Almost certainly sold as a building lot

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33 Hillside Road, built in 1911, listed for $3.250 million and sold for $3 million. It’s across from the high school, which can bring traffic, but it’s way back from the road on 2.27 (non-divisible) acres in the RA-1 zone, and high on the hill, so that shouldn’t be objectionable.

Steam heat, no a/c, stucco siding, etc., it’d probably cost far more to bring this house up to date than to start anew, so that’s what I’m guessing will happen.

Update: Nice obituary of the late owner, Peter Hamilton, who lived here 50 years and was a very, very nice guy.

Monday reports of Friday's sales and contracts

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Sold: 42 Bruce Park Drive,guide price, $4.125 million, selling price, $4.255 million. Of course, even that price didn’t get the buyers everything they saw on the property:

“Excluded: Weathervane on roof…select Peonies from garden, Daffodil bulbs and some assorted plants from vegetable garden.”

“So long, suckers”

Sold: 10 Elskip Lane (named after the developer’s two Pekingese, Elsa and Skippy), in Bailiwick, $2.299 million asked, $2.7 million got. “One of Greenwich’s most desirable neighborhoods” according to the listing agent. Maybe so, but without a sunshine-drenched chef’s kitchen, I doubt it’s actually coveted.

ELSKIP LANE

Contract: 39 Sunshine Avenue, NoPo, listed at $1.875, gone in 12 days, so presumably going for more. The same house sold via bidding way in 2021, ask: $999,999.

I aint’ sayin’ nothing.

sunshine AVENUE

And it's even lower among college graduates of an earlier era viewing the recent product (Update)

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Gallup: Percentage of People Saying College “Very Important” Sinks To Record Low

This year, Gallup’s Aug. 3-24 poll finds that the percentage of U.S. adults viewing college as “not too important” nearly matches those rating it “very important.” The 64-point gap between them in 2013 has shrunk to just two points today.

Updte: In response to comments by The Mick and catorenasci, I offer these two articles;

Professor Reynolds on Instapundit:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The End of College as We Know It: AI is wreaking havoc in universities, but higher ed’s woes long predate ChatGPT.

What’s the matter with universities? Syracuse missed its 2026 enrollment target and may run a $30 million deficit. Minnesota is cutting its budget by $225 million over two years. Tulsa is slashing tuition by more than half. Colleges enroll 4.2% fewer undergraduates than last year. Cornell, Yale, Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis put out plans—not radical enough, if you ask me—to reimagine the university. Wossamotta U?

Colleges are known for left-leaning professors, speech suppression, bizarre courses—Occidental College taught “The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie”—and easy grading more than critical thinking, judgment and problem solving. It’s easy to blame artificial intelligence, but problems run deeper. . . .

According to Gallup, in 2013, 70% of Americans said college was very important. Today it’s only 31%. If universities don’t change, more than a few will implode, while others will wither away over decades. AI and alternative forms of learning are already rising. Something radical is needed to stop the decay of our once great universities. Who will step up?

Who indeed? The link above is supposed to be a free link, but in case it doesn’t work for you, you can read the whole article here, too. And you should.

And as for K-12 …

The Hill

The blue-state model for education has failed, and the public has caught on

“In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote in an 1879 travel book. “That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

It appears that most Americans now agree with him. New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.

What is most troubling is that the near-total contempt for our school system does not make a bit of difference. Families and students have become largely irrelevant to an education cartel, a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating political alliance of unions and politicians.

According to Gallup, only 32 percent of American adults say they are “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with the quality of K-12 education. That is the lowest figure in Gallup’s 27 years of asking the question. Public satisfaction with the school system has dropped almost 20 points since just 2024.

…. We have also seen the dismal decline in standards at elite universities like Harvard, where faculty have been compelled to teach high school-level math classes to students.

In May, faculty in the University of California system (which eliminated standardized testing to achieve greater equity in admissions) reported an alarming lack of math knowledge among new students.

Most recently, a University of California, San Diego, faculty report found a nearly 30-fold increase since 2020 in incoming students whose math skills fell below a high-school level.

Faced with low proficiency scores, teachers’ unions and school administrators have continued to lower proficiency requirements. They are simply pushing students out the door without basic skills, robbing these kids of any chance to break out of cycles of poverty and unemployment. When confronted with their poor performance, school board members have declared meritocracy to be a form of “white supremacy.” Gifted and talented programs are being eliminated in the name of so-called “equity.”

…. Figures such as Randi Weingarten with the American Federation of Teachers effectively made their unions piggy banks for the Democratic Party and appear at far-left rallies to support Democratic causes. In return, Democratic leaders give this cartel most everything that the demand, including barring competition in the form of public vouchers or tying budgets to improving the education of actual students.

It is a closed circuit. Democratic leaders increase school budgets and salaries and the unions then send back hundreds of millions to fund Democratic campaigns.

Illiteracy and innumeracy among inner city high school “graduates” are as high as 97%, and those schools have been producing that dismal result for decades, dooming black kids to another generation and hopelessness. This is called “compassion”.

This is why Learing Centar graduates (or Harvard grads, but do I repeat myself?) should never be let loose in the general population

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January 1, 1804: Haiti gains its independence

Grok did this? Who Knew?

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Grok just made a TON of people angry with its thoughts [sic] about Jesus Christ

The request to Grok: “remove the fake gods from this image”. Grok complied, and whoo, boy!

Here’s the picture Grok was requested to analyze:

But, but … that’s WAAAASIST!

Why, why … you can’t do that!

And a raghead weighs in with his own false claim:

Damn it, this is what happens when news shows fail to properly screen their guests; the result can be as dangerous to correct thinking as airlines’ failure to screen their pilots is to passengers

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Veteran Pilot Startles Interviewer With the Truth About the Dubai Hijacking

Robert Spencer:

Australia News 24 was interviewing a veteran pilot, Captain Byron Bailey. The interviewer opened the door to the truth being told when she asked him how the whole thing had happened. Bailey responded:

Yeah, I'm not really surprised with Flydubai, operating Dubai to Tel Aviv, and with Muslim pilots, or not all Muslim, but — the captain was Indian. He was the real hero in this I've flown in and out of Tel Aviv with the British airline a lot. I also flew many times out of Dubai, so I'm fairly aware of the whole situation. 

But how deep do you want to go into it? Because I, I hear, them saying, “Oh, we wonder what the motive is.” Well, excuse me, in Du— in the Middle East, the motive is, the fact that Islam calls for the death of Jews. All Jews. It's part of the core belief of Islam. This whole commission, this joke they had in Australia recently about antisemitism, just ignores the reality of what is the core belief of Islam that all Jews must die until the world becomes pure, free of Jews. 

At this point, the interviewer, sensing that this interview had spun wildly out of her control, tried to rein Bailey in, interjecting “Okay—” But the indomitable old captain blandly continued:

But this was actually probably an act of religious devotion where the guy took the advantage of the fact that he could kill Jews and martyr himself in the process, because that's what they want to do.

The interviewer tried again, steering Bailey back to discuss the technical aspects of how it happened, not the ideology that led it to happen, by saying: “Okay, let's just stick to the technical aspect here with how perhaps passengers luckily were able to get into the cockpit…” He answers affably, “Sure.” And there the available video ends.

Medical School: DEI and DIE

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I saw this on Harvard Medical’s website and it inspired another post. Can you spot the white males in this photograph?

For that matter, can you count the number of Americans? I would far prefer to entrust my health to a well trained Indian or Asian doctor than a Harvard DEI graduate, but surely there are still some Americans, male and female, capable of handling the rigors of medical school.

The Hospital Hiring Numbers That Have The Trump Admin Demanding Answers

At one hospital, only two Americans were accepted for residency positions.

Additionally, RGH’s Internal Medicine residency program has 72 residents, according to the American Medical Association’s FREIDA database, with 24 residents in each postgraduate year. The program lists J-1 visa sponsorship for international physicians.

The hospital’s reliance on foreign workers extends beyond doctors, too. In January, WXXI reported that roughly 150 international nurses had relocated to Rochester through Rochester Regional Health’s recruitment program, while another 80 were waiting for visas. RRH officials described international nursing recruitment as an important part of the health system’s workforce strategy. At the time, the officials complained that the pipeline was slowed by the Trump administration’s $100,000 fee for certain new H-1B petitions.

The Rochester controversy comes amid a broader national reliance on immigrant health care workers. Immigrants accounted for 17% of the U.S. health care workforce in 2024, including 28% of physicians and surgeons, according to KFF. Thousands of foreign-trained doctors enter U.S. residency programs each year.

Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri criticized the system, writing on X that “our medical system is structurally designed to promote foreign labor and hurt Americans.” Schmitt argued that Americans are “routinely blocked from becoming doctors by our outdated residency match program, in favor of foreign grads.”

The residency system is highly competitive, and American medical graduates must secure residency positions before they can practice independently. Critics argue that hospitals should not be turning to foreign workers for positions that could go to qualified Americans, particularly when U.S. medical graduates already face intense competition for limited residency slots.

That concern is at the center of the Rochester controversy. Public records show Rochester General Hospital sponsors H-1B workers, including medical residents, while Rochester Regional Health has actively recruited international nurses.

What remains unclear is whether 80 of the hospital’s 82 residency positions actually went to H-1B or J-1 visa holders, a number that Rochester Regional Health has not yet confirmed. D’Esposito is now demanding that the hospital show exactly how many residency slots went to foreign visa holders and how many went to Americans.

Well, Harvard

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‘Free Luigi’: Professor calls for accused murderer’s release at Harvard fat liberation panel

‘Health insurance industry is equal opportunity evil,’ Roxane Gay says

Rutgers University professor Roxane Gay called for the liberation of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering the United Healthcare CEO, at a fat liberation panel hosted at Harvard Medical School. 

….

Gay also told the audience, “The health insurance industry is equal opportunity evil.” She serves as an artist-in-residence for the Master of Science in Media, Medicine and Health and the Media and Medicine Certificate Program at Harvard Medical School.

“They are terrible for thin people, for fat people, for white people, for black people … They just want to prioritize profit over bodies and health,” she said. 

…. Gay serves as the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She is the cousin of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who resigned from her position following criticism for numerous plagiarism allegations. 

Panelists at the event, titled “Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies,” discussed “the intersection of fatness and healthcare,” according to a description of the panel on Instagram. 

They also discussed “the way fat bodies are pathologized by medical professionals with grave consequences, and how medical professionals can more ethically treat fat patients as people rather than as problems to be solved,” the post states. 

Independent journalist Benjamin Ryan called the event a “Masterclass of Medical Misinformation and Denialism About Obesity’s Health Risks,” in a post on X. 

He noted that another panelist, author Da’Shaun Harrison, said “Fascism, is the very foundation of the Western society, the very foundation of the U.S., through the transatlantic slave trade and through colonialism.”

Harrison said “body fascism” is society’s rigid set of rules for how bodies should look and function, used as a way to punish fat people.

MORE: Nearly half of young adults call Luigi Mangione’s actions ‘acceptable’ in new poll