The death of two Harvard undergraduates, William Cowper Boyden III and William Stanley North III

by philg

It’s the Day of the Dead for our neighbors in Mexico.

While cleaning up my mother’s possessions, I found a correspondence between my late father, apparently a friend of William Cowper Boyden III, and the young Mr. Boyden’s father. I couldn’t find much on the Web regarding the sad December 22, 1955 death of two young Harvard men, but the Crimson obliquely referred to them having been killed in a car accident:

The William Cowper Boyden III Scholarship and the William Stanley North III Scholarship, set up in memory of two College students killed while driving home for Christmas vacation, has a combined endowment of over $25,000.

I found the letters interesting because it seemed unlikely that a younger-than-average Jewish scholarship student like my dad (he skipped at least the last year of high school) would have been friends with anyone from such a well-established family, but also for the style of pre-email pre-ChatGPT correspondence. It’s also sad because so little trace is left of these two men.

19560110-bill-boyden-deathDownload
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Forced masking is back in California

by philg

“Mask mandates return in parts of the Bay Area as virus season nears” (San Francisco Chronicle via Yahoo! News):

Mask requirements are returning to health care settings across parts of the Bay Area, as local health officials brace for the annual surge in respiratory illnesses – including COVID-19, influenza and RSV – that typically arrives with colder weather.

Starting Nov. 1, several counties – including Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Sonoma, Napa, San Mateo and Santa Cruz – will again require health care workers, and in some cases patients and visitors, to wear masks in patient care areas through the winter and early spring.

What about the county that will be hosting a COVID-19 superspreader event soon (the Super Bowl)?

Santa Clara County’s rule goes further, requiring everyone – workers, patients and visitors – to wear masks in “patient care areas” of hospitals, clinics and nursing homes.

#FollowTheScience

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Today’s resilient children and the Addams Family

by philg

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate (i.e., everyone in Florida, to judge by the AI Data Center quantity of electricity that our neighbors are burning on lights and animatronics).

The somewhat spooky Addams Family was on TV from 1964-1966, the years in which President Lyndon Johnson was getting the U.S. into the temporary debacle of the Vietnam War and into long-term insolvency via Medicare, Medicaid, and other welfare state expansions (it’s not a “great society” if anyone has to work). The show was considered suitable for all ages, like pretty much everything else broadcast in prime time.

What about for today’s tender children? Sixty years after its original broadcast, the show is considered too challenging for children under 13. From Amazon Prime:

In researching this blog post, I discovered something remarkable: the Addams Family was originally a New Yorker magazine cartoon series (in the pre-all-Trump-hatred version of the magazine). From 1956:

Here’s something kids could learn from (Wikipedia):

The sudden cancellation in 1966 brought issues for Addams, as he faced a drop in income with the show no longer in development. His second wife Barbara Barb was a practicing lawyer who had engaged in “diabolical legal scheming” during their marriage, and had convinced Addams to sign over the rights to future television and film adaptations, as well as rights to some of his other cartoons. Following their divorce she remained in possession of these rights until 1991, when she sold them to allow development of the Sonnenfeld films. Addams could also no longer publish his comics in The New Yorker as Shawn’s ban remained in effect even after the television series concluded. Addams became bitter towards the magazine “for disowning his family”

(Charles Addams died childless. The above-cited marriage to the clever lawyer lasted two years.)

Loosely related, but I can’t help bragging about the Greenspun Family’s one brush with greatness… my father’s college classmate, Fred Gwynne, played Herman Munster. I don’t think that a scholarship student like my dad was invited to the same parties as the son of a Wall Street partner and a Fly Club member (“no Jews please”; the similar Porcellian Club’s first Jewish member was Jared Kushner, Harvard Class of 2003), but maybe they overlapped in a core class.

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My college application recommendation letter from 1979

by philg

We’re closing in on college application deadlines. One of the albums that my mom kept included a recommendation letter for my own application to MIT in 1979. I was working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on the Pioneer Venus project (specifically, data analysis for information streamed back from the Orbiter). Goddard was a two-tiered plantation where the elites were federal government civil service employees and the slaves were employed by contractors. In my case, the contractor that actually sent me paychecks was Computer Sciences Corporation, though I worked on site at NASA every day. My boss was Naren Bewtra, who was born in India and came to the U.S. to earn a physics Ph.D. at Cornell.

Here’s the album page:

Related:

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Report from the trenches: The post-Trump de-woked Smithsonian (Vol II)

by philg

After seeing the lowrider special exhibit (see Report from the trenches: The post-Trump de-woked Smithsonian (Vol I)), we continued around some other parts of the de-woked and attacked-by-Trump Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

In the Entertainment Nation section, Carl Nassib was highlighted as the most notable football player in U.S. history (“openly gay”):

Hamilton was featured as the most notable Broadway show in U.S. history due to its “performers of color”:

The Phoenix Suns are are most notable basketball team because at one point the multi-millionaire players advocated for open borders (according to Harvard, low-skill immigration makes multi-millionaires richer while impoverishing the native-born working class).

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:

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Number of Americans dependent on food stamps has been reduced from 17 million in 2000 to only 42 million today

by philg

Josh Hawley, a senator who calls himself a “Republican”, in the New York Times:

Millions of Americans rely on food assistance just to get by. The program often known as food stamps — officially it’s now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — is a lifeline that permits the needy to purchase basic food items at the grocery store. Last year, SNAP enrollees hit about 42 million. That’s over 12 percent of the American population.

We’re informed that low-skill migrants make America rich. America has never been richer in migrants (CIS):

We’re informed that government spending on poverty relief reduces the number of poor people. The federal government spends more than $100 billion per year of workers’ (chumps’) tax dollars on SNAP. How much larger was the group of helpless government-dependent Americans 25 years ago before the most recent $trillions had been spent on SNAP? According to the USDA, the number of food stamp-dependent Americans in 2000 was… 17 million:

In other words, in the past 25 years the number of Americans who’ve become dependent on food welfare exceeds the population of Taiwan (23 million), where all of the world’s highest-tech integrated circuits and bicycles are made. The Google says that while we managed to grow our food-welfare-dependent population by more than 2X, TSMC grew its market value from $40 billion to over $1 trillion.

(Note that the 42 million Americans who are enrolled in SNAP/EBT shouldn’t be taken as an estimate of the number of Americans receiving what used to be called “welfare”. There are about 78 million Americans currently on Medicaid, for example. Maybe the discrepancy is that a multi-member welfare household shows up just once for SNAP and multiple times for Medicaid? Or some people getting taxpayer-funded food are getting it via programs with other names (see chart below)?)

Inflation-adjusted spending seems to have grown by about 14X since 1970 (USDA):

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Immigration kills pride in paying income tax?

by philg

It’s National Immigrants Day, perhaps known to Native Americans as “National Steal All the Land Day”.

Before the personal income tax Americans enjoyed a feeling of pride in their private charitable and community efforts. When a natural disaster occurred (see Climate Change Reading List: Johnstown Flood for an 1889 example) people knew that there was no FEMA and therefore they voluntarily contributed money, materials, and time to relief efforts and felt pride in helping their fellow Americans. One of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s “eliminate private property” proposal was that humans enjoy feeling generous and if you don’t have the option of voluntarily donating property then you are denied an opportunity to feel good.

In the 20th century we switched to a system of forced extraction for good works, especially during the Lyndon Johnson administration when Medicaid, food stamps, and other cradle-to-grave welfare programs were introduced. To the extent that these welfare programs were being spent on people for whom a taxpayer had some fellow feeling it might have been possible to feel pride in paying tax. Irving Berlin was famous for enjoying his role in contributing to American society via paying tax and the Treasury Department promoted a song that he wrote on the subject:

Some of the lyrics that today’s pro-Hamas Americans might not appreciate…

You see those bombers in the sky,

Rockefeller helped to build them,

So did I.

A thousand planes to bomb Berlin.

They’ll all be paid for, and I chipped in,

That cert’nly makes me feel okay.

Ten thousand more, and that ain’t hay!

I wonder if open borders has finished the process of killing any joy a typical American might feel in sending his/her/zir/their money to the IRS. Almost all of us agree that it is worth paying taxes to finance infrastructure construction, e.g., gasoline tax to build and maintain the Interstates. Some of us agree that it is worth keeping an American underclass on welfare for four generations or more. Very few of us, however, seem to be excited about providing migrants with taxpayer-funded housing, food, health care, etc. Some Americans would rather help the world’s unfortunate in situ at a vastly lower per-person cost (if we spend $1 trillion/year on welfare for immigrants and their descendants, for example, that’s $1 trillion that we can’t spend on relatively low-cost-per-person programs that would save vastly more lives if spent on poor people in poor countries). Some Americans are haters and don’t want to help foreigners other than via voluntary trade.

Lack of pride in paying taxes seems to be a factor in state-to-state moves. Quite a few of our neighbors say that they moved from California or the Northeast because they didn’t agree with what their state and local governments were spending money on, e.g., race discrimination (“DEI”), gender-affirming surgeries for teenagers, a fully funded work-free lifestyle for migrants, etc. Without taking the dramatic step of renouncing U.S. citizenship, though, and paying the associated exit tax, none of us can escape paying federal income tax (exception: moving to Puerto Rico). Therefore, the shift in government spending in favor of migrants wouldn’t motivate Americans to move but it could result in less life satisfaction.

Speaking for myself, the taxes that I most enjoy paying are the following:

  • property tax, despite the epic quantity, because Palm Beach County and Jupiter do great jobs with the schools, the roads, public safety, etc.
  • aviation fuel tax because I love airports and air traffic control
  • gasoline tax because I value being able to get from Point A to Point B on smooth roads without traffic jams (Florida accomplishes the smoothness, but nearly every part of the U.S. seems to be plagued with traffic jams)

I’m sure that there are some progressives in Maskachusetts who actually do love paying state and federal tax that funds a work-free lifestyle for migrants, but my suspicion is that overall our decision to open U.S. borders in 1965 was one that has made us significantly less happy with the 30-50% of our working lives that we spend working for the government’s benefit. Running an asylum-based immigration system has perhaps made the situation worse because tens of millions of the migrants currently resident in the U.S. never expressed any affinity for the U.S. or American culture. They just said that they were afraid of being killed or attacked in their home countries.

Related:

  • “The downside of diversity” (New York Times, 2007): “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The [Harvard] study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.”

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Why won’t rich states fund SNAP and other welfare programs during the federal shutdown?

by philg

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”).

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.”

So…

  1. the state is rich
  2. the political party that runs the state says that inequality is bad
  3. the political party that runs the state says that taxpayer-funded food is a human right
  4. there is no political opposition to the ruling party
  5. 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…

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?

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Fat Leonard

by philg

Happy U.S. Navy Day for those who celebrate.

A related book for American minorities, i.e., the minority of Americans who pay federal income tax… Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy (Craig Whitlock 2024). The book is a great argument for replacing the entire U.S. Navy with sea drones, which won’t be vulnerable to attack (nobody will cry if a drone is lost), bribery, etc. The case of Fat Leonard, and the book, expose a fundamental incompatibility between modern Americans and life aboard ships. Prior to no-fault no-shame divorce, the man on the ship and the woman back home were both coerced to be at least reasonably faithful to each other. Even in the rare cases where he didn’t fear God, the man would be shamed if he had too many girlfriends and prostitutes in foreign ports. The woman wouldn’t harvest substantial alimony and child support if she had sex with 10 different boyfriends while the husband was at sea defending our nation. The book describes what happens when all of this social infrastructure is torn down, but ship schedules that keep spouses separated for months at a time are preserved. The females left at home eventually realize that the local family court will give them whatever they want. The males at sea are thus reduced to poverty and can’t afford girlfriends, prostitutes, or new wives on whatever is left to them after paying alimony and child support. Far Leonard figured out that a man who has lost his kids, home, and wife back in the U.S. and who now has only one third of his paycheck to spend is a man who is easy to bribe.

Who was this pioneer of social psychology? Leonard Glenn Francis ran a “husbanding” business to supply ships, ideally expensive U.S. Navy warships whose officers weren’t likely to quibble about prices, with whatever they needed when in various Asian port. Much of his financial success was attributable to jihad:

The USS Cole arrived mid-morning on October 12 in Aden, an ancient Arabian port, and anchored at the mouth of the harbor. The guided-missile destroyer had transited the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and needed to stop for several hours so it could take on 220,000 gallons of fuel before continuing north into the Persian Gulf. As the crew started to eat lunch, a small red-and-white motorboat approached. The two men aboard smiled and waved as they drew close to the hulking warship. Unsuspecting sailors on the Cole waved back, thinking the skiff had come to collect trash. In fact, the two men were suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaeda and the motorboat was packed with explosives. The terrorists detonated their cargo and blew a gaping hole in the side of the Cole that almost sank the $1 billion vessel. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and forty-two were wounded, making it the deadliest assault on a U.S. Navy vessel in thirteen years. The attack presaged the far bigger one that al-Qaeda would inflict eleven months later with hijacked airliners. Just as the United States was unprepared for 9/11, the Navy had not foreseen that a common motorboat could torpedo one of its powerful warships. The Cole disaster instantly upended the Navy’s risk calculations for foreign port calls. Unsure of the extent of the maritime threat posed by al-Qaeda, the Navy curtailed ship visits to Yemen and other Muslim countries and upgraded force protection requirements elsewhere.

Francis devised a solution: a floating barrier that encircled a ship to prevent waterborne intruders from getting too close. The primitive contraption was merely a makeshift fence of heavy barges and pontoons linked by steel cables. But in a deft stroke of marketing, he branded it as the “Ring of Steel.” The Ring of Steel sounded impregnable and looked plausible when he showed it to Navy force protection officers. “It was impressive,” said Jim Maus, the supply officer from the USS Independence. “No little boat is going through that. Bounce off it, maybe.” The Ring of Steel was also portable. Glenn Marine could move the components from harbor to harbor and customize the perimeter to suit any ship. Shaken by the Cole bombing, the Navy grabbed the Ring of Steel as a lifeline. It didn’t have better ideas to protect its ships in Southeast Asia. Nor did it trust commercial ports or revenue-starved foreign navies to provide adequate security. The only other option was to park ships at well-guarded U.S. bases in Japan and Hawaii. With the Ring of Steel, Francis not only saved his company, but found a way to expand it. After the Cole attack, Glenn Marine became one of a handful of contractors that could meet the Navy’s enhanced force protection requirements. Most competitors in the husbanding industry were mom-and-pop operators who couldn’t or wouldn’t invest in their own floating barriers. That meant more business for Francis. “The Navy went crazy and paranoid over the Cole,” recalled Commander David Kapaun, an operations officer based in Singapore at the time. “Leonard jumped on that like you wouldn’t believe.”

There was also a virtuous interaction between Navy tradition and jihad:

He knew if he wined and dined the Americans, they were unlikely to question his exorbitant fees, including for the Ring of Steel, which cost between $50,000 to $100,000 per day. “Everybody had to use the Ring of Steel,” he recalled. “So literally, the military’s force protection became the golden goose for me.” For ship captains, no price was too high to protect their crews, not to mention their careers. The Navy held them accountable for everything that happened on their watch, regardless of whether they were personally responsible. If a low-ranking seaman screwed up a task that led to a serious accident, the Navy disciplined the commanding officer on the grounds that he or she had failed to ensure the sailor was properly trained and supervised. The Navy upheld that unforgiving standard after the attack on the Cole. A high-level investigation concluded the Cole was “a well-trained, well-led and highly capable ship” and that the skipper, Commander Kirk Lippold, was not at fault. Intelligence reporting had also failed to detect any threats in advance of the visit to Aden. But the Navy nonetheless blocked Lippold from promotion and forced him to retire—Pentagon officials and members of Congress decided someone needed to be held accountable for the disaster. Many commanding officers thought the Navy and Congress treated Lippold unfairly, but the message resonated: Take every precaution. As a result, few ship captains were willing to risk a port visit without the Ring of Steel, no matter the expense—particularly after 9/11 demonstrated that al-Qaeda’s attack on the Cole was not an isolated event. Terrorist threats spread to Southeast Asia. In October 2002, an al-Qaeda affiliate bombed Bali’s tourist districts, killing 202 people. Seven Americans died and the U.S. consulate was damaged. The Navy reduced its visits to Indonesia, but demand for the Ring of Steel soared in other ports. Glenn Defense’s bottom line soared with it.

An officer would be demoted or fired if something bad happened to the ship, but there were no consequences for wasting taxpayer funds.

The book has some inspiration for upgrading your next party:

With his shirt untucked and his stomach hanging out, an inebriated Leonard Francis lay atop a banquet table at one of the most exclusive restaurants in Singapore. A prostitute hand-fed him leftover morsels from the $30,000 feast he was hosting. Around the table, his American guests—about two dozen U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel—puffed Cohiba cigars from Cuba and swilled Dom Pérignon while a gaggle of young women massaged their necks. One Navy officer present said the scene resembled a “Roman orgy.” For the five-hour party with his American customers, Francis had rented Jaan, a Michelin-starred restaurant on the seventieth floor of a luxury hotel. Through plate-glass windows, the private dining room boasted spectacular views of the Singapore skyline and, in the distance, the twinkling lights of ships on the South China Sea. But the sights inside the restaurant that evening made an even more indelible impression. One prostitute flashed her breasts at Rear Admiral Robert Conway Jr., the commanding officer of the USS Peleliu expeditionary strike group. Colonel Michael Regner, the normally rigid commander of the strike group’s 2,200 Marines, mouthed the words to “Y.M.C.A” while a band played the disco hit. One Navy captain was spotted French-kissing a prostitute. As the spectacle unfolded, a few officers watched slack-jawed, unsure how to respond to their superiors’ conduct. The rest had the time of their lives.

U.S. Navy officers weren’t supposed to accept bribes, whether cash or fancy dinners/fancy women, but the service came up with a workaround whereby captains and admirals would pay $50 to Fat Leonard’s company as their share of a meal that cost far more (remember that all of the numbers in the book are in pre-Biden dollars):

The “Valentine’s Cheer” celebration unfolded the next night in a balloon-decorated banquet room at Petrus, the Michelin-starred restaurant on the top floor of the Shangri-La Hotel. About twenty people attended, including a half-dozen Navy spouses who received floral bouquets and fancy chocolates from Glenn Defense. The avant-garde menu showcased elements of molecular gastronomy, including champagne espuma and coral powder made from dehydrated lobster roe. The Americans and their genial host also ate Oscietra caviar, gobbled slices of bread topped with foie gras and Wagyu beef, and savored Périgord black truffle, a rare French fungus that is to be served within three days of harvesting. A different wine accompanied each of the eight courses. “It was one of the most extravagant things I’ve ever seen,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Edmond Aruffo, an officer on the Blue Ridge. “I didn’t know people lived like that.”

Some officers and civilian Navy employees took cash instead of or in addition to fine living:

The senior civilian supervisor at the Naval Regional Contracting Center in Singapore was Paul Simpkins, a fifty-one-year-old South Carolinian who had specialized in the fine print of defense contracts since he was a teenager. He served more than two decades as a uniformed contracting officer in the Air Force and attained the rank of master sergeant before retiring from active duty in 1994. He then filled a variety of civilian contracting jobs for the Marines and Navy before arriving in Singapore in 2005 for a two-year assignment. In his new job, he held the power to award millions of dollars in federal contracts. The child of a single mother, Simpkins grew up poor in the South. The military provided him with a steady career, if not riches, and opportunities to live all over the world. A slim, fastidious man, he was an introvert who rarely socialized with coworkers or discussed his personal life. Few knew that he had been married five times or that his current wife had cancer and was living in Japan. Even fewer knew he was cheating on her with a Chinese girlfriend who would eventually become spouse number six.

After several conversations, Simpkins cut to the chase: What was in it for him? Francis was pleased. This was a man he could do business with. Ordinarily, he devoted months or years to grooming Navy contacts, but occasionally he got lucky and found someone who was unabashedly greedy. During a subsequent visit to the hotel bar, Francis said he handed over an envelope containing a stack of $100 bills—$50,000 worth. Simpkins smiled, allegedly taking the bribe and sliding it into his jacket pocket.

… Reagan—he bribed Simpkins with an additional $350,000 by wiring the money to a Japanese bank account in the name of his cancer-stricken wife. As an added sweetener, he said, he provided Simpkins with prostitutes on more than ten occasions.

Here’s the government worker and Fat Leonard:

The money paid to Simpkins and others was a great investment:

David Schaus, the lieutenant in the Ship Support Office who had feuded with Francis over the Reagan’s wastewater bill, devised a

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Honda Odyssey calls in an airstrike on its own AGM battery

by philg

Our 2021 Honda Odyssey’s factory battery, a fancy absorbent glass mat device, failed after three years. A friend’s 2023 Honda Odyssey factory battery, also presumably an AGM model, failed after 1.5 years. His car couldn’t be trickle-charged or jumped from another car and ended up being towed to the dealer. Our 2021 Honda Odyssey recently had a no-warning “won’t start” failure of the 1.5-year-old Duracell-brand AGM battery that has a 4-year warranty. Measured via Fluke 17B+ multimeter, the voltage on the battery was mostly around 11-11.3 volts, but confusingly would sometimes spike over 30 volts, even with the car turned completely off. I trickle-charged for about three hours and it came up to 12.3 volts, thus enabling me to drive to the local Batteries Plus (closer than the Honda dealer).

The battery store used a portable tester and a portable load tester and both said “this is a good battery that just needs some love, understanding, and charging.” I responded that the battery might be good at everything, but it wouldn’t start the car so I would pay for a replacement regardless of warranty coverage. They took the battery back into the shop and it wouldn’t take a trickle charge so they gave me a new one for free ($20 tip to the guy who turned the wrench on the car, though, with my formerly ironic “this will pay for half of your next Starbucks”).

I think that the culprit for these sudden deaths might be the auto stop/start feature that supposedly reduces emissions even as it kills starter motors and batteries. This feature can be disabled on a per-drive basis, but not persistently. The Florida heat is tough on batteries, but AGM batteries are supposed to withstand the heat better than older designs, at least according to our AI overlords (and Consumer Reports!).

Honda doesn’t seem to have prepared for this, e.g., with a voltage check on shutdown or before startup. The warning light system is limited to flagging charging failures, i.e., low voltage after the car is started. Nor did they make it easy to get the battery out/in (some plastic trim, some intake manifold piping, etc. has to be removed and then it is a very tight fit to get the battery out/in from its case).

This isn’t a huge financial issue (see below), but it is strange to me that Honda has put so much effort into making the rest of the car bulletproof only to leave the machine vulnerable to sudden catastrophic failure. In theory, a person who had a full set of tools and a YouTube video on how to remove the battery could take it out, lug it to a battery store, and get a replacement, but that would require a second vehicle in addition to a strong back.

Maybe the answer is that Honda was boxed in once they chose to do the stop/start feature. Our AI Overlord says that stop/start requires AGM and that AGM tends to fail without warning. Some excerpts:

The starter motor engages dozens or hundreds of times per day, not just a few times. While the engine is off, the battery powers everything: lights, climate control, infotainment, sensors, steering assist, and ECUs. So the 12 V battery is no longer doing one big job (starting once per trip) — it’s cycling constantly, partially discharging and recharging every few minutes. Traditional flooded lead-acid batteries [aren’t good for] Frequent, deep partial discharges; Thousands of charge/discharge cycles; Sustained accessory loads while the alternator is off. In a stop/start car, a normal flooded battery would: Sulfate rapidly (lead sulfate crystals harden after many partial cycles); Lose cranking power within months; Often fail prematurely (sometimes in under a year).

AGM (Absorbent Glass Mat) batteries often fail with less warning than traditional flooded lead-acid batteries, … Flooded batteries usually decline gradually … AGMs, on the other hand, tend to hold voltage well until near the end, then fail abruptly. … The glass mat holds electrolyte in close contact with the plates — this minimizes self-discharge and maintains performance, but when a plate or cell fails (sulfation, corrosion, or separator drying), the failure propagates quickly. … AGM chemistry maintains surface charge voltage even with reduced true capacity. So a casual voltmeter check can look fine (e.g., 12.6 V) while actual cranking capacity is collapsing. … AGM: Maintains very low resistance and high voltage until one cell’s electrolyte dries or a separator fails; That causes a sudden collapse in available current; You may have zero warning—fine one day, stone-dead the next.

Here’s a page from a Toyota dealer in Orlando giving the expected battery life as short as 2-3 years for a Florida car:

The cited source is Johnson Controls, which seems strange given that Johnson Controls doesn’t make batteries, but it turns out that they did make automotive batteries until 2019. Their former division is now private-equity-owned Clarios. American consumers get Clarios batteries as Optima and DieHard. Our failed Duracell was made by East Penn, I think. They really should cut the warranty period for Floridians!

Is this a situation where it would make sense to boldly go into the lithium-ion battery frontier? Lithium batteries supposedly last much longer. The Duracell AGM has 70 Ah of capacity, but maybe this much isn’t needed in never-freezing Florida. A 40 Ah Lithium battery costs $950 and has a secret reserve that can be tapped if someone sits with the car on and music blasting for an hour. It weighs just 14.5 lbs. so that should improve the Honda’s 0-60 time. $950 seems a bit steep for 0.5 kWh of stored energy. Extrapolated to the cheapest Tesla 3’s 57.5 kWh battery, that would be $110,000 just for the battery, which we know can’t be right since the entire Tesla 3 costs less than $40,000. Lithium batteries don’t do great in the cold, but there should be a good market in the sunbelt. Clarios says it has made 1 million 12V lithium batteries for cars, but maybe they are sold only to car manufacturers. Google AI says that approximately 400 million lead-acid 12V car batteries are made… each year.

Here we are in the 40th year of the lithium-ion battery (developed by three trailblazing female scientists who shared a Nobel in 2019) and still we can’t reasonably get one for an application that makes perfect sense!

Separately, maybe Honda should move the battery away from the engine. AGM batteries, supposedly, can sit right in the passenger compartment, e.g., under a seat. Perhaps that would help, though of course the greenhouse interior gets hot too. (BMW puts the battery in the trunk, I think, to keep it away from engine heat.)

Finally, maybe AGM should be renamed “GGTTC”: God’s Gift To Towing Companies. I’m convinced that today’s cars with automatic stop/start are more likely to need the services of a tow truck than, say, a car made in 2015 that had a standard flooded acid battery.

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