Palestinian Fatwa, the Democrats’ move to Bluesky, and X’s algorithmic bubbles

by philg

Starting a few days after the recent Election Nakba, my righteous friends began announcing their departure from X (Twitter) to Bluesky, a Democrat-only safe space with similar technical features. X is now too toxic, but the toxicity wasn’t a problem so long as Democrats were securely in power.

A similar situation seems to have been going on among the Palestinians. “Gaza’s top Islamic scholar issues fatwa criticising 7 October attack” (BBC, November 8, 2024):

The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the devastating war in the Palestinian territory.

Professor Dr Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, is one of the region’s most respected religious authorities, so his legal opinion carries significant weight among Gaza’s two million population, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim.

Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls “violating Islamic principles governing jihad”.

His fatwa highlights that, according to Islamic law, a military raid should not trigger a response that exceeds the intended benefits of the action.

The October 7, 2023 attacks could have been a fine example of jihad, in other words, but only if military victory had been achieved. Only after 13 months of fighting could an Islamic determination of whether the attack was justified be made because a key element of justified/not-justified is the extent to which the jihadis are victorious.

From an MIT professor, November 16, 2024, on Facebook:

Searching for “leaving bluesky toxic” on X, I found the following screenshot, purportedly from Bluesky:

(The account seems to have been deleted. As noted in Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? I think that “Lillian” exhibits a logical thought process, unlike the Democrats who said that Trump was a “threat to democracy” and then expressed “get well soon” sentiments after he was shot. If the above is authentic, the only way to maintain an account on Bluesky is to buy into this illogical thought pattern (Trump’s continued existence is a dire threat and also Trump’s life must be preserved for as long as possible).)

My search uncovered some additional elevated intellectual discourse among the elites on Bluesky:

I can’t figure out why X is intolerable to the righteous. As far as I can tell, X’s algorithms create virtual echo chambers for liberals and conservatives. The X servers learn that conservative responses to liberal posts, e.g., from the New York Times or a Democrat politician, are unlikely to be welcomed by the people who enjoy the original post and, therefore, a conservative response gets just a handful of views. A response by the same user to a conservative post, however, might get thousands of views. Each X user, therefore, was already in an algorithmic bubble.

Separately, because people do sometimes disagree with what I post on Facebook and X, I have decided to leave both platforms. I have created a social media site that will be restricted to users who share my point of view. It’s called DoucheSky (TM).

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A trip to Los Angeles, Sherman Oaks, and Burbank

by philg

Here’s a report on a recent business trip to Sherman Oaks (into LAX and out of BUR).

A heroic masked Californian is turned away from the gate at PBI for not being in a sufficiently high-priority boarding group (if there were any justice on this planet, Trump would have lost the recent election and masked passengers would enjoy top priority boarding along with military personnel):

The JetBlue Mint “studio” in their new-configuration planes. The seats are angled and that leaves a little bit of extra space in the first row. They actually put a second seat belt in the suite/studio for a guest (not during takeoff/landing) and the bed ends up being a little wider. My excuse for this luxury is that I needed to get some work done.

Departing east from PBI we flew over a 20-acre estate on Palm Beach that a Democrat judge in New York appraised, in an entirely nonpartisan manner, at $18 million. (A one-acre vacant lot nearby recently sold for $85 million.)

Bold #resistance can begin within moments of stepping off the plane in LAX via access to “Books Banned Elsewhere”:

The streetscape in front of my luxurious Courtyard hotel in Sherman Oaks included $5/gallon gasoline (currently about $3/gallon in Florida), outdoor maskers, and the unhoused:

One is greeted at the Burbank airport by a sign reminding healthy travelers to “wear a mask”:

The airport also features an exhibit on the built-in-Burbank Lockheed P-38 Lightning, which helped the U.S. achieve “peace the old-fashioned way” (as B-17 and B-29 fans like to say) in World War II:

Thanks to United Airlines for getting us to SFO on time in a somewhat newer twin-engine plane.

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A trip to Berkeley, California

by philg

The Election Nakba, in which Donald Trump was elected to a second dictatorship, occurred on November 5, 2024. This post is about a November 14, 2024 journey to Berkeley, California.

BART warns customers that “face coverings [are] required” and 10-20 percent seem to comply:

The gathering on the platform above includes about 16 people. Three are masked. One appeared to be unhoused (obscured behind the person in the gray jacket). One is Islamically covered, but not masked. Within a few steps of the Downtown Berkeley station there were unhoused Californians, outdoor maskers, and Halal food:

We entered the University of California’s art museum and found that most of the exhibit space was restricted to artists who identify as “women”:

To honor Democrats who have fled from X to the safe space of Bluesky (user who posted “there are only two genders” is banned from the platform within 30 seconds), we visited the Free Speech Movement Cafe:

Given that Democrats said that Americans would lose their freedoms and their democracy if Trump were elected (see Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? for some examples), I had expected riots on campus or at least mostly peaceful protests. Surely, these brave souls who tweeted (before fleeing to Bluesky) about #resistance wouldn’t meekly surrender everything that was important to them. Not only did we not encounter any anti-Trump protests, it was difficult to find anti-Trump signs. A handful:

There were far more signs related to masks than to the horrors of a second Trump dictatorship:

The famous campanile has a statute of Abraham Lincoln, whose signature on the Morrill Land Grant Act was important for the founding of UC Berkeley (also a sign at the top regarding the gender ID of certain carillon players). My friend asked a sophomore majoring in environmental sciences what she knew about Abraham Lincoln. The graduate of California public schools knew that Lincoln had been a U.S. president, but not in which century this had occurred nor did she know of any wars or acts with which Lincoln was associated.

Our next stop in search of anti-fascism pro-democracy protests was Sproul Plaza, famous for student activism. We found a couple of Trump-related posters amidst of a sea of unrelated material:

The anti-Israel protest that began just after October 7, 2023 was still in full operation.

End-stage Berkeley feminism is complete covering of the body, except for an eye slit, when in Sproul Plaza:

We wandered back into the commercial district and found that coronapanic level varied by shop.

We found that there was roughly one marijuana store on each block. Examples:

For those who get hungry after consuming a lot of healing cannabis, the good news is that L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is opening soon:

Moe’s Books is still at the center of Berkeley’s intellectual life. The area near the front door is primarily devoted to Queers for Palestine books, e.g., The Queer Arab Glossary (a bestseller in Gaza and the West Bank?):

(The secular Jews whom I know in Berkeley all say that they want Israel to be replaced by a river-to-the-sea country that would be ruled by Arabs and in which Jews, at the discretion of the Arab rulers, might continue to live as a minority group. These Jews-by-birth, none of whom have ever visited Israel, say that they’re “anti-Hamas” but also that Israel and Hamas are equally bad and that Israel should cease to exist as a nation. (Sometimes for fun I ask them “Suppose that you were pro-Hamas. What would Hamas want you to say that is different from what you currently say?”)

Going deeper into the store, we found a lingering commitment to coronapanic:

Some of the featured mid-store books:

Immigration Realities is from the giant brains of Columbia University Press, which starts its description of the book with “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work.”

Right around the corner from this important work about how “border walls do not work”, we find the border wall that UC Berkeley installed around what used to be People’s Park:

On the way to a rich neighborhood south of downtown, I found that the Berkeley Playhouse has found one social justice cause to elevate above all others:

A clothing store:

A couple of miscellaneous houses:

A $3 million house features Black Lives Matter sign and alarm system signs on the front fence, plus a car sticker advertising the Black-free private school to which the kids are sent at a cost of $40,000 per year per child:

I Ubered back to San Francisco with a driver who lived in Oakland and said how happy he was that Sheng Thao, the mayor of Oakland, had recently been recalled.

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Department of Government Accountability (DOGA): Silicon Valley Bank and the San Francisco Fed, 1.5 years later

by philg

Our stroll to the first morning of work in San Francisco included the usual sights, e.g., a homeless encampment in the same frame as a self-driving Waymo:

Also, a smashed office building glass door:

It also took us past a Silicon Valley Bank “Experience Center” and the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, notable for supervising SVB right until the bank was seized by regulators in March 2023.

According to ChatGPT, nobody at the San Francisco Fed was fired as a result of this spectacular immolation of taxpayer dollars (somewhere between $15 and $25 billion; the government pretends that didn’t do the bailout with peasant dollars because it made other banks pay, but of course the other banks are where peasants keep their money).

NYT, 2018:

[Mary C.] Daly, who is openly gay, will become the third woman among the 12 presidents of the Fed’s regional banks. As a senior executive at the San Francisco Fed, she has been a leading voice for addressing what she has described as a “diversity crisis” in the economics profession and at the Federal Reserve. At the San Francisco Fed, she pushed successfully to balance the hiring of male and female research assistants.

Her online biography was updated June 2024 and makes no mention of her role in the SVB collapse.

Incredibly, the bank still operates as SVB, though it is now a division of a North Carolina-based bank. SVB still has its DEI presentation online, updated a few months before the bank failed.

If not for the regulatory seizure they would have put 100 percent of employees through DEI training by now. The 5 percent quota for Black leaders didn’t go into effect until 2025:

Circling back to the life of an expert witness, here’s the view of the Ferry Building from the conference room where I was imprisoned:

In response to a reader question about whether ChatGPT can be trusted, Perplexity.ai’s answer:

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Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco

by philg

I finally made it to the Walt Disney Family Museum, smack in the center of San Francisco’s Presidio. Why is it in San Francisco when almost everything that Disney did was in Los Angeles or Orlando? Disney’s only child, Diane Disney Miller (mother of 7!), moved to the Bay Area in the 1980s.

I recommend that you have your Uber or Waymo drop you off at the top of Andy Goldsworthy’s Wood Line. You can then walk downhill through the Wood Line to the Yoda Fountain and from there it is an easy walk to the museum (arrive at the Wood Line about 40 minutes before your timed ticket to the museum).

Lucasfilm is headquartered in the Presidio and everyone is welcome to look at the Yoda fountain. Sadly, it is not inscribed “No, Try Not. Do or Do Not, There Is No Try.”

The museum is in the middle of the Parade Ground:

Getting into the museum costs $25 per adult or is free for those wise enough to refrain from work: an SF resident “receiving Medi-Cal and food assistance can redeem free general admission for themselves and up to three additional guests” (source). I got two free tickets via my Ringling Museum membership.

Back in the 11th century, it seems, Hughes d’Isigny and son Robert moved from France to England and that’s where d’Isigny was anglicized into Disney. The family moved to North America in 1834 (bouncing around Canada, Florida (Orange County, near today’s Walt Disney World), Chicago, and Missouri):

Disney was an ambulance driver in World War I and managed to refrain from writing a tedious novel about the experience:

Disney’s first animated movie company, whose techniques were informed by Animated Cartoons (E.G. Lutz) went bankrupt:

His second company, which featured Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, also essentially failed due to some badly drafted contracts with Universal Pictures, which took over the character. Walt Disney had to #persist through two business failures, essentially, before he could begin building the Mickey-based Disney that we know and love today. The museum does a great job of making it clear just how many false starts there were in what might seem like a steady inexorable rise to greatness.

Speaking of failures, both visitors and staff at the museum refused to accept the idea that simple masks had in any way failed to stop the spread of an aerosol respiratory virus (note also the spectacular autofocus failure of the iPhone 16 Pro Max just when I was relying on it to show that the young slender staffer chose to wear a mask while the older staffer did not):

From the museum’s own web site (11/18/2024), the ideal masked vision:

Here’s Derek Zoolander’s Disneyland, which perhaps needs to be at least three times bigger for non-ant visitors:

The museum covers the shift of EPCOT from actual city to mere theme park, but not the fact that the city phase of EPCOT enabled Disney to have its own county and issue tax-free municipal bonds. Note the underground car infrastructure below.

Visitors are given a trigger warning, though it was unclear to me what the triggering content might be. Certainly, Song of the South clips were not played.

The trigger warning was repeated before a few signs that mentioned Squaw Valley Ski Resort, home of the 1960 Winter Olympics in which Disney provided some entertainment (in a victory for Native Americans, the resort was renamed Palisades Tahoe, thus removing all references to the existence of Native Americans other than the word “Tahoe” itself, which is a corruption of a Washo word for “lake”).

Nerds will appreciate the preserved multiplane camera, in which cels could be placed at different distances from the lens for more realistic perspective during camera motion.

What else is nearby? The Officers’ Club is now a free museum with a permanent exhibit devoted to the Native Americans who apparently won’t be getting any of their land back:

A temporary exhibit is up right now relating to the setting aside of the U.S. Constitution because politicians and bureaucrats declared an emergency and decided that it would be expedient to intern Japanese-Americans:

(Similar reasoning, of course, was applied in 2020 when the First Amendment right to assemble was tossed in favor of Science-dictated lockdowns.)

We didn’t leave by Waymo in an exciting rush of spinning LIDAR, but it would have been nice to!

Note Alcatraz in the background. If the U.S. government ever decides that it needs to reduce the amount of deficit spending/money printing that it does on the Cheat Our Way to Prosperity Plan maybe this island can be sold to a mid-level NVIDIA employee for $1 billion for use as a private home.

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How was the immigration of José Antonio Ibarra supposed to make the average American better off?

by philg

Let’s take a moment to remember Laken Riley. In a closed-border world she would in all likelihood be getting ready to enter the nursing profession, ideally here in Florida where population growth means that we’re always short of healthcare providers. Instead, she is gone, her murderer welcomed into the U.S. by the Biden-Harris administration in 2022.

Suppose that José Antonio Ibarra hadn’t killed Laken Riley or committed any other violent crimes. What was there in his educational or employment background that the U.S. needed? We are informed that diversity is our strength and that every immigrant enriches us culturally and economically. What was there about José Antonio Ibarra that made us want to welcome him to the U.S., pay for his housing and airfare from NYC to Georgia, etc.? What is the rationale for our open borders policy, in other words? Why wouldn’t it have made sense to screen out Mr. Ibarra even if we didn’t expect him to kill anyone?

Laken Riley was killed back in February, so I hope that it isn’t too soon to look at the economics of what happened. José Antonio Ibarra killed a universally liked young soul who would have earned about $86,000 per year (BLS) in 2024 dollars. If we assume a 40-year working career and don’t do a net-present value adjustment, that’s $3.44 million in GDP that will be lost (perhaps $1 million was invested in Laken Riley’s upbringing and education, so that investment was destroyed via opening our border to Mr. Ibarra).

What will it cost to imprison this 26-year-old migrant for the rest of his life? USA Facts says that there is a big variation from state to state, with Maskachusetts being the leader:

It’s tough to believe that Georgia is able to imprison the convicted at $30,000 per year when Massachusetts is spending over $307,000/year, but maybe this is correct. If Mr. Ibarra can live to 82, the life expectancy for Hispanics nationwide (due to systemic racism, apparently, more than 3 years longer than white Americans can expect to live), this will cost approximately $1.7 million in 2024 dollars (probably not accurate because prison costs should rise faster than inflation).

On the third hand, if imprisonment means that Mr. Ibarra is prevented from reproducing, the U.S. taxpayer may actually spend far less on him than we spend on the typical low-skill migrant because the typical low-skill migrant and his/her/zir/their descendants require multiple generations of public housing, free or subsidized health insurance (Medicaid), SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone.

Related:

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Book selection at the San Francisco fine arts museum gift shop

by philg

What do the folks who run the de Young Museum gift shop think that their California customer base wants to read?

Here’s one categorized as “Art Theory & Criticism”:

(Just now, I reviewed the photos that I took inside the museum. No Black women appear in any of the galleries.)

A few more about the victimhood category of “women” more broadly (so to speak):

The author who is an expert on mansplaining (Rebecca Solnit) also happens to be an expert on planetary physics:

What about people with more advanced gender IDs than simply “woman”?

The museum offers a Land Acknowledgment. What about the Indigenous?

How about all-purpose #Resistance?

Related:

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A true artist can sell his crack for $1 million

by philg

I hadn’t ever noticed this before, but on a recent visit to the de Young Museum in San Francisco, I noticed that they’d purchased Andy Goldsworthy’s crack for what was, no doubt, a significant sum:

Speaking of the museum, they acknowledge that they’re on someone else’s land:

Native Americans are welcome to return to their land for $20 per person, $30 for parking, and $35 for the special exhibit of 100-year-old work that “challenged gender norms”:

It was great to see the Pavia tapestries again (see Could robots weave better tapestries than humans ever have?), especially with the added bonus of Californians wearing their 3-cent surgical masks against an aerosol virus (one of them with the mask over a beard):

The museum reminds us that it is critical to consider the victimhood category of an artist (“women”, “of color”, and “LGBTQ+” are the choices):

Then they organize an activity centered around a sculpture by Louise Nevelson, who rejected and resisted being categorized as a “woman artist” (“I’m not a feminist. I’m an artist who happens to be a woman.”).

Here’s a work that Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus might have been able to steal and that would look great in any house:

I’ll cover the gift shop book selection in another post….

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Grafitti Drone countermeasures?

by philg

On a recent trip to San Francisco, a local friend took us to Andy Goldsworthy’s Spire in the Presidio:

We had just come from a parking lot where quite a few cars were virtuously marked:

Our friend said “What we need is a drone to paint the Spire sculpture in the Palestinian flag colors.”

Let’s suppose that residents of the U.S. with a lot of community spirit did build some drones that could paint the sides of building with huge messages such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”, “#Resist”, and “Trump is a Nazi.” It is much easier to build a spray-painting drone than a scrubbing drone, I think. How could cities and building owners defend against virtuous painting drone owners/operators?

(Though moderately rich by average American standards and blessed with a garage at home, our friend who lives in SF drives a 22-year-old car for fear that anything nicer will attract thieves.)

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