Author: philg

Public schools teach third graders about the merits of race and gender segregation

by philg

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

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46:1 ratio of car repair cost to failed part cost

by philg

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).

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Happy Mother’s Day and AANHPI Month

by philg

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.

Having completed a crash course in Korean for Android users, I consider my Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month off to a good start.

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”.)

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.

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Five year anniversary for American Airlines mask requirement

by philg

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?

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How the elites justify coronapanic

by philg

Tomorrow is the five-year anniversary of my blog post If coronashutdown is to protect the old, why do young people have to pay for it?

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).

Related:

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Should a DUI conviction result in a license limited to operating a self-driving car?

by philg

Loyal readers know me as a neo-Prohibitionist (see Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.? (2016) and Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? (2020) and Coronaplague, experts, and Prohibition (2020)).

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.

Jalopnik:

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How many migrants will the Catholic Church settle on its 177 million acres?

by philg

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:

New York Times:

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…

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.)

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BLM and chin diapers in 2025

by philg

Our AI Overlords at Meta want me to become Facebook friends with our son’s former kindergarten teacher. She works at an all-white private school in an all-white suburb of Boston. Here’s what her profile looked like in April 2025 (I did some blurring in Photoshop):

Masks are still relevant, but wearing them underneath one’s chin works just fine. Black Lives Matter remains a high-priority social justice cause among those who’ve chosen to live and work in Black-free parts of a notably white state.

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Self-storage rent up 24 percent after six months

by philg

I’m not sure if it’s our inflation-free (TM) economy or that self-storage places underprice at move-in time and then raise the rent according to how difficult they think it will be for you to move your stuff, but the local self-storage place (Compass) just bumped our rent by 24 percent after six months (54 percent annual inflation rate), effective today.

Is this

  • a sign that inflation is alive and well?
  • an indication that South Florida continues to prosper?
  • a standard bait-and-switch tactic by self-storage places?

Rents for apartments and prices of houses are rising only gradually here right now, as far as I know, so I don’t think the “South Florida is booming” explanation is correct.

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ADHD boom coinciding with older/single parents

by philg

“Trends in Mental Disorders” by Arnold Kling (an economist whom a friend follows):

So why are we seeing an increase in people being labeled as depressed, or autistic, or ADHD?

Some of these labels have become high status. Nonbinary is high status among affluent teenagers. But I do not believe that the desire for status is the main driver.

I suspect that more children are being born with innate mutations, because their parents are older, reducing sperm and egg quality. These mutations result in unusual personality characteristics.

I suspect that children are spending less time with other children. Families are smaller. There are fewer neighborhoods with a lot of children. And there is a reluctance to let children go out on their own seeking children with whom to play. I suspect that having close adult supervision most of the time stunts children’s growth in social competence and confidence.

Children are skilled at manipulating their parents. When parents are easily manipulated, the child’s self-control is less likely to develop. When there are four children, no individual child has a good chance to manipulate parents. When there are one or two, manipulation is easier.

Children are skilled at manipulating their parents. When parents are easily manipulated, the child’s self-control is less likely to develop. When there are four children, no individual child has a good chance to manipulate parents. When there are one or two, manipulation is easier.

I wonder if it’s time for my standard line: “If you think teenage parenting is bad it’s only because you haven’t seen old people with kids.”

Any chance that the above trends will reverse? It doesn’t seem likely among native-born Americans who are college-educated. I talked to a senior at Brown the other day (considering how kids will do almost anything to get into an Queers for Palestine League school these days, she was surprisingly diffident about the overall experience there). She’s moderately religious/conservative and, therefore, might be expected to have more children than average for her cohort. She said that she didn’t want to have any children until she was at least 30 years old (“my 20s are for me”). Also, she didn’t want to have any kids until she’d been married for at least two years (“in case I want to divorce,” she noted, expressing zero commitment to marriage per se (i.e., she would stay married only if it seemed like the best option going forward)). So her life plan was to get married at some point between 26 and 28 and then have children at some point between 30 and 32. This is a recipe, I think, for having exactly the kind of family that Arnold Kling decries (older parents, 1-2 children, maybe just one parent if things don’t go perfectly).

Loosely related…

A screen shot in case this Israel-hating Asian-American is disappeared…

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