According to the print version of the New York Times, New York City is mostly peaceful and the principal hazards to human happiness are the continued and persistent existences of Donald Trump and the state of Israel:
The parallel universe version of Manhattan covered by the New York Post is a war zone in which people carry rifles as they walk along the sidewalk:
(The gun violence, which never would have happened if Kamala Harris had been elected president, occurred at 6:30 pm yesterday and Southwest Harbor, Maine is a bit far from any printing plant so some of the discrepancy might be explained by logistics.)
As long as we’re on the subject of our media heroes, here’s a CNN story about purported starvation in Gaza in which a woman with a double chin was selected as to illustrate the story:
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What am I doing in this nearly-all-white corner of Maine, you might ask? Waiting for BIPOC Climbing Night:
Californians love to destroy things that taxpayers fund, e.g., the Santa Monica Airport. Thirty nine years ago, this love of destruction reached the Los Angeles Central Library, torched by a still-unknown arsonist (see state-sponsored NPR). Nearly 400,000 books were destroyed. Here are some photos from the restored building.
Note the mural showing happy children with guns and also one of Elizabeth Warren’s ancestors:
We need humanoid robots so that every house can have one of these candeliers:
A plaque reminds us that Californians torched their own library twice in one year:
More than five years since the start of Coronapanic, the locals are still trying to avoid SARS-CoV-2 by voluntarily entering a crowded public space while wearing a cloth mask of some sort (note accessory Whole Foods bag):
From my earlier A Greta Thunberg yacht trip to California?, a poster in the Teen section reminding young Californians that humans are in charge of viruses and can end a pandemic via their own actions:
Also worth a repeat, the library reminds teens to cooperate in thwarting ICE:
New York City’s developers and landlords are in a mad scramble to block from City Hall the socialist who wants to freeze rent.
Mamdani is pushing for a host of housing changes to try to ease costs for renters. While he seems to have softened his stance toward working with private developers more recently, at the top of his list is still a controversial rent freeze on the city’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
I can’t figure out how the U.S. patchwork of government-controlled housing prices meets the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. American A chooses to refrain from work and lives in public housing and pays $0/month. American B chooses to refrain from work and lives in rent-stabilized or rent-controlled housing and pays whatever housing cost back before 80 million migrants were invited into the U.S. (60 million through 2015). American C chooses to refrain from work and is forced to pay market rates, i.e., fight with over 300 million humans for scraps. What’s “equal” about the government giving these three equally idle humans radically different housing options and prices?
It looks like Mayor Mamdani’s first act, after a huge Queers for Palestine rally, will be to freeze the rent on apartments that are already absurdly cheap compared to the market. But I wonder if that could just be a first step toward government control of all residential rents in New York City. If the government did step in to control rents on all NYC buildings that would be a tremendous step toward the Equal Protection that Americans are supposed to receive from their government.
We live in a democracy, otherwise known was “mob rule”. There are way more tenants than landlords. Nearly every American city is divided into those who are blessed by the government with free or cheap rent and those subjected to cruel market forces. Maybe suburban homeowners would feel some sympathy for landlords, but wouldn’t we expect a majority of voters in nearly every city to vote for government-set (low) rents? It seems like the kind of simple decision that voters in Maskachusetts earning less than $1 million/year were asked to make regarding raising tax rates on those earning more than $1 million/year (the constitutional amendment passed and, supposedly, the fatcats didn’t move).
It’s the 72nd anniversary of the Korean War Armistice.
Our virtual loosely related journey starts in downtown Los Angeles:
A 15-minute Uber ride with photos taken out the window, Garry Winogrand-style:
Once you get to “Koreatown” you discover that it isn’t a town at all, but rather some strip malls that happen to contain a lot of Korean restaurants and shops. (Little Tokyo, by contrast, has a few attempts at recreating the experience of being in Japan.) Example:
Twin Falls is now a testing ground for whether the bitter cultural divisions intensified by this year’s presidential campaign [Good Hillary vs. Evil Trump] can recede in favor of the co-dependency that marks many communities with large white and immigrant populations. In this southern Idaho city of 45,000, the question surrounds a growing Muslim population.
The rancor in Twin Falls began to surface only over the past year and a half as concerns about domestic terrorism awakened a fierce and sudden debate about whether the local Muslim population represented a point of pride or a potential danger — an anxiety that Trump amplified during his campaign. For decades before, the refugee resettlement program run by a local community college had flourished with little opposition, with refugees filling open jobs on dairy farms and in cheese factories.
The headline reminds white readers that they’re “dependent” on the “local Muslim” immigrants and also that Muslims aren’t “white”. But the body of the article reveals that it is local business owners seeking cheap labor who are dependent on the imports. There is, apparently, no need to explain how a working-class native-born resident of Twin Falls is better off as a result of the new arrivals or how he/she/ze/they would suffer if the immigrants on which he/she/ze/they “depends” departed. The “local community college” is getting most of the federal cash, it seems, in exchange for facilitating the importation of humans (which is not “human trafficking”?).
The article goes on to remind readers that non-coastal Americans are stupid because they can’t distinguish among the various species of migrants:
A sexual assault took place in a local apartment complex, and rumors spread that the suspects were Syrian teens. “Syrian Refugees Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho,” read a headline on the Drudge Report. The case was sealed because it involved juveniles, including the victim, a 5-year-old girl. Still, Twin Falls police corrected a few facts, saying the suspects were from Sudan and Iraq.
The real issue with the sexual assault of a 5-year-old, according to the Washington Post, is that some natives of Twin Falls can’t tell the difference between a Syrian and an Iraqi.
What’s happening in Twin Falls circa 2025? As tourists wandering/biking around for three days we encountered Islamically covered women at least 4 or 5 times a day. No burqas with full face coverings, but always more than a hijab. The clothing was sharply at odds with the prevailing shorts and T-shirt fashion for the typical female out in the 80-90-degree dry heat. The elites live in a Muslim-free environment. We didn’t see any covered women at an upscale restaurant overlooking the canyon, on the trails leading to waterfalls, or in expensive neighborhoods (“expensive” = $600,000+ for a house). The Twin Falls Mosque is in a neighborhood of shabby $200,000+ houses.
We talked to some local high-school- and college-aged native-born kids. They expressed pride that their high school was “diverse”, but also noted that the Muslim immigrants formed an entirely separate society within the high school and that they themselves had never been friends with a Muslim student.
The local science museum explains that non-natives lead to environmental, ecological, economic, social, and human health impacts.
On our way out of town we were reminded that ecosystems can be destroyed by newcomers who “end up where they shouldn’t be”…
Note that all of Twin Falls is apparently considered a dumping ground by the elites of Boise, some of whom we met in Sun Valley. They all advised us to avoid even a brief stay in Twin Falls. The density of hijabs is lower in Boise, at least in the expensive downtown areas where we spent most of our time. That said, Google Maps shows a variety of mosques:
The Murakami show at the Cleveland Museum of Art includes some murals that would be awesome to have in a kid’s room if only a humanoid robot could be adapted to do the work of either applying wallpaper or directly painting.
Another area where the robot could work… recreating Sol LeWitt murals in the home. Different color schemes for every holiday.
For my friends in health care, the artist’s conception of what a nurse looks like:
Circling back to the principal theme for today… if you had nearly-free high-skill labor from a robot would you use some of it to have wall murals in your house? Or would it make more sense to cover a wall in large tiles of flat-screen TVs and do this electronically?
The implication of the article is that it would have been righteous for Zohran Mamdani to check the “I am Black” box for a race-based preference if he had actually been Ugandan rather than part of an immigrant population from India.
Today’s question is why it would have been fair for a recent immigrant from Uganda, even one with the correct skin color, to receive preference in college admissions or hiring. America’s race-based college admissions and jobs allocation systems were advertised as reparations for past discrimination and slavery. If someone who shows up in the U.S. five minutes ago scoops up these preferences doesn’t that prevent the preferences from going to the people for whom they were intended? What discrimination could an actual Black Ugandan who arrived in the U.S. yesterday, for example, have suffered at the hands of the bad people (i.e., white Americans)?
The idea of affirmative action (race-based discrimination by do-gooders or white-/Asian-haters, depending on your perspective) was started by President Lyndon Johnson via Executive Order 11246 in 1965. This was, coincidentally, at a point when immigrants weren’t a significant percentage of the U.S. population (Pew):
(Note that the open borders of the Biden-Harris administration made the above 2015 forecast inaccurate. The U.S. became 15.8 percent foreign-born in 2025 (CIS).)
Even though Donald Trump has gotten the federal government out of the race-based discrimination business we still have private corporations and universities engaging in it. The question for today: Why are race-based preferences available to immigrants?
The rich university will have to write a check to the U.S. Treasury for $200 million?
The university will pay the $200 million in three installments over three years.
Columbia receives about $1.3 billion in federal research grants annually, and the university said it would have all been at risk if it had remained on the White House’s blacklist.
Grant Watch, a project run by research scientists who compiled information on the grants pulled by the Trump administration, estimated that about $1.2 billion in unspent funding from the N.I.H. to Columbia had been terminated or frozen. Other federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, also pulled grants.
If I’m reading this correctly, over the next three years the university will get $billions in funding, every dollar of which will generate a profit for the nonprofit, but the profit might be a little less than it would have been in some ideal world of profitability from the nonprofit organization’s perspective.
It’s a right-wing conspiracy theory that elites want to keep expanding human population until the peasants are forced to eat bugs. Debunking this theory, a recent article in MIT’s Technology Review, “How poop could help feed the planet”:
Nutrients crucial for agriculture are in “short supply,” but certainly there is no reason to close the border to low-skill migrants or reconsider the goal of another doubling of U.S. population:
Could this possibly work? If you live in Seattle you’re already eating food derived from human poop:
A recent review in the Journal of Environmental Management, in fact, touts wastewater treatment plants as “renewable biological nitrogen mines” that can supply the essential but expensive component from reclaimed sewage sludge at a time when many farmers are finding it harder to obtain. Sewage can, the authors conclude, “become an important raw material for the sustainable production of organic-mineral fertilizers from renewable resources available locally, with a low carbon footprint.” Extracting nitrogen and phosphorus for reuse can also help remove those pollutants from the plants’ outflow and reduce the amount of organic matter destined for landfills and manure lagoons, which store and manage huge concentrations of livestock waste. Reinserting ourselves into nature’s recycling system, in other words, could help us meet the planet’s growing food needs without unduly fouling the environment.
The Varcor system heats the incoming poop and separates it into solid matter and vapor. A process called mechanical vapor recompression allows the compressed steam to be reused as a heat source while the water and ammonia vapor are separated and distilled. The conveyor belt/dryer carries the remaining solids to the giant crepe-making spindles and then into a waiting truck below. The plant is now selling three to four truckloads of this dry fertilizer to farms every week.
What’s happening with the population collapse that Elon Musk keeps warning about? It’s exacerbated by what the Technology Review authors call “the planet’s burgeoning population”:
Waste-to-fertilizer strategies, even if scaled up, won’t be enough on their own to help feed the planet’s burgeoning population. By viewing people as not only consumers but also producers, however, they could help us take far better advantage of some underrated natural assets that won’t run dry anytime soon.
Today at the Norwell, Massachusetts library: “Join Norwell Library for the Pride Month session in our Issues Facing Democracy series part 2 or 4. This time, we will be focusing on the LGBTQ+ experience.” Both June and July are Pride Months? Or maybe every month in Maskachusetts is a Pride Month? (the official calendar says that we are currently in between International Drag Day and Gay Uncles Day)
