We Close on New House Aug. 12th

Now organizing movers.

Tennessee

This is my fourth visit to Tennessee.  My first was a 1980 corporate trip to support introduction of the GenRad/Futuredata in-circuit emulator product. This was a product well ahead of its time. Some day, I will engage in archaeoengineering that will fill all your nerd requirements for the year by telling you about it. I barely remember thst trip except getting Salisbury Steak dinner on ceramic plates with metal utensils on an airliner. I was fortunately not in the smoking section. (At the dawn of time: the pilot wore a leopard-skin loincloth.

The word pilotess would have been incomprehensible and unneeded.)

My second trip was to speak at Lincoln Memorial University School of Law. I think it was in the 2000s. I no longer remember what my presentation was about.  I met Dr. John Lott at this event. 

My third trip was to look around last year in preparation for considering the move with our daughter. 

This is my fourth trip and the first as summer hits.  What a summer! The positives:

1. People are friendly and polite.  Only a couple of drivers that make me say, "Go back to Los Angeles!"

2. Everything is so green here. Northern Idaho is like this, too. But the Boise area is completely brown right now except where irrigation has corrected the problem. That picture i took yesterday from what I hope will be my backyard really shows what the adjective verdant means.

4. Gasoline runs from $3.13 to $3.28 per gallon depending on location. 

Downsides:

1. Hot and humid. Between May and September, I expect my daytime will either be indoors, in a car, or in my pool. Of course, right now in the Boise area, the situation is just about as bad. It is dryer but temperatures often exceed 100 degrees.  Misery is similar.

2. Houses are different here. Most houses here have small windows.  Even though electricity seems similar in price (loss of hydroelectric) they build as though every kilowatt is being rationed like your life depends on it. I think it is because they are generally poorer here.

3. Houses are often built with a colonial facade but interiors are quite similar.  Lots of basements. Idaho has them also but not so abundantly.  Partly this is using earth cooling. Partly this is hoping thr rare tornadoes will let you survive even without a purpose-built tornado shelter.  The basement in the new house could be retrofitted into a combination fallout and tornado shelter will a lot of cinder blocks and some concrete. It has a toilet, sink, and shower. It could be turned into an expedient fallout shelter in a few hours, I think, but we are downwind of Oak Ridge National Laboratory so probably not very useful. 

4. Those basements come with staircases that range from worrying to terrifying. They are narrow, steep, and in some cases there is nothing to prevrnt you from falling out on to the floor. Many of these would not be up to code if built today, but most building codes grandfather them in. If inspection report does not screech about these, we will spend the money to retrofit something safer.  

5. The existing staircase has the correct run/rise ratio.  Rebuild so the steps are less steep and end in a landing followed by a 180 degree turn and more steps to the bottom. Add studs from joists to floor on which sheet rock goes and another banister.  It will be a little claustrophobic but less scary and safer, especially for the dogs. 

Today's Tragically Bad Phishing Email

DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY


1500 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20220
TELEPHONE: +1(202)256-4380


COMPLIMENT OF THE DAY, OUR DEAR ELIGIBLE CUSTOMER
FIRST OF ALL, WE ARE VERY SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE OF THIS LETTER. IN CASE YOU ARE ALIVE, PLEASE WE NEED CONFIRMATION! NOW TO START WITH, I'M MR. SCOTT BESSENT, THE NEWLY APPOINTED UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. SO, I AM DUE RESPECT AND HUMBLED TO WRITE YOU THIS VERY E-MAIL FOR WE TO KNOW THE FACT OF ALL THIS INFORMATION AS IT SOUND SO BITTER TO OUR EAR WHEN WE HEARD ABOUT THIS UGLY NEWS THAT YOU HAD A TERRIBLE DISEASE ACCIDENT CALLED (CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE) THAT LEAD YOU TO DEATH, THAT IS THE CAUSE YOU'RE SILENT SINCE. OF THE TREASURY

Is there any better sign of not mastering English?

Worst Hotel Stay of My Life (I Am 69)

Red Roof Inn Kingsport, Tennessee. When we arrived, rhe front desk was unmanned. Ten minutes later, the clerk arrived. He gave the same excuse for the empty pool that he gave my daughter two weeks before: "Severe weather." This might explain closing the pool but not the absence of water.

In the morning, my wife attempted shower. It would not start. While attempting to get it going, the faucet came out of the wall. She tried to clean up water on floor. It became obvious the floor had not been cleaned in sometime. 

I went to front desk to check out and get a refund for subsequent days. My wife had checked us in so I had missed the warning signs that something was amiss. 

One sign said rhat they would not rent to anyone who lived in a 60 mile radius.  This suggests that drug dealers, prostitutes, and people whose money ran out before their month did were trying to live here. The other emphasized that you could not stay there on a promise to pay. When we arrived, I had heard a rather angry argument a few doors down.

While waiting for rhe desk clerk, the guy aheadv of me complained th as soon as it started raining, water came through the ceiling. The clerk gave me the phone number for Expedia to arrange a refund.  We had made the reservations through Hotels.com. We had not prepaid.  Expedia tried to talk sense into the clerk who could only say his manager would be in on Monday.

Fortunately we ended up in a lovely Hampton Inn the next night.

UPDATE: I called back to Red Leaking Roof this morning.  Again, they refused to refund the unused nights. I called corporate.  Still waiting for a response. 

UPDATE 2: Never again with Red Roof or hotels.com.Red Roof corporate wanted proof that I stayed in another hotel. They also insisted that Expedia cancel the reservation first. Hotels.com needs an itinerary number to talk to a human. I do not have that in front of me.

UPDATE 4: Hotels.com canceled the reservation and the hotel from hell promised a refund for the unused nights. (The real test will be of refund comes through. Always use credit card for dealing with organizations of uncertain trustworthiness.) 

Hotels.com made this harder than needed but did come through.  Red Roof Inn, about whom I used to have a pretty high opinion, is now on my below Motel 6/random roach motel list.

UPDATE 6: Email from Red Roof Inn Kingsport promising refund soon.

I Think We Found Our New House

Sufficiently close to Kingsport to be on city water but in forested mountains.  The driveway is steep enough that we will probably uaes ice tires in winter. It is about an acre with a 36' x 18'  salt-water system pool. It has an 20' x 30' shop.with a garage door leading out to an adequately wide enough expanse of sky. Other parts of the property are forested. I may need to pour a level concrete driveway for the telescopes.

It is fully fenced for the dogs. 

It is nominally 2671 sq. ft.; a little small. It has a substantial partially finished basement with a bathroom but no windows. While the staircase down to this part is scary enough that we will probably hire an engineer to design a less scary staircase (turn in half on way down losing a small amount of room), that can wait for old house to sell. The basement connects to the garage which has a less worrisome staircase.  We will add banisters to the left side on both staircases also. It looks like a two car garage but one bay is so deep that two cars will fit head to tail. $489,000.

There are lots of houses for sale here. Many are impressively beautiful in a ostentatious way like my current house but too many staircases for us to enjoy.

Some are just weird. This house had the most impressive view:

Unfortunately, it was on a cliff. It was mildly scary looking down. The oartially finished basement had a 15' ceiling. It was bigger than some houses we have owned. There were doors leading to sections that were not even quite at the partially finished stage. $620,000 for a showpiece where our dogs would not have a yard.

$3.19/Gallon Gasoline

Tennessee must be close to refineries. 

At Some Point, I Hope to Get Rich Enough to Stop Flying Commercial

I hate flying in a cattle car.  Charter only. Probably at the $5 million invested level.

One Way RV Rental

My wife and i have toyed with the idea of renting a small motor home for our cross-country trip with deranged doggies. While there are one-way rentals available, they are from high-demand cities to others in the same category: Los Angeles to Chicago, etc. 

Do any small towable trailers have bed, stove, and toilet? The attraction of bringing home with us is the prospect of trying to get our dogs to not bark in our hotel rooms.

Another News Story You Will Not See in Lamestream Media

6/25/26 Free Press reports on Trump’s deputy director of the Bureau of Prisons, a former inmate Trump patdoned during his first term. (Another beneficiary now runs the pardons office at the White House.) Behind a paywall; open a private tab.

John Smith (yes, really) found God in prison and used being in a white collar prison to learn about finance and credit. This happens a lot. One of my nephews did likewise and now is a successful businessman in Portland. 

Among the interesting facts is that federal inmate population is falling under Trump as he attempts to right the wrongs of Biden's superpredator crime bill.

Be Glad You Are Not European

 PJMedia:

The region is suffering a record-breaking, early-summer heat wave with temperatures soaring as high as 40–44°C, the way the French reckon it, or 104–111°F in actual degrees. This is when Americans would set the thermostat to 68° (actual degrees) or maybe go see a movie at a theater where they keep it that temp all the time.

But at the École Primaire La Planette school in Nîmes, they have no air conditioning — naturellement — and according to Miss Jo on X and other sources, a child there "recently fainted because of the heat," even while "classes were being taught in corridors to get out of the heat."

Parents of the students there did what parents in America would almost certainly do in a similar situation, and they raised money to buy five portable air conditioning units for the school. The community got so involved that the parents needed just three days to raise the required €2,000.

So far, so good.

But Mayor Vincent Bouget is an actual member of the Parti communiste français (PCF), and if there's one thing Communists can't stand, it's the community doing stuff. Bouget ordered the school to remove the A/C because "it sets a precedent," and "in some neighborhoods, parents don’t have the means to act."

 Over on X, snippy French response was thst Americans can't complain about this because we have a mass murder problem in our schools. But mass murder in schools in a problem in several European nations at higher rates per 1000,000 people as is mass murder  

Temporary Protected Status is Temporary

Mullin v. Doe (2026) ruled that the Administration has authority to end TPS as, in their opinion is warranted by changes in the conditions that justified TPS for those nations. TPS for Haitians started in 2010 because of the eathquake. It is no longer 2010. Syrian TPS is from 2012 when the Assad regime's brutal oppression and murders. Millions of Syrians have since returned home.

The TPS law also says that non-constitutional questions about TPS and the President's authority to grant TPS are not subject to judicial review. Clear enough? 

Supreme Court Pounded a Stake Through the Vampire Rule

Wolford v. Lopez (2026) footnote 3 cited some of my published work. Hawaii's law that prohibited concealed weapon licensees from entering a business without express permission of the owner violates the Second Amendment.  Other states with similar rules are going to have to come up with some other way to discourage licensees from carrying. Perhaps requiring them to wear a yellow emblem of a gun on their clothes.

Also nice, a congratulations email from a DOJ official.

The Blazing World

One of the nice things about a detailed narrative history like this is how many ideas sloppily or simplified elsewhere get clarified. I have read descriptions of the Glorious Revolution that describe King James II Revolution the Great Seal of England into the Thames before boarding a ship to the continent. Also impulse in some references is that Parliament requested William of Orange come over and replace James in a peaceful and bloodless coup. Both of these seemed dramatic enough to make me skeptical.  The Blazing World corrected my understanding.  James did indeed throw the Great Seal of England into the Thames but some days before he escaped custody of William's forces and slipped out of the country.  Parliament did not invite William to take the throne, followed by a peaceful entry. William and a small army landed on the Kentish coast and marched to London.

If you are need of knowledge of this pivotal set of events that leads to our Revolution, Healey's book is detailed and interesting. 

Antifa Does Not Exist and Just Got 30+ Year Sentences

6/13/26 DOJ press release lists a dozen Antifa members sentenced to terms of 100, 70, 50, and 30 years.

Chief Judge O’ Connor said, “The defendants’ violence and terrorism is an assault on Democracy. The defendants’ planning, staging, and execution of the attack led to the attempted murder of an officer who ironically is not even involved in enforcing immigration law.” 

Danger to democracy. Got that Biden. Your boys are the threat   

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

6/10/26 Philadelphia Inquirer writes about grade inflation in Philadelphia schools. Teachers are upset because students who aeldom show up for classes are passing. 

A fourth teacher who has worked in multiple types of schools in Philadelphia said the practice is not limited to the district.

She most recently taught at a city charter and said some of her middle-grades students were at kindergarten reading and math levels.

A combination of administration pressure to raise grades and sometimes administrators just altering the grades to a passing level means kids are moving up through the grades without acquiring the necessary skills or learning important life lessons, like showing up for classes.

I had my suspicions ad to what is driving this confirmed deeper in the article:

“The gap was huge,” the fourth teacher said. “The school’s explanation is that there’s a school-to-prison pipeline, and the older students are, the less likely they are to graduate. But they’re not meeting standards. The gaps are huge. It was very shocking to me how they would just pass the kids. I’m a parent, and I want my kids to be prepared properly.”

Everyone knows this whole "school-to-prison pipeline" idea was predicated on high discipline rates for black and Hispanic boys.  That failure to learn self-discipline mostly prepares them for criminal behavior could not possibly be part of the pipeline, could it? This insistence on meeting standards of benefit is racist leads to unprepared kids going to at worst jail.

Laffer Curve Vindicated?

6/23/26 Mountain States Policy Center points to reductions in the Montana state income tax rate and subsequent increases in total revenue. The Montana state tax agency's report seems to confirm this, showing a 211% increase in income tax revenue. However, CPI increased 43% from January 2014 to May 2026. There was a real inflation-adjusted increase in revenue. Why?

The Laffer Curve explanation is that increased business activity because of incentives to business activity. If you get to get keep more of your income, you are likely to take more risks. This increases gross profits and therefore taxable income.

Another explanation is that high-income people from other states (California, Washington, Colorado) are increasing taxable income. Even if this explains it, it is only a slight variation on Laffer Curve. High-income people choose states where they get to keep more of their income. Hence the influx to states without state income tax such as Tennessee (headed there Friday to buy a new home), Wyoming, Texas, Florida, and Texas.

Unless every state decides to go full Democrat and enact state income taxes at the same rate, lowering state income tax rates seems like a straightforward to increase revenues. Of course, that assumes this is the goal not the semisocialist "fairness" (envy) concept.

Names That Make Me Giggle

 6/22/26 CBS News:

Washington — A federal judge on Monday ruled the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it created a centralized database that contains Americans' private information, which she said has since been used by some states to incorrectly remove U.S. citizens from their voter rolls.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., sided with a voting rights group and nonprofit that works to protect privacy in finding that the administration violated three different laws with its new system that includes Americans' citizenship data. [emphasis added]

Yes. Sparkle. Aside from the question as to whether the Administration violated the law to allow states to verify citizenship, the name alone makes me giggle. Look, a lot of silly names came out of the 1960s and 1970s. A friend had a classmate who had to bring in his birth certificate to show that his middle name was 

 

But I think I would have changed my name rather than sound like I forgot to stop using my stripper stage name. I speak as someone whose first and last names seem to be unspellable by some.

 

DOGE is Still Busy

Not much discussion since Musk left but what he started is still busy. The sheer volume of stuff is amazing. Not multibillion savings but add them all together and they add up to a lot. A professional services contract for a national health advisor in Senegal for $524K. I would love to know how much eventful ends up in Virginia. 

A Billion Here, Another Billion There

After yesterday's coverage. 6/22/26 Fox News:

A fugitive accused of helping mastermind a $3.7 billion Medicare fraud scheme — one of the largest in U.S. history — is in American custody after authorities tracked him down in Turkey and flew him back to the U.S. to face charges, the FBI announced Monday..

It used to be an article of faith on the left that we would have enough money to take care of every poor person if we were not wasting it on the military.  I wonder if we could take care of every poor American if so much of the budget was not being stolen, often by non-citizens. 

Only a billion if you round. 6/19/26 Houston Chronicle:

A nurse practitioner from Nevada has been charged with multiple federal felonies after being accused of using clinics in the Houston area to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare.

Marizel Yukee, of Las Vegas, was indicted Thursday on federal Medicare fraud charges. Yukee is accused of working with others to defraud terminally ill people by providing them with unnecessary treatments and then billing the government for their care.

The Blazing World: Full of Amazing Stories

P. 361 tells how Edmund Halley calculated the total acreage of England at the close of the 17th century. He took the most recent map of England, cut it out and weighed it.  Then he cut out a circle at the center of the map and weighed it. The area of that circle adjusted by relative weights gave a pretty accurate total acreage. Yes, mountains works render this imprecise until you consider how few mountains England has 

Curious Educational Services Company CEO Indicted; LA Schools Chief Resigns

6/22/26 KABC:

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- The superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District resigned Sunday night, nearly four months after the FBI served search warrants at his home and the LAUSD's headquarters as part of an ongoing investigation.

An LAUSD spokesperson confirmed to Eyewitness News that the district received a letter of resignation from Carvalho...

On Feb. 27, two days after the FBI conducted searches at Carvalho's home and LAUSD offices, the district's Board of Education voted unanimously to place him on leave pending the outcome of the probe.

"Mr. Carvalho remains confident that the evidence will ultimately demonstrate that he acted appropriately and in the best interests of students," said a statement released in March, attributed to a spokesperson for Carvalho. "We hope the school board reinstates him promptly to his position as superintendent."

Authorities have not charged Carvalho with any crimes.

The FBI also searched a third location near Miami. The Miami Herald reported the Florida property belonged to Debra Kerr, who previously worked with AllHere, an education technology company that had a contract with Los Angeles schools before it collapsed and its leader was indicted for fraud.

 In 2024, Carvalho heavily touted a deal with AllHere for an AI chatbot named "Ed" designed to help students. But about three months after unveiling the technology and paying the company $3 million, the district dropped its dealings with AllHere, which collapsed into bankruptcy. Months later, founder Joanna Smith-Griffin was charged with securities and wire fraud, along with identity theft.

At the time, Carvalho denied personal involvement in the selection of AllHere, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Do you wonder why Los Angeles city schools perform so much worse than the standard? Perhaps less money spent on "Ed" and more on "Education."

 

Paranoia? Or Has the CIA Found Common Ideology With the Denizens of the Deep?

6/18/26 The Hill:

(NewsNation) — China has alleged marine life is being weaponized by foreign intelligence agencies for espionage.

China’s Ministry of State Security released an article Friday on social media platform WeChat, saying an “invisible secret war” is ongoing.

 “In recent years, the work of national security organs has found that overseas spy intelligence agencies continue to collect and steal sensitive data from our ocean through a variety of new spy devices,” the ministry said. 

he article named a variety of measures allegedly taken by foreign agencies to collect information, such as buoys, unmanned submarines, wave gliders and marine life.

“Spy turtles” and “spy fish” are existing in the China sea, according to the ministry.

Have those Chinese fishing fleets devastating fisheries around the world caused those who identify as aquatic to make common cause with us?

Your Collection of College Hate Crime Hoaxes

 6/19/26 College Fix has a collection of college hate crime hoaxes. Among the more interesting stories: 1/16/26 College Fix:

A red cross and a reference to a 15th century French duke has caused an uproar at Northwestern University as LGBT students and professors fear for their safety.

Around Jan. 6, someone painted a “Cross of Burgundy” and wrote “CHARLES THE BOLD DUKE OF BURGUNDY 10 NOV 1433 — 5 JAN 1477” over a “trans flag” on campus. Students regularly paint over “The Rock” with various messages....

“It’s one thing to go repaint the entire rock white with a red (symbol) and take away the trans memorial,” Yarberry (pictured) told the student newspaper. “But to use the trans memorial as the backdrop for a symbol associated with Nazism and fascist ideologies, that is a very political statement.”

While Yarberry and others were painting over the X, “a student approached them and took responsibility for painting the cross.”

“[T]he student mostly defended the decision as solely expressing interest in the duke of Burgundy. The person did not identify themself,” the newspaper reported.

Yes, X is definitely a fascist symbol.  Remember these?

 

Kudos to the student sufficiently interested in history to do homage to a Duke of Burgundy. I suspect most Poison Ivy League students think this is about a wine.

 

 

 

The Almost God-Like Power of AI

Or is that of the BBC? 6/18/26 Houston Chronicle:

International visitors to Houston this summer are enjoying the full splendor of the Bayou City, from Houston's iconic stadiums to its sprawling gas stations, to its delicious beer and barbecue.

One international news outlet added one other feature to Houston during its broadcast of the 2026 FIFA World Cup on Wednesday: majestic mountains.

No, that's not a typo. BBC, the British news outlet, hosted a World Cup studio show on Wednesday shortly after the completion of DR Congo's 1-1 draw against Portugal in the second 2026 World Cup match held at Houston Stadium. The studio show broadcast an AI-generated image of Houston's skyline in the background as analysts discussed the match, featuring a largely accurate depiction. One issue with the AI image? The left side of the screen was adorned with rolling foothills and mountains, depicting a scene more fit for Los Angeles, Salt Lake City or Phoenix than Houston.

This is a problem at two levels: the misuse of AI (although an ordinary green screen can also be manipulated to have this effect) and a reminder of how little BBC, often considered a good standard for news media, cars about truth. 

My wife's great concern about AI is is power to deceive.  If young people were receiving adequate educations, this would be less of a problem.  Seeing the Apollo 11 footage with a tiny set of McDonald's arches, or more realistically with a microphone boom shadow in the foreground, will deceive many 

Incremental Progress to GOTO

Every night, I learn something new. Tonight, it was that having adjusted the polar axis to the right latitude, the locking bolts need to be tightened.  These are either M8 or M10 Allen wrenches and my garage is too chaotic preparing to move to find my metric Allen wrenches at this hour. 

UPDATE: While the screw threads might be metric, a 3/32" Allen head wrench fits perfectly. Or it needed a 2.38mm metric Allen head wrench. As much as most of the world is supposedly metric, the reality of a U.S. market prevents getting too far off our standard.

From The Blazing World

This history of the English Civil Wars is approaching the end as we approach the Glorious Revolution. A brief mention of Seth Ward: "he studied at Cambridge where, in fulfilling the rather bizarre role as official university jester, he so offended the vice chancellorthat he was temporarily suspended." (p. 355)  

I do not know if this is bizarre. Many professors at Poison Ivy League schools are hard to distinguish from jesters already. 

Balancing the Budget by Dealing With Fraud?

6/21/26 New York Post:

A fugitive accused of running a $1.2 billion Medicare fraud conspiracy has been captured overseas and returned to the United States, becoming the second suspect taken into custody from the FBI’s new “Most Wanted Fraudsters” list.

Federal officials said Herbert Leon Kimble, 60, was arrested in the Philippines after allegedly evading authorities for nearly two years.

Prosecutors said Kimble operated a healthcare fraud scheme that generated more than $1.2 billion in Medicare charges and affected thousands of beneficiaries, many of them elderly.

Authorities said the operation used call centers to steer patients toward medically unnecessary orthopedic braces.

Kimble pleaded guilty in 2019 to multiple federal offenses, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, healthcare fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, making false claims and offering kickbacks and bribes.

Okay, I know it is only a billion dollars, but to paraphrase Sen. Dirksen, "A billion here, a billion there, after a while it adds up to real money." 

Outrageous (Earned) Weslth Produces Outrageous Envy

People who type for a living and have never created anything technological are envious that someone who can getsabsurdly rich.

If they had not transed his son, he would not have broken their rice bowls. Immorality has consequences. 

Belarus

6/26 Council on Foreign Relations reminding of the supposed incompetence of the Trump Administration in foreign policy:

For the past year, the Trump administration has been slowly renewing relations with Belarus, partly to enhance that country’s autonomy and thus diminish Russia’s ability to use Belarus to pressure NATO’s eastern flank. The warming fits a broader pattern of U.S. outreach to Armenia and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus and to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, also with the goal of restricting Russia’s influence. But Washington needs to tread carefully. The challenge is to reduce Russia’s sway over Belarus without provoking Russia to formally annex the country, while preparing for that eventuality regardless.

Russian annexation would be an admission that Putin does not trust Lukashenko to be his puppet. Nor should he. Belarus' army is woefully inadequate compared to Ukraine. Belarussian reliance on Russian air defense systems after the last few days of wildly successful attacks on Russian petroleum refineries should be a hint that directly going to war with Ukraine might end badly for them. To quote Lukashenko:

In the interview, the leader went into great detail and spoke very frankly about this position.

“First, Belarus is highly vulnerable militarily should Ukraine begin attacking Belarus in the same manner it attacks Russia (we recognize this reality, so we have no desire to engage in war). Belarus is laid out like an open palm before the Ukrainian military. We are fully aware that our critical life-support systems, production facilities, and logistics hubs would come under attack. They have stated, they have already identified 500 such targets on the territory of Belarus.,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

Second reason, the head of state continued, is that the Belarusian people hate wars: “We have already suffered enough throughout our history; we understand that many of our military personnel would die. For what? Why should they die?”

Third reason: if Belarus joined the war, the front line would be extended significantly. “If Russia were to attack Kiev from Belarusian territory, the front line primarily for Russia (and naturally for us) would be extended by 1,500 km along the Belarusian-Ukrainian border,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said. “We and the Russians would be unable to defend this sector.” 

What a Shocker: Racial Discrimination is Illegal

6/18/26 College Fix:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down a state-funded scholarship program Thursday that awarded financial aid to college students based on certain racial categories — a decision that drew praise from conservative legal groups.

Dan Lennington, an attorney at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which represented taxpayers in the case, celebrated the ruling as a “major win.” 

“Wisconsin Supreme Court holds that [Gov. Tony] Evers Admin cannot offer scholarships based on race. This is a huge win for equality & provides a ROADMAP for Wisconsin Taxpayers to challenge many other programs worth BILLIONS,” he wrote on X. 

Sarah Parshall Perry, an attorney and vice president of Defending Education, also praised the ruling in an X post Thursday.

“The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Perry wrote. “Wisconsin got the message. Their Supreme Court just ruled the governor cannot administer scholarship opportunities based on race.”

 This is a sensitive subject for me because when I graduated from high school 27th in a class of about 1000, it seemed as though poor white kids were outside the scope of what university knowledge. I had a classmate of East Indian origin, back when East Indians were considered a victim group, who ended up with a full-ride scholarship to one of the Poison Ivy League universities.

If scholarships are awarded based on poverty or socioeconomic class, this will still award a lot to blacks and Hispanics, but not Robert L. Johnson's kids. 

I Think This is Progress

 

Another 2nd Amendment Victory

6/17/26 Fox News reports that Florida Court of Aopeals has ruled that 18-20-year-olds have a right to carry concealed and the Florida AG will not challenge the decision. This surprised me not in the least. A Florida Deputy A-G called me several weeks ago for expert opinion on the law's constitutionnality.

Why Academia Is Increasingly Held in Contempt

An historian at Boston University both praises a couple robber barons (Carnegie and Rockefeller) and then compares the UFC event at the White House to lynching.

She said during the Gilded Age there was no “open display of denigration of American symbols and American values” like there supposedly is now.

She then praised people like JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie for saying they were “offering a way forward for the United States.”

Richardson then said Trump “is deliberately tear that apart and he is doing so on the same cultural argument of course that people used to back the first Gilded age that is these cultural wars that turn white Americans against marginalized people of color.”

UFC does not appeal to me. I would not have hosted it at my home. But this comparison is just absurdly stupid. If there is anyone tearing apart our culture today and denigrating American symbols and values, look at the Poison Ivy League universities and the Democratic Party.

Lynching usually involved dragging men out of jails, frequently castrating them, hanging them or burning them to death.

9-0 Second Amendment Decision

6/18/26 CBS News:

 Washington — The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of a Texas man who challenged a federal law that bars certain drug users from having firearms.

In a unanimous decision in the case U.S. v. Hemani, the justices found that Ali Hemani's prosecution for having a firearm while he was an unlawful drug user is inconsistent with the Second Amendment. Hemani allegedly was only an occasional user of marijuana when the FBI found a handgun at his Texas home in 2022.

9-0. Language in decision emphasizes that disarming someone requires some sort of due process (criminal conviction, involuntary commitment).

The decision is here. Interestingly enough; Hemani's house was searched out of concern that he might be terrorist-adjacent. The government found nothing of that nature so file some charge, any charge 

Google Maps Compass is Magnetic

I assumed that since it had access to GPS that the little magnet symbol pointed true north. No. I should have realized this when trying to use it next to my Losmandy mount whose electric motors confused it horribly. 

The last couple times I have tried to use the goto feature, the first alignment star was a good ten degrees off. Because my polar axis was aimed at magnetic north, not true north; the 11 degree difference meant that sewing to Vega was about 10 degrees off. Unfortunately, Polaris is simply not visible at any hour for which I have to energy for which to stay up. Tomorrow i will make a North marker out front with a compass and a protractor.

 

No. Digital Compass app shows both magnetic and true north. 

Why is DOJ Investigating Gov. Newsom?

 6/16/26 Time:

A second probe reportedly relates to an investigation into Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, that had been opened during the Biden Administration. Williamson was indicted last year on federal charges that she was involved in a scheme to steal $225,000 from a dormant campaign account belonging to former U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, who is now the Democratic nominee to succeed Newsom as California governor. Williamson pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and making false statements to federal investigators.[emphasis added]

So dirty that even Biden started looking. 

Prepare for Cheap Gasoline Next Year

 6/17/26 CNBC:

The oil supply shock caused by the Iran war has eroded global demand for crude — but a lasting resolution to the conflict could drive a surge in supply volumes and trigger a major oil overhang next year, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday.

Free markets are amazing things: capable of adjusting demand to changes in supply in a way that government bureaucrats can only wish to do  

New York Times Sinks Trump as Epstein Client Claim

 6/16/26 New York Times Magazine examines evidence concerning Epstein's suicide including this interesting piece of evidence:

We obtained about a dozen pages of other notes handwritten by Epstein in jail that were also previously unseen — including some in which he tried and failed to come up with significant information he might have on Donald Trump to offer to prosecutors....

 

His attorneys discussed with federal prosecutors the prospect of a proffer: giving them information that might be useful in other cases in exchange for the possibility of some leniency in his own. Epstein was particularly preoccupied with what he might have on Donald Trump, who was then serving his first term in office. Jotting on a legal pad, he returned to the president again and again, trying to dredge up anything to offer prosecutors. But his scribblings — “Trump is a total con artist — smoke & mirrors” and “Never had money”— suggest that he could come up with little that wasn’t already known.

 Epstein had nothing to give to prosecutors to implicate Trump, something that would have led to a devastating and probably unsurvivable indictment. 

More Envy

6/16/26 Yahoo Finance:

 At the close of trading in New York, the 500 richest people on the globe had added $336 billion to their fortunes, the biggest haul ever recorded in a single day, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That brought their collective net worth to a record $13.3 trillion.

Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire, extended his lead over the group with his net worth rising more than 10% to $1.27 trillion. And the dozen people at the bottom of the list — the least wealthy of the world's superrich — each stood at $7.9 billion, the highest-ever bar to enter the index.

Yes. I was a good bit richer at the close of  trading yesterday. So were most people with IRAs, 401(k)s, 403b funds: about 60% of Americans. As I explain in my instructions on how to get rich, the traditional model of investing in stock funds when young, transitioning to safer but slower growing bond funds as you get closer to retirement is low risk but low return. I have gone all stock funds and enjoyed enormous growth through several crises (dot-com bubble, housing collapse in 2008, Covid) much richer than I started.

Some People Are Too Stupid to Stay Out of Jail

6/15/26 CBS2:

Officers with the Wilder Police Department conducted the stop on May 5, 2026, in Greenleaf, Idaho. During the investigation, officers conducted a lawful search of the vehicle and arrested the driver, identified as Mr. Pettibone of Boise, on felony and misdemeanor drug-related charges.

Police said that during the search, officers also discovered materials describing the sexual abuse of children. After a subsequent investigation, Mr. Pettibone was charged with two felony counts of visual representation of the sexual abuse of children in violation of Idaho Code 18-1507C.

Hidden Features

 I was watching a YouTube video about cat features that most owners do not know about because they are not in the manual (or at least at least the quick start guides that many manufacturers use instead of the full War & Peace manual which I bought for my CT5.

Some are in the "Is that not obvious, why sre allowed out doors without adult supervision?" category.  The little arrow next to the had two filler icon means, gas nozzle goes here. They claimed only 10% of drivers know this. 

The first surprise was a feature my 2014 Jaguar had that I was disappointed not to have on the CT5. On the Jaguar, hold the unlock button for the seconds and all the windows roll down and the sunroof opens. Hold lock down three seconds and they all close. 

It is in the CT5 War & Peace manual. Double click unlock and hold unlock for three seconds and all the windows roll down. Double click lock and hold it for three seconds and all the windows roll up. There is an annoying chirp when it does this, but I am not planning to use this feature while engaged in covert operations. 

The other feature I vaguely knew about from the window sticker: Intellibeam. While driving in the dark, this will detect oncoming headlights and reduce from high to low beam and back again to high beam. I looked through the manual carefully and found no mention.  You turn it on when you start the car by pressing a button at the end of left stalk. I guess having on by default might be a problem in city streets.  There is an icon on the stalk but it is not all clear what it means. There are times when a picture is worth a thousand words and times when ten words are worth multiple icons. I am still trying to imagine the icon string to explain Intellibeam.

Do Not Let the Race-Baiters Blind You to American Unity

My wife and i were at Home Depot yesterday. While off looking for something, my wife struck up a conversation with a black woman who works there. (My wife can strike up a conversation with a telephone pole.) Being of a similar age, they were exchanging warm memories of the Bicentennial, which for me involved firing beer cans out to sea from a friend's homemade mortar. (Still rising when lost to sight.) This led to a sentimental discussion of D-Day and the sacrifices of those who served on Omaha Beach.

We have more in common than not.  Ignore race-baiters like Ibrahim Kendi. 

An Implausible Explanation

 6/3/26 DW:

A hotel in the southern German state of Bavaria came under heavy criticism for a message refusing a reservation to an Israeli guest that included a message reminiscent of the Nazi era.

The case came to light when Israel's consul general to southern Germany, Talya Lador, posted the rejection message on X.

"Have we returned to the 1930s?" Lador wrote in German.

A screenshot in her post shows an English-language message from the Hotel zum Hirschen in Bavaria telling the recipient that "there are no Jews allowed in our hotel." 

Funnest Collection of Memes Yet

Here.

A few/examples 

Some Satire is Too Close to Eurocrat Reality

Elon Musk is about to become a trillionaire

If he agreed to pay just 80% of that as a wealth tax to the EU, the EU government could use its efficient operating experience to fund bicycles with solar panels attached to them for over 40 residents of the Netherlands

Elon is being selfish by not paying the wealth tax

Vast numbers responded to you as a serious proposal.  

The Continuing Saga of the Explore Scientific Mount

I do not have the latest firmware. This explains the problems with using the latest control software. I will update it tomorrow 

I installed the latest firmware in the mount. The ExploreStars Envision app now connects at least with WFi but not Bluetooth. Even without doing a 2 star alignment, its attempt at goto Sun was close enough that I am convinced the problems is solved 

U. S. "Dark Fleet"

Not to avoid sanctions but to circumvent the Irsnian blockade. 6/10/26 CNBC:

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. military has secretly helped 200 commercial ships and more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

I have found the relatively low price of oil globally with the Strait of Hormuz closed.  The amount moved (at night without lights) is a fraction of thr normal transport so oil is still tight but at least our allies (Australia, Japan, South Korea) should get some benefit.  Our erstwhile allies even benefit. If only they were helping! Of course, the Royal Navy is now not even a shadow of its former self, more like a shadow of a ghost so expecting their help is unrealistic.  Besides, they have emerging impolite opposition forming. 

ICYMI

The party that drew brush mustaches on Bush Jt. and/made every wave of the hand by Trump or Musk into a Nazi salute just picked a World War II buff with a SS tattoo their nominee for U. S. Senate.

Why? 6/5/26 OpenSecrets reports billionaires are funding his campaign that claims rich people have too much influence. 

If billionaires are upset about their wealth enough to back one of their opponents would it not be simpler to do this wholesale (give away your billions) rather than retail (putting in office intent on taking that wealth). This suggests that he has no intention of doing so.

The New Mount Needed a Protective Carry Case

I am not sure invented this customizable cube foam for making custom cases but I hope they got rich.

This is an SKB, a little more expensive than the Chinese cases but I feel better about buying American 

Everything fits in here but the telescope which has its own case, and the tripod 

The IEXOS-100 Mount Problem Seemingly Solved

The problem with getting the ExploreStars app to reconnect to the mount seems to be solved. The app connects to the mount through TCP which is a connectful protocol unlike UDP. (Stuff i learned last century.)

It seems that leaving the app to do anything else or depowering the mount leaves the app in a state where it still has a connection open. Solution: stop the app. Force Stop (clumsy) or drag the app off the home screen which stops it.  Restart opens a new connection. The app has no stop or quit command. 

I was able to reconnect multiple times this way. I can do two star alignment after reconnecting.  I wish the Envision version which runs on Android cellphones would successfully connect.  A phone is more connection than a tablet for this. 

Do You Have a 1970s 800 BPI Tape Drive?

When I wasx n high school I wrote a veey nice text editor in assembly language for the Interdata 7/16 series of minicomputers. (Interdata's text editor was awful, limited to what would fit into its 64K of RAM, and slow). I found the tape while going through my random collection of stuff. I would dearly love took get access to it again. Any Suggestions?

This is EBCDIC not ASCII. 9 track tape.

Boomer Greed

 6/7/26 Fortune article title:

‘The golden years are not golden’: Boomers are hoarding most of America’s wealth and power because they’re terrified of outliving their money

The arrogance of that title really steams me even the article quotes a number of Boomers refuting that title in part.

1. "Hoarding": like we are never going to spend it. For the most part, Boomers are not overwhelmingly rich. There are homeless Boomers and many barely making their rent or mortgage payments.  I am not one of them, but I know such. 

2. Power: does he mean we elected Trump? Or that we reliably show up to vote? Zoomers can fix this easily enough.

3 Where is our "hoarded wealth" going after we die? We are not taking it with us. We are going to leave it to our GenX children who Zoomers will again claim are hoarding. Much of my wealth is already spent on meals out and services overwhelmingly provided by younger people. 

4. Houses? Yes we bought houses for $106,000 in the 1980s on wages commensurate with those prices ($45,000 was my salary at the time). We paid interest rates that seem horrifying today. I refinanced a mortgage at 10.5% in 1989. We had a 18.5% car loan. (We had pretty good credit at the time.) Life was not easy back then.

5. We had limited capabilities because of technology. A few years ago, my son asked, "Hiw did you buy houses before the Internet." Slowly and carefully  .

BZoomers need to stop whining or Boomers might buy billion dollar yachts and sink them at sea to deny that wealth to the Zoomers.

More Weirdness From the Combined Minds of My Wife and Me

Canis Ex Machina

It had been 40,000 years since the Great Collapse when our expedition reached HD56689 B. We knew that before the GC our ancestors had seeded B with our distant cousins. Would they still be recognizably human in culture. Other planets we had explored were still physically human with slight variations in size and color (two-meter adults on Rigel F with coal-black skin, one meter adults with interesting and sometimes beautiful primary color skin spotting on HD44449 C). These were startling, but we grew to see them as just interesting variants on the basic human pattern.

What we found too disheartening was civilizational drift. Some had gone cannibal; the sociologists recorded what they found. After losing a few sociologists to the pot, we decided this was a civilization best studied from drones and moved on. Others completely lost technological knowledge; they had reverted to hunter-gatherer societies with no apparent forward progress in 40,000 years to the state from which they had regressed.

HD56689 B was unique. We could see evidence of an advanced civilization: large cities; some strangely narrow, unpaved roads; what seemed to be something like very large bird roosts made of concrete. The population was clearly shrinking. We contacted the small remaining leadership. After a bit of struggle getting the AI Translators working with what seemed (t us) a very primitive language, we pieced together what happened.

Their ancestors separated from the mainstream of human technology by the GC had started insanely breeding the Earth-origin mammals to do the important jobs of machines. The swifferhound had a large fine haired tail. It was very small, about 500 grams. It would climb shelves and use its tail for dusting.

They bred the vacuum shepherd to inhale dirt and dust into outsized lungs, then exhale the contents outside. They had fairly short lifespans because of high lung cancer rates.

They bred a transport elephant with a very broad flat back on which enormous loads could be strapped to the mid-abdominal tusks. (Our biologists suspected some now lost to them gene editing played a part in that one.)

They bred bats to 40 meters long with commensurate wingspans that carried humans on transcontinental journeys from batplane roost to batplane roost. They consumed vast quantities of insects and birds on the way. This limited them to travel on the only settled continent and outlying islands.

Tractordogs operated the only agricultural machinery they had still produced. Combines were operated by their canine pilots through the fields.

It was both unsettling and impressive to see our mighty species operating almost without technology. So why was the civilization dying. Some centuries before, at what they now called Peak Animal Helper, an interspecies virus spread rapidly through all the mammals killing most of them in one generation. While survivors carried a gene for immunity, the generations of careful breeding made the survivors weak and less effective at their functions. As an example, chauffeur dogs sometimes intentionally crashed ground vehicles so that they could devour the occupants.

We tried to explain the concept of machines as less vulnerable helpers and dogs as companions, but I fear the concepts would not stick and future explorers would find empty cities here.

This whole concept was dreamed up by my wife as ww were returning from a star party in Payette. There has to be a better title for this. Maske suggestions! 

Support for Gay Marriage Falling. Why?

Andrew Sullivan, a prominent gay journalist has an answer that makes a lot of sense. 6/5/26 Daily Dish:

The New York State legislature recently tackled the vital, pressing issue of whether the terms “mother” and “father” are cruel and oppressive. They concluded that these terms are indeed transphobic and need to be replaced in law by “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” “Paternity” is also bigoted and axed. Among the Democrats, the vote was, natch, a few shy of unanimous. And let’s not kid ourselves: Hochul’s signature is inevitable. On all questions gay and trans, the Dems are now entirely controlled by trans and “queer” extremists....

I suspect the queers are so insulated they don’t even realize that this is what they have been effectively saying to Joe Public for a decade now. Remember when they told you that gay and lesbian people were just like everyone else, and just wanted to be left alone? Scrap that. We’re actually queers who believe marriage is a “fundamentally violent institution” and that the sex binary is a white supremacist fiction. Now we’ve gotten marriage, we will indoctrinate your kids in queer and gender theory, fire you if you don’t repeat our pronouns, force girls to shower next to boys in locker rooms, give irreversible sex changes to minors, and insist that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

Yes. When LGBs pleaded for rhe right to be left alone, there was little argument.  Active and aggressive prosecution of LGB activities in private was out of fashion. Police had more important problems to pursue. When "the love whose name we dare not speak" refused to shut up, it was hard to ignore. 

The genital mutilation of children made a lot of people upset. That LGBs who wanted to be left alone were now automatically assumed to be tied to the T and Q did not help. LGB sex seems positively tame compared to cutting off genitals and breasts.

Star Party in Payette

I hate doing star parties in summer. If it's really not dark until about 10:00. People with much better eyesight could see Venus well enough to aim at it 20-30 minutes before me. Venus is at the gibbous phase right now. Not very interesting. 

Jupiter was more interesting.  Even my Televue-85 was showing multiple cloud bands at 108x. As much as I am frustrated by the inability to control the mount for goto and even somple centering, it tracked very reliably.  Jupiter stayed center of eyepiece even at 108x as long as 30 minutes.  By comparison, Dobsonian owners and one gal with an alt-az mounted Newtonian were busy moving and adjusting every couple minutes.

.

The Televue-85 is a very small aperture refractor of exceptional quality. It does not have the resolution of the 8" telescopes but it is dramatically inferior, either. When it was showing two bands, an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain was also showing two bands. The light disadvantage, which is the square of aperture, is not as severe as you might expect because your eye does a pretty good job of compensating for brightness difference. 

The Televue-85 is not the best choice for planetary observing although it id gorgeous on the Moon. It is better suited to deep sky astronomy because its short focal length allows a very wide field of view, well suited to the Pleiades or globular clusters such as M13. My 50mn eyepiece provides a 3 5 degree field.

The great advantage is portability.  It weighs about ten pounds and on the mount it weighs about 20 pounds.  At one point I realized that I might be able get the Sun so I could pick it up and carry it to a better location. 

We had a decent crowd of people out there.

Things That Drive Me Crazy

I ordered a roof rack system from Amazon thst clamps onto the Hyundai's roof bars intended for that purpose.  The left and right attachment mechanisms of course have locks to prevent theft.  The key fits three of the four locks. It will not even insert into the fourth. The logical step would be replace one appropriately keyed, or even all four. No. All Amazon can do is send me a new unit.  Keep the bad one. I may try and figure out to repair that bad lock.

It is hard to believe this is cost effective.

Explore Scientific iEXOS 100-2 Mount

This afternoon, I took it out and looked at the Sun. I must have gotten pretty well polar aligned because it was trqcking very well. Obviously, two star alignment was impossible, but i was able to use LURD (left, up, right, down) buttons to center the Sun in the eyepiece. 

This evening, LURD was completely useless. It is random how ExploreStars app works.

The Declining Importance of the Strsight of Hormuz

No, not a MAGA talking point. 6/4/26 New York Times:

But with every passing day, the world is learning to live without the Gulf’s seaborne exports.

1Just as the Covid-19 pandemic and President Trump’s tariffs forced a significant rewiring of global supply chains, the Strait’s closure has prompted a similar adjustment. You might be part of it. When gas prices rise rapidly, people start to limit their driving. Walmart just reported that customers are now buying less than 10 gallons of gas at a time on average at its filling stations.

The United States, Brazil, Canada, Kazakhstan and Venezuela are already increasing their oil production. Large releases of crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are also helping to cover shortfalls. Like a stream that finds its way around a fallen log, markets locate new supplies when the old ones are suddenly cut off.

At some point, the Iranian crazies will get poor enough for their religious objections to evaporate. By then, Iran will be a less important source of oil. And on the bright side, reduced consumption of oil will make the world a better place for Greenies.

Goodbye to Mercury

Rhe element, not the planet. As part of thinning stuff we do not need in preparation for our move, a few items have turned out to be harder to dispose of then I expected.

Back in the 1960s, mercury was something with which most kids had some chance to play. It is incredibly dense (13x water; lead will float in it), very standoffish from almost everything, and with a weird negative meniscus.  Unlike water which will slightly rise on the inside of a container, mercury will do the opposite. 

It was not generally considered a particularly risky material to have on your hands. We always washed thoroughly after handling it and we all knew it did not belong in our bodies.

Somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s, the worryworts turned mercury into thr great hazard. My recollection from chemistry classes turns out to be what EPA says: mercuric organic compounds are terrible neurotoxins and represent a serious hazard in your body including through cuts in the skin and seafood. Mercury vapor is a serious hazard and letting it heat is a bad idea. But elemental mercury is not terribly dangerous to handle.

From the procedures required to dispose of it, you would think that it requires a haz-mat suit and air cover. We are having a hard time finding somewhere that will take it. 

The uranium seems to be even harder to properly discard. This is radiation meter test sample, bought on Amazon, and delivered in normal mail, not a leadlined van. It is not uranium metal but a thumbnail sized piece of uranium ore.

It is an alpha particle emitter. Alpha particles are low energy and are stopped by a sheet of paper, your skin, or the metal can in which thus uranium sits. Like mercury, you do not want in your body, where even the short range of alpha particles can be a carcinogen.

Heck, small amounts of uranium show up in ground water in the Boise area. Yet that word radioactive causes worrywort paranoia, even at the very low levels and intensities of alpha particles.

Anyway, I do not need either the mercury or the uranium sample. I just need to get someone to accept them. The difficulty in finding a place to properly dispose of them suggests that for all the worrywortism, the powers that be want this stuff in a landfill.

A Sense of Loss

One of you is scheduled to come take this 1983 Encyclopedia Britannica away Thursday or Friday. They are, in any rational sense, an obsolete marker of a 20th century literate middle class American family. You wanted a comprehensive overview of human knowledge not just for your own curiosity, but as a starting point for your kids when they started school. While encyclopedia are never a particularly good source for a research paper, like Wikipedia or Grokopedia, they were a starting point for enough knowledge to know what to ask next. 

These were a uniformly bound and in the case of the Britannica beautiful above and beyond their content. They represented an attempt at presenting a consensus of educated academics at a time when that phrase still meant something positive. 

Articles were usually anonymous but you would sometimes get surprised at identified authors for some entries. An article in the 1963 Americana (with which I grew up and which were a companion on many boring weekends when I was 10 or 11) about American English was by H.L. Mencken, about as expert a user of 20th century American English as you could pick. He is remembered today  for the acerbic "Puritanism.—The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." This is not a fair statement of Puritan concerns but it captures well Mencken's wit, and style with a pen.

Another was an article about vigilantism by Glenn S. Dumke, for many years chancellor of the California State University system,  back when that was a sign of education not Marxism or other forms of woke. His article observed what I have since discovered in my deeper reading: In Gold Rush California, vigilantism were an expression of popular justice often no worse than the legally constituted courts.

As the title of this posting implies, there is a sense of loss as these leave. They are the loss of an aspect of 20th century American middle class idealisn that for all its flaws aimed high and achieved much. They also carry a sense of wistful personal loss.  My wife and I bought these around the time our daughter was born in 1983. They were expensive (about $1100, if I recall correctly) but something of a statement that we were going to bring our daughter up in a home that put knowledge and education at the core of her life. We already had a 1963 Americana, but the Britannica was always first in class so why not the best?

Goodbye, dear friend.