Our local (Jupiter, FL) CVS adapts to RFK, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again program. You no longer have to buy three huge bags of Twizzlers to get a discount, as one did under the Biden administration. “Must buy 2”:
Admission: Our 11-year-old was home sick with a cold (a ridiculous situation in Florida!) and requested Kit Kats so I bought him some.
Related:
COVID-19 state of emergency ending? (March 2023, when Biden was considering winding down the COVID-19 emergency in May 2023, a CVS in Maskachusetts incentivizes buying Cadbury candy eggs in quantity 10 and washing them down with 36 cans of Coke)
A few photos from the Palm Beach Gardens (Florida) Barnes & Noble…
The secret to American female happiness is more focus on the self:
A book for ICE employees tasked with picking MS-13 members out of the crowd of 30+ million undocumented Americans:
A book by an Egyptian who wrote “a heartsick breakup letter with the West” but won’t leave the U.S. and return to Egypt (he says that he wants to help Gazans, bombarded for no reason and through no fault of their own (according to the book jacket), but won’t go back to his native Egypt and cut some holes in the border fence to help his Gazan brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters escape?).
A Facebook friend and social acquaintance from my Cambridge days, Lisa Randall, penned an article for the Boston Globe about how working class federal taxpayers should be forced to keep feeding a rich university in a rich state:
the Trump administration has done what has seldom been done before: unified the faculty behind a common, unwavering defense of academic freedom and their unrelenting belief in the value of universities, particularly their own.
(Remember that part of “academic freedom” is the freedom to use the peasants’ tax dollars to run racially segregated theaters, e.g., from 2021:
She posted a link to the article on Facebook. One of her friends, apparently a Deplorable, said “Not one penny of my tax$ for a $50B endowment woke factory thanks”. I trotted out my standard line about how it was unclear why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems”, would want or accept any federal money. Shouldn’t Harvard want to fund itself via donations from the rich and from state taxes and see federal money spent at universities that are in poorer-than-average states, e.g., in Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi (stats on median household income by state; DC at the very top, of course, and Maskachusetts and New Jersey right underneath due to Medicare/Medicaid buying pharma and the Department of Education subsidizing universities)? I cited this 2016 piece from the Harvard Gazette, which calls itself “the official news website for Harvard University”.
The responses from her friends opened an interesting window into how academic elites think:
I was called “the dullest knife in the block” for thinking that an article in the Harvard Gazette by a “Harvard Staff Writer” and containing a series intro likely written by an editor was in any way related to an official Harvard position. It was an mere “opinion” piece and represented only the opinion of that one writer. (Which would mean that Harvard officially thinks that inequality is good? Or Harvard doesn’t think inequality is bad?)
Research grants should be allocated by merit and not by geography or wealth. An unstated assumption seemed to be that a Harvard lab couldn’t move if Harvard failed to secure private/state funding to replace the federal funding. Although it is, in fact, common for entire labs to move when a professor moves for whatever reason, the Harvard folks couldn’t imagine anyone leaving Harvard to follow the money. Our neighborhood here in Florida actually is periodically a destination for a moved lab, e.g., this neuroscience lab that moved in 2023 from University of California. Florida State University beat MIT in a competition to host the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in 1990 and the New York Times said FSU was “expected to draw scientists in biology, physics and engineering from all over the world”. Another NYT article said “M.I.T. felt that it deserved the project”. Today, the Chief Scientist down at FSU’s lab is Laura H. Greene while the hidebound MIT magnet lab is run by a white male, Robert Griffin.
A giant-brained Ph.D. participant from California disputed that Michigan was any poorer than Maskachusetts (Wokipedia says that MA median household income is nearly 50 percent higher than in MI). For those who only fly over the Midwest, it’s apparently plausible that the Rust Belt state and its biggest city of Detroit are both in prime fiscal condition.
The idea that the peasants of Michigan would benefit if $2 billion/year in federal money were redirected to, for example, University of Michigan from Harvard was questioned. Nobody but me was able to see that Michigan would be better off it were able to collect state income tax, property tax, and sales tax from the people paid by the $2 billion/year in grants. Nor that when those researchers went out to local retailers that the state would once again be able to collect more tax revenue as the retailers staffed up. (They would probably argue that the move of Citadel from Chicago to Miami didn’t hurt Chicago and didn’t help Miami (the Miami HQ for Citadel is expected to cost “$1 billion-plus” (translation: $2 billion?); imagine the cost for the building permit on this 54-story tower!).)
Here’s the HTML title tag for the Harvard Gazette:
<title>Harvard Gazette – Official news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and research — Harvard Gazette</title>
and here’s how it is rendered by Google when one searches:
Maybe the courts will block Donald Trump’s attempt to redirect the working class’s tax dollars to universities other than Harvard and similar. But if Trump does succeed, I think the elite schools and their elite graduates will be completely blindsided. Even after being told by the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re violating the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of race (especially against Asians), these schools imagine themselves to have gotten rich by being more virtuous than anyone else. A few fun points from the Boston Globe article…
We wouldn’t understand DNA if the working class didn’t fund Harvard:
The nature of DNA was discovered by an X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, who was doing pure research to understand its molecular structure. Under the current funding crisis, Franklin might well have been laid off before making her groundbreaking discovery that accounts for much of modern medical research.
It is unclear how Rosalind Franklin, a British Jew working in pre-Islamic Britain with funding from a private company (Wokipedia says Turner & Newall), would have been disadvantaged by a change in where U.S. taxpayer money is spent.
The subtitle of the article is an interesting window into how elites think: “What happens when research is fully privatized?” There hasn’t been any proposal from the Trump dictatorship, or indeed anyone in Washington, D.C., to “fully privatize” research funding. The current dictatorship merely wants to take away money from the Queers for Palestine League schools that fail to comply with the dictator’s reading of the U.S. Constitution. Presumably the money taken away from Harvard would then be spent at schools that don’t engage in race discrimination, don’t support Hamas, etc. See, for example, “University of Florida denies appeal of pro-Palestinian student protester’s suspension” and “Protesters handcuffed, arrested at FSU amid nationwide demonstrations against Israel-Hamas War”.
Part of an i-Ready assignment for our third grader in the Palm Beach County Schools:
This is a description of a real-world endeavor that is also valorized by CBS:
“When we actually got into the classroom, the books were just mainly about white boys and dogs,” Dias said. … She started a book drive. The idea was simple, but ambitious – to collect 1,000 books about black girls. … The books began arriving and stacking up. By the time “CBS This Morning” visited, Marley had collected close to 1,300 books. Marley’s favorite among them is “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson.
Woodson – who won both the prestigious Newbery Award and a National Book Award for “Brown Girl Dreaming” – knows the importance of identifying with characters in a book.
“Seeing a story on a page about a black child written by a black author not only legitimizes your own existence in the world, because you’re a part of something else. ‘Look, I’m here in this book,'” Woodson said.
Maybe one of today’s third graders will grow up to run a taxpayer-funded public library with books that are segregated according to the race and gender ID of the protagonist. #IHaveADream
Happy National Odometer Day to those who celebrate…
By taking a car to the dealer three times, I learned how white women with Long COVID feel. After every visit, the dealer said “Your AC is working perfectly.” On the fourth visit, the diagnosis was “There is no refrigerant in your system. It all leaked out from a failed receiver drier.” Because of Climate Change, I had no idea what a receiver drier was. From the Interweb:
1.They act as a temporary storage container for oil and refrigerant when neither are needed for system operation (such as during periods of low cooling demand). This is the “receiver” function of the receiver drier. 2.Most receiver driers contain a filter that can trap debris that may be inside the A/C system. 3.Receiver driers contain a material called desiccant. The desiccant is used to absorb moisture that may have gotten inside the A/C system during manufacture, assembly, or service. Moisture can get into the A/C components from humidity in the air. This is the “drier” function of the receiver drier.
It turns out that this is a $28.44 authentic General Motors part, including dealer markup. The total repair bill was nearly 46X this amount, however, at $1,297.34. I have to believe that this is some kind of record.
(Fortunately, the entire cost was covered by a $2,600 GM Protection Plan that I had purchased after hearing frightening tales of $25,000+ transmission replacements. The 2022 Chevrolet has only about 7,000 miles on it and will be covered by this extended warranty until it is 11 years old.)
It is a little tough to understand how the labor added up to $1,057.50. The shop’s nominal rate is $225/hr so that would be 4.7 hours of labor happening between the 7:45 am dropoff and 10:53 am “your car is washed and ready” pickup. Perhaps, though, this also includes some diagnosis time from Service Visit #4? Friends who’ve been getting Toyota and Audi repairs in Maskachusetts and Florida have reported some huge labor estimates/charges relative to the flat rate labor hours found with a Google search and/or the actual time the car spent in the shop. Dealers seem to be quoting and getting fixed prices that work out to $300-400/hr. for their labor. I wonder if car care has become like human care: you’ll pay a way higher price if you don’t have insurance and, therefore, it makes sense to buy “insurance” even when you don’t need the insurance part of the insurance (i.e., to shift the risk). Or just buy a high-quality Georgia-built Kia with its 5-year bumper-to-bumper warranty and 10-year powertrain warranty (Kia achieves its superb quality without the benefit of union workers).
Separately, let’s raise a glass of DOT 3 brake fluid to our 2021 Honda Odyssey (built in Alabama by non-union workers who rejected a UAW organization effort). After 4.5 years and 50,000 miles it has suffered exactly 0 failures of any kind. (The only expenses have been for maintenance items, such as oil changes, wiper blades, battery, tires, and brakes.) Due to the miracle of Bidenflation, the minivan is currently selling, in nominal dollars, for almost exactly what we paid for it (survey of similar-mileage Odysseys offered by dealers).
I found an Android phone on the sidewalk today. It wasn’t password-protected so I figured it would be easy to find the owner by calling some of his/her/zir/their contacts. This proved more challenging than expected because the entire interface was in Korean. I returned the last five phone calls and nobody answered. Digging into the text messages, however, I found one that contained a “Happy Mother’s Day” meme. I called the associated number and reached the phone owner’s daughter.
What did the rest of you do for moms? (Keep in mind that, according to one of America’s leading intellectuals, depicted below along with the person who helped prepare the family home for Kwanzaa every December 25, “mom” can be interpreted as “mothers, stepmoms, grandmothers, godmothers, aunties, and all the women in our lives who love, raise, and guide us.” A blind person’s Labrador retriever would be included, I think, since the Canine-American “guides us”.)
Today I am thinking of my mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and the many lessons she taught me. I am so proud to be her daughter.
Happy Mother's Day to the mothers, stepmoms, grandmothers, godmothers, aunties, and all the women in our lives who love, raise, and guide us. pic.twitter.com/lcTNSkmr7B
What’s a good gift for a mom? How about this translation of some of the works of Confucius, famous for telling us that we need to show filial piety? I’m not sure why it makes sense to pay $35,000 for a stupid white person’s translation of a smart Chinese person’s teachings. Who cares if Joshua Marshman was the first to do a translation back in 1809? Is there any reason to believe that it is better than a modern translation? The photos below are from Raptis, a shop in Palm Beach, Florida.
Here’s another book from the same store, a copy of Ulysses for $300,000. The price might sound unreasonable until you reflect that it would probably take the rest of anyone’s life to get through the tedious work.
Flashback to 2020, an email that I received with a subject line of “American to require customers to wear a face covering starting May 11”. #Science said that 250 humans could share an aluminum tube without exchanging any respiratory viruses so long as those humans wore cloth face rags.
The “food donations” line is confusing. Except for trips to “essential” marijuana stores, Americans mostly sat at home. Why did they need more calories if they didn’t get off their sofas?
The average age of a Covid-19-tagged death here in Massachusetts is 82. Thus, presumably to the extent that any lives are saved from Covid-19 by our educational, social, and economic shutdown, they will be roughly 82-year-old lives.
A friend in Berkeley, California who was an early and enthusiastic adopter of Faucism (cloth masks, double masks, N95 double masks, experimental vaccinations, double and triple boosters, Paxlovid for the inevitable encounters with SARS-CoV-2, school closures, lockdowns, etc.) recently set me an April 16, 2025 paper, “Pandemic preparation without romance: insights from public choice”, by Alex Tabarrok, a tenured economic professor at George Mason University (i.e., a state government employee who can’t be fired). My friend loves this paper and believes that it covers purported “missteps” in the elite Covidcrat response to SARS-CoV-2.
I pointed out that the professor starts from the assumption that humans are in charge of viruses (therefore, preparedness could possible reduce deaths to zero) and then promulgates a narrative that keeps those who spent 2-3 years deep in coronapanic feeling fully justified:
In its size and scope the COVID disaster was unique. COVID killed more Americans than World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War combined.
The professor even has data:
Of course, the body count method is fundamentally flawed when talking about a virus that kills people at a median age of 82 and that targets those with multiple comorbidities. If SARS-CoV-2 had actually killed a lot of American seniors who had 10+ years to live, we would have seen the following:
Since we didn’t see any of these things happening, we are forced to conclude that COVID-19 did not have as dramatic effort on American demographics as wars that killed healthy men at age 18 (remember, though, that “Women have always been the primary victims of war” — Hillary Clinton). Nor did Americans suffer as many lost life-years from COVID-19 as we did from the regular relentless toll of car accidents.
This preface is a far more interesting window into the psychology of American elites than anything in the rest of the paper. It confirms my often-expressed statement that almost nobody who advocated for school closures, lockdowns, forced masking, and forced vaccinations will ever come to see him/her/zir/themself as having been wrong (much less apologize!). These folks either deny that school closures and lockdowns ever occurred (a popular strategy for Californians, New Yorkers, and the righteous of Maskachusetts) or they say that all measures were based on the best available Science at the time and that what’s wonderful about Science is how it evolves from week to week. Mostly, though, these folks simply don’t look at data that contradicts their faith in themselves. A Maskachusetts lockdowner who said that COVID-19-tagged death rate is a measure of a state’s collective intelligence will never get curious about how “do almost nothing” Sweden ended up with a lower COVID-19-tagged death rate than “do absolutely everything” Maskachusetts (or how Maskachusetts ended up with roughly the same age-adjusted COVID-19-tagged death rate as “do almost nothing after a couple of months of panic” states derided as being full of stupid people).
Coronaplague is a primarily sexually transmitted disease in Massachusetts? (May 26, 2020): Here we are in Massachusetts in our third month of shutdown with 2.3X the death rate of never-shut Sweden … Judging by the shape of the curve of deaths per day, the virus is spreading here at roughly the same rate as it has been spreading in Sweden.
Courts are reluctant to take away convicted drunk drivers’ driving privileges because in many parts of the U.S. it is very difficult to function without a self-driven car (less true now than in 2005 due to Uber/Lyft).
How about an intermediate restriction on a convicted DUI American: a license limited to operating a full-self driving car? In an ideal world, of course, the supervisor of Tesla FSD wouldn’t be drunk. But if an alcoholic is going to be out on the road, and we know that alcoholics will be out on the road, wouldn’t all of us be far safer if the drunk driver’s job were limited to supervising an AI? The car itself could be tweaked to recognize that the driver was too impaired by alcohol for even the supervision function and then shut itself down.
We shouldn’t condone either drunk driving or drunk supervision of driving, of course, but on the other hand the U.S. is jammed with behavior that nobody condones. So maybe it is best to be realistic about our fellow Americans’ capabilities. Some people cannot lay off the booze (I actually don’t blame them. I was offered alcohol at 6:45 am by JetBlue a few months ago and nearly every restaurant in Florida seems to make various kinds of alcohol available with breakfast). If we accept that, maybe we can mitigate with a license restriction.
The Catholic Church has selected a new pope, a man who fled the violence and dysfunction of his native Chicago to live in comparatively peaceful/safe Peru and, more recently, in the migrant-free environment of Vatican City:
Taking the name Pope Leo XIV, he shares Francis’ commitment to helping the poor and migrants.
The Catholic Church owns 177 million acres of land worldwide (source). The Church does make changes to its real estate portfolio periodically. For example, in 2024 it sold a church in the Northeast:
Father Larochelle said Muhammad Quandil and Sadaf Ali of North Attleboro purchased St. Augustine Church for $675,000 on Aug. 23. The sale included the church with an attached parish center, a separate rectory building and a parking lot.
Father Larochelle said the buyers plan to use buildings for functions and events for the religious community at the mosque they belong to in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, about 10 minutes away. The mosque, a place of worship for Muslims, has no room to expand on site in Rhode Island because of wetlands, Father Larochelle said.
(No matter how many churches are turned into mosques we should remember that in no way are Christians in the U.S. being “replaced” by Muslims. That’s a discredited conspiracy theory.)
The question for today: of the 1,400+ parishes that the Catholic Church has shut down in the U.S. during this most recent immigration wave (not a “replacement”), how many were turned into migrant housing? California, New York, and Maskachusetts are packed with rich Catholics, for example. Where are the Catholic-funded apartments or houses for migrants in California, New York, and Maskachusetts? We can find articles about Church property becoming mosques. Who can find an article about Church property becoming a permanent home for enrichers?
Also, in September the new pope will be 70 years old. Wouldn’t it make more sense for a younger executive to assume this role? Pope John Paul II started the job at age 58.
Here’s what ChatGPT 4o thinks Vatican City would look like if some apartment towers for migrants were added:
This is the best that ChatGPT could do for a church-to-migrant-housing transformation:
Loosely related…
Congrats to Cardinal Prevost. Who has the very real chance to be the first elected official from Illinois not to end his term in office by beginning a jail term.
Speaking of Illinois, should we give the new pope credit for having escaped the violence, dysfunction, and high taxes of his native Chicago in favor of the relative safety, order, and efficiency of Peru? (He was there 2014-2023.)
