San Diego mosque shooting: What do Californians have in common?

by philg

California is an exemplar for what a lot of Americans want our nation to become. It is 28 percent immigrants, for example. Taxpayer-funded unlimited health care is a human right, including for the undocumented (except, bizarrely, Californians who say that they hate inequality stopped giving MediCal to undocumented new arrivals while preserving it for existing beneficiaries; of course, a newly arrived undocumented migrant disqualified from MediCal due to a completely arbitrary arrival date limit can always get taxpayer-funded care at the nearest emergency room). Any day now, California will ladle out massive quantities of taxpayer funds to those who identify as “African Americans” (a committee was formed (see below) after the legislature passed a law requiring… a committee to be formed).

The unfortunate recent shooting at a mosque in San Diego involved a diverse group of people from different cultures and ethnicities.

Americans can’t agree on the nature of the mosque. It served an entirely peaceful group of Muslims, according to the Righteous at Wikipedia. The peaceful Muslims are mostly notable for being the victims of hatred:

The mosque was the target of an attempted bombing on January 11, 1991. The attempt occurred during a period of high tensions as part of the Gulf War, and the mosque received a large volume of hateful phone calls. The bomb was later discovered to be defective

(No culprit was ever identified or arrested, according to Google AI.)

It was the home for 2 out of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers, according to the Deplorables at the New York Post and was a center for Jew-hatred:

More recently, Imam Taha Hassane has come under fire for his comments on the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.

“This did not start last week or on October 7. This is the result of brutal Zionist occupation and genocide,” Hassane said in a video posted to social media days after the savage Hamas attack.

“Resistance is justified when people are under occupation and don’t let them change that narrative.”

His wife, Lallia Allali, allegedly posted graphic images of a “Jewish star murdering babies with ‘the devil is killing’” scrawl in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks

(The helpfulness of the mosque is confirmed by the National Commission on Terrorism Attacks Upon the United States (report).)

Another aspect of the shooting that we probably won’t see covered by mainstream media… “Muslim security guard killed by neo-Nazis made Facebook posts admiring Hitler, blasting Jews” (Not the Bee):

Two people who hated Jews killed another guy who hates Jews.

In other words, Californians from different backgrounds might be able to unite under an anti-Jewish political banner (perhaps, as with Zohran Mamdani, this will be styled as an “anti-Israel” banner, not too different from how German forward-thinkers rebranded crude “Jew-hatred”, offensive to middle-class Germans, to the scientific-sounding “antisemitism”, something that educated Germans could sign up for as a policy).

Except for agreement regarding the pernicious nature of Jews/Israelis, however, what do the people who currently live in California have in common? At one time, the answer might have been a shared economic interest. This was strained a bit during the early Silicon Valley boom, but the chip and electronics companies built factories in California as well as design labs. In the current AI boom, some people with IQs of 160-200 in the SF Bay Area work at desks and all of the high-value manufacturing happens in Taiwan. The data center construction and operation jobs that AI creates will nearly all be in states (and countries) other than California, which has a high cost of electric power. Absent state government confiscation and redistribution, it isn’t clear how profits from AI will reach Californians outside of the Bay Area (or even most of those who don’t work in AI and who live in the Bay Area).

Pew regarding the shift in data centers away from California:

The chart does a simple count, but because new data centers are much larger than ones built 20 or 30 years ago, California’s #3 position is misleading. ChatGPT says that California is a “legacy market” that has already been reduced to irrelevance:

If the shooters hadn’t killed themselves, in other words, they might have grown up to receive a state transfer of some wealth earned by Jensen Huang, but otherwise it is tough to see what connection or common cause they might have had with Jensen Huang or anyone else at NVIDIA. Same deal with the victim. Amin Abdullah, the security guard who perished in the attack, was a Muslim who worked at a mosque and was a father of eight children. What was his shared cultural or religious connection to a childless atheist working at a tech company and spending weekends at Pride events in San Francisco?

Note that with our asylum-based immigration system, I don’t think that the rest of the U.S. is far behind California in terms of being a random assemblage of humans with nothing in common. By design, the only thing that asylum-seekers have in common is that they didn’t like where they used to live. But California is a little ahead of the national trend.

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Lack of commitment to the bachelor’s degree

by philg

Department of Kids Today… I had dinner with a friend whose son is a freshman studying engineering. Dad has an MD/PhD so you might expect the child to put some value on credentials. “I would drop out if I were offered the right job,” he said. “After all, college is a means to an end. If the end is already available, why spend additional years on the means?”

Companies are already getting rid of old people in favor of young people who are “AI-native”. What if companies figure out that a high school graduate who is proficient with AI tools is just as productive as someone with a bachelor’s degree who is proficient with AI tools?

If I could short a basket of high-tuition private universities, minus the Ivy League, I would!

Related:

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Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, and NVIDIA employees meet for dinner

by philg

Employees from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, and NVIDIA meet at Protégé in Palo Alto for dinner.

The Apple COO: “My stock options are worth so much that I’m planning to buy all of the gold currently available on the world market.”

The Microsoft CFO: “My stock grants have gone up so much since Copilot launched that I’m planning to take over the diamond monopoly by purchasing DeBeers.”

The Amazon VP: “AWS Trainium has been knocking it out of the park with people trying to catch the AI wave. I’m going to use my 2025 bonus to buy all of the Class A office buildings and luxury rental high-rises in Brickell and Miami Beach so that I’ll be ready to profit as people from California and Washington continue to flee the high taxes and dysfunction.”

The Meta President: “Even though the metaverse failed, we’re still minting money from people addicted to the Like button. I’m cashing in some of my RSUs to buy all of the oil platforms that are offshore from Angola.”

The Alphabet/Google Chief Investment Officer: “The stock grants that they gave me when I was hired are worth so much that I’m picking up one of the smaller Hawaiian Islands.”

The NVIDIA branch office receptionist slowly finishes her bite of A5 Wagyu, then says, “I’m not selling.”

Happy National Stop Nausea Day to those who are sick with envy!

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Packing up our parkas because of Climate Change in Alaska

by philg

Our family heads to Seattle tomorrow and then gets on Norwegian Joy for a trip up to Glacier Bay National Park and back. Pre-Climate Change, the average high temp in May was 57 for Juneau (62 in June). Here we are towards the end of May and, due to Climate Change inflicted on us by the profligate CO2-emitting policies of Donald Trump, high temps are in the 40s. It will be snowing when we reach Juneau on Sunday:

Maybe this week is an outlier?

State-sponsored public media:

Statewide, Alaska saw its coldest December-through-March in a half-century. In famously cold Fairbanks, that same period was the coldest on record. Juneau had its coldest December ever recorded and — in a place known for being snowy — its snowiest winter. And, while not as extreme, Anchorage saw its coldest-ever month of March.

Maybe Climate Change has lent some cheer to those stuck in Miami traffic? Wall Street Journal:

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Al Gore wrote, with what would become his customary hyperbole, “the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of the glass shattering in Berlin.” The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”

Florida’s population in 1992 was around 13 million. Mr. Gore’s notional Flexodus would have reduced that figure below six million. Today, the state’s population has nearly doubled instead of more than halved. More than 23 million souls now call Florida home.

How about the increased hurricane risk predicted by Professor Dr. Al Gore, Ph.D.? Homeowners’ insurance rates are falling statewide. The local NBC station regarding Stuart, Florida, directly on the Atlantic Ocean:

I’d better close this post so as to avoid tempting the hurricane gods who last visited their major hurricane wrath on Palm Beach County in 1949.

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Boston’s white working-class suburbs have been transformed into multi-cultural wonderlands

by philg

As part of my April 2026 move-out-of-Cambridge experience, I went to the Home Depot in Somerville, Maskachusetts. Four “youths” were riding full-size e-bikes around the aisles. The checkout lady appeared to be a Somali and was in full Islamic attire. One of the young clerks was white and Following Science (wearing a surgical mask to protect him/her/zir/theirself against an aerosol virus), but mostly it was an environment that would have been alien to a working-class native-born American.

I remember Somerville as a white working-class suburb when I arrived at MIT in 1979 and we would head over to Somerville Lumber in Bennett’s station wagon to buy loft-building supplies for my dorm room (I don’t think MIT ever charged me for the wall damage done by the toggle bolts!). ChatGPT says that it was 95 percent white in 1980 vs. about 60 percent non-Hispanic white today.

Malden was another bastion of the white native-born working class. Today is at least 43 percent immigrant, as shown on this January 2019 PDF (perhaps Malden is up to 50% by now; MA was at 17% in 2019 (below) and today is closer to 20%).

The transformation seems to have occurred well prior to the Biden-Harris open borders period. Here’s some 2016 data on “newly diverse places” (as of 2016, non-Hispanic whites were already a minority in Malden):

Some specifics regarding Malden from the above, again using 2016 data:

Note that the newly diverse communities don’t include places where the decision-making high-income elites would be likely to live (Cambridge might appear to be an exception, but the city maintained an Underclass of Color even in the old days). It seems that the white working class in Massachusetts (voters without a college degree) actually voted against a continuation of the Biden-Harris open border policy by voting, in a narrow majority, for Donald Trump 2024. Naturalized immigrants are more likely to vote Democrat than native-born Americans. So it seems that the native-born white working class of Massachusetts voted solidly against this transformation and yet it was imposed on them.

Consider the effect on someone who grew up in Somerville or Malden and was 20 years old in 1980. This person is now 65 years old and, if still in his or her hometown, part of a literally alien society. Here’s old white guy/Senator Ed Markey at the Malden Islamic Center:

Maybe this particular old white guy wants to talk about the “victims of Gaza”, which the mosque seeks to support, but does the average native-born white person want to do that? In order to live in a society that resembles that one in which the Somerville or Malden Boomer grew up, he or she would have to move to The Villages (NW of Orlando), which is roughly 95 percent non-Hispanic white and only 5 percent foreign-born. (Moving to Florida isn’t as much of a financial win for a Maskachusetts peasant as it would be for an elite. Social Security income isn’t subject to state income tax, for example, and the state estate tax exempts the first $2 million in assets.)

Finally, a New England senator says that the U.S. is short by hundreds of hospitals for the existing population. At the same time, it makes sense to continue bringing in 1-2 million legal immigrants every year to add to the population that is facing the hospital shortage:

Related:

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Why we can’t simply limit oil and gas exports to 2025 levels

by philg

For the past couple of months I’ve been wondering here why U.S. consumers are paying more for gasoline than in 2025 (albeit still less than in 2022) if the Trump administration could simply limit exports of oil and gas to 2025 levels with a simple “it’s a war” explanation. This question is answered, to some extent, in “The World Can’t Get Enough U.S. Energy, Keeping Prices High for Americans” (WSJ, yesterday):

The Trump administration is trying to tamp down rising prices, including by waiving restrictions on trade between U.S. ports and releasing oil from strategic stockpiles. Trump said last week he supports suspending the federal gasoline tax. Gasoline prices nationally averaged $4.51 a gallon on Sunday and could keep climbing into Memorial Day weekend, the starting gun to the busy summer driving season.

The administration has said it wouldn’t impose a ban on energy exports. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNBC last week that the U.S.’s economic future depends on selling its energy abroad and that this was a top item on the Trump agenda.

“We can’t be a major energy exporter to the world if we decide sometimes to stop exporting our energy,” he said.

In other words, the Trump administration is allowing Democrats, previously climate change alarmists who wanted fossil fuel prices to be higher, to harp on lower-than-2022-but-higher-than-2025 gasoline prices, possibly resulting in dramatic losses of Congressional seats in November 2026, in order to preserve the U.S.’s long-term market position.

What’s the scale?

The ports of New York, Philadelphia and Albany, N.Y., exported 174,000 barrels a day of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products last month, according to Kpler. That is 10 times the volumes they shipped over the same period last year. Halfway through May, the pace of exports is even higher, well over 200,000 barrels a day—the highest monthly pace on Kpler’s records since 2017.

These barrels so far this month are predominantly heading to Europe, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the U.K., Kpler’s Smith said. Analysts say that is a sign that a shortage of refined products has spread from Asia to Europe.

The U.S. exported 2.7 million barrels of U.S. diesel, gasoline and other refined products to Australia in March, according to Kpler. Before the war broke out, exports there had been sporadic. An additional 1.8 million barrels headed to Australia in April.

I wonder if the Trump administration’s policy makes sense even for those who have a long-term perspective. If Democrats can take control of Congress maybe they will obstruct the U.S. fossil fuel industry in some other ways, e.g., with a long-dreamt-of carbon tax.

Separately, why isn’t there a lot more production in response to the higher price? The current price of oil is about 15% lower than it was in 2022 (chart below), but still much higher than it was in 2025:

Maybe it is because the market is predicting a sag down to $89/barrel by October 2026 and a further sag to $75/barrel by October 2027?

The lower chart is curious. Investors have changed their opinion of the likely cost of oil in October 2027, up from about $60 to $75. Are they expecting that we’ll still be at war? That inflation will go back to the raging 2022 levels?

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Why haven’t name-brand hybrid e-bikes gotten dramatically lighter?

by philg

Summer is here for most of those who escaped the New England lockdowns during coronapanic. Average Nashville high temp for May is 79 degrees (unlike Maskachusetts, Tennessee has no state income tax and no estate (death) tax; state tax competitiveness index).

Many moons ago, I wrote about a 2013 Trek e-bike that weighed 52 lbs.: Trek T80+ Electric Bike Review. The ungainly unbalanced rear hub motor beast has a 250W motor and a 250 Wh battery. I bought it as an experiment and figured that if I loved e-biking I would treat myself to a fancier mid-drive one when the Trek died. Here we are 11 years after the closeout purchase and the Trek has not died. It’s on its second chain and has needed a new rear tire, but otherwise just works. The range is more than adequate for running errands around Jupiter and bike theft is a minimal issue (if the Florida police do catch a bike thief do they say “Where did you think you were, San Francisco?”; I sometimes use the built-in wheel lock if leaving the bike for an hour or two). The ancient Trek has the “torque sensor” that is advertised as a selling feature in 2026 by e-bike vendors, though the company (BionX, in the Islamic Republic of Canada) that made the electric gear went belly-up in 2018.

I’d love to buy a new e-bike if I could find the same comfortable geometry and the same motor/battery power at 33 lbs. Is that possible? (TL;DR: nobody has ever managed to make mid-drive light; mid-drive was the Holy Grail 10+ years ago, but it might be an emperor with no clothes except for climbing steep hills (certainly the old Trek’s hub motor was fine for climbing hills in Eastern MA)) For reference, let’s have a look at the upright riding position of the ancient Trek:

How much progress has there been in this industry? The closest Trek current bike that I can find to the T80+ is the Verve+, starting at $2,000. The versions that are the most popular would weigh about 65 lbs. in a larger frame size.

The cheapest lightest version of this bike has the same motor/battery specs as my “survivor”. It is spec’d at about 42 lbs., but that’s for the M size and mine is an XL so let’s say that it would be 44 lbs. in L or XL. That’s not a negligible reduction, but the T80+ was literally thrown together and it is way off my 33 lb. spec.

What if we spent $6,749 on a Cannondale FlyingV (plus a $15 E-bike Battery Recycling fee?!?). The web page includes the word “weight” in numerous places to crow about how light the bike is due to its carbon fiber construction. The one spec they left out, though… the weight. It’s got 600 watts of motor power for people who want to kill themselves at 28 mph and 400 Wh of battery. An independent review says it weighs 40 lbs and it doesn’t have the suspension seatpost of the old Trek T80+. The review makes it sound uncomfortable as well: “The riding position aboard the FlyingV is balanced, fairly upright but with a sporty edge. The stance suits the bike’s character to a tee. If you want to fly, you’ll need to be at least a little fit and flexible – this isn’t your living room sofa on two wheels.”

Maybe the answer is a comfortable upright bike has to be super heavy? Giant’s $700-900 “city” bikes weigh 25-30 lbs., a fair amount more than a $1,000 non-electric road bike at 20 lbs. (examples). When road bikes are electrified they don’t get that much heavier. Here’s a road bike with the same 250W/250Wh spec as the old T80+. The Ride1Up weighs 28 lbs., presumably in a medium size, and costs $2200 (almost the same as the $2100 2013 price of the T80+, which is $3000 today if adjusted for the inflation that the government tells us does not exist). The same company makes a more upright city-style bike that costs $1400 and porks out to 40 lbs. with a 360 Wh battery. What if you spend $7000 on a carbon fiber hybrid from Specialized, the Turbo Vado SL 2 6.0 EQ Carbon? It weighs… 40.5 lbs. and has 520 Wh of power.

How are consumers getting these monster bikes onto roof racks or even into the backs of their monster SUVs when it is time to take the bike in for service? It seems as though the bikes that are actually selling in quantity weigh 50 lbs. or more. A review of what Bicycling says is the sweet spot e-bike, the Aventon Level 3, doesn’t even mention weight. Nor is the weight found on the page that sells the bike. Gemini says the beast weighs 67 lbs. and “The [733 Wh] battery is removable, allowing you to reduce the total weight to roughly 58 lbs for easier transport.”

Did everyone get rid of their roof racks and replace them with hitch racks, some of which can hold bikes up to 80 lbs.? Save the planet by attaching it to a Tesla Y’s receiver hitch, but leave half the e-biking family at home because it says “designed to support vertical loads of up to 160 pounds”? The two-bike hitch racks empty can weigh over 50 lbs.; the four-bike ones weigh over 70 lbs.!); maybe better to buy a cheaper one from Torklift that can handle more weight (the same company sells a Toyota Sienna receiver hitch that can handle 700 lbs. of tongue weight, which might translate to 350 lbs. of e-bikes). If you search for “bent receiver hitch with bike rack” the Google returns stories from people who bent the hitch or, worse, the frame of their vehicle, by loading up bikes.

Circling back to my original question… why no 33 lb. comfy hybrid e-bikes given all of the progress that has been made in materials? ChatGPT says a 250 Wh battery weighs only 3-4 lbs. ChatGPT says that the killer is the motor: “A 250W mid-drive (bottom bracket) motor system typically adds ~6–10 lbs (2.7–4.5 kg) compared to a normal bottom bracket. … Ultra-light e-bikes (like Fiido Air) avoid mid-drives. They use small rear hub motors instead. That saves ~5–8 lbs immediately.” (apparently the feel and balance of the mid-drive is worth the extra weight for most consumers, but the “sweet spot” is “Lightweight hub motor + torque sensor”) ChatGPT says that 67 percent of e-bikes globally are sold with hub motors, not the mid-drives that I thought were going to dominate the industry. In Europe and for premium bikes, though, mid-drives are dominant. The mid-drives up wearing out the drivetrain, though, so the super heavy bike has to get loaded into the car for the trip to the bike shop more frequently… (see above)

ChatGPT says that Fazua, a Bavarian company founded in 2013 and now owned by Porsche, is the leader in making a lightweight mid-drive system. Their completed city bikes, however, weigh at least 40 lbs. Internet reviews of Fazua’s reliability are mixed, to say the least, compared to the standard Bosch. ChatGPT: “In general, Hub motors are more reliable than mid-drives”. So maybe the answer is that I can have a better balanced bike if the battery is moved to the downtube, but the architecture of the motor in the rear wheel needs to be retained in order to avoid what ChatGPT claims is a 5-8 lb. weight hit and a lifetime of additional maintenance.

Let’s close with a bike that isn’t exactly “name-brand” (Giant, Trek, et al.), but that does seem to have the architecture that ChatGPT recommends… Urtopia Carbon 1 Pro (about $2100 as of a couple months ago). It seems to have a similar geometry to the $6,749 (plus $15 recycling/virtue fee) Cannondale, above. It lacks the suspension seat post of the old Trek, but maybe the flexible carbon frame absorbs shock reasonably well. Instead of cutting the promised-by-ChatGPT 5-8 lbs. by switching to a hub motor, the practical weight savings is only 3 lbs. (37 lbs. vs. 40). This one might be worth a test-ride (the company has dealers).

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Tesla full-self-driving tackles the bikes, pedestrians, and general chaos of Cambridge

by philg

My April trip to Maskachusetts included a couple of trips within Cambridge in a new Tesla Y with FSD (see The Trump- and Elon-hater leases a Tesla Model Y). After lunch at Happy Lamb Hot Pot in Central Square, the owner, a mutual friend (pilot, $5 million townhouse owner), and I piled into the miracle vehicle for a trip to Micro Center, an Ohio-based chain that is one of the things I miss about Cambridge (the closest store to Jupiter is in Miami, which is to say… not close). The Tesla was almost immediately faced with the challenge of a one-lane one-way road with parked cars on both sides and a cyclist on a non-e-bike. An impatient human might have squeezed past the bicycle, but the Tesla wisely waited until there was a gap in the parked cars on the right and the cyclist moved over.

The Tesla navigated around a couple of delivery trucks that were stopped in right lanes.

The car navigated to a bizarrely back corner entrance to the Micro Center parking lot, drove behind the Trade Joe’s, and then found itself a parking space with empty spots on either side. Thus ensued the apparently mandatory 2-minute denunciation of Elon Musk as a person, e.g., for allowing non-compliant speech on X, tempered with praise for the engineering achievement of FSD.

On the way to my old condo, the Tesla got flummoxed by an SUV that was parked almost in the middle of the (standard Maskachusetts practice). There actually was enough space to squeeze by in the opposite-direction lane, but the owner had to take the wheel and press on the accelerator. Tesla’s software had dealt beautifully with pedestrians in crosswalks, but trying to turn right from Harvard St. there was a confusing situation. A guy in a wheelchair was waiting to cross the side street. The Tesla, just like a human, was waiting for him to cross. I envisioned the Tesla and the wheelchair attendant getting tired of standing still at the same time and a collision enusing. The attendant waved us through and the Tesla FSD seemed to undestand the hand gesture (not my imagination, apparently). The car tried to park in the driveway to the right of the condo, which has three unmarked angle parking spots. That seemed like a recipe for disaster so the owner selected a curbside dropoff instead.

Overall impression: very impressive, but also rather terrifying not knowing whether the machine was going to run over the wheelchair user. Maybe there needs to be a soothing voice repeating “trust the process”?

Speaking of what happens when our AI overlords meet the Boston-area roads… a friend here who drives a late-model Kia gets frequent alerts from the car about his drunkenness. When he swerves around the numerous potholes, the car thinks that he’s impaired. Google AI:

A 2021 federal law (HALT Drunk Driving Act) mandates that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) require new passenger vehicles to be equipped with advanced, passive drunk and impaired driving prevention technology by roughly 2027–2028. The technology will detect impairment—via alcohol sensors or behavioral monitoring—and prevent vehicle operation, though the final rule is delayed due to technology readiness, privacy, and accuracy concerns

Kia is ahead of the mandate!

In other driving news, I broke into my neighbor’s apartment and took the keys to her 2014 Mini, which she leaves sitting for months at a time while she’s in California. The car has 90,000 miles on it and won’t die, though many important systems have failed and the check engine light was lit. BMW’s engineering is rather impressive in that the car is virtually impossible to stall no matter how incompetent one is at driving a manual transmission. Backup cameras became mandatory in the U.S. in 2018 and it was alarming not to have one in the Mini. As compensation for this tech loss, I was treated to a continuous diet of NPR news while driving the car. What did I learn?

  • high gas prices have reduced consumer sentiment to the lowest it has ever been since 1952. This was a 20-minute segment on the ills of high gasoline prices without a single mention of how the end-of-April prices are actually lower in both real and nominal dollars than what Americans were paying in 2022 and no mention of NPR’s previous climate change alarmist and calls for carbon taxation to make fossil fuels more expensive. (Separately, are the University of Michigan geniuses behind the poll confident that, from a consumer perspective, things are worse than after the 2008 collapse? Than during the 22 percent misery index (inflation+unemployment) during the Jimmy Carter administration?)
  • when Democrats are back in power they need to force companies to continue to pay health insurance when workers go on strike. But really we need universal health care and universal taxpayer-funded child care so that union workers can strike for months or years if necessary to get what they’re owed as a consequence of AI.
  • there is an important a PBS series about the “often-overlooked history of Muslims in the United States” (“19 young Muslims went out for plane rides in beautiful weather on September 11, 2001”?)
  • Trump wasn’t being attacked for political reasons at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, but rather because there has been a rise in the amount of “gun violence” overall in the U.S.; Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to resort to violence, but the Democrats are generally shooting while the Republicans have subjected Democrats to “verbal violence”.
  • climate change is bad, but the muscular intelligent government of Maskachusetts is ready, e.g., with doors that will seal off the Blue Line MBTA tunnel from the airport (“If the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 were to happen today, AccuWeather experts estimate the total damage and economic loss would reach $440 billion”; maybe this is why my friend with the townhouse pays $20,000 per year for insurance and rates are yet much higher on Cape Cod?)
  • Michael Tilson Thomas, a symphony conductor who had just died, was a “pioneer in the gay rights movement” because, after moving to San Francisco, he was open about having a male partner (Thomas moved to San Francisco in 1995)

[What were gas prices at the time of the NPR Boston broadcast vs. in 2022? CBS: “The current average in the state is $4.16 for a gallon of regular gas, AAA said on Thursday. … The record high for Massachusetts is $5.05 back in June of 2022”. What if we adjust $5.05 June 2022 dollars to today’s mini-dollars? Gas cost about $5.95 April 2026 dollars in Maskachusetts during the Paradise Years (TM) of the Biden-Harris administration.]

With the withdrawal of federal tax dollars and substitution of money from rich progressive Democrats (example), the content of NPR seems exactly the same!

Loosely related… what if you hate Elon Musk and Donald Trump so much that you’re willing to drive yourself (“manually”!) while saving the planet via purchasing an EV of epic expense? A friend in Cambridge did just that. His Lucid Gravity has some nice features, but it can’t be parked next to a standard-height Maskachusetts curb without severe door damage on opening. Every time he parks and someone in sitting on the right side, he must use the touch screen to tell the car to jack itself up to maximum suspension height. After that, a door will just barely clear the curb:

I assume the idea is that those who save the planet are so elite that they never have to park on the street.

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