Happy National Estate Planning Awareness Week to those who celebrate. Remember that the first advice from any attorney to a client in Massachusetts or New York is “move out of Massachusetts [or New York] to a state that doesn’t have an estate tax”. Here’s a map from the Tax Foundation (people with money should move from the colored-in states to the grayed-out states, especially to those grayed-out states that also have no income tax, e.g., New Hampshire, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, etc.):
This post is about Mr. Evans Greenspun, a relative who lived in the United Kingdom and who was unable to spell “Evan” correctly. Evans left $200 million in a Cayman Islands bank but neglected to write a will. Here’s a hardcopy letter from attorney Elliot Barnes that I received this summer about my petroleum chemical engineer relative:
I expect to receive my 50 percent share of the funds imminently and will be following divorce plaintiff MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s example by donating much of it to Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign.
Separately, I’m wondering how the above scam can be profitable given that it required putting a stamp on an envelope (sadly I didn’t save the envelope so I can’t remember if it was actually mailed from the UK). “Attorney” isn’t a title that lawyers in the UK use, is it? “Solicitor”, perhaps, would be more credible? The letterhead street address in London doesn’t match precisely in Google Maps. A first name of “Evans” is likely to raise suspicion; wouldn’t an LLM have suggested changing it to “Evan”?
For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens.
“We’re talking about the prevention of a potentially deadly, life-changing diagnosis,” said Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York, who was not involved with the study. “This is real world data of how a public health recommendation can change children’s health.”
The article never points out that parents who ignored pediatricians and public health recommendations (prior to 2017) and did the obvious thing (gradually introduce young humans to a wide range of foods that they might be expected to consume as older humans) did better by their kids.
Meanwhile, will we ever see a retraction of the advice that saliva-soaked face rags kept 2-year-olds safe from aerosol viruses that killed Americans at a median age of 82?
Marjorie Merriweather Post famously built Mar-a-Lago, but lived in that modest $18 million (value used by New York judge) shack only during “the Palm Beach season”. She lived in Northwest Washington, D.C. during the spring and fall and in the Adirondacks during the summer. Her DC place, cozy by Mar-a-Lago standards, opened as a museum in 1977 and somehow I missed it while growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. My excuses: I started working full-time at NASA (on Pioneer Venus in 1978); I was too young to drive; the museum is nowhere near the Metro; despite high crime rates, Jimmy Carter wouldn’t send the National Guard into the city (he was too busy appeasing the Ayatollahs).
Ms. Post loved dogs, decorative art, orchids, Japanese gardens, and aviation (her private four-engine turboprop Vickers Viscount ferried everything but the gardens with her among the three estates).
The Museum costs $20/adult, but it is free for federal government workers suffering the trauma of receiving 100 percent pay for 0 percent work:
… offering free admission to those receiving SNAP benefits. Present your EBT card upon check in at the visitor center. and receive complimentary entry for 4 guests.
Ms, Post was apparently prescient regarding the kind of society that the U.S. would one day become. A sculpture on the outside of her mansion shows a youth with a swan:
ABC (“Three of four suspects were apprehended” but, as far as I can tell from searching, our noble media never updated us regarding the names or backgrounds of any of the suspects):
The “mansion” itself is unremarkable compared to Mar-a-Lago and, but the contents and gardens are spectacular. A hillside Japanese garden is small, but awesome, and contains some of the stone lanterns that are virtually impossible for consumers to buy today (cheap cast concrete versions are available):
Ms. Post loved her dogs and built a cemetery for them, as well as for the departed canines belonging to family and staff members, on the estate grounds:
Ms. Post built a greenhouse for her orchids (note the modest Islamic dress; in any group of people in Washington, D.C. in October 2025 there was typically at least one person wearing hijab or abaya and at least one person wearing a COVID-19 mask (both indoors and out)):
Some fake iOS background blurring:
The interior is jammed with interesting objects so it is impossible to do justice to them. There are a couple of Fabergé eggs (maybe Optimus can make replicas of these for all of us?):
Here’s an idea of how much there is to see in the “icon room”:
Ms. Post collected a ton of figurines that included dogs. A few examples:
Homage to the highest tech devices of the day:
A couple of personal favorites:
Let’s exist through the COVID-19-safe gift shop:
As far as I can tell, 100 percent of the objects in the museum and estate were made either by East Asians or white Europeans. Ms. Post’s prime years coincided with an almost complete shutdown of immigration to the U.S. Nonetheless, the gift shop reminds us that we should celebration immigration/diversity:
We are informed by Science that there are at least 74 gender IDs, but most of the books for sale celebrate the achievements of people who identified with 1 out of 74:
I wonder if today’s insanely rich people, who are far richer than Marjorie Merriweather Post ever was, will one day leave us beautiful estates in which to wander. It doesn’t seem as though we’re going to get this, though. When Bill Gates sends $200 billion to Africa, for example, it doesn’t even leave a lasting mark on Africa (there are more needy Africans today than ever before, I think). So let’s raise a plastic glass before we eat our Costco ramen to the woman who left Americans this evidence of what the dining experience used to be:
For readers who protested today, some lyrics by Elvin Bishop during the first Trump dictatorship (album version on YouTube):
He is the president, but wants to be the king Know what I like about the guy? Not a goddamn thing I want to know, how can four years seem so long? Yeah, Lord have mercy, what the hеll is going on?
Here’s an adapted version performed to the delight of a San Francisco audience after the
A 12-year-old’s comment on the above: “If the guy hates Trump so much why does he look just like him?”
We attended 100 percent of today’s No Kings protests in Jupiter, Florida and, thus, can proudly display the following meme:
I asked ChatGPT for some suggestions of appropriate classical music:
Beethoven – Eroica Symphony (No. 3, 1804): Originally dedicated to Napoleon as a “hero of liberty,” until Beethoven tore up the dedication when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor.
Giuseppe Verdi – Nabucco (1842), especially “Va, pensiero”: The Hebrew slaves’ lament became a covert anthem for Italian independence from Austrian rule.
Richard Wagner – Rienzi (1842): A Roman tribune rises against corrupt nobles and tyranny. (Note that, unlike Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Wagner is in no way associated with National Socialism/Hitler.)
Béla Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra (1943): Includes a mocking “interruption” of a Nazi marching tune — a defiant gesture during World War II.
The U.S. has arrested a “Louisiana man” for purportedly participating in the Gazans’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israeli civilians. New York Times:
This was an unavoidable situation, apparently, because he supposedly lied to Biden administration immigration officials about his level of effort in globalizing the intifada, achieving river-to-the-sea liberation, etc. Let’s ignore for the moment the question of why Americans believe that government bureaucrats who don’t speak Arabic would be able to separate truth from fiction. The question for this post is what was our theory for how Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi’s presence in the U.S. was going to make the U.S. a better place for existing Americans.
(I personally think that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi may well have told the truth. The U.S. has an honor system in which a prospective immigrant is asked “Have you participated in terrorism?” and, by the standards of a significant percentage of Americans (especially the young/progressive and, certainly, almost every resident of Dearborn, Michigan), what the Gazans did on October 7, 2023 was a legitimate military action by oppressed indigenous Arabs, not “terrorism”. The October 7 attack was organized by a democratically elected and popularly supported government (Hamas), certainly, and, even after the Israelis counterattacked, was supported in opinion polls by the majority of Gazans.)
In June 2024, al-Muhtadi submitted an electronic US visa application in Cairo. In the application, he denied serving in any paramilitary organization or having ever engaged in terrorist activities. His application said he intended to live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and work in “car repairs or food services”. He entered the US in September 2024.
Let’s leave aside the question of why a “Louisiana man” (NYT) such as Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi would intend to live in Oklahoma. Why was opening the border to someone who was going to work in “food services” going to make the U.S. a better place to live? Oklahoma was already critically short of health care workers (2024 KFOR) so bringing in one more person who would be a customer for health care rather than a provider would make it tougher for existing Oklahomans to access medical care. Maybe one individual restaurant owner would benefit from the cheap labor that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi could potentially provide, but we’re told that advancements in robotics will soon render low-skill humans obsolete. That would leave U.S. taxpayers on the hook for multiple generations of welfare in the event that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi either ceased working or never earned enough to get over the threshold for public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, Obamaphone, etc.
What is our rationale, in other words, for operating an immigration system under which Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi was eligible for permanent U.S. residency and eventual citizenship?
If the majority of American voters can agree that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi moving from Egypt to Oklahoma wouldn’t have made the U.S. better off, even if Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi hadn’t been part of the October 7 attacks, why doesn’t Congress change U.S. immigration rules so as to prevent a future Biden/Harris-style administration from admitting more “Louisiana men” like Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi?
Like Harvard, MIT takes an official position that inequality is bad. In an ideal world, all humans would have the same wealth and income and, therefore, all states would have the same wealth and income. Here’s an example from MIT’s official news page:
Inequality is “a threat to America’s values and political system”. MIT is a richer-than-average university and, thanks to the Feds pouring all of the nation’s wealth into higher ed and health care, its Massachusetts home is the richest state (Washington, D.C. is yet richer, but not a state). One would think that MIT would, therefore, refuse federal grant money, preferring to fund itself via state tax dollars and private/endowment dollars. Every dollar refused by MIT could be spent at University of Michigan, for example, a less-rich university in a poorer-than-average state.
Instead of refusing federal money, though, MIT is fighting to keep it while preserving the school’s passion for race-based admissions and Rainbow Flagism. The Hill:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would have required sweeping changes on campus in exchange for a funding advantage in federal grant awards.
The 10-point memo was provided to nine higher learning institutions last week, requiring reforms such as a rewiring of the admissions process by adjusting the consideration of race or ethnicity, student grading and demanding that transgender women be excluded from women’s locker rooms and sports teams.
I still can’t figure out why the Trump administration wants to fund the Racism League schools. What institution ever changed in response to being showered with billions of dollars? The federal government could send its research dollars to universities that never engaged in race discrimination and/or never adopted Rainbow Flagism as an official religion. The Queers for Palestine universities would find a way to replace the federal funds with state and/or private funds and/or research groups would follow the federal money by moving to to the non-racist universities. Nowhere in the MIT Mission Statement is “hoover up as many federal tax dollars as possible”. In fact, the statement describes MIT as a purely altruistic enterprise working to help humanity and, therefore, anything that MIT can do to reduce inequality would be a positive step:
Here’s an example of two Nobelists moving from MIT to Zurich in response to a “CHF 26 million donation from the Lemann Foundation” (26 million Swiss Francs translates to 32.5 million post-Bidenflation dollars; see exchange rate chart below for how the USD was worth 1.4 Swiss Francs in 2003 and, thanks to the inflation-free environment that Congress has created via deficit spending, is now worth 0.8 Swiss Francs):
The Nobel Prize-winning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join the University of Zurich in July 2026. Using external funds provided by the Lemann Foundation, the two researchers will establish a new center for development economics, education and public policy.
How’s the uprising going? Have the revolutionaries managed to kill enough fascists to make a difference? Or are Bernie and AOC still our only hope?
So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.
What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
The NYT said, in the above article, “We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust.” What could account for low levels of trust? The political science nerds in the 2020 paper, below, say “We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies.” (i.e., a random assemblage of humans via asylum-based immigration will result in a low-trust society).
Could AI perhaps update this classic “To the barricades” image to show young American progressives wearing Antifa T-shirts and carrying avocado toast?
Also last night: Mayor Mamdani picks FDR as his “favorite modern-day president”.
This is a curious choice given that FDR was an enthusiastic proponent of killing as many Japanese and German civilians as technology allowed, e.g., 100,000 in just one night in Tokyo in March 1945, in order to force Japan and Germany into unconditional surrender (both nations repeatedly expressed willingness to negotiate mutually acceptable peace treaties, but the U.S. rejected the idea in favor of killing more Japanese and Germans). I can’t think of any American president who has been responsible for killing more civilians than FDR directed to be killed. If the Israelis followed FDR’s example, they would have shelled and bombed the Gazans, without texting/phoning warnings in advance, until the Gazans decided to surrender. Instead of sending food, water, and other supplies to the Gazans, the Israelis would have implemented something like Operation Starvation, the U.S. operation intended to prevent food from reaching Japan via ship (begun under FDR and continued under President Truman).
FDR is also a curious choice because he’s responsible for putting Japanese Americans into concentration camps during WWII (blessed by the Supreme Court) out of mere suspicion that they might try to work against the U.S. government’s program of killing as many Japanese soldiers and civilians as quickly as possible. Zohran Mamdani explicitly says that he wants to fight against the federal government (example below). If Trump followed FDR’s example, Zohran Mamdani would be interned for the duration of the federal effort to arrest and deport undocumented migrants with criminal records (“New Yorkers”, in Mayor Mamdani’s parlance).
Maybe FDR is celebrated by Mamdani because he gave Americans free cash? Ida May Fuller, for example, got paid nearly 1000X what she’d contributed to Social Security. Who wouldn’t love that?
Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, a six-story converted factory trimmed in orange and gold, has been many things to many people during its life: a mystery, a noisy neighbor, a source of suspicion, and, for thousands of Muslims who live or work along Atlantic Avenue, the main street of Arab Brooklyn, a place of worship.
Last week, the mosque became, not for the first time, a symbol of terror. A federal affidavit unsealed on Tuesday describes links between the mosque, several Brooklyn businessmen and a cleric in Yemen who, prosecutors say, claims to have funneled more than $20 million to Al Qaeda. ”They did their fund-raising right here in our own backyard,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.
But while Al Farooq has been the spiritual home of some infamous men — including, briefly, the blind Egyptian sheik eventually convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the man who killed Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 — the role of the mosque and its members in supporting more recent terrorist activity remains unclear.
(New Yorkers responded to the 1993 jihad, which killed 6, including a pregnant woman, and injured more than 1,000, by advocating for increased levels of Islamic immigration and then responded to the 2001 jihad against the World Trade Center by advocating for completely open borders to Muslims.)
Who watched the debate? I saw a few snippets on X. I was, of course, happy to see Florida Realtor of the Year 2020/2021 (Andrew Cuomo) and Florida Realtor of the Year 2026 (Ayatollah Mamdani) on stage at the same time. Mostly, however, I’m amazed that these are the three ablest humans among the 8.5 million (or 9 million if we count the uncountable undocumented?) residents of New York City.
Separately, I’m close to 100,000 views on this X reply:
It is unfair to paint Mr. Mamdani as a Hamas supporter. Based on his public statements, he is equally aligned with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
It is unfair to paint Mr. Mamdani as a Hamas supporter. Based on his public statements, he is equally aligned with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The 14th Amendment theoretically provides for Equal Protection. Thanks to the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, federal government workers who don’t work during a shutdown are paid in full, just like the government workers unfortunate enough to be declared “essential” and forced to work. What’s “equal” about someone who works 40 hours per week (add 15 hours for commuting in DC? Traffic was horrific when we were there the weekend of October 2-5) getting paid the same as someone who works 0 hours per week and who might be playing Xbox or on vacation at Disney World, in Europe, or in Asia?
Alternatively, if government employees who don’t work get paid shouldn’t Equal Protection require ordinary citizens who don’t work to get paid the same amount after any government shutdown?
What makes the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 Constitutional?
Here’s a $20/person museum in Northwest DC that we visited earlier this month (the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the rich heiress/executive who built Mar-a-Lago). Not only do the non-essential federal government workers get paid time off, but they can use that paid time off to go to un-free museums for free (“Federal workers are invited to seek respite and rejuvenation at Hillwood with complimentary admission (with government ID).”). What kind of “respite and rejuvenation” is needed after a person transitions from doing almost nothing in exchange for a paycheck to doing exactly nothing in exchange for the same paycheck?
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)
