Category: Journalism

Wall Street Journal celebrates an all-male gay throuple

by philg

A 2023 post, No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage (2015), linked to a Wall Street Journal article about the beauty of a three-female throuple: “How Instagram’s Favorite Therapist Makes Her Throuple Relationship Work”. From 2025, “One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation?”

Good clean fun:

The men contracted with interior designer Jennifer Kole of Jenami Designs for a design fee of around $405,000, including furnishings. The en-suite bathroom has a 7-foot-by-4.5-foot shower with multiple shower heads, plus a free-standing soaking tub, ensuring no one is left waiting their turn.

Product designers are also exploring intimacy through form. New York-based furniture designer Kouros Maghsoudi created a sculptural bed called Hug, designed to comfortably accommodate up to three partners.

Should everyone join in this trend?

Real-estate agents are noticing more throuples and polycules buying homes together, often with everyone’s name on the deed. “Monogamy in this economy?” says Kathy “Kiki” Sloan, an employing broker with Property Dominator in Denver. She has seen a steady uptick in multipartner buyers treating shared ownership as both a romantic and financial move. Her advice: Get the paperwork sorted early. It should include a cohabitation plan and, ideally, an estate plan. Wendy Newman, a California-based real-estate agent with Wesely & Associates, adds that polyamorous families have been buying homes together for decades, but today more are “out” from the start and set up ownership structures that support everyone. Flexible layouts, with extra rooms, double primary bedrooms, accessory dwelling units and adaptable spaces are increasingly popular, she says.

One thing that I haven’t seen in the WSJ: a celebration of the normalcy of mixed-sex polygamy. Three women: good/wholesome/normal. Three men: good/wholesome/normal. One man and two women: no representation. I asked ChatGPT to write a story in the WSJ style:

In a fictional suburban vignette that reads like a zoning-board case study, an American-born Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed finds his tidy life colliding with global custom.
His wife, Donna Jones, a blonde convert to Islam, embraces the faith with a zeal that extends beyond the couple’s split-level home.
After a family decision made oceans away, she sponsors the arrival of a second wife from Somalia, turning belief into blueprints.
Suddenly the household needs more than harmony; it needs square footage.
An architect is hired to add bedrooms, rework entrances, and persuade the local code book to tolerate an unconventional floor plan.
Neighbors whisper, contractors measure, and the mortgage grows, a familiar American story with unfamiliar terms.
For Mr. Mohammed, born here and fluent in the rhythms of suburbia, the expansion tests the elastic limits of assimilation.
For Ms. Jones, the renovation is a practical expression of conviction, drywall standing in for doctrine.
The second wife’s arrival brings cultural translation alongside luggage, as daily routines are renegotiated room by room.
In this imagined tale, the clash is less about faith than about permits, proving that in America even private lives must pass inspection.

Note that it completely fails in the task in the first sentence. The WSJ news story disclaims itself as “fictional” when we know that everything in the WSJ is factual. Let’s see if Grok does better.

In the quiet suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota, Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed, a 42-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Minneapolis, has quietly become a case study in the evolving boundaries of American family life. Mr. Mohammed, a successful logistics manager, married Donna Jones, a blonde former Lutheran schoolteacher who converted to Islam in 2015, in a ceremony that drew little attention at the time. Last year, Mr. Mohammed traveled to Somalia and returned with a second wife, Fatima Hassan, 29, who holds a valid spousal visa under U.S. immigration law. The couple’s three-bedroom colonial home, purchased in 2018, soon proved too small for the expanded household, which now includes four children from Mr. Mohammed’s marriages. Local architect Sarah Kline was hired to design a $320,000 addition featuring a separate wing with its own entrance, kitchenette, and private bedroom suite for Ms. Hassan, preserving what the family describes as “cultural harmony” while respecting the existing household’s privacy. Ms. Jones, who works part-time as a Quran tutor, told neighbors the arrangement reflects “mutual respect and shared faith,” though she acknowledged the adjustment has been challenging. The project has drawn scrutiny from the city’s zoning board, which approved the addition after confirming it complies with local building codes, but some residents have quietly expressed unease about polygamy’s presence in their community. Legal experts note that while polygamous marriages are not recognized for civil purposes in the U.S., the arrangement remains lawful as long as only one union is registered with the state. Mr. Mohammed declined to comment for this article, citing a desire to keep his family’s private life out of the public eye. The addition, expected to be completed next spring, stands as a tangible symbol of how immigration, faith, and personal choice are reshaping the American suburban landscape in unexpected ways.

Note that the story becomes primarily about the narrow-mindedness of non-Muslim Americans and the scourge of Islamophobia. The prompt didn’t say anything about neighbors being upset:

Write a 10-sentence article in Wall Street Journal style about American-born Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed married to a blonde convert to Islam, Donna Jones, who brings a second wife over from Somalia and an architect has to expand their house to accommodate the new wife.

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Stocks for the long run and money illusion

by philg

“Bank of America Shares Finally Recover From 2008 Financial Crisis” (Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2025):

Bank of America notched a symbolic win Friday when its stock traded higher than $55.08, a level not seen for America’s second biggest bank since before the 2008 financial crisis.

Like other banks that were damaged during the crisis, Bank of America has struggled to get its stock price back to the highs seen when George W. Bush was still president. Citigroup shares also haven’t recovered to their past high of around $530 in 2007.

Bank of America’s previous closing high was $54.90 on Nov. 20, 2006.

Perhaps a cautionary tale for those who are buying into the AI bubble!

Nowhere in the article: any inflation adjustment. It thus becomes a good example of money illusion. The WSJ is supposed to be by and for people who are sophisticated about money. That a stock today trades higher in nominal dollars than it did in 2006 is meaningless given the reduction in value of the dollar. $54.90 in November 2006, adjusted for official CPI, is equivalent to $88.49 today. An investor who bought BofA stock in 2006, in other words, has lost nearly 40 percent of his/her/zir/their money.

(Adding insult to injury, if the stock keeps going up and the investor sells at only a 20 percent loss then the IRS will be there to collect 23.8 percent of an illusory “gain” (an increase in the nominal price) and a state such as California will collect an additional 13.3 percent (9 percent in Maskachusetts).)

Reporter biography: “Alexander Saeedy … is a graduate of Yale University, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in History.”

Also in journalism, the New York Times displays a sampling of what it says are photos from Emmanuel Goldstein’s laptop (“Democrats Release Photos Showing Epstein Ties to Powerful Men”: “The 92 photos, selected by Democrats on the Oversight Committee from a trove of 95,000 images in Mr. Epstein’s email account and on one of his laptops”):

Three-fourths of the sample images include Donald Trump so a reasonable reader would infer that 75 percent of the images released (or maybe 75 percent of the 95,000 total?) included Donald Trump. Buried lower in the article: “The series of photos does include three images of Mr. Trump”. In other words, the representative 4-image sample of the 92 images chosen by the NYT contains 3 out of 3 Trump-related images.

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Unprovoked genocide against the Uyghurs

by philg

I’m reading House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. I’ll try to cover the book’s main subject in a later post, but this one is about the use of propaganda.

The author:

Eva Dou covers technology policy for The Washington Post. A Detroit native, she previously spent around a decade covering international politics and technology for the Post and the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, Seoul and Taipei. She is currently based in Washington D.C.

In other words, the author is embedded in U.S. corporate media. What does she have to say about our rivals in China?

By late 2017, there were growing signs that something was very wrong in China’s far-west Xinjiang region. Guards with machine guns manned checkpoints in and out of cities; travelers had to have their faces scanned and walk through full-body scanners. On the streets, pedestrians were stopped by police at random to have their phones checked for illegal political or religious content. Gas stations were barricaded and ringed with razor wire as a precaution against bombings. Officials warned that even modest expressions of Islamic faith, such as growing a beard or wearing a headscarf, would be scrutinized as potential signs of extremism. And a growing number of people—especially members of the Uyghur ethnic minority—were being hauled off without trial to prisonlike sites called “reeducation centers.” Estimates of how many people were detained (in either short-term or long-term detention) ranged from the hundreds of thousands to more than a million. Reports of torture, abuse, and deaths trickled out. Under the banner of counterterrorism, Xinjiang had become the world’s most repressive high-tech surveillance state. And Huawei had helped build it. The company’s next-generation fast networks, facial-recognition algorithms, and high-definition cameras had all combined to build an invisible net of enormous scale. Huawei was not the only tech company to sell surveillance gear into Xinjiang. But it was certainly among the major suppliers. In Xinjiang, and across the nation, Huawei was hawking a fulsome portfolio of advanced surveillance technologies, built in cooperation with hundreds of startups and other partner companies. There were smart glasses that police could wear on patrol to scan crowds for faces on a watch list. There were high-definition police body cams that streamed live to a big screen back at the command center. There was a listening device that could monitor and analyze conversations within a ten-meter radius outdoors, day and night. There were biometric scanners that picked up iris patterns in the eyes, which could be used to identify a person, similarly to fingerprints. There was a voiceprint database to match voices on audio recordings against known individuals. These gadgets were often marketed under the brands of Huawei’s partner companies, with Huawei satisfied to take a low-key role.

The Chinese, in other words, engaged in unprovoked aggression against the Uyghurs purely because of prejudice against “Islamic faith” and “ethnic minorities”. This was done “under the banner of counterterrorism”, but the author doesn’t mention any terrorist incidents in which Uyghurs might have been involved. What does American-produced AI have to say?

Various incidents described by Chinese authorities as terrorist attacks or riots by Uyghur separatists have occurred in China, particularly in the Xinjiang region, over the past few decades. 

“Major incidents often cited include:

  • July 2009 Ürümqi riots: Ethnic violence in the capital of Xinjiang resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 people, mostly Han Chinese civilians.
  • March 2014 Kunming railway station attack: A group of knife-wielding assailants attacked civilians, killing 31 people and injuring 141 others. This attack occurred outside of the Xinjiang region.
  • April 2014 Ürümqi train station attack: A knife attack and suicide bombing killed three people and injured 79.
  • May 2014 Ürümqi street market attack: Two vehicles were driven into a market and explosives thrown at shoppers, resulting in 43 deaths and over 90 injuries, making it one of the deadliest attacks in the conflict.

The Chinese government has consistently attributed these events to Uyghur separatist and extremist groups, notably the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP).”

I find it interesting how the official “Chinese bad; Islam is the Religion of Peace” line can be subtly supported even by a book about a telco supplier. (Note that the above passage, read by a skeptical person, actually calls into doubt the Biden administration’s “genocide” accusation. If the Chinese government were simply killing most or all Uyghurs they wouldn’t need to bother with high tech surveillance.)

(Of course, the Chinese response to jihad was quite different from what the U.S. has done, e.g., the deaths on 9/11 motivated us to open the borders to a vastly larger group of Muslim immigrants, the 2016 jihad of second-generation Afghan-American Omar Mateen motivated us to bring in Rahmanullah Lakanwal, one of his wives, and four of his kids.)

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Today is your chance to join the cognitive super-elite

by philg

Below, New York City’s intellectual elites admit that they’re not capable of setting an oven to 325, sticking a $20 supermarket special turkey in, and walking away for a few hours. These are the folks whose advice we’re supposed to follow on complex economic, scientific, medical, and political topics. Wall Street Journal:

If you picked up a 99 cent/lb. turkey at Costco (below, from Stuart, Florida) or an 84 cent/lb. turkey at Walmart and managed to get it into the oven that therefore makes you one of the cognitive super-elite.

How about the intellectual elites at Harvard and MIT? Maybe they are more capable than New York elites? The answer seems to be “Yes… at setting their houses on fire.” Recent email from the City of Cambridge:

My technique, which I hope won’t burn down our concrete house with tile roof:

  • steam roast at 275 for about one hour on maximum steam (to prevent the finished product from drying out)
  • roast at 325 with light steam until internal temperature hits 125 (another 45 minutes or so if it’s a small turkey)
  • roast at 400 with no steam to crisp the skin until internal temp hits 165

Here’s our oven: LG WSEP4727F. This doesn’t produce anywhere near as much steam as the KitchenAid range that we once had (plumbed to the sink), but I think the steam does help prevent dry-out and the oven has a much larger cavity for turkey roasting and all other purposes than, for example, Miele ovens that are 5X the cost and literally half the internal size. Unlike the KitchenAid, which ran flawlessly from 2015 through coronapanic in Maskachusetts, the LG’s steam pump failed after just one use. After months of phone calls (cue the person in India who asks, after being told the model number and that it is a wall oven, whether it is gas or electric) and multiple house calls we finally got the necessary parts replaced and the steam feature has worked ever since that replacement.

So… happy Thanksgiving to everyone, especially to the undocumented migrants who enrich us with their multicultural Thanksgiving traditions from around the world.

(I would be delighted to get comments from anyone who does any steam cooking today and hear what was done and how it worked out!)

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María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize

by philg

Progressive friends who never previously mentioned María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician, now celebrate her winning a Nobel Peace Prize. I wonder how carefully they’ve researched this lady. First, let’s have a moment of silence for Hugo Chavez, whose premature death robbed him of the Nobel Peace Prize that was his due. Perhaps we can reflect on the words of Noam Chomsky when he met this lion of democracy and peace:”I write about peace and criticize the barriers to peace; that’s easy. What’s harder is to create a better world… and what’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created.”

(Collectively, of course, the Venezuelans created such a great world in Venezuela that the Biden-Harris administration decided that 100 percent of Venezuelans were eligible to live in the United States, thus enabling them to replicate their success on a larger scale.)

Let’s see how truly peaceful the heiress to Barack Obama’s Mantle of Peace truly is. An unbiased “news” article from America’s journalists at The Week:

… many have started to point out that the 58-year-old is a strong ally of Israel and openly backs the country’s decision to bomb the largely unarmed civilians of the Gaza Strip. While there is no known evidence to argue that she supported the one-sided attack on the Palestinian civilians, Machado is undoubtedly an ally of Benjamin Netanyahu. In the past, the centrist-right leader had even declared that if she gains power, she will restore diplomatic relations with Israel.

It’s a fact that Israel launched a “one-sided attack on the Palestinian civilians” and this fake Peace laureate somehow supports the attackers rather than the unarmed and Peaceful Gazans.

(The Week’s article is a little confusing, actually. The “civilians” of Gaza are “largely unarmed”. Does that mean that some civilians in Gaza are armed with rockets, machine guns, etc., but are still considered “civilians” because they don’t also have tanks?)

Related:

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Immigrants don’t commit crime because criminals aren’t “immigrants”

by philg

State-sponsored NPR assures us that “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans, studies find”. The state-sponsored news organization in the UK demonstrates a brilliant method of proving this Scientific fact.

“What we know about synagogue attacker Jihad Al-Shamie” (BBC):

The Manchester synagogue attacker was Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent.

“Syrian descent”? Meaning that his ancestors came to England after the Second Crusade besieged Damascus? (before the country of “Syria” existed)

Al-Shamie, who lived in Prestwich, Manchester, is understood to have entered the UK as a young child and was granted British citizenship in 2006 when he was around the age of 16.

So… Jihad wasn’t born in the UK and then lived in the UK with a UK passport. The article never describes Jihad as an “immigrant” or uses the word “immigrant” or “migrant”. So, to the extent that stabbing and running over Jews on Yom Kippur are crimes in the UK there is no immigrant guilty of those crimes. Jihad was not an “immigrant.”

Separately, would it make sense to grant immediate British citizenship to anyone named “Jihad”?

Finally, how about a movement regarding this noble enricher who was unjustly killed by police with “His name was Jihad; Say His Name” signage? From Grace Lutheran Church in Wisconsin:

Tweak it to “Jihad Al-Shamie. Listen to his name. Say his name aloud. Hear yourself saying his name.” I asked Grok to work on this:

ChatGPT:

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Obtaining some public records in Brookline, Maskachusetts

by philg

“I tried to pry public records from Brookline schools. They stiff-armed me for months.” (Boston Globe, 9/21/2025):

The rub: Because of flaws in our state’s law, theory differs from practice. It takes just minutes to file a public records request, but as I painfully learned, to actually get a request fulfilled may require months upon months of follow-up; a nontrivial sum of money; a lawyer or two; and persistence verging on a pathological inability to let go.

Just after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the schools superintendent sent out two messages that sparked instant backlash. “As you are likely already aware, violence is escalating rapidly in Israel and Palestine,” began one note, sent to the entire school district community. Though the town includes large Jewish and Israeli populations, the note neither decried the Hamas atrocities nor expressed sympathy to the many affected local families. A separate note to staff recommended an undeniably slanted set of teaching resources. It included links to pro-Palestinian sources like Visualizing Palestine and Decolonize Palestine but no similarly pro-Israel sources to balance them, and nothing on Hamas.

(I’m not sure that it is reasonable to call the October 7, 2023 event “Hamas attacks” given that there were fighters from UNRWA and Palestinian Islamic Jihad involved, as well as “civilian” Gazans. By saying that it is only “Hamas” that wants to destroy the Zionist entity and achieve river-to-the-sea liberation the implication is that if the 6 or 7 remaining Hamas-affiliated Gazans were removed the Gazans would cheerfully accept the existence of Israel.)

On Oct. 16, 2023, when I filed my request, I figured I was just asking for a couple of days’ worth of one official’s emails on a specific topic. Type a few terms into a search bar and done, right?
Wrong. It took more than 18 months to get that modest request fulfilled, and I still don’t have one central document (but I’ve given up). It took enlisting pro bono lawyers; appeals to the supervisor of records, the state team that handles public records requests; countless nagging emails; two speeches and a half-dozen emails to the School Committee. … I refiled the request in May 2024. This time, when it was once again met with silence, I knew enough to appeal after 10 days to the supervisor of records. That office promptly ordered the town to respond.

In July 2024, the Brookline town counsel did send over a document. Only one, but still — a document!
Sadly, it was nothing but an email saying a draft of a Google Doc for the Oct. 7 messaging had been created. All names were blacked out, without the justifications for those redactions that are required by law. Also, I knew the superintendent had received many emails responding to his messages; our local Brookline News had even covered them. Where were they?

Stymied, I finally sought legal help through the Anti-Defamation League’s project on antisemitism in K-12 schools, and it provided two top-notch pro bono attorneys. In mid-December, I wrote to the town counsel conveying, for the first time in my life, the ultimate attention-grabber: “You’ll be hearing next from my lawyers.”

Soon came the count — the town counsel’s office had identified 368 potentially relevant emails — and the price tag: they estimated that at least 39 hours of staff time would be needed to process the emails, at a cost of $926.25.

In April and May of this year, the town counsel sent over four batches of repetitive, sometimes irrelevant emails, sprinkled with a few gems. Several indicated that two senior district staffers had led the drafting of the messages: a senior director of teaching and learning, and the director of the Office of Educational Equity.

Any Massachusetts taxpayer who wants to fund “education” instead of “educational equity” can move to Florida, I guess.

Here’s a page from the Decolonize Palestine site that the school bureaucrats wanted students to read:

In other words, we always must circle back to Queers for Palestine.

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New York Times and Claudine Gay

by philg

Check out the caption at the bottom of the photo in this recent New York Times article:

Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University, left the university only months after she started the role.

The tenured plagiarist, who can choose to collect a paycheck from Harvard every week until she is dead, even if her brain goes “full Biden”, “left the university” according to the New York Times. What does the Harvard web site say? “Claudine Gay is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and Professor of African and African-American Studies.”

A peasant reading the article might get the false impression that there were financial consequences in Academia for elite workers who break rules or make mistakes!

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Wall Street Journal warns New Yorkers not to move to Florida

by philg

New York-based journalists love to write about how New York taxpayers shouldn’t flee to Florida and skip paying 14.8 percent state/city income tax, 8.9 percent sales tax, and 16 percent estate tax (vs. 6-7 percent sales tax in FL and 0 percent income/estate). Here’s a recent example, “The Worst Housing Market in America Is Now Florida’s Cape Coral”:

The median home price soared nearly 75% to $419,000 in three years, transforming the character of this middle-income community that for decades has catered to retirees and small investors. … Home prices for Cape Coral-Fort Myers have tumbled 11% in the two years through May

So the prices went up about 56 percent, over a five-year period. That’s before adjusting for Bidenflation. What happened in the U.S. overall? Prices went from 218 to 331 (source), a rise in nominal dollars of 52 percent:

In other words, for people who bought a house five years ago (the average tenure in a house for an American is about 12 years), what the WSJ calls “the worst housing market in America” outperformed the U.S. residential real estate market overall.

What Zillow shows is that the Cape Coral market was more volatile than the national average:

So Cape Coral actually has been a bad market for home-flippers who had the misfortune to buy in at the peak, but for the typical Cape Coral homeowner it has been a better market (albeit, not by much) than the average U.S. real estate market. What about for the elites who put the Wall Street Journal together? How has their Manhattan real estate done by comparison? Zillow:

(“New York County”=Manhattan)

So Cape Coral is objectively speaking the worst housing market in the U.S. (reported as fact/news by the Wall Street Journal rather than as opinion). At the same time, people who owned property in Manhattan fared far worse over the past 6 years or almost any time window within those 6 years.

Related:

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Harvard’s latest win in court and the New York Times

by philg

“Judge Rules Trump Administration Illegally Canceled Harvard Funding” (NYT):

Harvard University won a crucial legal victory in its clash with the Trump administration on Wednesday, when a federal judge said that the government had broken the law by freezing billions of dollars in research funds in the name of stamping out antisemitism.

The ruling may not be the final word on the matter, but the decision by Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court in Boston was an interim rebuff of the Trump administration’s campaign to remake elite higher education by force.

What does the multi-page article lack? Any background information on this judge. Her Wikipedia page:

Allison Dale Burroughs (born 1961) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States district judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She was appointed in 2014 by President Barack Obama. She is most notably known for rejecting the lawsuit Asian students brought against Harvard’s race-based admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2019).

It wasn’t worth mentioning, in other words, that her previous ruling in favor of Harvard, allowing them to continue to discriminate by race, was overturned by the Supreme Court. Nor did the NYT have space for “Obama-appointed” anywhere in the article, despite the fact that justice right now seems heavily dependent on whether a judge was appointed by a Democrat or a Republican president (all three Supreme Court Justices appointed by Democrats, for example, said that it was constitutional for Harvard to sort applicants by skin color).

Update: The Wall Street Journal does the same thing, e.g., in “Harvard’s Pyrrhic Legal Victory” (editorial) and “Trump Administration’s Cuts to Harvard Funding Are Unconstitutional, Judge Rules” (“news”).

(Note that I personally don’t understand why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems” is willing to accept any federal money. Harvard is a rich institution in a richer-than-average state. One would think that they’d seek money from the Massachusetts state government and ask that all federal money be redirected to less-wealthy universities in poorer-than-average states, e.g., University of Michigan.)

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