Author: philg

Henry B. Plant Museum in Tampa

by philg

One of Florida’s great 19th century hotels, the Tampa Bay Hotel (1891; 511 rooms built for $3 million), fell on hard times during the Great Depression and was converted to use by what today is the University of Tampa, a private 11,000-student school. A portion of the structure is preserved as the Henry B. Plant Museum, named for the railroad tycoon who built the hotel.

Instead of elbowing their way off Spirit, the elite guests of the hotel would step out of their private railcars just a few feet from the front door of the hotel. The original front entrance dog sculpture has been preserved and also the museum shows an early word processor:

The museum explains that immigrants destroyed career opportunities for Black Americans in the 19th century, just as Harvard economists found was true in the 21st century (see “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER 2007)):

In the 1890s, Black dining room supervisors and servers faced increasing job competition from European immigrants. Efforts to combat this challenge revealed competing understandings of Black manhood.

It looks as though $1-$2/day was a good wage in 1903:

Because my almost-12-year-old companion is passionate about art museums, our next stop was the main Tampa Museum of Art. He was delighted to find The Bucs at Fifty, a photo exhibit:

He also enjoyed a Man with the Golden Gun-style car/plane. Original from 1974:

The museum displays a 2016 work:

The curators fail to credit James Bond:

I still can’t figure out how it is possible for a tax-exempt nonprofit organization to advertise a policy of race-based discrimination:

In 2022, The Tampa Museum of Art launched an initiative to purchase a work of art by a Black or African American artist in tandem with its annual Juneteenth Cultural Celebration. The Museum selected Ya La’Ford as its 2024 Juneteenth artist.

Roughly half of the money spent by a nonprofit is government money (foregone tax revenue because charitable deductions are tax-deductible). How is it legal for a museum to say “We’re going to buy works of art only from people who are of one specific race that we consider superior”? Here’s the artwork that was purchased under the race-based scheme:

While on the beautiful Riverwalk, a 2.6-mile path, we saw a dolphin in the Hillsborough River. We stopped briefly at Armature Works before heading back towards the airport. On the way we stopped at a 49ers v. Buccaneers game in which fans were encouraged to drive sound levels above 100 dBA SPL (maybe closer to 90 dBA most of the time, still well about the 85 dBA OSHA limit for factory work without hearing protection) and a hearing loss company is one of the in-stadium advertisers:

The best customers for hearing aids are probably those who sit near the pirate ship and are thus subject to perhaps 100 cannon blasts per game.

iPhone 17 Pro Max super wide lens:

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Multiculturalism comes to the old neighborhood

by philg

As we get our houses ready for National Immigrants Day (October 28), from a friend in Maskachusetts:

I just drove on Sandy Pond Rd in Lincoln. A Somali (I assume, since he was black with lighter skin and curly hair) took out a prayer mat, oriented it toward Mecca and was doing a midday prayer on the side of the road (there’s no sidewalk). Right in front of a house belonging to a family with a last name of Goldstein.

(Note the hateful failure to capitalize “Black”, but the friend who used the hateful language is an immigrant and, therefore, it would be wrong for me to criticize him while he is enriching us with his presence.)

A July post from the church in the middle of town:

In April, we posed–and eventually distilled–a question in response: What if we activated one of our spaces–the parsonage–to provide urgently needed temporary housing to refugees?

We wish to state clearly that using the parsonage for refugee housing is not necessarily what will be proposed at a special congregational meeting on September 29, but the “what if” of this hypothesis (some might even call it a lightning rod) is what we are working with to ground our debate, open our hearts, and stretch our imaginations.

*The recommendations for length of stay per family vary from several months to about a year.

In Massachusetts, appropriate housing is hard to find and expensive. Newly arriving refugees are often put up in a crowded hotel room for up to 90 days while they are connected with essential services and look for other housing. Some families are transferred to shelters.

A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is at the bottom of every page of the church’s web site:

(See Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?)

The July post had estimated the cost to the church of helping out migrants at roughly $48,000 per year, mostly in foregone rent. I contacted a friend who is a member of the church to ask whether this expenditure had been approved by the congregation:

That issue was put to rest before the meeting, thank Heaven. … What we voted on is a $7 million improvement of the stone church, which I favored. 95% of the Church agreed. Progress!

So the Righteous voted to spend $7 million on themselves and nothing on the migrants whose cause they champion.

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Ample qualifications to run a $100 million AI startup

by philg

At the intersection of the OnlyFans and the AI Bubble, “Eric Schmidt’s ex-mistress, 31, sues former Google CEO, 70, over alleged stalking, abuse and ‘digital surveillance’” (New York Post):

The 31-year-old former mistress of Eric Schmidt has accused the ex-Google CEO of stalking, abuse and “toxic masculinity” — claiming that he subjected her to an “absolute digital surveillance system” as the pair have secretly tussled over cash, a failed AI startup and access to a sprawling Bel Air mansion, The Post has learned.

In early December, Ritter and Schmidt — whose net worth is estimated by Bloomberg at $44.8 billion — struck a “written settlement agreement” that required Schmidt to make “substantial payments” to Ritter but whose details remain under seal, according to a Sept. 8 filing in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

In the since-withdrawn TRO request, Ritter claimed that the tech tycoon days earlier had locked her out of the website of her startup Steel Perlot — an AI-focused venture firm into which Schmidt had plowed $100 million, a source close to the situation told The Post.

The article suggests that “a German Shepherd named Henry” is a disgrace to his breed in terms of providing protection. Despite owning this powerful beast, the plaintiff says that she’s been a victim of sexual assault at the hands of a senior citizen who is 39 years older than herself. Young lithe actresses and directors, such as Gavin Newsom’s current wife, couldn’t escape from elderly obese Harvey Weinstein, but none of them had a German Shepherd to assist them.

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Inheriting money from the UK branch of the Greenspun family

by philg

Happy National Estate Planning Awareness Week to those who celebrate. Remember that the first advice from any attorney to a client in Massachusetts or New York is “move out of Massachusetts [or New York] to a state that doesn’t have an estate tax”. Here’s a map from the Tax Foundation (people with money should move from the colored-in states to the grayed-out states, especially to those grayed-out states that also have no income tax, e.g., New Hampshire, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, etc.):

This post is about Mr. Evans Greenspun, a relative who lived in the United Kingdom and who was unable to spell “Evan” correctly. Evans left $200 million in a Cayman Islands bank but neglected to write a will. Here’s a hardcopy letter from attorney Elliot Barnes that I received this summer about my petroleum chemical engineer relative:

I expect to receive my 50 percent share of the funds imminently and will be following divorce plaintiff MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s example by donating much of it to Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign.

Separately, I’m wondering how the above scam can be profitable given that it required putting a stamp on an envelope (sadly I didn’t save the envelope so I can’t remember if it was actually mailed from the UK). “Attorney” isn’t a title that lawyers in the UK use, is it? “Solicitor”, perhaps, would be more credible? The letterhead street address in London doesn’t match precisely in Google Maps. A first name of “Evans” is likely to raise suspicion; wouldn’t an LLM have suggested changing it to “Evan”?

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#TrustTheScience, peanut allergy edition

by philg

New York Times, today:

For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens.

“We’re talking about the prevention of a potentially deadly, life-changing diagnosis,” said Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York, who was not involved with the study. “This is real world data of how a public health recommendation can change children’s health.”

The article never points out that parents who ignored pediatricians and public health recommendations (prior to 2017) and did the obvious thing (gradually introduce young humans to a wide range of foods that they might be expected to consume as older humans) did better by their kids.

Meanwhile, will we ever see a retraction of the advice that saliva-soaked face rags kept 2-year-olds safe from aerosol viruses that killed Americans at a median age of 82?

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Hillwood Estate in Northwest DC

by philg

Marjorie Merriweather Post famously built Mar-a-Lago, but lived in that modest $18 million (value used by New York judge) shack only during “the Palm Beach season”. She lived in Northwest Washington, D.C. during the spring and fall and in the Adirondacks during the summer. Her DC place, cozy by Mar-a-Lago standards, opened as a museum in 1977 and somehow I missed it while growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. My excuses: I started working full-time at NASA (on Pioneer Venus in 1978); I was too young to drive; the museum is nowhere near the Metro; despite high crime rates, Jimmy Carter wouldn’t send the National Guard into the city (he was too busy appeasing the Ayatollahs).

Ms. Post loved dogs, decorative art, orchids, Japanese gardens, and aviation (her private four-engine turboprop Vickers Viscount ferried everything but the gardens with her among the three estates).

The Museum costs $20/adult, but it is free for federal government workers suffering the trauma of receiving 100 percent pay for 0 percent work:

Like most other American museums, it’s also free for those wise enough to refrain from work (see How to get free museum admissions for life: sign up for food stamps (SNAP/EBT)):

… offering free admission to those receiving SNAP benefits. Present your EBT card upon check in at the visitor center. and receive complimentary entry for 4 guests.

Ms, Post was apparently prescient regarding the kind of society that the U.S. would one day become. A sculpture on the outside of her mansion shows a youth with a swan:

ABC (“Three of four suspects were apprehended” but, as far as I can tell from searching, our noble media never updated us regarding the names or backgrounds of any of the suspects):

The “mansion” itself is unremarkable compared to Mar-a-Lago and, but the contents and gardens are spectacular. A hillside Japanese garden is small, but awesome, and contains some of the stone lanterns that are virtually impossible for consumers to buy today (cheap cast concrete versions are available):

Ms. Post loved her dogs and built a cemetery for them, as well as for the departed canines belonging to family and staff members, on the estate grounds:

Ms. Post built a greenhouse for her orchids (note the modest Islamic dress; in any group of people in Washington, D.C. in October 2025 there was typically at least one person wearing hijab or abaya and at least one person wearing a COVID-19 mask (both indoors and out)):

Some fake iOS background blurring:

The interior is jammed with interesting objects so it is impossible to do justice to them. There are a couple of Fabergé eggs (maybe Optimus can make replicas of these for all of us?):

Here’s an idea of how much there is to see in the “icon room”:

Ms. Post collected a ton of figurines that included dogs. A few examples:

Homage to the highest tech devices of the day:

A couple of personal favorites:

Let’s exist through the COVID-19-safe gift shop:

As far as I can tell, 100 percent of the objects in the museum and estate were made either by East Asians or white Europeans. Ms. Post’s prime years coincided with an almost complete shutdown of immigration to the U.S. Nonetheless, the gift shop reminds us that we should celebration immigration/diversity:

We are informed by Science that there are at least 74 gender IDs, but most of the books for sale celebrate the achievements of people who identified with 1 out of 74:

I wonder if today’s insanely rich people, who are far richer than Marjorie Merriweather Post ever was, will one day leave us beautiful estates in which to wander. It doesn’t seem as though we’re going to get this, though. When Bill Gates sends $200 billion to Africa, for example, it doesn’t even leave a lasting mark on Africa (there are more needy Africans today than ever before, I think). So let’s raise a plastic glass before we eat our Costco ramen to the woman who left Americans this evidence of what the dining experience used to be:

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“No Kings” playlist

by philg

For readers who protested today, some lyrics by Elvin Bishop during the first Trump dictatorship (album version on YouTube):

He is the president, but wants to be the king
Know what I like about the guy? Not a goddamn thing
I want to know, how can four years seem so long?
Yeah, Lord have mercy, what the hеll is going on?

Here’s an adapted version performed to the delight of a San Francisco audience after the

A 12-year-old’s comment on the above: “If the guy hates Trump so much why does he look just like him?”

We attended 100 percent of today’s No Kings protests in Jupiter, Florida and, thus, can proudly display the following meme:

I asked ChatGPT for some suggestions of appropriate classical music:

  • Beethoven – Eroica Symphony (No. 3, 1804): Originally dedicated to Napoleon as a “hero of liberty,” until Beethoven tore up the dedication when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor.
  • Giuseppe Verdi – Nabucco (1842), especially “Va, pensiero”: The Hebrew slaves’ lament became a covert anthem for Italian independence from Austrian rule.
  • Richard Wagner – Rienzi (1842): A Roman tribune rises against corrupt nobles and tyranny. (Note that, unlike Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Wagner is in no way associated with National Socialism/Hitler.)
  • Béla Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra (1943): Includes a mocking “interruption” of a Nazi marching tune — a defiant gesture during World War II.

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How was the immigration of Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi supposed to benefit Americans?

by philg

The U.S. has arrested a “Louisiana man” for purportedly participating in the Gazans’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israeli civilians. New York Times:

This was an unavoidable situation, apparently, because he supposedly lied to Biden administration immigration officials about his level of effort in globalizing the intifada, achieving river-to-the-sea liberation, etc. Let’s ignore for the moment the question of why Americans believe that government bureaucrats who don’t speak Arabic would be able to separate truth from fiction. The question for this post is what was our theory for how Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi’s presence in the U.S. was going to make the U.S. a better place for existing Americans.

(I personally think that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi may well have told the truth. The U.S. has an honor system in which a prospective immigrant is asked “Have you participated in terrorism?” and, by the standards of a significant percentage of Americans (especially the young/progressive and, certainly, almost every resident of Dearborn, Michigan), what the Gazans did on October 7, 2023 was a legitimate military action by oppressed indigenous Arabs, not “terrorism”. The October 7 attack was organized by a democratically elected and popularly supported government (Hamas), certainly, and, even after the Israelis counterattacked, was supported in opinion polls by the majority of Gazans.)

From The Guardian:

In June 2024, al-Muhtadi submitted an electronic US visa application in Cairo. In the application, he denied serving in any paramilitary organization or having ever engaged in terrorist activities. His application said he intended to live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and work in “car repairs or food services”. He entered the US in September 2024.

Let’s leave aside the question of why a “Louisiana man” (NYT) such as Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi would intend to live in Oklahoma. Why was opening the border to someone who was going to work in “food services” going to make the U.S. a better place to live? Oklahoma was already critically short of health care workers (2024 KFOR) so bringing in one more person who would be a customer for health care rather than a provider would make it tougher for existing Oklahomans to access medical care. Maybe one individual restaurant owner would benefit from the cheap labor that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi could potentially provide, but we’re told that advancements in robotics will soon render low-skill humans obsolete. That would leave U.S. taxpayers on the hook for multiple generations of welfare in the event that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi either ceased working or never earned enough to get over the threshold for public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, Obamaphone, etc.

What is our rationale, in other words, for operating an immigration system under which Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi was eligible for permanent U.S. residency and eventual citizenship?

If the majority of American voters can agree that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi moving from Egypt to Oklahoma wouldn’t have made the U.S. better off, even if Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi hadn’t been part of the October 7 attacks, why doesn’t Congress change U.S. immigration rules so as to prevent a future Biden/Harris-style administration from admitting more “Louisiana men” like Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi?

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MIT decries inequality and also wants federal money diverted from poorer-than-average states

by philg

Like Harvard, MIT takes an official position that inequality is bad. In an ideal world, all humans would have the same wealth and income and, therefore, all states would have the same wealth and income. Here’s an example from MIT’s official news page:

Inequality is “a threat to America’s values and political system”. MIT is a richer-than-average university and, thanks to the Feds pouring all of the nation’s wealth into higher ed and health care, its Massachusetts home is the richest state (Washington, D.C. is yet richer, but not a state). One would think that MIT would, therefore, refuse federal grant money, preferring to fund itself via state tax dollars and private/endowment dollars. Every dollar refused by MIT could be spent at University of Michigan, for example, a less-rich university in a poorer-than-average state.

Instead of refusing federal money, though, MIT is fighting to keep it while preserving the school’s passion for race-based admissions and Rainbow Flagism. The Hill:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would have required sweeping changes on campus in exchange for a funding advantage in federal grant awards.

The 10-point memo was provided to nine higher learning institutions last week, requiring reforms such as a rewiring of the admissions process by adjusting the consideration of race or ethnicity, student grading and demanding that transgender women be excluded from women’s locker rooms and sports teams.

I still can’t figure out why the Trump administration wants to fund the Racism League schools. What institution ever changed in response to being showered with billions of dollars? The federal government could send its research dollars to universities that never engaged in race discrimination and/or never adopted Rainbow Flagism as an official religion. The Queers for Palestine universities would find a way to replace the federal funds with state and/or private funds and/or research groups would follow the federal money by moving to to the non-racist universities. Nowhere in the MIT Mission Statement is “hoover up as many federal tax dollars as possible”. In fact, the statement describes MIT as a purely altruistic enterprise working to help humanity and, therefore, anything that MIT can do to reduce inequality would be a positive step:

Here’s an example of two Nobelists moving from MIT to Zurich in response to a “CHF 26 million donation from the Lemann Foundation” (26 million Swiss Francs translates to 32.5 million post-Bidenflation dollars; see exchange rate chart below for how the USD was worth 1.4 Swiss Francs in 2003 and, thanks to the inflation-free environment that Congress has created via deficit spending, is now worth 0.8 Swiss Francs):

The Nobel Prize-winning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join the University of Zurich in July 2026. Using external funds provided by the Lemann Foundation, the two researchers will establish a new center for development economics, education and public policy.

“Nobel laureate Esther Duflo proposes taxing 3,000 billionaires to protect the world’s poorest from climate change—and most Americans likely agree with the plan” (Fortune 2024) . After evaluating the $32.5 million deal, the professor who is passionate about making billionaires pay their fair share has decided to move from Maskachusetts (top personal income tax rate of 46 percent, state+federal) to a country that is renowned as a tax haven for the world’s richest people (Puerto Rico is better for U.S. citizens, though).

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The New York Times called for an “uprising” six months ago

by philg

Six months ago, the New York Times told the righteous to grab their rifles and run to the frontlines of “a comprehensive national civic uprising” (see “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.” (April 17, 2025): “It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising”)

How’s the uprising going? Have the revolutionaries managed to kill enough fascists to make a difference? Or are Bernie and AOC still our only hope?

So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.

What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.

Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

The NYT said, in the above article, “We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust.” What could account for low levels of trust? The political science nerds in the 2020 paper, below, say “We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies.” (i.e., a random assemblage of humans via asylum-based immigration will result in a low-trust society).

Could AI perhaps update this classic “To the barricades” image to show young American progressives wearing Antifa T-shirts and carrying avocado toast?

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