Flying First Class

We flew first class on American to Dallas. The only time thst I flown first class before was in the 1990s when NRA needed me at the last minute to testify at a Michigan legislative hearing. I think there were no mooing class seats available at short notice. My wife was skeptical of spending a few hundred dollars extra but so much leg room and elbow room! Being literally the first row on and off was also very luxurious. While waiting to take off, the flight attendants got us something to drink. 

Clifford Simak Mastodonia

The Beatles' Taxman was a response to the their encounter with British tax law once they started making real money. 

Mastodonia is a time travel story where an important subplot is that the money they Stef going to make from time travel will be exempt from the IRS because they will set up operations in 150,000 BC North America where the U.S. lacks jurisdiction. Did Simak suddenly start making as the saying goes, "real money"?

It is, even ignoring the cynical question about tax avoidance, an intriguing story of an archeologist who goes looking for a crashed spacecraft and runs into an ancient stranded astronaut who is immortal and can construct "time roads" into Earth's past. Pleistocene, Miocene, Jurassic.

Subplot involve giving poor ghetto dwellers a frontier with no resource limits, safaris to hunt dinosaurs, Hollywood goes to make movies, religious fanatics attempting to get a monopoly on travels to Crucifixion time. Lots of interesting ideas and a love story.

Legal Scholars Conference at GPRC

I had been quite worried about how my speaking would go at this.  I am told it came across well. I do not know if this would work for an hour lecture in a classroom.  I was pretty tired after 15 minutes. 

Legal Immigration to America

A recurring complaint of the left is that legal immigration is,so hard and expensive that there is no practical way to legally come here. This has seemed like crap to me, because the Kennedy-Mazzoli Immigration Act of 1965 gave preference to Western Hemisphere immigrants.  If you are legal immigrant, share your experience. 

An Important Effort by Trump Administration to Expand Recycling

 4/15/26 AP:

The Environmental Protection Agency is reconsidering whether facilities that recycle plastic chemically should be held to the same strict air pollution standards as incinerators.

The possible change is alarming environmental advocates who say it would lead to more dangerous pollution spewing into communities, with fewer or no checks at the federal level. The plastics industry disputes that, saying it would clear up confusion while still controlling emissions.

The world is pumping millions of tons of plastic pollution into the environment every year. While dozens of countries and many environmental groups have urged caps on production, industry and several big oil-producing countries have resisted, arguing instead for improvements in reuse and recycling.

Chemical recycling uses heat or chemicals to break down plastics. The main method, a process known as pyrolysis, has long been regulated as incineration by the Clean Air Act. The EPA limits emissions from incinerators of nine air pollutants, including toxic particulates, heavy metals and dioxins.

The agency says a potential new rule could instead recognize pyrolysis as manufacturing.

The American Chemistry Council, an industry group, has long argued for such a change.

How dare you solve a landfill and ocean pollution problem! 

MSM Does Journalism

 9/15/26 Newsweek:

Images claiming to show President Donald Trump kissing his executive assistant, Natalie Harp, on a golf course have circulated widely on social media, prompting questions about whether they are genuine....

No established news organization, official White House photographer or photo agency has been identified as the source of either image. Searches of White House material and photographs published by AP, Reuters and Getty Images did not locate a corresponding image from the purported encounter.

The two circulating pictures appear to be versions of the same scene rather than independent photographs corroborating one another. One is clearer, while the other is blurred and contains fewer details that can be examined.

The higher-resolution version contains several visual irregularities associated with AI-generated imagery. Harp’s visible hand appears to have six fingers, while parts of the golf equipment and background lack consistent shapes and detail. The lower-resolution image is too degraded for some of those anomalies to be seen clearly, but blurring an image does not establish that the underlying scene is authentic.

Newsweek also submitted both versions to Grok, the AI assistant developed by xAI. Its assessment was consistent with the anomalies outlined above. Grok said no single irregularity proved fabrication but concluded that the combined evidence was characteristic of an AI-generated image that had subsequently been blurred or compressed.

Newsweek further asked ChatGPT to assess the files. It said the irregularities described above were consistent with AI generation or substantial digital manipulation and found no useful camera, date, location or editing metadata embedded in either image. ChatGPT cautioned that metadata is often removed during online sharing and therefore cannot settle the question alone, but assessed fabrication as the more likely explanation.

OpenAI’s verification tool found no SynthID watermark or trusted C2PA record linking the image to OpenAI products, but cautioned that this did not rule out its creation with another AI system....

The images do not authentically show Trump kissing Harp on a golf course. No verified source for the purported photographs has been identified, and the clearer version contains visual anomalies associated with AI generation, including what appears to be a sixth finger on Harp’s hand. The two pictures are versions of the same unverified scene, not separate images confirming that the encounter occurred.

The Headline Sounds Like Big Mother is Going to Knock on the Door

 The actual article seems not bad at all, except for the cost to preventwhat is actually a rare but tragic situation. 9/21/26 Daily Caller:

Massachusetts Responds To Lindsay Clancy Failure By Expanding Home Surveillance Of New Moms..

Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey recently proposed expanding home visits from nurses for new parents and postpartum mental health screenings across the state.

Healey has proposed a $2 million investment to provide universal access to the Department of Public Health’s (DPH) Welcome Family program across the state and also $250,000 to broaden the Department of Mental Health’s Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms, according to a Sept. 15 news release. The move comes as the Lindsay Clancy trial in Massachusetts has fueled an intense public debate about postpartum mental health conditions. (RELATED: Patrick Clancy Says Lindsay Never Asked Forgiveness For Killing Their Kids)

Welcome Family is a voluntary and free home visiting program “that supports parents and caregivers in the weeks after a baby is born,” per the announcement. The program presently serves 3,000 births annually, according to Healey’s office.