NCAA is supposed to boycott states that do not practice Rainbow Flagism. “N.C.A.A. Ends Boycott of North Carolina After So-Called Bathroom Bill Is Repealed” (NYT, 2017): The N.C.A.A. on Tuesday “reluctantly” lifted its ban on holding championship events in North Carolina, remov … | Continue reading
There are no greater fools than investors in Silicon Valley startups (underperforming the S&P 500 while consuming massive fees and saddling investors with tremendous risk). Let’s see how well ChatGPT can do the job of a VC. Prompt: In the style of a Silicon Valley venture capi … | Continue reading
With April Fools’ Day coming up, a look at the second half of The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy (2022) by Christopher Leonard… (the first post: A book about the Federal Reserve and inflation) The book covers the pointless nature of the F … | Continue reading
The New York Times informs us that humanity faces an “existential crisis” and/or “existential threat” due to climate change (2014 example regarding a New York politician). We also face an “existential threat” from coronavirus (NYT Editorial Board, May 24, 2020). Finally, there is … | Continue reading
H.J. Res. 7 proposes that coronapanic in the U.S. be officially terminated, despite Joe Biden’s desire to continue the State of Emergency at least through May (at which point it can be extended if a variant of concern is identified!). Who wants to continue cowering? Let’s look a … | Continue reading
Israelis have been fighting each other lately regarding changes to the judicial system. See, for example, “Demonstrations forced Israel’s prime minister to delay a judicial overhaul” (NYT): Much of life in Israel came to a halt yesterday: Hospitals stopped providing nonemergenc … | Continue reading
Here’s a tweet in which the author says we should celebrate people who were born during Women’s History Month (a.k.a. “March”) if they identified as “women”: It's very fitting that Ruth Bader Ginsburg z"l was born in the month of March, #WomensHistoryMonth. #RBG was and rem … | Continue reading
Yesterday was the last day on which a child could receive “medically necessary” gender-affirming care, the end of a one-year bureaucratic process (even in Florida, government does not move at Amazon speed!). From April 2022… “Gender-affirming care, a ‘crucial’ process for thousan … | Continue reading
A friend who has owned a Tesla X and still owns a Tesla S recently added a Lucid Air Touring to his fleet. Here’s what he likes more about the Lucid: substantially quieter at all speeds smoother ride over the potholes of Maskachusetts (“better suspension”); can be put into “sw … | Continue reading
“China says it ‘firmly opposes’ a potential forced sale of TikTok” (CNN): China said it would “firmly oppose” any forced sale of TikTok, in its first direct response to demands by the Biden administration that the app’s Chinese owners sell their share of the company or face a b … | Continue reading
“Ancient Judaism Recognized a Range of Genders. It’s Time We Did, Too.” (New York Times, March 18, 2023): I’m transgender and nonbinary, and as a rabbi I’ve offered bereavement spiritual care for the past 17 years. There are four genders beyond male or female that appear in an … | Continue reading
Continuing to mine The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, an introduction to Ron DeSantis for non-Floridians… One area where Ron is out of step with the American mainstream is in thinking that there should be consequences for government incompetence. … | Continue reading
A timely book… The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy (2022) by Christopher Leonard. Motivation… BREAKING: The Fed introduces new $1 dollar bill pic.twitter.com/CVcmNH59bq— Not Jerome Powell (@alifarhat79) March 19, 2023 First, since this … | Continue reading
While in the Azores earlier this month I met a Dutch couple who work in online marketing. The wife mentioned that she uses ChatGPT to draft a lot of her communications. “English is not my first language,” she explained, “and ChatGPT always uses correct grammar and spelling. So I … | Continue reading
Continuing our discussion of The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, by Ron DeSantis… in the opening post regarding this book, I noted that a Boston progressive had confidently condemned DeSantis for aiding and abetting actual slavery that the Florida s … | Continue reading
Israel has been in the news lately due to a proposal to change the country’s judiciary to be more like what we have here in the U.S. (Wikipedia) This will result in “tyranny” replacing “democracy” (nytimes). (Perhaps Israelis can flee this tyranny and seek asylum in Syria or Leba … | Continue reading
I just RSVP’d for a family wedding. Here’s what I found in the wedding registry: In other words, to mark an event traditionally associated with reproduction guests can give the gift of abortion care (for pregnant people). Since I absolutely have to be there and might have to … | Continue reading
As a companion to my pieces on what public libraries offer in Palm Beach County (in Florida, where books are purportedly banned) and in Maskachusetts, some March 13, 2023 images from a library in Ponta Delgada, Portugal. What’s the neighborhood like? Here’s the building next doo … | Continue reading
A March 12, 2023 trip to the Cambridge, Maskachusetts public library… Let’s stop first in the bathroom, a gender-neutral experience: The kids’ section is heavy on Black-themed books, but all of the children present appeared to identify with non-Black skin colors. About 2 … | Continue reading
I received a mailing from a music organization in Cambridge, Maskachusetts, “A unique program of music written by women and people of color”: I’m very sorry that I can’t attend and see if The Mask is about an N95 mask and his/her/zir/their journey of protection (modern update … | Continue reading
Today is the three-year anniversary of the Boston public schools closing. From boston.gov: Mayor Martin J. Walsh and Boston Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius today announced the district-wide closure of all Boston Public Schools for students, effective on Tuesday, … | Continue reading
Readers: Please help me keep these bank failures straight. “First Republic Stock Plunges After Bank Rescue Plan, Dividend Suspension” (WSJ, today): First Republic Bank shares fell more than 30% Friday after a multibillion-dollar rescue deal orchestrated by the biggest U.S. bank … | Continue reading
I have begun to read The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, despite my general aversion to this genre of literature. I consider reading Ron DeSantis’s book to be a duty both as a blog publisher and as a new Floridian. Progressive academic friends in Ca … | Continue reading
Dedicated to diversity and regulated/supervised by a San Francisco Fed that was dedicated to diversity (see also “San Francisco Fed elevates a gay woman — its vice president — to the top job” (LA Times, 2018)), Silicon Valley Bank is being described as a casualty of its own woken … | Continue reading
Here’s some unusual weather at SFO: KSFO 142256Z 23024G38KT 3SM -RA BR FEW008 BKN029 OVC047 13/12 A2970 RMK AO2 PK WND 20044/2201 SLP058 P0000 T01330117KSFO 142209Z 22030G44KT 2SM -RA BR FEW008 BKN012 OVC017 14/12 A2968 RMK AO2 PK WND 20044/2201 PRESRR P0000 T01440122KSFO 142156 … | Continue reading
It’s college acceptance letter time. If your child doesn’t get in, consider whether he/she/ze/they should have used ChatGPT to do the authoring. Here’s an essay penned by the Nvidia chips: As a 17-year-old Black girl, I have had to navigate a world that is not always kind to tho … | Continue reading
Here are some photos from my recent trip to Cambridge, Newton, and Wayland. The high school where the Tsarnaev brothers took Tolerance and Diversity classes features a “Black Lives Matter” banner in 4X the font size of the sign that describes the building’s secondary purpose (“sc … | Continue reading
I’ve been listening to Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica, in which the 1950s version of the island is described as a paradise to which film stars and billionaires seek to escape. A fabulous oceanfront estate could be purchased and/or built for thousands of Bri … | Continue reading
I’m inaugurating a new category for blog posts today: transferism. The working class has already paid for a portion of all of the luxurious electric cars being driven around Silicon Valley. Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness scheme forces the working class to pay for elite families’ ki … | Continue reading
Various state governors are arguing for a $15 per hour minimum wage. Examples: $7.25 is not a livable wage in 2023. Our minimum wage hasn’t been raised in 14 years, and it’s lower than 30 other states.It is time to finally raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. pic.twitter.com … | Continue reading
Loyal readers may remember a review here of a book by a Los Angeles Times reporter on America’s taxpayer-fueled heroin habit (see Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.). Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty covers the same story from the angle of the … | Continue reading
Folks at Facebook like to lecture others, sometimes via software, regarding gender equity. What happens inside their own company? “Meta has a pay gap problem, with women abroad getting lower pay and smaller bonuses than men” (Business Insider): The company, formerly known as Fa … | Continue reading
How are readers celebrating Women’s History Month? We walked by the Apple Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida and found that they were celebrating “female creators”: In other words, they’re celebrating the women who created the Apple II, the Macintosh, MacOS (and underlying U … | Continue reading
Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was sitting at his desk when his phone rang. It was Ilhan Omar, a Congresswoman from Minnesota. Jonathan had been following her work in Congress and was impressed by her commitment to justice and equality. “Hello, … | Continue reading
The conventional words of a male who hogs an unearned position of power (lockdown governor) that rightfully belongs to a female: Women have rewrote, challenged, changed, and made history — shaping New Jersey and our nation into a more perfect union. This #WomensHistoryMonth, we … | Continue reading
Here’s a pharma company that celebrates Black women: For Black History Month, our Multi-Ethnic Momentum BIG shares Black trailblazers in pharmaceuticals. In 1908, Anna Louise James became the first Black woman graduate of Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. Committed to diversity: h … | Continue reading
Happy Purim to readers who practice Jewcraft. If you’re in Maskachusetts, you might wish to attend the Boston Jewish Community Center’s Purim Drag Story Hour, organized with the PJ Library, a free book-of-the-month-club for children (heavy on stories about women achieving the unt … | Continue reading
Here’s ChatGPT (Feb 22) on the Vanquishing of Corn Pop: What if we need a poem about the second greatest American? Why is Kamala Harris only “a role model for girls everywhere”? What stops an ambitious young person of any of the 74 gender IDs recognized by science from havi … | Continue reading
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 ca … | Continue reading
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 maint … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 pos … | Continue reading
A February 5, 2023 exchange with ChatGPT: What if we change the question slightly? Let’s get away from skin color: 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 Sco … | Continue reading
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. W … | Continue reading
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 experim … | Continue reading
Extremely loyal blog readers may recall that I wrote about The Queen of Versailles in 2013: 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, minu … | Continue reading
Here’s a typical perspective from an American Jewish Democrat: This is a wonderful opportunity to take action to support refugees and asylum seekers. People seeking asylum are being turned away at borders around the world. Take this time to support refugees by fostering a welco … | Continue reading
One reason the New York Times subscription is worth it is for the window into the thought processes of the elites. “Over 75,000 Job Openings in Iowa Alone. Millions of Refugees Seeking Work. Make the Connection.” (NYT, 2/2/2023) is a great example. Excerpts: Across the globe, 3 … | Continue reading