Evolution of the Telluride Association Summer Seminar

by philg

I’m listening to The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (“One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023”). The author was born in 1963, just as I was. Unlike me, he did not drop out of high school but, by contrast, was admitted to a highly selective Telluride Association Summer Seminar (not in Telluride, Colorado, but in Ithaca, NY and Baltimore, MD). The choices circa 1980:

Telluride was offering three seminars that summer, one on literature and revolution, one on the life of the American city, and the third on sociobiology,

I was curious to see if the program still existed. It does. The choices of topic for 2025: Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies.

Maybe the author would have benefitted from one of these programs. Here’s the beginning of a story of how he ends up in the hospital:’

Early in the second week, as Michael and I were cutting across the sweeping [New Rochelle, NY] high school grounds on our way home, talking about classes and the usual bullshit, I noticed a group of Black guys up ahead on the bank of the lake to my left. They seemed about our age, or a few grades older, but did not look like they had spent the day in school. Several were lounging against the low, thick branch of a weeping willow; others were horsing around, tagging each other and darting out of range; and one or two were sitting on the ground.

(There was no motivation for the subsequent attack and facial disfigurement other than the victim being white.)

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DEI at the Fort Lauderdale Airport

by philg

Thanks to Alaska Airlines’s focus on DEI rather than on starting and/or completing flights, I had a multi-hour opportunity to inspect the gates and the art collection at FLL.

As we look back with nostalgia on Black History Month, here’s a Southwest gate:

Remember that 15 pieces of flair is the minimum:

How about art? Here’s an exhibit from someone who “has challenged societal barriers as an LGBTQ+ female artist”:

Note the featuring of Frida Kahlo, who broke through a lot of barriers by having sex with the married already-successful artist Diego Rivera, and Georgia O’Keefe, who broke through a lot of barriers by having sex with the already-married Alfred Stieglitz (more than 20 years older), an already-successful art dealer and photographer.

Intrigued by Southwest Airlines’s “I am Black 365 Days a Year” flair, I asked ChatGPT and Grok to make “I am Golden 365 Days of Year” signs. Both systems were provided with one of Southwest’s as an example. ChatGPT:

Grok:

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Today’s “economic blackout”

by philg

From state-sponsored NPR:

An organization is calling for a national boycott in the form of an “economic blackout” on Friday, urging Americans not to shop for 24 hours.

This movement, spearheaded by The People’s Union USA, a grassroots group, follows the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at several companies, including Target. The boycott coincides with protests against President Donald Trump’s plans to reduce the government workforce and mass firings at federal agencies.

I don’t know why retailers are the focus given that healthcare is nearly 20 percent of the GDP. Are these folks suggesting that Americans boycott getting their COVID boosters, flu shots, and healing marijuana? What about government? That’s a huge slice of the economy. Does the The People’s Union USA suggest that employers don’t send withheld taxes to the government today? Given that the federal government is now run by an illegitimate fascist dictator, i.e., Donald Trump, why would a righteous individual pay federal taxes on any day of the year? Surely a progressive wouldn’t want to advance Nazism by sending tens of thousands of dollars to a Nazi.

Speaking of Nazis… is the name racist? Why is a boycott a “BLACKout”? State-sponsored NPR reassures us:

What are you all doing to support this grassroots movement? As it happens, my first stop in the morning was Home Depot (Deplorable-founded) to pick up some parts for our electrician (see Electrifinflation).

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Florida vs. DC area school observance of Valentine’s Day

by philg

Closing out February with a reminder that this month is host to Valentine’s Day….

From our local “5th Grade Gifted Science Teacher” (Florida state law requires that public school systems offer gifted education beginning in 2nd grade):

I am writing to all parents to remind you that our class is having a Valentine Exchange this Friday. I sent home a bright pink flyer 2 weeks ago with the information and class list needed if your child wanted to participate. It is optional. I am writing because I have seen many of my students who did not show you the flyer as it is still in their yellow folder. If your child chooses to participate, he/she is required to bring one for each child in the class. Your child can also bring Valentines for friends in other classes if they choose.

Additionally, our class is having a Valentine Box Design contest. The child with the most creative box will win prizes that I have purchased. There will be a first, second and third place winner. Again, it is optional, and those children who opt out will receive a bag to place their Valentine’s.
You can send in a class treat if you would like. After we pass out the Valentines, we will be watching a movie.

Please ask for the pink flyer if you have not seen it yet. Thank you.

From a high school administrator in the Washington, DC area:

Join us February 14th for a fun Valentines event, hosted by the LGBTQ+ Allies Club. We’ll play some mini games and introduce you to the mission of the club.

What “mini games” are part of the LGBTQ+ lifestyle? A video game from “The 13 Best Queer Games to Play During Pride Month (and Beyond)” (PC Magazine)? Croquet because it is #1 in “Lawn Games Every Gay Should Know”?

Circling back to Florida, the Valentine Exchange is more 2SLGBTQQIA+-oriented than what we had growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. Kids here in Florida are required, if they want to participate at all, to bring a card for every other member of the class, regardless of gender ID, and are forbidden from writing anything personal in any card. A boy, therefore, must present other boys with cards if he is to present any girls with cards. In 1970s Bethesda, we chose which other members of the class to give cards to and wrote whatever we wanted. Each card always went to a member of the opposite sex, as far as I can remember (there were no “gender IDs” back then so “opposite sex” was a defined term).

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Electrifinflation

by philg

Leftover Inflation? (November 2024):

I wonder if there is a significant “leftover inflation” yet to come, though, from companies and people who neglected to raise prices or who were locked into long-term agreements during the core years of Bidenflation.

Our electrician, a solo practitioner in mid career (i.e., he already has all of the skills that he is going to have), is coming over tomorrow. His rate in December was $100 per hour. His rate for 2025: $125/hour. I think that he was at $90/hour in 2022, when we first hired him, but he apparently hadn’t kept up with inflation, which means he is now charging 40 percent more than he was in 2022.

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Alaska Airlines DEI

by philg

Here’s the Alaska Airlines July 2024 DEI update:

Their commitments didn’t include committing to flying to Seattle from FLL on February 20, 2025 at 7:00 am. I got a text message from them about cancellation just as I was walking up to the gate shortly before 6:00 am. Note that their plan is a 30-hour delay (the substitute 3-leg flight is on February 21, a day later than the original 2-leg flight):

(A lot of other passengers got texts with the same itinerary and none of them complained to the gate agent because Alaska Airlines had wisely chosen not to send any personnel to the gate. Everyone gathered in a Fall of Saigon scene back at the ticket counter and then at a carousel to retrieve what would have been our checked bags.)

What was Alaska Airlines working on if not getting us to the destination that we’d paid for? The skin tone and gender ID of the pilots: “125 new students enrolled in the Ascend Pilot Academy (26% BIPOC, 36% Female). Surpassed commitment to increase Black female pilots at Air Group by nearly 33%.”

For those concerned about safety, the good news is that a DEI pilot hire can’t crash an airliner that never takes off.

My DEI day started hours earlier. If I’d wanted to do a slow three-leg trip to Fairbanks I could have done it starting at nearby PBI. Instead, I chose to fly from FLL, which is an hour’s drive away. Because it would be 4:15 am and I might want to snooze, I reserved “Uber Premier” at over $190 rather than Uber Comfort at $110. Initially a pavement-melting GMC Yukon was going to show up, but then either the driver canceled or Uber canceled him because he wasn’t expected to arrive by 4:15 am. A 2022 Tesla 3 was substituted. The driver was a nice guy and I learned a fair amount about Teslas (he’s test-driven the new Model 3 and says that it is noticeably quieter inside, the doors close more solidly, and FSD works great). However, I don’t think the Model 3 qualifies as “Premier”; it’s a “Comfort”-class car. Uber still charged the originally quoted $190+ price despite not delivering a “Premier” car. I’m surprised that they haven’t been sued for this by an energetic class action lawyer. Uber doesn’t have a customer service phone number (some sort of AI chatbot instead for questions about charges), which means Uber has pocketed the extra cash for all similar downgrades unless a customer has gone to the trouble of disputing the charge with his/her/zir/their credit card bank.

Here’s part of Uber’s site:

From their 2024 ESG report:

They weren’t committed to keeping the Uber Premier appointment that they’d made, but they say they are committed to “racial equity”.

Rationally I can accept that incompetence and indifference to the customer are both possible (even plausible given the concentration and lack of competition in both U.S. airlines and U.S. ride sharing) without a percentage of corporate focus being devoted to DEI. But it is tough to avoid the temptation to search for “Company X diversity” after a negative customer experience. That makes me a hater?

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Taxpayers vs. the Community Engagement Specialist

by philg

A heart-wrenching story from the NYT, “Government Workers Who Have Lost Their Jobs Worry About Their Housing”:

After losing his job at the U.S. Forest Service, Cameron McKenzie was worried about finding a new job. But first, he had a more immediate concern: How was he going to pay the mortgage?

He’s done the math — finding another job in the environmental sector could take months — and keeping up with the nearly $2,700 monthly payment on his three-bedroom home in Blairstown, N.J., will be a challenge, if not impossible. “Even on unemployment,” said Mr. McKenzie, 27, who worked as a community engagement specialist, “I’m not going to be able to make my mortgage payment.”

Mr. McKenzie’s termination was among thousands of federal job cuts, part of a purge of the work force under an executive order signed by President Trump.

It’s the New York Times, so it is important to stress that the “community engagement specialist” profiled happens to be a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:

Mr. McKenzie, who worked at the U.S. Forest Service, said he and his husband are planning to list their New Jersey home — which his husband first purchased in 2022 for $215,000 — in May, when there’s more greenery to make it more attractive to potential buyers. Though they used to split the mortgage payments, Mr. McKenzie took on the task when his husband started law school. He estimated that around half of his $87,000 salary was going toward the payments and a construction loan the couple took out to cover renovations.

Who else is profiled in the article? “a single mother with three children” working as a “a health insurance specialist” and “Nathan Barrera-Bunch, who was a management analyst at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs … staying in Washington might not be feasible. It all depends, he said, on whether his fiancé, who still works for the federal government, can keep his job and if Mr. Barrera-Bunch can find a new one.”

In other words, the NYT apparently couldn’t find a single fired federal employee who was in a heterosexual partnership of some sort. Nor could they find an example of children growing up in a two-parent household.

Let’s circle back to Mr. McKenzie. If his cash compensation was $87,000 per year it seems fair to assume that he was costing taxpayers $250,000 per year (salary, benefits, pension, office space, etc.). What does a “community engagement specialist” do that justifies 100 percent of the personal federal income tax of perhaps 20 median-income families being harvested (i.e., for those 20 families, not a penny of their tax dollars can be used to deliver other services to them)?

I tried to answer my own question and found these slides from the Forest Service that include contributions from two community engagement workers. Here are some samples:

The white male cares about social justice, but is hogging this position that pays 2-3X private sector wages and thereby preventing a Black trans female from enjoying it? Only a white male can understand “Recreation Equity”, apparently:

Taxpayers keep funding DEI and yet don’t get any diversity, equity, or inclusion. The folks who get paid to achieve DEI aren’t discouraged by their long track record of (paid) failure:

Whiteness is to blame, it seems, but the white people won’t give up their unearned jobs and fat government salaries:

Critical Race Theory is not being funded or applied by the government, except in the minds of paranoid MAGA:

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Which explorer called the Gulf of Mexico/America the Golfo de Florida?

by philg

Wokipedia says that the Gulf of Mexico/America was referred to at some point by at least some people as the Golfo de Florida. Here’s the cited source with, in turn, some of its citations:

Here’s the section that seems to be the basis for Wikipedia’s “other explorers”:

This seems like a good bachelor’s thesis topic a history major! Separately, if the Gulf of Mexico v. Gulf of America dispute can’t be settled amicably, my vote is for Golfo de Florida!

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Linear microaggressions at Brown

by philg

Our mole inside Queers-for-Palestine Brown University signed up for Linear Algebra and was sentenced to read “Mathematical Microaggressions” by a past president of the Mathematical Association of America, Francis Edward Su. He/she/ze/they starts off by relating his/her/zir/their own personal trauma:

Here are some example microaggressions in the math world:

Turning tricks is somehow bad:

Math will be improved with more diversity:

Here’s the organization’s current “Executive Director” (“president” wasn’t a sufficiently august title?):

They’re so certain that diversity improves mathematics that they hired one of the world’s whitest white guys to be their leader?

Not shying away from controversy, the organization took a brave stand against murder in 2021 with “Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics Statement in Support of our Asian and Asian American Community Members”:

On March 16, 2021 a man killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, and injured one man in a shooting spree in Atlanta, Georgia. This violence has renewed broader calls to support our Asian and Asian American communities. The specifics of this tragic incident remind us that there are multiple layers of identity-based marginalization and hate related to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. One solidarity movement with the victims of the hate crime is #StopAsianHate. This is not a response to last Tuesday’s events, but to a broader arc of increased hate crime since the COVID-19 pandemic started.

(Maybe hate crime has come back down thanks to hate-free leadership by Biden-Harris? The FBI says it went up between 2022 and 2023:

But the U.S. population grew dramatically over the same period due to the open border. So perhaps hate crime has gone down on a per capita basis. Nobody can know because nobody can accurately estimate the number of undocumented migrants who are our guests.)

What else do these university-affiliated folks do with the fat overhead payments that NSF has been giving them? “2021 Award Winner Announced for MAA’s Inclusivity Award”:

In 2019, MAA launched the Inclusivity Award in recognition of the importance of its core value of Inclusivity and building a healthy, vibrant mathematical community where all are welcome and encouraged to flourish. The 2021 award winner is William (Bill) Hawkins, Jr.

UnderDr. Hawkins’s leadership, the SUMMA Office created an archival record of American PhDs in mathematics and mathematics education who are members of minority groups, initiated the Minority Chairs Breakfast annually, established the Tensor-SUMMA projects “to encourage the pursuit and enjoyment of mathematics by students who are members of groups historically underrepresented in the field of mathematics,” organized panels at JMM on issues that affected minority institutions or populations, published a poster on African and African-American Pioneers in Mathematics, and provided guidance to those who wanted to establish an intervention project.

“I am delighted to be able to recognize my friend and colleague, Bill Hawkins, with the 2021 Inclusivity Award,” said MAA Executive Director, Michael Pearson. “It has been my privilege to work with, and learn from, Bill during my tenure at MAA.”

Circling back to Clouseau, let’s hope that he can learn some linear algebra from YouTube while the Brown faculty teaches him about microaggressions (a $91,676/year experience for 2024-5).

Related:

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Mom’s Proud Democrat card arrived in the mail

by philg

My mother died on January 6, 2025 (obit). She’s still eligible to vote in New Jersey and some other states, I think, so it makes sense that a new Proud Democrat card arrived in the mail this month:

I can’t figure out why the righteous are limited to 3 outrage choices in each category. If my mom had lived to pick

  • Attacking the fundamental rights of LGBTQ+ Americans
  • Gutting abortion access
  • Enacting mass deportations

she would be precluded from picking “Severely limiting voting access” (e.g., to those who are alive).

A longer letter was attached. Your kindergarten education will serve you well because 100 percent of those who participate can be a “leader”:

Every Democrat — each and every one of us — will be a leader in the fight to stop the Trump administration’s dangerous agenda.

Could this be a reference to the War of Northern Aggression (“Civil War”)?

But we, the Democratic Party, have fought through major inflection points in history before.

The overall package seems inconsistent. America is going down the “path of darkness, chaos, and hate”. At the same time, there is a concern about “mass deportations”. Why wouldn’t a noble undocumented migrant be far better off after being deported? He/she/ze/they would get a U.S. taxpayer-funded flight far away from the darkness, chaos, and hate.

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