One of my favorite posts from 11 years ago, Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate, poked fun at Tim Cook for complaining that people he’d never met in Indiana and Arkansas were racist and might put up a “whites only” sign while simultaneously going to work every day in a white-only environment:
A Florida senator whom I wish would retire writes about federal tax dollars being funneled to Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in western Maskachusetts (I was there once, part of being a houseguest of some Democrats who have a $2 million lake house nearby and who subscribe):
Do you think your tax dollars should fund a dance festival? I sure don’t, but Democrats do.
They’re demanding a $375k earmark for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the latest appropriations package. That’s not fiscal responsibility, it’s a total waste of YOUR MONEY.
It’s not funding a dance festival. It’s funding race- and sex-discrimination. Jacob’s Pillow explains their discriminatory policies, e.g. , “Prioritization of BIPOC Vendors”: https://t.co/yiRVzNYlzf
The organization’s December 2024 web page proudly describes the federal funds recipient policies of discrimination that is contrary to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection. Here are just some of the ways that they promise to discriminate based on race and gender ID:
Prioritization of BIPOC Vendors: Conduct focused research and expand the use of BIPOC-owned vendors
83% of the 2024 episodes in our monthly “PillowVoices: Dance Through Time” podcast featured BIPOC artists, and 100% featured women.
All of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive playlists featured BIPOC and women artists.
off-campus and on-campus programming for low-income, BIPOC Berkshire residents.
How can government money be used to fund activities that should be illegal and unconstitutional if the government itself did it? (I guess we have had government-run race- and sex-discrimination in contracting, with set-asides for women- and minority-owned businesses, but I have never figured out how that is Constitutional.) I have never been able to get a straight answer from any of my lawyer friends as to how the government can operate and fund race discrimination without first repealing the 14th Amendment.
Happy Kwanzaa to everyone. Our Kwanzaa Bush decorated with an ornament we received as a gift from a neighbor:
The Democrat who runs New Jersey reminds us that this is the time for white men to cosplay as Maulana Karenga (“convicted of felony assault, torture, and false imprisonment of women”).
For Christmas Eve, on which a lot of Legacy Americans celebrate the birth of a baby, the same governor celebrates funding abortion care for babies:
NEW: We are providing over $22 million to boost access to reproductive health care.
While the Trump Administration restricts reproductive rights, @NJGov will support family planning providers, grow our workforce, upgrade facilities, and safeguard essential medications.…
The Roman World into which Jesus was born was a pure market economy. Property was private, taxes were ridiculously low by modern standards (perhaps 1-5% of income), and government-provided welfare was negligible. The New Testament describes a Christian community that voluntarily opted out of the Roman economic and political system:
Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.
There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.
Acts 4:32, 34
We’re told that socialism and communism are enjoying renewed popularity in the U.S. Young progressives love Bernie Sanders and the Ayatollah Mamdani.
It’s perfectly possible to set up a voluntary communist or at least communalist society in the U.S. See, for example, Amana, Iowa: 75 years of communal living, in which people lived without private property embedded within a capitalist society.
Why aren’t at least some young progressives living their dream via voluntary contract?
Loosely related… Jupiter Mayor Jim Kuretski’s house, Christmas 2021:
Microsoft has been publishing data about the gender, race, and ethnic breakdown of its employees for more than a decade. Since 2019 it’s been publishing a full diversity and inclusion report annually, and at the same time made reporting on diversity a requirement for employee performance reviews. Now it’s scrapping its diversity report and dropping diversity and inclusion as a companywide core priority for performance reviews, just months after President Donald Trump issued an executive order to try and eradicate workforce diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
… employees no longer have to submit exactly what they did to improve security and diversity and what they plan to do in the future. … replaced with a simplified form that asks employees to reflect on the results they delivered and how they achieved them, and any recent setbacks and goals for the future. … In HR documentation, the company doesn’t even use the word “diversity” anymore, opting for just “inclusion” instead.
Also on December 4, 2025, pictures of my Windows 11 login screen:
Microsoft knows that I have chosen to use the Windows operating system and it reminds me about “the extraordinary women who have made a positive impact on the modern world.”
Who are the extraordinary women who built Microsoft Windows? I asked ChatGPT, “Who were the most important programmers of Microsoft Windows operating system that are identifiable by name?” and received the following answer:
Tim Paterson, wrote original QDOS/MS-DOS
Mark Zbikowski, designed MZ executable format
Dave Cutler, lead architect Windows NT
Lou Perazzoli, NT memory manager author
Mark Lucovsky, NT kernel/I-O subsystem
Rob Short, core NT kernel engineer
Jim Horne, NT cache manager author
Tom Miller, original NT kernel team
Darryl Havens, original NT kernel team
Steve Wood, original NT kernel team
Ralph Lipe, Win32 input/driver stack
Ken Reneris, GDI graphics subsystem
Philip Fortier, early USER window manager
Bob Day, GDI and USER components
Raymond Chen, Win32 compatibility steward
David Thompson, Windows 95 lead architect
Brad Silverberg, Windows 95 project leader
Jim Allchin, merged 95/NT codebases
Mark Russinovich, modern kernel authority
Dave Plummer, wrote Task Manager/Pinball
What do the people behind Microsoft Windows know about “extraordinary women” that the typical user doesn’t know? How did Microsoft become an expert on this subject? Will an extraordinary woman figure out a way for Windows 11 to run smoothly in less than 128 GB of RAM? Will an extraordinary woman figure out a way for Windows 11 to delete a file from the C: drive (M.2 SSD) without waiting for spin-up of the D: drive (HDD)?
A friend in central New Jersey has a new Tesla Model Y:
I just calculated my effective $/kWh rate on my first month of the EV charging plan. Regular rate is ~$0.24/kWh. After 9pm, I get charged $0.04/kWh. Last month of charging has cost me $10.
My response:
The peasant renter pays 24 cents for electricity at night. The elite homeowner with the new Tesla pays 4 cents, It’s a great country.
Loosely related, a plug-in hybrid at our local strip mall:
Eric Adams, who identifies as African-American, is on track to be replaced by an immigrant, Zohran Mamdani, today, just as predicted by this 2007 Harvard-NBER paper:
I’m sure that it is painful for some to see New York’s Blacks reduced to political irrelevance, but academics might be celebrating a successful prediction.
Separately, while I was on a JetBlue PBI-PVD flight recently a friend texted to ask my whereabouts. The reply: “Above the Mamdani Caliphate.”
Gavin Newsom loves to brag about how rich California is. Here’s a typical post in which he says that “California is the fourth largest economy in the world” and is getting richer every day (“#1 in new business startups”).
California is the fourth largest economy in the world.
#1 in new business startups #1 in manufacturing #1 in farming #1 in public higher education #1 in Fortune 500 companies
Six of the top ten U.S. cities for quality of life in 2025 are located in California.
Here’s a recent post from Gavin Newsom in which he says that “40 million people [will] lose access to food.” (Note that there are actually more than 40 million people on SNAP, which in no way should be considered “welfare”, but let’s accept 40 million as an approximation.) He doesn’t say that “Except for the 5.5 million Californians on SNAP/EBT (“CalFresh”), who will be fully funded with state tax dollars because California is so rich, SNAP/EBT beneficiaries nationwide will lose access to food.”
Donald Trump is literally dancing in Asia while 40 million people lose access to food.
the political party that runs the state says that inequality is bad
the political party that runs the state says that taxpayer-funded food is a human right
there is no political opposition to the ruling party
the state won’t provide food for its residents unless it can feed at the federal trough
How is it possible for all of the above to be true?
Loosely related because Kentucky isn’t a rich state…
My faith teaches me that food is lifegiving and meant to be shared. From the miracle of fishes and loaves to the Last Supper, we are called to feed and care for each other. The Trump administration prohibiting SNAP benefits is wrong. We should be fighting hunger, not causing it.
Governor Beshear has a huge charitable heart so long as other people are working longer hours to pay for his charity (kind of like if I borrow my neighbor’s car, donate it to a non-profit org, and then call myself virtuous/charitable). But why won’t he fund free food for all needy Kentuckians with Kentucky state tax dollars?
Two weeks into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has frozen or canceled nearly $28 billion that had been reserved for more than 200 projects primarily located in Democratic-led cities, congressional districts and states, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Each of these infrastructure projects had received federal aid, sometimes after officials spent years pleading in Washington — only to see that money halted as President Trump has looked to punish Democrats over the course of the fiscal stalemate.
The projects include new investments in clean energy, upgrades to the electric grid and fixes to the nation’s transportation infrastructure, primarily in Democratic strongholds, such as New York and California.
The article goes on to describe parts of the U.S. that are much richer than average, e.g., New York City, and Chicago, and where nearly 100 percent of those in power say that they want inequality in the U.S. reduced.
I can’t figure out why these haters of inequality asked for the money to begin with. The only position that would be consistent with their stated principles would be “We’ll pay for what we need ourselves. Don’t even think of giving us federal money until Buffalo, Providence, and Detroit have been lifted up to an equal level of per-capita income.”
A few photos from my August trip to the Mamdani Caliphate (there were about 15 marijuana stores within two blocks of my Lower East Side hotel and the density fell to 0 once one got to Chinatown (Asians don’t want to maximize their health?)):
The last photo in the series is of the Vladeck Houses, a public housing project on prime Lower Manhattan land (note the luxurious amount of land devoted to green space; no non-government development in Manhattan has anything like this). The city could sell this land to a private developer, give each resident enough money to buy a single-family house almost anywhere in the U.S., and might still have enough money to fund all of the fancy infrastructure projects for which they’re trying to feed at the federal trough.
I posted the above idea as a comment on the article and it drew at least 12 angry replies. The righteous agree that the rich hard-working Blue states should keep 100% of their money and stop subsidizing lazy unproductive Red states. Inequality, apparently, isn’t something to fight against when Blue is richer than Red. Here are some of the responses:
These places also contribute far more money to the Federal coffers than they get in return unlike the majority of red states that receive far more in federal aid than they contribute. Maybe it’s time to stop the free loading. If blue states are going to get cheated by the federal government perhaps we should stop funding it. See how the red states feel about it when there are no blue state dollars coming to their aid.
since they pay the vast majority of the taxes, they’ve earned it. Blue states: makers; Red states: takers
There would BE NO federal funding without these states. They supply almost ALL of it, and the red states leech off that. Residents of the states paying in deserve federal funds as much as the freeloaders.
A migrant who enjoys a fully taxpayer-funded lifestyle in NYC is not a “freeloader”, but everyone in a Red state is a “freeloader”.
(Separately, much of the data on maker/taker states is distorted by retirement moves. A person might pay into Social Security and Medicare through age 65 while living in New Jersey, for example, and then collect Social Security and Medicare benefits in Florida or South Carolina after a post-retirement move. This makes it look as though NJ is subsidizing SC/FL even though it is just the younger self of the older beneficiary who is paying (assuming that we accept the accounting fictions of Social Security/Medicare).)
Finally, how’s everyone’s shutdown going? The media is reporting a complete meltdown of Air Traffic Control. However, we did a flight on Sunday to Tampa International and ATC was apparently fully staffed because they cheerfully gave us (optional for them) VFR advisories. The only drama was that 2/3 runways at KTPA were closed for maintenance, leaving only 1L, which requires a 12-step program to reach from the FBOs. The ground controllers would give single-pilot piston aircraft Russian novel-length instructions and then be surprised when 1956 Cessna 172 flying club pilot couldn’t follow them correctly. For someone leaving Sheltair, the directive from ground control might be “Romeo 2 to right turn on Sierra to left on Sierra 2 across 28 to November 3 to left turn on November to hold short 1 Right then right turn Lima then left Juliet then left Victor then right Victor 1 then left Whiskey to 1 Left” (the “hold short 1L” is implicit).
(On arrival, the ground controller said “You’re going to Signature, right”, referring to the Gulfstream-fueling operation substantially owned by Climate Change Alarmist Bill Gates. I responded “Are you kidding? I can’t afford Signature.” We actually did go to Signature TPA once (see Merry Christmas to the Sea Turtles).)
How did your blog host do on the 12-step program? I didn’t even try it! The magic words: “Request progressive.” (progressivism is always great, as I’m sure everyone will agree)
