Category: American Life

Regina Gittes Greenspun Eulogy

by philg

It’s been a year since my mother died (obituary). From the October 5, 2025 placement of ashes.

Kel Maleh Rachamim

O God, full of compassion, Thou who dwellest on high! Grant perfect rest beneath the sheltering wings of Thy presence, among the holy and pure who shine as the brightness on the heavens, unto the soul of Regina the daughter of Daniel and Cecile who has gone unto eternity, and in whose memory charity is offered. May her repose be in paradise. May the Lord of Mercy bring her under the cover of His wings forever, and may her soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life. May the Lord be her possession, and may she rest in peace. Amen.

Memory from Nephew Doug Frankel

Why was I lucky to be the nephew of Regina?

Because to me she was vacations. And adventure.  And culture.  And art.  And laughter.  To me she was an anchor, a homebase, and a challenge not to be lazy. When she did art, she didn’t just do it for herself, she did it for countless kids, inspiring them as an example and as a teacher and as a cheerleader. 

My mom and dad and little sis and I regularly hit the road for Bethesda, to Aunt Jean’s house, which felt like a second home because she made it that way.  It was a place I could overeat and oversleep and listen to conversations that were way over my head.  When her kids applied to schools, it seemed like they were aiming for Harvard and MIT, at the very very least, unless they could do better. 

I had so much ice cream with Regina over the years, it felt fitting that when we came to see her in Jupiter, Florida, we all went out for ice cream and it was great.  A truly good time.  Regina was always there for me and that meant the world.  And I know she meant the world to my mom, who never stopped bragging about her sister.  She said “You know, our house was one of the biggest in the whole neighborhood.  We had a lot of floors and a lot of bedrooms.  But we picked the smallest room on the highest floor, and we shared it.  Because that’s the way we liked it.  We always wanted to be together.  Jean is a wonderful sister.”  We will miss you Aunt Jean.  

Eulogy

Jewish tradition requires that a formal eulogy be delivered.

Regina exerted tremendous energy throughout her life in bringing and keeping family and friends together. She traveled from her home in Bethesda to New York, Boston, California, Florida, Egypt, Switzerland, France, and Mallorca for family reunions, visits to grandchildren, college reunions.

Regina was a diligent scholar and helped imbue her children with the values of reading, preparation, and on-time delivery of schoolwork. Regina showed us by example how to welcome friends and neighbors into a home. Regina showed us by example how to balance the roles of individual, spouse, and parent, never spending so much time on one role that she neglected the other two. She loved, appreciated, and supported fine art, literature, performance art, classical music.

Regina was always ready to explore new areas. She visited China, India, and Southeast Asia, for example, while her husband preferred the comforts of familiar destinations. Regina learned to play pinball and pool at age 90 from her grandsons. Regina was the one who said that it was time to move into a senior community where it would be easier to socialize while our father Nat would have stayed in our Glen Echo house from inertia.

Regina was patient and never succumbed to the distractions of the Internet and cable TV. She would go with me to the Palm Beach County Public Library in Jupiter and pick out a stack of large print books and then read them from cover to cover.

Regina was generous with her time and money. She taught at Washington Hebrew Congregation every weekend for many years. She taught art to grandchildren and any other children who happened to be around. She donated to conventional charities, never discouraged when I pointed out that the CEOs of those charities were paying themselves over $1 million per year. She donated her time and efforts within the Maplewood senior community to organize art exhibitions and hands-on arts and crafts events.

She was a beloved wife to Nathaniel for 65 years, never succumbing to the prevailing divorce culture despite her strong independent streak. She was a reliable loving mother to us even when we didn’t deserve it. Regina didn’t hold grudges and she didn’t complain about own challenges, even when her joints began to fail and required replacement.

Regina had many fine personal qualities that I will strive to emulate.

Graveside Mourner’s Kaddish (facing east)

Exalted and hallowed be His great Name. (Congregation responds: “Amen.”)

In the world which He will create anew, where He will revive the dead, construct His temple, deliver life, and rebuild the city of Jerusalem, and uproot foreign idol worship from His land, and restore the holy service of Heaven to its place, along with His radiance, splendor and Shechinah, and may He bring forth His redemption and hasten the coming of His Moshiach. (Cong: “Amen.”)

In your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon, and say, Amen.

(Cong: “Amen. May His great Name be blessed forever and to all eternity, blessed.”)

May His great Name be blessed forever and to all eternity. Blessed and praised, glorified, exalted and extolled, honored, adored and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He. (Cong: “Amen.”)

Beyond all the blessings, hymns, praises and consolations that are uttered in the world; and say, Amen. (Cong: “Amen.”)

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and a good life for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen. (Cong: “Amen.”)

*He Who makes peace (Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur substitute: “the peace”) in His heavens, may He make peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen. (Cong: “Amen.”)

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Wall Street Journal celebrates an all-male gay throuple

by philg

A 2023 post, No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage (2015), linked to a Wall Street Journal article about the beauty of a three-female throuple: “How Instagram’s Favorite Therapist Makes Her Throuple Relationship Work”. From 2025, “One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation?”

Good clean fun:

The men contracted with interior designer Jennifer Kole of Jenami Designs for a design fee of around $405,000, including furnishings. The en-suite bathroom has a 7-foot-by-4.5-foot shower with multiple shower heads, plus a free-standing soaking tub, ensuring no one is left waiting their turn.

Product designers are also exploring intimacy through form. New York-based furniture designer Kouros Maghsoudi created a sculptural bed called Hug, designed to comfortably accommodate up to three partners.

Should everyone join in this trend?

Real-estate agents are noticing more throuples and polycules buying homes together, often with everyone’s name on the deed. “Monogamy in this economy?” says Kathy “Kiki” Sloan, an employing broker with Property Dominator in Denver. She has seen a steady uptick in multipartner buyers treating shared ownership as both a romantic and financial move. Her advice: Get the paperwork sorted early. It should include a cohabitation plan and, ideally, an estate plan. Wendy Newman, a California-based real-estate agent with Wesely & Associates, adds that polyamorous families have been buying homes together for decades, but today more are “out” from the start and set up ownership structures that support everyone. Flexible layouts, with extra rooms, double primary bedrooms, accessory dwelling units and adaptable spaces are increasingly popular, she says.

One thing that I haven’t seen in the WSJ: a celebration of the normalcy of mixed-sex polygamy. Three women: good/wholesome/normal. Three men: good/wholesome/normal. One man and two women: no representation. I asked ChatGPT to write a story in the WSJ style:

In a fictional suburban vignette that reads like a zoning-board case study, an American-born Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed finds his tidy life colliding with global custom.
His wife, Donna Jones, a blonde convert to Islam, embraces the faith with a zeal that extends beyond the couple’s split-level home.
After a family decision made oceans away, she sponsors the arrival of a second wife from Somalia, turning belief into blueprints.
Suddenly the household needs more than harmony; it needs square footage.
An architect is hired to add bedrooms, rework entrances, and persuade the local code book to tolerate an unconventional floor plan.
Neighbors whisper, contractors measure, and the mortgage grows, a familiar American story with unfamiliar terms.
For Mr. Mohammed, born here and fluent in the rhythms of suburbia, the expansion tests the elastic limits of assimilation.
For Ms. Jones, the renovation is a practical expression of conviction, drywall standing in for doctrine.
The second wife’s arrival brings cultural translation alongside luggage, as daily routines are renegotiated room by room.
In this imagined tale, the clash is less about faith than about permits, proving that in America even private lives must pass inspection.

Note that it completely fails in the task in the first sentence. The WSJ news story disclaims itself as “fictional” when we know that everything in the WSJ is factual. Let’s see if Grok does better.

In the quiet suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota, Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed, a 42-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Minneapolis, has quietly become a case study in the evolving boundaries of American family life. Mr. Mohammed, a successful logistics manager, married Donna Jones, a blonde former Lutheran schoolteacher who converted to Islam in 2015, in a ceremony that drew little attention at the time. Last year, Mr. Mohammed traveled to Somalia and returned with a second wife, Fatima Hassan, 29, who holds a valid spousal visa under U.S. immigration law. The couple’s three-bedroom colonial home, purchased in 2018, soon proved too small for the expanded household, which now includes four children from Mr. Mohammed’s marriages. Local architect Sarah Kline was hired to design a $320,000 addition featuring a separate wing with its own entrance, kitchenette, and private bedroom suite for Ms. Hassan, preserving what the family describes as “cultural harmony” while respecting the existing household’s privacy. Ms. Jones, who works part-time as a Quran tutor, told neighbors the arrangement reflects “mutual respect and shared faith,” though she acknowledged the adjustment has been challenging. The project has drawn scrutiny from the city’s zoning board, which approved the addition after confirming it complies with local building codes, but some residents have quietly expressed unease about polygamy’s presence in their community. Legal experts note that while polygamous marriages are not recognized for civil purposes in the U.S., the arrangement remains lawful as long as only one union is registered with the state. Mr. Mohammed declined to comment for this article, citing a desire to keep his family’s private life out of the public eye. The addition, expected to be completed next spring, stands as a tangible symbol of how immigration, faith, and personal choice are reshaping the American suburban landscape in unexpected ways.

Note that the story becomes primarily about the narrow-mindedness of non-Muslim Americans and the scourge of Islamophobia. The prompt didn’t say anything about neighbors being upset:

Write a 10-sentence article in Wall Street Journal style about American-born Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed married to a blonde convert to Islam, Donna Jones, who brings a second wife over from Somalia and an architect has to expand their house to accommodate the new wife.

Related:

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George Foreman, Rob Reiner, Frank Gehry, and other losses in 2025

by philg

As we prepare to celebrate 2026 let’s look back on some losses in 2025.

Brigitte Bardot, an icon of pre-Islamic French feminine beauty, died at 91. Still-funded-with-federal-tax-dollars, but in no way “state-sponsored” NPR:

In her 2003 book, Un Cris dans le Silence, she disparages immigrants, gays, French schools and contemporary art. She called Muslims “invaders” and railed against the killing of animals in the name of religion. She apologized in court in 2004 but also doubled down on what she called the “infiltration” of France by Islamic extremists.

(The percentage of France’s population who follow Islam is approximately double what it was in 2003.)

Here’s my favorite image from this New York Times collection. Just look at the beautiful golden hair (also, the lady in the photo looks okay):

Maybe we need to watch The Truth (nominated for an Academy Award back before the Academy banned movies made by white people)?

George Foreman, the oldest person to ever win the world heavyweight championship, died at 76. The father of 12 was also a big Donald Trump supporter, as it happens. The eponymous grill was actually developed by Michael Boehm and Bob Johnson. The latest version (Chinese-engineered?) might be an engineering miracle since they say it can be thrown into the dishwasher and also that it is nonstick. I don’t know how that is possible given that dishwasher detergent is abrasive (Google AI: “dishwasher detergents are chemically and physically abrasive, designed with strong alkaline ingredients and sometimes mild scouring agents to break down tough food, fats, and stains, which is great for dishes but can damage delicate items like knife edges, aluminum, and wood handles over time. While gels are generally less harsh, powdered and tablet detergents often contain stronger abrasives, making handwashing best for items you want to keep pristine”). Maybe we can credit Foreman as a miracle worker?

On the opposite side of sentiment regarding Donald Trump, Rob Reiner was murdered by his son, a sad example of heritability of personality. Reiner was addicted to hating Donald Trump and paranoid about what might happen if Trump were to become or continue as President. The son was also an addict and, apparently, paranoid, but with a different addiction and a different target for his paranoia. Big Five personality characteristics, such as conscientiousness, are heritable at about 50 percent. Abnormal personality, such as schizophrenia, is heritable at an even higher rate (maybe 80 percent).

Prunella Scales, who appeared in Fawlty Towers, died at 93. Maybe we need to re-watch the show?

Frank Gehry died at 96, which is how I learned that he was born “Frank Goldberg”. Imagine if his career in architecture were starting today and all of the far-wilder stuff that he would likely do with 3D printing. A photo taken of the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles after picking up a Robinson R44 helicopter:

(Remember that Jews sunk the Titanic, a magnificent ship that Arab-Palestinian engineers created. The perpetrators were Goldberg, Rosenberg, and Iceberg.)

James Watson, dead at 97, was the only famous person who died this year with whom I was personally acquainted. I remember him as being passionate about the potential for the World Wide Web to transform education at a time when hardly anyone in academia was interested. Maybe the hoped-for transformation is finally upon us with AI? (Watson was canceled for revealing his belief that genetics is a key determinant of intelligence and that there isn’t any reason to expect the same median IQ in different races of humans.)

The toughest loss for me was, of course, that of my mother (see Obituary of Regina Greenspun, 1934-2025).

Readers: I hope that you didn’t lose anyone you loved in 2025 but that if you did you will spend some time today remembering them.

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Happy Kwanzaa

by philg

Happy Kwanzaa to everyone. Our Kwanzaa Bush decorated with an ornament we received as a gift from a neighbor:

The Democrat who runs New Jersey reminds us that this is the time for white men to cosplay as Maulana Karenga (“convicted of felony assault, torture, and false imprisonment of women”).

For Christmas Eve, on which a lot of Legacy Americans celebrate the birth of a baby, the same governor celebrates funding abortion care for babies:

A photo from a year ago at a Palm Beach County library:

The library also reminds us that Kwanzaa coincides with HIV/AIDS Awareness Month:

Let’s remember that how important this was to Kamala Harris’s family growing up.

Also from a year ago, the library’s new nonfiction books:

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Why aren’t we seeing a resurgence of voluntary communism within the U.S.?

by philg

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!

The Roman World into which Jesus was born was a pure market economy. Property was private, taxes were ridiculously low by modern standards (perhaps 1-5% of income), and government-provided welfare was negligible. The New Testament describes a Christian community that voluntarily opted out of the Roman economic and political system:

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.

There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.

Acts 4:32, 34

We’re told that socialism and communism are enjoying renewed popularity in the U.S. Young progressives love Bernie Sanders and the Ayatollah Mamdani.

It’s perfectly possible to set up a voluntary communist or at least communalist society in the U.S. See, for example, Amana, Iowa: 75 years of communal living, in which people lived without private property embedded within a capitalist society.

Why aren’t at least some young progressives living their dream via voluntary contract?

Loosely related… Jupiter Mayor Jim Kuretski’s house, Christmas 2021:

Related:

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The lazy Floridian’s Halloween and Christmas lighting

by philg

Happy Official Beginning of Christmas Season for those who celebrate. (I guess younger Americans think it is okay to decorate for Christmas even before Thanksgiving.)

Gretchen Wilson and lyricist John Rich in “Redneck Woman”:

And I keep my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long

It turns out that HOAs aren’t huge fans of this approach. Traditionally people get cheap strings of outdoor-rated lights and put them up themselves or hire professionals to do it for $thousands. The light strings then have to come down after New Year’s. The typical Florida house, however, is built with a lot of exterior light sockets. There are recessed cans underneath loggias, for example, and the typical house has plenty of loggias where people can sit outside in the shade. There will be some sort of front entrance light, perhaps coach-style lights with candelabra bulbs. There may be flood light sockets that can hold PAR38 bulbs.

Why not turn the house itself into the holiday light display? Replace all of the existing bulbs and recessed trims with RGB WiFi, Zigbee, and/or Thread bulbs? This is a report on our 2025 mostly-Govee solution.

We opted for an all-WiFi approach because we wouldn’t have to plug in a bridge, e.g., the one required by Philips Hue. Also, we have reasonably good WiFi coverage even outdoors thanks to TP-Link Omada (still going strong after 3.5 years, though it doesn’t even try to do most of the stuff that Unifi offers to do).

The front of our house has 6 candelabra bulbs that we replaced with Govee ($10/bulb). The 8 recessed cans we filled with Govee trims at $30 each. Govee, unfortunately, doesn’t make anything in PAR38 so we got Feit RGB WiFi bulbs at $15 each. For a table lamp inside we replaced a three-way bulb with a $20 Govee 1200 lumen RGB bulb. We already had some entryway recessed bulbs (BR40 and BR30) on the Philips Wiz system (their ghetto-level WiFi bulbs for people who don’t want to invest in Hue). I installed everything myself after borrowing a neighbor’s ladder for the floods and had it all connected up in less than two hours, including setting on/off schedules for each group of bulbs.

For a little more visual pizazz we indulged in two Govee light strips ($120 each for 100′) that we can hide in the bushes, but will likely have to roll up and store until next fall in order to keep them safe from the landscapers. These required some extra work because their power supplies aren’t waterproof so I purchased waterproof boxes from Home Depot. Finally, I tried to find a use for a 50′ string of Govee “permanent outdoor lights”, intended for under-eave attachment, that I’d previously tried out around a loggia in a failed experiment. These too have a non-weatherproof power supply.

The Govee app has a few built-in holiday schemes and, of course, lights can be infinitely customized by the patient or simply set to a solid color of one’s choice. Loyal readers won’t be surprised to learn how disappointed I was that there is no Pride festival scheme.

The Feit app is more basic and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have even a Christmas scheme. The Wiz V2 app is perhaps somewhere in the middle in terms of power/complexity. It probably makes the most sense to stick with either all-Govee or, if money is no object, Philips Hue.

How did it work out? The flood lights ended up being a mistake. A bright light of color (not a hateful “colored light”) pointing at the viewer’s face isn’t useful. We got plunged into a world of tech support hell with the WiFi Govee lights after an Omada outdoor access point failed and we let the TP-Link tech support folks in to change a bunch of roaming settings. The Govee lights don’t work well if the WiFi network is trying to be clever about supporting roaming and optimizing the access point selection for each device. Probably it is smarter to user Matter over Thread or Zigbee (Philips Hue) and thus have just one hub that is a WiFi client. Many of the Govee devices are compatible with Thread, though not fully controllable using their app via Thread.

Our neighbor’s awesome house, mostly done with inexpensive non-WiFi stick-in-the-ground 12V lights (handheld RGB control):

Our house, using primarily the sockets it was built with (we can’t take credit for the lion statues; they were installed by a previous owner!):

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Today’s resilient children and the Addams Family

by philg

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate (i.e., everyone in Florida, to judge by the AI Data Center quantity of electricity that our neighbors are burning on lights and animatronics).

The somewhat spooky Addams Family was on TV from 1964-1966, the years in which President Lyndon Johnson was getting the U.S. into the temporary debacle of the Vietnam War and into long-term insolvency via Medicare, Medicaid, and other welfare state expansions (it’s not a “great society” if anyone has to work). The show was considered suitable for all ages, like pretty much everything else broadcast in prime time.

What about for today’s tender children? Sixty years after its original broadcast, the show is considered too challenging for children under 13. From Amazon Prime:

In researching this blog post, I discovered something remarkable: the Addams Family was originally a New Yorker magazine cartoon series (in the pre-all-Trump-hatred version of the magazine). From 1956:

Here’s something kids could learn from (Wikipedia):

The sudden cancellation in 1966 brought issues for Addams, as he faced a drop in income with the show no longer in development. His second wife Barbara Barb was a practicing lawyer who had engaged in “diabolical legal scheming” during their marriage, and had convinced Addams to sign over the rights to future television and film adaptations, as well as rights to some of his other cartoons. Following their divorce she remained in possession of these rights until 1991, when she sold them to allow development of the Sonnenfeld films. Addams could also no longer publish his comics in The New Yorker as Shawn’s ban remained in effect even after the television series concluded. Addams became bitter towards the magazine “for disowning his family”

(Charles Addams died childless. The above-cited marriage to the clever lawyer lasted two years.)

Loosely related, but I can’t help bragging about the Greenspun Family’s one brush with greatness… my father’s college classmate, Fred Gwynne, played Herman Munster. I don’t think that a scholarship student like my dad was invited to the same parties as the son of a Wall Street partner and a Fly Club member (“no Jews please”; the similar Porcellian Club’s first Jewish member was Jared Kushner, Harvard Class of 2003), but maybe they overlapped in a core class.

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Immigration kills pride in paying income tax?

by philg

It’s National Immigrants Day, perhaps known to Native Americans as “National Steal All the Land Day”.

Before the personal income tax Americans enjoyed a feeling of pride in their private charitable and community efforts. When a natural disaster occurred (see Climate Change Reading List: Johnstown Flood for an 1889 example) people knew that there was no FEMA and therefore they voluntarily contributed money, materials, and time to relief efforts and felt pride in helping their fellow Americans. One of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s “eliminate private property” proposal was that humans enjoy feeling generous and if you don’t have the option of voluntarily donating property then you are denied an opportunity to feel good.

In the 20th century we switched to a system of forced extraction for good works, especially during the Lyndon Johnson administration when Medicaid, food stamps, and other cradle-to-grave welfare programs were introduced. To the extent that these welfare programs were being spent on people for whom a taxpayer had some fellow feeling it might have been possible to feel pride in paying tax. Irving Berlin was famous for enjoying his role in contributing to American society via paying tax and the Treasury Department promoted a song that he wrote on the subject:

Some of the lyrics that today’s pro-Hamas Americans might not appreciate…

You see those bombers in the sky,

Rockefeller helped to build them,

So did I.

A thousand planes to bomb Berlin.

They’ll all be paid for, and I chipped in,

That cert’nly makes me feel okay.

Ten thousand more, and that ain’t hay!

I wonder if open borders has finished the process of killing any joy a typical American might feel in sending his/her/zir/their money to the IRS. Almost all of us agree that it is worth paying taxes to finance infrastructure construction, e.g., gasoline tax to build and maintain the Interstates. Some of us agree that it is worth keeping an American underclass on welfare for four generations or more. Very few of us, however, seem to be excited about providing migrants with taxpayer-funded housing, food, health care, etc. Some Americans would rather help the world’s unfortunate in situ at a vastly lower per-person cost (if we spend $1 trillion/year on welfare for immigrants and their descendants, for example, that’s $1 trillion that we can’t spend on relatively low-cost-per-person programs that would save vastly more lives if spent on poor people in poor countries). Some Americans are haters and don’t want to help foreigners other than via voluntary trade.

Lack of pride in paying taxes seems to be a factor in state-to-state moves. Quite a few of our neighbors say that they moved from California or the Northeast because they didn’t agree with what their state and local governments were spending money on, e.g., race discrimination (“DEI”), gender-affirming surgeries for teenagers, a fully funded work-free lifestyle for migrants, etc. Without taking the dramatic step of renouncing U.S. citizenship, though, and paying the associated exit tax, none of us can escape paying federal income tax (exception: moving to Puerto Rico). Therefore, the shift in government spending in favor of migrants wouldn’t motivate Americans to move but it could result in less life satisfaction.

Speaking for myself, the taxes that I most enjoy paying are the following:

  • property tax, despite the epic quantity, because Palm Beach County and Jupiter do great jobs with the schools, the roads, public safety, etc.
  • aviation fuel tax because I love airports and air traffic control
  • gasoline tax because I value being able to get from Point A to Point B on smooth roads without traffic jams (Florida accomplishes the smoothness, but nearly every part of the U.S. seems to be plagued with traffic jams)

I’m sure that there are some progressives in Maskachusetts who actually do love paying state and federal tax that funds a work-free lifestyle for migrants, but my suspicion is that overall our decision to open U.S. borders in 1965 was one that has made us significantly less happy with the 30-50% of our working lives that we spend working for the government’s benefit. Running an asylum-based immigration system has perhaps made the situation worse because tens of millions of the migrants currently resident in the U.S. never expressed any affinity for the U.S. or American culture. They just said that they were afraid of being killed or attacked in their home countries.

Related:

  • “The downside of diversity” (New York Times, 2007): “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The [Harvard] study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.”

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Grandson of the National Gallery donor is now funding the U.S. military

by philg

From the New York Times:

Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter. … A grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, Mr. Mellon was not a prominent Republican donor until Mr. Trump was elected. But in recent years, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

The article doesn’t mention that Grandpa Mellon was perhaps the greatest donor to the American people in the history of the nation. He gave his art collection and an endowment to establish the National Gallery of Art. He did this despite being the subject of what ChatGPT says what was a politically motivated tax fraud lawsuit by President FDR:

The government under FDR’s Treasury and Justice Department pursued a civil case (and attempted criminal charges) against Mellon for alleged under-reporting of income in 1931, improper loss transactions (“wash sales”) of stock, and questionable charitable deduction claims (e.g., an art collection transferred to a trust) that might reduce his tax liability. The case dragged on for years: a grand jury outside Pittsburgh declined to indict Mellon for fraud in 1934. In 1937, after Mellon’s death, the Board of Tax Appeals concluded there was “no doubt” the record did not sustain a fraud charge and found his trust and transfers to the art-trust valid. The government still obtained some additional taxes owing, but far less than originally sought.

His children Paul Mellon and Alisa Mellon Bruce were also major donors to the museum. Collectively they must have given money and artworks that are worth tens of $billions today. (Contrast to today’s billionaires who skip out on paying capital gains tax and send money straight to Africa.)

How about if we start a thank-you card-writing campaign? The $130 million donated is $130 million in taxes we won’t have to pay! (Yes, I recognize that all marginal federal spending can be considered additions to the debt rather than additions to collections from working Americans, but eventually taxpayers have to pay the debt unless it is inflated away to insignificance in our inflation-free Scientifically-managed economy.)

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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.

Related:

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