Join the JCC and OUT MetroWest to celebrate the joy of Purim with a Drag Story Hour! Grab a costume and enjoy Purim-themed stories, crafts, and, of course, Hamentaschen! Introduce kids to glamorous, bold, and unabashedly queer role models, while sharing love and acceptance through storytelling.
If we hadn’t moved to Florida, I would be there. I would dress up as Queen Esther every day in exchange for a plate of poppy seed hamantaschen (note that the “queer role models” may not be role models for conventional transliteration because they’ve spelled “Haman” with an “e”) . My motto: Don’t stop eating them until you test positive for opioid abuse! (thus combining the ancient Hebrew tradition with the modern American one)
I returned to the Panama Canal last month after a 20-year absence (my previous trip inspired by reading Path Between the Seas). The Panamanians voted in 2006 to take on $billions in debt to expand the canal (nobody explained to them that proper governance means that $trillions can be borrowed without a vote) and the new locks were finished in 2016. Agua Clara:
The Panamanians like to highlight their environmentalist credentials, noting that using the canal saves our planet by making transportation less energy-intensive (compared to going around Cape Horn). Here are the Italian-made gates (up to 4,200 tons):
The canal, whose operation can yield more than $1 million per ship for the largest container ships, has made Panamanians the world’s only sincere environmentalists. They preserve the rainforest because they believe that cutting down all of the trees will result in reduced rainfall and, therefore, reduced opportunity to operate the canal (each operation of the locks costs fresh water, a limited resource).
I wonder if there is another climate change angle to the Panama Canal. If indeed our beloved Earth is going “full Venus” in 50-100 years due to CO2 we will need geoengineering to reverse the process, perhaps some combination of reducing new CO2 emissions, capturing existing CO2 in the atmosphere, and shading our home from the sun. The climate change alarmists say that the time to act is right now using the money and technology that we have in 2023. The French took this approach in 1881. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the hero of the Suez Canal and the husband of Louise-Hélène Autard de Bragard (43 years his junior), raised money and started digging. They wasted $287 million and 22,000 lives over 8 years before giving up in 1889. The Americans started around 1906 and finished ahead of schedule in 1914. Path Between the Seas attributes most of the Americans’ success to improvements in mining machinery during the intervening 20 years.
Maybe advanced humans will look back from the 2060s and laugh at the puny humans of the 2020s attempting to do geoengineering.
Separately, if we do master geoengineering will we keep cooling the earth until sea level is 10′ below its current level? The most valuable land is in coastal cities. Lowering sea level just a bit would add a tremendous amount of wealth to the world’s richest and most influential people. It would be like Battery Park City in every coastal city all around the world (on the ship that brought us to Panama we met a gal who is fully trained as an attorney, but hasn’t yoked herself to a law firm yet because she is the indirect beneficiary of a 30-year affordable housing contract in which a two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park City with a market value of $5,000/month is leased out for $1,000/month).
Email from the K-8 public school in our former suburb of Boston, featuring 2-acre minimum zoning to ensure that nobody with fewer than 3 million Bidies ($2 million in pre-Biden money) can afford to buy a vacant lot and build a house:
We believe that in order to become and maintain being a district and larger community in which AIDE [antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity] thrives, members must commit to their ongoing growth in learning and awareness … To complete the challenge, each day pick just ONE piece of content. We’ve included three kinds:
We are informed that racism is a public health emergency (example from Minneapolis; and “Declare Racism a Public Health Emergency” (New York Times)). Yet, according to the above chart, the emergency is not so severe as to preclude a “Pause for February Vacation”. It is okay to sit on the beach in Aruba while daily oppression continues.
The white background indicates that white is the default and/or preferred race? One good thing about our former town is that I’m pretty sure almost everyone there is qualified as an expert on the Day 4 subject: “What is Whiteness?” Also note that the next step after identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+ is joining the military (days 18 and 19).
Here are the local victimhood experts:
Here are some photos of Aruba (February 12, 2022) getting ready for the February break arrival of the anti-racists:
One constant feature of health care in Maskachusetts was the provider asking, often as the first question of an encounter, “Do you feel safe at home?” A fit 6’2″ tall 25-year-old who identified as a cisgender heterosexual man would be asked this question just the same as a frail slight person identifying as female.
A memorable example of this was the delay of care being provided to Senior Management after I had taken her to a community hospital in Cambridge, MA at 5 am. Getting to the bottom of the “Do you feel safe at home?” question was more important than asking about the labor pains that had occasioned the hospital visit (the same hospital where she had been receiving prenatal care, so it wasn’t a new-patient situation). In order that she would be free of coercion, the person who got up at 4:30 am to do the hospital drive had to removed into a separate room so that the 9-months-pregnant person could answer this question freely before moving on to whether abortion care (perfectly legal at all stages of pregnancy in Maskachusetts) or delivery was desired.
An example in miscommunication occurred when the question followed me telling the doctor that I had recently returned from a trip to Israel. This was early in the adoption of the “Do you feel safe?” question so I heard it as “Did you feel safe?” and launched in a long explanation of security risks in Israel, the lack of street crime compared to big U.S. cities, etc. The doc then had to explain that she didn’t care about Israel but about whether Senior Management was physically abusing me.
Because I’m in possession of a mostly timed-out body, I’ve had quite a few encounters with physicians here in Florida since August 2021. What did these encounters have in common? Never once was I asked if I felt safe at home. Nor are patients asked to wear masks, even inside the full-service hospitals with operating rooms, etc.
Separately, I’m noticing that a remarkably high percentage of doctors in Florida are private jet charter customers. The specialist who toils for peanuts in MA and pays 5% income tax (9% under the new “millionaires’ tax” if there is a rare good year) will pay 16% estate tax on finally dying. He/she/ze/they can bask in the glory of institutional prestige, e.g., at MGH, even if prestige doesn’t come with a lot of money. The counterpart in FL seems to earn twice as much, pays 0% income and estate tax, and spends the extra on a luxurious lifestyle.
In Atlas Shrugged, the productive and successful Americans retreat to an isolated town in Colorado and stop paying taxes to the massive inefficient bureaucrat U.S. government. Under the pre-Trump tax code, that happened to some extent with American corporations (see this 2015 post (obsolete now due to changes implemented during the Trump dictatorship that forced companies such as Apple to abandon their sham Irish/Dutch tax homes)), but it did not seem to be happening for individuals on a large scale.
I visited Houston, Texas in December 2022, on my way back from Corvette driving school report (Ron Fellows near Las Vegas). A friend invested heavily there in 2009 when everyone else was running away. Specifically, he invested in The Woodlands, a town north of Houston in a Republican-dominated county (Houston is run by Democrats). “The population has tripled since I moved here,” he said. Everything that you see or touch The Woodlands is at most 20 years old and, therefore, in beautiful condition. There is a fake “town center” strip mall with supermarket, restaurants, and stores for the rich: Tesla (showroom only; illegal to sell direct in Texas; #FreeMarketEconomy), Gucci, TUMI, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, etc. The more successful residents of The Woodlands generally have huge houses, e.g., 10,000 square feet or more. One guy built a replica of a White House wing, complete with Oval Office, and lets charities use it for fundraising events. (“For maximum authenticity, they should get a guy from the local memory care unit to sit in the big chair,” was my response to seeing a photo of this.) Houses are cheap by Florida standards, with an older (1988) 10,507 square foot lakefront place on the market now at $3.25 million and a 1997 house available at $4 million (Zestimate: $3.6 million). Here’s a 2012 house offered at $6.5 million:
Maybe this can’t work in other states because it is too difficult and expensive to build infrastructure in most parts of the U.S., but it should be a cautionary tale for city governments. Nobody who was on welfare in Houston moved to The Woodlands, but lots of people who had been paying huge amounts of sales and property taxes moved. So the ratio between the takers and makers went up as The Woodlands grew… “Houston Finance Head Warns of Massive Budget Deficit After Federal COVID-19 Funds Expire” (The Texas, March 31, 2022): “The state’s largest city has been using federal COVID relief dollars to plug budget holes and provide raises, but is lurching towards a fiscal cliff once the federal funds expire.”
A couple of iPhone images taken from a Robinson R66 (no photo window, sadly):
I happened to visit “Market Street” on a rainy day:
There is still a lot to love about Houston per se, but maybe you don’t need to live there. My favorite part of the museum district (note the Tesla 3 from Hertz):
Where better to see the ritual of masks outdoors than in a big city full of Democrats?
Let’s hear it for Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress:
From the fine arts museum, a timely reminder for Ron DeSantis about racism in the classroom:
An image ruined by motion blur in the main subject, worth big $$ and suitable for display because the failed attempt was made by Cartier-Bresson:
Masks of color:
I learned about Gyula Kosice. He built the following installation from 1946-1972:
From James Turrell, inspired by being up in the air:
Some stuff that I desperately want for our house:
The museum is home to a substantial Louise Nevelson (NYT: “a few years [after the birth of a son] Nevelson broke up her marriage. She refused any alimony, however, on the ground that to accept it would be immoral”).
Concerned that you don’t have what it takes to produce a $1 million artwork? The Cy Twombly Gallery might boost your confidence:
Conclusion: If you don’t have to commute into work in downtown Houston, The Woodlands is close enough to access everything great about Houston, but doesn’t suffer from any of the bad stuff.
I’m sick with envy every time I see a Gulfstream on the ramp. Maybe ChatGPT can help.
(Does the above answer make sense? Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Scott are billionaires, but they did not get rich by employing workers or engaging in business. Why are they told to “implement responsible and sustainable business practices” and to support workers?)
How about our corporate overlords?
I would love to see a corporation “engage in … self-reflection”! ChatGPT demands “fair wages”. Suppose that a corporation accepts ChatGPT’s demand.
(ChatGPT implies that employers are paying $8.65/hr, but a quick search reveals that entry level at McDonald’s is $13.75 to $15/hr in Palm Beach County.)
Is there room for improvement among those who walk across the southern border?
In short, “No.”
Is there room for improvement among those who are already U.S. residents?
(Item #3 seems consistent with the others. If migration is good for the U.S., why would we strive to reduce the flow of valuable migrants?)
Combining all of the above… If you identify as white and native-born, I hope that you’re spending today acknowledging your privilege and making sure that you pay sufficient taxes to buy all migrants free access to the healthcare services that you’re unable to use (because out of network).
To prepare for our own adventurous journey to Colombia, a friend and I listened to Walking the Americas, by Levison Wood, a British Army veteran. Mr. Wood starts farther south than we did, but is handicapped by not having any assistance from Royal Caribbean. Without a boat, Mr. Wood will have to push through the notoriously challenging Darien Gap. Today we tend to think that this term refers to a “gap” in the highway that would otherwise connect Alaska to Argentina. One of the locals interviewed in the book says that the name refers to a gap in the mountains that made it easier to travel through from Atlantic to Pacific than through other parts of Panama.
Mr. Wood’s companion is Alberto, a 42-year-old Mexican fashion photographer who often says “chinga”. Alberto was ready for a distraction in 2016 because he’d recently been targeted in Mexican family court by his wife of one year, availing herself of the then-new no-fault divorce law to obtain a free house after a one-year marriage. From “Do changes in divorce legislation have an impact on divorce rates? The case of unilateral divorce in Mexico” (Aguirre 2019; Latin American Economic Review):
In 2008, Mexico City was the first entity to approve unilateral divorce in Mexico. Since then, 17 states out of 31 have also moved to eliminate fault-based divorce. … The results indicate that divorce on no grounds accounts for a 26.4% increase in the total number of divorces in the adopting states during the period 2009–2015. … Unilateral legislation has proved to be an effective tool in modifying family structures in Mexico…
Alberto’s achievement in walking from Merida, Yucatan to Colombia is more impressive than the author’s. Alberto was not writing a book and was not a former paratrooper.
The Darien Gap turns out not to be all that challenging for our heroes. They have enough connections to get the Panamanian authorities to bless the expedition. They hire Emberá and Kuna Indians as porters and guides (I visited these folks about 20 years ago via Robinson R22 helicopter from the local flight school). But the rest of the book features plenty of challenges, e.g., hiking to 12,536′ to the top of Cerro Chirripó, Costa Rica’s highest peak and walking through gang-held areas of San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
The author points out that Central America’s population is 4X what it was a few decades ago and, in his opinion, this is the principal explanation for the region’s poverty.
The migrants whom the walkers encounter are from Africa, Haiti, Nepal, and Pakistan and have typically entered the Americas by flying to Brazil. The Panamanian authorities explain that, after arresting migrants, they will typically assist them in reaching the United States by transporting them to the border with Costa Rica. This gets the migrants out of Panama, which does not want them, and is cheaper than deportation (Panama pays for some bus rides instead of paying for plane tickets back across the Atlantic).
Here are some of the animals that we saw while walking through the Colombian jungle (at the cruise port in Cartagena). Warning: the toucans are friendly, but one of them likes to bite sneakers and it hurts!
The book lends itself well to the audio format and the narrator is convincingly British. I recommend Walking the Americas to anyone planning a journey to or through Central America. Separately, if you want to see a restored Spanish colonial town and a lot of beautiful nature, I recommend the UNESCO World Heritage site of the old city within Panama City and then do your nature excursions in Panama, which is much wealthier and better developed than other nations in the region. They don’t promote tourism as much as the Costa Ricans do because any time they need $1 million they can let a big container ship through the new locks. Cartagena is jammed with tourists, locals trying to sell things to the tourists, car traffic, massive holes in the sidewalks, etc.
Cochrane has shown that the correlation between forced masking and coronaplague is minimal (i.e., general public masking does not reduce the spread of a respiratory virus, just as Science, including the WHO, said for 100 years prior to June 2020). We’ve had a good natural experiment on COVID-19 vaccines in that countries vary dramatically in their vaccination rate. Where is the study that shows, from these data, that population-wide COVID-19 vaccination, as aggressively promoted by the CDC (down to age 6 months!), reduces COVID-tagged death rate?
The New York Times offers a map and table of countries and their “fully vaccinated” rate. We can see that Chile is 93% fully vaccinated and Spain is virtuously at 87%. Compare to just 34% in Ukraine and 30% in Nigeria.
The correct approach to an analysis would almost certainly include adjusting by share of population over whatever we can agree is the COVID-vulnerable age (CDC says 6 months; European public health officials say 50 (age of vaccine eligibility); previous attempts have used 65; median age of a COVID death is about 80). But what if we do a rough cut by looking at the raw (not age-adjusted) COVID-tagged death rates?
Country
Vaccination Rate
Covid-tagged deaths/million
Chile
93%
3,080
Spain
87%
2,301
Switzerland
70%
1,603
Turkey
64%
1,175
Ukraine
34%
2,565
Nigeria
30%
15(!)
Is it obvious from the above that #VaccinesSave?
(We could also look at excess deaths by country during three years of coronapanic. Vaccinated Chile is at 18%; Spain at 11%; packed-with-filthy-unvaccinated-disgusting-people Switzerland at 8% (no data for Turkey, Ukraine, and Nigeria).)
Why does this matter? Let’s look at a post-Cochrane tweet from a person who might be described as a moderate believer in public health interventions. With her MD and MPH, certainly, she cannot just throw in the towel on the idea that humans, at least with sufficient credentials, can be masters of their own destiny. In light of the Cochrane review, she says that we will master our destiny with vaccines and Paxlovid:
HIGH POPULATION IMMUNITY & Omicron being less severe. Cochrane review yesterday showed masks don't work well for population control. Now have to 1) Figure out who needs boosters (suggest older/vulnerable like WHO says) every year 2) Get Paxlovid on formularies for those who need https://t.co/4XCeZWYge8
But if the Followers of Science fooled themselves for 3 years on masks, why can’t the Followers of Science also be wrong about the effectiveness of vaccines and Paxlovid? Is it worth looking at age-adjusted country-to-country comparisons to make sure that we aren’t wasting a lot of time, energy, and money that could be better spent on, e.g., fighting obesity (first step under Philip’s dictatorship: no more Buy 2 Get 3 candy sales at CVS!)?
Fighting COVID with ineffective tools is not cost-free because humans have limited time, energy, and money. Closing schools, for example, will ultimately cost more lives than SARS-CoV-2 infection because people with less education live statistically shorter lives. Dollars printed to pay people to sit at home for 2 years are dollars that can’t be used to pay people to lose weight (imagine what you could do for public health if you gave Americans $600/week on condition that they lose 1 lb. per week! (maybe people would game the system by bulking up in the week prior to the first weigh-in?)).
(Speaking of Paxlovid, my friends in California seem to be Pfizer’s best customers. They said that they would never get COVID because (a) they had 4 or 5 Pfizer shots, (b) they mostly stayed home for 2+ years, and (c) they wore their N95 masks on the rare occasions when they left home. Then they got COVID (once or twice) and, despite being reasonably young (60ish) and not obese or chronically sick, they would guzzle Paxlovid within hours of an at-home test yielding the sacred magenta line. (How did they get it so fast when the rest of us have to wait 2 months to see a primary care doc? Telehealth!))
the protagonist talks about her days as an engineer at IBM. One day she asked her manager why he had a clock counting down. The manager said that it was showing him the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until he could retire. Why did he care? “Because that is the moment when I can start living,” was what the guy said. As a result of this conversation, the Queen of Versailles quit her engineering job and took up fashion modeling in Manhattan. Then she devoted herself to being the wife of a rich guy and mother to seven children.
The funniest line in the movie was Jackie Siegel talking about the setbacks during the Collapse of 2008 forcing the family to travel to Upstate New York via commercial airline. One of the younger kids, accustomed to the Gulfstream life, asked “Mommy, what are all of these people doing on our plane?”
Jackie Siegel is back, finishing Versailles, her huge Orlando house, in front of an TV audience (Queen of Versailles Reigns Again; streaming on HBO). (In the 2012 documentary, I remember she and her husband saying that the inspiration for the house was the Paris casino in Vegas and not Louis XIV’s bungalow in Frogland, but in this new TV series they talk about the French original as the inspiration.)
The saddest event between the two documentaries is that one of the Siegels’ daughters was addicted to Xanax and was entrusted to rehab. She formed an alliance with a fellow patient, ultimately pronounced cured by the psychologists. As soon as they were out of rehab, he introduced her to heroin. She was dead of a methadone overdose at age 18 (New York Post):
Victoria, who was a big part of the documentary, had gone to rehab to deal with a Xanax addiction. It was there she met her 26-year-old boyfriend.
“The day she got out, she tried her first heroin … a month later she was dead,” Jackie said. The boyfriend later died of a drug overdose as well.
(About 20 years ago, a friend paid handsomely for his childhood best friend to go to the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment of alcoholism. At Betty Ford, he met Hollywood heroin addicts and, upon being cured and released, began to party with them. He overdosed and died.)
The HBO show is a mixture of lifestyle and construction challenge, but I think it is worth watching to see what happens when half of the fine craftspeople of Florida come together in one place. I learned about the High Point Market, a furniture trade show that takes up 10 million square feet. Also, that the decorator chose red as a pool table felt, not tournament blue. Sometimes style is more important than function!
Sadly, the house was built right next to a big lake and not too many feet above the lake. It’s not within a FEMA flood zone, but the lake itself and shores are flagged as “Zone AE” with a 1 percent annual flood risk. Hurricane Ian was purportedly a 500-year flood event and Versailles flooded (TMZ).
Fired Googlers: How about a system that returns the FEMA flood zone, not just a map, in response to an address? ChatGPT is useless:
