Month: December 2023

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Israeli army is beginning its destruction of the Vast Labyrinth™ of tunnels underneath Gaza:

Israel’s military has begun pumping seawater into Hamas’s vast complex of tunnels in Gaza, according to U.S. officials briefed on the Israeli military’s operations, part of an intensive effort to destroy the underground infrastructure that has underpinned the group’s operations.

....Israeli officials say that Hamas’s underground system has been key to its operations on the battlefield. The tunnel system, they say, is used by Hamas to maneuver fighters across the battlefield and store the group’s rockets and munitions, and enables the group’s leaders to command and control their forces. Israel also believes some hostages are being held inside tunnels.

I have a question about this. I've seen video of the tunnels under Al-Shifa hospital, which were built by Israel itself back in the day, as well as video of smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt in the southern city of Rafah. In addition, I've seen a report or two about the discovery of a few smallish tunnels (one kilometer or less). But that's it, and I've heard nothing about finding anything aside from "several" grenades and AK-47s.

Now, I don't expect the IDF to share its intelligence with me, but if they've really found hundreds of miles of tunnels full of soldiers and materiel I'd expect to see at least a little bit of leaked reporting about it. They were certainly eager enough to share video of the tunnels under Al-Shifa.

So what am I missing here? Are there really hundreds of miles of tunnels all over Gaza? Are they really full of rockets and bombs and guns? Does Hamas really hide there? Israel says it doesn't want to send soldiers into the tunnels because it might be dangerous, but that hardly makes sense. They're searching for hostages, aren't they?

Somebody please educate me.

As you know, our little blue planet is part of the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way, in turn, is part of the Local Group, which includes two other major galaxies: Andromeda and Triangulum. A group is a collection of galaxies that are close enough to be gravitationally attracted, which means that in a few billion years we're going to collide with our partners.

What happens then? Nobody knows, really, We might merge into a single giant galaxy, or we might just pass close enough to shear off lots of stars from each other. Check back in the year 4000002023 and I'll let you know.

I mention this, of course, because I was out in the desert on Sunday night and one of my targets was the Triangulum Galaxy. I used a broadband filter for the first time, which is basically a fancy light pollution filter, and it worked pretty well. The filter improved the contrast and made the background sky darker than usual, which in turn made post-processing easier. I also tried to address the severe noise I got last month from my narrowband filter by taking some advice and dithering my images. I'll spare you the explanation, but I've tried dithering before and haven't noticed much difference, so this time I amped it up and it did cut down significantly on the noise.

Anyway, here's the Local Group. The Triangulum Galaxy is at the top. Andromeda is in the middle. The Milky Way is at the bottom.

A few days ago the International Institute for Strategic Studies released the 2023 edition of its Armed Conflict Survey:

The Armed Conflict Survey 2023 continues to capture a world dominated by increasingly intractable conflicts and armed violence amid a proliferation of actors, complex and overlapping motives, global influences and accelerating climate change.

This is not really accurate. Here's a modified version of their global map of military deployments:

I've done two things. First, I erased Africa and the Middle East. Second, I redrew the endless Kashmir standoff to represent its true size.

There's one major conflict left (Ukraine) and a few modest ones. That's it. Aside from Vladimir Putin's adventure in Ukraine, the world is basically pretty peaceful outside of Africa and the Middle East.

Needless to say, this doesn't mean that Africa and the Middle East are unimportant. It's only to state more accurately exactly where the world does and doesn't have serious conflict. The vast, vast majority of the world has very little at all.

Aid to Ukraine and Israel (and Taiwan) is being held up because Republicans are demanding that the aid be tied to border security changes. As best I can figure out, these are their demands:

1. Restart construction of the wall.
2. Make asylum harder to get by tightening the standard for "credible fear."
3. Give the president power to shut down the asylum system.
4. Reinstate the "safe third country" policy that bans asylum for anyone who passes through a safe country on their way to the US.
5. Beef up the border patrol and the number of asylum judges.
6. Restrict humanitarian paroles that allow the entry of immigrants from certain countries if they have an American sponsor. Presumably this would also restrict things like President Biden's recent grant of temporary legal status to nearly half a million Venezuelans who are already in the country.

How unreasonable are these things? I'd say #3 is absurd overreach, but I'm not sure Senate Republicans are insisting on it. It would probably get tossed out in court anyway. And #4 is problematic too, especially since Mexico wouldn't think highly of it.

As for the others, the wall is a waste of money but we've wasted plenty of money before with no ill effects. The credible fear standard really does need to be better and more tightly defined, even if we can debate exactly how much. More border agents and more asylum judges are a good idea. And the humanitarian parole program isn't very big to start with, so restricting it wouldn't do a lot of damage.

Republicans also want to end "catch and release," but I'm not quite sure how you do this. If someone makes it into the country but isn't yet deportable, what else are we supposed to do? Put them all in huge detention camps? That might well appeal to Republicans, but it's a nonstarter.

Here's a suggestion that's a little bit out there: I wonder how Republicans feel about DREAMers these days? What would happen if Biden agreed to most of their immigration demands in exchange for legislative approval of the DREAM Act? Would they be open? My sense has always been that although many Republicans oppose DREAM, most of them don't oppose it very much. It's for kids, after all.

Anyway, just a thought. But it strikes me that Biden could agree to 4½ Republican demands without too much trouble, and maybe get DREAM as part of the deal. Unless you just flat out object to any restrictions on illegal immigration, what's the harm?

If it's inflation day, it's also earnings day. And earnings increased nicely in November:

These are both pretty good numbers: high enough to mean real gains for workers—especially after the big August decline—but not so high that it's likely to worry the Fed too much.

Since the start of the pandemic, overall wages are now up 1% compared to the rate of inflation and nonsupervisory (blue collar) wages are up 3%. That's not gangbusters, but it's better than nothing. Inflation may have been high for a while, but wage gains were even higher.

Today is inflation day, and the news was generally good. Both CPI and core CPI were a little higher than last month but still in pretty good shape:

The core rate of CPI has been rising a bit since its low point in June, but even at that it's still only running at 3.5%. That's not too worrisome.

Measured on a year-over-year basis, headline inflation clocked in at 3.1% and core inflation at 4.0%. Both were lower than they were last month.

The latest version of "No, you are" comes from Allysia Finley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who says that Biden is the real dictator. Her evidence is the usual farrago of right-wing nonsense: Biden signed some executive orders she doesn't like; he put in place some protections from oil drilling that she doesn't like; he has border policies she doesn't like; and most laughably, a lunatic federal judge said he was bullying social media platforms, an allegation so ridiculous that even the Fifth Circuit largely overturned it. Oh, and Biden's Justice Department has gone after Donald Trump on "trumped up charges." Uh huh.

This is all nonsense. Some of it is just stuff Finley disagrees with while the rest is a figment of her imagination. Conversely, here's a reminder of why lots of people are afraid of Trump's authoritarian streak:

• He tried to violently overthrow the 2020 election.
• He often speaks admiringly of foreign dictators.
• He has explicitly promised to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies.
• He wants to eliminate big chunks of the civil service so he can appoint his own loyalists instead.
• He writes about "rooting out" all the vermin who don't support him.
• He laughs about being a dictator on "day one" and then stopping.

These aren't merely points of ordinary partisan disagreement. They are the signs of a man who will at least try to bring down the rule of law for his own aggrandizement. He may not succeed, but it won't be for lack of desire.

This is Agathla Peak in Arizona. According to our friends at Wikipedia, it is an "eroded volcanic plug consisting of volcanic breccia cut by dikes of an unusual igneous rock called minette."

It is one of many such volcanic diatremes that are found in Navajo country of northeast Arizona and northwest New Mexico.

The English designation Agathla is derived from the Navajo name aghaałą́ meaning 'much wool', apparently for the fur of antelope and deer accumulating on the rock. The mountain is considered sacred by the Navajo.

The New York Times has an interesting piece today about pedestrian deaths in the US. As I've noted before—along with many others—US pedestrian fatalities decreased for decades but then suddenly turned up in 2010. Since then fatalities have continued to drop in other countries but have increased about 50% in the US. Why?

The Times brings something new to this mystery: According to their analysis, pedestrian deaths have gone up only at night. During the day fatalities stopped declining, but didn't go up.

Possible reasons range from automatic transmissions to increased cell phone use to larger cars and trucks on the road. None of these seem really convincing, though. It turns out the evidence just doesn't support them. But there's also this fascinating tidbit:

This prompts an obvious alternative explanation: The increase in fatalities has something to do with pedestrian behavior. If it were driver behavior, after all, every age group would be increasing.

And guess who uses smartphones the most? Ages 18-64. Children largely don't have phones and old people don't use them much. So maybe the big change is pedestrians staring at their phones and walking unsafely?

Saying this is taboo, because we're not supposed to blame virtuous pedestrians when nasty, reckless, polluting drivers are ready at hand. And yet, if this were a matter of bigger cars or distracted drivers, surely they'd be wreaking havoc on kids and the elderly too? Why wouldn't they?

Granted, this is just a guess on my part. And there's another factor here that the Times doesn't mention: Only fatal crashes have gone up. The total number of pedestrian crashes has been rock steady the entire time.

So: the problem is only fatal crashes at night among ages 18-64 in the US. That is indeed very peculiar. And it's at least worth a look to see if this suggests something going on among pedestrians, not just drivers.

Over at New York, John Herrman tries to figure out what the heck Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. Along the way he notes this: "After bone-deep layoffs, the company is still bleeding talent."

That reminds me: When Musk took over Twitter he immediately fired half the employees, including an astonishing number of engineers. In the ensuing months, every time Twitter suffered an outage or a glitch of some kind it seemed like the whole world pounced. It was always a harbinger of what was to come as Twitter slowly deteriorated into unusability.

But it's now been more than a year and Twitter is.......fine? Sure, it's shedding advertisers like cat hair, but that's because of Musk's contempt for the things advertisers want. Operationally, Twitter seems to be running smoothly with a tiny fraction of the engineering staff it used to have. So what were all those engineers doing back in the pre-Musk era?

For what it's worth, I'll also repeat here something I've said repeatedly on Twitter itself: I don't really notice much difference since Musk took over. Lots of people are abandoning Twitter, but I can't quite figure out why. Maybe the decline of Twitter is more obvious if you follow lots of sketchy accounts? In my case, I follow only about 150 accounts and all of them are normal, sober feeds. I haven't been bombarded with trolls or bots or white nationalists or anything like that. Everything is pretty much the same as always.

I still have a hard time figuring out how Twitter survives if advertisers abandon it en masse because they don't need the grief, but otherwise it seems OK. Am I missing something?