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The Gothamist published an article on the push to ban street vendors from the magisterial Brooklyn Bridge. I am 100% in support of banning street vendors from the Bridge, but I will focus on another point in the report. See the following quote:

But vendors said there are not many legal spots where they can move to. Street vending has become more common as asylum seekers try to make ends meet without work permits.

Setting aside the reporter’s insistence on using asylum seeker as a blanket term for aliens who may or may not have actually applied for asylum, much less have a colorable asylum case, I submit for the record that hawking wares on the street is not a legal solution to not having employment authorization. An alien who is not authorized to engage in employment is not authorized to engage in self-employment (many aliens who are explicitly here on work visas are not eligible to engage in self-employment, see e.g., H-1B specialty occupation workers and O-1 aliens of extraordinary ability). The article quotes a street vendor advocate in the very next paragraph as describing street vendors as small businesses. An alien who lacks employment authorization cannot legally work as a street vendor regardless of his or her desire to make ends meet.

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Importance of Bing Indexing For Alt Search (2022) by SpaceGhost (Blue Dwarf)
https://thenewleafjournal.com/importance-of-bing-indexing-for-alt-search/ I only stumbled accross this article a couple of days ago, despite the fact that it prominently mentions the cheapskatesguide article about being de-indexed by Bing.

Back in 2022, I wrote an article on the importance of being in good standing with Microsoft Bing for reaching searchers who prefer privacy-friendly search solutions. While Bing itself is far from privacy-friendly, many alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, and Swisscows use Bing’s search index. That particular article was inspired by a post on Cheapskate’s Guide about being de-indexed by Bing and, as a result, being unavailable to DuckDuckGo searchers. I learned today from my New Leaf Journal Koko Analytics referrer logs that I had received referrals from Blue Dwarf, which is a small independent social network run by the admin of Cheapskate’s Guide. Sure enough, the referrals came from the author of the excellent Cheapskate’s Guide post discovering my article. Very neat. My original article came before The New Leaf Journal itself suffered a Bing blacklisting, but we were restored after just more than half a year and are now doing well with Bing and all of its derivatives. See my GitHub repository on Bing bans.

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I just published my article on Grenada’s annual October 25 Thanksgiving. As I explain in that piece, Grenada’s Thanksgiving commemorates the date of the commencement of the 1983 U.S.-led intervention to restore order on the island after a palace coup. It occurred to me right after publishing the article (somehow only after) to check whether then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan noted the intervention in his Thanksgiving Proclamation.  I found that he hardly could have in his 1983 Thanksgiving Proclamation since he issued it on September 15. I checked 1984 out of due diligence, but the 1984 Thanksgiving Proclamation was similar in brevity and substance to the 1983 edition. To be sure, short, lite Thanksgiving Proclamations have been more common than small Thanksgiving dinners. I conducted some research last year to see whether I could turn former President Calvin Coolidge’s Thanksgiving Proclamations into an article. I succeeded with his first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1923, but in so doing I discovered that Coolidge’s Proclamations became more and more simple through the final one he issued in 1928.

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Running The New Leaf Journal takes me interesting places. For example, it has taken me to Grenada over the last few days. Not literally, mind you. I am not much of a traveling guy (nor am I a big fan of planes or other vehicles). I am researching Thanksgiving in Grenada for what promises to be an exciting follow-up to my excessively long study of Thanksgiving proclamations in the Philippines. If you ever wondered about Grenada’s version of Thanksgiving, your questions will be answered in short order.

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This buttery, garlicky sausage and rice recipe is simple, cheap, and pretty much to die for by Dale Roll (SoraNews24)
Plus, the stores sometimes even put out recipes, making it even easier to use them! For example, the official Twitter of 7-Eleven’s 7-Premium brand of prepared foods posted the perfect recipe for your busy weekday meal featuring their plump and juicy “Golden Wieners.”

SoraNews24 published an entire article about making a recipe released by 7-Eleven in Japan. I think the recipe looks good (“to die for” is probably excessive, however). But regardless of whether you think 7-Eleven’s sausage-butter-rice dish looks appetizing, I am sure you can join me in praising the convenience store chain for fully embracing open source.

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I use a low-end Beelink mini-PC as a TV box (this will be a New Leaf Journal article eventually). I run Fedora on the mini PC and switch between GNOME and Kodi sessions depending on what I am doing. Yesterday, I upgraded from Fedora 39 to Fedora 40. The upgrade went smoothly. Everything appeared to be good until I tried to start a Kodi session only to have Kodi crash after its logo appeared. What happened? I think it was a segfault (I love segfaults). How did I fix it? I could have read through the logs and tried to diagnose the issue, but I instead chose the path of less resistance. I uninstalled the Fedora Kodi package and installed the official Kodi Flatpak from Flathub (note not the Kodi Flatpak from Fedora’s Flatpak repo). I then reinstalled my small number of plugins (including MrKarabat’s unofficial Crunchyroll plugin) and was off to the races.

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From Mr. Heinrik Karlsson’s “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”

Having idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about.

I feel under attack. I will have people know that some articles in my series on interpreting hair color in Japanese anime, manga, and visual novels have actually done alright. The better example of people not caring about my idiosyncratic interests is actually my al|together visual novel review project, but I think that endeavor is genuinely worthwhile.

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Israel Has No Right to Self-Defense as ‘Occupier,’ Russia Says by The Moscow Times (The Moscow Times)
Israel has no right to self-defense against Hamas militants in Gaza as an occupying power in Palestine, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations said Wednesday.

The Russian government is appropriating Soviet humor. (I dare say that this is a better example of Russia’s questionable Iran-coddling commentary than the one I used for an October 14 article at The New Leaf Journal.)

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I return from a brief and unplanned publishing break with an important story (“important” is the operative word here). I use a MikroTik hAP ac3 internet router. However, I disabled its wi-fi functionality and use a low-end tp-link access point for wireless. The access point is right in front of my computer. I turned on my computer a bit before 9:00 AM this morning. I noticed that the lights on my access point were off. Was there a power issue? I was about to check before I remembered that I had just been connected to wi-fi on my phone. Then I remembered that I had set the router to turn its lights off at night (I access my access point’s admin panel less frequently than I access my router through Winbox). I deduced that the lights return at 9:00 AM when I witnessed the green lights return at 9:00 AM. Another mystery solved.

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New BIA Decision Requiring Aggregate Analysis of Past Persecution in Asylum Claim by Matthew Hoppock (Hoppock Law Firm)
The Board said all the way back in 1966 that long and pervasive discrimination can amount to persecution. Matter of Salama, 11 I&N Dec. 536 (BIA 1966) (recognizing discrimination against Jews in Egypt as persecution). Matter of Salama was one of the first BIA decisions construing the phrase “persecution on account of race, religion, or political opinion” in the Immigration and Nationality Act. What today’s decision confirms is that the Board’s analysis in Salama, that “a government campaign of discrimination” may be persecution, remains true.

I wrote a detailed analysis of a 1966 Board of Immigration Appeals decision in Matter of Salama, 11 I&N Dec. 536 (BIA 1966). In that post, I worked through the decision and examined the small number of citations to it in precedent decisions. I opined that although I first came across the decision while researching economic persecution precedents, its analysis is too limited to provide much value in that area of asylum law. The Hoppock Law Firm’s description of Salama as holding that “long and pervasive discrimination can amount to persecution” is over the target. However, as I explained in my piece, the limited analysis makes it difficult to discern an easy-to-apply broader principle in Salama.

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I came across an article noting that Corey Seager of the Texas Rangers was walked three times in a 3-game sweep of the Baltimore Orioles in the American League Divisional Series, breaking Barry Bonds’ 2003 record of 8 for a divisional series. I am not a baseball fan and am not following the playoffs, but I took note of the article since I recently wrote about some of Barry Bonds’ more absurd intentional bases on balls and regular walks records, with a focus on 2001-2007. There is one major difference between Bonds’ 2003 NLDS and Seager’s 2023 ALDS. 6 of Bonds’ 8 walks in the 2003 NLDS were intentional whereas only one of Seager’s 9 walks in 2023 were intentional.

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Anti-Israel Statements After the Massacre Trigger Free Speech Fights in Higher Education by Jonathan Turley (Jonathan Turley)

Universities and colleges across the country have become embroiled in a debate over free speech in the aftermath of the…

Jonathan Turley’s blog is part of my RSS feed collection. One reason I enjoy his work is because he is consistent in his views and articulates his position well. However, his recent piece on free speech issues related to the response to pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses in the last week was a bit sloppy. That some high-powered law firms rescinded offers of employment to Harvard law students on account of their views has received a good amount of publicity. After Mr. Turley touched on that issue (granting private law firms have discretion in hiring), he made a claim that I am less familiar with.

However, some have gone further to discuss these views as unprotected free speech and suggested that law students holding such views should be prevented from joining the bar.

I have not seen examples of people arguing that law students who support Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, or more charitably justify their atrocities, should be prevented from sitting for the bar. At a minimum, these arguments are far less common than the broader debate about the views being expressed on college campuses. I agree with Mr. Turley’s position that abhorrent views should not prevent one from becoming a lawyer, but he provides no source for examples of people making this argument. While this is not the sort of disingenuous claim I examined in my critique of experts say headlines, it does read like trying to squeeze a side argument where it does not fit. The omission of a source is notable because he provides many sources for other issues raised in the article. For whatever it is worth, I think what we are seeing raises questions about U.S. immigration policy and the efforts to subsidize college tuition through federally backed loans, not admittance to the bar.

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Hackaday published an article titled Spuds Lend A Hand In The Darkroom. I have no experiences with darkrooms, much less potatoes in darkrooms. Thus, I cannot comment on the utility of the potato-darkroom recipes referenced in the article. However, if your potato has reached the stage where it is growing hands, it is much more amenable to darkroom usage than to kitchen usage.