General MacArthur in Manila 1945 and Israel in Gaza today

I’m been reading The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College; published 2025 by Oxford University Press (i.e., a military work from a publisher in a country that can’t defend its own border)).

The loss of the Philippines in the first place was due to incompetence, similar to how Japanese success at Pearl Harbor was due to incompetence (failure to heed a radar warning of planes inbound from the NW). Having squeezed and provoked Japan, the U.S. expected attacks in Asia and yet the Japanese caught the Americans by surprise:

Recalled to active duty as the United States was on the verge of war, MacArthur wanted to defend the entire archipelago. “We are going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no one will try it,” he explained. On the first day of the war, the Japanese caught the air forces under his command on the ground and destroyed them. MacArthur then attempted to defend the entire island of Luzon. While his men did well tactically—fighting the Japanese to a standstill—their supplies were in the wrong positions, which sealed their fate as they retreated into the cul-de-sac that was the Bataan Peninsula.

The decision to fight in 1945 to take back the Philippines might also be said to have been an example of American military incompetence. Most of the senior officers wanted to ignore the Philippines and capture Formosa (present-day Taiwan) instead as a more useful base for bombing and invading Japan (USNI article). The Philippines would have been freed from Japanese rule in August 1945 when Japan unconditionally surrendered, though of course it was tough to know that in late 1944.

The book is about the fight for one city, Manila, and as such there are some parallels to the present-day fighting in Gaza. What the two battles have in common:

  • a mostly urban environment
  • the majority of people in the environment were/are not soldiers
  • the army trying to take the city (US in 1945; IDF today) was trying to minimize the number of non-soldiers killed
  • the army defending the city was indifferent to the number of non-soldiers killed and/or actually trying to increase the number of non-soldiers killed

The differences:

  • the non-soldiers of Manila were hostile to the defending army (Japan) and, in fact, was an organized guerilla force against the army whereas the non-soldiers of Gaza are fervent supporters of the defending army
  • the army attacking Manila (US) was trying to minimize damage to buildings and other infrastructure
  • the army attacking Manila (US) wasn’t trying to feed the army defending Manila (Japan) and, in many cases, defenders had to surrender or commit suicide because they’d run out of food and/or water

The book reminds us that war is most glorious when seen in the rearview mirror:

One of the great myths of World War II is that the American public immediately rallied to the cause after Pearl Harbor. The truth is that men had to be drafted, and they did not want to be in either the Army or the Philippines. Willard Higdon was honest about his motivations: “I was 27 yrs old, with a wife and a 5 yr. old dtr. I did not want to go.”

The Japanese actually weren’t that excited about owning the Philippines:

The main reason for their invasion in 1941 and 1942 was geopolitical. The Philippines had few natural resources that the Japanese economy required. What they wanted was to drive the Americans out of the western Pacific and, once that was done, they wanted to liquidate their commitment to the Philippines quickly. The Japanese had little interest in turning the archipelago into a Japanese colony.

The enemy doesn’t always cooperate with one’s plans…

Even as late as February 5 [the battle was February 3-March 3], MacArthur had no plan for an urban battle. “I do not believe anybody expected the Japs to make a house-to-house defense of Manila,” Eichelberger told his wife. The general belief—at MacArthur’s headquarters, at Krueger’s headquarters, and with the press—was that the Japanese would evacuate without a fight. Thirty years later, when he sat down to write his memoirs, Chase could not understand why anyone had made this assumption. “It was counter to everything the Nips had done in previous campaigns.”

The U.S. had almost no experience with the kind of fighting that was to ensue:

Other than some short operations in World War I and a few in the European theater, the last time Americans had fought in cities had been in 1864 and 1865 with the battles of Atlanta and Richmond. There are seven major characteristics of urban warfare. The first is that artificial terrain features constrain and channel movement. Buildings become significant geographical objectives. Roads direct advances in certain directions. Both can be barriers. Depending on the material used in their construction, they might be quite vulnerable to military action or quite impervious. Some weapons have better utility than others in the city, and these issues often influence tactics. Another feature is that ground operations are compressed and decentralized. Engagements are between small, tactical units—squads, platoons, companies—for small, geographic objects—a room, a building, or a city block. A third factor is that combat usually becomes three-dimensional. Soldiers fight ground operations as in any other form of ground combat, but they also advance and fight in sewers and blast holes through basement walls. They also have to fight an opponent that might control the floor of a building immediately above or below them, and they might move from rooftop to rooftop. City combat always consumes more time than other forms of fighting. This factor is relative, though. How slow is slow? The month-long fight for Manila was significant compared to other ground operations fought in the Pacific, but nothing compared to the eight-month-long struggle for Stalingrad or the twenty-eight-month-long siege of Leningrad. A fifth factor in urban warfare is the presence of civilians. There are always non-combatant deaths in urban operations and their presence requires some effort at stability operations afterward, but sometimes also during the period of active combat. Civilians can be assets or liabilities when it comes to intelligence gathering, as both the Americans and Japanese would learn. The ready influence of the media is another factor. Cities by their very nature are media centers and always have resident journalists. Since urban areas are also important population, political, economic, financial, cultural, religious, trade, and transportation centers, their fate attracts the interest of reporters. A final dynamic of urban warfare is the outsized ramification of its outcomes. Location matters, and cities are always more important than undeveloped countryside, and engagements for their control have more influence than engagements in isolated areas. Each of these would be in play in Manila.

As in the Gaza fighting, the army trying to take the city owns the airspace:

The US forces also had total air superiority, and piper cub observation planes loitered over the city looking for targets.

(Note failure to capitalize Piper Cub!)

A civilian population that does not support the defending army makes a city tough to defend:

The Japanese were well aware that the Filipinos on Luzon were welcoming the Americans enthusiastically. They resented this and they had orders—which they implemented willingly—to make the Manileños pay. The Battle of Manila was defined by the methodical targeting of the civilian population. The Japanese historian Hayashi Hirofumi has argued, given where most of the incidents took place, that the majority of these killings were done by the Imperial Japanese Army.1 Their orders, though, came from Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji. He made the determination that there was no difference between Filipino guerrillas and civilians. “When the enemy invaded Manila, the citizens were welcoming the enemy well and disrupted all of our fighting action,” he reported. “The number of citizens is estimated to be about seven hundred thousand, but on the front line north of the Pasig River between 3 and 5 February, the general public carried out the following guerrilla activities: communicate with U.S. troops before our attacks, shoot our soldiers, and report our locations to U.S. troops. As a result, our surprise attack was infeasible, and many of our troops were unable to achieve their objectives.”2 The attitude that all Filipinos were the enemy was widespread among the Japanese defenders. Taguchi Hiroshi, a Navy aviation mechanic who became a prisoner of war, explained to U.S. Army investigators in late March: “The enlisted men in the lower ranks, believed that, since the Filipinos indicated that they were cooperative toward Americans in their attitude and had ill feeling toward the Japanese, because prices of food and other articles during the period when we occupied the Philippines went very high . . . , higher officials ordered the destruction of Manila and the Filipinos.”

Some locals were more creative than others…

“The real heroines at San Agustin were the prostitutes, they were the ones that helped,” Gisbert declared. The Japanese had concentrated them in the Intramuros. Gisbert guessed that their numbers were in the hundreds. They were willing to serve as nurses. They were also quite good at scrounging. They could acquire clean linen, or whisky, which Gisbert used as anesthesia. All of which suggests that they had a way of influencing Japanese supply officers.

Even as American soldiers were getting killed, MacArthur refused to let them fight effectively (i.e., by using artillery) because he doesn’t want his former home trashed:

The general was genuinely horrified by what was unfolding in Manila, and seemingly unable to process it. “MacArthur was shattered by the holocaust,” Lieutenant Paul P. Rogers, the headquarters typist, observed. Everything he had done to spare Manila in 1941 was being undone by his own troops, and the major coup of taking the city intact with its port facilities undamaged was falling apart in front of him. Admitting to that kind of setback was not in him. Suddenly the general and his command had a vested interest in making sure there was as little coverage of Manila—positive or negative—as possible. A press report that declared, “Manila is dying” set him off. MacArthur ordered Diller to block any usage of that phrase. He also ordered the units under his command to refrain from using artillery in the city. “That was most unlike the General, who prided himself on winning victories with minimum loss of life,” Diller recalled.

Eventually the subordinate officers wear MacArthur down:

He appointed a three-man committee to talk with MacArthur about the artillery restrictions. After listening to the three, MacArthur, despite his vehement and emotional initial response changed course completely. His subordinates were making it clear that they were not only taking heavy losses, but at rates they could not sustain. With reporters now in the mix, he could ignore that consideration only so long. He removed all the limits on both the artillery and on the media. His public relations man was happy: “They did start using artillery, and it all worked out just exactly the way I wanted it to.” The removal of restrictions on artillery was the third major event that shaped the battle for Manila. Despite their reputation as being a bunch of “yes men,” the staff had pushed back against the general and gotten him to reverse himself. Robert S. Beightler was happy with this decision: “From this point on, we really went to town.” Beightler was advocating any means which he believed would speed up the tempo of combat and save both American and Filipino lives. After the battle ended, he reported to Krueger: “the fantastic defenses of small pockets of resistance which had been isolated required the employment of all available weapons.” Some of this argument is rather weak. The infantry used indirect fire as a crutch to avoid close combat. The problem: it resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Figuring the exact numbers killed in Manila is a tricky business. It seems

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Media that isn’t state-affiliated can’t survive without state funding

NPR says that it isn’t state-affiliated media because it gets less than 1% of its funding from the government/taxpayers (2023). NPR also says that it can’t survive without taxpayer funding (2025).

2023: “NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media'”

2025: “The Order threatens the existence of the public broadcasting system

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Book about a serial killer that is important for both pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers

I recently finished listening to American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century, a book about Israel Keyes. Mr. Keyes was born at home, one of 10 children, and was not only never vaccinated but didn’t interact with medical doctors for his first 18 years. He never even had a birth certificate. (The events of the book occur before the Sacrament of Fauci became available and, therefore, “never vaccinated” refers to the pre-2020 standard childhood vaccines.) From the perspective of those who are pro-vaccination, the fact that Mr. Keyes became a serial killer will be important (i.e., without the 57 shots recommended by the CDC through age 18, Mr. Keyes’s mental health was impaired, though the book describes him as “bisexual” and membership in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is considered a sign of superior mental health, so maybe being Bi and being a serial killer cancel out?). From the perspective of those who are anti-vaccination, Mr. Keyes being extraordinarily robust, intelligent, and conscientious will be important (of course, he eventually makes one mistake that leads to his arrest).

According to the author, we didn’t learn as much as we could have about Mr. Keyes’s life of violent unprovoked crime due to the incompetence of the U.S. Attorney in Anchorage, Alaska, Kevin Feldis (now a partner at Perkins Coie). He allegedly refused to allow the FBI professionals interrogate the suspect and, instead, inserted himself.

The book might inspire you to develop or purchase a “panic ring” that can be pressed one-handed to summon the police. Keyes was usually able to tie up his victims before they were able to make any phone calls, but they generally would have had enough time to move a thumb on top of a forefinger ring. If the GPS location and mobile data connectivity services are handled by a Bluetooth-linked mobile phone, the ring shouldn’t need to be large even with a long battery life. It looks as though a phone-linked necklace/bracelet is available from invisaWear:

The victims weren’t immediately gagged so perhaps it would also work if the phone were just constantly listening for “I have an itch” or a similar phrase. If Hitler 2.0 can get Neuralink to work, perhaps it would be sufficient just to think “I need to be rescued”.

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NVIDIA will have to spend $1 trillion of its market cap on employee retention?

NVIDIA is worth over $3 trillion and has approximately 30,000 employees. The company could be quickly overtaken by the competition, though, if all of the employees quit. No problem, right? Just pay every employee $1 million per year for the next ten years and nobody will quit. That would cost only $300 billion. Most of NVIDIA’s employees are in California where the personal income tax rate on successful people is close to 50 percent (federal plus state). Each employee would realize only $500,000 in after-tax spending power if paid $1 million pre-tax. Suppose that the average NVIDIA employee is already worth $20 million. He/she/ze/they wouldn’t rationally keep coming to work every day for the next ten years unless spending power could be roughly doubled. That would require giving every employee about $40 million in pre-tax compensation over the next ten years (presumably most of this would be via stock grants that would dilute existing public investors). That’s a $1.2 trillion cost to prevent employees from “calling in rich”.

Does the fact that NVIDIA has already made nearly all of its employees so rich that they can afford to retire comfortably (for some, moving away from California might be necessary) impair NVIDIA’s likely long-term value to outside investors?

Who could conceivably overtake NVIDIA, you might ask? The Intel Gaudi line doesn’t seem to have caught on. Amazon (“Trainium”), Google (“TPU”), and some startups are all going after the H100 market that is responsible for most of NVIDIA’s revenue (the desktop gamers have been reduced to insignificance). Here’s a story on Google’s potential self-sufficiency:

Amazon and Google don’t sell chips, but instead sell time on their chips via their cloud services which is, presumably, what most customers want. So NVIDIA can’t be complacent and let its employees wander off to either pleasant retirements or startups where there is a realistic chance of making significant money.

Maybe this overhanging need to pay already-rich employees crazy high compensation is priced into NVIDIA stock, just as my Church of Efficient Markets pastor says. Yet I have doubts…

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Peace, love, Microbus, and MAGA

Eighty-eight years ago today, on May 26, 1938, the Nazi Party’s union labor organization laid the foundation stone of the first Volkswagen factory. Adolf Hitler was present to witness this step in his 1933 vision becoming a reality. (DW) And, of course, today is Memorial Day where we remember Americans who died in our fight to strip the Germans of their empire (a fight that might not have been necessary if we and the British had stayed out of World War I?).

Let’s have a look at a cherished survivor of this company’s output, spotted here in Jupiter, Florida:

It seems to have one of the 5 mph bumpers that NHTSA required from 1973-1982 so perhaps it is a second generation (1967-79) bus, beloved by hippies, anti-war agitators, Grateful Dead fans, etc. Here’s the surprise…

A closer look…

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George Floyd Remembrance Day, Five Years Later

It’s been five years since the life of the greatest of all Americans was cut short and Tim Walz reminds us that we should “honor him”:

What have we actually done for Americans like George Floyd? The Boston Globe says that $1 billion was spent in Maskachusetts and there is nothing to show for it.

The most significant change to American society since May 2020 is that the borders were fully open for about four years, thus leading to a massive increase in low-skill immigration. In addition to at least 4 million green cards (permanent residence) issued (“legal immigrants”), there were approximately10 million undocumented migrants (combined total of more people than live in New York City and Los Angeles put together). “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER 2007):

For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points.

That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.

Readers: What are you doing to honor George Floyd today?

Related:

  • “How the Right Has Reshaped the Narrative Around George Floyd” (New York Times, May 24, 2025), which points out that it is a right-wing lie for anyone to say that George Floyd had a criminal record (the NYT certainly does not list any examples of crimes in which Mr. Floyd might have been involved)
  • Apple reminds us about the “sacred” nature of today:

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Checking up on my 2003 Chinese-made car price prediction

From 2003, The Chinese car:

Within 10 to 20 years the Chinese will be able to sell a car that is very similar to today’s rental car: 4 doors, 4 seats, air conditioner, radio, new but not fancy. It will cost between $2000 and $3000 in today’s dollars. With cars that cheap it will be unthinkable to manufacture in the U.S. Consumers won’t bother to finance a $2000 purchase separately (maybe they’ll add it to their credit card debt).

Among the large range of my failed predictions, this one would appear to have been an unusually spectacular failure. Very few Chinese-made cars are available in the U.S. and they cost $40,000-70,000, not $3,000. Maybe there is some hope for salvaging my reputation as a prophet. “What a $15,000 Electric SUV Says About U.S.-China Car Rivalry” (Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2025):

For an American used to a $50,000 gasoline-powered SUV as the standard family choice, the Chinese market is hardly recognizable. … Chinese car buyers no longer need to debate whether an EV can be made affordable, not when a decent starter model costs $10,000 and a luxury seven-seater with reclining massage chairs can be had for $50,000. … Toyota said its bZ3X—the recently introduced model that starts at $15,000—was designed in China by the company’s engineers in the country, who worked with a local joint-venture partner. It is made in Guangzhou with Chinese batteries and driver-assistance software from Momenta, a Chinese leader in that field.

I was off by a factor of more than 3X, then? What if we adjust for the inflation that the government assures us doesn’t exist? Adjusted for official CPI, $3,000 in 2003 is equivalent to about $5,250 today. So I was off by only a factor of two! What if we try to adjust for inflation as experienced by Americans who buy houses? (official CPI excludes the cost of buying and living in a house in favor of a hypothetical “owner equivalent rent”) The Case-Shiller Index has gone from 133 to 324:

If we adjust the $3,000 number from 2003 with the growth in house prices, we get $7,300. My prediction was of a $7,300 car, then, in today’s money and the WSJ says that $10,000 now buys a reasonably good car (denied to Americans, but available in the world’s largest market for cars).

Related:

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Are America’s rich people betting on the rich becoming more concentrated and isolated?

“The Ultra Wealthy Are Riding Out the Market Chaos in Luxury Real Estate” (WSJ):

Despite a chill in the overall housing market, ultraluxury home sales in areas like New York, South Florida and Los Angeles are accelerating as the wealthy buyers bet on real estate’s long-term value. Since February, the number of homes sold for $10 million or more has surged in major markets nationwide, according to an exclusive analysis by The Wall Street Journal. Between Feb. 1 and May 1, sales at that price point in Palm Beach, Fla., surged 50% from the same period last year, while sales in Miami-Dade County jumped 48.5% year-over-year, according to public records and local multiple listing service data. In the luxury ski destination of Aspen, Colo., sales jumped 43.75% in that same period, followed by Los Angeles County at 29% and Manhattan at 21%.

When President Trump’s tariffs were first announced, some wealthy buyers tapped the brakes and backed out of deals. In recent weeks, however, real-estate observers have been surprised to see a wave of big-ticket sales across the country.

The largest was the $225 million sale of a residential compound in Naples, Fla., in late April, the country’s second-most expensive home sale ever recorded. The seller was tied to the DeGroote family of Canada, property records show. The same week, billionaire David Hoffmann paid $85 million for a waterfront property nearby.

Home buyers at lower price points, by contrast, are holding off on buying and selling amid the chaos, agents said. For Miami homes below $20 million, for example, listing prices have dropped 10% to 20% since the start of the trade war, said agent Danny Hertzberg of Coldwell Banker.

“The most bullish buyers seem to be the highest-net worth buyers,” said Hertzberg, who knows of at least three Miami homes in contract to sell for $40 million or more. “The rest of the market is soft—frozen in some aspects—whereas the top of the market is accelerating in the number of sales and prices.”

The estimates of construction costs don’t seem right:

Hoffmann, an activist investor, already owned a smaller home in Naples but was searching for a larger compound in the area for five years. “This wasn’t a spur of the moment thing,” he said. The $85 million house, which measures about 17,200 square feet with eight bedrooms, ticked all the boxes in terms of design, size, quality and location. He is also in contract to buy the adjacent property with a guesthouse, bringing the total purchase price to just over $100 million. The two properties had been listed for a combined $125 million.

Hoffmann said he has diverse investments, including a “significant” amount of money in the stock market, but isn’t worried about short-term fluctuations. Moreover, he felt he got a good deal on the Naples home, since it would cost about $110 million to build today.

Even at $1,000 per square foot, a 17,200-square-foot-house would cost only $17 million to build.

Especially in higher-end neighborhoods of South Florida, a physical house is seen as a depreciating asset that will require a bulldozing or a gut rehab after 20 years. In my brain, the only ways that it could make sense to consider such an asset an “investment” are (1) interest rates are near 0 percent and it is easy to get a 90-95 percent mortgage, (2) an expectation that the land underneath will become much more valuable. Interest rates are not close to 0 percent anymore. The only reason that land would rise dramatically in price is if rich Americans decide that they need to cluster together even more tightly.

(See the classic 1997 “A Long Run House Price Index: The Herengracht Index, 1628–1973” in which real estate doubled in value… over 345 years; “The Amsterdam rent index: The housing market and the economy, 1550–1850” (2012) is similarly discouraging regarding appreciation potential beyond whatever is happening in the larger economy; a 2002 paper by Gregory Clark (of The Son Also Rises fame) found that constant-quality rents actually did rise substantially in England between 1550 and 1909.)

Why should we care? Rich Americans control our political parties, especially the Democrats (The Nation). If the rich are concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods they have less reason to care about what happens to the rest of us. It might be rational to support filling the U.S. with Tren de Aragua members if you are assured that you will never encounter one.

Some porn from the WSJ (the $51 million Palm Beach, Florida house that Bren Simon, widow of the real estate tycoon Mel Simon, recently bought):

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AI adds some joy to my life

I’m continuing the project of archiving my mother’s documents and artwork, including some photo albums that she made. Here’s Adobe Acrobat’s opinion of a 1968 trip to France album in which your ignoble blog host plays a small (5-year-old) role:

Don’t waste time on family history when AI can summarize it for you!

This reminds me of the old story…

A management consultant attended his first symphony concert and submitted the following analysis:

a. For considerable periods, the four oboe players had nothing to do. The number of oboes should therefore be reduced, and the work spread more evenly over the whole concert program, thus eliminating the peaks and valleys of activity.

b. All twenty violins were playing identical notes. This would seem to be an unnecessary duplication, so the staff of this section should be cut drastically.

c. Obsolescence of equipment is another matter warranting further investigation. The program noted that the leading violinist’s instrument was several hundred years old. Now, if normal depreciation schedules had been applied, the value of this instrument would have been reduced to zero and the purchase of more modern equipment recommended long ago.

d. Much effort was absorbed in the playing of demisemiquavers, which seems to be an unnecessary refinement. It is recommended that all notes be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver. If this were done, it would be possible to use trainees and lower-grade operatives more extensively.

e. Finally, there seemed to be too much repetition of some of the musical passages. Therefore, scores should be pruned to a considerable extent. No useful purpose is served by repeating on the horns something that has already been handled by the strings. It is estimated that, if all redundant passages were eliminated, the whole concert time of two hours could be reduced to twenty minutes and there would be no need for an intermission.


What did AI have to say about this 63-page photo album? It found an Avis rental car receipt and our future overlord’s entire summary of the monthlong vacation was based on that:

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The long dark winter is finally over

February 2024, regarding a tragedy that began in 2023: Microsoft keyboards back from the dead.

After massive daily injections of healing Paxlovid, the Sculpt keyboard has risen! Amazon now stocks the Incase “Designed by Microsoft” keyboards.

Get yours before the 6,000 percent tariffs kick back in (the case is stamped “Made in China”, almost surely by the same factory that Microsoft used).

The new supplier’s site:

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