The footprints of the destroyed buildings are preserved as memorials, surrounded by the names of those killed, starting with the 1993 parking garage jihad.
The museum is nearly all underground:
The museum has a lot of touch screens:
A cornerstone plaque was preserved, dedicated to the thousands of legacy Americans who constructed the World Trade Center:
Generally speaking, the destruction and deaths that occurred at the site are attributed to motive-free “terrorists” with no relationship to any religion. Example:
A drawing from Alexandra, age 3, whose father was killed in the not-related-to-Islam attacks:
The remains of Ladder Company 3’s truck were preserved:
All 11 members of Ladder Company 3 were in the North Tower when it collapsed and all were killed.
One fight that New Yorkers will apparently never give up on is the struggle against SARS-CoV-2. More than five years after coronapanic began, the “one person per bench” rule still applies:
The gift shop reminds us that most of the heroes of 9/11 were female:
Some were Canine-Americans:
We are reminded that “Love is Stronger than Hate”:
A last look at a tower foundation:
A few steps away, it’s back to the average New York City streetscape:
Many American Muslims have faced a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility since the Sept. 11 attacks … the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. But anti-Muslim prejudice still endures, echoing the Islamophobia that arose in the earliest days after Sept. 11.
“I think that day belongs to everyone who lived it and what came after belongs to a smaller group of us,” said Mr. Awawdeh, 39, who is now the president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition and a confidant of Mr. Mamdani. “That part of the story this country still has not told itself honestly.”
… backlash faced by high-profile Muslims in politics or the arts, and attacks on Islamic religious expression, including the construction of mosques and the wearing of religious clothing like hijabs.
“Muslim America now has a greater cultural footprint, more institutional power and a lot more support from allies, comrades and friends all throughout the country,” Mr. Dandia said. “Now when people think of Muslim America, they have names and faces they can point to.”
How many haters are there?
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this year, 43 percent of American adults said Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42 percent said Muslim Americans are having a negative impact on the country. When asked to explain their views, respondents often cited the Sept. 11 attacks.
In March 2002, 25 percent of American adults said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, but that number had risen to 51 percent in the survey conducted this year.
Who are the haters?
Those views have become highly polarized, with Republicans expressing far more negative views of Islam than Democrats, a change from after the attacks when supporters of both parties held similar views.
Let’s close with a fatwa from a scholar of the Quran and the Hadiths…
In addition to the expected terrifying rollercoasters there are a lot of music shows. One artist that you won’t hear too much, not even covers of her songs, is… Dolly Parton. She uses the park to showcase lesser-known musicians.
A great example of humility.
Loosely related, a Dolly Parton pinball machine, photographed at The Pinball Dudes, Jupiter, Florida (a great dealer), January 2023:
As in Maskachusetts (old law; updated recently as noted below), a pregnant person’s pregnancy can be terminated in Illinois at any gestational phase via abortion care if the pregnant person’s mental health can be thus protected . (Given that any child has the potential to “drive a parent crazy”, any pregnancy in any pregnant person can be subjected to abortion care at any time.) Here are the rules explained by the City of Chicago, which notes that “People of all gender identities need access to safe abortion care.”
The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry has an exhibit on “prenatal development” featuring preserved “specimens”:
The “specimens” can also be characterized as “fetuses”:
The museum strays from Illinois law and principles, however, in a slide show in which the legal-to-abort-at-any-time collection of cells is described as “another human being” or “this baby”:
ChatGPT’s mind is subtle enough to handle the apparent contradiction:
Yes, the exhibit uses “baby” in the ordinary prenatal sense, while Illinois law uses different categories for determining legal protection. That is a real linguistic tension, but not a formal legal contradiction. Immediately before delivery, a healthy 30-week fetus may colloquially be called a baby and could, under the statutory health exception, legally be subjected to an abortion intended to cause fetal death. Were the same child delivered alive instead, intentionally causing its death would not be abortion care and could be prosecuted as murder.
Under current Massachusetts law, abortion is legal for the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. It is allowed after that only if a physician using best medical judgment says it is necessary to preserve the life, physical or mental health of the woman, because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis or because the fetus wouldn’t likely survive outside the uterus.
Under the new language, abortion would be legal at any point in pregnancy for any reason. It would leave it to health care providers whether or not to perform an abortion.
The state Senate adopted the measure Friday, sending it to Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, who has signed other laws strengthening abortion rights.
The governor is a childless white women. She’s surrounded by apparently white women whose average total fertility is statistically minimal. The progressive overlords couldn’t find any token People of Color to help them celebrate the expanded abortion care availability?
Related:
Kermit Gosnell, a Black man unjustly imprisoned in Pennsylvania for conduct that, with minor tweaks, would have been perfectly legal in Maskachusetts both before and after this new law
Happy National Financial Awareness Day to those who celebrate…
We had a family discussion about the possibility that even successful people might be forced to work, e.g., to pay for a child’s college expenses. “It doesn’t matter how much you earn,” I told the kids. “It is always possible to spend every last penny.” They dispute this. I cited examples of second and third homes, of first class airline tickets to Europe, of expensive cars and watches.
The very next day, I ran into a neighbor who had purchased a Porsche 911 GT3 Touring the day before (i.e., while our family discussion was occurring). “The dealer called me and said he had a white and gold one in stock,” said the new owner. “My initial thought was to reject the color, but I went over to see it and came home with it.” In other words, an impulse decision to spend $300,000(?).
(As far as I know, this purchase won’t put any financial strain on the owner, but I thought it was a funny coincidence!)
Meanwhile, any news on the 2020 Tesla Roadster? If it had been delivered as promised would the early ones already be ready for the lithium-ion scrap heap?
Happy World Population Day, except to Elon Musk who says that humans are going extinct and should have more children, while simultaneously Elon refuses to make a Tesla self-driving minivan. In honor of this glorious day, set up after the Earth’s population reached 5 billion in 1987 (due to population collapse, Earth now has only about 8.2 billion humans (or maybe 10 billion)) , let’s take a look at a population on the other side of an ocean from us…
Gemini says Climate Change is real. Prompt and answer:
Is Climate Change real from a European perspective? I.e., is Europe hotter than it was 50 years ago and is it almost certain to become yet hotter 50 years from now?
Yes and yes. From a data-driven, scientific perspective, the physical reality of climate change in Europe matches both of your conditions.
When I asked Gemini “Create a poster for Americans to show solidarity with European heatwave victims by turning their thermostats up from 72 to 74” (no mention of skin color), it produced the following:
Note that the U.S. is a mixture of skin tones while everyone in Europe seems to be nonwhite. Could this reflect Gemini’s belief that European leaders have chosen a Climate Change adaption strategy of replacing their heat-intolerant subjects with imports from Africa and the Middle East who are, presumably, accustomed to hot weather.
Note closely related, but I love the “feels like the inside of a McDonald’s Apple Pie” phrase:
Even though France is experiencing a heatwave that feels like the inside of a McDonald's Apple Pie, the Minister of Ecology is firmly against air conditioning.
Stingy bitch Monique Barbu said that A/C does nothing to address climate change and people should adapt to global… pic.twitter.com/0kyDoQOx2r
Also, European Union regulations require that animals being transported cannot be exposed to a temperature higher than 30C, perhaps with a +5C tolerance. The European Food Safety Authority, however, says that horses cannot be exposed to temperatures higher than 25C (i.e., about 20C cooler than temps inside upper-floor Paris and Berlin apartments when it was 40C outside?).
Let’s celebrate America at 250. What have we accomplished as a people, working together, that is great? Let’s leave out our military heroics because those are regularly celebrated in statuary, political speeches, etc. Let’s leave our literature because books are usually written by one person. Same deal with software, much of which is substantially created by small teams. In the comments, please leave what you think we’ve done that has done the most good for humanity overall outside of military.
I’ll go first: integrated circuit fabrication. While the transistor was developed by a small team, including Nobel laureate William Shockley, who later set up Silicon Valley, and the IC itself was invented by Jack Kilby, it literally takes a village to fabricate ICs in significant quantities.
What are some resources that we can use to teach tweens and teens about the miracle of birth (of their smartphones)? Here are some with promise…
From our brothers and sisters in Korea (indirect shout-out to the U.S. military since the South Koreans probably wouldn’t be fabbing chips today if not for our willingless to cooperate and sacrifice as a society in the military domain):
A high school kid who built a fab in his parents’ garage and, after attending CMU (“the school that actually builds instead of talks”), runs his own semiconductor company (example of American suburban greatness; Europeans don’t have A/C and they don’t have garages so Sam Zeloof’s counterparts in the Old Country wouldn’t have been able to do this):
Happy birthday to us and maybe readers will come up with an even better idea for something that Americans working cooperatively can take pride (not “Pride”) in!
What did I reject? Air conditioning, even though Carrier World HQ is a few minutes’ drive from our house and A/C has enabled people to work hard and achieve in parts of the world where that was never previously possible, because it was mostly achieved by one person. I also rejected aviation, even though the U.S. did a lot at the systems level (airports, radio comms, air traffic control, etc.) because there were contemporaneous efforts in other nations as well. I rejected spaceflight because the Russians started it and the impact on humanity from our headline space achievements has been limited (communications satellites have had a huge impact, of course, but we weren’t the first to put a radio station in orbit). I rejected politics because most countries that have a U.S.-style government, rather than a parliamentary system, have devolved into dictatorships.
(What did our AI Overlords suggest? ChatGPT: “Immigration and assimilation at massive scale”. Gemini: “Eradicating Disease & Public Health Breakthroughs” (absurd; all of medicine relies heavily on European biology, especially German) and “The Interstate Highway System” (guess which German got there first?); Grok: “Genome sequencing and biotech” (how much benefit has humanity actually derived from this? where exactly in America was Francis Crick born?); Claude: “The development of the polio vaccine (Salk and Sabin)” (“American” Albert Sabin was a Polish Jew born “Abram Saperstejn”; Salk was an American Jew, but how many collaborators did either of these guys need? This wasn’t a collective achievement) and “The long, hard-won expansion of civil rights” (absurd, since we’re informed that DEI remains essential due to rampant discrimination and a lack of civil rights, e.g., Republicans preventing nonwhite Americans from voting by requiring ID) and “The Interstate Highway System” (Claude says that it was only “influenced by Hitler” and not “inspired by Hitler” so I guess that’s okay to label as 100% American).)
Happy July 4: Why doesn’t Congress do anything? (representative of my non-250th July 4th output, from 2018) “We celebrate our traitorous rebellion against a legitimate government so that we could govern ourselves and yet it does not seem that our current government is any more responsive to the people than was King George III and his Parliament. Politicians ask for our votes by saying that the current set of laws and/or implementations of laws is intolerable. Yet once they get elected and the paychecks begin to flow they don’t seem inclined to change anything.”
Music for the day, by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (2021 performance). Wokipedia says that Gottschalk was rejected by the Paris Conservatoire not for his Jewish background, but because he was American and “America is a country of steam engines”. (Ironic that in the subsequent the U.S. not only ran away with industry, but also with dominance of the music world. The French turned out to be comparative failures at both industry and culture.)
Back in 2023 I wondered Where are the gardens and museums created by the Silicon Valley rich? That’s still a good question, in my opinion. Elon Musk is a trillionaire. In addition to voluntarily paying whatever taxes Elizabeth Warren deems fair, why hasn’t he built off-the-charts open-to-the-public gardens near his spaceports? It’s Elon Musk’s birthday today so maybe he will decide to think about the little people for once…
Earlier in June 2026, we visited the Bloedel Reserve, a 140-acre garden surrounding a fancy house that was all built by a lumber executive and his wife. It’s on Bainbridge Island, a suburb of Seattle made possible by the ferry system.
After they got too old to really use it, they turned it over to the public. Walk through the swamp:
Then over the bridge:
Then through the ferns:
Then arrive at what passed for a “mansion” in the days before trillionaires:
If you’re not a Floridian insistent on warm water, it’s a beautiful view from their back yard:
Everyone needs a Japanese tea house and garden to accompany it:
Speaking of Japanese, how about a moss garden like Saihō-ji in Kyoto?
Land Acknowledgement
The nonprofit that runs the garden admits that the land is stolen. Instead of giving it back to the rightful owners, however, they will somehow “honor” the rightful owners by charging everyone, including the rightful owners, $29 to enter (or $1 for those on welfare who show up with their SNAP card). Reserve in advance because they limit the number of people per hour who enter, a coronapanic innovation that they decided to maintain (or maybe they’re still trying to promote social distancing?).
Who is today’s Anti-Bloedel? I nominated succcessful divorce plaintiff MacKenzie Scott Bezos. Wokipedia says that she gave $26.3 billion to various non-profit organizations, including universities, since 2020. This money, nearly 100% of which was unrealized capital gains, was never taxed by the U.S. Treasury or Washington State (with its fresh new capital gains tax that gave us Jeff Bezos, the Starbucks billionaire who said he wanted to pay more tax, et al.), has apparently disappeared without even a ripple in the waters of the various lakes of crises facing the U.S. Perhaps some nonprofit executives have enjoyed higher salaries as a consequence, but the issues she claimed to care about at the outset of her giving (“racial equality, LGBTQ+ equality, democracy, and climate change”) have all gotten worse. Elon Musk ran away with all of the money and he isn’t Black. Scott Weiner, who represents the full Rainbow Flag spectrum, was recently attacked in San Francisco. Donald Trump was elected to a second term as President (proof that “democracy” doesn’t exist in the U.S.). Climate change, as evidenced by the fully baked Europeans, has gotten far worse. If Sam Bankman-Fried was an “effective altruist” maybe MacKenzie Scott Bezos can be characterized as an “ineffective altruist”? Or maybe altruism simply isn’t effective in the aggregate?
Here’s hoping that MacKenzie Scott Bezos will build herself a magnificent mansion with gardens and, following her death in 2070 (she identifies as female and, therefore, due to all of the disadvantages that women suffer, is likely to live only to age 100), will donate it to the public.
White-collar men in the 1950s often characterized their world as a “rat race”. If college-educated, they competed with only a small subset of Americans for high-paid desk jobs. Men in the 50s did not compete with immigrants because substantial importation of humans into the U.S. stopped in 1924, not to be restarted until President Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 (see below). A house in a safe suburb with good schools and A/C could be purchased, at the end of the 1950s, for about one quarter the cost today (in real dollars; see $112/month to live in a brand-new house in Bowie, Maryland). Relative to income, a house cost about 1.7X annual salary vs. over 5X today (ChatGPT table below). Partly due to this low cost for housing in a safe suburban neighborhood with decent schools ($1+ million today?), a man’s income was generally sufficient to support a wife and 2-3 children as well as himself. Sex outside of marriage was discouraged both legally and socially and, therefore, the man would usually be married before age 25. No-fault divorce (“unilateral” in research parlance) did not exist and, therefore, if the man wasn’t behaving outrageously (beating the wife, drinking heavily, failing to work, having affairs), the wife couldn’t profit via a divorce lawsuit (a divorce might be arranged by mutual agreement, of course). In addition to marital security, the 1950s man often enjoyed a lot of job security from (1) the lack of competition in the labor market, and (2) the tendency of large companies to provide lifetime jobs, which today is limited to government work.
What’s the correct term for what similar men face today? They inhabit a world in which you can’t spit in the street without hitting a college graduate. Men must compete with women for jobs and, despite women being more likely to earn college degrees, be passed over for hiring or promotion when a company decides that “diversity” is its strength. If a female or favored minority human competitor doesn’t take the white-collar man’s job, Claude is ready to replace him. The companies that once offered native-born Americans jobs for life are now home to platoons of H-1B “non-immigrant” immigrants.
A house in a neighborhood with low crime, an orderly familiar culture, and good schools, is about 10X the median college graduate’s income (5X for houses overall, but the typical suburb is no longer a white picket fence idyll). A college education for the kids, so that they can get into the “rat race” that the parents ran, is now 5X more expensive state colleges and 9X more expensive at elite Queers for Palestine-type schools . (ChatGPT on the history of federal government programs to make college more affordable: “GI Bill for veterans in 1944, first general federal student loans in 1958, major modern federal aid framework in 1965, and Pell-style direct grants in 1972/1973”)
Where in the 1950s he likely partnered with a virgin aged 20 (ChatGPT says 10-25% of 1950s brides might have had sex with someone other than their fiancé/husband), today he’s with a 30-year-old veteran of the sexual revolution. If he is persuaded to marry her, she can sue him for divorce a day later for any reason or for no reason. For men who strayed in the 1950s and got sued for a “fault divorce”, the resulting financial drain was primarily alimony and it lasted only a few years because the plaintiff would remarry and that shut down the alimony revenue stream. The risk of losing his role as a father was controllable due to the requirement that a plaintiff find a “fault” ground, such as infidelity. If a man gets sued today because the wife found someone she likes better, the man can lose his “father” role, and access to the young people who used to be his children, due to factors entirely beyond his control. The man’s biggest financial exposure in a divorce lawsuit is typically “child support” (paid to an adult female to spend on whatever she wants, not to a “child”), which can last for 23 years (Massachusetts) or 21 years (New York) even if the plaintiff has married her lover and that lover earns far more than the defendant and even if the lover is the biological father of the child (nytimes: “I pay child support to a biologically intact family, a father and mother, married, who live with their own child.”). (In the cases where alimony is the primary profit from a divorce lawsuit, the defendant might be paying for 50 years because there is no longer any social pressure for the plaintiff to remarry. She can have sex with 100 men and write a magazine article about the “single MILF” lifestyle and this has no impact on her cash entitlement.)
This is not to say that American in the 1950s was better overall, of course. We had been starved of enrichment via immigrants since 1924 and, therefore, weren’t as strong under the “diversity is our strength” axiom. We didn’t have Internet or LLMs for personal use. A 1950s car, though beautiful in our museums today, came out of the factory as a junk heap compared to a 3-year-old Toyota today. We had three TV channels to watch on a 21″ CRT. But in terms of career security and personal life security, the 2020s are inferior to the 1950s. So, returning to the title question… if the 1950s were a “rat race” for white-collar men, how would we characterize the situation today?
Loosely related…
I really want to find a wife but man where do I even look?
All the girls I work with are whores.
All the girls from my university are whores.
All the girls I meet on tinder are whores.
Where do I even look?
Being born in Gen Z is the worst experience ever.
I’d gladly give…
— The Right Wing Patriot (@DavidRobinr0) June 22, 2026
A post on X from an offensively titled username so I’ll just copy the text:
White Americans and Europeans are the ONLY people worldwide that are EXPECTED to compete with the ENTIRE world for jobs.
50+ years ago White men with STEM degrees got good jobs. Things like engineering or applied mathematics guaranteed a good career.
Now we are required to compete against not just our own people, but the brown and black hordes worldwide that are willing to work for pennies.
It was an ECONOMIC CRIME committed against our people.
(I post this not for the truth or falsehood of what the author writes, but for the expression of a feeling of insecurity and, therefore, pressure even worse than the rat race of 50 years ago.)
Americans have collectively decided, through our elected representatives, to boost U.S. population to Chinese/Indian levels, mostly via low-skill immigration:
Democrats now agree with Republicans, apparently, that cheap oil/gas is desirable and that Climate Change (TM) need no longer be fought by cutting CO2 emissions.
If the heat in the Lower 48 becomes unbearable and the seas inundate Boston, New York City, DC, Miami, and other major coastal cities, Alaska seems like a natural evacuation destination. There is plenty of high ground in mountainous Alaska and the weather is pleasantly cool all year along the coast. The all-time record high for Juneau is 90 degrees, set in July 1975, and the average daily high temp for Juneau in July is 63.
One critical problem with life in the low-density parts of SE Alaska is transportation. Today’s airplanes typically can’t fly in the 0/0 foggy conditions that often plague this part of the country. There isn’t a high enough population density to support frequent nonstop flights among the various towns, nearly all of which are cut off from any road network, e.g., due to being on islands. The fabled Alaska Marine Highway (see Chapter XII of Travels with Samantha) is expensive and infrequent, perhaps partly due to the Jones Act that requires them to use U.S.-built vessels and that prevents an Asian-run company from offering competitive service. Below, the Alaskan-built MV Hubbard (cost $60 million in pre-Biden dollars; a “dayboat” that holds 53 cars; launched 2019):
What about a machine that can fly itself the 40-80 nm. legs that are required to get around this part of the world and that can navigate safely around terrain via reference to GPS and a database? That’s the autonomous electric aircraft (vertical takeoff and landing isn’t necessary, actually, since nearly all of these places have high-quality airports/runways, but eVTOL would work). Could that encourage more Americans (and “New Americans”) to settle in this part of the U.S.? Want to see a friend or shop? That will be a 20-minute flight. Need to see a medical specialist? The regional hospital in Juneau can be reached easily and you’ll be home in time for dinner. Need to be evacuated to Seattle or Anchorage for specialized hospital care? That’s done with a 20-minute electric air ambulance ride followed by a jet flight.
We’ve already seen this trend to some extent with islands for the rich. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket weren’t beyond peasant means until private jet ownership became common. A house near ACK had no value to a rich Texas family until the rich Texans got their Gulfstream and could fly directly to ACK rather than flying commercial to Boston and taking a piston-powered airplane or the road+ferry.
