"Message: We care"

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The bridge of good intentions

NYTimes: California's Equity Agenda Is a Smashing Success

David Strom:

There is a massive movement among University of California STEM professors to bring back standardized testing. 

There is a simple reason for that, and it has nothing to do with a right-wing political awakening among the professoriate. It's because they have found themselves wasting time teaching 7th-grade math to students who are supposed to be taking advanced classes. 

Of course, it's no surprise that it is STEM professors, especially older STEM professors who haven't been brought up steeped in the SJW movement, who are leading the charge. Many, though not all, still have some connection to the real world through their work. 

Fortunately, the NYT is here to protect decency, fairness and compassion:

Strom:

If the problem is that an unusually large number of minority students can't do basic math, the solution is not to pretend that this isn't the case and call it "justice." It's to teach them math, or at least direct them to life paths where math proficiency is not required. 

We don't need engineers with certificates that say "qualified," and results say "bridge collapsed." Pawel either thinks bridges collapsing is a price worth paying for the piece of paper and the applause given to underachievers, or she lives in a fantasy land where ability is determined by credentials alone. 

I vote for the latter. Liberals love credentials. As long as we all agree that something is true, reality be damned.

Liberals always speak in aspirational terms that touch our hearts and avoid our rational minds, and they also live in a world where touching hearts is all that matters, at least in addition to having a nice, largely unearned income. They speak of equity from their expensive salons and discuss its importance at galas where they applaud each other for thinking the right things and spending enough time browbeating the hoi polloi for being concerned with actual results. 

And this:

NY Regents Scrap Graduation Exam Requirement: ‘You Don’t Assess a Fish on Climbing a Tree’

“…"… after the test became controversial because black and Hispanic candidates passed it at significantly lower rates than white candidates."

More on New York (Moron New York?)

New York’s education policy-making board passed a resolution Monday phasing out the requirement that students pass a series of Regents exams to earn a high school diploma.

Current 12th graders will be the last graduating class required to pass at least four Regents exams in math, English, science and Global Studies.

Students on track to graduate in 2028 will no longer be required to pass the exams to finish high school, but they will still take them.

…

Education officials are calling the new graduation requirements “NY Inspires”.

“NY Inspires is fundamentally about strengthening teaching and learning and creating deeper, more meaningful educational experiences for every student. By maintaining rigorous standards while giving students more opportunities to apply their knowledge, think critically, solve problems, and demonstrate what they know and can do, we are better preparing them for college, careers, civic life, and the future,” said state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa.

Shocker: two below-ask sales

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44-40 Mayo Avenue, Belle Haven, has sold for just $21.250 million on a guide price of $24.9. It’s comforting to know that there are still bargains to be had out there.

And a ranch house at 47 Husted Lane only fetched $6.650 million instead of its asked-for $7.450. That’s probably because it was described as “sun-filled” instead of “sun-drenched”. It’s not often that you see one of our finest professionals, Sally Maloney, make such a rookie error, but perhaps she was just being daring and stepping outside convention.

Pending in Old Greenwich

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24 Rocky Point Road, listed at $5.150 million but gone in 8 days, so we can assume it;’s fetching more. Owners paid $4.3 in October ‘24 and painted it white, and put it back on the market, so not bad, depending on how much Sherwin Williams charges for Arctic White these days.

Described as “sun-drenched” and located on “one of the most coveted streets in Greenwich”, because of course is: in the wacky world of real estate clichease, every house is both of those.

Rocky Point Road may in fact be the most coveted street in an AE flood zone — I haven’t checked the numbers — but this house was built in 1932, and it didn’t float away in the hurricane of 38, or Donna in 1960, or Sandy in 2012 — or if it did, it was placed back on its foundation — so water wings and a Zodiac inflatable should see you through.

A tad pricey, but I'd buy it in a heartbeat (so don’t forget to hit my donation button to the right)

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I went with Gideon on a lightning tour of Caroline McNally’s new listing at 380 North Street, yesterday, priced at $28.5 million — I don’t think I’ve seen a finer house in all my years in this racket. Designed by Mark Finlay and custom built by Hobbs for these owners in 2008, every room is just about perfect; Finlay has the ability that I haven’t seen except in Alex Kaali-Nagy designs, to build rooms that feel right-sized for humans: no matter how large a particular room is, and there are several of them here, they all still manage to feel comfortable and inviting. Too many of the Greenwich mega-mansions I’ve been in over the years are really just Costco warehouses with expensive wallpaper. Not this one.

Hobbs always builds a fine house, but they’ve outdone themselves here: beautiful moldings and finishes, antique oak flooring, solid doors, and quality windows that those of us on Anderson budgets would never recognize.

Gideon tells me that Hobbs, like a number of top builders will, for a fee, come back to a house they’ve built and bring it back to its original perfection; I don’t know whether it was Hobbs who did that work here, but someone did; I initially mistook this for new construction, not an 18-year-old house, because it looks and feels as fresh as the day it was built, which, at this price, I suppose it had better.

And then there’s the view: the house is on the top of the hill, high enough to offer a sweeping view of Long Island Sound, the Stamford skyline, and maybe the Manhattan skyline as well (if not, a stealthy nighttime visit to the neighbor’s yard by your gardner armed with some tree poison would do the trick).

12,00 square feet, 5+ acres, fabulous property. The pictures at the link don’t capture how magnificent this place is; if you look at them, you’ll probably react as I did: yeah, yeah, very nice, but I’ve seen essentially the same pictures of every other house priced from $10 million up. But this one is better than those, and that’s not the fault of the photographer, it’s just that the house has to be walked through and felt to really appreciate what’s here, and I don’t believe any photograph can capture that.

I’ve ever gushed about a house before, and almost certainly won’t do so again – it would ruin my image as a curmudgeon — but this one is truly very, very special.

Benjamin Street sale

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67 Benjamin Street, 1942 construction, punkah cooling system, was listed at $2.995 million, Gideon’s buyers paid $3.2, just because they were feeling generous. Plans are to fix it up, rent it for a few years, and then build new. Which I suspect was the original intention of the builder who paid $1.375 for the property in 2020, and then realized he could just collect his winnings at the counter without ever lifting a hammer.

punkah fan

So, back from a flying trip to Greenwich and back to blogging.

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Pal Nancy was passing through Riverside after spending time with friends on the Cape, so I took advantage of her proximity — it’s quite a bit farther to Colorado — and we caught up. Nancy was effortlessly picked up at and returned to LaGuardia by Lou Van Leeuwen’s Luxury Car Service by the way, and reports “what a wonderful man Lou is”. That’s true, he is; book accordingly.

I also deliberately stayed away from all new on the internet for the past 2 1/2 days, and wasn’t that refreshing. I went back on this morning and nothing’s changed, same old outrages, same old, same old. Oh well, let’s try to get back into things by discussing real estate first, as a warm-up.

And therein lies the problem: who would commit to any fossil fuel project when the next administration is going to stop it?

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now-shuttered phillips 66 los angeles refinery, february 27, 2026

Refineries, pipelines, power plants, hydro-dams, mines, development of new internal combustion engines

THE OIL IS NO GOOD AT THE PUMP IF YOU CAN’T REFINE IT INTO GAS OR DIESEL:

continued… It's not feedstocks. The US can get all the crude oil it needs in this hemisphere; supply chain disruption at Hormuz mainly affects the Europeans and China. (The Iran War isn't about oil, it's about preventing insane religious fanatics from getting nukes.)

No, the main reason gas prices keep going up is a squeeze in U.S. refinery capacity. Who in their right mind would commit the huge lump of capital it takes to build a new refinery just to have it shut down by anti-CO2 nutballs the next time the Democrats are running the federal government?

This is a justified fear. The state of California shut down two major oil refineries and now has to import gas, very expensively. Which they blame on greedy Big Oil, because of course they do.

For gas prices to come down, potential refinery builders have to believe they'll get their capital investment back. That means we need a major change towards a more permissive regulatory environment.

The Republicans have had two years in power to enact into law the reforms Trump made via executive orders, and failed to act. At the very least, solidifying those orders into statutes would have made them more difficult to reverse the instant the next Democrat president is sworn in. The refusal to do so says all we need to know about both parties’ devotion to keeping government exactly the way it is and they way they like it.

Delay, delay, delay — the Democrats' (and a critical core of Republicans’) judicial game plan wins again

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Enjoin the Trump administration in every way until we regain power and can make certain this assault on our deep state never occurs again. This decision makes that day grow closer.

The Supreme Court Just Ruled Against Election Security

On Monday evening, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Trump administration's emergency request to allow the U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) new ballot-mail rule to take effect for the 2026 elections.

The ruling leaves U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani's preliminary injunction in place and effectively means the rule will not govern the November midterms.

The decision has allowed a lower court ruling to stay in place that blocked the federal government from only delivering ballots to individuals who were verified registered voters in their respective states.

Justice Kavanaugh concurred with the ruling provided by the majority, saying that the new rule imposed by the United States Postal Service may be legal, but the move was made too close to the midterm election.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were the lone dissenters in the case. Alito took aim at Kavanaugh’s decision in his dissent, claiming that the courts were to blame for the case coming before the Supreme Court so close to Election Day.

The ruling deals a significant blow to Republicans who hoped to rein in mail-in ballots after Republican leadership in the Senate failed to advance election security measures before the election.