Author: philg

Learjet N722BD crash in Palm Beach County

by philg

Sad day for aviation in Florida, A 2003 Learjet 60 en route from Texas to the Bahamas crashed into a house here in Palm Beach County, about 30 miles south of us. The crash of N722BD is reported (NY Post) to have occurred shortly after 1 pm, 1300 local or 18Z. Here’s the archived radar from November 1, 2026 at 18Z:

(The crash was just southwest of the W in “West Palm Beach.”)

Anecdotally, it has been rainy all day here.

There is some horrific ATC video that is so bad it sounds as though it might be AI:

If we believe the audio to be genuine, the plane was getting hit by some pretty bad turbulence (up and down at least 600′), consistent with being on top of or next to a thunderstorm. What’s confusing is that the pilot monitoring (a Learjet 60 is a two-pilot aircraft and, therefore, it is not the pilot on the controls who communicates with ATC) reports “we’re managing the ice” (i.e., the plane’s hot wings are preventing ice from accumulating) and also that the outside air temperature was -47C, We’re normally taught that icing tends to be prevalent when flying through heavy clouds at between 0 and -20C. The official government story is that icing can happen down to -40C.

An aviation friend sent me this, but I’m not sure what his source is:

Assuming no mechanical problems, what could have brought a Learjet down in these conditions? Turbulence can become so severe that, unless the pilots have anticipated it and slowed down quite a bit, a plane comes apart. Icing can become so severe, with supercooled liquid droplets, that it overwhelms even a fully certified flight-into-known-icing (FIKI) system. A tailplane stall is theoretically recoverable, but if not corrected will result in a nosedive. Ordinarily a plane’s wing’s pull up while the horizontal stabilizer of the tail pushes down. This is what gives a standard (non-canard) aircraft its stability. If the tail stalls, e.g., due to ice formation, the plane can pitch down. Partial failure of the anti-icing system, which depends on running compressed hot air from the engines (“bleed air”) into the wing and tail leading edges, can result in an uncontrollable bank and/or spin (on wing producing dramatically more lift than the other).

Anyway, a sad day. Based on a search, the plane was actually based here in South Florida at KFXE and, therefore, the pilots should have been more than familiar with thunderstorm hazards. So the crash is a mystery at this point, but almost surely the weather played an important role.

Update: An ADS-B-tracking web service shows that the crew were successfully avoiding the most severe weather, but not slowing down to a speed that would have resulted in the airplane stalling before it became overstressed by turbulence. They blundered into a narrow but severe cell at full cruise speed shortly before impact. Some people who have reviewed dashcam footage of the crash are saying that the horizontal stabilizer (tailplane) was entirely missing as the plane crashed into the ground (even worse effect than a tailplane stall).

Even small turbojet airliners have been brought down by thunderstorms. Braniff 250 was an 80-seat airliner that experienced structural failure in 1966 due to turbulence even though the pilots had slowed down almost to the recommended turbulence penetration speed (source). This would be much less likely today because Air Traffic Control now has access to high quality weather radar.

You might reasonably ask “Why would anyone be crazy enough to try to get through weather like this?” One answer is that if you’re going to fly in Florida or Texas and aren’t willing to try to get through ugly convective weather you’re not going to be able to fly on a schedule. That’s not a problem for private aircraft owners, but for airlines and charter pilots the passengers expect the schedule to kept. The second answer is that most of the time it is possible to stay in clear air and navigate around the worst cells visually. One thing that investigators will want to look at is why ATC gave them a descent when they were over Naples, Florida and why the crew accepted the descent. They’d been at 41,000′ (“FL410”) over the Gulf of Mexico and apparently descended to 35,000′ (FL350) on arrival in Florida. Why not stay as possible until past all of the ugly weather? It is possible to be assertive with ATC, though when above 18,000′ ATC has the authority to say “Well, if you can’t accept lower then I’m going to have to vector you to Cuba and back”.

(Weather is much lower in New England than in Florida. I was with a friend in a Pilatus PC-12 turboprop coming back towards Bedford, MA (KBED) from Ohio. There was some ugly stuff on the in-cockpit NEXRAD over western-central Massachusetts. I insisted on staying at our cruising altitude (25,000′?) because that would keep us from entering the tops of the clouds. Everyone else on Boston Center was an airliner and ATC pushed us with “Everyone else is going through it.” I responded with “Well, they’re Boeings and Airbuses and we’re not. If we have to circle to lose altitude once we’re clear of this that’s okay.” They plainly thought we were absurdly conservative/chicken, but let us do what we asked for, eventually entering a rapid descent once clear. Our little 9-seater probably could have handled the tops of the rain clouds painted by NEXRAD, but why subject our passengers to the turbulence and ourselves to the stress if we didn’t have to?)

Related:

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What was The Science (Kristin Knouse) doing during coronapanic?

by philg

We previously looked at what MIT’s top biologists were up to in Who pays when a jury finds that a survivor is lying? What I hadn’t realized, though, was that many of the events played out during humanity’s desperate struggle against the world’s most lethal respiratory virus.

In the fall of 2020, most states were still deep in coronapanic, e.g., with closed schools and demands that peasants Follow The Science. (Not Florida, of course! It was illegal for children to stay home from school.) What was Dr. Knouse, Ph.D. biologist doing? Instead of trying to see if she could be useful in the War against SARS-CoV-2, she was working toward her successful shut down of another lab at Whitehead/MIT. The Sabatini Lab’s efforts could have been useful in the fight against COVID-19 or a future pandemic, according to our most eminent biologist (ChatGPT):

There is a particularly strong scientific connection between David Sabatini’s research and potential treatments for COVID-19. In fact, scientists studying SARS-CoV-2 identified one of the molecular pathways that Sabatini helped discover and characterize as a possible target for antiviral drugs.

There are two important connections: his pioneering work on mTOR, a protein complex involved in cell growth and metabolism, and his laboratory’s expertise in genome-wide CRISPR screening.

Sabatini is best known for his role in discovering the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) and explaining how cells use this pathway to regulate growth, metabolism, and protein synthesis.

Viruses depend on cellular machinery to reproduce. SARS-CoV-2 is no exception.

A February 2021 article in The Lancet Healthy Longevity also argued that rapamycin and related mTOR inhibitors warranted clinical trials to evaluate whether they could prevent infection or reduce severe COVID-19.

Toddlers in Maskachusetts were forced to wear saliva-soaked facerags 8 hours/day in the fall of 2020. American seniors in prime health were dropping dead every day (see Wave of death among the elderly bankrupts Social Security for what happens to a pension system when beneficiaries who were expected to live 10-20 additional years are killed). What was Dr. Kristin Knouse up to? She was comfortably on her iPhone working on a personal vendetta. Sample text messages from the Deplorables at Fox (searching for “knouse text messages site:nytimes.com” yields no results since, per usual, there are alternative realities for Fox and the NYT!):

It looks like Sabatini was too distracted by work and his new lover(s?) to realize that Knouse was trying to destroy him and his lab. As of November 2020, Tobi Oni reports that Sabatini was “speaking about [Knouse] in glowing terms”:

Two female professors chatting in 2021:

(Their glee about MIT revoking tenure reminds me of my late friend Joel Fajans describing how tenure worked at U.C. Berkeley: “I can be fired for any reason, except incompetence.” The survivor talks about how she “drank champagne while watching the Tweets” (little did she imagine that just over a year later X would be turned into a space where Deplorables would be able to post freely!).)

Here’s a text message that didn’t come from Fox (source) and I’m not sure of the date:

Mayor of Boston Michelle Wu’s Christmas present to her subjects in 2021 was ordering 5-year-olds to be injected with an experimental non-FDA approved drug if they wanted to go into a restaurant, theater, sports arena, or any other indoor public place. (See Two-year anniversary of Boston’s order that 5-year-olds be injected with an experimental vaccine in order to appear in public.) Until 2025, any shots for 5-year-olds were administered under an FDA Emergency Use Authorization. So the coronapanic emergency was an “emergency” from the point of view of the FDA, but not enough of an emergency that an MIT biologist could temporarily set aside her personal grievances.

Loosely related, the Fox article links to the Whitehead’s DEI report in which the German-born director, Ruth Lehmann, brags about hiring based on race and gender ID (“Improving the hiring, retaining and promoting of diverse talent”) and excluding white males from high school programs:

Launching the Whitehead Institute High School Internship Program, in which high school students in grades 10 to 12 from historically underrepresented groups will work directly with our Members, post-docs and staff scientists to explore biomedical science and gain experience with hands-on research.

Substantially all of their money comes from taxpaying peasants. The report notes that some of these tax dollars were used to hire full-time DEI bureaucrats. The report also highlights that the institute won’t highlight research results, unless absolutely forced to, by white males.

(Based on her bio, Prof. Dr. Ruth Lehmann, Ph.D. has no children. So her personal example might not be too inspiring to any young female who (a) loves #TheScience, and (b) wants to have children. In other words, she shows that the price of success in biology is becoming a biological dead end. (See “Women in Science”))

Finally, let’s look at some must-watch video for any expert witness going into a deposition. If the patent litigator asks what you meant when you texted “I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow and feel like I’ve been gang-raped!”, start talking about how you had gone for your annual visit to the gym. (What kind of odds are available for a bet that this text message and deposition transcript section never shows up in the New York Times?)

“Evidently, we did end up having sex” is another example of how Prof. Dr. Knouse, Ph.D. is the best deponent in the history of litigation. The video also covers gaps in the text chain that she produced for the internal Whitehead/MIT investigation. These gaps weren’t noticed by the IQ 207 lab directors and the 150 Harvard Law graduates at the firm that Whitehead hired to investigate the purported misdeeds of David Sabatini. Our 11-year-old has better electronic forensics skills.

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Failed to get any trick-or-treaters this year

by philg

Typically we hand out more than 1,000 pieces of candy to trick-or-treaters. This year, none of the kids would come up the walk to where I was sitting next to the bowls.

Separately and unrelatedly, I decided to wear a costume reminding the neighbors of my Massachusetts roots.

(source)

Important to remember: Listen to Black Voices and Listen to Immigrant Voices… unless you’re on a Lindsay Clancy jury.

Loosely related…

Also, Monday could bring some news regarding America’s Mom: “Lindsay Clancy is due in court Monday. The hearing may settle if she’ll face new trial”.

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Happy Halloween from the Manatees

by philg

A friendly reminder that eating the leftover Halloween candy and/or stealing from the kids while they’re at school can lead to significant bulk (Jupiter, Florida):

The town turns a bit darker at night…

Finally, I hate to brag (in fact, nobody hates to brag more than I do), but I attended Taylor Swift’s wedding.

We saved a ton of money this year on treats to hand out. All thanks to our fiscally responsible Congress and the stewardship of our wise Federal Reserve technocrats for keeping inflation under control. A few nights ago at the highest-end department store here in Jupiter, Florida, Twix was down from $5.97 to only $5.87 (“Manager’s Special”). A Lindt-brand Dubai choice was only $13.37, previously unaffordable at $13.47.

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Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed -> Abdul El-Sayed on Wikipedia

by philg

Yesterday, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed was Americanized slightly on Wikipedia. October 29, 11:09:

This introduction to the page hadn’t been touched for 10 years, according to archive.org, which shows a 2016 version as its earliest capture. That changed on October 29, 20:15:

The politician’s full name of “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed” was removed from the introduction in favor of restating the headline name.

Allahu Akbar, as they say in Michigan.

Separately, I was listening to NPR today in my neighbor’s 2018 Toyota Camry (I volunteered to drive it to a tire shop). The intrepid journalists characterized Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed as America’s first Muslim candidate for U.S. Senate and celebrated Democrats for their virtue. Mehmet Oz ran for Senate in Pennsylvania as the Republican nominee in 2022, but perhaps being Republican cancels out “Mehmet is the Turkish version of the Arabic name Muhammad” (Wikipedia)?

Update from the Deplorables at the New York Post… “El Sayed courted voters at mosques where speakers dubbed US ‘House of Satan’ and called for ‘final annihilation of Jews’”:

“I have to get on the ballot to be able to get your vote, inshallah. So, my team is here in the back … we need your signature to get on the ballot,” El-Sayed told the congregation, after he was welcomed to the pulpit by a mosque leader who introduced him as “our beloved brother Dr. Abdulrahman.”

(i.e., the full name is apparently used by typical Michiganders)

What else happened during Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed’s visit to the house of prayer for The Religion of Peace?

During the same service, a leader read a closing prayer in Arabic, which called for Allah to take the “worst revenge” upon Zionists.

“The Zionists have spread corruption in the land. Your forbearance has deceived them, so show them your power … They killed our brothers and sisters, so take the worst revenge upon them,” the leader sang, according to the footage.

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California’s billionaire tax will make California’s high-speed rail dream come true?

by philg

California proposes to confiscate roughly 5 percent of California billionaires’ wealth (Prop. 40 in the November election). Let’s ignore the fact that the first $1 billion in net worth is exempt and assume that California can harvest 5% of all billionaire wealth. Would that be sufficient to pay for a single high-speed rail line at California government project rates?

ChatGPT says the combined wealth of all of the billionaire douches (about 260 of them) in California is approximately $2.4 trillion, so a very rough estimate of the tax harvest is $120 billion. In fact, advocates of Prop. 40 say that they’ll get $100 billion. Here’s the neutral language of what voters are fed by nonpartisan election officials: “It will raise about $100 billion to replace the funding Trump and his billionaire donors took from working people to line their pockets.” This assumes that nobody moves out of Paradise to Hell (California to tax-free New Hampshire, Tennessee, Miami/Palm Beach, Austin, etc.), which, in any case wouldn’t reduce revenues from this new wealth tax (“The measure would apply the tax to billionaires who were California residents on January 1, 2026“).

Assuming that the advocates are correct and everything works as advertised, how many awesome high-speed rail lines could be built for $100 billion? The projected cost of the 30-year-old single line high-speed rail project is now up to $230 billion (Deplorables at Fox).

Imagine being the richest state in the U.S., imposing an entirely new kind of tax on the richest residents of that state, and still not having enough money to build the kind of railroad that folks in Japan, China, Europe, and Morocco are able to afford and build!

(I’m personally a fan of Prop. 40. California’s billionaires sat still for the 13% state income tax. Moving out of California won’t enable a rich douche to escape the 5% wealth haircut. Maybe a handful of people with assets between $25 million and $1 billion will move out for fear that the next election will hit the “almost rich” with a 5-10% wealth tax, but 23-year-old AI billionaires will quickly replace them. Californians are absurdly undertaxed, despite headlines and appearances. The owners of commercial property may pay almost nothing in property tax due to a combination of Prop. 13 and inflation (they pay tax on the nominal value of the property at the time of purchase plus 2% per year). There is no state estate tax, which makes California a good place for passing down the “generational wealth” that Californians say shouldn’t be possible to pass down. You’d think the peasants would revolt and say that Prop. 13 doesn’t apply to properties worth more than $2 million and that California will take 16% (the Maskachusetts/New York rate) of estates worth over $2 million. But for some reason these obvious methods of reducing inequality are never highlighted or put on the ballot.)

Irrelevant, in my view… “The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act” (NBER) says that the tax will actually reduce net tax revenue for the state by about $39 billion over 10 years. The economists behind the paper claim that the billionaire targets of the tax will move out and, therefore, stop paying California’s 13.3% state income tax. Why is that irrelevant? $4 billion/year is only about 1% per year of the state government’s colossal spending. Californians say that they hate inequality and, therefore, they should be happy to bear 1% more of the cost of running their government in exchange for getting rid of some of their richest douches. I would feel more pride of ownership in our 2021 Honda Odyssey if we could expel from the neighborhood the guy with the new Rolls-Royce and also the guy with the 2005 Ford GT. And maybe the other guy with the Rolls-Royce who has been observed (by our 5th grader) picking up in the car line at the local public elementary school. Would that be worth paying more in tax? Sure. If my envy level were high enough, it could even be worth paying 10% more in taxes (property and sales here in Florida; we have no income or estate tax).

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Having some trouble checking my Bitcoin portfolio

by philg

On the advice of the Sound Money Experts, I moved 100% of my savings into Bitcoin on October 6, 2025. I paid $126,210 per coin and, to keep the coins safe from someone breaking into my desktop PC or phone, I decided to let the professionals at Binance be the custodians of my retirement funds.

I’m having some trouble logging into Binance today. Can anyone share what they know about the likely value of my retirement fund? Nothing unusual is happening in the market or on the Binance exchange according to the company’s home page right now:

Here’s the international binance.com site at 9:14 pm with no mention of anything unusual having occurred:

Loosely related:

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Checking in on “We Won’t Be Missed” (labor share of the economy goes to zero)

by philg

A year ago, Pascual Restrepo published the best-titled AI-related related paper ever: “We Won’t be Missed: Work and Growth in the AGI World” (NBER). Abstract:

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) … makes it feasible to perform all economically valuable work using compute. I distinguish between bottleneck and supplementary work—tasks that are essential versus non-essential for unhindered growth. As computational resources expand: (i) the economy automates all bottleneck work, (ii) some supplementary work may be left exclusively to humans, (iii) output becomes linear in compute and labor and its growth is driven by the expansion of compute, (iv) wages converge to the opportunity cost of computational resources required to reproduce human work, and (v) the share of labor income in GDP converges to zero.

The ideas aren’t new, but the Yale econ professor proves via the title that the Queers for Palestine League faculty can add valuable gloss.

Based on observing our neighbors decorate their houses for Halloween and Christmas, sometimes spending up to $10,000 on professional light installation just for Christmas, my own theory is that the economy can expand to accommodate currently-impractical/unaffordable activities such as wrapping cars with seasonal decorations every few months. We’ve already seen that demand for landscaping and horticulture is essentially unlimited. I grew up in a neighborhood where all of the houses had simple landscapes that the homeowners could maintain themselves. Some people would pay a high-school student to mow their lawns, but paying a gardener circa 1970 wasn’t part of an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Due to a combination of the U.S. becoming wealthier and labor becoming cheaper (the miracle of the low-skill immigration wave that began in the mid-1960s), we now have upper-middle-class neighborhoods that can’t be maintained without intensive specialized labor and machines. Imagine the Japanese gardens that people would have if Optimus ownership became the norm!

Are we on Prof. Restrepo’s track yet? Regarding the final and most dire-sounding prediction of labor share going to zero, some progress has been made:

We should expect to hear politicians trumpeting this stat before every election? No matter how large the economic pie and even if we’re way better off, envy will make a falling labor share seem like an unfairness emergency to the average voter. A simpler formulation of the situation is that the economy always has to be divided between labor and capital. Machines are part of capital and machines have been getting smarter. American humans, on the other hand, are becoming less capable. (See “Gen Z — the first generation officially dubbed dumber than the last” (NY Post) and “American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the ‘Reverse Flynn Effect'” (Popular Mechanics 2023); note that these data are tough to square with the religion of Enrichment via Immigration because IQ rose between 1924 and the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, decades during which the U.S. was not enriched) We should expect markets to give machines more and humans less.

But is the simple statistic misleading in our “means-tested everything” transferist political system? Consider a “single mom” cruelly forced to work 80 hours/month once her youngest child turns 14 (no need to work at all before then). She gets paid minimum wage times about 18 hours per week, but her total compensation from the economy includes at least the following extras: (a) housing that might be worth $30,000+ per year, (b) health insurance (Medicaid) for herself and her kids (another $30,000/year at market rates), (c) food via SNAP/EBT, and (d) an Obamaphone. The extras are primarily funded by financially successful Americans and those folks get a lot of their income by investments in capital. “In San Francisco, a Family Earning $325,000 Qualifies for Government Aid” (New York Times):

(The couple featured is also a good example of how a lot of wages aren’t set by the market: “Mr. Marman, 36, brings in about $135,000 as a therapist for the city”. The government can pay its workers whatever it wants to pay. (How hard did the New York Times have to work to find a Black husband/Asian wife couple? Grok says that this pairing is 0.08% of U.S. married couples, though likely somewhat higher in SF.))

How about the automation prediction? “No Widespread Displacement, but the AI Employment Gap for Young Workers Has Widened to 19%” (Stanford August 2026):

… young workers in AI-exposed occupations are increasingly falling behind their less-exposed peers. Employment among workers ages 22–25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now stands about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with employment among similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. Experienced workers show no comparable gap. … the shortfall was 15% at the July 2025 data vintage and is 19% as of June 2026. The adjustment appears to operate primarily through reduced hiring of young workers rather than increased separations.

What constitutes “AI-exposed”? That’s in the appendix (page 52 of the PDF). Some of the stuff that I think should be easy to automate, e.g., fitness training, is listed as “lowest exposure” (why can’t a phone app count reps and, via its camera, microphone, and speaker, keep someone on an exercise routine?). The Stanford geniuses think that our neighbors will continue having to pay their mobile detailers (“Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment”):

Bad news for computer nerds. We’re among the most exposed:

(I don’t think the Stanford authors are considering what would happen if Elon Musk’s promises regarding Optimus turn out to be true. They’re looking at AI without robotics.)

Who wants to predict where things will be in one year? I’ll say that through a combination of market forces and AI and the expansion of the welfare state distorting statistics with more means-tested benefits, the headline labor share falls to 50% by Q3 2027.

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Who has been to Chiricahua National Park?

by philg

This blog, in 2020: Do we need some more national parks?

A friend who has been suffering through shutdown on an oceanfront estate in Maine mentioned that Acadia National Park has experienced record-breaking visitor counts. For the first time in history, you need to make a reservation before driving into the park at all.

Donald Trump, this week:

Who has been to this park (formerly a national monument)? I’ve flown by in Robinson helicopters (following Interstate 10, with no risk to pedestrians).

Here’s what it looked like in the good old days:

Today (someone needed an aperture vs. depth of field tutorial?):

Looks like it is a 2-hour drive from Tucson and El Güero Canelo.

Related:

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Mad pumpkin skills at the Palm Beach County Library

by philg

If you need some last-minute pumpkin decoration ideas for Halloween, a couple of examples from the local (Jupiter) branch of the Palm Beach County Library:

What else was topical at the library? A book about Zohran Mamdani and Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed:

Also, a reminder of the true threat to the traditional culture and value system of the United States. Featured by the librarians:

What will your life be like after enough additional immigration to generate European levels of population density here? You will be freed from the tyranny of the private automobile and will be able to wait for, then crowd onto, public transit. Life After Cars:

The time spent waiting for the bus can be put to good use with some Craftivism:

Crafting a Better World: Inspiration and DIY Projects for Craftivists: A Dynamic Craft Book with Hands-On Projects, Learn to Make Art that Makes a Difference (Amazon):

It all started with a tiny stitch and a big prick. For the first two years of the Trump presidency, I watched in quiet dismay as he assaulted every aspect of our democracy and our decency. He felt anathema to the aspirations for my practice as an artist.

I STARTED MAKING THESE CHOCOLATES when George W. Bush was elected and haven’t stopped. They’re a delicious way to express my constant outrage that a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is so often based on laws made by men. We talk a lot at our shop about how not all women have vulvas and not everyone with a vulva is a woman, but everyone can be angry about violations of basic human rights. With this recipe, you can re-create these chocolates to enjoy them on your own, give them to a friend, or sell them at a bake sale to raise money for abortion access funds. I hope they serve as a sweet reminder of a woman’s right to choose.

FURIOUS VULVAS

Makes 10–100 vulvas, depending on the size of the mold

INGREDIENTS

¾ teaspoon pink Hawaiian alaea sea salt; honestly, any flaky high-quality sea salt will work! If you use table salt, use ½ teaspoon and add more to taste.

1 scant tablespoon pink peppercorns

1 pound dark chocolate (Make sure it’s a high-quality chocolate sourced in ethical ways! We use 65% Republica del Cacao and we love it.)

EQUIPMENT

A vulva mold (see below)
A spatula, preferably an offset spatula
A parchment-lined sheet pan

DIRECTIONS

  1. Procure your vulva molds! You can find an abundance of vulva molds online. Searching for “vagina chocolate mold” (even though I know you know that the vagina is the internal genitalia and the vulva

A clever neighbor’s project…

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