Some photos from an October 2025 visit to Frederick, Maryland that are relevant to our observance of Transgender Awareness Week…
Formerly Christian churches have been mostly converted over to Rainbow Flagism, e.g., a Lutheran church founded in 1738:
The United Church of Christ, founded in 1745:
Their principal flag:
The chamber of commerce folks have adopted the full trans-enhanced religoin:
The shops around town generally adhere to Rainbow-First Retail in which shoppers must pass by a sacred flag as they enter. Perhaps under the guidance of the above business organization, the rainbow flags at businesses nearly all have a “Protect Trans Kids” inscription within the Biden-style trans triangle:
We hit Frederick on the way back from a history tour of Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia and the Antietam battlefield from the War of Northern Aggression. Because we visited during the shutdown (October 3, 2025), it was a great lesson for the kids on how times changed. In the mid-19th century government workers had to come into work every day and toil in extreme temperatures in order to receive pay. In the 21st century, government workers are guaranteed to get paid while sitting at home and the taxpayers who must fund their paychecks are denied entry to various historical sites and museums.
The “ferry” part of Harper’s Ferry is now bridged for the convenience of trains and hikers. Harper’s Ferry is the HQ for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and the town is rich in resources regarding the trail. As recently as 1970 only about 10 people per year hiked the entire trail. Today it is more than 1,000 per year.
The ironwork done in 1893 is still keeping the trains from falling into the river, 132 years later:
The machines that were so critical to Union success in the War of Northern Aggression continue to roll through Harper’s Ferry:
The “park store” in town is run by a private group and was therefore open. It was, apparently, women who did most of the fighting in the Civil War (there was no section for “men’s history” or “white history”):
Spotted in a local’s driveway and pointed out by our keen-eyed 10-year-old (don’t miss the “Punch More Nazis”):
Below is the closed visitor center for the Antietam battlefield. Just as education wasn’t “essential” during coronapanic, this educational facility isn’t “essential” during a shutdown (i.e., the workers get paid at 100 percent and the kids who show up and try to learn something get nothing).
Here’s a sobering reminder of our insignificance. Soldiers whose names are long-forgotten fought and died for control of Burnside’s Bridge. The Sycamore tree at the far end was there during the battle and it remains there today, 160 years later.
The battlefield isn’t as dense in sculpture as Vicksburg or Gettysburg, but there are many beautiful pieces nonetheless. Examples:
We eventually made it back to Bethesda where the kids learned about the health benefits of marijuana, the importance of Black lives specifically (Korean restaurant door), and the evils of plastic straws (imagine telling a 1970s high schooler that one day marijuana would be considered “essential” and plastic straws would be considered tremendously harmful!).
I have a business trip to Wilmington, Delaware. I thought I would check to see if there was any reason to tack on a day at the end to do something in “Filthadelphia”. Here’s the official tourism site for “the City of Brotherly Love”, reached after searching (on October 13) for “events in philadelphia november 2025”:
Here’s the first event listed:
The text:
A bold installation honoring transgender, queer, intersex and asexual members of the community, In Plain Sight debuted during Pride Month and continues to serve as a vibrant celebration of the TQ+ community on the Delaware River waterfront.
Created in collaboration with local artists and creatives, the sculpture incorporates colors from the different LGBTQ+ pride flags, each representing a segment of the community. The piece sends a loud, clear (and proud) message that all LGBTQ+ visitors are wanted and welcomed warmly in the birthplace of liberty.
One American fencer is highlighted as important. Her achievement was fencing while wearing hijab as a positive example to counter the horribleness of Donald Trump:
Trump apparently wrongly questioned the value of importing millions of Muslims as U.S. residents/citizens shortly before Omar Mateen, child of immigrants from Afghanistan, killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub (June 2016). (Note that children of Muslim immigrants are statistically more likely to be interested in waging jihad than their parents were (Harvard report on Danish study).)
A TV actor is highlighted for identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+:
Anthony Fauci is featured as the most notable physician in our nation’s history (note the modeling of a cloth mask rather than an ineffective N95 mask):
(I am desperate to see a Fauciland theme park on the campus of NIH Bethesda!)
Speaking of coronapanic, a separate part of the museum reminds us to “fight the virus, not the people”:
Science fiction has been important to the extent that it has been about women:
Clips of some of America’s greatest television moments are available. There is a Sesame Street show in which kids are exhorted to wear masks and also one in which kids are told that immigrants, especially Muslims in hijab, always make America a better place for everyone:
In a separate section of the museum, visitors are reminded that today’s immigrants have “much in common with those who came before” (i.e., a no-skill Islamic asylum-seeker immigrant from Somalia has a ton in common with Heinrich Engelhard Steinway, who built pianos in Germany prior to building pianos in New York):
The entertainment section has a “micro-gallery” about racism and comedians of color:
Those who appreciate engineering will be pleased to learn that the museum displays a portrait of Elon Musk:
The World War II exhibit reminds visitors that the U.S. and U.K. defeated Germany without significant assistance from the Soviet Union.
Likely unrelated to Trump and his war on wokeness, the museum falsely states that German-Jewish immigrant Ralph H. Baer invented “the first video game” circa 1966. Baer was perhaps the first to try to make a consumer-priced device that could attach to a TV, but Wokipedia correctedly credits earlier efforts on mainframe computers.
The currency exhibit reminds us that most of the world’s important societies for most of human history have been governed by females:
A $100,000 bill is displayed as well. Although intended for transferring funds from one Federal Reserve Bank to another in 1934, if Congress continues its deficit spending program this could be useful to feed into Coke machines:
The 10-year-old and I found ourselves in the “American Enterprise” exhibit in front of a wall of business pioneers all of whom just happened to be female. I said to the kid “standing here and looking at this wall you can learn that the success of American business was entirely due to women.” This generated some righteous indignation among a couple of 40ish people nearby (presumably furloughed government workers). They proceeded to lecture us to “open your eyes” and look at other walls within the same exhibit. We actually did as they suggested and found Eli Whitney displayed as having equal importance to American enterprise as “Jemmy”, an “enslaved entrepreneur” who made baskets (this pairing makes a certain amount of sense because Whitney’s cotton gin kept slavery going longer than it otherwise might have).
The de-woked attacked-by-Trump gift shop offers this classic American candy, invented by Johannes “Hans” Riegel Sr.:
Some of the apparel in the gift shop celebrates 2SLGBTQQIA+, but most of it celebrates those who identify as “women”. Women are voting, doing science, building WWII weapons, being legends rather than ladies:
Maybe the books would feature some victimhood category other than “female”? Well, a few did:
But mostly the books ignored Blacks and the Latinx in favor of victims whose victimhood was a consequence of female gender ID, just as most of the jobs and government contracts set aside for descendants of American slavery have been scooped up by white women:
Ironically, for a museum that features certain Americans because of their gender or race ID, the gift shop sells a book celebrating the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection:
Oregon’s governor has been posting her opposition to the federal government’s plan to clean up mostly peaceful Portland, e.g., this tweet:
Not having previously heard of this person, I visited her official web site to learn something about her background:
On November 8, 2022, Tina Kotek made history along with Maura Healey of Massachusetts, becoming the first openly lesbian governors elected in American history.
Throughout Tina’s professional career as an advocate for those in need, she has carried the value of service instilled in her by her parents to get real results for Oregonians.
Tina’s grandparents came from Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century to find opportunity and a better life. Her parents were proud first-generation Americans. They believed in hard work, being informed citizens, and encouraging their children to follow their dreams.
Tina moved to Oregon from the East Coast in 1987, and fell in love with the beauty of the state and the openness of the people. She finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon, graduating without student debt because of a Pell grant, work study assistance, and affordable tuition.
Tina came out as a lesbian in her early twenties. While it wasn’t always easy, each experience coming out to others strengthened her resilience. While getting her graduate degree, Tina fought for and won domestic partnership rights for faculty and students at the University of Washington.
The word “lesbian” appears four times in this official biography, including in the very first sentence. The reader learns about the governor’s passion for lesbianism twice before learning anything about a job that the governor might have had prior to becoming governor (unless one considers “having sex with other women” to be a job?). In other words, the reader might reasonable infer that the governor’s primary qualification for being governor is lesbianism (or “identifying as a lesbian”).
Donna Strickland: I think the biggest mistake we make in teaching, all the way up through undergrad, is teaching what science we already know. Science is not about knowing; it’s about figuring out how to ask the question why. It’s not about learning how everything else has already been done. That’s not to say we don’t need that, but we should instruct them to ask the right questions as opposed to knowing the answers. … As students, you’re always taught that you’re not going to succeed unless you know all the answers. The higher you go in science, the fewer answers there are. The goal is not to have the answers but, first, to be able to ask the right questions.
Especially now that Grok and ChatGPT know all of the answers, why not reengineer education around trying to answer new questions? Young people would still have to do the drudgery of learning the answers to old questions, of course, but they’d be doing that in the context of trying to make some progress on an unanswered question. The same thinking would enliven our nation’s science museums, most of which explicitly say “the Science is settled”.
I’m not sure that the book lives up to the “ignite your career” promise from the title, unless the strategy to “ignite your career in Science” is to quit and do medicine instead. Donna Strickland echoes what I wrote in “Women in Science” (2006; “This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.”):
Keating: What are your feelings on how the status of women has changed over your career, and where do you see it going?
Strickland: Well, it’s changed, but I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that physics itself is not appreciated highly by society. All these other issues, why they say women don’t want to do physics, would have been true in medicine as well—and yet now more women go into medicine than men. Parents still tell children that are good in science to become doctors. If you get paid well, society says, “We value this.” Physics is not one of those valued things; it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman…
Many of the interviewees point out that there is a huge overproduction of PhDs relative to the number of sought-after academic jobs and that the chance of career success is low. A book like this, in which Nobel laureates are interviewed, is almost the definition of sample bias. Undergrads at a Queers for Palestine League university fall prey to this as well. The freshman at MIT or Yale subconsciously absorbs that being a tenured biology professor at MIT or Yale is a typical outcome for someone with a biology PhD because tenured biology professors are the only PhD biologists that the freshman has encountered.
The book contains some information that is misleading, e.g.,
For example, even with a doubling of salary, you’re not likely to register a doubling in well-being. In fact, the effect of wealth has been shown to be nonlinear. Beyond a certain income threshold, happiness saturates, leading to a diminishment in returns beyond, according to Nobel Prize–winner Daniel Kahneman.
A 10% raise delivers a similar boost in satisfaction across income levels, research finds
A big raise provides significant boosts in happiness even at household incomes of $500,000, according to a new research report.
A wealth of research has long shown that more money makes a big difference to people with low pay, moving them from insecurity to stability. Above that level, the effect is often assumed to be much smaller.
But according to a paper by Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the bonuses and leaps in income high earners reap are so large that they keep adding to well-being in the same way that smaller pay bumps do at lower tiers of earnings.
So it’s true that a $1 raise doesn’t make a Wall Street hero significantly happier, but there isn’t a diminishing return to a 10 percent raise.
The book reminds us that academics all around the world love to see elites locking down the peasants. Tim Palmer, a senior citizen physicist in the UK, celebrates the fact that eventually the rulers of the UK locked down their young healthy subjects in an attempt to slow the spread of a disease that kills 80-year-olds:
Palmer: It’s a tough problem. As a scientist, we can’t make decisions. All I can do is lay out the signs as clearly as possible and hope the politicians get it. At least in the UK, politicians did get it eventually with COVID. They were slow on the uptake—and the science, of course, was pretty uncertain in the initial phase, largely because a lot of people were asymptomatic—but they did get it eventually.
Of course, the UK had a higher COVID-tagged death rate than do-almost-nothing Sweden and a higher rate of excess deaths compared to do-almost-nothing Sweden. The lockdowns in the UK were spectacular failures, in other words, by the advertised standards of the Covidcrats (minimize Covid-tagged deaths even if it drives up long-term deaths from other causes, such as unemployment, sedentary lockdown lifestyle, alcohol consumption, deferred health care, and lack of education) and yet the Nobel-winning genius considers the muscular Science-informed public policy to have been a success.
Let’s circle back to the issue of victimization by gender ID. Donna Strickland again:
The problem in the seventies, in my time, is that women were told we could do anything, but the men weren’t told you also have to do your share. When Maria Goeppert Mayer won her Nobel Prize [in 1963], the newspaper wrote, “San Diego housewife wins Nobel Prize.” Everybody said it’s OK that she’s doing science because she’s also doing all her women’s jobs too. Well, this is not possible. It’s not possible for us to be twice as much. We will have around-the-world gender equity when we also let men look after children and the elderly. It bothered me during COVID-19 that it was like, “Well, all the women have to lose their jobs because they’re the ones who look after kids and the elderly.” I don’t think women are more caring than men. That’s just as offensive as saying women aren’t as smart as men. If everybody did their share, then everybody could have an equal shot at it.
She doesn’t want “everybody to do their share” on construction sites, on Florida roofs in July, or on oil rigs, but rather wants men to relieve women of some onerous household chores, such as putting shirts into electric washing machines and dishes into automatic dishwashers. She is echoing Bill Burr on the subject of a job that can be done in one’s pajamas being the hardest job in the world:
Let’s close with a Nobel nerd’s prediction of where we end up relative to our AI overlords:
Geradus ’t Hooft: I expect there will be an intelligence so smart that Einstein, Feynman, and ’t Hooft would all look like primitive gorillas. The point is that all abilities of biological life forms can be copied by human engineers: we make houses taller than trees, dig holes deeper than moles can, we can fly faster and higher than birds, with much heavier machines, and so on. So why can we not produce brains that work better than the human brain? Well, biology took millions of years to create us; our machines are only a few centuries old, and we’ll get there and beyond. I do not quite follow the ideas AI engineers are using. I think it could be done better, but comparing the previously mentioned examples, people will make many different AI machines, each for their own particular purposes.
Recent email from the Jewish Community Center of Greater Boston:
Of course, I had to click down and see what the event “For gender expansive, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ kids ages 0-8” was all about:
Come together with other gender expansive kids and their families for a playground playdate in Cambridge. Socialize with parents and caregivers while the kids run, climb, and slide. Then, enjoy a craft and allergy-friendly snacks with new friends. For gender expansive, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ kids ages 0-8 yrs with their caregivers.
Apparently, at least in Boston/Cambridge, the odds of a 6-year-old child being both 2SLGBTQQIA+ and highly allergic are fairly high….
I visited the South Street Seaport for the first time in years and discovered that it has kept up with the times. The sacred Rainbow Flag is worshipped at a height of 4X the height of the American flag (Rainbow Flag at the very top of the mast of the museum ship while the American Flag is about one quarter of the way up).
The worshippers can’t seem to decide on which sect of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ religion they are following. A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is flown from the front of the ship while a classic non-trans Rainbow Flag is flown from the mast near the stern. Views from the top of the building are superb:
The Tin Building includes a hidden-behind-curtains-at-the-back-of-a-tea-shop restaurant:
When the American flag is displayed we can refer to the official U.S. flag code for guidance on orientation, etc. I’m wondering what the corresponding document would be for the Rainbow Flag, which is far more sacred (it is permissible and protected speech to burn an American flag (Supreme Court) but burning a Rainbow Flag is punished by 15 years in prison).
Here’s what I assume is the proper way to display a trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag (flown by Joe Biden in 2023 and reported by state-sponsored PBS):
The trans-enhancing triangle is on the top.
Here’s part of a taxpayer-funded display of the state religion’s sacred symbol in Boise, Idaho on July 1, 2025 (after Pride but before Omnisexual Visibility Day (July 6));
The trans-enhancing triangle is on the bottom. That can’t be correct, I don’t think, but where is the flag code to establish authoritatively that it isn’t correct? (See Big Sky v. Jackson v. Park City as a summer destination for images of a taxpayer-funded display in 2023 where the triangles are on the top, just as Joe Biden set up.)
Speaking of the U.S. Flag Code and Boise, the folks who run the Zoo decided that the American flag fit perfectly into the Olive Baboon habitat:
The backup Baboon American flag boxes were displayed contrary to U.S. Flag Code (maybe a protest against the Trump administration?):
Finally, let’s have a look at post-Pride (July 2025) displays of the sacred flag and related symbols by merchants in Boise:
One establishment reminds the public that a MAGA hat can be considered “Nazi symbology” or, at least, Nazi-adjacent:
