California white savior gets arrested

by philg

A few screen shots from joesanberg.com before it gets taken down…

His X profile consists of just a single quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and shows no white people other than himself:

Here here says that he wants to give money extracted from native-born taxpayers to “low-wage, undocumented workers” (via a state EITC analogous to the federal cash hand-out program). He’s also proud that, if “single motherhood” occurred in the manner convention for white Jews, mom sued dad. I appreciate that every photo of Californians includes at least some Followers of Fauci:

A big donor to the Democrats, he was considering running for President in 2020 (Atlantic):

Wall Street Journal, Sustainable Business Section, 2022 (sponsored by the accounting experts at Deloitte):

Since it is Women’s History Month, one of Sanberg’s tweets regarding this most noble of gender IDs:

More recently… “Joseph Sanberg, Co-Founder of Aspiration Partners, Arrested for Conspiring to Defraud an Investment Fund of at Least $145 Million” (U.S. Department of Justice):

Ibrahim Ameen AlHusseini Pleads Guilty to Scheming with Sanberg

SANTA ANA, California – Joseph Neal Sanberg, 45, of Orange, the co-founder and largest shareholder of the financial and sustainability services company Aspiration Partners, Inc., was arrested today on a federal criminal complaint alleging that he conspired to defraud two investor funds of at least $145 million.

Sanberg’s coconspirator, Ibrahim Ameen AlHusseini, 51, of Venice, pleaded guilty today to an information charging him with wire fraud for falsifying documents and information to assist Sanberg. According to his plea agreement, signed on February 7, 2025, and unsealed today, AlHusseini personally received approximately $12.3 million in payments from the scheme. AlHusseini is scheduled for sentencing on September 29, 2025. … AlHusseini was arrested on a criminal complaint on October 7, 2024, and has been released on bond since November 13, 2024.

I can’t figure out what Mr. Sanberg allegedly did with the $145 million? Spent it on 8 Mar-a-Lago’s (using the New York judiciary’s estimated value of $18 million)? Used it in some business where he was the primary shareholder? I guess it is at least fair to say that Sanberg was telling the truth when he tweeted out “We need Court reform. Now.”

Flash back to 2023, when Mr. Sanberg tweeted “Justice, justice shall you pursue!”

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An old guy is #4 in the Iditarod right now

by philg

The Iditarod leaders should cross the finish line within the next 24 hours. The leader, from Alabama(!), has just 73 miles to go.

As with aerobatics and endurance flying (see Department of Old Guys can Fly: nonstop cross-country at 1,100 lbs gross weight: “EAA keeps saying that their mission is to inspire young people, but if you look at the ages of the airshow performers, the round-the-world and over-the-poles pilots, and achievers such as Ebneter, maybe what EAA is actually doing is inspiring the elderly!”), it seems that the most inspiring story from the Iditarod is likely to be Mitch Seavey’s finish. The current #4 musher’s bio says “At 65 years of age, I’m running the Iditarod because it’s hard.” He won the race, which requires a lot of physical effort by both mushers and dogs, in 2004, 2013, and 2017.

It’s too bad that Donald Trump has gutted NIH funding, at least to the Queers for Palestine League. I would love to see a Columbia University study on the heritability of dog mushing prowess. (Mitch Seavey’s son Dallas Seavey has won the Iditarod six times.)

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Learn to Code

by philg

I don’t know if Joe Biden is dead or alive right now, but I have fond memories of his 2019 career advice to coal miners:

Suppose that a high school student took Joe Biden’s advice in 2019 but skipped the coal mining phase. He/she/ze/they will graduate from college in 3 months with a CS degree. We randomly selected this person so he/she/ze/they will have median skills as an entry-level computer programmer (“coder”).

Let’s hear from an LLM expert to get some insight into what the demand for a median-skilled programmer is likely to be…

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Five-year anniversary of the first U.S. lockdown order

by philg

According to “Statewide COVID‐19 Stay‐at‐Home Orders and Population Mobility in the United States” (2020), today is the five-year anniversary of the first American lockdown order:

In the United States, the first coronavirus‐related activity restrictions were issued on March 12, 2020, when a community within New Rochelle, New York, was declared to be a “containment area.” A traditional quarantine order would require individuals presumed to be exposed to stay at home. This containment order was not intended to limit individual movement. Instead, it mandated the closure of schools and large gathering places within the zone, including religious buildings (Chappell, 2020). Residents were allowed to enter and leave the containment zone, but they were not allowed to gather in large groups within the designated geographic area.

On March 16, 2020, a “shelter‐in‐place” order was issued for six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area (Allday, 2020). Shelter in place was a term many Californians were familiar with due to its use during wildfires and other natural disasters, active shooter drills, and other short‐term emergency situations. In those contexts, “shelter in place” means “stay where you are,” but that was not what the COVID‐19 orders were asking residents to do. The order did not require individuals to stay where they happened to be located when the order was released. Residents were allowed to leave home for essential purposes, including food, medical care, and outdoor exercise, and people working at businesses deemed to be “essential”—such as grocery stores, hospitals, pharmacies, veterinary clinics, utilities, hardware stores, auto repair shops, funeral homes, and warehouses and distribution facilities—were allowed to continue onsite work.

Related:

  • “COVID-19 Lockdowns Unleashed a Wave of Murder” (Reason, December 2024): “In 2020, the average U.S. city experienced a surge in its homicide rate of almost 30%—the fastest spike ever recorded in the country,” write Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris in a research review for the Brookings Institution published this week. “Across the nation, more than 24,000 people were killed compared to around 19,000 the year before.”
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Market is tanking or merely mean-reverting?

by philg

A Ukrainian immigrant friend has been (understandably) expressing rage at Donald Trump for wanting to shut down U.S. support of Ukraine’s military. He also recently texted us that he was enraged with Trump’s tariffs (that never actually happen? I can’t keep track) tanking the stock market. As an index investor who worships at the Church of the Efficient Market Hypothesis I don’t trade and, therefore, don’t check the market.

Not having previously checked, I proposed the following:

Compare to June 1, 2024 so that we filter out some of the noise (back in June the market thought that we’d have continuity with Genocide Joe)

I don’t think we can count the market’s optimistic run-up when it looked like Trump was going to win

Then I looked at a one-year chart:

The Google says that we’re up

adjusted for inflation, perhaps not

5643/5283 [the March 10 price divided by the June 3, 2024 price] compared to around June 1 that’s up 7%

actual inflation (not the government’s fake number) is 4%/year (3% in 9 months)? so we’re up about 4% real in 3/4s of a year, which means the market is on track to deliver a 5% real return (more like 6% if we accept the government 3% annual inflation stat)

that’s not too different from normal (7.5 percent real annual return over the past 20 years using the government’s understated inflation figures, so probably closer to 6 percent if we adjust for inflation by looking at the stuff that an investor might want to buy (houses in decent neighborhoods and upscale vacations, not DVD players at Walmart))

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Five-year anniversary of universities charging full tuition and delivering almost nothing

by philg

Five years ago, here: Coronavirus enables elite universities to pull off the ultimate scam?

First the big research universities figured out that they could charge more than $50,000 per year in tuition for in-person classes taught by graduate students with a tenuous hold on the English language. Now they’ve figured out that they can charge $50,000 per year without having to deliver in-person classes at all!

… A poster cluster in Harvard Yard, afternoon of March 10, 2020:

Speaking of universities, here’s one from the official White House X feed to Columbia:

Note that I don’t believe Columbia will receive less money as a result of this purported “cancelation”. The money will be “unfrozen” soon enough. It will be like the billions of dollars that the U.S. taxpayer has paid to Hamas over the years. We see a headline about “aid” to UNRWA (i.e., a funnel straight to Hamas) being cut off and then the “aid” is quietly restored a few months later after some weak promise is made by UNRWA or affiliates. Nonetheless, I enjoy hearing the former New Yorker saying “Shalom Columbia”!

In case the above gets memory-holed one day by a righteous administration:

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How did our coronapanic investing ideas work out?

by philg

Five years ago… Investing in the time of plague?

Thought experiment: What stocks will go up in response to the coronavirus plague?

One idea: Comcast and similar cable TV stocks. If people are stuck at home they won’t mind paying for premium channels and will be less likely to cut the cord.

Second idea: airlines and hotel stocks. “Buy on bad news” is the theory here.

Some ideas from readers in the comments:

  • Oil ETFs and/or Exxon/Mobil (XOM)
  • Valero (VLO) for diesel fuel
  • telephone stocks (Verizon?)
  • an index fund of Japanese pharma companies
  • carnival cruise stock
  • short Boeing and Airbus (BA, EADSY)

Let’s see if my ideas are reliably terrible. Comcast is about flat today (dramatically lower, if adjusted for Bidenflation) than it was five years ago while the S&P 500 has roughly doubled:

How about Hilton (HLT) as a proxy for the hotel industry? It has outperformed the S&P 500.

For airlines, JETS seems to be the ETF that holds U.S. airline stocks. It hasn’t done great.

Reader ideas? XOM and CCL (Carnival cruises) would balance each other out:

Conclusion: it is difficult to beat the index.

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Justifying our total war against Japan

by philg

It’s the 80th anniversary of a bombing raid on Tokyo in which the American military killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night (Wokipedia). Did the Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii justify our attacks on their civilians?

University of Alaska in Fairbanks runs a beautiful museum and it answers the above question to some extent.

Right now, about one fifth of the core exhibit space at the Museum of the North is devoted to the victimization of 220 Japanese-Alaskans whom President Franklin Roosevelt ordered interned (with Supreme Court approval) and also the evacuation of 800 Native Alaskans from islands thought vulnerable to Japanese attack.

The PhD scholars explain on a sign leading into the exhibit that the Japanese were on track to conquer interior Alaska, western Canada, and Seattle:

If we hadn’t waged total war on this enemy, including killing 100,000 civilians in one night (pre-atomic bombs), folks in Seattle would to this day be forced to live a Japanese lifestyle. Certainly, it wouldn’t have made sense to engage in the settlement negotiations that the Japanese expected after Pearl Harbor.

What else goes on in the museum? First, visitors are reminded of the irrationality of W-2/1099 work in the American Welfare State (admission is $20 for chumps; free for EBT cardholders):

The PhDs in charge of the museum use native languages whenever possible (Troth Yeddha’ is apparently not, as I’d thought, a location of one of Jabba the Hutt’s branch offices) and also note that the noble indigenous themselves don’t want to use these languages anymore (consistent with John McWhorter’s explanation of how humans converge toward a single language in a media- and telecommunications-rich world)

Compare your level of patience and attention to detail to Cynthia Gibson’s, who sewed salmon vertebrae into a dress:

The Into the Wild bus will be on display here soon:

Looking for decorating ideas?

Even without indoor plumbing you can have a beautiful home:

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Progressive town in Maskachusetts admits being 60 years late to the feminist party

by philg

Happy International Women’s Day to those who celebrate.

A January 7, 2025 post from the suburb of Boston where we used to live:

History was made today in Lincoln. Town Clerk Valerie Fox swore in Sergeant Jennifer McNaught as the newest member of the department. Sgt. McNaught becomes the first woman supervisor in the department’s history.

More than 60 years after second wave feminism made it through the United States, the righteous progressive town finally appoints a female to a position of responsibility. Why admit being this late to the feminism party? (Also, if the town has been working for years on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Anti-Racism (“IDEA”, not the discredited “DEI”) why are both of the employees in the photo white? They wanted to hire some non-white people, but couldn’t find anyone qualified?)

Massachusetts progressives love to talk about how stupid, racist, and sexist folks in Alabama are, for example, yet Birmingham, Alabama appointed Annetta Nunn captain in 1995 (CBS) and police chief for the whole city in 2003. If we assume the “captain” job in Alabama is comparable to the “supervisor” job in Maskachusetts, it took the progressives of Lincoln, MA 30 years to catch up to the people whom they enjoy characterizing as primitive and prejudiced.

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Robinson goes to war

by philg

Incredibly, the U.S. military decided that it didn’t need to waste every possible dollar every day. The Army will now do some primary training of helicopter pilots in the Robinson R66 (rebranded the “TH-66 Sage”) at a civilian flight school in Marianna, Florida, a one-hour drive from Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee. An R44 would probably make better economic sense, but the idea of a piston-powered aircraft is apparently too terrifying for America’s bravest heroes.

See “Crew Training International and Helicopter Institute awarded U.S.Army FAA Part 141 Helicopter Flight School Pilot Program” (March 6, 2025)

Related:

the airspace (Marianna at the top center; note the magenta color for the airport, which indicates that there is no control tower):

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