Category: Florida

American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, Florida (Paging Bernie and AOC)

by philg

The American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, Florida is open to the public only on rare occasions. October 3, 2026 was a car show and fundraiser for the Lion’s Club and the rabble were admitted for $30 per adult (our kids got in free). It’s an amazing collection that cries out for an intervention by our political thought-leaders. Mark Pieloch, a dog pharma and supplement flavoring tycoon, decided that he needed to own about 30 Ford GTs, nearly all of them from the two modern reboot (of the GT40) generations and nearly all of them with less than 30 miles on the odometer. (Note that I don’t think it is reasonable to call the Ford GT a “Ford”. They’ve been produced by contract manufacturers, e.g., Mayflower Vehicle Systems and Multimatic. Contrast to the Corvette ZR1X, an insanely powerful machine that is built in a regular GM factory that also makes the humbler versions of the Corvette (even the humblest version is “insanely powerful”, though, when you consider realistic public road situations).)

Here’s the first room. The 2020 Ford GT in the foreground has 24 miles on the clock. A 1966 GT40 rotates on the turntable in the center of the modern GTs. A museum employee said that it had cost $9 million.

Just one ring of recent GTs, then? No. There are a couple of additional rows of them, e.g.,

Viewed from the other side of the room:

We’re talking about a Gulfstream G700 hangar, essentially, entirely filled with the latest generation of Ford GTs, nearly all of which have never been driven. Is that collecting or hoarding? Either way, I feel that it is time for Bernie and AOC to step in. Just as Bernie reminds us that nobody needs more than three houses, I think that we can all agree that nobody needs more than 3 pristine never-driven modern Ford GTs. One never-driven GT is a sculpture. Two more could be backups. But the 4th one? That’s intolerable inequality and, dare I say it, billionaire greed!

If we walk deeper into the museum, we find an entire row of the 2005ish GTs:

Directly across the aisle, a 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder. The window sticker is still stuck: $915,000 (in pre-Biden dollars!). How much practical value has been delivered by this machine? 32 miles worth. (ChatGPT says that Car and Driver got better numbers out of the Porsche 918 than they did out of the 2017-2022 Ford GTs, which sold for substantially less.)

That’s a G-Wagen in the back. Here’s some Gemini output that makes me wonder what Google has been feeding its AI:

In Palm Beach, Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons function like a chronological alimony registry. You can pinpoint exactly when a settlement was finalized based on the specific body style and dashboard layout of the G-Class she is driving:

Speaking of German stuff, Mark Pieloch was an avid Porsche collector as well. He has about 10 Porsche-brand diesel tractors:

Imagine telling someone “I’ll pick you up in my Porsche” and then showing up with one of these tractors! They’re not unreasonably expensive:

Here’s one that Grok says might be worth $5 million, though, a 1959 718 RSK Werks Spyder that was raced:

Just how big is the second room?

There are some additional hangars full of cars, but they’re not regularly open to the rabble.

Corvettes are reasonably well-represented, though I don’t remember seeing any C7s. Almost every conceivable Ford Mustang is displayed.

Here’s a wood-paneled 1957 Ford Country Squire:

Another wagon that, if retrofitted with A/C, would be awesome to own:

The perfect pace car for Elvis:

How was the car show? Pretty good and a reasonable turnout despite the fact that it has been an unusually wet September and October in Florida despite a complete absence of hurricanes from the North Atlantic. Free and dog-friendly. Here’s another dream station wagon:

If you love cars, I recommend finding one of the special events and going. Based on the museum’s Form 990, it seems that all of the money paid goes to whatever group is supposed to benefit. Grok says that the cars and the real estate are owned by Mark Pieloch individually so it isn’t a tax-avoidance vehicle (so to speak) as you might expect. Grok even found the records for the real estate:

Brevard’s parcel record for 3500 Sarno Road lists the owner as PIELOCH, MARK J, mailing address a Melbourne post office box. The use code is a privately owned tourist attraction, the buildings date to 2016, and the 2026 value is about $18.1 million. A 2025 tax bill on that parcel is on the order of $320,000, which is what you pay when the property is not under a charitable exemption.

Unlike, for example, the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates, Mark Pieloch is apparently paying more than his fair share of tax rather than burdening those who’ve been less successful with the chore of funding government.

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The sea-level glass pavilion in Miami where elite sea level and hurricane alarmists will take shelter

by philg

Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up… Carnegie-Mellon has released renderings of its new home in Miami. It’s a massive sea-level almost-all-glass pavilion that will generate a ton of CO2 every minute (for A/C):

For 20 years CMU’s Nobel-winning Climate Doomers told us that hurricanes of never-before-experienced intensity would be ravaging Miami at least once per year. If forced to move to the Hurricane Belt, you’d expect the elites of Pittsburgh to build themselves something like the German U-boat base in Saint-Nazaire (26-foot-thick roof). What do we see instead? The folks who said that everyone in Miami was going to be killed by hurricanes or driven out by rising seas are going to park themselves inside a literal glass house (at sea level, of course!).

What would a structure in South Florida built by people who took their own predictions seriously look like?

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Elon Musk has made all of the world’s yachts more valuable

by philg

Last month, I attended a birthday party for a yacht broker. His co-workers said that business was booming for all sizes of boats (though maybe they don’t deal with anything smaller than 35′? 70-125′ seems to be their bread and butter). “In the old days we could have just closed the office in August, but the phone never stops ringing.” What’s changed? “Boat buyers are richer and younger,” was the answer. “They’re taking much longer trips and want bigger more capable boats for those trips. Starlink has been the catalyst. It makes a tremendous difference, especially, for the crew, and has made people more willing to work the longer voyages. The owners can still work, no matter how long the trip.” How does Starlink compare to the previous generation of satellite-based Internet for yachts? “It’s 100 times faster,” a broker said, “a total game-changer for both speed and reliability.”

Speaking of reliability, it seems that the mid-priced yachts ($10-25 million) either have two independent Starlink subscriptions and receivers or, in some cases, two antennae and a single receiver that is smart about which one to use (“diversity is our strength” in the RF world). “You need the second antenna,” the brokers explained, “because sometimes the line of sight to the satellite is block by a mast.”

What I can’t figure out is where these additional/bigger yachts are parking. The world was already short of slips before the cash showers of government coronapanic programs and, more recently, AI. “They keep building marinas here in South Florida,” said a broker.

Its infrastructure fund went from owning zero marinas in 2024 to roughly 200 marinas today — more than anyone in the world.

The company paid $5.6 billion in early 2025 for Safe Harbor, which at the time owned and operated 138 marinas in the United States and Puerto Rico, including dozens of marinas from Maryland to Maine as well as the Caribbean’s largest in Fajardo, P.R. It also runs nine marinas on the Mediterranean, catering to large yachts in places like St. Tropez, Antibes and Monaco.

What’s going on locally? An $80 million revamp of a marina just south of Abacoa:

The facility will feature two five-story indoor storage buildings with 427 enclosed dry storage slips and 20 wet slips.

Someone with $80 million to invest didn’t get the climate change memo? The buildings are designed to handle 180 mph hurricane winds (the last hurricane to make landfall in Palm Beach County in a “major” category (= 3) was in 1949). But they’ll be worthless if sea level rise happens as promised by the Climate Doomers.

How much does a true “yacht” cost an Nvidia receptionist? A Turkish-built 125′ Hargrave, which ChatGPT says is mid-market at this size, is advertised at $24.5 million. Westport is a “step up”. For the programmer who has been at Nvidia 10 years, “Feadship / Lürssen / Oceanco / Royal Huisman: an entirely different stratum—bespoke, extremely expensive, and usually much larger, though some of these yards historically built yachts around this size.”

Related:

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Larry Ellison: 82 years old with five children who need tutors

by philg

Despite my love for all things Oracle, somehow I missed that Larry Ellison, now 82 years old, has five children under 18.

“The Gated Community Where Larry Ellison Bought Eight Homes for His Staff” (Wall Street Journal, 9/28/2026):

The Ellisons have kept details about their five children, who are younger than 18, private. They are involved parents, according to people familiar with the interactions. The Manalapan home has several buildings that include areas where the older children are home-schooled. There are an array of tutors, and the children are learning several languages, the people said.

I hope for the kids’ sake that Larry is on one of those Silicon Valley life extension plans!

Unintentionally funny:

“Every single home has a view of the water,” local agent Ashley McCoy of Serhant said of Palm Meadows Estates.

Any development engineered out of the Everglades, like the one where Larry chose to park the staff, must have ponds and canals to hold rainwater and prevent flooding. Developers present these water features to newcomers as some sort of amenity that could have been more houses if they’d been greedier, but the reality is always that a neighborhood has the minimum pond acreage deemed necessary by the hydrological engineers (whose skill level is amazing, incidentally! Our development (Abacoa) has supposedly never flooded in 25+ years, despite catching the edges of a few hurricanes; the Science wasn’t as advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, I think, and Florida adopted some new rules about the miracle of land creation in the 1970s (source)). Also, the typical pond has a noisy fountain in the middle that runs all day to interfere with algae and mosquito production.

Related:

  • “Larry Ellison adds Lion Country to PBC purchases including Eau Palm Beach” (Palm Beach Post, 2025): “After almost 60 years, the family that founded Lion Country Safari, Florida’s largest drive-through safari, has sold its 600-acre Loxahatchee land holdings for $30 million to the family of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, reportedly the third-richest man in the world. … Technology magnate Ellison also has bought multiple other properties in Palm Beach County, including a Manalapan mega mansion, a waterfront estate in North Palm Beach and the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa that he purchased in 2024 for $277.4 million.”
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The climate and hurricane doomers of Carnegie-Mellon move to Miami

by philg

For twenty years, Carnegie-Mellon University has been dishing out fat helpings of climate and hurricane doom.

What’s the most obvious place to set up a new campus for 3,500 students and keep them safe from ever-more-intense hurricanes and relentless sea level rise? How about Miami, Florida?

The press release says that the new campus will be about 6 inches above best-case predicted sea level in Wynwood:

The new campus, to be built in Miami’s dynamic Wynwood neighborhood, is ultimately planned to support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. students, nearly 300 faculty, and over 600 staff members, pending appropriate regulatory approvals. The first students are set to enroll in 2028, marking a bold step forward for the university and its ambitions.

Carnegie-Mellon is home to Nobel-winning Climate Doomer Ed Rubin:

Emeritus Professor Ed Rubin was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, when U.S. Vice President Al Gore shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for which Rubin was coordinating lead author of the Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage. The awardees were recognized for their “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Rubin is the first CMU faculty member to share in a Nobel Peace Prize.

Rubin, who helped establish the Engineering and Public Policy program at CMU, is the the most highly cited authority on carbon capture and storage systems and is an internationally recognized expert in energy and environmental technology innovation and climate change mitigation.

“Decarbonization: Climate change is personal now” (cmu.edu 2023):

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says carbon capture deployment is lagging if we want to meet global mitigation targets. With the stakes so high, why is this the case?

“We’re now seeing the linkages between climate change and other phenomena like forest fires, droughts, heat waves, and floods. If your house burns down in a forest fire, that gets your attention. If your house floods because of a hurricane, that gets your attention. When science links those tragedies to climate change induced by human activities, then the realization kicks in, ‘Hey this isn’t something far in the future that doesn’t affect me or my family.’ It’s getting personal now,” says Rubin.

CMU faculty won’t sit out hurricanes in Pittsburgh anymore, in other words, but will voluntarily make hurricanes part of their lived experience.

cmu.edu, 2007:

“Adaptation planning is becoming critical as communities, states and countries begin to address rising sea-levels and other challenges of a changing global climate.”

Formerly a military officer, Perkins is now one of 1,000 volunteers in the United States selected and trained by Former Vice President Al Gore and the non-profit group The Climate Project to spread the message of global warming and the urgent moral responsibility to take action.

After 19 additional years of taxpayer-funded Science, the “urgent moral responsibility” and best adaptation turned out to be moving from Pittsburgh to Miami and grabbing Ken Griffin’s money with both hands.

In 2008, cmu.edu warned us that “the climate crisis isn’t going away”.

Here’s one of CMU’s top professors in this area, Costa Samaras. Right in the middle of coronapanic (July 2020) he reminded everyone to continue to panic regarding sea level rise:

The same CMU professor said that Florida would be cooked by 2030, just two years after the new CMU campus opens.

This links to a NYT article on which the professor is a co-author:

Rising average temperatures make extreme heat more likely, hurricanes and storms more intense and threaten fresh water supplies. Climate impacts have already started to hit.

Where better to move than Miami if you’re afraid of more intense hurricanes and storms? There is so much in this guy’s feed that I can’t resist one more:

Let’s close out this post with a big thank-you to the lockdown Democrats of Chicago, Illinois, New York City, and New York State. Without their tireless efforts to degrade the quality of life in Chicago and NYC, there is no way that Ken Griffin would have brought himself and his $55+ billion to Florida!

Related, the land that CMU said would soon be underwater was worth $1.1 billion:

See also Preparing for the Age of AI with Prof. Uju Anya at Carnegie-Mellon at $93,614 per year and imagine how awesome it would be if Prof. Dr. Uju Anya, Ph.D. were to teach “Speaking Blackness in Brazil” on this new campus.

Bill Gates weighs in on the move…

In case any of the above tweets are memory-holed…

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Sixth Annual Freedom to Breathe Day in Florida

by philg

Today is the sixth anniversary of Ron DeSantis’s executive order 20-244 that prevented local governments from collecting fines from peasants who violated local Covidcrats’ orders, thus effectively rendering those orders toothless. Excerpts:

Ron DeSantis will be gone soon, due to term limits, and I will miss him despite his recent foray into what seems like madness (exempting a lot of homeowners from paying property tax while still allowing them to vote to increase county services and spending; I thought we’d tried that experiment at the federal level!; I would welcome a law that limits growth in per-capita spending by county/local governments, but not one that mints voters who have no skin in the game).

Related…

Also, “A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose.” (Boston Globe, 9/22/2026), regarding the question of whether, towards the end of Year 7 of coronapanic, it is safe to shed one’s N95 mask one evening per week (short answer: no).

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Bad news for the Florida Beach Season: there is no beach (NYT)

by philg

Americans in the Northeast are making plans to come down to Florida this winter, either 183 days (the “skip on state taxes” plan) or just a shorter break from misery. They might want to consider this New York Times article from 31 years ago, “Scientists Say Earth’s Warming Could Set Off Wide Disruptions” (September 18, 1995):

A continuing rise in average global sea level, which is likely to amount to more than a foot and a half by the year 2100. This, say the scientists, would inundate parts of many heavily populated river deltas and the cities on them, making them uninhabitable, and would destroy many beaches around the world. At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year.

The NYT’s “experts” were sort of right. It did become impossible to go to a lot of East Coast beaches in 2020, but that was because Science made it illegal (#StayHomeSaveLives), not because the beach had physically disappeared.

Maskachusetts COVID-19 Order No. 22, issued 25 years after the NYT article predicted beach closure:

How has Florida’s shoreline changed over time? Here’s Catesby’s map from circa 1729:

Compare to today (Google Earth):

Loosely related, but I had to mention this in case it jinxes us with a repeat of Hurricane Andrew (1992; Category 5 landfall, 25-mile-wide swath of destruction south of Miami), “The Atlantic Just Broke a 60-Year Record” (ScienceAlert):

September 12th became the furthest into the year we have ever gone without a hurricane in the Atlantic basin since the advent of modern satellite tracking in 1966 – by a day.

“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” explains António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

“The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.”

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Migrants whose TPS status has expired can stay and work for 10+ years via the asylum process

by philg

The New York Times today says that Key West wouldn’t have any tourists if not for Haitian migrants. Somalis built Boston and Minneapolis and Haitians created Florida tourism. “Haitian Workers Keep Key West Tourism Afloat. Now They’re Disappearing.”:

The Haitian hotel housekeepers, restaurant cooks and Uber drivers who quietly help power Key West’s tourism economy are disappearing.

Some have been detained by Border Patrol agents since late July, when the Trump administration ended a legal protection that had allowed 330,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States.

There is “violence and instability” in Haiti, but we can import 100% of Haitians and the same people won’t create any violence or instability here:

It’s a situation familiar to communities across Florida; the state has the nation’s largest Haitian population, including tens of thousands who have lost the legal safeguard known as Temporary Protected Status, which the United States had granted them because of the violence and instability in their home country.

(the violence and instability are features of the terrain, not something in any way related to the people who inhabit the terrain)

The New York Times constantly reminds us that workers should be paid more (they’re “underpaid”). But in the context of making sure that we max out on immigrants, it is also bad if workers in the U.S. get paid more:

When Mayor Sam Kaufman visited Hispanic-owned restaurants last month, owners shared stories of line cooks, busboys and delivery drivers, some with valid work permits, getting detained and deported. Those who remained were being crushed with extra work, with some owners delivering food themselves.

Mr. Kaufman noted that Key West was too far from the mainland to bus in workers.

“The price of labor is going to shoot up,” he said. “There is going to be real competition to retain the work force.”

Or will the supply of workers be reduced? Here’s the most interesting part of the article:

One such person, a 41-year-old father of two, said he had fled gang violence in Haiti for Brazil, before joining relatives in Key West in 2022. The man, who did not want his name used for fear of attracting immigration authorities, works at a supermarket deli, earning $19 an hour.

He lost T.P.S. in July. He is still able to work because of a pending asylum claim, but that offers little guarantee against immigration detention. Inside their tiny trailer home, he and his wife anxiously monitor WhatsApp for immigration enforcement updates last month as they care for their young children.

Asylum is a 10-year bureaucratic process, at least (see Will any Salvadorans in the U.S. go home to El Salvador today?). So by saying “I request asylum” this guy should be able to get W-2 work until his anchor babies (multiple “young children”) are old enough to sponsor him for a green card under family unification (a U.S. citizen adult has the automatic right to bring parents here).

At what rate are migrants being detained by ICE? The NYT article says that 5,000 Haitians live in Key West and that 30 were detained in August. (I don’t think this 5,000 number counts children since they’re “American”, not “Haitian”, via the magic of birthright citizenship.)

Related, a web page regarding the La Concha, built by Haitians in 1925-6 as the first luxury hotel in Key West.

See also the Overseas Railroad Wikipedia page, regarding the railroad that prominent Haitian Henry Flagler opened in 1912 and that opened Key West to mass tourism.

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Recognition of Art by Women (Norton Museum in West Palm Beach)

by philg

The Recognition of Art by Women: In Retrospect show at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach closes on September 27 so there is still time to plan a somewhat unfashionably-early-in-the-season trip to Palm Beach County (via DJT!).

Official description:

Recognition of Art by Women series began at the Norton in 2011 in an effort to recognize and promote living women artists through solo exhibitions, addressing the persistent inequity in exhibiting and acquiring art by women.

I can’t figure out how this is legal under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which purportedly guarantees “equal protection” to women vs. artists of other gender IDs. The Norton Museum is heavily funded by taxpayers, sometimes directly from local, state, and federal government and sometimes indirectly via tax deductions taken by donors (such as Ken Griffin, a refugee from the collapse of public order in Chicago/Illinois). Given that about half of the money is coming from taxpayers, could they host an art show limited to white male cisgender heterosexual artists, for example? If not, how are they allowed to host a show in which art can be selected only from artists identifying as “women”?

How bad has the historical discrimination been against women that the museum needs to redress the imbalance with this limited-to-one-gender-ID program? “Of the Norton’s 10 directors, nearly half have been women.” The first director was named “Mary”. The “women-only” series was initiated, 15 years ago, by a director named “Hope”.

The most recently featured artist, Danielle McKinney, paints pictures of Black women not working, which the curators say is “radical”.

(There is some support for this in BLS data; Black women are more likely to work than white women, while the reverse is true for Black men. Non-Black men are more likely to work than any of the foregoing.)

One of the radical acts:

A previously featured artist, María Berrío, does some interesting work:

The sculpture garden features a work by Louise Nevelson, who objected to being pigeonholed (“I’m not a feminist. I’m an artist who happens to be a woman”).

Also an interior Nevelson (I love her work so much! Maybe this one would be easier to steal):

How about some kid art? Here’s a painting by a local public school kid:

And one from the private school for nerds started by Jeff Greene, a billionaire refugee from NYC:

Here are some folks who probably should have used Kodachrome. Check out the color fading on these Polaroids:

(Imagine a camera technology so that even Walker Evans seems incompetent.)

Exit through the gift shop… (these photos were taken in June, admittedly)

Stop at Costco on the way home for some low-priced steak:

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Alex Vindman, the immigrant carpetbagger, loses to a socialist

by philg

Background: Alex Vindman tries to take a Black woman’s job (Florida Senate race)

Tonight:

A Vindman victory was at 93% on Polymarket. How important was money?

Vindman, a retired lieutenant colonel and Iraq War veteran who rose to prominence as a witness during President Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment hearings, was viewed as a heavy favorite against Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, heading into Tuesday’s contest.

Vindman raised $16 million for his campaign, a significant number for a Democrat in red-leaning Florida, while Nixon brought in just over $900,000.

Unlike Marco Rubio and his successor, Ashley Moody, the “socialist” wants to help the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” achieve their military goals:

Nixon is an advocate for cutting U.S. aid to Israel, a controversial position in a state with the country’s third-largest Jewish population. Her stance put her at odds with members of her own party at times and was in contrast to Vindman, a Jewish immigrant born in Soviet Ukraine.

Nixon introduced a resolution in the state House calling for a “de-escalation and ceasefire in the state of Israel and occupied Palestine.” She also said she would have supported a congressional resolution in July that would have stripped $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel.

“I would have voted in support of that, because we cannot continue to send money to countries that are violating international law, that are violating human rights, that are actively destroying,” she said Friday on WMNF radio of Tampa. “Throughout my adult career, I have fought for the safety and the well-being and the humanity of all people. And me stating this does not make me antisemitic at all.”

(I had no idea that Vindman was Jewish, incidentally, until tonight!)

What does Angie Nixon promise? Everything will be “free” rather than “taxpayer-funded”:

I suppose that for the 50 percent of America’s eligible voters who don’t pay federal income tax, almost everything that the government does is “free”.

Here’s something that I can agree with Angie Nixon on: “Expanding Section 8 vouchers so every eligible family can access one without languishing on a waitlist.” If housing is a human right then everyone who refrains from work should get a “free” house. If housing is not a human right then why does anyone in the U.S. get a free house? It makes no sense to say that Person A should get a free house worth $6000/month on the market while Person B, identically situated, gets nothing (either a place on a waiting list or a rejection note that the waiting list is full).

Angie Nixon doesn’t agree that “No data center is illegal on stolen land”:

No new construction of data centers before there are real federal guardrails put in place, including environmental review and community input requirements.

No human will be illegal and nearly all will be able to vote soon (“swift path to citizenship”):

Where California has a one-time 5% tax on noxious billionaires, Angie Nixon will hit them every year for 5%:

(As previously noted, I disagree that Angie Nixon and similar can be called “socialists” because under Soviet socialism every able-bodied adult was required to work.)

Related:

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