As a keen follower of The Science, my main take-away from the Democrats’ nationwide anti-Trump mass gatherings was “Why aren’t they wearing masks?”
A sea of old white people crammed together (source), none of them masked:
These are the same people who demanded that public schools be closed for 18 months, and that peasants be ordered to wear masks outdoors. Old white Democrats demanded that, except for mostly peaceful BLM protests, the subjects would be forbidden to assemble more than 25 people outdoors (Maskachusetts December 2020), or no more than 3 households (California, October 2020), or no more than 10 people from 2 households (Colorado, October 2020)).
I’ve been to Thailand a dozen times or so when I was living in HK and Singapore.
I always felt bad for people who made it a bucket list or honeymoon destination from the other side of the world.
Don’t be fooled by the White Lotus hype; it’s disgusting:
Phuket – crowded and gross beaches. Koh Samui – average beaches, terrible SCUBA. Bangkok – horrible traffic, dirty, and Patpong will scar you for life. The Mandarin Oriental is cool but that’s about it. Pattaya & Krabi – where society’s dregs go on vacation. Phi Phi Island – where backpackers go for drugs, and the water is filled with trash. Even the beaches from the movie The Beach are too murky to even snorkel. Chang Mai – full of ped0s, fake temples, and depressed elephants.
Thailand is only nice as a really cheap alternative for deviant Germans or lower class Brits to retire; it’s better than some dreary place like Liverpool in terms of women, weather, and the price of a pint.
Thank you for applying for a job at the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Based on your essay, however, we are unable to offer you employment at this time.
Note that I actually liked what little I saw of Thailand on a 2001 business trip there. See “A Photographer’s Guide to Bangkok”, from which these photos are excerpted:
Our energetic government employees have been vilified for inefficiency (most recently by the notorious DOGE), but the example of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia shows that federal workers can be very energetic indeed.
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, entered the US illegally sometime around 2011, but an immigration judge in 2019, after reviewing evidence, withheld his removal. That meant he could not be deported to El Salvador but could be deported to another country. A gang in his native country, the immigration judge found, had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
(“could be deported to another country” is inconsistent with what Democrats on X and Facebook are saying, i.e., that the noble Abrego Garcia had the right to permanent residence in the U.S.)
ChatGPT, regarding the value (in 2025 dollars) at stake in this deadly dispute:
In El Salvador, pupusas are a beloved and affordable staple. Typically, a standard pupusa costs between $0.25 and $1.00 USD, depending on factors like ingredients, size, and location.
A federal employee, in other words, determined that a gang member who didn’t like a pupusa ten years earlier (maybe the gang prefers panes rellenos?) was lying in wait for Mr. Abrego Garcia to return to El Salvador so that he could be executed. Therefore, Mr. Abrego Garcia could stay safe in the U.S.
(It’s unclear to me why Mr. Abrego Garcia is safer in Maryland than in El Salvador. The murder rates in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are more than 20X higher than in El Salvador. The border was fully open for four years and any Salvadoran, including cornmeal-hating gang members, could enter the U.S. and stay permanently temporarily (latest extension by the Biden-Harris administration, oddly in conflict with the fact that the State Department rates El Salvador as safer for American travelers than France or my beloved Sweden (see below).
Additionally, Mr. Abrego Garcia would be at risk in Maryland from his wife, with whom he apparently has a history of physical violence (ABC). Suppose that she has availed herself of her 2nd Amendment rights during Mr. Abrego Garcia’s sojourn in El Salvador? He returns to Maryland as a hero to all Democrats and is promptly filled with lead by the wife.
Surely the United States is now home to far more non-imprisoned violent Salvadorans than El Salvador itself (which successfully exported nearly all of its violent criminals to the U.S. and then imprisoned the rest).)
I’m at a loss to understand how Americans imagine that our English-speaking government workers are capable of sorting out what happened in a pupusa exchange 15 years ago.
According to Maryland Sen. Van Hollen, we’re in a “climate crisis” exacerbated by a “climate emergency.” What’s the right thing to do in that situation? Tap into a lake of Jet A and fly roundtrip to El Salvador without first making any appointments (nytimes):
I’ve written about this repeatedly based on my interactions with old people… the U.S. desperately needs a simple-to-establish bank account, with associated credit card, that can be supervised by a second person. This would be useful for some young people, but it would be primarily for the elderly to prevent them from being cheated out of their savings and Social Security. The idea is that they could enter into small transactions at reliable merchants without restriction, but if they try to buy something over a threshold amount or transfer funds over a threshold, an Account Protector’s approval is sought, e.g., via text message “Grandma is trying to pay $700 for diet pills advertised online. Press 1 to approve.”
Kris Owen, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran, had planned to spend his golden years in Indiana with his wife, Karen. They wanted to spend more time with his son and travel the world together.
Owen received a pop-up message on his computer in 2023 saying that his personal information was compromised — and was told to call a phone number.
When he did, an individual posing as a federal agent said they would safeguard his money and instructed him to convert some of his savings into gold bars, Owen told ABC News. After weeks of communications and after receiving what he thought was a letter from the FBI, Owen purchased $80,000 worth of gold bars.
“They told me to wrap it in a box … with Christmas wrap paper,” Owen said.
He then took his gold to a grocery store parking lot near his house, he said, expecting to hand it over to a federal agent so the gold could be kept in a secure location. A car soon pulled up next to Owen and he placed the gold in the back seat before the driver took off.
The FBI and a local Indiana police department had Owen go undercover to try to catch an individual who was supposed to receive $50,000 from him. Owen, wearing a wire, met with the individual at a parking lot and placed a box with fake cash in the individual’s back seat.
Law enforcement followed the individual, who they later identified as Abdul Mohammed, and took him in for questioning. He was charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and two counts of wire fraud.
Mohammed, who later fled the country, was a courier — an individual recruited to pick up gold bars or cash from victims, according to law enforcement officials.
(Our government tortures airlines and private pilots with APIS and eAPIS manifests of who is on every outbound flight and all passengers’ passport details and yet Abdul Mohammed was able to easily leave after being arrested, charged, and then released by our revolving door justice system?)
In an exclusive phone interview, ABC News spoke to a suspected courier from jail as he faces charges in two states for his alleged involvement in gold bar schemes.
Yash Shah, 27, who was originally charged with multiple felonies in 2023 related to the scam, claims he does not know where the gold is going. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years probation, but he was arrested again last November for his alleged involvement in a Maryland case. He is currently being held without bond in a New York detention facility.
“I’m not a criminal or anything like that,” Shah told ABC News. “I’m just a normal person. They [were] just saying … if you wanna make a little more money, you have to go pick up the package, and you have to just drop it over there. That’s it.”
Shah claims he was hired by someone from India and was paid between $800 and $4,000 to pick up packages, some which contained gold bars. His attorney, Nicholas Ramcharitar, said Shah took between five and 10 trips traveling all over the Northeast as a courier.
Mr. Shah wasn’t suspicious when offered 50X what UPS charges for the same service because… he is not a criminal?
What’s the LLM angle?
“These tech support pop-ups that initiate the whole scam emanate from a call center in India,” Delzotto said. “So we have a lot of focus on India with [a lot of] these illegitimate call centers.”
LLMs will be a lot more successful at fooling us than Indian humans (they still say “the reason of my call” instead of “the reason for my call”), so the bleeding out of American wealth to scammers around the world is likely to intensify. Right now our banking system has only two modes: (1) you’re a fully capable adult who can distinguish Agent Abdul Mohammed from a real FBI agent, (2) you’re a mental vegetable who can’t buy socks at Amazon and all of your money is held in trust and the bank takes instructions from the trustee(s). But a typical 79-year-old doesn’t fit well into either of these modes. He/she/ze/they is, one hopes, nearly capable of Mode 1 banking, but some kind of second signature or text message approval or something should be required before $80,000 is withdrawn.
Traffic in the U.S. is going to get slower every year as the population continues to expand via immigration and children of immigrants (Pew, 2015). Self-driving systems are going to get better every year, but perhaps not good enough that they can be completely unsupervised. What are people going to do on multi-hour car trips where they still have to sit in the driver’s seat and look at the road? How about exercise? With more time lost to traffic jams Americans will have less time to hit the gym or walk in the neighborhood so we’ll get yet fatter and weaker unless the car itself becomes a gym.
Suppose that resistance bands were built into the dashboard, floor, doors, and ceiling of the car. I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of this, but the request fried our future overlord’s brain.
It could look something like this image from Amazon, but with the band attached to the door or the dash instead of to the wall:
Harvard University is in the news right now for its showdown with the Trump Administration. Remember that inequality is bad and also that the federal government should spend taxpayer dollars at the nation’s richest institutions in the richest states rather than at, for example, University of Mississippi, Ohio University, or University of Michigan (the 13th poorest state).
My question for today is how did Harvard keep the river of taxpayer cash going for so long given its explicit race discrimination polices, most famously in admissions and hiring, but also in selling theater tickets. From a 2021 post:
We have designated this performance to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members. For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run.
Proof of vaccination or negative test results required to attend.
Maybe a privately-financed and privately-run theater could refuse to sell tickets to those with the wrong skin color (though it would seem to be contrary to the Maskachusetts state law), but how can a federally-funded enterprise do it?
Here’s Harvard, the operator of a one-race-only theater, claiming the moral high ground as a recipient of federal dollars:
“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” – President Alan Garber https://t.co/6cQQpcJVTd
There have been plenty of racists in the history of the United States, but right now I can’t think of any recent racists held up as morally superior to the average person, business, or institution.
Related:
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which Harvard was found to be violating the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment requiring equal protection (but the Feds said “Hey, let’s just keep sending them money because they surely wouldn’t violate the Constitution ever again”?)
Happy Tax Day for those who celebrate (i.e., Americans who aren’t smart enough to have joined Mitt Romney’s Club 47).
David Brennan and Jackie Mustian, attorneys at Moffa, Sutton, & Donnini, gave a talk at Sun ‘n Fun about how people avoid owing a 6 percent sales tax when buying an aircraft that will ultimately be based in Florida. (Imagine the potential liability for an elite buying a $100 million Gulfstream!)
First, it seems unlikely that Florida is getting any real benefit from imposing this tax. The true beneficiaries are attorneys and accountants who set up schemes to avoid it. Perhaps because of that, there is no urgency among legislators to eliminate the tax, as Maskachusetts did back in 2001. Under the assumption that the tax, and the army of professionals whose job it is to avoid it, are with us forever, here’s what we learned…
A nonresident who owns a new-to-him/her/zir/them aircraft has to be careful about visiting Florida for reasons other than maintenance or flight training. If the aircraft is here for 21 days within the first six months of ownership, Florida sales tax is owed. A flight that lands at 11:55 pm and departs 10 minutes later at 12:05 am is considered to have spent two days in Florida out of the allowable 20.
A Florida resident cannot take advantage of the above exemption. If the Florida resident is the sole owner of a Maskachusetts, Delaware, or Montana LLC that owns the aircraft, the 20-day exemption might apply, but an auditor might also try to look through the LLC shell to the real owner. The Floridian ideally would keep the aircraft out of state entirely for six months and also not display an obvious intent to bring it into the state on Day 183 (maybe the Floridian is a super douche and also is looking at buying a house in Nantucket and has written to the airport there about getting on the hangar waitlist).
Where the tax advisors seem to make money is in setting up an LLC that is in the business of owning an aircraft and reselling it or its use to others. Prior to the aircraft purchase, the LLC is registered with the State of Florida to collect sales and use tax. The “real owner” then dry leases time with the aircraft from the LLC and the LLC collects and remits sales tax on the dry lease payments, e.g., $75/hour, but only for those hours flown within the State of Florida. In the speakers’ opinion, the State of Florida doesn’t have a legal basis for challenging the reasonableness of the lease rate. The state is entitled to collect tax only on the money that is actually changing hands. That said, a $10/hour dry lease rate for a $1 million aircraft could seem ridiculous. (Other states where this kind of scheme is employed have some rules about the minimum cost for the dry lease based on prevailing interest rates.)
It’s too bad that DeSantis and the Legislature haven’t cleaned this up. In my opinion, the efficient way to tax aviation is a fuel tax and if the state wants more money from aircraft owners it should simply raise the existing aviation fuel tax (FL 206.9825):
Books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” were among the nearly 400 volumes removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library this week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office ordered the school to get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. … In addition to Angelou’s award-winning tome, the list includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials..
Some Jewish Democrats in the group agreed with him that these book removals were an outrage on a similar scale to what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Let’s have a look at the very first book of the headline, Memorializing the Holocaust. According to Amazon, the full title includes the word “Gender“, a word that appears 15 times on the selling page, and the book is properly categorized in “General Gender Studies”. The author is “Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies”. Here’s the Amazon description:
How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck. Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust’s effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.
The book is so important to our wider culture and has touched its readers so deeply that, after 15 years on Amazon, it has garnered exactly zero reviews. (Maybe it is required reading in some college-level gender studies courses? The book is “57,829 in Books” for sales, much higher than Queer Black Dance, featured in an independent bookstore.)
I find the CBS article and the reaction to it interesting because they show how easily discontent can be manufactured by our media. Nobody in the group, other than me, bothered to find out whether the “Holocaust book” was about the Holocaust. All of the Democrats accepted CBS’s headline characterization of the book and reflexively condemned Trump and Hegseth.
Most of the lectures at Sun ‘n Fun happen in a modern air-conditioned building that belongs to Central Florida Aerospace Academy, a public high school. Fittingly for today’s topic, one enters the building via a door that features a coronapanic sign:
The presenter was Dr. Daniel Monlux, the kind of physician that noble aid recipients in the Middle East, accustomed to free food, education, health care, etc., probably wouldn’t ask to see twice (he was in the F/A-18 in the U.S. Navy). Dr. Monlux is a founder of Wingman Med, a consulting firm that helps pilots maintain their medicals.
The most important take-away from the talk is that every pilot should get certified under BasicMed even if he/she/ze/they also holds a conventional medical certificate. That way, if there is a hiccup in the medical renewal process, the pilot can still fly his/her/zir/their family around in a Cessna or Cirrus. There is no obstacle to dual medical certification.
What can go wrong in the medical renewal process? If the pilot discloses a new condition of some sort (the FAA doesn’t normally have access to a pilot’s medical records other than self-disclosure, according to Dr. Monlux) and that new condition isn’t on the “CACI list” or the pilot doesn’t have the right documentation for the AME (Aviation Medical Examiner) to issue a medical under CACI then there will be a deferral.
First, how can the pilot avoid a deferral? One way is to look at the CACI list web pages and figure out what the AME will need to see. Typically it is a report from a physician (not a nurse-practitioner or PA) within 90 days of the aviation medical exam.
Suppose that there is a deferral? Then the pilot is plunged into a hellish holding pattern. Mostly this is not due to the low-paid doctors employed by the FAA in Oklahoma City wanting to torture pilots, but rather because the FAA is required by regulation to use only USPS and hardcopy letters for communicating with pilots. It takes 2-3 months for a hardcopy mail exchange to occur. If the pilot hasn’t given the FAA exactly the information requested in the format that is requested, there will be at least another 2-3 months of delay. (no need for a DOGE reengineering here!)
Pilots often make things worse during this process. They will submit more information that the FAA requests, e.g., a full medical record from a provider that happens to have a medication list and a condition list. Invariably, these lists at medical institutions are out of date and contain conditions and medications that are no longer relevant, but once the FAA sees any of them they will need an explanation (from a physician within the past 90 days) about why the condition no longer exists and the medication is no longer being taken.
These processes can drag on for years and there is a plan for the FAA to start denying medical applications, rather than simply continuing the deferral farce, if the pilot can’t get organized to supply everything that the FAA needs (could be challenging in a country where it can take 3-4 months to get an appointment with a specialist). If the FAA actually denies a medical certificate then the pilot can’t continue to fly under BasicMed.
As noted above, most problems in this domain are self-inflicted. However, in the event of a complaint by a copilot, for example, the FAA does have access to prescription drug databases and might be able to see, for example, that a pilot was prescribed opioids (America’s favorite pastime) or anti-psychotic drugs.
Let me close with a trendy new topic: What if you’re a massive beefcake and decide to slim down via Ozempic or similar? Make sure that it is prescribed for weight loss, not diabetes! Diabetes is a matter of serious concern to the FAA because, among other things, it can affect vision.
Readers: Who has been on Ozempic or a competitive GLP-1 inhibitor? I have a few friends on them and everyone seems happy in their new thin guise. Is Elon Musk right that everyone should be on them? I would have to lose 20 lbs. to get into what the government says is an ideal weight range. As long as our house is within 15 minutes of Costco, I don’t see that happening absent Ozempic and, at the same time, I hate the idea of giving myself injections almost as much as I hate the idea of grueling exercise.
I’ll write up a couple of in-depth items separately, but here’s an overview of my day at Sun ‘n Fun (Lakeland, Florida).
Previous visits to Sun ‘n Fun have been via (1) commercial flight from Boston and rental car from Tampa (advantage: Bern’s Steakhouse, back when you didn’t need to reserve months in advance), (2) Cirrus landing in the morning (complicated NOTAM, but not as busy as Oshkosh) and then potentially long-ish wait to depart between end of air show and 7 pm curfew, (3) minivan from our home in Jupiter, with stop at nearby Legoland. This year, I decided on a night-before flight to Bartow, Florida, a former P-51 training base (KBOW) that is 30 minutes from Lakeland, rent a car from Avis, and stay in a hotel (Florida has so much hotel capacity that prices don’t get to the insane levels that they do in Oshkosh). The mechanics of this worked out pretty well, but it is a mistake to try to leave Sun ‘n Fun by car within the first hour after the end of the air show.
For those who want to build their own planes, Sun ‘n Fun has a full slate of skills-building classes. Not sure that I would want to fly in a plane that contained my very first welds:
The airshow was loud, louder, and loudest with, admittedly, some finesse from superstar Mike Goulian. There were demonstrations of the F-35 (A and C models), the E/A-18G Growler, the F-16, and the Blue Angels (back to an all-male pilot team now that the Amazon Prime movie cameras aren’t rolling). With a smartphone, I think that the breakups are the best pictures that one can take of the Blue Angels, e.g.,
If you want to be a hero among progressives, you can volunteer with this Illinois-based organization (the representative was wearing an N95 mask, of course!) to exfiltrate a 15-year-old from benighted Florida to a state where his/her/zir/their genitals can be safely removed as part of gender-affirming care (abortion care is also part of the mission and the org says “hosted our very first drag show” in the 2024 annual report):
I’m not sure that the message of Elevated Access resonated with everyone at Sun ‘n Fun. There were some downright Deplorable people and planes (a couple of veterans, below):
As bad as it is to be a teenager in need of gender-affirming care stuck in Florida, the status of certified avionics is even worse. Situation summary: grim and expensive. Systems are old and clunky, e.g., the 2009 Garmin package touted in the latest -G7 Cirruses, and super expensive. There is still no reasonable upgrade path for the 4000 Avidyne-equipped -G2 Cirruses. A broker estimated that about 5 percent of these have been converted to the latest Garmin gear ($150,000 in an airframe that, pre-Biden, was only worth about $150,000) and that nobody should invest this kind of money. Considering that brokers make a commission on the total price of the plane, the advice not to do the Garmin upgrade means that it must be a stunningly terrible value. (Contrast to realtors, who always advise homeowners to do a huge amount of work prior to selling!) The Avidyne Vantage system is not certified yet. Dynon has nothing for the -G2 Cirrus.
Cirrus runs a great operation for owners at Sun ‘n Fun, including a perfect viewing location as well as air conditioning and cold drinks/snacks. I had my checkbook out to purchase a -G7, but the company refused my demand to add Blue Steel and Magnum to the color chart:
The latest and greatest Cirruses typically come with built-in oxygen for maintaining mental sharpness at high altitude. I’m wondering if this is being done all wrong. There’s a bottle built into the plane that is expensive to service and recertify. FBOs are getting into the habit of charging a fortune to top up these bottles with oxygen because their costs of labor and insurance are so high (the typical oxygen customer is a jet owner). There are some portable systems (example) that supposedly can concentrate enough oxygen up to 18,000′ to keep one pilot mentally sharp. It is rare to have more than two people on an oxygen-required flight and also fairly rare to go above 18,000′ (the limit for nasal cannulas). Maybe it would make more sense to put two of these these concentrators into the typical unpressurized airplane than a bottle-based system. I guess have a bottle supplement for those rare super high altitude flights.
V1 Hats is working on the problem of baseball cap-headset interference by thinning out the material near the ear:
I wish that it were possible to get custom designs and logos! Godzilla, at a minimum.
Here are some imports from China that made it in just under the tariff wire:
Towards the campground:
Flying out of Bartow, some ideas for decorating one’s living room ceiling and a nice museum devoted to the military’s time here:
