Bruce P Weber

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. - F. Douglass

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@MurrayHillGuy1 1996, October. Yankees-Braves WS. City was LIT.

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@TVietor08 @jmart Huh? This moves sux azz but whaaaaat? What has happened to you? Even if this is a bad attempt at gallows humor, can’t be so capricious about govt seizing private property…

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@TedPillows Cash

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

The French hate air conditioning.

So Paris built a 120-kilometre machine under its streets for producing cold.

It’s called Fraîcheur de Paris, and it does for summer heat what district heating did for winter: centralise the problem.

Instead of every museum, office, hotel, hospital and shop bolting its own cooling plant onto the building, Paris moves cold through pipes.

The network sends water chilled to 2 to 4°C through buried supply lines. The water enters a connected building, absorbs heat through an exchange station, then returns at 12 to 14°C to be cooled again.

It essentially functions with two pipes. One carries the cold out, the other carries heat back.

The production plants cool the circuit from 12°C to 4°C. Some sites use the Seine as a heat sink. In colder periods, the system can use the river’s own temperature for free cooling, which means the machines work less and the electricity demand drops. The Seine water doesn’t become the building water. It stays separate, passing temperature across heat exchangers.

The scale is pretty strange when you see it written down though.

It's got 15 production sites, 4 storage sites, 120 km of underground network with 924 subscribers. This has resulted in 7 million square metres cooled, and 493 GWh of cooling sold.

A cold utility running beneath one of the densest cities in Europe.

The Forum des Halles has been cooled this way since 1979. The Louvre since 1986. Galeries Lafayette, Opéra Garnier, Hôtel de Ville, Station F, La Samaritaine and the National Assembly all sit on the same idea. Tourists stand in the Louvre looking at paintings while a municipal cold loop does part of the dull work below ground.

The boring part is the breakthrough.

Cold can be stored at night in chilled water or ice, then used during daytime peaks. The network is monitored from a control room with more than 125,000 control points. A delivery station inside a building takes 5 to 7 times less space than a standalone cooling installation and avoids the roof and façade clutter that turns cities into compressor farms.

That matters because conventional air conditioning solves heat by moving it somewhere nearby. In a dense city, thousands of private machines mean thousands of outdoor units rejecting heat into streets, courtyards and roofs, plus refrigerants, noise, vibration and maintenance spread across every building.

Paris’s public cooling network has a stated coefficient of performance of 4, against 3 for a wet standalone system and 2 for a dry standalone system. Against an equivalent set of autonomous installations, Fraîcheur de Paris says the network gives 100% higher energy efficiency, 35% less electricity use, 90% fewer refrigerant-fluid emissions and 50% lower CO2 emissions.

The climate backdrop is the real reason this exists.

Paris ran a full crisis exercise called “Paris at 50°C” in 2023. Météo-France’s 2050 reference trajectory for France points to heatwave days becoming five times more frequent, hot nights rising sharply in urban centres, and some local extremes around 48°C becoming possible.

The city signed a 20-year concession in 2022 with Fraîcheur de Paris, owned 85% by ENGIE and 15% by RATP. The contract is worth a projected €2.4 billion. The plan is to extend the network by 158 km by 2042, add 20 production plants and 10 storage sites, and reach more than 3,000 subscribers, including hospitals, nurseries, schools and care homes.

This is basically the infrastructure version of admitting that summer is becoming a public systems problem...

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@ByronDonalds Huh? You still own the property. Why does it matter if there is a mortgage on it or not?

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@grahamformaine She may be spineless,, but she is not corrupt.

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@SKaneNBCS E-G-O

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@RyanGarciaESM Yeah, no way

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@FiresideYankees @RyanGarciaESM No

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@EthanLevins2 The PLO did

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

To have a state, there's a simple test. It's called the Montevideo test. It comes from the Montevideo Convention in 1933, and it's a four-part, four-element test.

The four elements are:

1. Do you have a defined population?
2. Do you have defined borders?
3. Do you have the capacity to conduct foreign relations?
4. Do you have a single effective government?

There's a couple things to understand about this. The first thing is that Israel, despite being called an illegitimate state, is actually a very old country.

I don't mean ancient Israel. I mean, the Israel that was founded in 1948 was founded at a time when there were only 58 countries in the world. It became the 59th state.

So people always say, "Oh, this newfangled creation, Israel." No, no, no. Israel's older than roughly two-thirds of all the countries in the world. And in fact, it was created in precisely the same way and at about the same time as many of the decolonized states in the world that were just drawn as lines on the map by European colonialist powers.

It's the same thing with many of the Arab countries. Iraq was drawn up that way. Lebanon was definitely drawn up that way. Syria was drawn up that way with no regard for their indigenous, in many cases, local minority populations.

Lots of countries in Africa were created this way. Cameroon was created this way. Part of South Africa and Botswana were split off this way. We could talk forever about the dozens of countries that were created just the same way Israel was, and nobody ever protests them because there's no Jews there, right? So there's nothing to protest.

The point here is that Israel met in 1948, and has met every second of every day since then until today, all four of the Montevideo Factors.

[Bruce P Weber @btrain12]

@RoKhanna @grahamformaine Booooooooooooooo!!!!

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

Four days before Israel declared independence, Golda Meir made a desperate secret trip to Amman. Disguised as an Arab woman, she met with King Abdullah of Transjordan — an Arab leader who acknowledged Jewish rights to the Land & who many hoped may choose peace.

Abdullah had long kept private contacts with Zionist leaders. He dreamed of a Greater Syria under Hashemite rule and saw cooperation with the Jews as strategically useful.

In their November 1947 meeting, he had hinted at possible accommodation.

But by May 1948, the Arab world was locked in rejection. Abdullah told Golda he was now “one of several” — no longer free to act alone. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon were all committed to destroying the Jewish state the moment it was born.

He still wanted peace with his Jewish neighbors. But he felt trapped.

Before they parted, the King looked at Golda and said these remarkable words:

“I believe with all my heart that divine providence has brought you back here, restoring you to the Semitic East which needs your knowledge and initiative. Conditions are now difficult, but be patient.”

It was a poignant, almost prophetic farewell.

King Abdullah paid for his pragmatism with his life. On July 20, 1951, while visiting Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, he was assassinated by a local Arab gunman acting on orders from the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi war criminal, Amin al-Husseini. Peace with Jews was considered treason.

This became a tragic pattern: moderate Arab leaders who dared acknowledge Jewish rights or seek accommodation were sidelined, exiled, or killed.

From 1948 onward, maximalist rejectionism has been rewarded while moderation has been punished.

Yet the Jewish state survived — and thrived anyway.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

BROWDER: Lavrov called Rubio and threatened U.S. interests in Ukraine. Russia supplied information to Iran to target U.S. interests in Middle East.

Truly astounding to watch how Trump administration dealing with Russia right now. That would have been red line under any other U.S. government, any political party, at any other time in history.

I’m old enough to remember that if Russia made any kind of threat against U.S. interests, the U.S. would respond with most blistering, dangerous threats against Russian interests, and nobody would do anything about it.

That's how Cold War and post-Cold War era functioned. Every American president, every Republican and every Democrat, took very strong line with Russia, and any nasty thing they did was met with most severe and aggressive reprimand.

[Mike Ginsberg 🇺🇸🇮🇱🟧 @MikeGinsberg6]

Van Hollen and the Democrats miss--or, more likely, choose to ignore--the fundamental, intractable problem: too many Palestinian leaders (Hamas and PA) and, sadly, civilians are ideologically and liturgically committed to reclaiming Israel as Islamic territory. Deep down, no matter how much we talk about a two-state solution, too many Palestinians and their Muslim state supporters simply cannot concede a sovereign Jewish state in any part of historic Palestine. They simply cannot abide Jewish sovereignty in any part of historic Palestine--to concede such sovereignty over formerly Islamic land is, in their own words, a catastrophe. If Jewish sovereignty in Israel was reduced to one city block of Jerusalem, they would be fighting a holy war for that one block.

These irridentist elements now have an ally in the West: the progressives who seek "decolonization" which, as a practical matter, would mean the end of Israel. Israel is the canvas on which they project their fantasies of overthrowing "colonial" oppressors. These progressives are now in command of the Democratic Party and Van Hollen must follow them, for he is their leader.

I, and I suspect many Israelis and Jewish Americans, are convinced that if the collateral consequence of a realized two-state solution was an Israel so weakened territorially that it eventually was pushed into the sea, the world would shed some tears and then move on with its life. I cannot get out of my head the scene in Jerry Maguire when Jerry gets fired, gives a big speech to the entire office, and everyone goes back to work as if nothing happened. I fear that is Israel's future if the Islamist-Progressive alliance gets its way.

All this is the real "hard truth" that all, and especially Democrats, must see if they truly want to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. @MDGOP @BaltCoGOP @BaltimorecityGOP

[Steven Fulop @StevenFulop]

I love this article and there's a clear lesson here for NYC as well.

For 12 years as mayor here, I was unapologetically pro-housing growth. At times I faced pushback from NIMBYs, whom we overruled. I brushed off plenty of trolls on social media accusing me of prioritizing developers. I absorbed political pressure from the building trades when I refused to force projects into their deals. But I held the line and was elected 3 times bc the noisy ppl aren’t the majority.

I was YIMBY before that was even a term.

This article is proof that a housing-first agenda and the discipline to discard the noise is the most effective path to affordability. Period. Full stop.

The hard truth is that it takes a decade : first getting capital comfortable enough to trust an administration, then getting them to invest, sourcing deals, navigating entitlements, and finally breaking ground. But if you commit and stay the course, it works.

https://t.co/Xw6CU350fw

[JJ in NH @JustJoshinNH]

In my lifetime, way back, someone with a Nazi tattoo who sought high office would’ve been run out of town on a rail, hard stop. Wouldn’t have been a question; disgrace and disgust would’ve ended the matter. Speaks to a coarsening of our senses that this isn’t a dealbreaker.

[Evan Rosenfeld @Evan_Rosenfeld]

Why Van Hollen’s push to condition aid for a two-state solution is dead on arrival.

This idea that the US can just dangle or cut aid to force Israel into “ending the occupation” and magically revive two-states ignores what both Israelis AND Palestinians actually want right now.

[𝔼𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕠𝕥 𝕄𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕟 @ElliotMalin]

So far 40.4% of @TheDemocrats electorate in TX-35 want to send Jews to concentration camps to be castrated.

Somehow this is better than PA-03 where 44.6% of @TheDemocrats electorate thinks Jews deserve to be shot and killed.

[Magdi Jacobs @magi_jay]

It's 2026 and Democrats on twitter are going after a Jewish Congressman for saying a Waffen SS tattoo is disqualifying. This is after a lady calling for "Zionist" concentration camps got past a Democratic primary. People need to get their sh*t together.