Happy New Year to those who celebrate and, of course, Happy Last Day of Kwanzaa to everyone.
Today is the day that Ayatollah Mamdani takes over control of New York City. Folks have made dire predictions about what might happen under a Mamdani Caliphate, but I find it tough to believe that he could do a worse job than his predecessors. Here’s a calculation of what’s been happening in NYC public schools, for example:
Source for the above:
THE EXODUS FROM NYC PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Enrollment Collapse:
2019–2020: 1,002,200 students 2025–2026: 844,400 students → A loss of ~158,000 students (-15.7%)
Spending Increased Despite Fewer Students:
2019 DOE Operating Budget: $34.0B → $33,900 per student 2025 DOE Operating…
I share some goals with the new mayor, actually. I’m an enthusiast for free public transit, which is fairly common in Florida (trolleys along tourist routes in Miami Beach, Uber-style Teslas zipping people around Coral Gables). I suppose sufficiently high congestion prices for driving around NYC that there aren’t any traffic jams and the money used to make the buses and subways (1) free, (2) frequent, and (3) comfortable. Mobility that doesn’t cause time-wasting traffic is something that New York is rich enough to afford and 98 percent of the infrastructure is already paid for (subway tracks, roads, buses). As a resident of Palm Beach County, I’m a huge fan of massive tax increases on the NYC rich. Every successful New Yorker who moves to Palm Beach from NY lowers our property tax bill (where “success” = rich enough to buy a $10 million house).
For readers who are celebrating Kwanzaa, a golden retriever busting into the Kwanzaa bush:
As we prepare to celebrate 2026 let’s look back on some losses in 2025.
Brigitte Bardot, an icon of pre-Islamic French feminine beauty, died at 91. Still-funded-with-federal-tax-dollars, but in no way “state-sponsored” NPR:
In her 2003 book, Un Cris dans le Silence, she disparages immigrants, gays, French schools and contemporary art. She called Muslims “invaders” and railed against the killing of animals in the name of religion. She apologized in court in 2004 but also doubled down on what she called the “infiltration” of France by Islamic extremists.
(The percentage of France’s population who follow Islam is approximately double what it was in 2003.)
Here’s my favorite image from this New York Times collection. Just look at the beautiful golden hair (also, the lady in the photo looks okay):
George Foreman, the oldest person to ever win the world heavyweight championship, died at 76. The father of 12 was also a big Donald Trump supporter, as it happens. The eponymous grill was actually developed by Michael Boehm and Bob Johnson. The latest version (Chinese-engineered?) might be an engineering miracle since they say it can be thrown into the dishwasher and also that it is nonstick. I don’t know how that is possible given that dishwasher detergent is abrasive (Google AI: “dishwasher detergents are chemically and physically abrasive, designed with strong alkaline ingredients and sometimes mild scouring agents to break down tough food, fats, and stains, which is great for dishes but can damage delicate items like knife edges, aluminum, and wood handles over time. While gels are generally less harsh, powdered and tablet detergents often contain stronger abrasives, making handwashing best for items you want to keep pristine”). Maybe we can credit Foreman as a miracle worker?
On the opposite side of sentiment regarding Donald Trump, Rob Reiner was murdered by his son, a sad example of heritability of personality. Reiner was addicted to hating Donald Trump and paranoid about what might happen if Trump were to become or continue as President. The son was also an addict and, apparently, paranoid, but with a different addiction and a different target for his paranoia. Big Five personality characteristics, such as conscientiousness, are heritable at about 50 percent. Abnormal personality, such as schizophrenia, is heritable at an even higher rate (maybe 80 percent).
Frank Gehry died at 96, which is how I learned that he was born “Frank Goldberg”. Imagine if his career in architecture were starting today and all of the far-wilder stuff that he would likely do with 3D printing. A photo taken of the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles after picking up a Robinson R44 helicopter:
(Remember that Jews sunk the Titanic, a magnificent ship that Arab-Palestinian engineers created. The perpetrators were Goldberg, Rosenberg, and Iceberg.)
James Watson, dead at 97, was the only famous person who died this year with whom I was personally acquainted. I remember him as being passionate about the potential for the World Wide Web to transform education at a time when hardly anyone in academia was interested. Maybe the hoped-for transformation is finally upon us with AI? (Watson was canceled for revealing his belief that genetics is a key determinant of intelligence and that there isn’t any reason to expect the same median IQ in different races of humans.)
Our HOA has cut fees for 2026. Digging into the budget, it looks like one savings is insurance, which has fallen from $55,000 to $40,000 per year. This covers a substantial clubhouse with gym, a pool, and a playground. Holiday lighting has fallen from $6,000 to $4,000 so maybe the “Big Lighting” cartel has been broken up? Xfinity will get more money, $94,000 instead of $89,300. That covers television only for about $725 per house; residents pay for Internet separately.
Despite the apparent improvement in insurance rates, the big multi-state companies, e.g., State Farm and progressive Progressive, still don’t want to write coverage for our neighborhood (about 2.5 miles inland and, therefore, moderately exposed to hurricanes).
How are things back in Massachusetts? In response to the meme “90% of modern real estate is trying to avoid blacks while not admitting you are trying to avoid blacks”, a friend responded “I have never tried to avoid blacks”. He lives south of Boston in a town that Google AI says is less than 0.5% Black. It is about the same distance from Boston as Brockton: “Brockton became the first majority-Black city in New England in 2020, a major demographic milestone.” (Google AI)
Some parts of our exchange:
(him) Brockton is a sh*thole
(me) So you didn’t avoid Blacks, you just avoided looking at any houses in places where Blacks live. You paid about 3X per square foot to live in [nearly-all-white town], which is 0.5% Black and is inconvenient, rather than in Brockton, which is 50% Black and blessed with many walkable neighborhoods.
It is 0.05% African American, not 0.5%. I am just saying I have never once had the thought enter my mind.
(me) That makes it even worse. Your racism is so deeply embedded that you aren’t even aware of your racism. You need to camp out at the local public library and read every book on anti-racism.
(another friend chimes in) Your decisions prove structural racism because they are proxying racist behavior. It is like claiming that your equestrian community welcomes all races.
(the guy who says he hasn’t tried to avoid Blacks) I have never seen a single black person in my town. Not even working as a landscaper. I guess I have as UPS driver.
(me) I thought you didn’t see color?
(One thing that I do like about our corner of Florida is that it is common to see Black and white people working together and, sometimes, living in close proximity and with both groups paying market rents (in MA Black people inhabit a parallel society and if they live in a white area it is usually as wards of the taxpayer).)
Department of AI job security: AI writes 5X as many lines of code to solve the same problem as a human. In other words, the LLMs are smart enough to write code that only their future selves will have the patience to read. See this comparison by Peter Norvig of Google (you’d think that in an entirely unbiased comparison by a Google employee Gemini would be the clear winner, but Norvig says “The three LLMS [Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT] seemed to be roughly equal in quality.”
Speaking of job security, here is a white man who purports to be an expert on Swahili and Kwanzaology and somehow still has a job:
Happy Kwanzaa to all celebrating and enjoying the festivities. This year, the first principle of Kwanzaa, Umoja, which means unity in Swahili, is especially on my mind. Let’s embrace that value in Virginia, our country, and around the world. pic.twitter.com/7IjPKNhoFT
The Somali immigrants who built Boston (“cannot talk about any achievement that the city of Boston has had in safety, jobs, and economic development, in education, without talking about the Somali community,” said Mayor Michelle Wu) have also been featured on X lately (not in the New York Times or CNN, though?) for harvesting federal taxpayer money via registering fictitious day cares. Example with more than 75 million views:
🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable
Public schools are always hungry for more money, e.g., to spend in administration, pensions, employee health care, etc. (occasionally on classroom instruction as well) What if every public school in the U.S. registered with Minnesota officials as a Somali day care? Just leave off the state from the address and include the ZIP code so that checks get through the mail. Minnesota politicians and state workers never noticed that the day cares they were paying were nonexistent. Why would they notice that a ZIP code to which they were mailing checks (drawn on the US Treasury) wasn’t part of Minnesota? In the unthinkably rare event that a Welfare-Industrial Complex worker comes to inspect there will almost always be children on site.
Bank of America notched a symbolic win Friday when its stock traded higher than $55.08, a level not seen for America’s second biggest bank since before the 2008 financial crisis.
Like other banks that were damaged during the crisis, Bank of America has struggled to get its stock price back to the highs seen when George W. Bush was still president. Citigroup shares also haven’t recovered to their past high of around $530 in 2007.
Bank of America’s previous closing high was $54.90 on Nov. 20, 2006.
Perhaps a cautionary tale for those who are buying into the AI bubble!
Nowhere in the article: any inflation adjustment. It thus becomes a good example of money illusion. The WSJ is supposed to be by and for people who are sophisticated about money. That a stock today trades higher in nominal dollars than it did in 2006 is meaningless given the reduction in value of the dollar. $54.90 in November 2006, adjusted for official CPI, is equivalent to $88.49 today. An investor who bought BofA stock in 2006, in other words, has lost nearly 40 percent of his/her/zir/their money.
(Adding insult to injury, if the stock keeps going up and the investor sells at only a 20 percent loss then the IRS will be there to collect 23.8 percent of an illusory “gain” (an increase in the nominal price) and a state such as California will collect an additional 13.3 percent (9 percent in Maskachusetts).)
Reporter biography: “Alexander Saeedy … is a graduate of Yale University, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in History.”
Also in journalism, the New York Times displays a sampling of what it says are photos from Emmanuel Goldstein’s laptop (“Democrats Release Photos Showing Epstein Ties to Powerful Men”: “The 92 photos, selected by Democrats on the Oversight Committee from a trove of 95,000 images in Mr. Epstein’s email account and on one of his laptops”):
Three-fourths of the sample images include Donald Trump so a reasonable reader would infer that 75 percent of the images released (or maybe 75 percent of the 95,000 total?) included Donald Trump. Buried lower in the article: “The series of photos does include three images of Mr. Trump”. In other words, the representative 4-image sample of the 92 images chosen by the NYT contains 3 out of 3 Trump-related images.
A friend’s daughter is a passionate progressive and, after completing an expensive degree at an elite university, signed up as a public middle school engineering teacher. Things haven’t been going well. “What percentage of her students are easy-to-teach white or Asian native speakers of English?” “Zero,” answered her dad. “They’re all either Black or immigrants. Half of the students speak only Spanish.”
All of the work for the course is done in the classroom/lab and, therefore, no homework is required. At least half of the students did nothing, goofing off in class and turning nothing in. “I can’t grade their work because they didn’t submit any,” says the daughter, ” so at least half of the class should get Fs.” She talked to some of the veteran teachers, however, and they advised her to give everyone in the class at least a C. The paperwork associated with a D or F grade would be onerous.
The father is an Obama-style Democrat (bigger government, Rainbow Flagism, but not necessarily Biden/Harris-style open borders). He volunteered that the core problem with our public schools nationwide is chronic underfunding. He believed that in the good old days of American K-12 the schools had vastly more money per student. He and his daughter both thought that most of the problems would disappear if the class sizes were reduced to half of the current levels (i.e., double the number of teachers).
Urban Institute offers some trends. State and local governments now spend more on “public welfare” than on schools:
Public welfare is also the champion for inflation-adjusted spending growth (“health and hospitals” have also grown and would also have been considered “welfare” in the bad old days):
Inflation-adjusted spending on K-12 has grown by 136 percent compared to the purportedly good old days of school funding in 1977. (Perhaps it doesn’t matter for a growth comparison, but most numbers for “per-pupil spending” understate what society spends on K-12 because they don’t include the capital costs of building or renovating schools.)
Circling back to the grade inflation issue, I wonder if it is time to trot out my oft-expressed opinion that teachers shouldn’t grade their own students. There should be a neutral third party (maybe simply a teacher at another school) who does the grading while the teacher is purely a coach to assist students with doing well when they submit material to the neutral evaluator. (See “Universities and Economic Growth” from 2009, for example.)
Loosely related, a “Failure is not an Option” frame around an EDUKTOR license plate (Illinois), captured in the Juno Beach Pier parking lot:
Happy Kwanzaa to everyone. Our Kwanzaa Bush decorated with an ornament we received as a gift from a neighbor:
The Democrat who runs New Jersey reminds us that this is the time for white men to cosplay as Maulana Karenga (“convicted of felony assault, torture, and false imprisonment of women”).
For Christmas Eve, on which a lot of Legacy Americans celebrate the birth of a baby, the same governor celebrates funding abortion care for babies:
NEW: We are providing over $22 million to boost access to reproductive health care.
While the Trump Administration restricts reproductive rights, @NJGov will support family planning providers, grow our workforce, upgrade facilities, and safeguard essential medications.…
The Roman World into which Jesus was born was a pure market economy. Property was private, taxes were ridiculously low by modern standards (perhaps 1-5% of income), and government-provided welfare was negligible. The New Testament describes a Christian community that voluntarily opted out of the Roman economic and political system:
Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.
There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.
Acts 4:32, 34
We’re told that socialism and communism are enjoying renewed popularity in the U.S. Young progressives love Bernie Sanders and the Ayatollah Mamdani.
It’s perfectly possible to set up a voluntary communist or at least communalist society in the U.S. See, for example, Amana, Iowa: 75 years of communal living, in which people lived without private property embedded within a capitalist society.
Why aren’t at least some young progressives living their dream via voluntary contract?
Loosely related… Jupiter Mayor Jim Kuretski’s house, Christmas 2021:
Earlier this month, picking up a tree from Home Depot (Alton/Palm Beach Gardens) in the Rolls-Royce:
Sadly, the pre-Christmas shopping rush in Palm Beach Gardens has been marred by a recent arrival from Georgia, Antonio Moore. He murdered Rita Loncharich, aged 65, at the Barnes & Noble. He later admitted that he stabbed the victim in the back without any motive and despite not knowing her. Fox:
Despite the tragedy, let me wish a Merry Christmas to all readers, even those who don’t celebrate.
