Report from a NYC budget hotel
A budget hotel in New York is one that has a pricetag that someone other than Saudi royalty can afford. I’m staying in one of them right now, and you know what? It’s not bad.
It has some drawbacks, of course. One is the lack of a lobby; maybe four chairs and that’s it. No food except one vending machine – and another similar hotel I stayed in recently didn’t even have that. But it does have a little fridge, which helps – although no microwave, which doesn’t help. No ice bucket. No ice machine. No drawers, although two tiny square open cubbies.
No closet, but a foot-wide opening with a bar across the top and a few hangers. Woe to you if two people occupy the space and have enough clothes for a week and a couple of parties. No place to put more than one suitcase. No carpet, which must make it easier to clean and more allergy-free, but isn’t very comfy. A very small bathroom with almost no counter space.
But good beds. A good shower and lots of hot water. A decent although not overwhelming number of outlets. Speedy-enough wifi. Fairly quiet although not soundproofed.
But what’s up with this – a new pet peeve of mine, and not limited to New York hotels at all – nothing to hold onto in the shower. Now, fortunately, I don’t really need something of that sort. But it’s a nice thing to have, even for young people. And I would assume that it would protect the hotels from lawsuits as well.
Also, I’ve noticed there’s a sort of euro-styling in these places. Things look very spiffy but are small and tight, as though in a boat. But since “regular” hotels in New York and Boston are now going for between six hundred and eight hundred dollars a night for a regular room, the budget hotel is very much in my future.
The epitome of government waste
This is extraordinary, and I don’t mean that in a good way:
One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries.
The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.
FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.
This reporter spent a year investigating the agency a decade ago, and I found egregious and self-serving violations of hiring, pay, contracting, and purchase card rules. One thing I could not discover is why the agency actually existed, other than to provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees. Endless junkets to resort destinations, which employees openly used to facilitate personal vacations, were justified as building awareness of the agency in the hopes that someone would actually want to use its voluntary services.
Please read the whole thing, if you can stomach it. As bad as you may have thought the grift and corruption in government has been, this is probably worse. Note that this agency has been that way a long time – the reporter says he investigated it a decade ago, but … crickets:
What surprised me most about my FMCS investigation was what happened afterward: nothing. An inspector general made a referral to the FBI, but there were no prosecutions. Instead, President Barack Obama nominated a chief subject of the investigation to the top job.
It took DOGE and Trump to shut it down. It was a good ride – a great ride – while it lasted, and we paid for it.
But the Democrats would love for this sort of agency to continue.
Hamas “Health Ministry” casualties continue to be published by the MSM as though they’re true
It’s preposterous that the MSM continues to report like this:
For a second night in a row, Israel’s military launched airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, killing at least 13 more people by early Wednesday after more than 400 were killed the previous day, according to health officials in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory.
According to “health officials in the “Hamas-run Palestinian territory” – according to the terrorists who started the whole thing and whose death statistics have been proven false and/or misleading time and again. Who are these 400?:
Israel’s military said it had targeted a Hamas military site in the enclave’s southern al-Mawasi humanitarian zone, near the border with Egypt. At least two civilians were among those killed Wednesday, according to the Red Crescent.
The Red Crescent seems to be the Moslem version of the International Red Cross; the latter organization has been biased against Israel for quite some time.
More:
The mounting deaths come after Israel definitively ended a two-month ceasefire with Hamas before dawn Tuesday, resuming full-scale military operations in Gaza and threatening to ramp up its assault further. …
Even before Israel resumed military operations it had halted all humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza, drawing warnings from aid agencies and the United Nations that civilians would suffer unduly for the impasse in talks aimed at extending the ceasefire.
Why, those warmongering Israelis, breaking that ceasefire and stopping “humanitarian aid” as well, for no discernible reason at all! And that “impasse” in the talks – who might be responsible for that? CBS’s lips are sealed.
More:
Dr. Marc Perlmutter, an American surgeon who has been volunteering at the al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, northern Gaza, told CBS News on Tuesday that the facility was struggling to cope with the influx of new patients wounded by Israel’s attacks, and that young Palestinians were among those with the worst injuries.
“The level of bodily damage that these children get in particular is insane.”
I have little doubt that there are some injured children with terrible injuries as collateral damage in this war. Israelis have no desire to hurt children, and Gazans purposely put children in harm’s way, as we know. And who is Dr Perlmutter? Not too many American surgeons are working in Gaza hospitals these days, so I looked him up and found pretty much what I expected to find:
Mark Perlmutter is an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina. He is Jewish but believes that Zionism is “sadism” and “the moral equivalent of Nazism.”
Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon from California. He alleges that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Yet in an essay for Politico, Perlmutter and Sidhwa present themselves as physicians lacking “any political interest in the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—other than wanting it to end.” From this perch of supposed neutrality, they accuse Israel of “murdering children” yet do not have a bad word to say about Hamas, even though their article goes on for nearly 5,000 words.
The essay by Perlmutter and Sidhwa is an illustration of how the media can launder Israel’s virulent critics to render their views palatable, or even compelling to a mainstream audience.
That article on Perlmutter is from last August.
As for the CBS article, it fails to acknowledge that Hamas can’t count bodies that fast or that many or most of the dead might indeed be Hamas fighters hiding among some civilians. Plus of course, after the MSM’s horrendous reporting on the Gaza hospital strike that wasn’t, shortly after the war’s beginning, the MSM should never make this error again of publishing Hamas reports uncritically. There is no excuse. The only rational explanation is that it’s purposeful on the MSM’s part.
Oh, and speaking of hospital strikes – here’s the French MSM:
Israeli forces advanced deeper into the Gaza Strip on Friday and blew up the only specialised cancer hospital in the war-torn territory, as Israeli leaders vowed to capture more land until Hamas releases its remaining hostages.
Nasty, nasty, nasty Israelis. You have to get to paragraph number three to read this:
The Israeli military said it struck the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which was inaccessible to doctors and patients during the war, because Hamas militants were operating in the site. Turkey, which helped build and fund the hospital, said Israeli troops at one point used it as a base.
Note that weasel word “militants” from France24.
And then later:
Dr. Zaki Al-Zaqzouq, head of the hospital’s oncology department, said …
“I cannot fathom what could be gained from bombing a hospital that served as a lifeline for so many patients,” he said in a statement issued by the aid group Medical Aid for Palestinians.
He can’t fathom wanting to obliterate “Hamas militants” hiding there.
Further down we have this:
Hospitals can lose their protected status under international law if they are used for military purposes, but any operations against them must be proportional. Human rights groups and UN-backed experts have accused Israel of systematically destroying Gaza’s health care system.
Human rights groups and UN-backed “experts” say Israel is evil, and France24 dutifully reports it.
“Cornhead” announces a victory …
… of the legal variety. Here’s the link, and here’s an excerpt:
I’m a solo practitioner in Omaha. I was hired as the Special Knox County Attorney to represent it in a federal court lawsuit. …
The Knox County industrial wind farm is the flagship project for National Grid Renewables. The projected cost is $1.3 billion. North Fork Wind intends to build 150 plus wind turbines over 600 feet in height. North Fork Wind spent – exclusive of attorneys’ fees – $19.3 million developing this project. Local landowners are projected to be paid $5.8 million per year. Knox County political subdivisions are to receive $2.8 million per year. These are big numbers.
On March 14, 2025, Senior United States District Court Judge John M. Gerrard mostly granted my motion. After his ruling, I doubt that the industrial wind project will be built. The full 40-page memorandum and order can be found at PACER, docket 4:24-cv-3150.
Open thread 3/22/2025
I love the way she gives herself over utterly to the backward falls:
The Department of Education changes size and focus
Here’s the story from Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:
That political change includes plans to scale-down the U.S. Department of Education. Not truly to “eliminate” it, which would require an act of Congress, but to eliminate the leftist-NGO funding and woke education mandates, and to send most of its functions back to the states. I wondered aloud in recent posts what would become of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) through which we [Legal Insurrection’s Equal Protection Project] have filed so many complaints.
Although Trump’s executive order regarding the Department of Education does refer to closing it, it actually – according to Professor Jacobson – is “more like putting the [DoEd] on a crash diet.”
So DoEd will retain some spending and assistance program funding, as much of its current burden cannot be fully eliminated or offloaded Significantly, the remaining spending must be monitored to make sure that “any program or activity receiving Federal assistance” elimiates DEI discrimination and simlar agendas.
Will this hold up? Once again, time will tell.
Federal judges on the left are determined to stop Trump
These judges apparently consider themselves the firewall against Trump and the troglodytes who elected him:
More nationwide injunctions and restraining orders have been issued against Trump in the past month that were issued against the Biden administration in four years. On Wednesday alone, four different federal judges ordered Elon Musk to reinstate USAID workers (something he and DOGE have no authority to do), ordered President Trump to disclose sensitive operational details about the deportation flights of alleged terrorists, ordered the Department of Defense to admit individuals suffering from gender dysphoria to the military, and ordered the Department of Education to issue $600 million in DEI grants to schools.
On one level, what all this amounts to is an attempted takeover of the Executive Branch by the Judicial Branch — a judicial coup d’état. These judges are usurping President Trump’s valid exercise of his Executive Branch powers through sheer judicial fiat — a raw assertion of power by one branch of the federal government against another.
But on another, deeper level, this is an attempt by the judiciary to prevent the duly elected president from reclaiming control of the Executive Branch from the federal bureaucracy — the deep state, which has long functioned as an unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of the government. This unconstitutional fourth branch has always been controlled by Democrats and leftist ideologues who, under the guise of being nonpartisan experts neutrally administering the functions of government, have effectively supplanted the political branches. Unfortunately, to large extent the political branches have acquiesced in the usurpation of their authority.
So it’s The Left Strikes Back. Problems at the ballot box? Send in the judiciary. What failed to be accomplished through the kangaroo court lawfare to which Trump was subjected prior to his election – the goal being to prevent him from being elected to a second term at all – could possibly be accomplished by tying his hands whenever he tries to do much of anything as president. These are not unbiased decisions for the most part, but these judges consider it their duty to stop the right from changing things in any big way.
It’s somewhat similar to Russiagate during Trump’s first term, which was an attempt by the intelligence community and the FBI, DOJ, and press to hamstring Trump and if possible remove him from office. That didn’t work, either. Will this? It really depends on SCOTUS, and many people are worried about how Roberts will see his role and that of the Supreme Court.
It also reminds me very much of what’s been going on for quite some time in Israel regarding Netanyahu. There’s been a huge conflict between Israel’s extremely powerful Supreme Court (much more powerful, actually, than our own) which is controlled by the left, and Netanyahu. In Israel, the judiciary works like this:
Though Israel is in a state of war on several fronts, the judges presiding in that trial are forcing him to testify three days a week, every week, because, they have argued, it is “in the public interest” to bring the trial to a speedy conclusion. So, determining the exact number of cigars that Mr. Netanyahu received as gifts from friends has come to take precedence over his running of the war.
The judges know, of course, that they will pay no price for their risible definition of “the public interest,” which the public itself would undoubtedly have rejected. Because Israel’s deep state has achieved the dream of bureaucrats since the dawn of bureaucracy: the complete divorce of authority from accountability. The judges know that if their lopsided priorities hinder the war effort, it will be the prime minister, not those who coerced him, who will pay the political price.
At this late stage in the game, one may speculate that this is exactly the point of their whole exercise. Because the Netanyahu trial is not a real criminal procedure. It is a means for doing what elections could not: removing him from power. It is an arena of the struggle for supremacy between democracy on the one hand and the administrative state on the other. …
Under a heavy cloud of judicial-sounding terms, Israel’s Supreme Court judges have removed sovereignty itself—that is, the power of final decision over the whole realm of law and politics—from the elected branches of government and transferred it to themselves.
The Supreme Court completed this move in the course of the war, when it exercised a new power it invented for itself: judicial review over what we have for a constitution. It is now in the position to prescribe the rules of the political game, not just its concrete results.
Much much more at the link.
The JFK files and the conspiracy theories
No, I haven’t read the newly-released files. That would be quite a task. But as I already indicated, I am nearly certain that they will reveal little of note, and yet that people wedded to the various and sundry conspiracy theories of the JFK assassination will find all sorts of ways to turn them into something that lends credence to the idea that the killing was the result of a vast conspiracy.
So I find this from the Babylon Bee humorous (hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”):
According to sources, the final unredacted release of the CIA’s JFK Files contains no incriminating information, definitively proving that the CIA destroyed all their incriminating JFK Files.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” JFK assassination research enthusiast Edward Dunbar posted on X. “We finally get the files after all these years and there’s nothing in them. That can only mean they destroyed that one file that said ‘We did it’ years ago!”
Where there’s a will, there’s a way – and there has always been a will to make JFK’s assassin into something much bigger than the unimpressive lone Communist gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.
One thing about Oswald that made a deep impression on me is that, when the assassination occurred and I first saw a photo of him, I thought he was at least 35 or so. I was young and he didn’t look like a 24-year-old to me, but that’s indeed what he was. And you know what? He still looks to me like a man in his mid-thirties. This is basically meaningless, but it strikes me when I see photos of him.
Another thing that’s clear is that he was trouble – and troubled – for nearly his entire short life:
[Oswald’s father] 5][6] Robert died of a heart attack two months before Lee was born. …
As a child, Oswald was described as withdrawn and temperamental by several people who knew him. When Oswald was 12 in August 1952, his mother took him to New York City where they lived for a short time with Oswald’s half-brother, John. Oswald and his mother were later asked to leave after an argument in which Oswald allegedly struck his mother and threatened John’s wife with a pocket knife.
Oswald attended seventh grade in the Bronx, New York, but was often truant, which led to a psychiatric assessment at a juvenile reformatory. The reformatory psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, described Oswald as immersed in a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which [Oswald] tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations”. Hartogs concluded:
“Lee has to be diagnosed as “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies”. Lee has to be seen as an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self involved and conflicted mother.”
… Evelyn D. Siegel, a social worker who interviewed both Lee and Marguerite Oswald at Youth Hou”>heese, while describing “a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him”, found that he had detached himself from the world around him because “no one in it ever met any of his needs for love”. Hartogs and Siegel indicated that Marguerite gave him very little affection, with Siegel concluding that Lee “just felt that his mother never gave a damn for him. He always felt like a burden that she simply just had to tolerate.” … Hartogs reported that she did not understand that Lee’s withdrawal was a form of “violent but silent protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life”.
A great deal is known about Oswald; you can find a ton of it in the book I keep recommending for anyone who wishes to learn an enormous amount about both Oswald, the assassination as a whole, and every single conspiracy theory about it and why they don’t hold water: that book is Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, which can be found online here.
I also recommend this previous post of mine, as well as the comments there. I’ve written quite a few other posts on the assassination, but if you read just one I’d suggest it be that one.
Open thread 3/21/2025
March wind
As a child I recall learning an old rhyme that went something like this: “March wind, April showers, make room for the sweet May flowers.” And doing a search just now, I see that’s pretty close to the lyrics of this 1935 song. I don’t recall ever hearing it before, but someone obviously had quoted it to me:
Why am I writing about this? Well, it’s March, and the month is living up to its name. I’m still in New York and doing a lot of walking, and the wind has been chill and pretty fierce much of the time even though the temperature isn’t all that cold.
So what’s up with this “March wind” thing? I hadn’t a clue, but when I looked it up I discovered this:
… March is a transition month — obviously. We are heading out of the cold short days of winter into the longer and much warmer days of spring and summer. Cold air is situated north while warm air is trying to approach from the south.
Temperatures during the month of March are more extreme over shorter distances PLUS we have the heat of the sun finally at an angle that can actually warm up the surface quicker.
With the sun heating up the Earth’s surface, pockets of warm air form. These pockets of warm air start moving towards the cold dense air that is still hanging out, leftover from the winter months. The difference in the air mass temperatures (between the warm air and cold air) create differing pressures, which in turn create winds.
The greater the difference in the high and low pressures, the stronger the force of the winds. Also, the distance between an area of high pressure and an area of low pressure will also determine the speed of the moving air.
Question asked; question answered.
NOTE: When I was really little – and I mean maybe three or four years old – I thought that wind was generated by the moving trees. After all, I’d noticed that trees and leaves moved a lot on windy days, so it made perfect sense to me.
Tim Walz – one of many dodged bullets in the 2024 election
The selection of Tim Walz for her VP pick was one of Harris’ biggest mistakes in her presidential run – and that’s saying something, because she made a lot of big mistakes. But anyone who had ever paid attention to Walz previously knew he had a terrible record during the Minneapolis riots and has no real appeal on a gut level as a politician.
For me, one of his most cringe-worthy poses was his attempt to project a macho “regular guy” vibe. And he’s still trying:
Since faceplanting as Kamala Harris’ running mate, the Minnesota governor has been holding rallies and making the media rounds in a desperate attempt to boost his stock for a 2028 presidential run.
Here’s Tim:
Tim Walz on Trump supporters: "I think I can kick most of their ass" pic.twitter.com/CHstXUb7ng
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 18, 2025
How can a person be that tone deaf? Someone should tell him that what works in Minnesota doesn’t necessarily work on a national level.
Kamala Harris may be running for the governorship of California. One of her problems has been that what works in California doesn’t necessarily work on a national level. So maybe retreating to the state level is a good idea for her. I doubt she’ll run, though, unless pretty much assured she’ll win the Democratic primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in California.