Here are some thoughts after flying a factory-new $700,000 Robinson R44 Raven II from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Our machine is the gold one in the foreground on the ramp at KTOA: (One of the teachers in the safety course, regarding a photo of the R22, R44, and R66 lined … | Continue reading
As we remember Pearl Harbor today, I will share some photos from a recent visit to the National WASP WWII Museum in Sweetwater, Texas. I learned that just over 1,800 women who’d already earned at least Private certificates were invited to train as Women Airforce Service Pilots (c … | Continue reading
“Fans pause action for Friday prayers during first World Cup in a Muslim country” (Reuters): As noon approached, muezzins across Qatar called Muslim soccer players, fans and officials to the first Friday prayers of the first World Cup to take place in a Muslim country. How’s … | Continue reading
I arrived in Los Angeles for the Robinson Helicopter Company’s safety course on November 13. The engineer who founded the company, Frank Robinson, died the day before at age 92 (AVweb). Frank democratized helicopter flying with his reasonably priced machines that were simple to o … | Continue reading
I am headed to Las Vegas today. Would anyone like to meet there or in Pahrump/Death Valley over the next 7 days? No plans currently other than meeting Hunter Biden at Sheri’s Ranch. The couple next to me on this luxurious private United jet has voluntarily elected to come from S … | Continue reading
Kanye West said that Jews controlled the media and, to show how wrong he was, Jews got him removed from all media. He’s back on Twitter, though, thanks to the non-Jewish Elon Musk. If Congress and Joe Biden get organized with a reparations system for Black Americans (see below), … | Continue reading
I was chatting with a Dutch friend on WhatsApp on Thanksgiving Day, reminding him that we were celebrating our theft of an entire continent from the benevolent peace-loving Earth-preserving Native Americans. I shared a photo from the morning golden retriever walk: For his part … | Continue reading
The U.S. has been the world leader in enabling a plaintiff to go to family court and obtain half (or more) of a defendant’s future earnings (see Real World Divorce and a recent enhancement for alimony and child support plaintiffs in Maskachusetts). This week, however, we’ve lear … | Continue reading
Letters sent to the judge (public because they were officially filed in the case) reveal a more positive side of Elizabeth Holmes, now sentenced to serve 11 years in Federal prison (but maybe Joe Biden will pardon her?). But the letters also reveal a lot about their authors and s … | Continue reading
Have folks tried to follow and understand the story about Twitter’s pre-election-2020 suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and other material that politicians asked them to deep-six? 1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022 I think there i … | Continue reading
“Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find” (NYT, today): Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3, … | Continue reading
I can no longer tolerate the environment of tolerance for a wide range of speech that Elon Musk has established on Twitter. It is time to leave for Mastodon. Who’s with me? It looks as though there is already a “Philip” using the service. So my username will be @PhilipTheSecond@ … | Continue reading
A story to keep in mind as we enter the season of outrageous consumerism (i.e., Christmas)… I visited a friend who lives in a 10,000-square-foot beach house here in Florida. The core of the two-story house is open, which makes the ceiling in the living room about 25′ high. He sa … | Continue reading
Mindy the Crippler’s primary leash, purchased in March 2021 from chewy.com: The upper snap, useful for parking a dog outside of a shop, has failed. The same product is still available on chewy.com: That’s a 33 percent price increase in what the human and AI minds at Chewy.c … | Continue reading
It’s December and therefore time to think about Christmas gifts. My vote for best all-around gift, suitable for friends and family of all ages… Joey: The Story of Joe Biden, by Dr. Jill Biden (who better to tell the story than a physician who wasn’t around at the time?). The V … | Continue reading
FastCompany says that Apple and Google will kill Twitter by removing the app from their respective monopoly stores if they see anything on Twitter that they don’t like. Twitter, obviously, will remove anything and anyone that the company deems objectionable. Historically this wa … | Continue reading
All of the U.S. media that previously celebrated lockdowns, school closures, forced masking, and forced vaccination are now highlighting the purported horrors of life in Zero COVID China. The apparent 180-degree change is justified by the idea that SARS-CoV-2 today is far less da … | Continue reading
Loyal readers will remember that I’ve long been an advocate of alcohol prohibition: Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.? (2016): “the modern police state is much more sophisticated. Americans are packed much more tightly together and subject to more surveillance. Getting truckl … | Continue reading
From a bookstore in Kensington: A Guardian review says it is all about the death panels: Side Effects forces us to face up to – rather than ignore or deny – the realities of balancing the vast sums that can be spent on a single, seriously ill patient against the “distressing … | Continue reading
A Facebook friend posted “The Israel We Knew Is Gone” (Thomas Friedman, NYT, Nov 4, 2022): Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose … Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman.“Impossible … | Continue reading
Friends in the D.C. area have been texting me tonight regarding a Mooney that landed in some powerlines near KGAI. From CBS: A small plane crashed into power lines in Maryland, leaving two people dangling about 100 feet in the air, officials said. The crash knocked out power to … | Continue reading
Joe Biden spent Thanksgiving connecting with the American working class and hearing about their struggles in an economy ravaged by inflation. “Biden, family hit Nantucket stores for some holiday shopping” (AP): Biden, his wife, Jill, and daughter Ashley went from store to store … | Continue reading
It has been a month since Elon Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter. Changes are happening at a fast pace, potentially proving SR-71 pilot Paul Crickmore’s point “You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3.” According to President Biden, this is a platform for lie … | Continue reading
“Trump hosted Holocaust denier at Mar-a-Lago estate during visit with Kanye West, a week after announcing 2024 run” (CNN, today): Former President Donald Trump hosted White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago estate this week, d … | Continue reading
I was chatting with a guy who works at a Los Angeles-based manufacturer about the challenge of building back up to full production. “One issue is that if you got COVID at any time during the past two and a half years,” he said, “California assumes that you got it at work. Then if … | Continue reading
Continuing with our Thanksgiving theme, we can give thanks to the most generous members of our society. The most praiseworthy generosity is, of course, giving away money that other people earned. If we accept that stealing a neighbor’s car and donating it to charity makes me a mo … | Continue reading
Back in the 20th century, a Ph.D. physicist in our lab at MIT introduced all of us to his favorite musical artists. Ice Cube was high on the list, especially for Death Certificate. We can give thanks today for Ice Cube’s thoughtful analysis of the Covid vaccine Science. From the … | Continue reading
Poor countries are the victims of rich countries, according to the Newspaper of the Righteous, and should get paid for their victimization. “Calls for Climate Reparations Reach Boiling Point in Glasgow Talks” (NYT, November 11): For decades, vulnerable countries and activist gro … | Continue reading
Zillow managed to lose nearly $1 billion buying and flipping houses during the most dramatic real estate inflation in the history of the United States. They could have bought houses at random and made money, at least in nominal dollars, yet they managed to lose. MIT alum and maj … | Continue reading
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Except for Canadians, who celebrated on October 10. Speaking of Canadians, what’s the plan for David DePape, the undocumented immigrant who attacked Paul Pelosi? Will he be deported to Canada after completing a prison sentence? From https://www.speak … | Continue reading
In a document written, I think, well before the Elon Musk takeover, Twitter wanted to hit the following quotas: (Grammar police: Not “WHOM you work with?”) They already had 46 percent “women”. So they just needed to fire men and non-binary workers in order to achieve the 2 … | Continue reading
Nephrology is all about vascular access. How do you get a device that can draw out enough blood flow for the dialysis machine? A patient who has a temporary need for dialysis, e.g., from septic shock leading to poor kidney perfusion, will get a “VasCath”, a large bore central ven … | Continue reading
Picking up with our medical school diary, authored by our anonymous mole inside the system… It’s the fall of 2019. I meet at 9:00 am in the hospital dialysis unit with nurse practitioner (NP) Nora. She’s 34 and has worked at the nephrology practice for four years, progressively … | Continue reading
“The pilots flying passengers across US state lines for abortions” (Guardian, October 30): All Steven knew was what time and where. A part-time pilot from the Chicago area, he was picking up a total stranger in his single-engine plane, a passenger who needed to fly more than a t … | Continue reading
Due to the death of democracy and the success of fascism, the Tyrant of Tallahassee continues to govern Florida. What if Ron DeSantis wants to be El Presidente? I’m not sure that he can do it unless he changes some of his harsh ways. The majority of Americans are indifferent to w … | Continue reading
A year ago: What edge does Rivian have in the truck or EV market? The company had a market cap of $140 billion. How has the stock done over the past 12 months, relative to the S&P 500? | Continue reading
Everyone I know who tried the first robot vacuum cleaners eventually gave up. They held so little debris that it was just as much work to empty them as it would have been to vacuum the room with an $80 Hoover. Walls got banged up from the robot’s clumsy attempts to map rooms and … | Continue reading
Friends who bought private jets and luxury waterfront property with their crypto profits were discussing the FTX meltdown and Sam Bankman-Fried‘s return to financial Earth. One cited the Sequoia Capital investment memo regarding the vegan MIT graduate founder: The FTX competiti … | Continue reading
A friend is a mid-level manager at one of the FAANG companies that enforces religious orthodoxy here in the U.S., e.g., by deplatforming those who fail to respect the rainbow flag. She expressed dismay that her division was being trimmed by 20 percent in order to shore up profits … | Continue reading
Americans generally affirmed the idea that the country will be better with bigger government and higher taxes. Whether this is true or false, Florida’s prosperity primarily depends on the differential between Florida and other states, not the absolute quality of life in Florida. … | Continue reading
On our way back from Paris, we checked in at JFK and the TWA Hotel to see how COVID-19 was doing in terms of living in the heads of New Yorkers. I was quickly rewarded with the trifecta: outdoors, bearded, masked. The Lockheed-turned bar is a lot of fun. Note the official enco … | Continue reading
A leader introduces bold Bigger Government policies. The economy deteriorates. Violent crime rates rise. Inflation rages. Even for those with money, there are shortages. Voters express their undiminished love for the leader under whom they’ve become poorer affirmed his leadership … | Continue reading
In observance of Veterans Day, let’s look at the territory that the Greatest Generation fought for in the 1940s… In the old days there was a tradeoff between being an independent tourist and joining an organized tour. As an independent tourist perhaps you wouldn’t see as many th … | Continue reading
I’m leaving this here as a reminder to my future self. One month before any trip to the Louvre: join Amis du Louvre (Adhérent) to get a membership for however many adults are in your household (kids are free). The cards will be mailed out and then you can skip the lines at the P … | Continue reading
People in Maskachusetts say that they’re “progressive”. Very few earn more than $1 million per year. Why, then, did more than 1.1 million people vote “no” on a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to ding the rich (more than $1 million/year in income) at a 9% rate … | Continue reading
There have been plenty of “lesbian” state governors in the past, apparently, but this is the first time a “lesbian woman” has prevailed in a race: (NYT): From the West Coast (Advocate): Readers: What else have you found as historic firsts? In other post-election analysis n … | Continue reading
In Democrats love elderly white guys, Florida edition (August 24), I predicted a 56:44 victory for Ron DeSantis in yesterday’s election. Ray, in the comments, predicted a 6 percent margin for DeSantis. How did we do? The voters, including all of the new ones driven into Florida … | Continue reading
From an immigrant friend on the East Coast: I drove to my [athletic] club today and listened to NPR to get my pulse up.Started counting how many times they said “democracy is on the ballot”, “election deniers”, “threat to democracy” and so on47 times in 50 minutes What was the … | Continue reading