Proper burial for an aviator: Portal of the Folded Wings in Burbank

After a business trip to Pasadena, I caught a flight to Las Vegas (for 9 minutes of Formula 1) out of Burbank. On the way, I stopped at the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation. This 1924 structure is a fitting final destination for those who have tackled the challenges of flying. Here are some photos:

There is a Space Shuttle memorial in the front:

It’s California, so help yourself to whatever you want at CVS, Apple, or the Nike store, but don’t steal any flowers. That’s an actual “crime.”

Who are some of the people memorialized here?

John Moisant, who made it across the English Channel in a Blériot XI and died four months later on the site of the big New Orleans Airport shortly afterwards, and sister Matilde:

If you don’t mind your ashes being interred in a lockdown state, it looks as though there are still spaces available because folks who died recently are under the floor (I think):

I wonder if EAA could build something like this in Oshkosh. There is actually a cemetery right next to the airport:

Pricing at this cemetery is quite reasonable: $1,100 per plot.

If it’s just ashes, though, and a bronze plaque, maybe there could be a structure like this Portal almost anywhere within the annual EAA AirVenture event grounds or, perhaps, near the EAA Museum.

For aviators who did not appreciate lockdowns, perhaps there could be something like the Portal in the Florida Free State? Orlando has a rich aviation history, is 100′ above sea level in case Professor Dr. Greta #FreePalestine Thunberg, M.D., Ph.D. proves to be correct about future ocean height, and is a common destination for travelers who might wish to pay their respects to a departed aviator.

Who’s an expert on cemetery startups? If there are no full caskets/bodies, is it tough to get zoning approval? It could even be a monument with no ashes at all. Since the deceased were aviators, their ashes could be scattered in the air. Maybe airport management would then be happy to have it on airport grounds. Pay your respects, return your rental car, catch your flight out of MCO.

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Checking the COVID-19 Olympics scores for Florida and California ahead of the DeSantis v. Newsom debate

Governor French Laundry and Governor Science Denial are debating this evening. Let’s do a little pre-debate fact-checking. Americans have agreed that all of a society’s success can be measured by the society’s score in the COVID-19 Olympics. A society that achieved 0 COVID-tagged deaths by pushing all of its citizens into Hamas-style tunnels for 10 years (until a vaccine-style vaccine became available that definitively reduced deaths on a population-wide basis) would, for example, be celebrated as the best of all possible societies.

Lockdown-champ California starts off in the lead in the COVID-19 Olympics by having a lower COVID-19-tagged death rate. Once you adjust for the percentage of the population over 65, however, the death rates are about the same and the excess death rate may actually be higher in California (the CDC makes these data available, but somehow doesn’t bother to make it easy to compare states).

Where is SARS-CoV-2 having a field day right now? The CDC’s wastewater page:

The Science-denying Republican strongholds of Minnesota and Vermont are seriously plagued (God hates Republicans and loves #Science). California is moderately plagued and the plague level in Florida is “low”. In other words, if we accept that current Scientific dogma that humans, especially politicians and bureaucrats, are in charge of viruses, Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns, mask orders, forced vaccinations, school closures, etc. have resulted in a higher rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection than the Team Sweden approach that Ron DeSantis adopted in the summer of 2020 (see Ron DeSantis and Coronapanic for excerpts from the not-so-great man’s book).

I continue to maintain my position that Nikki Haley would be more likely to prevail over Joe Biden in November 2024 because Ron D doesn’t have the soothing optimistic tone that Americans love. For example, Americans want to believe that someone who hates Jews and loves jihad will do a 180-degree flip once exposed to suburban life in Michigan or Minnesota. Ron just says “no”:

(Possible influence for Ron D’s rejection of Immigration Dogma: Florida is where, in 2016 (prior to Ron DeSantis assuming the governorship), first-generation Afghan-American Omar Mir Seddique Mateen killed 49 people at a gay nightclub. Mr. Mateen came from a “moderate Muslim” family and had spent his entire 29-year life in the land of Diversity is Our Strength (TM).)

Loosely related:

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The wheels of justice move even slower than traffic in Los Angeles

“Under the 10 Freeway: Immigrant businesses scraped by while landlord dodged Caltrans” (Los Angeles Times):

Their landlord, Apex, owned by Ahmad Anthony Nowaid, had failed to pay rent on the 48,000-square-foot triangular lot at South Alameda and East 14th streets for more than a year, and owed $78,000, according to Caltrans, which sued the company for back rent in September.

The property was one of five that Caltrans was attempting to evict Apex and another Nowaid company from, including a plot along the 5 Freeway in Sun Valley and another a block away from the fire. All told, Nowaid owed about $620,000 to Caltrans in unpaid rent as of September, the agency said in court filings.

In April, court records say, a Caltrans employee visited the lot and told tenants to stop paying their rent to Apex as the state planned to evict the company.

Several tenants, including Serafin, said they stopped paying Nowaid this month after receiving notice from the court to appear for the lawsuit in December. They said that the moment they stopped paying rent, Nowaid threatened to lock the gates again.

The story is interesting because you’d think that the government would have great access to its own courts, yet a California state agency was apparently unable to use the California state courts to evict a nonpaying tenant. Via their strong tenants rights laws, Californians managed to flambée their own 10-lane freeway (not sure if freeway is masculine or feminine in French, but in California it can identify as any gender, presumably).

Separately, the headline references “immigrant businesses”. Diversity was supposed to be the freeway’s strength. The primary tenant was named “Ahmad”, an Arabic name that is a diminutive of “Mohammed”. The article describes the subtenants as immigrants from Mexico. As a group, they should have been super strong, yet the article describes the result as economically marginal.

“I lost everything,” Serafin said. “We are not educated people. Most of the people are people that crossed the border, work hard, or maybe grew up here. But we are working-class people. We break our back to barely make a good living.”

The triangular tract was chaotic, with no clear entrance or address, and with unhoused people living in tents and trailers outside its gates. Graffiti was scrawled around the perimeter. Inside, workers and equipment shared close quarters amid the stacks of pallets.

Serafin said fires regularly broke out in encampments around the property, but calls to police or for cleanups often went unheeded. He and others would sometimes pay homeless people $20 just to move away from their businesses.

“We’re living paycheck to paycheck,” said Jose Luis Villamil Rodriguez, 53, who had a mechanic stand under the freeway.

Maybe it works better for private landlords? An aviation friend owns some apartment buildings in California. He says to budget $80,000 to $200,000 in legal fees to evict a tenant who doesn’t pay rent and 1-2 years of time, but “if the word ‘Covid’ is mentioned they get 4 years.”

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Grand Theft Auto comes to life in Los Angeles

Someone torched a homeless encampment and a pallet storage facility underneath a 10-lane freeway, melting the guard rails and resulting in a shower of concrete that had been supporting the freeway. A gaming enthusiast striving for a high score in Grand Theft Auto? No. Real life in Los Angeles this weekend. The Daily Mail:

Coincidentally, our tender 8- and 10-year-olds were at a birthday party this weekend where the hosts brought in a “gaming truck” with Xbox. Their mom was supervising, saw Mario on the outside of the truck, and decided that it would be okay if the boys played “a racing game”. At dinner, the boys recounted the fun that they’d had smashing into buildings, running over criminals, stealing and punching, etc. “Were you playing Grand Theft Auto?” I asked. “Yes, that was the name of the game!” they responded.

I had always thought of Grand Theft Auto, which I’ve never played, as American. What other country has a lot of cars and social decay? Wikipedia, however, says that the creators are Scottish.

Proving that there is always balance in the universe, just as Los Angeles was being trashed by this fire San Francisco was being cleaned up. Also from the Daily Mail“Outrage as San Francisco boots vagrants off streets ahead of Xi Jinping visit – as California Governor Gavin Newsom admits woke city was only given polish to impress world leaders”:

  • In the span of a few days, the city scrubbed seven intersections in the notorious Tenderloin and South of Market – leaving the hotspots almost unrecognizable
  • Where tents were once propped up, sidewalks are clear and spotless. Locales where homeless once congregated are cleared, video from the sites shows
  • Hangouts along Mission Street and Market are no more, along with an open drug market that for over a year has been outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal building
  • Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted the clean-ups were only done to provide a good impression for visiting world leaders

Gavin Newsom said that the idea of a border wall was “a monument to stupidity” and “a distraction” when Trump proposed it. Here’s the new San Francisco border wall:

Let’s check on traffic in LA at 10:30 am on a Monday:

It doesn’t look worse than usual!

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Has California succeeded where Tranheuser-Busch and Target failed?

It’s been more than a month since Governor French Laundry signed a new California bill that revoked the state’s ban on taxpayer-funded travel to the Lands of the Deplorables (26 horrible states).

Hate is now okay, in other words? Not exactly. The new bill says that California taxpayers’ money will be used to eliminate hate in the 26 bad states via advertising: “creates a new public awareness project that will consult with community leaders to promote California’s values of acceptance and inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community across the country” (press release)

The marketing geniuses behind Target and Bud Light famously failed this summer at their stated goals of getting more Americans to embrace the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle or, at least, celebrate the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. The bureaucrats in Sacramento imagined that they will be more successful than the world’s highest-paid advertising experts.

Readers who live in formerly banned states: have you been reached by California’s public awareness project? If you were a hater, were you persuaded to stop hating?

Separately, I’m wondering if the ban revocation was timed to allow California elites to travel (on the taxpayers’ dime) to Austin, Texas for today’s Formula One race. Who’s watching the race on TV or in person? It might be fun to be a Formula One fan here in Florida if the organizers would schedule the Miami race for February or March rather than May (a time when a person should be paid to sit outdoors all afternoon, not pay $2,000 for the experience).

Separately, a Facebook friend in Maskachusetts is an attorney with a passion for Constitutional rights (which is why he continues to reside in a lockdown state?). He recently represented a woman who was attacked and ultimately sued by her wealthy suburban Boston neighbors for thoughtcrime. An excerpt from her lawsuit defense:

[one lawn sign displayed by the defendant] shows the words “PRIDEMONTH” and then the letters on each side of “PRIDEMONTH” fade out, to “PRIDEMONTH” to finally “DEMON” and on the last line, it says “Makes sense now.”

The judge was hostile to the Deplorable lady, and she told the defendant to stop sharing her political views, but ultimately couldn’t find a basis to rule in favor of the plaintiffs.

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The right wingers who fund Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns, DEI programs, gun safety laws, and welfare schemes

I’ve got my mother’s AOL account password and try to log in every day or two to clear out the spam, unsubscribe her from all of the scam mailing lists that she’s on, etc. Considering that mom says she’d vote for Joe Biden even if he were a mental vegetable and/or dead, it is a little strange that she is on rightwing.org‘s mailing list:

The folks behind this are bravely defending “the American way”:

Where are these rightwing warriors based?

Glendale, California! In other words, every day they are paying taxes to keep Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns, DEI programs, gun safety laws, and welfare schemes going.

I find this even harder to understand than my mom being on their list!

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Social justice in the Palo Alto high school

A friend sent me this assignment, recently given to students at the public high school in Palo Alto, California:

Let’s focus in on a few…

This is a little confusing. Racism explains why “Black and Latino men” are incarcerated at higher rates than other residents of the U.S. But how can racism explain why men are more likely to be incarcerated than people who identify with the other 73 genders recognized by Science?

What would happen to a student who cited Elizabeth Warren as an example?

This is the one that upsets me. Our house is 3 miles from the climate change-enhanced ocean, yet we are redlined by State Farm and excluded from homeowners insurance.

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California innovation: Gun safety freedoms

From Governor French Laundry:

I am in love with him/her/zir/them referring to these restrictions as “freedoms”.

Separately, I can’t figure out why the proposal is so weak. He/she/ze/they says these tweaks will “end our nation’s gun violence crisis”. But if the government continues to allow private citizens access to firearms, won’t there still be plenty of gun violence? Governor French Laundry promises to ban “civilian purchases of assault weapons”, but that still leaves approximately 6 percent of Americans in possession of an AR-15. If any one of those 6 percent wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, that’s high potential for gun violence!

Also, though Americans under 21 will be restricted by these freedoms from legally purchasing a gun, those 21+ will still be able to do so. Aren’t there enough Americans over 21 committing gun violence that we would still be suffering from a “gun violence crisis” even if nobody under 21 ever did any shooting?

Readers may recall Seal off criminal-rich neighborhoods to tackle the public health emergency of gun violence? in which residents of some neighborhoods would be locked down and walled off. Could being forbidden to leave the house/neighborhood also be considered a “gun safety freedom”?

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Cowering at home for three years as Burning Man prep

Most of the folks whom I’ve met at Burning Man (attended in 2014 and 2015) were California residents. Thus, some of the Americans who most enthusiastically embraced school closures and lockdowns have found themselves stuck for an extra day or two on the Playa. Cowering at home from 2020 through 2022 could be considered prep for this year’s Burning Man, in which the car gate was closed by authorities due to deep mud.

A couple of tweets from the organizers:

The airport closed on Saturday, supposedly, but there are no NOTAMs for 88NV in the official FAA system. An AvWeb story:

(Note the “shelter in place” phrase, mirroring the language of the San Francisco mayor in 2020: “Homeless individuals are not subject to the shelter in place order”)

From 2015, not the best leggings for mud… (my original caption: “Russian journalist”):

Maybe a good mud vehicle?

A hard “no” on this one:

This probably wouldn’t work either…

Related:

  • Burning Man for turboprop pilots (links to the rest of my photos)
  • the New York Times, which said that a 12-18-month lockdown was the best thing that ever happened to K-12 kids, now reports that a 2-day lockdown requires near-divine intervention: “By Sunday afternoon, a White House official said President Biden had been briefed on the situation and that administration officials had been in touch with state and local officials.”
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Who will sell me an office building in San Francisco?

Everyone agrees that the city of San Francisco is in a “doom loop” (see “San Francisco suffering ‘Doom Loop’ amid large vacancy rates” (NBC, August 16), for example). Based on an August 2, 2023 visit, I think it is time to buy!

Office space that used to rent for $80 per square foot per year is now selling for $120 per square foot for the entire building (source). If rental rates go back to where they were, in other words, a buyer could make his/her/zir/their money back in two years.

There is no question that San Francisco is suffering from a deep self-inflicted wound of shutting down during coronapanic, which emptied out the city as the elite righteous fled to their suburban bunkers. The children who lost 1.5 years of school will live shorter lives, statistically, due to their curtailed education, and also suffer from a lower lifetime income. But that suffering and those premature deaths are a long way off. Meanwhile, the negative economic effects of lockdown are already priced into the real estate in SF.

What about the disorder, crime, etc. that gets so much press? Those aren’t being addressed because the elite neighborhoods aren’t significantly affected. The elites don’t care what happens in the Tenderloin because they never go there. Similarly, the elites in government shouldn’t be starved for property tax revenue because of Proposition 13. The typical building in San Francisco has been owned for a long time and is paying property tax on a 2005 value, for example. Thanks to inflation and a period of sustained economic growth before coronapanic, nominal property values are still higher than the Prop 13 tax value for the typical building. Thus, if a building sells, even for half what it was worth in 2019, the city’s rulers get a boost in revenue.

My theory is that eventually the crime and disorder will begin to hurt the elites and they’ll fight back with an oppressive clean-up like what Giuliani did in 1990s New York City. California Democrats have already shown that they will disregard all of their stated principles, such as providing housing for the unhoused, when expedient. Thus, nothing would stop a California Democrat from rounding up all of the unhoused in San Francisco, exporting them to “protection camps” in the Central Valley, and prosecuting and imprisoning anyone who commits what today are considered minor crimes.

In other words, San Francisco peasants don’t have to wait for some kind of improvement in government efficiency or other unrealistic change. The peasants’ lives will improved just as soon as the elites’ lives are touched. This is the same mechanism that operated in 2020. The elites had insulated themselves from every conceivable bad thing. They had schedule flexibility so they didn’t have to share the jammed roads with peasants. Their neighborhoods were untouched by crime. They had private jets and helicopters so they could move around freely. Then SARS-CoV-2 came along, a virus that had the potential to kill both the rich and the poor. The elites took previously unthinkable actions, such as closing schools for peasant children, in hopes of saving their own skins. Sweeping through the city and removing anyone living in a tent is a much less difficult policy to implement than locking down peasants and their school-age children for 1.5 years.

What are the forces in San Francisco’s favor? The U.S. is headed for a population of 450 million (Pew), entirely driven by low-skill immigration. The U.S. hasn’t succeeded in building any new cities. With a larger population, therefore, the price premium for an existing city should increase. Existing cities are at the center of transportation systems.

The huge flaws in my argument: Detroit and Baltimore. Despite massive population growth for the U.S. as a whole, these cities remain poor and depopulated. The Rust Belt cities of Upstate New York and Ohio also can be considered counterexamples. I don’t have an argument for why San Francisco can’t become Detroit.

A potential flaw in my plan to get rich by purchasing an office building is that residential can come back without commercial coming back. The academics who provided the necessary intellectual cover for elite policy in 2020, by saying that work from home was actually more productive than in-office work (i.e., the companies that paid rent on office space were stupid) have now been drafted to say that work from home is 10-20 percent less efficient (paper from 2023 versus paper from summer 2020; same author at same institution, but different Science as necessary). If we believe the 20% number, therefore, even a company with moderately paid workers might find it efficient to pay 50 Bidies per square foot per year in rent (assume 200′ per worker, that’s $10,000 per worker per year).

Leaving Detroit and Baltimore aside, there has to be some price at which renting office space in the heart of a city is a smart business move. It can be used for light manufacturing, for shipping and distribution, for collaboration, for running 3D printers, etc. The most desirable workers to hire are the young, who typically don’t have big comfortable houses in which to spend all day every day. Escaping roommates and a dark apartment to look out the window of a skyscraper should have some value to a 25-year-old.

Readers who are closer to San Francisco than I am: what’s your guess about the future of the city’s office space market?

Let’s look at some photos…

One of my first images, after getting out of BART, is a building-sized quote from a trans person (originated in state-sponsored PBS):

The Westfield Mall does indeed seem troubled, but not dangerous:

The elites can still buy their Rolex watches in the neighborhood and IKEA opens TODAY to serve the peasants.

If you don’t like Swedish meatballs after shopping for no-longer-that-cheap furniture, you can get trans-enhanced-plus-intersex-circle chicken and rice:

I already covered my grip to the Transgender Cultural District in Tenderloin thoughts from San Francisco.

We circled back to find a Four Seasons Hotel next to some empty retail space and an ornate Hearst building:

Pedestrians are righteously masked outdoors while the robotaxis clumsily poke their way through traffic:

(Why wouldn’t a robotaxi company want office space?)

What if the Islamically covered folks in the above photo want to purchase a notebook?

Shopping at Target is a slightly different experience than what I found during a May 2023 visit in Bozeman, Montana. The store offers “secured shelves” that only employees can open. Shoppers were reminded at the rainbow-free front door that they needed to follow the orders of California Covidcrats, “including wearing a face covering,” but the majority of the folks inside the store were mask-free.

Our next stop was Fisherman’s Wharf. The Musée Mécanique displays a machine that associates providing and using opium with being Chinese:

There were plenty of vacant stores in what used to be a prime tourist area.

The tax-avoidance champions at Patagonia say that our home planet is imperiled. Like other climate change alarmists, they simultaneously fret about comparatively minor issues. If they think the Earth needs to be “saved”, as they write on their front window, why did they buy an “intersectional Pride flag” instead of a solar cell array? Won’t the manufacturing and shipping of the Pride flag actually accelerate climate change? If all humanity will be wiped out soon, along with the planet itself, does it matter whether their LGBTQ+ employees enjoy “equality” at the time that they’re incinerated?

My host lives in North Beach and can purchase equality-enhancing Patagonia clothing all day every day. What if he wants groceries? The Safeway shut down and then most of the other stores in the mini-mall died:

We headed west before my redeye flight from the Harvey Milk Terminal at SFO.

After enjoying observing outdoor masking in the city, we were treated to visions of outdoor masking in the woods:

The beach that would be busy with swimmers near our house was empty due to cold water and big waves:

My friend and I had a great meal at a Korean place (Toyose) in the Sunset:

(The clientele was about 90 percent Asian and the place was full at 8:30 pm on a weekday.)

Circling back to the main theme of this post…. San Francisco still has a lot of creative people who start companies. Space gets tighter in the U.S. with every immigrant who comes across the border. How can city’s real estate not recover?

What if wrong as usual and the righteous stay in the suburbs? (i.e., Detroit and Baltimore turn out to be the models, not Manhattan) Below is what I found on the coffee table of a Democrat who says that his #1 passion is helping people of color. As it happens, 20 years ago he chose to isolate his family from people of color by moving to Piedmont (just above Oakland and a world away as far as the schools are concerned).

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