The 14th Amendment theoretically provides for Equal Protection. Thanks to the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, federal government workers who don’t work during a shutdown are paid in full, just like the government workers unfortunate enough to be declared “essential” and forced to work. What’s “equal” about someone who works 40 hours per week (add 15 hours for commuting in DC? Traffic was horrific when we were there the weekend of October 2-5) getting paid the same as someone who works 0 hours per week and who might be playing Xbox or on vacation at Disney World, in Europe, or in Asia?
Alternatively, if government employees who don’t work get paid shouldn’t Equal Protection require ordinary citizens who don’t work to get paid the same amount after any government shutdown?
What makes the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 Constitutional?
Here’s a $20/person museum in Northwest DC that we visited earlier this month (the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the rich heiress/executive who built Mar-a-Lago). Not only do the non-essential federal government workers get paid time off, but they can use that paid time off to go to un-free museums for free (“Federal workers are invited to seek respite and rejuvenation at Hillwood with complimentary admission (with government ID).”). What kind of “respite and rejuvenation” is needed after a person transitions from doing almost nothing in exchange for a paycheck to doing exactly nothing in exchange for the same paycheck?
Two weeks into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has frozen or canceled nearly $28 billion that had been reserved for more than 200 projects primarily located in Democratic-led cities, congressional districts and states, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Each of these infrastructure projects had received federal aid, sometimes after officials spent years pleading in Washington — only to see that money halted as President Trump has looked to punish Democrats over the course of the fiscal stalemate.
The projects include new investments in clean energy, upgrades to the electric grid and fixes to the nation’s transportation infrastructure, primarily in Democratic strongholds, such as New York and California.
The article goes on to describe parts of the U.S. that are much richer than average, e.g., New York City, and Chicago, and where nearly 100 percent of those in power say that they want inequality in the U.S. reduced.
I can’t figure out why these haters of inequality asked for the money to begin with. The only position that would be consistent with their stated principles would be “We’ll pay for what we need ourselves. Don’t even think of giving us federal money until Buffalo, Providence, and Detroit have been lifted up to an equal level of per-capita income.”
A few photos from my August trip to the Mamdani Caliphate (there were about 15 marijuana stores within two blocks of my Lower East Side hotel and the density fell to 0 once one got to Chinatown (Asians don’t want to maximize their health?)):
The last photo in the series is of the Vladeck Houses, a public housing project on prime Lower Manhattan land (note the luxurious amount of land devoted to green space; no non-government development in Manhattan has anything like this). The city could sell this land to a private developer, give each resident enough money to buy a single-family house almost anywhere in the U.S., and might still have enough money to fund all of the fancy infrastructure projects for which they’re trying to feed at the federal trough.
I posted the above idea as a comment on the article and it drew at least 12 angry replies. The righteous agree that the rich hard-working Blue states should keep 100% of their money and stop subsidizing lazy unproductive Red states. Inequality, apparently, isn’t something to fight against when Blue is richer than Red. Here are some of the responses:
These places also contribute far more money to the Federal coffers than they get in return unlike the majority of red states that receive far more in federal aid than they contribute. Maybe it’s time to stop the free loading. If blue states are going to get cheated by the federal government perhaps we should stop funding it. See how the red states feel about it when there are no blue state dollars coming to their aid.
since they pay the vast majority of the taxes, they’ve earned it. Blue states: makers; Red states: takers
There would BE NO federal funding without these states. They supply almost ALL of it, and the red states leech off that. Residents of the states paying in deserve federal funds as much as the freeloaders.
A migrant who enjoys a fully taxpayer-funded lifestyle in NYC is not a “freeloader”, but everyone in a Red state is a “freeloader”.
(Separately, much of the data on maker/taker states is distorted by retirement moves. A person might pay into Social Security and Medicare through age 65 while living in New Jersey, for example, and then collect Social Security and Medicare benefits in Florida or South Carolina after a post-retirement move. This makes it look as though NJ is subsidizing SC/FL even though it is just the younger self of the older beneficiary who is paying (assuming that we accept the accounting fictions of Social Security/Medicare).)
Finally, how’s everyone’s shutdown going? The media is reporting a complete meltdown of Air Traffic Control. However, we did a flight on Sunday to Tampa International and ATC was apparently fully staffed because they cheerfully gave us (optional for them) VFR advisories. The only drama was that 2/3 runways at KTPA were closed for maintenance, leaving only 1L, which requires a 12-step program to reach from the FBOs. The ground controllers would give single-pilot piston aircraft Russian novel-length instructions and then be surprised when 1956 Cessna 172 flying club pilot couldn’t follow them correctly. For someone leaving Sheltair, the directive from ground control might be “Romeo 2 to right turn on Sierra to left on Sierra 2 across 28 to November 3 to left turn on November to hold short 1 Right then right turn Lima then left Juliet then left Victor then right Victor 1 then left Whiskey to 1 Left” (the “hold short 1L” is implicit).
(On arrival, the ground controller said “You’re going to Signature, right”, referring to the Gulfstream-fueling operation substantially owned by Climate Change Alarmist Bill Gates. I responded “Are you kidding? I can’t afford Signature.” We actually did go to Signature TPA once (see Merry Christmas to the Sea Turtles).)
How did your blog host do on the 12-step program? I didn’t even try it! The magic words: “Request progressive.” (progressivism is always great, as I’m sure everyone will agree)
Immigration Logic 101 requires us to believe that low-skill immigrants expand the U.S. economy (aggregate GDP growth) and make everyone in the U.S. richer (per-capita GDP growth).
We’re informed that the U.S. economy is growing or, at least, not shrinking.
An analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the foreign-born population declined by nearly 1.5 million. … experts predict looming negative economic and demographic consequences for the United States if the trend persists. Immigrants are a critical work force in many sectors, and the country’s reliance on them is growing as more baby boomers retire.
Covering a somewhat longer time period and announced with a bit more color, DHS says that 2 million migrants are no longer among us:
a less colorful and more recent statistic from DHS:
Promises Made, Promises Kept!
Under the leadership of @POTUS Trump and @Sec_Noem, the foreign-born population in the United States has decreased by 2.2 MILLION this year! pic.twitter.com/hfTHNeCQbM
Today is the end of security support for Windows 10, thus making it impractical to run a Windows 10 machine connected to the Internet (Microsoft does have a paid Extended Security Updates program, in fairness, for one more year). As noted in $2449 of e-waste thanks to Microsoft (and best way for kids to organize and sort photos?), a lot of people with perfectly decently machines are being forced to upgrade. Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation is sitting on about $80 billion in assets, i.e., roughly $1500 for every American who identifies as Black (including Zohran Mamdani).
How about a law to confiscate the assets of the Gates Foundation, which have thus far escaped any federal taxation and which are headed out of the country (see “Bill Gates to Direct Majority of $200 Billion Pledge Toward Africa’s Future”; the $200 billion maybe includes some money yet to be donated?), and give them to the people who built this nation, i.e., Black Americans (see 1609 Project), so that they can replace their perfectly functional Windows 10 machines with Windows 11 machines that will perform the same tasks using the same applications at very nearly the same speeds?
Separately, how are we doing with Where are the 16 TB M.2 SSDs? (July 2025)? The only thing worse than $200 billion flying out of the U.S. is having to get creative about moving stuff off the C: drive.
Here’s the guy who won’t be paying even $1 in tax on those $200 billion in profits saying that other rich people should pay more in tax:
Here’s Bill Gates saying that there is too much wealth inequality in the U.S. (CNBC 2019):
He wants higher capital gains tax rates for the capital gains tax that he doesn’t pay (since he donates the appreciated assets to his foundation, which then ships the money to Africa). He doesn’t want to give his $200 billion to low-income Americans, which would immediately reduce wealth inequality in the U.S., but will instead give $200 billion to people in Africa.
Queers for Palestine makes more sense to me than what Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are doing!
Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day to those who celebrate. In the spirit of the holiday, here are some photos from the Abbe Museum, which is devoted to telling the story of the Wabanaki to anyone willing to pay $18:
Note that a person who is able-bodied and able-minded but who chooses to refrain from work gets in free via his/her/zir/their SNAP/EBT card. The person with a developmental or intellectual disability, however, is charged $16. The museum admits in various places that it occupies stolen land and, to their credit, admits the rightful owners for free (“Tribal ID” is required so Elizabeth Warren would be excluded).
Masks were encouraged on June 10, 2025. Note the fine Maine summer weather (50 degrees and rain/mist all day):
Inside the museum, roughly half of the visitors took the mask encouragement to heart (“to lungs”?), though I also observed a couple of ceremonial chin diapers. In a victory for common sense, a family visiting had 100 percent mask coverage rather than one member wearing a mask and then becoming infected by the non-masked members after returning home.
Two out of three masked in the photo below:
Here’s a Land Acknowledgement, which also informs via Science that the “Native communities [] have lived here for thousands of generations” (even with a Palestinian rate of reproduction, it is tough to understand how “thousands of generations” can fit into the 13,000 years that archaeologists say is how long people have lived in Maine):
And a statement about genocide and decolonization:
Nobody seems to like the idea of giving the land back to its rightful owners and paying rent.
Separately, I’m amazed that Donald Trump was able to address the Knesset today. I get jet lag just thinking about a trip to Israel. #NotMyPresident is 79 years old. How does he have the energy?
In case the author is arrested and imprisoned and all of her content memory-holed, a screen shot:
We have a bunch of 15-year-old Sonos gear that doesn’t comply with the new Sonos S2 religion. I thought it might be nice to upgrade the whole house, especially because the 10- and 12-year-olds don’t have phones with which to control music in their respective bedrooms. They could use a Sonos Era 100 or Era 300, for example, with voice control. (Senior Management quickly realized that there was a flaw in this plan, which is that Sonos doesn’t have parental controls. The 10-year-old could select gangster rap, for example, from the typical streaming service or SiriusXM.)
I picked up a $479 Era 300 as an experiment and used a Sound Level app on my phone to try to make sure that the volume level was equalized between the Era 300 and the legacy gear.
The Era 300 is Dolby Atmos-compatible, which sounds great until you realize that the popular music streaming services don’t generally provide Atmos content (it’s more for video?). A listening panel of two adults and two kids was assembled and concluded that a single Era 300 in my home office doesn’t sound obviously better, though maybe brighter, than an old Sonos Gen 1 Play:5, which has an eBay value of about $100. For listening from a desk chair, both of the magic Sonos devices were easily defeated by a pair of 13-year-old desktop Audioengine P4 speakers ($250) driven by a 10.5-year-old Windows 10 PC via optical S/PDIF through a NuForce Dia desktop DAC/amp with a mighty 18 watts of power (maybe the heir to the discontinued NuForce would be the USB-driven 50-watt AudioEngine N22?).
Admittedly, the near-field monitor comparison isn’t fair since the Sonos devices are intended to fill a room with sound. That said, I wonder if Sonos’s best idea wasn’t Sonos’s first idea: a networked DAC/amp that drives conventional bookshelf speakers. If one is content with the deprecated S1 gear, these amps, e.g., ZP120, are available on eBay for about $100 vs. $800 for the functionally similar latest version. The Era 300 weighs 10 lbs. and it’s what the typical person would stop at in one room. The old Sonos ZP120 is 5 lbs. A cheap Sony bookshelf speaker weighs 10 lbs. So it’s 10 lbs. of gear vs. 25 lbs (10+10+5).
(The latest amp is 125 watts/channel vs 50 or 55 watts on the older units, a difference of just over 3 dB in SPL. You could either content yourself with the roughly 100 dB max SPL that you’d get with an low-sensitivity speaker (85-87 dB) and 50 watts or get some high-sensitivity speakers (Klipsch, JBL, Triangle; I got some Klipsch outdoor speakers rated at 95 dB for our modest back yard).)
I also tested the Era 300 against a 20-year-old Sonos ZP100 amp driving 30-year Radio Shack Optimus LX5 bookshelf speakers, which have ribbon tweeters (!) and are available on eBay for $50-80/pair (originally $200-300/pair). The Radio Shack speakers, each of which weighs just 7.5 lbs., were separated by about 6′, which no doubt helped. The $150ish combination of decades-old used gear absolutely crushed the fresh-from-the-box $479 Era 300.
If you had the space, you could buy a used ZP100 or ZP120 and a couple of brand new tower speakers (about 100 lbs. total) for less than the cost of two of these wimpy Era 300s.
Maybe it’s worth paying $5,000+ to upgrade a house from Sonos S1 to Sonos S2 because the voice control, which runs locally on the device, is so convenient? Sadly, no. It failed at simple requests, such as “Hey Sonos, play Mozart string quartet” or “play Beethoven Pastoral piano sonata”. It works for volume up/down, but so do the physical buttons on legacy Sonos S1 gear.
Maybe it’s worth paying $5,000+ to upgrade a house from Sonos S1 to Sonos S2 because the S2 app is so much better than the S1 app? In my limited trial I didn’t find anything to love about the S2 app. One purported selling feature for the latest Sonos devices is that they can function as Bluetooth or AirPlay speakers. But if your primary use case is Bluetooth or Airplay there are much cheaper options than Sonos.
For those who are passionate about social justice, the big advantage of the latest Sonos gear is that one can listen while being 2SLGBTQQIA+ (photo from the Sonos home page):
One can also listen and set up while being Black:
I’ll try to end on an uncharacteristically kind note. I’ve probably purchased about 20 Sonos devices over the past 20 years and I think only one has died. On the third hand, this solid reliability record makes the latest $700 Sonos more vulnerable to competition from a $100 previous generation device sourced via eBay.
Pope Leo XIV weighed in on U.S. politics, saying that Catholic politicians must be judged on the full range of their policy positions and suggesting that the country’s treatment of immigrants is “inhuman.”
“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” Pope Leo said. “And someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Immigrants suffer “inhuman treatment” in the United States, according to this expert. Also, millions of humans voluntarily show up every year seeking this inhuman treatment. Center for Immigration Studies:
The government’s January 2025 Current Population Survey (CPS) shows the foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal together) hit 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025 — both new record highs.
Fans of logical conundrums may also appreciate this communication from someone on a selfie yacht who communicated that the Israeli Navy disabled his communications:
You're using the communications systems that were "disabled" to communicate to us regarding the disabling of your communications systems?
Finally, nobody can accused JetBlue of treating immigrants inhumanely. From a recent flight, in which they invite customers to watch movies specifically related to Hispanic Heritage Month:
Progressive friends who never previously mentioned María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician, now celebrate her winning a Nobel Peace Prize. I wonder how carefully they’ve researched this lady. First, let’s have a moment of silence for Hugo Chavez, whose premature death robbed him of the Nobel Peace Prize that was his due. Perhaps we can reflect on the words of Noam Chomsky when he met this lion of democracy and peace:”I write about peace and criticize the barriers to peace; that’s easy. What’s harder is to create a better world… and what’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created.”
(Collectively, of course, the Venezuelans created such a great world in Venezuela that the Biden-Harris administration decided that 100 percent of Venezuelans were eligible to live in the United States, thus enabling them to replicate their success on a larger scale.)
Let’s see how truly peaceful the heiress to Barack Obama’s Mantle of Peace truly is. An unbiased “news” article from America’s journalists at The Week:
… many have started to point out that the 58-year-old is a strong ally of Israel and openly backs the country’s decision to bomb the largely unarmed civilians of the Gaza Strip. While there is no known evidence to argue that she supported the one-sided attack on the Palestinian civilians, Machado is undoubtedly an ally of Benjamin Netanyahu. In the past, the centrist-right leader had even declared that if she gains power, she will restore diplomatic relations with Israel.
It’s a fact that Israel launched a “one-sided attack on the Palestinian civilians” and this fake Peace laureate somehow supports the attackers rather than the unarmed and Peaceful Gazans.
(The Week’s article is a little confusing, actually. The “civilians” of Gaza are “largely unarmed”. Does that mean that some civilians in Gaza are armed with rockets, machine guns, etc., but are still considered “civilians” because they don’t also have tanks?)
from the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), “a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group”: “an anti-Muslim bigot and supporter of European fascism would have no place being mentioned alongside the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other worthy winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.”
We strongly condemn the @NobelPrize committee's unconscionable decision to award this year's peace prize to @MariaCorinaYA. Ms. Machado is a vocal supporter of Israel's racist Likud Party and earlier this year she delivered remarks at a conference of European fascists, including… https://t.co/pAod3aMIiT
Here’s a recent email from the City of Cambridge, a taxpayer-funded enterprise that in theory is bound by the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause:
Everyone is encouraged to join the celebration by supporting Cambridge women-owned businesses and other entrepreneurs during the month of October and beyond. To find women-owned businesses in your neighborhood, visit the online Cambridge Business Diversity Directory.
The full event page links to this directory, which says “The Directory aims to elevate businesses owned by women, people of color, veterans, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and individuals of Portuguese descent.” The event page also notes “These events recognize, support, and are inclusive for all who self-identify as women or with womanhood, including transgender, gender fluid, and non-binary persons.”
I can’t figure out how any of this is legal. What in the Constitution allows a city to favor citizens (and migrants!) of one gender ID out of the 74 recognized by Science? And what in the Constitution allows a city to prepare a business directory that excludes most companies owned by white males unless they swear that they’re 2SLGBTQQIA+?
Readers: What are you doing this month to increase your purchases from companies that are purportedly owned by “women” (however the term may be defined) and reduce your purchases whose owners have other gender IDs?
