Intersection of Islam and 2SLGBTQQIA+ Pride in Port Angeles, Washington

by philg

Today is the Pride Match in Seattle, which “features a globally controversial matchup between Iran and Egypt, two countries where homosexuality is heavily criminalized. Despite objections from both nations’ football associations, FIFA is permitting rainbow flags and human rights displays inside the stadium.” (Google AI, citing The Atlantic)

Where else do Islam and Pride intersect in Washington State? Port Angeles, Washington. This was where would-be jihadist Ahmed Ressam was arrested on December 14, 1999 after Customs agent Diana Dean became suspicious of “Benni Noris”. The Algerian who had been enriching Canada had more than 100 lbs. of explosives in his rented Chrysler, intending to blow up LAX (for anyone who has been forced to travel through LAX it is tough to know where one’s sympathies should be in this situation).

The town is situated up against the Olympic Mountains:

What would the noble Islamic migrant have seen if he got off the ferry from Victoria, B.C. today? No huge sign or even small plaque at immigration or at the ferry honoring agent Diana Dean, despite the fact that she likely saved hundreds of American lives:

If Mr. Ressam had walked into the local office of the Democratic Party he would have been welcomed in Arabic:

At the front door, the Democrats specifically say that immigration/customs agents such as Diana Dean, Port Angeles’s greatest hero, aren’t welcome:

Context for the above:

Ahmed Ressam would have learned from the Democrats that the whole idea of borders is illegitimate:

Ressam was actually ordered deported from Canada due to his career as a criminal there, but because he refused to assist in his deportation by providing a passport he was allowed to stay in Canada indefinitely. (He is now living at taxpayer expense here in the U.S.) He could have learned this effective strategy from the Port Angeles Democrats (“Do Not Carry Any Documents From The Country Where You Were Born”):

Ressam could have drawn inspiration from RBG: “Fight for the thing you care about” (in Ressam’s case, Islam and Al-Qaeda).

Ressam would have been invited by the Democrats, and by at least half of the other downtown storefronts, to attend the June 14 “Pride on the Pier” festival:

What else would the noble Ressam have seen inside this office?

In the pantheon of resistance heroes, Jew-hater Martin Niemöller, who later become disillusioned with the Nazi Party for which he voted three times, is featured.

Strolling down the street…

What’s in the bookstore window?

(the front door had some more invitations to Pride events and Queerville)

Generally speaking, the town’s storefronts were examples of Rainbow-first Retail, in which the sacred Rainbow Flag must be passed by every customer.

Would would Ahmed Ressam have been enjoying as a snack after his ferry ride, but for Diana Dean’s interference? The “New Zealand-style” ice cream shop next to the ferry offers a Rainbow Sundae and a Pride Float:

How about some reading? The second downtown bookstore had a reasonably rich selection:

That’s it for Port Angeles!

Practical Tourism advice: it’s tough to plan a trip to the northern part of Olympic National Park more than a day in advance if you’re hoping to get up to Hurricane Ridge and actually see anything. There are some decent rainforest walks, though, even when the ride is covered in clouds.

We stayed at Olympic Lodge by Ayres, which might be the best hotel in town. Unfortunately, the WiFi is throttled to 10 Mbits under the best of circumstances and, therefore, it might not be practical to get a lot of work done while waiting days for the weather to clear.

Readers: Who enjoyed the Pride soccer game between Iran and Egypt?

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Olympia, Washington: Too busy with “Nothing but Hate for Israel and Zionism” to help their homeless neighbors

by philg

After two nights in Rainier National Park, we stopped in Olympic, Washington. The town’s passions are summarized beautifully on State Ave. Stonewall Youth, a group that hosts “drop-ins for queer+trans youth 12-21”, is surrounded by unhoused neighbors (the encampment in the photo below is one block away) and has not a single sign regarding what might be done to assist the unhoused. At the same time, the group is occupied with pro-Hamas advocacy: “Nothing but Hate for Israel and Zionism; Nothing but Love for Palestine and Liberation: from gaza to the americas, decolonization means attack!” (they don’t want to decolonize Olympic, Washington and give the land back to the Native Americans?)

5.5 years after coronapanic, indoor masking remains common in Olympia, but some locals go the full distance into delightful Outdoor Masking (not shown: the homeless guy in the background literally dancing to his own tuen):

The folks who post Black Lives Matter signs all over their town celebrate the memory of RBG, a person famous for refusing to hire any Black law school graduates, while ignoring their indigent neighbors:

Captain Little, a toy store, joins Stonewall Youth in combining advocacy for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ with advocacy for a Hamas-ruled society in which non-heterosexual sex is a criminal act:

Instead of collecting money to help their unhoused neighbors, a couple of whom walked by the store during the few minutes that I needed to get the photos, the toy store is raising money to help a 23-year-old Gaza “demolished home that was bombed by the IOF”:

Children are invited to a couple of Pride events:

One shopper who would absolutely love this children’s store is Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever:

Speaking of children, here’s what they experence at the Browsers bookstore… The front window:

Specifically in a section marked “Children” within the store:

(It is a little unclear what will happen on Juneteenth in Olympia, Washington. The U.S. Census says that the town is just 3% Black. Based on our walks around downtown, this seems like an overestimate.)

Featured for the parents, in the adult area:

At the front of the store, a reminder that the apparently meek person sitting in an armchair with a book is actually a brave fighter against fascism.

The edge of the building that holds the bookstore is devoted to a massive “Oympia-Rafah Solidarity” mural. The State of Israel is compared to the United States in terms of illegitimate occupation of land that properly belongs to the indigenous, but there is no indication that any of those behind the mural project have returned the land underneath their own houses to the rightful Native American owners and started paying rent. Curiously, the mural says that “no human is illegal” and the anyone can immigrate into the U.S., which seems to be inconsistent with their opposition to Jews having immigrated to British-administered Mandatory Palestine and, after being expelled from Arab/Muslim countries, to the State of Israel. Finally, note that not every Jew is a bad Jew. a Jewess who “refuses to occupy” might be acceptable:

Loosely related, the local indigents get a cheerful mural backdrop:

The sacred Pride mural is desecrated by the presence of rubbish cans in front:

The crosswalk murals are kept clean:

The local flag store sells everything but the American Flag:

Here’s a store that advertises a “No Hate” festival and also warns people to “Beware of [hate-filled?] dog”:

Maybe the dog doesn’t want to “Make America Gay Again”?

Shopping for women’s clothing is an occasion to ponder “No Kings”, Ukraine, Equity, and Immigrants vs. ICE:

Shopping for flowers is a time to remember to “Protect Trans Youth” and that “Queer is Normal”:

There is a huge disconnect between the interests of contemporary Olympians and those of the folks who set up and decorated the State Capitol. War is glorified, including our illegitimate war against Germany in 1917 (after providing a lot of help to the British while officially neutral, we declared war on Germany, untimately winning a “victory” that resulted in Adolf Hitler being elected):

The State of Washington officially flies the sacred Trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag:

It’s magnificent inside, the entire Marble Island of Alaska having been mined to decorate the interior (chandeliers from Tiffany):

Slaveholder George Washington is honored and, on the flip side, Martin Luther King, Jr. (the great man visited Washington State just once, spending four days in Seattle at a time when 1% of residents were Black):

The plastic aerosol virus shields that went up during coropanic are still there in the state offices where the public might show up. Perhaps nobody has had time to read “Those Anti-Covid Plastic Barriers Probably Don’t Help and May Make Things Worse” (New York Times 2021): “erecting plastic barriers can change air flow in a room, disrupt normal ventilation and create “dead zones,” where viral aerosol particles can build up and become highly concentrated.”

Next stop: Olympic National Park!

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Why don’t the Islamic European countries install A/C for their black burqa-clad lifestyle?

by philg

The forecast high for today is 104 in Paris, part of the predominantly Muslim region of Europe (measured by hours spent in religious observance).

It is supposed to hit 106 in Berlin on Sunday using the temperature units that God prefers:

The most popular outfit for women in these Islamic cities is a black burqa or at least a full covering that includes a hijab (not for a majority of females, of course, but the burqa/near-burqa would have a plurality; France is apparently jammed with haters and bans face coverings, but an uncovered face won’t provide a lot of cooling). This is not an ideal match for the prevailing hot sunny weather. Previously, Europeans said that they didn’t need A/C because they would just tough out the two-month heatwaves, like the one that hit the pre-Islamic UK in 1911 (temps up to 100). But now that these countries want to be welcoming toward their new citizens, many of whom do not have the option to strip down to a bikini (haram), why not fully air-condition apartment buildings and public spaces?

What’s it like over there? I’ve been talking to rich friends in Europe. All live in single-family houses that cost over $1 million. All are being subject to outside temperatures of 97-103 degrees F. None have air conditioning. Answer from a $15,000/month small house in Switzerland: “AC? We are Europoors.” When the heat began, he said that he was “surviving on the eight sleep, which actually does a decent job of cooling the bed”. (This seems to be a 400W Peltier cooler and, thus, will make the room hotter.) Today, though, “Last night was the most painful. 8sleep couldn’t keep up. [Slender Spanish-born] Wife, who is always cold and considers AC the Antichrist, even asked to chill her side of the bed. Still have no temp gauge to measure, but felt like sleeping in a sauna.” A reader in the Paris suburbs has the luxury of basement access, presumably denied to apartment-dwellers. It’s an inferno above-ground in the house (about 86F on the ground floor and much hotter upstairs), but the basement has stayed at 70 and the family is sleeping there.

A Dutch academic: “I have a PhD graduation today here. It’s a big affair where I need to put on a black suit and, over that, the toga and hat. There’s no AC in the building.” (He’s in a 4-story townhouse with no AC and also no screens on the windows. There aren’t that many mosquitoes in Holland and the Dutch apparently don’t mind sharing their houses with flies.)

New York Times, regarding the peasants in their stacked boxes:

Mr. Dewison’s apartment, like most in London, has no air-conditioning, and he said the temperature there had reached 45 degrees Celsius, or 113 Fahrenheit. He said he was worried about future heat waves and their effects on nature. “This is a bit mad,” he said.

Here’s how the Europeans are supposed to manage (source):

(Note that this means spending the entire day in the dark.)

Here’s an odd twist: the subset of Europeans rich enough to afford a trip to Miami or Houston for World Cup games ended up being far cooler than their (often Islamically covered) neighbors who stayed home. Both Miami and Houston have lower high temps than Paris or Berlin, for example. The stadium in Houston is fully air-conditioned. Any hotel where a spectator might stay is, of course, fully air-conditioned. So “the Germans went to Houston to cool off” is an accurate statement!

Circling back to the main question: Why won’t the Europeans, at least those who’ve received maximum enrichment from Syria, Afghanistan, and other conservative Muslim societies, go all-in on A/C as part of their transformation into places where fully covered Muslim women can feel at home, welcome, and comfortable?

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Wear a mask for National Safety Month?

by philg

June is National Safety Month (also, for maximum safety from Mpox (not to be confused with “monkeypox”), Go to the Bathhouse Month). Should we protect ourselves via outdoor masking as part of our celebration?

Let’s check “Does mask usage correlate with excess mortality? Findings from 24 European countries”, by a couple of Ph.D. haters in Brazil. The good news is that there is a correlation between the percentage of people wearing masks and the percentage of people dying in 2020-2021. In fact, the correlation is reasonably strong at 0.5, about the same as for education level/income and neighborhood income/school tests scores. The bad news for Massachusetts Scientists who’ve been fully masked indoors and out for the past 6+ years is that the correlation is positive (the higher the mask usage, the higher the rate of actual deaths vs. expected (“excess deaths”)):

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Revisiting Alan Greenspun’s 2007 book

by philg

Alan Greenspan died this week at 100. Let’s look back at Alan Greenspan Explains Modern Economics, my 2009 review of his fall 2007 book (i.e., he wrote it just as the U.S. subprime collapse was beginning).

Here’s a cautionary for folks like me with portfolios that are 100% invested in SpaceX:

One interesting story sheds light on the limitations of government economic forecasts. A booming economy and stock market swelled federal tax collections so much that there were unheard-of federal budget surpluses during the final years of the Clinton Administration. The non-partisan Office of Management and Budget, in the first half of 2001, predicted that federal budget surpluses would grow year after year. Everyone was trying to figure out what the Feds would do once they’d paid off 100 percent of U.S. long-term debt. Would there be massive tax cuts? Would the U.S. government start buying hard assets in other countries, the way that sovereign wealth funds from China and the Arab countries do now? Everyone in the government, including Greenspan, was shocked when the surpluses evaporated almost overnight. The forecasters hadn’t figured out that a sagging stock market would mean an end to collecting capital gains tax.

It looks as though Greenspan was prescient regarding the issue that has propelled socialists and “super-progressives” into political power here in the U.S. recently.

Greenspan sprinkles the book with discussions about income inequality. Greenspan says that as an economy becomes more productive, the returns to having good skills and being smart will increase (Gregory Clark has some statistics in Farewell to Alms showing the opposite; the returns to skilled labor in England fell and unskilled laborers were the biggest beneficiaries of economic growth). He thinks that the minimum skill level necessary to be productive in the U.S. is now far above what the graduates of our pathetic public school systems are capable of. He thinks it would be politically infeasible to turn our schools from unionized employee paradises into centers of educational excellence. With only dumb young Americans as a labor source, the U.S. economy will stagnate. His solution to continued economic growth is therefore a massive expansion of immigration of smart, well-educated, highly skilled workers from other countries. (Note that Chinese schools on average don’t have to be better than U.S. skills; we just need to attract immigrants from among the millions of Chinese who are better educated than the U.S. average.) Greenspan opposes our current immigration system, which does not give much weight to an immigrant’s potential as a worker.

It seems that Alan Greenspan didn’t realize that Somali immigrants had built Minneapolis and Boston, as their respective mayors now inform us. We can also look at this part of the book as an example of how little effect on policy even the most powerful Washington insiders can be. Greenspun was Chairman of the Fed. He had access to every member of Congress and four presidents. He presumably did tell these lawmakers “Hey, you should really put in IQ, education, working age, health, and income requirements on every immigrant and eliminate the U.S. asylum system so that you don’t just import needy humans into a massive welfare state.” What was the effect? The politicians doubled down and and then tripled down on low-skill immigration, oftentimes of people too old to work and guaranteed to need taxpayer-funded everything (e.g., automatic green cards for 75-year-old parents of new U.S. citizens, who might themselves be aged 50 or 60).

Perhaps we can give Greenspan credit for predicting our Age of AI and Robots (the perfect time to be importing low-skill humans!)?

Various portions of the book are sprinkled with Greenspan’s enthusiasm about technology and what it can do for productivity growth. He is basically optimistic about the future because humans will figure out how to do more with less. Like any good economist, he hedges his predictions of a prosperous 2030 here in the U.S. The main risks that he sees are Islamic terrorism and a resurgence of protectionism that would undo the benefits of globalization (you won’t find Greenspan showing up to protest a WTO meeting!). The main challenge that he sees is funding Medicare and Social Security, which are currently pay-as-we-go (i.e., Ponzi schemes). Despite increased immigration, taxes will rise to crushing levels and benefits will fall. The Europeans will be in even worse shape because they don’t have as much immigration. Greenspan does not address the issue of why a group of citizens would wish to pack their country with double the number of people in order to pay for their retirements. He puts no value on living in an uncrowded place with reasonable real estate prices and traffic.

(I don’t give him credit for predicting the impending insolvency of Social Security, which was obvious from them paying out benefits to the very first recipient that were 1000X what she’d paid in via taxes. Maybe I can give myself credit for predicting that immigration between 2009 and now would doom Americans to UNreasonable “real state prices and traffic”?)

Speaking of real estate prices, New York Times today (example of “When the market gives you an answer that you don’t like, declare market failure”):

Excerpts:

“We’re in a full-blown housing crisis,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, said in an interview. “Home prices are sky high, rent is through the roof. The median age of a first-time home buyer is at an all-time high. So the pressure to move was almost irresistible. This bill got through because it is big.”

Chief among the sticking points was a provision to check institutional investors, which had been crafted in negotiations among White House officials, Senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who leads the Banking Committee, and Ms. Warren.

The measure prohibits corporate entities from owning more than 350 existing single-family homes, although it does not require them to sell homes purchased before the measure became law. A stricter proposal that would have required investors to sell single-family homes built explicitly as rentals after seven years was dropped; it had prompted a backlash by home builders and affordable housing advocates, who feared it would discourage new home construction.

I can’t figure out how this is Constitutional. Most of what the federal government does is allowed, despite contradicting the Framers’ intent, because of the Commerce Clause:

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

Suppose that a corporate entity in the Mamdani Caliphate buys 351 houses in Buffalo, NY in order to rent them out via Section 8 to noble asylum-seekers from the world’s various dysfunctional societies. How is that an example of interstate commerce “among the several states”? Let’s assume that the corporation is a New York corporation based in New York and that 100% of its employees are New York State residents. The houses are all in New York State. It would be physically impossible for one of these houses to be sold for use in, e.g., the Islamic Republic of Michigan. Regardless of the merits of the law, how can the federal government do this? Why doesn’t it have to be a state-by-state decision?

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Mount Rainier National Park

by philg

Established in 1899 by President McKinley, Mount Rainier National Park was the nation’s fifth. It is today surrounded by signs informing visitors, who’ll pay almost nothing to enter ($80/year for an annual pass), that they might have to wait 3 hours in a car line-up (engines and AC running for maximum climate preservation!) to get to the “wilderness” experience inside the gate. In the bad old days of 1908, people paid $5 per car. The BLS CPI calculator goes back only to 1913, but ChatGPT says that this corresponds to $180 today. What did those with $180 of today’s dollars get when they arrived? Some fun activities that have had to be banned in today’s crowded national parks:

The visitors of 1908 didn’t have to deal with the negative effects of Climate Change:

Despite our abuse of Mother Earth, she apparently still loves Her children because we were blessed with unusually clear weather on Day 1 of our visit:

Evening above Myrtle Falls (near the Paradise Inn):

Speaking of Paradise, check out the 5G mobile service available in this mile-high island within the park:

The rest of the park is pretty shabby, consistent with the almost-free entrance price (see What if our National Parks charged Navajo prices?). The lobby of the Inn is beautiful, but the rooms are small and crummy by present-day standards:

Don’t miss Box Canyon and Silver Falls, east of Paradise:

Putting our rental minivan to shame, a Siberian Husky’s 13-ton motorhome (on tour from 2021-2033):

Don’t miss the short Twin Firs Trail through old growth forest on your way out to the west.

Practical tip: make sure to bring hiking sticks, especially if visiting in June when th snow won’t have melted.

Summary: a great place, but it was created for a country of 76 million humans for whom long-distance travel was expensive and onerous. Nobody seems to have thought about what it means to build a park for over 400 million Americans (we’ll get there pretty soon if legal immigration continues at 1.3 million humans per year and very fast indeed if we have another Biden-Harris-style surge of undocumented migration) who have access to low-cost comfortable cross-country transportation, plus another 70+ million foreign visitors to the U.S. (current level). Considering the gold-plated nature of much that is run by the government, it is unclear why the national parks stumble along shabbily. Entrance fees are low, a massive subsidy is required every year from taxpayers in general, and facilities are antiquated and in obvious need of maintenance. Meanwhile, access is rationed according to who is willing to sit in a 3-hour traffic line to get in, who can tolerate physical discomfort in crummy hotels, who doesn’t mind using outhouses when private enterprise in the same terrain has running water and a septic system, etc.

Related, from the New York Times:

This year, staffing remains sharply reduced, and some parks have scrapped their reservation systems, already leading to gridlock at popular sites.

They own some of the most valuable real estate in the world, in other words, and can’t get a sufficient return on that capital to pay a few rangers. A family of rich foreigners on a three-week national park trip will still pay almost nothing per person per day.

They can also buy a $250 nonresident annual pass — available online or at park gates. The same pass costs $80 for U.S. residents.

Almost ninety percent of the true cost of the foreign family’s visit will be paid by federal personal income taxpayers, many of whom won’t have enough time or money to visit the parks. (Only 10 percent of the NPS budget comes from visitor fees and another 3-4 percent from concession contracts.)

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If the 1950s were a “rat race” for men, what is the correct term for the 2020s?

by philg

White-collar men in the 1950s often characterized their world as a “rat race”. If college-educated, they competed with only a small subset of Americans for high-paid desk jobs. Men in the 50s did not compete with immigrants because substantial importation of humans into the U.S. stopped in 1924, not to be restarted until President Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 (see below). A house in a safe suburb with good schools and A/C could be purchased, at the end of the 1950s, for about one quarter the cost today (in real dollars; see $112/month to live in a brand-new house in Bowie, Maryland). Relative to income, a house cost about 1.7X annual salary vs. over 5X today (ChatGPT table below). Partly due to this low cost for housing in a safe suburban neighborhood with decent schools ($1+ million today?), a man’s income was generally sufficient to support a wife and 2-3 children as well as himself. Sex outside of marriage was discouraged both legally and socially and, therefore, the man would usually be married before age 25. No-fault divorce (“unilateral” in research parlance) did not exist and, therefore, if the man wasn’t behaving outrageously (beating the wife, drinking heavily, failing to work, having affairs), the wife couldn’t profit via a divorce lawsuit (a divorce might be arranged by mutual agreement, of course). In addition to marital security, the 1950s man often enjoyed a lot of job security from (1) the lack of competition in the labor market, and (2) the tendency of large companies to provide lifetime jobs, which today is limited to government work.

What’s the correct term for what similar men face today? They inhabit a world in which you can’t spit in the street without hitting a college graduate. Men must compete with women for jobs and, despite women being more likely to earn college degrees, be passed over for hiring or promotion when a company decides that “diversity” is its strength. If a female or favored minority human competitor doesn’t take the white-collar man’s job, Claude is ready to replace him. The companies that once offered native-born Americans jobs for life are now home to platoons of H-1B “non-immigrant” immigrants.

A house in a neighborhood with low crime, an orderly familiar culture, and good schools, is about 10X the median college graduate’s income (5X for houses overall, but the typical suburb is no longer a white picket fence idyll). A college education for the kids, so that they can get into the “rat race” that the parents ran, is now 5X more expensive state colleges and 9X more expensive at elite Queers for Palestine-type schools . (ChatGPT on the history of federal government programs to make college more affordable: “GI Bill for veterans in 1944, first general federal student loans in 1958, major modern federal aid framework in 1965, and Pell-style direct grants in 1972/1973”)

Where in the 1950s he likely partnered with a virgin aged 20 (ChatGPT says 10-25% of 1950s brides might have had sex with someone other than their fiancé/husband), today he’s with a 30-year-old veteran of the sexual revolution. If he is persuaded to marry her, she can sue him for divorce a day later for any reason or for no reason. For men who strayed in the 1950s and got sued for a “fault divorce”, the resulting financial drain was primarily alimony and it lasted only a few years because the plaintiff would remarry and that shut down the alimony revenue stream. The risk of losing his role as a father was controllable due to the requirement that a plaintiff find a “fault” ground, such as infidelity. If a man gets sued today because the wife found someone she likes better, the man can lose his “father” role, and access to the young people who used to be his children, due to factors entirely beyond his control. The man’s biggest financial exposure in a divorce lawsuit is typically “child support” (paid to an adult female to spend on whatever she wants, not to a “child”), which can last for 23 years (Massachusetts) or 21 years (New York) even if the plaintiff has married her lover and that lover earns far more than the defendant and even if the lover is the biological father of the child (nytimes: “I pay child support to a biologically intact family, a father and mother, married, who live with their own child.”). (In the cases where alimony is the primary profit from a divorce lawsuit, the defendant might be paying for 50 years because there is no longer any social pressure for the plaintiff to remarry. She can have sex with 100 men and write a magazine article about the “single MILF” lifestyle and this has no impact on her cash entitlement.)

This is not to say that American in the 1950s was better overall, of course. We had been starved of enrichment via immigrants since 1924 and, therefore, weren’t as strong under the “diversity is our strength” axiom. We didn’t have Internet or LLMs for personal use. A 1950s car, though beautiful in our museums today, came out of the factory as a junk heap compared to a 3-year-old Toyota today. We had three TV channels to watch on a 21″ CRT. But in terms of career security and personal life security, the 2020s are inferior to the 1950s. So, returning to the title question… if the 1950s were a “rat race” for white-collar men, how would we characterize the situation today?

Loosely related…

A post on X from an offensively titled username so I’ll just copy the text:

White Americans and Europeans are the ONLY people worldwide that are EXPECTED to compete with the ENTIRE world for jobs.

50+ years ago White men with STEM degrees got good jobs. Things like engineering or applied mathematics guaranteed a good career.

Now we are required to compete against not just our own people, but the brown and black hordes worldwide that are willing to work for pennies.

It was an ECONOMIC CRIME committed against our people.

(I post this not for the truth or falsehood of what the author writes, but for the expression of a feeling of insecurity and, therefore, pressure even worse than the rat race of 50 years ago.)

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Codex works to verify a chart showing Iran having a relatively high level of religious tolerance compared to neighbors

by philg

Here’s a chart from an X post charting answers to the question “The only acceptable religion is my religion” (perfect for Pride Month!):

Iranians living in the Islamic Republic of Iran are, according to this chart, much more likely to tolerate non-Islamic belief than, for example, the noble Palestinians who reside in Jordan (whose territory is about 80% of British “Palestine” and in which over 97% of residents are Muslim (0% are Jewish, which makes puts it on track to be celebrated as an ideal society from a progressive point of view)).

Should we believe this chart? Is it a reasonable size survey, for one thing? I found the cited source and was able to get the raw numbers. 1200 people were surveyed in Bangladesh and only 25 disagreed, consistent with the published bar chart’s percentage.

Codex crunched away for about 15 minutes, asking for permission quite a few times (I haven’t ever used it for something like this so maybe the next one will go smoothly). Codex (ChatGPT/OpenAI) concludes that the X chart is a fair representation of the data (i.e., it accomplished a fact check). The Codex-produced chart in Excel is hard to read, though, with the country names buried inside bars of color (not to say “colored bars”):

Note that some countries the X author left out are near the top here, e.g., Maldives (“100% Muslim” according to Google) and Libya (nearly 100% Muslim, according to Google, with the exception of some expats (oil industry workers?)).

I asked “Can you redo the chart so that the country names are in a separate column? Or at least left-justified?” This took another 10 minutes with many failed attempts and several requests for approval. The result was at least off by one, with the Bangladesh label applied to the percentage legend:

Another 5 minutes and much straining by NVIDIA chips in a data center somewhere…

So the AI assistant does work, but I think that asking a Chatbot to produce a chart, without reference to a desktop computer and Excel, might have been faster/simpler.

Separately, why did we attack a country that is far more tolerant than our NATO ally Turkey (recipient of about $31 billion in aid, cumulatively) and far more tolerant than Jordan, a country to which we have provided $34 billion in aid?

(Loosely related, maybe our surrender to Iran isn’t quite as great a deal for them as portrayed in the media. If it were, wouldn’t the Iranians have already agreed to our surrender? Instead, there are merely negotiations.)

Here’s Codex’s Excel output:

religion_likert_chart_labels_alignedDownload
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Father’s Day at the New York Times

by philg

The latest from the Scientists, “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated”.

The daughter is named “Elliot”, which in no conceivable way could encourage her to think that maybe her sex was incorrectly assigned at birth:

(Also, how was a child produced if there aren’t any Y chromosomes anywhere among the people who call themselves “parents”?)

Science is passed down to the younger generation:

A question that any American father might be asked, “How long did you have breasts for, Dad?”

Happy Father’s Day once again. I hope that none of the dads reading this blog are experiencing any pain or irritation from their breasts/bra today.

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The LeMay car museums in Tacoma

by philg

It’s Father’s Day. For those handful of American men who have any control over their kids’ lives, a suggestion….

If you’re anywhere near Tacoma, Washington and haven’t been carjacked yet (Tacoma is “safer than 1% of U.S. cities), the LeMay car museums are well worth a stop. The primary one is near the Almond Roca factory in Tacoma proper and styles itself “America’s Car Museum”.

We were there for a special American Supercar exhibition, in which the Corvette and Ford GT were featured prominently.

Here’s an astonishing 1000 hp Oldsmobile:

GM loaned the museum the C8 Corvette test mule:

Those who loved physics class will appreciate this 1923 Lincoln, the first car to drive over the doomed Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940:

If you need a last-minute art idea for America’s 250th:

Thanks to Harold LeMay’s fortune built hauling garbage, the museum has magnificent examples from every era of the automobile, a 1906 Cadillac, for example:

A 1930 Duesenberg:

A wartime Chevrolet:

A 1954 Chevrolet wagon that would be awesome to own with retrofit A/C:

If Greta Thunberg hadn’t segued into pro-Hamas activism, this would be the perfect 100 mpg car for her, from aircraft engineer Jim Bede:

In order to skip out on Tacoma’s reputation for violent crime, we stayed in the new development of Point Ruston, a bit to the northwest. Fortunately for Florida real estate values, the breakdown of order in the West Coast cities is still in evidence. A CVS in the moderately-rich area locks up the precious laundry detergent:

Immigration has resulted in a random assortment of humans with conflicting cultural and religious values. Below, Muslims complying with Islamic dress codes are juxtaposed with (1) a pet dog (haram), and (2) a female rollerblader shamelessly displaying her bare midriff:

Our good fortune with the weather and Mount Rainier views continued:

The counter-serve taco place has a trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag to which customers can pay their respects prior to ordering, an example of Rainbow-first Retail (examples from Bozeman, Montana).

We’re informed that Floridians are stupid. The hyperintelligent progressives of Tacoma, however, need to be reminded to close the water tap after filling a cup at the ice cream shop:

The coffee shop nearby has a complete Righteous Boomer No Kings Rally Starter Kit:

The fridge magnets for sale during morning coffee include one that situates anti-Trump protest in the context of Martin Niemöller-level heroism (which makes sense since The Reverend Niemöller hated Jews almost as much as today’s progressives and actually voted for the Nazi Party three times!):

Although the residents of western Washington State are surrounded by neighbors who are in obvious need of assistance, e.g., due to being unhoused, their political energies go into parading around in front of each other to show how much they hate what Donald Trump is doing 3,000+ miles away in D.C. Here’s the reading material provided at the coffee shop:

The next morning we hit the LeMay Collections at Marymount, a less-glitzy venue in south Tacoma. This shouldn’t be skipped! We opted for a docent tour, which included a ride in a Ford Model T and a visit to a massive car warehouse that is normally off-limits.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if Stellantis brought back the AMC Pacer?

The Collections includes a large exhibit on the Elon Musk of the 1940s, Preston Tucker. Promoting the public sale of stock in an unprofitable company whose products were delayed did not make Tucker a trillionaire, however, but got him prosecuted and shut down by the U.S. government. Tucker beat the rap, but the company was killed. Tucker’s design had a lot of safety features that would gradually appear in mass-market cars over the subsequent 30 years. The museum explains that the original design even included seatbelts but that they were removed due to a fear that the public would infer that the car was more dangeorus than existing designs. One design goal was that the engine and transmission could be removed and a loaner engine/transmission swapped in. This would take less than one hour and would enable repairs to be done offline.

How much fun would it be to have this Edsel station wagon? Our docent reminded us that Edsel Ford shouldn’t be associated with business failure, despite the lack of success of the Edsel cars that were introduced after his death. It was Edsel who twisted his dad’s arm into adding the Model A to Ford’s product line as an alternative to the Model T, which Henry Ford considered to be ideal.

The Collections has far more cars than the downtown museum and they don’t always get a lot of room for display and walking around:

There are a lot of gems, however, and the place is well worth 2 hours. You’ll learn about at least a dozen car brands that you hadn’t previously known existed. Below, I learned about an entire class of car that I hadn’t heard of, the “cyclecar“. 14 hp out to be enough for anybody, as Bill Gates famously never said.

Just imagine how much surplus oil we’d have if people did most of their errands in a modern version. Even with 1913 technology, this machine supposedly achieved 40 mpg at 40 mph (more than enough speed to get around Seattle and, in fact, even 15 mph was overkill during a lot of our time on I-5).

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