Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter. … A grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, Mr. Mellon was not a prominent Republican donor until Mr. Trump was elected. But in recent years, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.
The article doesn’t mention that Grandpa Mellon was perhaps the greatest donor to the American people in the history of the nation. He gave his art collection and an endowment to establish the National Gallery of Art. He did this despite being the subject of what ChatGPT says what was a politically motivated tax fraud lawsuit by President FDR:
The government under FDR’s Treasury and Justice Department pursued a civil case (and attempted criminal charges) against Mellon for alleged under-reporting of income in 1931, improper loss transactions (“wash sales”) of stock, and questionable charitable deduction claims (e.g., an art collection transferred to a trust) that might reduce his tax liability. The case dragged on for years: a grand jury outside Pittsburgh declined to indict Mellon for fraud in 1934. In 1937, after Mellon’s death, the Board of Tax Appeals concluded there was “no doubt” the record did not sustain a fraud charge and found his trust and transfers to the art-trust valid. The government still obtained some additional taxes owing, but far less than originally sought.
His children Paul Mellon and Alisa Mellon Bruce were also major donors to the museum. Collectively they must have given money and artworks that are worth tens of $billions today. (Contrast to today’s billionaires who skip out on paying capital gains tax and send money straight to Africa.)
How about if we start a thank-you card-writing campaign? The $130 million donated is $130 million in taxes we won’t have to pay! (Yes, I recognize that all marginal federal spending can be considered additions to the debt rather than additions to collections from working Americans, but eventually taxpayers have to pay the debt unless it is inflated away to insignificance in our inflation-free Scientifically-managed economy.)
Let’s check in with minivans for 2026 as it is long past time for us to retire our faithful 2021 Odyssey. For readers who worship at the Church of the Sliding Doors I will be grateful to get your advice. Nearly all of the driving will happen in Florida, a state with average gasoline prices (about $3/gallon most of the time in recent years). We expect to drive 10,000 miles per year and, therefore, would burn up $1500/year of gasoline at 20 mpg. Unlimited electric car charging at home is $31/month from Florida Power and Light, but it would be a bit cumbersome because we don’t park our minivan in the garage.
2026 Honda Odyssey: Exactly the same as the 2025 Honda Odyssey, which was almost exactly the same as the 2018 Honda Odyssey. Honda imposed a slight price increase in nominal dollars, which might translate to a slight price reduction in real dollars (adjusted for inflation). If Greta Thunberg hadn’t switched to pro-Hamas advocacy she would shed tears for the continued lack of a hybrid powertrain (admittedly the Toyota Sienna’s feels strained; see Toyota Sienna vs Honda Odyssey).
2026 Toyota Sienna: Would be tough to distinguish from the 2020 original. No improvements for 2026. Not as sporty or nimble as the Odyssey, but the dark green color matches much of the foliage in our neighborhood nicely and the optional captain’s chairs in the middle row would likely appeal to our spoiled kids (reduces seating capacity from 8 to 7). Hybrid powertrain approved by pre-Hamas-Edition-Greta Thunberg. Like seafaring blockade-running Greta, the Sienna isn’t afraid of danger. It comes with Toyota Safety Sense 2.0, an obsolete suite of feeble tech assistance from 2018. TSS 2.0 was superseded by TSS 2.5 (2021 Camry) and then by TSS 3.0 (2023 Corolla; 2025 Camry), but Sienna buyers are doomed to live in 2018.
2026 Chrysler Pacifica: Maybe the oldest platform in the group, dating to the 2017 model year? Zero improvements for 2026. The only plug-in hybrid minivan.
2026 Kia Carnival: minimal changes to this supposedly great 2020 minivan that is styled like an SUV (why not just get a Chevy Tahoe if the SUV image is desired?).
The German auto giant was bringing back the bus as an electric vehicle, albeit one with a boxy design and two-tone paint job reminiscent of the original. The reboot was more than two decades in the making, and the company said the vehicle would soon be available in the U.S.
In the 1960s, the bus and the Beetle helped Volkswagen enjoy rapid growth. U.S. sales peaked at almost 570,000 in 1970, more than a third of the brand’s global total. At the time, the van was priced at the equivalent of around $20,000, less expensive than most cars.
With a battery range of less than 250 miles per charge, the ID.Buzz doesn’t compare favorably with other new EVs. The German-led design also failed to account for some uniquely American tastes: It often needs to be fitted with extra cupholders at U.S. ports.
The commercial-vehicle business is also based at a plant in Hanover that is among the company’s most expensive. The labor cost of producing a vehicle in Germany was roughly $3,307 last year, compared with $1,341 in the U.S., according to a recent report by consultants at Oliver Wyman.
When Diess showed an ID.Buzz prototype in 2017, he promised EVs that would be “affordable for millions, not just to millionaires.” The company prepared its Hanover factory to produce up to 130,000 units a year, and executives hinted that they could in time manufacture it in the U.S. as well.
Only around 30,000 units were sold last year, hurt in Europe by key markets including Germany and Sweden rolling back EV subsidies.
In April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warned that the vehicle showed the international brake-warning sign in amber rather than the word “brake” in red capital letters, which is the requirement in the U.S. A few weeks later, the body said the third-row seat was too wide because it could accommodate three people even though it only had two seat belts. The company is fitting plastic parts to cover the sides of the seats in the roughly 5,600 vehicles affected.
Floridians love exotic new cars and yet I’ve seen only a handful of ID. Buzz minivans in the wild down here. One mom at a school event said that she loved hers, but noted that the range was short (officially 230 miles; Car and Driver highway test: 190 miles) and access to Tesla superchargers was “coming soon”. The exterior was snazzy while the interior looked like it had recently been the site of a birthday party, with lots of cake and snacks, for 17 preschoolers.
For those who can stomach the Nazi heritage, a Tesla minivan with FSD could be awesome!
(Is Tesla currently suffering from Osborne effect? They told all of their customers 1.5 years ago that HW4 is too feeble for self-driving and that HW5 has 5X the mental power (i.e., HW5 is like a Democrat from California with a Gender Science degree while HW4 is like a Red State HVAC tech) and that HW4 cars can’t be upgraded to HW5. Tesla said in June 2024 that HW5 would be delivered to consumers in January 2026, but now it looks like HW5 will show up in 2027.)
I hate to keep driving our venerable 2021 Odyssey with over 50,000 miles on the odometer, but I can’t see the value in switching to any of the above. People in Florida are careful about opening their doors so we have no door dings. Florida curbs are lovingly molded from concrete instead of being made from rough-hewn granite as in Maskachusetts. Therefore, we have no wheel rash. Since we don’t garage the car, however, I fear that the sun is taking its toll on the paint and interior and soon we will be getting notes from the G-Wagon-owning neighbors asking if we’re in financial distress. A few photos from the local strip malls just in the last week (an alien might infer from our parking lots that humans come in radically different sizes, which is why some can get around in small toys such as the Lambo while others need massive SUVs and pickup trucks):
One funny thing about our current Odyssey that I would miss: on a two-lane local road, it reads a sign about the Brightline train potentially exceeding 100 mph as a “speed limit is 100 mph” indication.
We are informed that Donald Trump has attacked America’s museums in general and the Smithsonian in particular. “Will Museums Fight Back Against Trump?” (New York Times, August 22, 2025):
The president’s attacks on the Smithsonian Institution and other museums have become an effort to redefine why such places exist.
President Trump has sought to govern with an iron grip the federal bureaucracy, the economy and even the finer details of White House architecture.
He wants to put his stamp on the culture of the nation, too.
The president, once a fixture of tabloids and reality television, is waging a war on the rarefied cultural spaces he says have become too “woke.”
We took our boys (10 and 12) to the de-woked Smithsonian National Museum of American History on October 4, 2025. Just inside the front door, the boys learned that they “belong” in girls’ sports just as soon as they raise their hands and say “we identify as girls”. It’s not a matter up for debate, but simply “fair play” when “transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender female athletes demand equality”. The Smithsonian certainly doesn’t mention that there are any dissenters (“haters”) from this dogma, though, as we would find throughout the museum every sign is translated into Spanish (but not Arabic, Chinese, Somali, Swahili, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, or any of the other languages of migrants who make America great).
There’s a lot of explanation for the womanly skateboarder at right:
Our primary objective was to see the lowrider show (see also Lowriders in Fort Worth for these machines in their native increasingly-Islamic element). Spanish 101: the word for “lowriding” is “El lowriding”.
The de-woked curators remind us that American Hispanics claim victimhood going back at least 75 years:
If I can get our Honda Odyssey’s batteries to stop failing (the most recent 4-year AGM battery survived for about 1.5 years) it would be awesome to find the paint shop that did this one:
The depth of color isn’t achievable with a wrap, I don’t think.
Father of the Year Daniel Tovar made a lowrider for his daughter:
One hundred percent of the people described and depicted in the exhibit as actually building lowriders of significance had traditional male names and appeared to identify as men (moustaches, male attire, etc.):
(the dapper gentlemen is Sonny Madrid, who founded Lowrider magazine in 1977)
The gift shop, on the other hand, explains that it is actually Latinas who are responsible for lowriders:
One of Florida’s great 19th century hotels, the Tampa Bay Hotel (1891; 511 rooms built for $3 million), fell on hard times during the Great Depression and was converted to use by what today is the University of Tampa, a private 11,000-student school. A portion of the structure is preserved as the Henry B. Plant Museum, named for the railroad tycoon who built the hotel.
Instead of elbowing their way off Spirit, the elite guests of the hotel would step out of their private railcars just a few feet from the front door of the hotel. The original front entrance dog sculpture has been preserved and also the museum shows an early word processor:
In the 1890s, Black dining room supervisors and servers faced increasing job competition from European immigrants. Efforts to combat this challenge revealed competing understandings of Black manhood.
It looks as though $1-$2/day was a good wage in 1903:
Because my almost-12-year-old companion is passionate about art museums, our next stop was the main Tampa Museum of Art. He was delighted to find The Bucs at Fifty, a photo exhibit:
He also enjoyed a Man with the Golden Gun-style car/plane. Original from 1974:
The museum displays a 2016 work:
The curators fail to credit James Bond:
I still can’t figure out how it is possible for a tax-exempt nonprofit organization to advertise a policy of race-based discrimination:
In 2022, The Tampa Museum of Art launched an initiative to purchase a work of art by a Black or African American artist in tandem with its annual Juneteenth Cultural Celebration. The Museum selected Ya La’Ford as its 2024 Juneteenth artist.
Roughly half of the money spent by a nonprofit is government money (foregone tax revenue because charitable deductions are tax-deductible). How is it legal for a museum to say “We’re going to buy works of art only from people who are of one specific race that we consider superior”? Here’s the artwork that was purchased under the race-based scheme:
While on the beautiful Riverwalk, a 2.6-mile path, we saw a dolphin in the Hillsborough River. We stopped briefly at Armature Works before heading back towards the airport. On the way we stopped at a 49ers v. Buccaneers game in which fans were encouraged to drive sound levels above 100 dBA SPL (maybe closer to 90 dBA most of the time, still well about the 85 dBA OSHA limit for factory work without hearing protection) and a hearing loss company is one of the in-stadium advertisers:
The best customers for hearing aids are probably those who sit near the pirate ship and are thus subject to perhaps 100 cannon blasts per game.
As we get our houses ready for National Immigrants Day (October 28), from a friend in Maskachusetts:
I just drove on Sandy Pond Rd in Lincoln. A Somali (I assume, since he was black with lighter skin and curly hair) took out a prayer mat, oriented it toward Mecca and was doing a midday prayer on the side of the road (there’s no sidewalk). Right in front of a house belonging to a family with a last name of Goldstein.
(Note the hateful failure to capitalize “Black”, but the friend who used the hateful language is an immigrant and, therefore, it would be wrong for me to criticize him while he is enriching us with his presence.)
In April, we posed–and eventually distilled–a question in response: What if we activated one of our spaces–the parsonage–to provide urgently needed temporary housing to refugees?
We wish to state clearly that using the parsonage for refugee housing is not necessarily what will be proposed at a special congregational meeting on September 29, but the “what if” of this hypothesis (some might even call it a lightning rod) is what we are working with to ground our debate, open our hearts, and stretch our imaginations.
*The recommendations for length of stay per family vary from several months to about a year.
In Massachusetts, appropriate housing is hard to find and expensive. Newly arriving refugees are often put up in a crowded hotel room for up to 90 days while they are connected with essential services and look for other housing. Some families are transferred to shelters.
A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is at the bottom of every page of the church’s web site:
The July post had estimated the cost to the church of helping out migrants at roughly $48,000 per year, mostly in foregone rent. I contacted a friend who is a member of the church to ask whether this expenditure had been approved by the congregation:
That issue was put to rest before the meeting, thank Heaven. … What we voted on is a $7 million improvement of the stone church, which I favored. 95% of the Church agreed. Progress!
So the Righteous voted to spend $7 million on themselves and nothing on the migrants whose cause they champion.
The 31-year-old former mistress of Eric Schmidt has accused the ex-Google CEO of stalking, abuse and “toxic masculinity” — claiming that he subjected her to an “absolute digital surveillance system” as the pair have secretly tussled over cash, a failed AI startup and access to a sprawling Bel Air mansion, The Post has learned.
In early December, Ritter and Schmidt — whose net worth is estimated by Bloomberg at $44.8 billion — struck a “written settlement agreement” that required Schmidt to make “substantial payments” to Ritter but whose details remain under seal, according to a Sept. 8 filing in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
In the since-withdrawn TRO request, Ritter claimed that the tech tycoon days earlier had locked her out of the website of her startup Steel Perlot — an AI-focused venture firm into which Schmidt had plowed $100 million, a source close to the situation told The Post.
The article suggests that “a German Shepherd named Henry” is a disgrace to his breed in terms of providing protection. Despite owning this powerful beast, the plaintiff says that she’s been a victim of sexual assault at the hands of a senior citizen who is 39 years older than herself. Young lithe actresses and directors, such as Gavin Newsom’s current wife, couldn’t escape from elderly obese Harvey Weinstein, but none of them had a German Shepherd to assist them.
Missing from the above-cited NPR piece on the relationship between Jennifer Siebel Newsom and Harvey Weinstein… “Jennifer Siebel Newsom sought Harvey Weinstein’s advice in 2007 sex scandal” (KTLA): “The email was sent in 2007, about two years after the first partner of California claimed Weinstein allegedly raped her.”
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:
