American Haters falsely assert that native-born Americans are being replaced by migrants and that migrants are enjoying taxpayer-funded housing, health care, education, food, and smartphones.
The progressives behind the Boise Art Museum came up with a plan to silence these haters. Membership is $60 for native-born Americans and free for immigrants. Dividing patrons into a group that must pay and a group that need not pay will “bridge perceived divides across cultures”.
What else goes on at the art museum? The sculpture park is nice! Note that admission is also free via reciprocity for those who are members of Florida’s Ringling museum.
We also checked into the Basque Museum, which explains how Basque men came to Idaho to raise sheep on free federal land. Fifteen of them would share a modest-size house (i.e., they did not receive the “dignity” that is a migrant’s right today in the form of a 1BR or 2BR apartment). According to the museum, as soon as the Feds shut down the offer of free land, the Basques stopped coming to the U.S.
One of the restaurants in the Warehouse Food Hall combines Basque and Vietnamese. I can’t figure out why. (We had some great food, conviviality, and Basque language instruction at Ansots (shared a table with a lady who runs the local Basque immersion preschool for 20 kids; two teachers come over every year for 13 months from the Basque part of Spain).)
It looks as though Boise has had at least one immigrant from San Francisco…
Also, Elizabeth Warren was visiting at the same time that we did:
A chain idea to appeal to roughly half of Americans: a Kilmar Armando Ábrego García-themed restaurant. The name: “Kilmar’s”. What should a restaurant named after this hero serve? CNN:
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, entered the US illegally sometime around 2011, but an immigration judge in 2019, after reviewing evidence, withheld his removal. That meant he could not be deported to El Salvador but could be deported to another country. A gang in his native country, the immigration judge found, had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
Obviously the menu must include the pupusas that Kilmar’s mom was making at home and that U.S. government employees had no trouble believing were a source of gang interest. The restaurant should offer margaritas just like the ones that Kilmar enjoyed with Maryland Senator Van Hollen and there should be a table with a fiberglass replica of Sen. Van Hollen so that customers can get pictures of themselves like the one below.
There should be a Chevy Suburban inside the restaurant that has been cut away to function as a table. The Suburban should be the same model year as the one that Kilmar was driving when pulled over in Tennessee.
Photos from a celebration of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García that we had in Sun Valley, Idaho last month:
People are expressing dismay that none of the people who partied with Jeffrey Epstein (Emmanuel Goldstein?) are being prosecuted and that we’re being denied access to a possible list of those people.
I’m not too interested in a list of customers for the world’s oldest profession, but I find it fascinating that people can simultaneously hold the following two ideas in their heads:
Jeffrey Epstein was a monster because he surrounded himself with paid young females, some of whom might have been younger than 18 and possibly even as young as 14 (the age of consent in Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, etc.)
we need millions more immigrants from places where a standard marriage age for girls is 12
I’ve been reading The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, a collection of New Yorker magazine articles, in order to develop some understanding of what our neighbors down in Palm Beach go through. One chapter is devoted to “privates” in which successful music stars perform at corporate events and private parties, e.g., for a birthday or a wedding. The costs range from $250,000 to $24 million (Beyoncé in Dubai) for something that was considered shameful during the Classic Rock period. Artists who express solidarity with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ are delighted to perform in Muslim countries where homosexual acts are punishable by imprisonment or death. Artists are also happy to perform for various dictators, e.g., in Central Asia. That said, our much-loved stars do have some scruples. With the exception of some Christian bands, no artist will agree to work a Chick-fil-A corporate event.
A recent New York Times article covers a kind of “inverse private” in which the musicians stay where they normally perform and the rich douche comes to them:
The musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra took their seats at Roy Thomson Hall on Wednesday for a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. Then a stage door swung open, and out walked the conductor.
He was not a world-renowned maestro or even a trained musician. The man who walked out, wearing a crisp white shirt and taking the podium, was Mandle Cheung, a 78-year-old technology executive who had paid the Toronto Symphony nearly $400,000 to lead it for one night.
Cheung, a lifelong fan of classical music who played in a harmonica band in high school and has dabbled in conducting, persuaded the orchestra to allow him to act out his long-held dream of leading a top ensemble.
“I had watched the videos and heard the recordings,” Cheung, the chairman and chief executive of ComputerTalk Technology in Toronto, said in an interview. “I had seen the magic of the guy standing in front of the orchestra with a stick. So I said, ‘Why can’t I do it, too?’”
He added: “I can afford to do it, that’s the main thing. So when it came across my mind, I said, ‘Hey, maybe I should give it a try.’”
This man is my hero!
How’s the book, you might ask? There are a lot of interesting tidbits. Just be aware that it is the New Yorker and, therefore, all of the world’s ills are blamed on the existence of Republicans in general and Donald Trump in particular. Trump is mentioned roughly every three pages, despite his apparent lack of connection to any of the events chronicled. The author never explains why California is plagued by inequality, a high poverty rate, and envy given that nearly everyone there is a Democrat. If Republicans were eliminated, rich Democrats would give most of their money to social justice nonprofits and to community-building (Andrew Carnegie is cited approvingly for his funding of libraries). There would be no war (just as Andrew Carnegie prevented any wars from happening in Europe via his 1910 founding of a peace institute). The author never explains why rich Democrats can’t do all of this starting right now.
Today we had a CPI update from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Back in November 2024, I predicted that the official number would be 3 percent. (Keep in mind that official CPI does not include the cost of buying and paying ongoing costs for a house, the largest expense for the typical American family.) My reasoning for a persistently high number is that we have “leftover inflation” from union deals struck during raging Bidenflation, from businesses finally adjusting their prices to reflect the new reality, etc. Essentially the wage-price spiral.
Let’s see how I did!
The NYT today says official CPI is at 2.7 percent and 2.9 “core”.
Democrat-sponsored NPR says that my theory is garbage and all of the inflation was created by a single Republican:
Related:
Can our government generate its own inflation spiral? (2022): Government is nearly half the economy and everything the government pays money for is indexed to inflation. Medicare, military and similar contracts, Social Security, pensions, employee salaries, etc.
Oddly, that directive conflicts with one signed on January 20th, 2025, triggering the withdrawal of offshore wind lease areas and retroactive review of already-approved projects. This initial memorandum threatens not only a once-rapidly developing U.S. power source, but also undermines America’s energy independence and, by extension, our national security.
She pointed out “the industry that took over 20 years to build up in the US is being destroyed in months” (offshore wind is such a great idea commercially that almost nothing was done during the 12 years of Democrat rule within the past 20 years?).
From my conversations with people who invest in renewable energy projects around the world, the main limitation for wind in the US is the lack of modern DC transmission lines. Each state gets to regulate power transmission and the typical regulator is hostile to cheap out-of-state power, unlike in China where they ship power up to 1,900 miles with a single line that can power 50 million houses. The New York Times pointed this out in 2024:
In the United States, the best places for wind tend to be in the blustery Midwest and Great Plains. But many areas are now crowded with turbines and existing electric grids are clogged, making it difficult to add more projects. Energy companies want to expand the grid’s capacity to transport even more wind power to population centers, but getting permits for transmission lines and building them has become a brutal slog that can take more than a decade.
The transmission line Sprouse was talking about is the Grain Belt Express, a planned eight-hundred-mile-long power line that will connect wind farms in southwestern Kansas to more densely populated areas farther East. The Grain Belt Express is designed to carry five thousand megawatts of electricity, enough to power approximately 3.2 million homes. The project has been in the works since 2010. It was taken over by Invenergy, a Chicago-based energy company, in 2020. After years of lawsuits and legislative wrangling, regulators in Missouri granted it final approval in October, 2023. If all goes as planned, construction will start in early 2025 and be completed in 2028. One of the biggest obstacles that the United States faces in its fight against climate change is getting renewable energy to the places that need the most electricity. Many of the best locations for wind and solar farms are, by their very nature, remote. And moving that energy elsewhere requires navigating a byzantine permitting process for transmission lines
When I pointed out that offshore wind couldn’t make economic sense without dollars extracted directly from taxpayers during construction and indirectly from peasants during operation, the Maskachusetts Democrat responded with “MA locked in a 20-yr contract with Vineyard Wind for 9 cents/ kWh” as though that were a favorable rate for wholesale electricity. I quickly found that right now, in the middle of peak summer demand, the wholesale rate in New England is about 4 cents per kWh ($40 per megawatt-hour):
Solar, of course, is now down to about 1.3 cents per kWh in sunny places and never more than about 2.2 cents in the U.S. (NREL). See also a real-world 2024 project in Saudi Arabia at 1.3 cents per kWh. As of 2024, the NREL nerds said that onshore wind was just barely competitive with current wholesale electricity rates (4.2 cents/kWh) and offshore was 3-4.5X the cost:
How come Europeans can do offshore wind, then? The Europeans are able to do everything with water at a much lower cost than Americans can. They don’t have the Jones Act that requires everything to be done with U.S.-built, American-crewed ships and, therefore, don’t have to pay 5X the world market price for an oceangoing vessel. A law firm that specializes in these “mine out the taxpayer” projects says “A typical offshore wind farm may require as many as 25 types of vessels–to lay cable, transfer crew, address surveying, lift components, monitor the environment, install, maintain and service turbines–many of which will require construction of new Jones Act-compliant vessels”.
A male (sort of) Massachusetts Democrat responded to the above data with “You are such a fool.”
The magical thinking that what is currently inefficient will some day become efficient reminds me of the enthusiasts for California’s high-speed rail project, but we also see it among those who promote nuclear power plants. As far as I know, no nuclear plant built in the past 50 years has made a profit. The most recent plant (in Georgia) was 7 years late and $17 billion over budget (the final cost should be about $35 billion). Yet the nuclear power enthusiast will posit a hypothetical world in which Americans are capable of building a nuclear power plant on time and within budget. In that fantasy world, the cost of nuclear power becomes competitive with solar+storage, wind, or natural gas.
I’m still baffled by the Democrats who say that Donald Trump is Hitler 2.0 and yet won’t wish him dead. But at least some are logical.
For example, here’s a 2/28/2025 Facebook post from a Democrat (my late mother’s cousin) who previously explicitly compared Trump to Hitler and who makes the logical inference:
T-Mobile is scrapping its diversity, equity and inclusion programs under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration as it looks for regulators to green-light two major acquisitions.
In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission dated July 8, the wireless carrier said it would discontinue DEI policies “not just in name, but in substance.”
“We recognize that the legal and policy landscape surrounding DEI under federal law has changed,” T-Mobile wrote.
Here’s the correct analysis, I think:
“In yet another cynical bid to win FCC regulatory approval, T-Mobile is making a mockery of its professed commitment to eliminating discrimination, promoting fairness and amplifying underrepresented voices,” FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, wrote on X. “History will not be kind to this cowardly corporate capitulation.”
How is it possible for a company to abandon one of its sacred principles without at least pretending to have changed its mind, e.g., saying “What we did in the past was wrong”? It’s okay to say “We thought we could make more money by adopting a completely new moral system”?
The funding release comes after the school reached an agreement with the federal government to block transgender athletes from female sports teams and erase the records set by swimmer Lia Thomas.
The university previously said “Lia Thomas is a woman”. If the Feds had threatened to take away $1 the school presumably would have continued to say “Lia Thomas is a woman”. There was some amount of money, however, at which Lia Thomas’s gender ID changed. But what was that amount of money? Would Penn have been willing to say “Lia Thomas is not a woman” for $1 million? $5 million?
It looks as though someone pulled out and then threw the fuel cutoff switches for both engines of the Boeing 787 that was operating as Air India 171. Airways offers a timeline.
The Air Current has a clear and annotated picture of the switches:
It is tough to understand how this could have been a mistake. After being pulled out to release the lock the switches had to be moved down/back to the cutoff position. During climb out, on the other hand, the appropriate levers are generally being moved up (gear and flap levers, for example).
Some interesting items from the Air Currents article:
When populations decline, the average age of people in the population increases. This has several harmful consequences. Eventually, there are not enough young people to care for older people and to economically support them through contributions to social programs; to fuel economic growth, technological innovation and cultural progress; and to fund government services. … Fertility rates in the United States are below the level necessary for population replacement, and they are declining almost everywhere else. Contrary to the alarmism you sometimes hear about exponential population growth, experts say that the number of humans on Earth will peak before the end of this century and fall afterward.
It might seem that humans are inflicting so much harm through climate change that everyone and everything on Earth would be better off with fewer inhabitants. But climate change will remain a problem even if we allow the population to decline. We have to change our patterns of consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions — no matter how big or small our population.
There are some great ideas in the above. First, “experts” can predict how many children humans will choose to have in the year 2100. Second, humans cause climate change, but the scale of the damage is unrelated to the number of humans.
don’t worry if you’re not getting enough phone calls about solar panels, home improvement, final expense insurance, Medicare benefits, etc.: “India is expected to continue growing until it peaks at 1.7 billion people in 2061.”
“Five countries are expected to contribute more than 60% of the world’s population growth by 2100: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tanzania.”
don’t worry if you’re concerned that the “affordable housing crisis” in the U.S. will subside: “the U.S. population is expected to grow slowly and steadily to 421 million by 2100.”
The last projection/guess confuses me. U.S. immigration levels are determined by presidential whim, not by any law. As demonstrated by Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a president can open or close the border. If Americans elect Democrats we could have at least 2.5 million new neighbors per year from 2029 through 2100, which would work out to a boost in population of 177 million (and perhaps quite a few more if asylum and welfare eligibility are expanded).
