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Nooo, not anti-Semitism at all!

Back in the days of not-so-long ago, American history teachers used to assign The Diary of a Young Girl, the writings of Anne Frank as her Jewish family and she hid from the Nazis in an attic in Amsterdam, after the Germans occupied it.

Born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, under the Weimar Republic, her family emigrated to the Netherlands in 1934, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power. Germany invaded Holland and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, and the Dutch government fled in just a few days. The Netherlands surrendered on May 15th. As the Reichskommissariat Niederlande, the Nazis civilian occupation government, began increasing oppression of the Jews in 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in a concealed room of a larger house, where they remained until August of 1944, when they were arrested by the Gestapo. They were sent to the concentration camps, and Anne died somewhere between February and March of 1945.

The recovery of her diary writings were published in 1947, and quickly became famous. And so we come to this:

Statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti

Story by CBSNews | Sunday, August 4, 2024

The statue commemorating Anne Frank, one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust, was defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti for the second time on Sunday.

The statue is located in Merwedeplein, near the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

According to images published on X, the base of the statue was spray-painted with the slogan “Free Gaza” while the girl’s hands were painted with the same red color, AFP reported.

Sunday was the 80th anniversary of the August 4, 1944 capture of the Frank family by the Gestapo.

Miss Frank had nothing to do with the war in Gaza, or the extermination of Ismail Haniyeh, or anything else. The restoration of the nation of Israel had not occurred when she was captured, and eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen camp. So I really don’t want to hear that defacing her statue was some sort of anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli protest without being anti-Semitic as well.

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896, in response to the anti-Semitism in Europe, in Christian Europe, where Jews had been pushed into ghettos, faced serious restrictions in society, and were occasionally the victims of pogroms. Mr Herzl claimed that the only solution to anti-Semitism in Christian Europe was for Jews to get out of Europe, and set up an independent state just where Israel is now. But it wound up taking the Nazis and the Shoah to make Israel a reality.

At the end of the war, half of the Jews in Europe were dead, and almost all of them had been completely dispossessed of their homes, their professions, their property. They quite literally had no place to go, no homes to which to return.

Think of what had happened. Though Germany had been completely under the Nazis’ control, most Germans weren’t Nazis. Yes, every German had been under twelve years of Josef Goebbels’ propaganda, something which told the German people that the Jews were their mortal enemies, that they were a tremendous danger, but if the non-Nazi Germans nevertheless cooperated with the Nazis in rounding up the Jews, so did the French, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Poles, the vast majority of whom were (supposedly) Christian, and who did not spend a dozen years being indoctrinated by the Nazis.

Even if the Jews could have returned to their pre-war homes, that would have left them living side-by-side with the very people who turned them over to the Nazis! 

Anne Frank? She had nothing to do with any of that. Her statue is a symbol of the plight of the Jews wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators in the lands they occupied. Yet now some anti-Semitic thug or thugs have chosen to vandalize her statue.

Let’s not kid ourselves: while the war in Gaza might have made it more newsworthy, anti-Semitism is the bottom cause, not some distinction between hating Jews and opposing Zionism. The Germans exposed the fact that the Christian Europeans really didn’t want the Jews living among them, and now it seems that they don’t want the Jews living anywhere else.

 

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Don’t blame Other People if your neighborhood is a mess

Our good friends on the left like to tell us that the plight of poor people is the result of systemic racism, redlining, poor schools — though never to say that vouchers for private schools or school choice could help! — and disinvestment in poorer communities, basically blaming all of their travails on greedy capitalists, and really anybody other than the poor themselves.

Then I found this, in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Residents welcome Philly’s citywide cleanup, but complaint data show trash quickly returns

Mayor Parker’s Office of Clean and Green aimed to deep clean every Philly neighborhood this year. Halfway through the program, Philly 311 data show that trash complaints have not receded.

by Saara Ghani and Ximena Conde | Tuesday, July 30, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

My Nguyen and Cloud, her big and fluffy dog, walk through their Kensington neighborhood every day. She worries that Cloud will rifle through the garbage on the sidewalk and get dirty — or worse, choke on something.

Just a week before, the area had been swarmed by city crews armed with leaf blowers, street sweepers, and water trucks — part of a citywide summer cleanup targeting every corner of Philadelphia.

“It doesn’t last, because people keep littering,” Nguyen said.

From Kingsessing to Kensington, residents have welcomed the added investment but said it is not a long-term solution. Garbage complaints keep rolling in to Philly311, the city’s reporting system for nonemergency complaints.

I certainly appreciate the alliteration the Inky’s reporters used, but it’s worth noting here that Kingsessing and Kensington are two of Philly’s poorer neighborhoods.

The story included a photo by staff photographer Tom Gralish that could be somewhat deceiving, showing the intersection of South 55th and Elliot Streets in Kingsessing, with a bunch of litter and trash in the street, but also six city workers equipped with leaf blowers, and it appears that they were blowing the trash into a smaller area for easier pick up. Nevertheless, there was a lot of trash!

Some of the problems are caused not by the residents just littering the streets, but illegal dumping, presumably from other neighborhoods, but that happens because people know that they can get away with it. Yet, just two weeks after the city cleanup crews have gone through, the system receives more complaints about trash than before the cleaning. Some of that can be attributed to people seeing that hey, someone did clean up the mess, people who might not have complained before because they thought it a waste of time and effort. I suppose that, under previous Mayor Jim Kenney, who mentally checked out of his job long before his term ended, very little got done, so almost anything getting done under the new administration is an improvement.

But, to me, it’s pretty simple: if you don’t want your neighborhood trashed, don’t trash your neighborhood. If you have some garbage in your hands, carry it with you until you get to a trash can; how hard is that? The above linked picture shows dozens of scraps of paper, some soda bottles and drink cups, the kind of thing you’d have after a trip to McDonald’s or a corner bodega. If you’re walking up to your house, and you see little stuff like that littering the sidewalk or the gutter, pick it up and take it in to your trash can. I can understand if the garbage is a used drug needle that no decent person would want to pick it up with his bare hands, but a sandwich wrapper or a drink cup? Just pick it up!

You don’t have to be wealthy to pick up a piece of trash. Just because there are a lot of poor people in the City of Brotherly Love does not mean they can’t try to keep their neighborhoods clean.

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Apparently your Freedom of Speech is dependent upon which side you support

Many on the left decried efforts to curtail anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas demonstrations, and backed the not-so-peaceful demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and Antifa during the 2020 Summer of Hate, shouting about freedom of speech. But now we have the amusing spectacle of The New York Times fretting about how cities can fight “hateful speech” when it comes from the right.

What Can a City Do When Neo-Nazis Start Marching Down Its Streets?

The brazen appearance of white supremacist groups in Nashville left the city grappling with how to confront hateful speech without violating First Amendment protections.

by Emily Cochrane | Thursday, August 1, 2024

They first arrived at the beginning of July: dozens of masked white supremacists, shuffling out of U-Hauls, to march through Nashville carrying upside-down American flags.

A week later, members of a separate neo-Nazi group, waving giant black flags with red swastikas, paraded along the city’s famed strip of honky-tonks and celebrity-owned bars. The neo-Nazis poured into the historic Metro courthouse to disrupt a City Council meeting, harassed descendants of Holocaust survivors and yelled racist slurs at young Black children performing on a downtown street.

The appearance of white nationalists on the streets of a major American city laid bare the growing brazenness of the two groups, the Patriot Front and the Goyim Defense League. Their provocations enraged and alarmed civic leaders and residents in Nashville, causing the city to grapple with how to confront the groups without violating free speech protections.

“I can’t imagine having a mimosa on Fifth and Broadway, and 400 Patriot Front members walk out of a U-Haul — it has to be one of the most jarring experiences as an American and as a tourist in the city,” said State Representative Aftyn Behn, who represents the city’s downtown. “Nashville is a microcosm of the greater country, and we are at a moment where we have to decide who we are.”

I’m not sure how 400 Patriot Front members would fit in “a U-Haul,” but whatever. But it seems to me that the best response to groups advocating things you hate is to ignore them, at least as long as they aren’t setting buildings on fire or physically assaulting people. These groups usually demonstrate with well-disciplined and orderly marches, then get back in their vehicles, and return to their homes.

Both of the groups that visited Nashville this summer have become more visible since the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va, and are now among the top sources of white supremacist propaganda. At the same time, the leadership of the other far-right groups like the Proud Boys has been disrupted by prosecutions over their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

White supremacists have appeared in Nashville before and have increasingly promoted racist and antisemitic messages across the country. Those include plotting to riot at a Pride event in Idaho, disrupting city council meetings in New England and protesting at the opening New York performances of “Parade,” a musical about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in the South.

Did you catch that? They were “plotting to riot,” not that they actually started a riot. According to the embedded Times story, police “received a tip that a group of people had jumped into a U-Haul van near a Pride event.”

Many of the men also had shields and wore shinguards, and the police recovered one smoke grenade, they said. They did not mention other weapons.

So, other than a “smoke grenade,” something which could be used to have a group of marchers emerge from a cloud of smoke, the 31 arrested men were unarmed. That Times story concluded with this gem:

The action in Coeur d’Alene was not the only threat that involved a far-right group and an L.G.B.T.Q. event on Saturday. In San Lorenzo, Calif., members of the Proud Boys disrupted the “Drag Queen Story Hour,” a reading event at the San Lorenzo Library that was attended by children, parents and other community members, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook.

The men shouted homophobic and transphobic slurs at the event organizer and were described as having a violent demeanor, authorities said. Deputies arrived and de-escalated the situation, but a hate crime investigation is underway, the sheriff’s office said.

So, the men in that protest “shouted” mean things at the organizers of the event, and “were described as having a violent demeanor,” but the story does not say that they actually committed any violent acts.

Back to the article originally cited:

(Nashville) City officials said they were reviewing ordinances related to face coverings, littering and permit requirements for parades, as well as consulting a First Amendment expert to ensure that any crackdown would withstand a legal challenge.

The white supremacist groups, city officials said, strategically navigate city regulations to avoid arrest or police interference. Often, they are penalized with littering citations for distributing antisemitic pamphlets; in one instance, a leader of the Goyim Defense League spent a few weeks last fall in a Florida jail.

If you follow the last link, which is behind a paywall, you’ll see that the man listed as having spent a few weeks in jail was sentenced to thirty days for littering. From what little I could see before the paywall blocked everything, there were no charges against him of any violent crimes.

Today’s left in America very much support protests and rallies by the far left, cheering on the Black Lives Matter and Antifa demonstrations which caused multiple millions in damage in break-ins and arson, and they still call Kyle Rittenhouse a murderer for having defended himself against three previously convicted criminals assaulting him during that famous “Fiery but mostly peaceful protest” in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But when a group of men, in “which members generally wear masks and ‘khaki pants and a blue or white polo shirt,’ and sometimes employ smoke bombs,” for dramatic effect, and even have an operational plan consisting of marching in an orderly column until they reach barriers are encountered, and disengage and march back to a pre-arranged spot “once an appropriate amount of confrontational dynamic has been established.”

They might be confrontational, and they might be unpleasant, but they proceed without weapons to exercise their freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. Liberal urban governments really hate that, but let’s tell the truth here, American liberals really do hate the freedom of speech when it isn’t speech they like.

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The Iranians should be worried!

As my good friend Robert Stacy McCain has noted, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it was responsible for the extermination — I refuse to call it an assassination, as one does not assassinate cockroaches — of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, though most people have concluded that they did. Personally, I hope that Israel is responsible! Arash Azizi certainly believes it!

A Wake-Up Call for Iran

Israel can pretty much do what it wants on Iranian soil.

By Arash Azizi | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 | 11:20 AM EDT

Ismail Haniyeh should have known that Tehran wasn’t a safe place for him to be. What has Israel ever wanted to do on Iranian territory that it hasn’t been able to accomplish? In 2018, it stole the country’s entire nuclear archive. In 2020, it killed Iran’s top nuclear-weapons official. In 2022 and 2023, it reportedly abducted, interrogated, and then released security officials who were planning actions against Israeli tourists in the region—and it did this entirely on Iranian soil. Such extensive operations show that Mossad has deeply penetrated Iran’s security architecture, much as it has in the hit Israeli TV show Tehran.

That’s all you get to read at The Atlantic, because the rest falls behind the paywall. But, not to worry, msn.com reproduced it for free! As much as I’m shelling out for subscriptions, free is still my favorite price!

Details are still emerging about the strike on Haniyeh, Hamas’s highest-ranking political leader, who was killed in Tehran in the early hours today. The assassination comes at an incredibly tense moment, less than 24 hours after Israel used an air strike to take out Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah official, in Beirut. Hezbollah has not confirmed Shukr dead, and Israel has not taken responsibility for the attack on Haniyeh. But fingers will naturally point to the country with both the capacity and the motive to go after the Hamas leader.

Israel has a history of targeting militant leaders behind the killing of its citizens. Palestinian militants massacred Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972, and Israel responded with Operation Wrath of God, a string of assassinations of militant leaders all over the world that ended only in 1988. Israel was always going to find and kill Haniyeh, a leader of the group that perpetrated October 7, the most lethal terror attack in the country’s history.

“Operation Wrath of God”? Yeah, I like that name!

We are told, of course, just how wrong, wrong, wrong! targeted assassinations are, but let’s tell the truth here: if the United Kingdom had had the ability to take out Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring in 1940, the way Israel supposedly exterminated Mr Haniyeh, does anyone doubt that Prime Minister Winston Churchill would have ordered it done? Does anyone doubt that the world would be a better place today if that had happened?

This supposed capability is hardly surprising. I’m old enough to remember when there was talk in the 1980s, perhaps a bit overblown, that the guidance system for American cruise missiles was so good that we could send it through the men’s room window in the Kremlin. With the ever-increasing capabilities of global positioning satellites, that Israel could put a weapon on any particular building it wished is not really surprising. The more surprising part is that Israel — if it was Israel! — not only knew that Mr Haniyeh was in Tehran, but knew exactly where he was staying. I expect to hear about crackdowns in Iran, as their security apparatus tries to find out how Israel got that information, in time for it to have been actionable. It will not pay to be one of the Usual Suspects in Iran right now!

Oh, who am I kidding? The Usual Suspects have already been in jail in Iran. The Islamic Republic will be scrutinizing anyone who had the information, scouring their computers to see if they can find a Mossad intrusion, interrogating journalists, and putting everyone in the neighborhood to the question. The Ayatollah might want to strike at Israel, but the real strike will be against Iranians themselves.

Ayatollah Ali Khameini has to be worried about something else. If Israel, or whomever, could target and kill Mr Haniyeh in his Tehran safe house, then the mad mullahs could just as easily be killed in their homes. It’s good that he’s worried.

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Karma comes for Ismail Haniyeh He started a war he couldn't finish, and now that war has finished him.

Ismail Haniyeh isn’t smiling anymore.

We noted, on June 6th, that Hamas leaders don’t really care about the lives of ordinary Palestinians, and see the sacrifice of their lives as politically useful:

Ismail Haniyeh is the ‘Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau,’ and as such is supposedly the chief officer of that terrorist group. On October 7, 2023, he gave a televised speech from Istanbul, telling the world that the October 7th attack was fully justified, which he “highlighted threats to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, the continuation of the blockade on Gaza and Israeli normalization with countries in the region.” Safely living in Qatar, Mr Haniyeh is once again rejecting a ceasefire proposal which does not give Hamas complete victory.

Mr Haniyeh is no longer “safely living in Qatar,” and his estimated net worth of $4 billion isn’t going to do him much good now, as someone has sent him straight to Hell.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is killed in Iran by an alleged Israeli strike, threatening escalation

by Abby Sewell | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 | 7:19 AM EDT

BEIRUT (AP) — Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a predawn airstrike in the Iranian capital Wednesday, Iran and the militant group said, blaming Israel for a shock assassination that risks escalating the conflict even as the U.S. and other nations were scrambling to prevent an all-out regional war. Iran’s supreme leader vowed revenge against Israel.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has pledged to kill Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. The strike came just after Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president in Tehran — and only hours after Israel targeted a top commander in Iran’s ally Hezbollah in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

The assassination of Hamas’ top political leader was potentially explosive amid the region’s volatile, intertwined conflicts — because of its target, its timing and the decision to carry it out in Tehran. Most dangerous was the potential to push Iran and Israel into direct confrontation if Iran retaliates.

Yahya Sinwar, you’re next!

Also read: William Teach, “Israel Strikes Beirut, Kills Hezbollah Commander“

Naturally, the maddest of the mad mullahs, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that revenge was Iran’s duty for “a dear guest in our home,” but Iran has already been striking at Israel, via it’s stooges Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States had no advance knowledge of, and was not in any way involved in, the sending of Mr Haniyeh to his 72 bacha bazi boys virgins, and I believe him: Israel would never have told the US in advance, because they’d rightly fear that the US would warn Mr Haniyeh that the strike was coming.

Israel, under the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, completely evacuated Gaza in 2005, forcibly evacuating the Jewish settlers there, and giving the Arabs in Gaza a chance to build something positive there, build an enclave of peace and prosperity. Instead, the ‘Palestinians,’ led by Hamas, turned it into a fetid and festering sewer of anti-Jewish hatred, terrorist activity, and tunnels for hiding weapons and fighters, and a launching pad for attacks on Israel. Hamas had a chance to strive for peace, by being peaceful, and thus pushing for an Israeli government which would be responsive to that peace. Instead, led in part by Mr Haniyeh, they sought, and got, war.

The diplomats are all worried that this will lead to a wider war, but the truth is that, unless Israel finishes off Hamas, and Hezbollah, too, wider war will come. Mr Haniyeh was living in luxury in Qatar, and frequently traveling around the Muslim Middle East, in seeming impunity, while the people he (supposedly) led were dying in a useless struggle. Now he is in Jahannam.

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Oh, noes! #COVID19 is surging in California! But still, few people are actually getting sick

The news is horrifically frightening, and Taylor Lorenz must be going absotively, posilutely bonkers: almost everyone in the Pyrite State has a cold.

COVID surging in California, nears two-year summer high. ‘Almost everybody has it’

By Rong-Gong Lin II | Monday, July 29, 2024 | 3:00 AM PDT

If it seems like many people around you are getting COVID-19, you’re not alone.

Federal data show coronavirus levels in California’s wastewater are surging to levels not seen in summertime since 2022, indicating a wide and worsening spread of COVID.

“We are seeing … a definite, definite surge,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious disease at Kaiser Permanente Southern California.

The surge is clearly apparent in doctor’s offices and clinics where people are seeking outpatient treatment, Hudson said. But, thankfully, not many people are having to be hospitalized because of COVID-19 at this point.

That’s from the Los Angeles Times original, but if readers are stymied by a paywall, the story can be accessed for free from Yahoo! News.

This ‘surge’ of COVID-19 isn’t being measured by actually testing of individuals, but by testing sewage to detect traces of infectious diseases circulating in a community, even if people don’t have symptoms. People infected can shed pieces of the virus when they use the toilet, bathe, or launder their clothing, and samples of the wastewater are taken and tested before the sewage is processed. The CDC are still testing for Monkeypox, though they now call it Mpox, because they don’t want to offend the poor dears who are most prone to contract it.

In particular, one of the FLiRT strains, known as KP.3.1.1, “has really taken off,” Hudson said. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that that strain accounted for 17.7% of coronavirus samples nationwide for the two-week period that ended July 20, up from 6.8% for the prior comparable period.

At that rate of growth, that strain is likely to become increasingly dominant in the next few weeks, Hudson said. “So, unfortunately, I think we are going to see a lot more cases.”

Coronavirus levels in California sewage are considered “very high” for a third consecutive week, the CDC said Friday. Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia — home to nearly 3 in 4 Americans — have either “high” or “very high” coronavirus levels in wastewater.

For the seven-day period that ended July 20, the most recent data available, coronavirus levels in California wastewater were at 93% of the peak from the summer of 2022. They’ve already exceeded last summer’s height.

Naturally, the newspaper is reporting that some people contracting the FLiRT variant are feeling the worst symptoms yet:

“I’ve had COVID a few times but this is the worst I’ve had it,” wrote one person on Reddit. The person reported recurring fever, being so congested they couldn’t breathe out of their nose, “terrible sinus pressure and headache … and I can’t stand up for too long without feeling like I’m about to pass out.”

Another person wrote that their “throat feels like razor blades” and that they feel like they’re “in living misery.”

Naturally, the Democrats are not going to grossly overreact by ordering the stupid and unconstitutional restrictions of 2020-21, because there’s an election approaching! No one’s really going to call for universal masking, regardless of how much they might wish, because it’s so politically damaging.

In Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, there were an average of 286 COVID-19-positive people in hospitals for the week that ended July 20. That’s flat from the prior week’s figure of 291, and about half as many as last summer’s peak and one-quarter as many as the peak of summer 2022.

Yet we were also told that California has already exceeded the 2023 summer peak, which can mean only one thing: if serious cases of COVID-19 are fewer, despite a wider spread, then COVID-19 in 2024 just isn’t as bad as previously. “Almost everyone has it,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases expert at UCSF.

But if almost everyone has it, and we aren’t all dropping like flies, it simply cannot be serious anymore. It will be for a few people, but a few people die from the flu or measles as well.

COVID-19 has lost its ability to scare, and few believe the people who try to ramp up fear.

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Welfare for the well-to-do

If you watch the Weather Channel, whenever one of the bad winter storms hits, or hurricanes, tropical storms, etc, you’ll see that they always have a graphic showing how many “customers” are without power. Customers does not equal people, but residential and commercial units consuming power. As ’empty nesters,’ we count as one customer, but are two people. When the first tropical storm/category 1 hurricane hit the Lone Star State earlier in July, the Weather Channel was telling us about how long customers in Texas were dealing with near 100ºF temperatures with no sparktricity for air conditioners. Primarily distributed by overhead wires, electricity is our most vulnerable to the weather utility.

Heat pumps are having their moment. Are they right for you?

More homeowners are opting for heat pumps, once thought to be ill-suited to cold Northeast winters.

by Frank Kummer | Monday, July 29, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

For decades, Scott Nelson’s Oceanside Service has been installing traditional residential cooling systems and gas-powered furnaces in Jersey Shore communities such as Long Beach Island.

Within the past few years, however, the Allenhurst-based contractor has seen a big change: More homeowners are opting for heat pumps, once thought to be ill-suited to cold Northeast winters. The switch is fostered by warming winters, more efficient heat pump units, and federal and state incentives.

“We give everybody the option,” Nelson said, referring to a traditional system versus a heat pump. “And 8 out of 10″ have been buying heat pumps.

Heat pumps are having their moment, boosted in recent years by federal tax credits and other incentives that align their cost more closely with traditional fossil-fuel powered units, while also being highly efficient.

And there it is! You, the taxpayers, are on the hook to buy HVAC systems for Other People! And the homeowners in “Jersey Shore communities such as Long Beach Island” are much wealthier than the typical taxpayer in Flyover Country USA. In June of 2024, the median sale price in Long Beach Island, NJ, was $2,250,000, up 32.4% from the same time in 2023.[1]Data accessed on July 29, 2024, and may show differently in the future, as the referenced real estate site updates information as it is received.

The momentum could grow with the Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement last week of $4.3 billion in grants for projects in 30 states aimed at reducing climate change and air pollution, fostering environmental justice, and accelerating a transition to renewable energy. Pennsylvania received nearly $400 million, and New Jersey and a coalition of other states received nearly $250 million, all funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as part of the Biden administration’s agenda.

The grants will be used to fund various programs, including those that encourage a switch to heat pumps such as Pennsylvania’s Priority Climate Action Plan.

So, even more of your taxed-away dollars — or that money borrowed from investors and repaid with interest — being given to Other People.

Our HVAC system, a circa 1995 heat pump system, was destroyed in the 2021 flood, and the $6,100 it cost to replace it came from our pockets, not the taxpayers. Remember that $6,100 figure; it will be important later. How much moolah is Uncle Sam giving to people wealthier than you? Skipping down a few paragraphs we find:

Heat pump installations can quality for federal tax credits valued at up to 30% of the cost paid for the unit, or up to $2,000 per year, for air-source heat pumps. There’s a rebate up to $8,000 for an ENERGY STAR-certified electric heat pump for space heating and cooling.

Pennsylvania anticipates using money from the Infrastructure Act to offer rebates starting in 2025 for heat pumps installed in low- to moderate-income households.

Further down, readers are told that the up-front costs for a heat pump are about $15,000, versus roughly $8,000 for a gas furnace. I guess that my $6,100 wasn’t so bad, huh?

Philadelphia has plans to try and push heat pumps, but has 440,000 mostly brick rowhomes, with an average age of 80 years. Many have insufficient electrical service to power a heat pump system. My heat pump system has not one but two 220-volt, 50-amphere circuits, one for the exterior condenser unit, and another for the blower unit in the crawlspace, which includes heating elements for the ’emergency’ heat cycle. With our ‘backup’ heating system, a propane fireplace, we’ve never needed to use the ’emergency’ heat cycle. A modern, 200-amp circuit breaker panel is needed for installation of a heat pump system, so many of the Philly rowhomes would also need an electrician to upgrade that before any heat pump system could be installed.

There’s more than just that, though. As Frank Kummer, the article author noted, many Philadelphia houses, particularly the rowhomes, “still have boilers that use radiators and baseboard heat. Those likely would need ductless, mini-split heat pumps.” While it is possible to mount mini-split units on interior walls, doing so is more complicated, and more expensive than mounting them on exterior walls.

This is a program that is nothing more than welfare for the already well-to-do. The heat pump systems do have tax credits, but that doesn’t mean that homeowners can simply stroke a check for $15 grand, and be able to wait for their tax credits. While some rowhouse neighborhoods like Fishtown are gentrifying, and might have some better-off homeowners who would consider heat pumps as they remodel, it’s more difficult to see how the working-class people in Philly’s working-class neighborhoods could do so. If their gas furnaces have to be replaced, it’s still cheaper for them to replace with new gas furnaces than heat pumps, as Mr Kummer’s article tells us.

And so I go back to the beginning, and how electricity is our most vulnerable to the weather utility. If you live in a Philly rowhome, and the power goes out on a bitterly cold February day, whether you had a heat pump based system, or your old natural gas fired boiler for radiators, both would be out. But a low-end home generator from Lowe’s or Home Despot can provide enough 110-volt, 20-amp power to run your natural gas furnace, while you’d need a substantial generator, providing 220-volts to run your heat pump system.

I have no objection at all to people being able to choose what kind of heating system they want; I do find it objectionable that the government has its snotty nose in these decisions, and that the feds are providing what amounts to welfare for already prosperous people.

References

References
↑1 Data accessed on July 29, 2024, and may show differently in the future, as the referenced real estate site updates information as it is received.
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Hamas delendum est

In November of 2022, I had the privilege of a far-too-short visit to Jerusalem, really just 3 days, and my daughter and I spent almost all of our time in the Old City. We were able to attend Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, visit the Western Wall, then ascend the Temple Mount to the al-Aqsa Mosque, though we could not enter that. We saw the Garden of Gethsemane, and many of the Christian sites there, along with taking the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross.

The Old City is simply amazing. Jerusalem has been destroyed several times before, and the Old City is not what it was in Jesus’ time, and much of what can be seen is actually Byzantine construction. Some things are clearly fanciful, as the alleged Tomb of Mary and Birthplace of Mary are there, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that Mary was either born or died in that city. Our best guess is that Mary was Galilean, from the area around Nazareth, and even though Nazareth is close to Jerusalem, at least in modern terms, roughly 144 kilometers, it’s not the kind of journey a young woman would normally have made just before the time of Jesus.

One of the places we stopped can be seen in the photo at the beginning of this article. To my American eyes, it looked like some kind of reading room, though SSG Pico — she is an Army Reservist, then deployed to Kuwait, and I met her in Jerusalem when she had a four-day pass — and I had to go along with Islamic respect: a head covering for her, and shoes off for both of us.

It wasn’t a reading room, but actually a mosque, the gentleman shown to the left of the photograph told us. It was quiet, and yes, he did try, gently, to proselytize us — we informed him that we were Catholic — but he was entirely respectful of us.

In November of 2022, the Christians, Jews, and Muslims of Jerusalem were able to live in peaceful coexistence. Yes, there were armed Israeli policemen around and very visible to keep the peace, but we were not bothered by anyone, in any place we walked, including the Temple Mount, run by a Muslim Waqf out of Jordan by mutual agreement, even though we were about as obviously Westerners as can be.

Our hotel was about half a mile north, off of Jaffa Street, and the vast majority of the people we saw walking to and from the Old City were visibly Jewish by their dress, and they, too, never bothered us. The Jewish restaurants outside the Old City, as well as Arabic restaurants inside — there’s an amazing sidewalk-and-inside cafe on the Via Dolorosa, near the fourth Station of the Cross! — served us very politely.

One important point: don’t ever eat at a kosher McDonald’s! They are absolutely awful!

My point is a simple one: these people can live together, if they’ll only try. In 2005, the government under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, forcibly evacuated all of the Jewish settlers from Gaza, and told the ‘Palestinians’ to make of it what they would. The Israelis hoped that reasonable heads would prevail, and the Arabs would take advantage of their unoccupied land to try to build something peaceful and prosperous. Gaza has few natural resources, but also enjoys some of the best beachfront property on the Mediterranean, and could have built resorts which would attract well-to-do European vacationers, and the euros that they’d have to spend.

Obviously, that’s not what they did. Instead, the Arab irredentists fought with each other, Hamas seized control in Gaza, and the whole thing became a big terrorist training camp. Instead of resorts which could bring some prosperity to Gaza, they built a vast tunnel system. What an absolute waste!

What’s happening in Gaza didn’t have to happen. It was started by bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists, who must have thought that, if they started a war, the other Arab nations would join them. Oops!

This is why Hamas must be completely destroyed! Given a chance for peace, being given land where they could develop the beginnings of a peaceful ‘Palestine,’ the Arabs proved that they were not interested in peace, that they were still interested in complete victory. You cannot reason with such people, at least not reason as those of us living in a Western civilization culture would do.

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This morning’s rant

Via William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, I saw this quote:

“I never imagined seeing the flag of a terror group holding eight Americans hostage for 292 days waved in the streets of our nation’s Capitol,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) wrote alongside an image of a protester waving the Hamas flag.

I guess that he’s not old enough to remember the campus protest chant, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!”

It’s amazing to me that there are so many people in Western countries, enjoying the fruits of Western civilization and a modern economy, supporting Islamist savages who would gladly hang all of the queers and force the women back into subjugation. It’s as though they just can’t wrap their pointy heads around the notion that, if Hamas did win, and drive all of the Jooooos into the sea, this new ‘Palestine’ would not somehow be all sweetness and light, with a First World economy, liberation for queers and trannies, religious freedom, freedom of speech and of the press, and the happiness of a wealthy, Ivy League university campus, but become the same squalor that the rest of the non-oil producing Arab Middle East is.

I have to laugh at the “Queers for Palestine” signs, of (mostly) white young women taking a leadership role in these protests, when none of them would be allowed any leadership roles at all under Islam. I have to laugh at those calling the Israelis “white settler colonialists” when every white person in America is the descendant or beneficiary of white settler colonialists, only here because white settler colonialists — including my first American ancestor, Richard Warren — drove out and (mostly) killed the Indians here before them. Every black person in America is the descendant or beneficiary of the evil white slaveholders who brought their ancestors here, rather than leaving them in the undeveloped squalor that is most of sub-Saharan Africa today. Every Hispanic person in America today is the descendant or beneficiary of the white Spanish settler colonialists who drove out and (mostly) killed the Indians south of the Rio Grande.

Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday, to Congress, referring to the anti-Semitic protesters outside:

I have a message for these protesters. When the tyrants of Tehran who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair are praising, promoting and funding you: you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.

Absotively, posilutely right!

When the people that today’s left are supporting actually take over, all of the campus idiots are going to be utterly astonished when they are among the first to be lined up against the wall and shot.
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