Loyal readers will be familiar with my love for Calvin Coolidge (great biography by former WSJ reporter Amity Shlaes, incidentally), born on this day in 1872 and our President from 1923-1929. Coolidge did not stray too far from what the U.S. Constitution says that Presidents should do, i.e., appoint people in the executive and judicial branches, sign legislation, and veto legislation. Modern-day presidents exhibit precisely the opposite of Silent Cal’s behavior. They’re flying around, giving speeches, comforting those who’ve suffered from a natural disaster or a crime, offering opinions on matters that the U.S. Constitution would seem to reserve to state legislatures and governors, etc.
Let’s suppose that the Democrat dream of imprisoning Donald Trump comes true. And let’s further suppose that the Democrat nightmare of Donald Trump winning the November 2024 election comes true. (I never believe that a Republican will win because my theory is that the majority of Americans want a planned economy and an ever-more-comprehensive welfare state.) How well could a U.S. president govern from the confines of a New York State prison cell? Personal theory: way better than if he/she/ze/they were trying to government from the White House. The imprisoned president would have much more time to read legislation and decide whether to sign or veto than a president constantly shuttling around the country (and world) on Air Force One. Depending on the restrictions imposed by New York Democrats, an imprisoned Trump might end up working in much the same manner as Silent Cal!
Let’s have a closer look at the 2SLGBTQQIA+ pit bull, which we’d be unlikely to see in Palm Beach County partly due to the cruel repression of Dictator Ron DeSantis and partly due to the fact that pit bulls are banned by most apartment complexes and HOAs.
Maybe the pit bull will reappear in his/her/zir/their rainbow garb for Nonbinary Awareness Week, which starts July 8.
And down in New York City’s Greenwich Village….
NEW: Washington Square Park in New York City has descended into chaos as massive brawls break out following Pride Celebrations.
In footage shared by @ScooterCasterNY, people can be seen hitting, pulling hair and fighting.
The average hotel room rate in the city is $301 a night, a record. A major reason: One of every five hotels is now a shelter, contributing to a shortage of tourist lodging.
In late 2022, as thousands of migrants began to arrive in New York City, city officials scrambled to find places to house them. They quickly found takers: hotels that were still struggling to recover from the pandemic-driven downturn in tourism.
Dozens of hotels, from once-grand facilities to more modest establishments, closed to tourists and began exclusively sheltering migrants, striking multimillion-dollar deals with the city. The humanitarian crisis became the hotel industry’s unexpected lifeline in New York; the hotels became a safe haven for tens of thousands of asylum seekers.
About 65,000 migrants are being sheltered in hotels, tent dormitories and other shelters, in large part because of the city’s legal obligation to provide a bed to anyone who needs one. The city projects it will spend $10 billion over three fiscal years on the migrant crisis.
Low-skill migrants make the U.S. richer economically and culturally, yet it is a “crisis” when more enrichment is happening?
We are informed by the New York Times that Replacement Theory is false, as well as racist. Only a fool could entertain the idea that native-born Americans are being replaced by low-skill immigrants streaming across an open border that is intentionally undefended despite Americans paying nearly $1 trillion/year to fund a military. We are also informed that 20 percent of potential tourists have been replaced by migrants.
STOUGHTON, Mass.—Eighth-grader Sandla Desir spoke softly in a classroom recently while reading the Dr. Seuss book, “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish,” aloud in accented English.
The book isn’t typical material for a 13-year-old. But when Sandla started at O’Donnell Middle School in September, the native Haitian Creole speaker could barely read.
Millions of migrants, most seeking asylum, have crossed the border in recent years and have been allowed to settle in the U.S. until a federal immigration judge decides their fate, a process that can take years. Among the record numbers, federal data suggest, are as many as one million children who have arrived with their families or on their own since 2021.
Districts are faced with the need for additional teachers and staff who can teach English … Adding the 90 shelter students has cost Stoughton, which teaches a total of 3,740 students, at least $500,000 for increased staff and busing costs. The state said it has reimbursed nearly all of that money. … The most immediate upfront costs this year were hiring five new staff members, including two teachers, and contracting for a bus to shuttle students to and from the hotel shelters, Baeta said. The district has gone from seven to 17 English-as-a-second-language teachers in the past five years.
Related:
“Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico 2016), in which Harvard economists find that the main effect of low-skill immigration is to transfer $500 billion/year (pre-Biden money) from the American working class to elite Americans, e.g., the kinds of folks who own hotels in New York City
I was delighted that the brief trip from the hotel to the airport included a view of the following car:
Not sure if I love the reference to Talladega Nights or “I Identify as a Problem” more.
A powerful politician directed a river of federal tax dollars into the KSME airport back in 2006 to build a world-class commercial airline terminal:
It has never been used.
We fired up and vaguely followed the Ohio River to Parkersburg, West Virginia (KPKB). We enjoyed tailwinds of up to 30 knots, but combined with the terrain that also made for bumps so we once again climbed as high as 7,500′. Note the Tesla charging station, below.
Parkersburg features a sometimes-used commercial terminal, thanks to continuing applications of your tax dollars into the Essential Air Service program. We enjoyed some breakfast there and got a lesson in philately as well as in how wrong people are in their perceptions of inflation. A luxurious four-seat piston-powered aircraft, the Beech Staggerwing, cost $9,250 and first class postage was 32 cents in 1997 (the stamp is now worth about 1.75 Bidies).
A photo of the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskill Mountains about 20 minutes before descending into KGBR:
Here’s Torrance’s finest product with 30.7 hours on the collective meter:
The happy owner supplied us with an Enterprise rental car, pre-tuned to NPR, for the trip to Boston/Cambridge.
As previously noted here, we were offered free samples of healing marijuana within 30 minutes of our arrival in Maskachusetts:
Every crosswalk in Great Barrington is painted in the sacred colors:
Retailers post signs for the world’s smartest humans:
They also worship the Sacred Rainbow in Stockbridge:
The world’s smartest humans are provided with instructions for how to use the devices depicted above:
Except for the final trip down the Mass Pike, including an inflation-free $15/person meal at McDonald’s, that was it!
Let’s consider how Joe Biden’s proposed new federal long-term capital gains tax rate of 44.6 percent would work without the inflation adjustment that other inflation-plagued economies have. We start with a California-based investor who purchased General Electric stock for $100/share in June 1997 and sold it for $162/share today:
At official CPI rates, the investor has lost money. $100 in June 1997 has the same spending power as $195 Bidies today. On top of the agony of the loss, he/she/ze/they will have to hand over to the Feds tax on $62 of fake profit. Let’s assume the investor lives in California and is financially comfortable. The total tax rate under Uncle Joe’s latest proposal will be 58 percent (44.6 federal plus 13.3 state). So the investor will pay $36/share in tax and thus net $126/share for a stock that cost $195 in today’s money. (The numbers are far worse if we use the cost of California real estate as the relevant measure of inflation rather than official CPI.)
This week, however, Harvard Yard is closed to the undocumented and the border fence is guarded by police. Photos from last night:
Harvard Square (the commercial area adjacent to Harvard Yard) is still open. Anyone wanting to protest against homelessness and/or assist homeless people was free to do so. However, we didn’t see any students or professional progressives stop to try to help the people sleeping on the sidewalk right in the heart of Harvard Square:
The local public high school does have an official government banner reminding people that one group of humans deserves special attention, but the group is not the noble Gazans:
The University restricted access to Harvard Yard until Friday afternoon in apparent anticipation of student protests, amid a wave of high-profile pro-Palestine demonstrations at universities across the country including Columbia University and Yale University.
The closures are a sign that Harvard’s leadership is hoping to avoid its own version of the scene at Columbia, where more than 100 students were arrested Thursday by the New York City Police Department for their participation in an ongoing pro-Palestine encampment on the school’s main quad.
An announcement of the closure, posted to Yard entrance gates, warned of disciplinary measures against Harvard students and affiliates who bring in unauthorized structures such as tents or tables or block access to building entrances.
An email sent to students and staff who work in the Yard stated that the closures are being done “out of an abundance of caution and with the safety of our community as a priority.”
Note how “abundance of caution”, the leitmotif of the Covidcrats, was woven in! Also that “safety” is the most important goal for a human, not liberating Al-Quds, destroying the Zionist entity, or stopping a genocide and famine that is intensified by a population explosion (60,000 pregnant women, an unspecified number of pregnant people of other genders, and more than 183 births per day (source)).
The arrests at Columbia sparked a wave of solidarity protests at universities across the country, including at Harvard, where more than 200 Harvard affiliates rallied in Harvard Yard Friday demanding that the University “disclose and divest” from Israeli companies and investments in the West Bank.
The rally at Harvard was co-organized by a coalition of recognized and unrecognized pro-Palestine groups. Unrecognized activist organizations — including the African and African American Resistance Organization and Jews for Palestine, which staged an occupation of University Hall in November — have increasingly led pro-Palestine organizing on campus.
The University “shifted to HUID access only to stay ahead of potential issues with non-Harvard recognized groups,” College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote in a statement to The Crimson on Sunday.
Apologies if the photos are blurry. I’m here in Cambridge after five days in a Robinson R44 and my hands are still shaking a little. The trip was from Los Angeles to Great Barrington, Maskachusetts. Within 30 minutes after arriving in Massachusetts, I was offered free marijuana samples from one of the “essential” businesses that was allowed to stay open while schools were closed:
Every crosswalk in Great Barrington is painted in the sacred colors:
Not too many people were out and about in Great Barrington on a Tuesday afternoon in the off-season so, though I saw some folks wearing masks I wasn’t able to get a photo of an outdoor masker in a rainbow crosswalk.
Also, NYU decides that a border wall might work in some circumstances…
Security remained tight around NYU Tuesday. A plywood wall now blocks NYU's Gould Plaza, where demonstrators gathered Monday night. @jennbisramtv reports. https://t.co/3mlvhq8rzK
My mom was Class of 1955 at Radcliffe, the women’s college that was part of Harvard University in parallel with the men’s college (“Harvard College”). Here’s part of a recent email from Radcliffe:
Women’s history is deeply entwined with the history of resistance. In this issue of our Women, Gender, and Society newsletter, we feature stories of women who challenged the status quo, from the German resistance to sex-positive feminism. Learn more about women who inspired change—and don’t miss the latest Schlesinger Library exhibition, which highlights the many facets of women’s movements working toward liberation in the United States, starting at midcentury.
By inference, I think it is also fair to say that people who identify as “women” are allied with Hamas (the “Islamic Resistance Movement”). If my mom’s class is representative, the typical Radcliffe graduate seems to have enjoyed tremendous success in resisting working for wages. Either during or just after college, these women got married to men and then lived off the wages earned by those men, whether they stayed married or availed themselves of the no-fault divorce laws that became available circa 1970 collected alimony.
Speaking of Hamas, once Harvard comes under Hamas’s direct management I wonder what they will think of the following:
Scenes from a shopping mall in Newport Beach, California:
The salespeople explained that “Creature Comfort Mode” had been released on Friday, March 8. When could we get one of these Lucid cars for which a 1-2 year wait was expected? “If you’re paying cash, you can have the car today.”
Not every question was appreciated, e.g., “If you’re trying to symbolize present-day California, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a surgical mask and a vaccine syringe rather than a bear?”
The Fashion Island shopping mall had no fewer than four car showrooms: Lexus, Lincoln, Lucid, Tesla. I guess any of these places will seem cheap compared to the Whole Foods that is in the same mall.
Speaking of cars and Newport Beach, we saw a Z06 Corvette parked in front of our hotel:
We also saw a Tesla Cybertruck on the road, but the less said about that experience the better.
For those who’ve been reading about the death of California retail, a reminder that Newport Beach is not San Francisco:
(the jewelry store did have an armed guard, so I guess it wasn’t in a completely different universe compared to San Francisco)
I do hope that Joe Biden in the 5th or 6th year of his reign will issue an executive order requiring every shopping mall to have a koi pond:
In the bad old pre-koi days, the mall was a Boy Scouts camp:
If you ask Google about “Australian open tennis”, the noble software defaults to showing “women’s singles”:
Note that uber-hater Margaret Court is highlighted at the bottom. From the Daily Mail:
In 2017, Court – a Christian pastor – shocked countless tennis identities and supporters after she boldly declared the sport was ‘full of lesbians’.
She also previously labelled gay marriage ‘a trend’ and the 24-time Grand Slam winner stunned many in tennis circles after stating her belief that transgender athletes have no place in professional sport.
If we click on “men’s singles”, we learn that Djokovic has been out in the wild infected Australians with his unvaccinated body:
A Scientist in the audience shouted “get vaccinated mate” at the ailing Serb last week (Daily Mail), but there is no evidence that Djokovic heeded this commonsense call.
This paper is a population based observational analysis of boosting, but restricted to people who had COVID. Austria has pretty good records and pretty good testing, but not perfect.
First these authors actually report, all cause death, and it is lower in boosted groups. They write, “All-cause mortality data indicate modest healthy vaccine bias.”
(people who get vaccinated tend to have been healthier to begin with)
And, “No individual younger than 40 years died due to COVID-19. “
(Djokovic is 36, so if he were Austrian he would be safe.)
Combining all of the above, Australians aren’t safe from death even if they’re boosted and an unvaccinated Djokovic is polluting the air with SARS-CoV-2 virus. When do vaccinated-and-boosted Australians over 40 begin dying in massive waves?
Related:
“‘How ironic’: Anti-vaxxers hijack tragic Aus Open death” (News.com.au): Heartless anti-vaxxers have hijacked the death of a much-loved British sports reporter who collapsed in Melbourne while covering the Australian Open. The family of UK Daily Mail sports journalist Mike Dickson, 59, announced his sudden death late Wednesday evening. “We are devastated to announce that our wonderful husband and Dad, Mike, has collapsed and died while in Melbourne for the Aus Open,” they shared in a statement. … “Journalist who tried to cancel Novak over not taking the Covid shots, collapses and dies suddenly. He was fully vaccinated,” Erin Elizabeth, a health blogger and anti-vaccine activist, said. … “The journalist who bullied Novak Djokovic for two years because he didn’t want to participate in the human experiment has now ‘suddenly and unexpectedly passed away’,” he wrote. “Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if he were unvaccinated.”
