I recognize that Trans Day of Visibility was Easter Sunday, ending Bisexual Health Awareness Month, and that today is Lesbian Visibility Day (we’ve moved past International Asexuality Day, National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, Day of Silence, National Transgender HIV Testing Day, and Nonbinary Parents Day (calendar)).
Despite the intervening five 2SLGBTQQIA+ holidays, I thought readers would appreciate seeing how Trans Day of Visibility was celebrated in Florida. Manatees who identify as bunnies:
On recent trips to the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston, friends who are Democrats spoke gleefully about the prospect of Donald Trump being reduced to poverty via lawsuits. While this might be straightforward in California or Maskachusetts, stripping a Floridian of all of his/her/zir/their wealth is more challenging.
Florida law shields insurance policies and annuity contracts from creditors. Statute 222.13, for example:
Whenever any person residing in the state shall die leaving insurance on his or her life, the said insurance shall inure exclusively to the benefit of the person for whose use and benefit such insurance is designated in the policy, and the proceeds thereof shall be exempt from the claims of creditors of the insured unless the insurance policy or a valid assignment thereof provides otherwise. Notwithstanding the foregoing, whenever the insurance, by designation or otherwise, is payable to the insured or to the insured’s estate or to his or her executors, administrators, or assigns, the insurance proceeds shall become a part of the insured’s estate for all purposes and shall be administered by the personal representative of the estate of the insured in accordance with the probate laws of the state in like manner as other assets of the insured’s estate.
That would seem to protect only the family of an insured after his/her/zir/their death. But then there is 222.14:
Exemption of cash surrender value of life insurance policies and annuity contracts from legal process.—The cash surrender values of life insurance policies issued upon the lives of citizens or residents of the state and the proceeds of annuity contracts issued to citizens or residents of the state, upon whatever form, shall not in any case be liable to attachment, garnishment or legal process in favor of any creditor of the person whose life is so insured or of any creditor of the person who is the beneficiary of such annuity contract, unless the insurance policy or annuity contract was effected for the benefit of such creditor.
Donald Trump could take an unlimited percentage of his wealth and stuff it into a whole life policy and then Florida state law might protect him from, for example, Democrats in New York.
How about 20-acre Mar-a-Lago, worth either $18 million or “hundreds of millions” depending on when you tuned into CNN. It looks like the house and central 1/2 acre of land (maybe this isn’t even the entire house?) can be protected from creditors as long as it it Donald Trump’s primary residence. This is based on the Florida Constitution:
It looks as though they’ve captured the godlike powers that Democrats ascribe to Mr. Trump, e.g., immortality. Age might tarnish this medal, but never the Donald himself!
Despite not being a member of the Palm Beach elite or even elite-adjacent, I managed to bust into Mar-a-Lago recently for an annual event that benefits a local children’s charity, A Place of Hope. Why would anyone want to go to Mar-a-Lago? It’s a National Historic Landmark and important as an example of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. The centrality of this style of architecture to South Florida is explained in Bubble in the Sun book: even those with the best information can’t predict a crash and, in fact, our neighborhood within Abacoa is all Spanish Colonial Revival.
The most hated man in America appeared midway through the event to welcome the guests, praise the organization, praise the musical and theatrical talent, etc. Donald Trump was gracious and did not mention politics nor did he talk about himself. He had no teleprompter. Only a small percentage of the guests mentioned Donald Trump or seemed to have the November election on their minds, but there were exceptions. In the It’s Not a Cult Category:
(Is the “most hated man” appellation accurate? Far more people hate Trump than, for example, Jose Antonio Ibarra (the migrant arrested for the murder of Laken Riley).)
The Mar-a-Lago staff put on a copious buffet. I asked about a dozen of the workers how they liked working there and all were positive, with the exception of a seasonal worker from South Africa who was neutral.
Sadly, we didn’t get to go into the original main house, but some of the architectural details were interesting nonetheless:
What did people drive to the event? Ferrari was a common choice:
More unusual Ferraris were selected for display closer to the house rather than simply parked in the back yard. The silver Enzo below might be worth $4 million. (Remember that Democrats agreed that all of Mar-a-Lago was worth $18 million at his trial in New York, though now CNN’s experts say that it is worth “hundreds of millions”.)
For my friends who are Porsche fans, though it was much more an event for Ferrari nerds:
Rolls-Royce was well-represented. They love their colors:
People wouldn’t think less of you if you showed up in a humble Ford:
I had some difficulty connecting with the local Honda Odyssey owner’s club at the event, but it was a pleasant crowd of people and one in which trust prevails. I managed to lose my valet parking ticket and was able to pick up my car without being asked to prove my identity or association with the car (I knew where it was in the parking lot because I’d been taking photos).
Speaking of cars and Florida, I’ve had to replaced all four tires and the battery recently on the 3-year-old Odyssey. The summer-all-the-time weather is tough on both tires and batteries, apparently.
Related (on the subject of elites in and around Palm Beach)…
Today was our presidential primary. From CNN, an example of how democracy is supposed to work from the party that says its sacred mission is to preserve our democracy:
And a baffling result from the Party of Tyranny (TM):
How does Nikki Haley, who has never tried to do anything for Florida, get more votes than Ron DeSantis, who has worked hard (and, if we believe the meager net worth on his financial statements, honestly) on behalf of Floridians for about 10 years (first in Congress, then as governor)?
I went to the local branch of the Palm Beach County public library system to vote today. The parking lot was packed at 1:45 pm and I took this as a sign of citizen engagement. It turned out, however, that the cars were parked at the library because people were using the library part of the library (despite CNN and NYT informing us that books are banned in Florida). Voting was in a community room and there were booths sufficient to accommodate more than 20 voters in parallel. The three poll workers told me that I was Voter #25… for the day. I’m grateful for the work that Ron DeSantis has done in his job as our governor, so I put in a thank-you vote.
For Irish readers, a snapshot from Sunday evening’s St. Patrick’s Day block party in our MacArthur Foundation-created development (Abacoa):
A week earlier, Abacoa hosted the Jupiter Irish Fest, complete with about 25 performers from the local Irish Dance school.
For folks from the Northeast and California who are afraid to move to Florida because of a perceived lack of righteousness, the local Palm Beach County library branch’s displays for Black History Month…
First, in the kids’ area:
It turns out that identifying as “female” is actually Black-adjacent. Here’s a book that was part of the Black History Month display:
Kids are encouraged to engage in a wide range of behaviors that would get them arrested in Florida:
And for adults:
Readers: How are your Black History Month celebrations going?
How will this work given that the World Cup is set for JULY? All the games will be at night? They’ll accept a 70 percent player attribution rate due to heat stroke? My bet is that the games are scheduled for 8 pm in Europe, which means 2 pm in Miami. This will maximize TV viewership.
(Miami isn’t actually hotter than many northern cities in July, but the humidity is reliably close to 100 percent. In fact, the New York Times says that Floridians are constantly on the verge of “extreme danger”. See Floridians brave Extreme Danger heat levels (July 2023), for example. And, as a loyal follower of The Science, I wouldn’t pay to sit outdoors on a summer afternoon in Miami and watch soccer, Taylor Swift, or anything else that people pay big $$ to watch. The Formula 1 spectators apparently don’t care. The Miami race is held in May during the hottest hours of the day and sells out.)
The board said the rule prohibits Florida College System institutions from using state or federal funds to administer programs that “categorize individuals based on race or sex for the purpose of differential or preferential treatment.”
Targeting DEI has been a key talking point of Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s education department during his second term in office.
How many people will lose their Victimhood Industry jobs?
The governor also asked Florida’s public colleges and universities in 2023 to report how much money they are spending on DEI. He later said they self-reported at least $34 million.
If we assume a fully loaded cost of $200,000 per year per bureaucrat, that’s 170 DEI experts who will now be looking for jobs in more righteous states.
Who doesn’t like a race-neutral environment?
Meanwhile, Black leaders have pushed back on the initiatives to limit DEI at state colleges, saying DeSantis is playing politics in his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination.
Some students have expressed worries that campuses across the state won’t be as welcoming to minorities in light of the changes.
A statement against racial equality from “Equality Florida”:
“There’s no surprise today that the State Board of Education, a board that has been a rubber stamp for Governor Ron DeSantis’s agenda of censorship and surveillance, moved forward with another sweepingly broad rule that abolishes diversity and inclusion programs in the Florida College System. The Board’s rules go well beyond what’s required by Governor DeSantis’s already extreme SB 266, handcuffing state colleges from using any state-funded resources on diversity programs that help recruit talented faculty, support students with unique needs, and help Florida’s colleges compete for national research and funding. This is a brazenly political attack on Florida’s colleges, and all minorities in Florida, and is one more way state agencies have been weaponized to support Governor DeSantis’s failing political ambitions. Shame on the State Board of Education for passing rules that weaken and threaten Florida’s colleges in service to one more manufactured culture war.”
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).
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).)
“Amazon sets sights on more Miami office space after Jeff Bezos’ Florida move” (New York Post); this seems like it could starve Washington State of expected (and well-deserved!) revenue from its new 7 percent capital gains tax. Senior and/or long-term Amazon employees can choose when to sell shares. They could move to Coral Gables or Miami Beach for a few years, sell whatever they want to sell, go to work in the Amazon Miami office, and eventually move back to Washington State if they’re keen to pay the 20 percent estate tax on death. California-based Amazon employees could skip out on 13.3 percent income tax by moving to Miami, at least during years in which they expected to cash out stock.
This year, I’m especially grateful that there is no war on U.S. soil. Regardless of which side in the Hamas-Israel fight one supports, nearly everyone will agree that war is hell and those who are insulated from war are fortunate. Since 1865, Americans have enjoyed better insulation than almost any other group of people, though, of course, quite a few Americans who identified as men have been sent off to fight.
Zooming all the way to the other end of the spectrum… I’m grateful that we can eat outdoors in nice weather in Florida without being besieged by yellowjackets, the wasps that ruin what would otherwise be great experiences in the Northeast U.S. I’ve enjoyed outdoor meals on both coasts and in Orlando and never been bothered. Florida is supposedly part of this insect’s range, so I have no explanation for why yellowjackets don’t swarm around restaurants and backyard barbecues.
For something in the middle… ChatGPT, which will be one year old on November 30, especially its ability to liberate programmers from the tedium of having to search for libraries and API calls (admittedly a tedium created by other programmers, drunk on the near-infinite memory capacity of modern computer systems). ChatGPT and similar have the potential to make programming an interesting job once again (see Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?).
Due to the crowds drawn by our neighbor’s fantastic pirate house, we ran out of candy last year after giving out 1,500 pieces. This year, the stock is 2,000 pieces (thanks, Costco). Here are a few photos around the neighborhood:
We need this costume (at a neighbor’s party):
Johnny Depp is attacked by a more aggressive foe than Amber Heard:
I love this house:
Forecast for trick-or-treating here in Jupiter is 79 degrees and clear.
One of the nice things about Florida is the geographical and psychological distance from upsetting world events. No matter how upsetting the headlines, people here recognize that (a) they’re not important or powerful enough to change anything, and (b) their own life is mostly unaffected. A typical Floridian’s mood is not controlled by the media.
