National Basketball Association celebrates Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

by philg

Our local public schools run fundraising events in which parents are urged to dine at particular restaurants on particular nights, with 10 percent of the revenue funneled back to the schools. At one of these events, a television was tuned to NBA TV.

The fine print at bottom: “Happy AAPI Heritage Month! The NBA family is dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive environment both on and off the court. Each May, the NBA and its affiliate leagues celebrate the rich history, culture, and achievements of AAPI communities.”

Readers: What have you done this month to celebrate the achievements of Asians and Pacific Islanders on NBA teams?

(Separately, a friend says that he prefers to watch basketball games from South Korea. “The net isn’t high enough for modern American players,” he says, ” so they don’t have to be as creative as was required when the game was designed. The South Korean players aren’t as tall so they have to work harder and use more strategy.”)

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Should former au pairs come back to New York to sue their host families for sexual assault?

by philg

New York Democrats opened a one-year hunting season on Donald Trump by temporarily removing the statute of limitations on sexual assault. A jury has demonstrated that no physical evidence is required for a plaintiff to make bank. Suppose that former au pairs come over from Europe to file lawsuits against the families for whom they worked in the 1990s. The jury will see a photo of a beautiful slender 18-year-old and, at the defense table, a fat old letch who used to be the host dad (cue the Harvey Weinstein footage). It won’t take a lot of juror imagination to picture the fat old guy pawing at the beautiful young woman, trapped in the room above the garage. If E. Jean Carroll can get $2 million for the assault on her 53-year-old twice-divorced body (in 1996, plus or minus 5 years), imagine what a jury would award for an assault on an innocent 18-year-old virgin.

Although divorce is much less common in Europe, if a former au pair has ended up divorced or a spinster or can claim to have suffered in some other way there could be enhanced damages from the assault. (As E. Jean Carroll achieved by saying that she wasn’t able to find new romance after the two proven divorces and one alleged rape.) Here’s a current photo of a household containing an au pair, from a profit-seeking government-authorized agency (only a handful of agencies can supply au pairs, which makes the trade profitable):

What jury is going to have trouble believing that something happened between the two folks on the left side of the photo during a full year living in the same house?

(For roughly half of the defendants, the former au pair plaintiff will be able to mine a rich deposit of salacious allegations made in a divorce lawsuit perhaps 15 years ago. New York divorce law did not technically become “no fault” until 2010 (Wikipedia), thus encouraging family court plaintiffs to present lurid accusations of abuse, rape, etc. in order to secure a victory.)

  • From a legal point of view, this path to riches could also work for a “bro pair” (male au pair), but these were not common in the 1990s
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If New York City has a falling population, why doesn’t it have room for migrants?

by philg

“NYC lost 5.3% of its population — nearly a half-million people — since COVID, with most heading South” (New York Post, May 18):

The US Census Bureau revealed Thursday that the Big Apple’s population is 5.3% lower than it was when the novel coronavirus first hit the country. Over 468,200 people fled the city between April 2020 and July 2022.

“As Crisis Grows, All of New York’s Migrant Plans Are Met With Outrage” (New York Times, May 18):

First the city tried hotels, then tents, then a cruise ship terminal, then school gyms. As migrants have continued to cross the border, the mayor pleaded on Wednesday for understanding — and ideas.

Now, the daily stream of migrants feeding the crisis has doubled in size in recent weeks, city officials say. As many as 700 migrants are arriving each day in the city — up from less than half that number since the expiration last Thursday of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allowed immigration officials to expel some border crossers back to Mexico.

With no clear solutions at hand, the city turned to shelter some migrants in public school gyms starting last week. That plan, like many others before it, was almost immediately met with outrage — not only from activists and human rights groups, but also from public school parents and the ranks of everyday New Yorkers.

More than 67,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the crisis began. Of those, 41,500 people are currently being cared for by the city, Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, said at a news conference on Wednesday. She said 4,300 people had arrived in just the past week.

Migrants are people as far as the U.S. Census Bureau is concerned. Therefore, New York City’s population is dropping dramatically despite the steady arrival of migrants. Why is it a challenge to find housing in a place with a constant number of buildings and a falling number of people?

Times Square was a little crowded on a Friday night earlier this month:

But courtyard near the Whitney was pretty empty considering the fine weather (mid-day Saturday):

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Should E. Jean Carroll have been able to sue Donald Trump? (statute of limitations)

by philg

New York Democrats opened a one-year window for 30-year-old sexual assault allegations recently so that E. Jean Carroll could sue Donald Trump for attacking her in a New York department store at some point in the mid-1990s (as Toucan Sam points out, the plaintiff’s inability to remember the date was helpful because it prevents the defendant from coming up with an alibi for that day, e.g., “flight records show that I was in Florida with my Boeing 727 and so does this photo from the Palm Beach Post.

States are sovereign and can usually do whatever they want, but Trump was no longer a New York resident at the time his plaintiff got funded by Reid Hoffman. Is a Florida resident vulnerable to attack in the New York courts today because he had the poor judgment to be present in New York State at some point in the 1990s?

I wonder what happens if other states copy New York. Suppose that Pennsylvanians, envious of the pharma wealth accumulated in New Jersey, say that they learned from Dr. Fauci about the critical importance of pharma and, therefore, there won’t be any statute of limitations for suing an out-of-state pharma company for pain and suffering that a plaintiff attributes to ingestion of a pill. Pennsylvanians have no paper records of what drugs were prescribed to whom back in the 1980s, but can come to court with dramatic testimony, corroborated by family and friends, about being harmed. Female plaintiffs can copy E. Jean Carroll and talk about how a pill taken in the 1990s caused their spinsterhoods. Why wouldn’t Pennsylvania juries want to #BelieveNeighbors and hit out-of-state pharma companies with massive judgments for actual and punitive damages? Pfizer’s market cap of $200+ billion could be siphoned away within a few years.

If all of the pharma companies have been mined out by Pennsylvanians, the Montana Legislature could decide that automobiles are critical to family life in Montana. Therefore, claims of premature component failures, injuries due to design or manufacturing defects, etc. shouldn’t be subject to any time limits. Montana residents then file suits against Ford, GM, Toyota, et al., saying that cars for which they paid $10,000 in 1985 ultimately proved to be unreliable. Plaintiffs have no paper records, but can offer dramatic testimony, corroborated by family and friends, about what terrible cars were delivered to them. Montana juries can award each plaintiff $28,755 in actual damages ($10,000 in 1985 money adjusted with CPI to today’s Bidies) plus punitive damages. Why not believe the car purchase survivor if the money is going to be paid by an out-of-state or out-of-country manufacturer to a local resident?

Volkswagen Group has a market cap of about $70 billion. Montanans should be able to take it all by saying that they suffered from problems with the Audi 5000, including unintended acceleration (proven beyond a doubt by CBS’s 60 Minutes show).

Readers with legal minds: Could what the New York Democrats did run afoul of the U.S. Constitution? The Fifth Amendment, originally binding only on the federal government, but eventually extended to the states:

No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

The Fourteenth Amendment:

…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

It isn’t obviously “due process” to go from a 5-year statute of limitations to a 20-year statute (2019 change by Florida Realtor of the Year 2020/2021) to no limit (the 2022 change) and then back to 20 years (scheduled for end of 2023).

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What to do with two old iPad Mini 2s with free T-Mobile mobile data?

by philg

We have a couple of iPad Mini 2s that were introduced in 2013, model number MF575LL/A (64 GB and T-Mobile LTE). If memory serves, these came with a free lifetime low-speed T-Mobile connection (though right now it seems not to be working; maybe it needs to be reactivated?). Checking the various “sell my stuff” web sites, these have no commercial value ($729 back in 2013, which purportedly corresponds to 947 Bidies). But they’re in great cosmetic condition and the batteries still work for a few hours at least so I’m reluctant to throw them out.

They can’t run the latest iOS, but most major apps work fine on iOS 12.5.

What is a useful application of such obsolete hardware, with particular attention to the mobile data connection. Thanks in advance for any ideas! (“idea” can include “give away to X”)

What if the idea is “throw out”? Here’s Apple’s environmental report from September 2015:

Related:

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