Why is it that every time there's bot activity on Twitter, it usually comes from the left? Here's a bunch of bots, or NPCs, repeating the same exact lines about @elonmusk. pic.twitter.com/PKreTcu7dC
Aren't these…….the same people who refuse to deport millions of illegal aliens? [Checks notes] Oh, it's because illegal aliens will vote Democrat and @elonmusk won't. Got it. pic.twitter.com/GFqUvtJR7s
Perhaps there’s a lesson to the media here, about cranking out biased Dem and leftist propaganda that no one wants to read let alone pay for, but they won’t learn it.
The Washington Post, which has lost 500k subscribers in the past year, has announced layoffs are coming to the paper. The meeting didn’t go well. pic.twitter.com/hOoeyI70jj
Today at The Washington Post town hall meeting, publisher Fred Ryan walked out, refusing to answer questions after dropping a bomb that there will be targeted layoffs. Proud of my @PostGuild colleagues for standing up and asking them anyway. pic.twitter.com/sfFeN3KHG6
Origins of COVID, science behind masks & lockdowns, Hunter Biden's laptop, FBI influencing elections, Biden weaponizing government agencies and shutting down free speech? Not so much. #GoWokeGoBroke
They cheered people — including military servicemen and medical professionals — losing their jobs for refusing a vaccine. They cheered people losing jobs from businesses being endlessly forced closed.
They fear the sun and the light it will shed on their dark deeds.
Good. 🙂
Kevin McCarthy on Hannity reiterates that if he's speaker, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell won't be allowed on the intelligence committee pic.twitter.com/Trd6bbowPh
House Democrat Vice Chair Ted Lieu says it'd be "stupid" and "dark" for Republicans to remove conspiracy theorist Adam Schiff from the Intelligence Committee or investigate the Biden family's corruption. pic.twitter.com/clcZTAIktn
I love how everyone is just supposed to feel sorry for these people who were fired for lying, shadow banning, censoring, effecting elections, and hiding the truth on many matters of great importance to the public.
Newsflash folks, you’re not the victims here, and if you are, it’s due to your own malfeasance and actions. Own it.
“Inside the final days of Twitter 1.0: How Elon Musk razed us to the ground”
“One by one, Amir Shevat’s team members were disappearing.
It was past midnight in Austin, Texas on Friday November 4th, and the 46-year-old software engineer found himself unable to sleep as he waited to discover which of the workers he managed would be fired from Twitter.
Employees had been braced for massive layoffs ever since Elon Musk took over the troubled social media company, and had been told to expect a final decision the next day.
Instead, the cuts began ahead of schedule on Thursday night, when Shevat’s colleagues suddenly began vanishing from the company messaging channel – each profile going grey as their work computers were remotely “bricked”, or made inoperable.
“It was very emotional,” recalls Shevat in an interview with The Independent. “You can’t go to sleep, you can’t do anything… you have to stay there for [your employees]. That’s what leaders do, in my book.” He likens it to a scene in The Matrix where the treacherous Cipher strolls among his helpless comrades, taunting them as he unplugs their brains one by one.
In San Francisco, 48-year-old data scientist Melissa Ingle was watching the same thing. Her team had set up a WhatsApp group ahead of time so they could stay in touch if they were fired.
As the clocks hit 11pm in each successive timezone – first New York City, then Chicago, then Arizona and the American Midwest – her colleagues were forcibly logged out of Twitter’s systems, sometimes while they were writing or running computer code.
“It was like this tidal wave coming across the United States, advancing towards you, and you had no idea if you were going to be drowned or if you were standing on high enough ground to escape this,” Ingle tells The Independent.
Shevat was fired that night, while Ingle’s job would survive another week. But for them and the other roughly 13,000 people who worked for Twitter before Musk, it was only the beginning of a chaotic month-long whirlwind of bizarre demands, sudden purges, public humiliations, broken promises, and allegedly cruel and abusive management tactics.
“The treatment Twitter has given these folks has been abhorrent,” says Akiva Cohen, a lawyer representing at least 22 former Twitter employees who accuse the company of illegally withholding their severance money and benefits. “[Musk] has mocked people after firing them, gone back on his and Twitter’s word about what severance employees could expect if they were fired after the merger, fired people on the eve of a holiday, and just hasn’t seemed to recognise, at all, that he’s dealing with human beings who deserve to be treated with basic decency and respect.”
This is the story of how Elon Musk all but razed Twitter 1.0 to the ground – and of what happened to the people who stood in his way.”
—–
Sorry, not able to muster much sympathy for these people. They did this to themselves, and America.
“The nation’s housing market is beginning to cool. As a result, a new analysis shows that an alarming number of recent home purchasers are now more on their property than it’s worth.
Some 250,000 people who took out a mortgage this year to buy a home are now underwater, meaning they owe more on their loan than the home is worth, Black Knight, a mortgage software provider, found. Another million have less than 10% equity.
Those unlucky homebuyers got caught in the crunch between historically high housing prices and rapidly rising mortgage rates, which in recent months have caused real estate values to slide.
While the portion of underwater mortgages is still historically low, “a clear bifurcation of risk has emerged between mortgaged homes purchased relatively recently versus those bought early in or before the pandemic,” Black Knight said.
California’s housing market is tanking faster than any other state’s.
Housing affordability tanked in California this year. But the state’s stratospherically-high home prices have also led to it witnessing some of the biggest drops in median sale prices since much of the US housing market peaked earlier this year.
Indeed, data provided to Insider from Zillow shows that California has more cities in the list of the top metros with the biggest drop in sale prices than any other state.
According to the stats, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Oxnard (which is located near Ventura) have all seen home prices fall more than 5% from their peak values earlier this year. Additionally, Stockton has seen its median sale price drop 4.8% from its peak. That brings California’s total to seven metros out of the top 20 for the nation that have seen the most severe drop in housing prices.”
Southern California home prices fell in November, marking the fifth time in six months that prices declined amid a broad slowdown in the housing market. https://t.co/1lx04WyAkG
“Back in 2010, RNC Chair Michael Steele was heavily criticized and eventually lost his position because donors were angry about what they believed was luxurious spending on private jets, floral arrangements, chauffeur services, and member meetings in expensive tropical locales. Donors were used to frugality from the RNC under the George W. Bush administration, when “Karl Rove would bitch if there were flowers on the tables” and staff holiday parties were catered by Chick-fil-A.
Despite Joe Biden’s economy and three straight cycles of election losses, the RNC’s big-spending days are back with a vengeance.
Perhaps because of these losses both RNC donors and committee members are intensely interested in the committee’s finances, particularly the spending. Late last week, RedState was provided a report dated October 7, 2022 that examined RNC’s 2021-22 spending. It calculated more than $500,000 in private jet expenses, $64,000 at clothing retailers, and $321,000 in floral arrangements.”
“To determine how that compared with the rest of Ronna McDaniel’s tenure, RedState examined RNC expenditures from 2017 through 2022. In addition to a review of Federal Elections Commission (FEC) data, RedState spoke with current vendors, state party officials familiar with the workings, former staffers (some from McDaniel’s tenure, and some who worked for prior chairs), and several current RNC members to verify numbers and dates. Most were only willing to discuss the matters on background, and all were promised anonymity to avoid potential retaliation.
It is difficult to accurately categorize all of the expenditures because a significant number of transactions seem to be misclassified. For example, nearly $5,000 spent in 2022 at Lululemon, a luxury athletic apparel brand, was classified as “office expense,” as were two expenditures totaling $9,300 at Madison Square Garden in 2017.
Our review found that the amounts spent during the 2021-22 election cycle seem to have been par for the course and possibly even lower than previous portions of McDaniel’s tenure. According to FEC filings, since 2017, the RNC has spent:
$3.1 million on private jet services
$1.3 million on limousine/chauffeur services
$17.1 million on donor mementos
$750,000 on floral arrangements
$80,000 in alcohol-related expenditures
Nearly $400,000 has been spent on event tickets and other entertainment activities, including $30,000 for a private box at a Las Vegas Raiders game, $13,000 for Broadway shows, $9,400 at Madison Square Garden, and $43,000 at Top Golf locations in Texas, Nevada, Virginia, and Maryland.
According to a senior staffer, the private box Raiders game was part of a retreat for senior staff members. RNC funds were also used to fly the senior staffers and their plus-ones first-class to Las Vegas, and for their hotel rooms, food, and alcohol, the staffer says.
Senior staff retreats were also held at the Salamander Resort & Spa in Virginia in 2021 and 2022, according to another staffer. A national committee member says that at the 2021 retreat, held from March 19-21, 30 senior staffers and their families attended, and the RNC paid for Katie Walsh and Mike Shields to speak to the group. FEC reporting shows that the RNC paid $260,000 to the resort in 2021 and 2022, classified as travel expenses and venue rental and catering.”
“Robert O’Brien, former national security adviser in the Trump administration, says that the Russians were willing to make a deal to release both Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed before Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. The Russians reneged on the deal after Biden was declared the winner of the election, according to O’Brien.
The goal for the Russians was to improve relations between Washington and Moscow after a meeting in October 2020. But, when the election was called for Biden in November, the deal was off. The article in The Hill that reports on O’Brien’s comments does not mention an exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. “Once we lost the election, the Russians lost all interest” in talking with the Trump administration, O’Brien said.
Last week the Biden administration secured a prisoner swap for WNBA Brittney Griner and Bout. There were many critics of the lopsided deal, on both sides of the aisle, though most criticism came from Republicans. Biden insists that Whelan is being treated differently than other prisoners, likely because of the espionage charges against him. Could be. Or it could be that the Russians knew it would be easier to get an international arms dealer in exchange for a basketball player with Biden. They bet right, as it turns out.
Trump weighed in by saying he turned down a deal when he was president for Whelan and he said it included Bout. I don’t doubt his comment. He was very successful in getting Americans held overseas released. He brought home 56 hostages from 24 countries. His record of success was more in four years than the eight years of Obama – Biden. Biden fancies himself some kind of superior negotiator when he has no record to prove that. Secretary of State Blinken isn’t impressive, either.
I hope Team Biden is working as hard to free Whelan as they say they are. I also hope they are working on the other Americans held overseas, though his administration’s record isn’t stellar so far. It’s encouraging that he said the name Marc Fogel last week. I wrote about Fogel last August. He’s been the forgotten man, certainly as long as Brittney Griner was in the news. Suddenly everyone was an WNBA fan. Celebrity wins out over regular Americans.”
“News has come out regarding the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, courtesy of Judicial Watch. The watchdog group announced yesterday that it had obtained records from a FOIA lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease. The entities had failed to respond to a FOIA request filed in June of 2021 regarding “the biodistribution studies and related data for the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson& Johnson COVID vaccines.”
Judicial Watch said that the records contained information…
…regarding data Moderna submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, which indicate a “statistically significant” number of rats were born with skeletal deformations after their mothers were injected with the vaccine. The documents also reveal Moderna elected not to conduct a number of standard pharmacological studies on the laboratory test animals.
Moderna submitted a Nonclinical Overview to the FDA to have its vaccine approved. Included in that overview was information that rats born to mothers that had been given the mRNA vaccine had skeletal abnormalities that included conditions such as “rib nodules” and “wavy ribs.” Moderna said the conditions were not considered “adverse.”
Whether or not this is significant for pregnant mothers who took the jab more than likely remains to be seen. In October of this year, the CDC said that COVID-19 vaccines were recommended for people six months and older, including pregnant and nursing mothers and women who are trying to become pregnant. According to the agency, getting COVID-19 could result in complications that could affect pregnancy and a baby’s development.
The point is that Moderna should have told us about the issue with the bone problems in the rats, and the FDA and CDC certainly should have told us. I believe that is called allowing people to make informed decisions about their bodies. And last I checked, that was a very important issue for many.”
“California’s landmark environmental law has helped thwart state lawmakers’ many, many plans for society. They’re now thwarting lawmakers’ plans for themselves too.
Last week, a California appeals court brought legislators’ plans for a new office annex on the state Capitol grounds to a screeching halt when it ruled the $1.3 billion project had been greenlit without the requisite analysis of its environmental effects.
That ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Save Our Capitol!—a motley coalition of small business groups, taxpayer advocates, preservationists, and environmentalists—arguing that the public had not been given adequate opportunity to comment on the final design of the office complex and that the state hadn’t put enough thought into less environmentally impactful designs.
Giving the unincorporated group the right to sue is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
The 1970 law requires that government agencies study the environmental impacts of their projects and, where possible, mitigate those impacts. That sounds simple enough. The original intent was to force the government to stop and listen to public feedback before paving over wetlands with a new highway project.
But the “citizen-enforced” law gives anyone the ability to file administrative appeals and lawsuits arguing that any of a long list of a project’s impacts on natural, physical, cultural, and/or historic resources had not been adequately studied.
Over the decades, court decisions also extended the scope of CEQA to cover even privately sponsored projects (like a new single-family home or apartment building) that government bureaucrats had a minimal level of discretion over.
Today, the law effectively gives anyone with a few hundred dollars to spare the ability to hold up massive projects, public and private, for years or even decades with arguments that this or that impact hasn’t been exhaustively examined in reports hundreds of pages long.
By delaying new homes for years (or some cases, decades), CEQA has become a major contributor to the state’s housing crisis.
The law has enabled activists to hold up government projects—both wise and ill-advised. CEQA lawsuits helped derail California’s high-speed rail project and delayed new bike lanes. The law has been an additional headwind on the state’s overregulated marijuana industry.
CEQA made national headlines earlier this year when Berkeley activists successfully used it to freeze student enrollment at U.C. Berkeley on the grounds that the university hadn’t adequately studied the environmental impact of its growing student body.
Enter the Capitol annex project. Back in 2016, the Legislature approved a plan to rebuild the existing 70-year-old, aging office complex that is reportedly riddled with asbestos and not handicap accessible.
The project quickly became controversial. A diverse array of critics contended that it was much too expensive, too disruptive of the historic Capitol grounds, would remove too many trees, and/or would be near defenseless against January 6th-style riots and other acts of political violence.”
I remember walking through one of my daughter’s neighborhoods where there were signs that said you could get a loan for 125% to buy a new home. It was a far cry when we were required to have a whole lot of money down. I am sure many thought it was a good idea.
Wandering Views 
And now you know why they had to shut him up before he could testify.
Note that the few R’s are the usual RINO’s….
LikeLiked by 2 people
They fear him because they know what he might expose. 🙂
Good parrots, here’s your crackers. 🙂
This is who they concentrate on while millions are pouring across our borders, many of them criminals….
LikeLiked by 2 people
Perhaps there’s a lesson to the media here, about cranking out biased Dem and leftist propaganda that no one wants to read let alone pay for, but they won’t learn it.
What goes around, comes around.
LikeLiked by 2 people
They fear the sun and the light it will shed on their dark deeds.
Good. 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
I love how everyone is just supposed to feel sorry for these people who were fired for lying, shadow banning, censoring, effecting elections, and hiding the truth on many matters of great importance to the public.
Newsflash folks, you’re not the victims here, and if you are, it’s due to your own malfeasance and actions. Own it.
“Inside the final days of Twitter 1.0: How Elon Musk razed us to the ground”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/inside-the-final-days-of-twitter-10-how-elon-musk-razed-us-to-the-ground/ar-AA15hd5p
“One by one, Amir Shevat’s team members were disappearing.
It was past midnight in Austin, Texas on Friday November 4th, and the 46-year-old software engineer found himself unable to sleep as he waited to discover which of the workers he managed would be fired from Twitter.
Employees had been braced for massive layoffs ever since Elon Musk took over the troubled social media company, and had been told to expect a final decision the next day.
Instead, the cuts began ahead of schedule on Thursday night, when Shevat’s colleagues suddenly began vanishing from the company messaging channel – each profile going grey as their work computers were remotely “bricked”, or made inoperable.
“It was very emotional,” recalls Shevat in an interview with The Independent. “You can’t go to sleep, you can’t do anything… you have to stay there for [your employees]. That’s what leaders do, in my book.” He likens it to a scene in The Matrix where the treacherous Cipher strolls among his helpless comrades, taunting them as he unplugs their brains one by one.
In San Francisco, 48-year-old data scientist Melissa Ingle was watching the same thing. Her team had set up a WhatsApp group ahead of time so they could stay in touch if they were fired.
As the clocks hit 11pm in each successive timezone – first New York City, then Chicago, then Arizona and the American Midwest – her colleagues were forcibly logged out of Twitter’s systems, sometimes while they were writing or running computer code.
“It was like this tidal wave coming across the United States, advancing towards you, and you had no idea if you were going to be drowned or if you were standing on high enough ground to escape this,” Ingle tells The Independent.
Shevat was fired that night, while Ingle’s job would survive another week. But for them and the other roughly 13,000 people who worked for Twitter before Musk, it was only the beginning of a chaotic month-long whirlwind of bizarre demands, sudden purges, public humiliations, broken promises, and allegedly cruel and abusive management tactics.
“The treatment Twitter has given these folks has been abhorrent,” says Akiva Cohen, a lawyer representing at least 22 former Twitter employees who accuse the company of illegally withholding their severance money and benefits. “[Musk] has mocked people after firing them, gone back on his and Twitter’s word about what severance employees could expect if they were fired after the merger, fired people on the eve of a holiday, and just hasn’t seemed to recognise, at all, that he’s dealing with human beings who deserve to be treated with basic decency and respect.”
This is the story of how Elon Musk all but razed Twitter 1.0 to the ground – and of what happened to the people who stood in his way.”
—–
Sorry, not able to muster much sympathy for these people. They did this to themselves, and America.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This was always going to happen. An over inflated market usually bursts eventually.
“Alarming Number of Home Buyers are Underwater as U.S. Home Prices Plunge
California’s housing market is cooling fastest, hitting home equity hard.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/12/alarming-number-of-home-buyers-are-underwater-as-u-s-home-prices-plunge/
“The nation’s housing market is beginning to cool. As a result, a new analysis shows that an alarming number of recent home purchasers are now more on their property than it’s worth.
Some 250,000 people who took out a mortgage this year to buy a home are now underwater, meaning they owe more on their loan than the home is worth, Black Knight, a mortgage software provider, found. Another million have less than 10% equity.
Those unlucky homebuyers got caught in the crunch between historically high housing prices and rapidly rising mortgage rates, which in recent months have caused real estate values to slide.
While the portion of underwater mortgages is still historically low, “a clear bifurcation of risk has emerged between mortgaged homes purchased relatively recently versus those bought early in or before the pandemic,” Black Knight said.
California’s housing market is tanking faster than any other state’s.
Housing affordability tanked in California this year. But the state’s stratospherically-high home prices have also led to it witnessing some of the biggest drops in median sale prices since much of the US housing market peaked earlier this year.
Indeed, data provided to Insider from Zillow shows that California has more cities in the list of the top metros with the biggest drop in sale prices than any other state.
According to the stats, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Oxnard (which is located near Ventura) have all seen home prices fall more than 5% from their peak values earlier this year. Additionally, Stockton has seen its median sale price drop 4.8% from its peak. That brings California’s total to seven metros out of the top 20 for the nation that have seen the most severe drop in housing prices.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Clowns.
Yes, by all means, let’s keep the current crop of failed “leaders” in place.
Imagine if this money had been spent on actually trying to win elections….
“Analysis of RNC Spending Since 2017 Shows Millions Were Spent on Private Jets, Limousines, Luxury Retreats, Broadway Shows”
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2022/12/14/exclusive-analysis-of-rnc-spending-since-2017-shows-millions-were-spent-on-private-jets-limousines-luxury-retreats-broadway-shows-and-more-n673852
“Back in 2010, RNC Chair Michael Steele was heavily criticized and eventually lost his position because donors were angry about what they believed was luxurious spending on private jets, floral arrangements, chauffeur services, and member meetings in expensive tropical locales. Donors were used to frugality from the RNC under the George W. Bush administration, when “Karl Rove would bitch if there were flowers on the tables” and staff holiday parties were catered by Chick-fil-A.
Despite Joe Biden’s economy and three straight cycles of election losses, the RNC’s big-spending days are back with a vengeance.
Perhaps because of these losses both RNC donors and committee members are intensely interested in the committee’s finances, particularly the spending. Late last week, RedState was provided a report dated October 7, 2022 that examined RNC’s 2021-22 spending. It calculated more than $500,000 in private jet expenses, $64,000 at clothing retailers, and $321,000 in floral arrangements.”
“To determine how that compared with the rest of Ronna McDaniel’s tenure, RedState examined RNC expenditures from 2017 through 2022. In addition to a review of Federal Elections Commission (FEC) data, RedState spoke with current vendors, state party officials familiar with the workings, former staffers (some from McDaniel’s tenure, and some who worked for prior chairs), and several current RNC members to verify numbers and dates. Most were only willing to discuss the matters on background, and all were promised anonymity to avoid potential retaliation.
It is difficult to accurately categorize all of the expenditures because a significant number of transactions seem to be misclassified. For example, nearly $5,000 spent in 2022 at Lululemon, a luxury athletic apparel brand, was classified as “office expense,” as were two expenditures totaling $9,300 at Madison Square Garden in 2017.
Our review found that the amounts spent during the 2021-22 election cycle seem to have been par for the course and possibly even lower than previous portions of McDaniel’s tenure. According to FEC filings, since 2017, the RNC has spent:
$3.1 million on private jet services
$1.3 million on limousine/chauffeur services
$17.1 million on donor mementos
$750,000 on floral arrangements
$80,000 in alcohol-related expenditures
Nearly $400,000 has been spent on event tickets and other entertainment activities, including $30,000 for a private box at a Las Vegas Raiders game, $13,000 for Broadway shows, $9,400 at Madison Square Garden, and $43,000 at Top Golf locations in Texas, Nevada, Virginia, and Maryland.
According to a senior staffer, the private box Raiders game was part of a retreat for senior staff members. RNC funds were also used to fly the senior staffers and their plus-ones first-class to Las Vegas, and for their hotel rooms, food, and alcohol, the staffer says.
Senior staff retreats were also held at the Salamander Resort & Spa in Virginia in 2021 and 2022, according to another staffer. A national committee member says that at the 2021 retreat, held from March 19-21, 30 senior staffers and their families attended, and the RNC paid for Katie Walsh and Mike Shields to speak to the group. FEC reporting shows that the RNC paid $260,000 to the resort in 2021 and 2022, classified as travel expenses and venue rental and catering.”
==
These failures were livin’ large….
LikeLiked by 2 people
Shocked?
Not at all. Elections have consequences.
The Russians know a patsy when they see one, and Biden is one.
“O’Brien: Russians were willing to make a deal to free Paul Whelan until Trump lost the election”
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2022/12/14/obrien-russians-were-willing-to-make-a-deal-to-free-paul-whelan-until-trump-lost-the-election-n517723?cx_testId=1&cx_testVariant=cx_undefined&cx_artPos=2&cx_experienceId=EXIO3RTI8YOF#cxrecs_s
“Robert O’Brien, former national security adviser in the Trump administration, says that the Russians were willing to make a deal to release both Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed before Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. The Russians reneged on the deal after Biden was declared the winner of the election, according to O’Brien.
The goal for the Russians was to improve relations between Washington and Moscow after a meeting in October 2020. But, when the election was called for Biden in November, the deal was off. The article in The Hill that reports on O’Brien’s comments does not mention an exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. “Once we lost the election, the Russians lost all interest” in talking with the Trump administration, O’Brien said.
Last week the Biden administration secured a prisoner swap for WNBA Brittney Griner and Bout. There were many critics of the lopsided deal, on both sides of the aisle, though most criticism came from Republicans. Biden insists that Whelan is being treated differently than other prisoners, likely because of the espionage charges against him. Could be. Or it could be that the Russians knew it would be easier to get an international arms dealer in exchange for a basketball player with Biden. They bet right, as it turns out.
Trump weighed in by saying he turned down a deal when he was president for Whelan and he said it included Bout. I don’t doubt his comment. He was very successful in getting Americans held overseas released. He brought home 56 hostages from 24 countries. His record of success was more in four years than the eight years of Obama – Biden. Biden fancies himself some kind of superior negotiator when he has no record to prove that. Secretary of State Blinken isn’t impressive, either.
I hope Team Biden is working as hard to free Whelan as they say they are. I also hope they are working on the other Americans held overseas, though his administration’s record isn’t stellar so far. It’s encouraging that he said the name Marc Fogel last week. I wrote about Fogel last August. He’s been the forgotten man, certainly as long as Brittney Griner was in the news. Suddenly everyone was an WNBA fan. Celebrity wins out over regular Americans.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh boy….
“Judicial Watch Releases Damning New Information on the Moderna Vaccine”
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2022/12/14/judicial-watch-releases-new-information-on-the-moderna-vaccine-n1653605
“News has come out regarding the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, courtesy of Judicial Watch. The watchdog group announced yesterday that it had obtained records from a FOIA lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease. The entities had failed to respond to a FOIA request filed in June of 2021 regarding “the biodistribution studies and related data for the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson& Johnson COVID vaccines.”
Judicial Watch said that the records contained information…
…regarding data Moderna submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, which indicate a “statistically significant” number of rats were born with skeletal deformations after their mothers were injected with the vaccine. The documents also reveal Moderna elected not to conduct a number of standard pharmacological studies on the laboratory test animals.
Moderna submitted a Nonclinical Overview to the FDA to have its vaccine approved. Included in that overview was information that rats born to mothers that had been given the mRNA vaccine had skeletal abnormalities that included conditions such as “rib nodules” and “wavy ribs.” Moderna said the conditions were not considered “adverse.”
Whether or not this is significant for pregnant mothers who took the jab more than likely remains to be seen. In October of this year, the CDC said that COVID-19 vaccines were recommended for people six months and older, including pregnant and nursing mothers and women who are trying to become pregnant. According to the agency, getting COVID-19 could result in complications that could affect pregnancy and a baby’s development.
The point is that Moderna should have told us about the issue with the bone problems in the rats, and the FDA and CDC certainly should have told us. I believe that is called allowing people to make informed decisions about their bodies. And last I checked, that was a very important issue for many.”
LikeLiked by 3 people
Hoisted by their own petard. 🙂
“California’s Landmark Environmental Law Finally Comes for the Legislature Itself
Golden State lawmakers have refused to fix the California Environmental Quality Act. Now it could cost them a brand new office building.”
https://reason.com/2022/12/14/californias-landmark-environmental-law-finally-comes-for-the-legislature-itself/
“California’s landmark environmental law has helped thwart state lawmakers’ many, many plans for society. They’re now thwarting lawmakers’ plans for themselves too.
Last week, a California appeals court brought legislators’ plans for a new office annex on the state Capitol grounds to a screeching halt when it ruled the $1.3 billion project had been greenlit without the requisite analysis of its environmental effects.
That ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Save Our Capitol!—a motley coalition of small business groups, taxpayer advocates, preservationists, and environmentalists—arguing that the public had not been given adequate opportunity to comment on the final design of the office complex and that the state hadn’t put enough thought into less environmentally impactful designs.
Giving the unincorporated group the right to sue is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
The 1970 law requires that government agencies study the environmental impacts of their projects and, where possible, mitigate those impacts. That sounds simple enough. The original intent was to force the government to stop and listen to public feedback before paving over wetlands with a new highway project.
But the “citizen-enforced” law gives anyone the ability to file administrative appeals and lawsuits arguing that any of a long list of a project’s impacts on natural, physical, cultural, and/or historic resources had not been adequately studied.
Over the decades, court decisions also extended the scope of CEQA to cover even privately sponsored projects (like a new single-family home or apartment building) that government bureaucrats had a minimal level of discretion over.
Today, the law effectively gives anyone with a few hundred dollars to spare the ability to hold up massive projects, public and private, for years or even decades with arguments that this or that impact hasn’t been exhaustively examined in reports hundreds of pages long.
By delaying new homes for years (or some cases, decades), CEQA has become a major contributor to the state’s housing crisis.
The law has enabled activists to hold up government projects—both wise and ill-advised. CEQA lawsuits helped derail California’s high-speed rail project and delayed new bike lanes. The law has been an additional headwind on the state’s overregulated marijuana industry.
CEQA made national headlines earlier this year when Berkeley activists successfully used it to freeze student enrollment at U.C. Berkeley on the grounds that the university hadn’t adequately studied the environmental impact of its growing student body.
Enter the Capitol annex project. Back in 2016, the Legislature approved a plan to rebuild the existing 70-year-old, aging office complex that is reportedly riddled with asbestos and not handicap accessible.
The project quickly became controversial. A diverse array of critics contended that it was much too expensive, too disruptive of the historic Capitol grounds, would remove too many trees, and/or would be near defenseless against January 6th-style riots and other acts of political violence.”
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Am I misunderstanding numbers here?
Say your simple house was worth $600K when you bought it last year and it is now worth 5% less–which is $30K less? Do I have the math right?
That means your house is now worth $570K?
But if that puts you underwater you didn’t put enough money into the house to begin with and you can’t afford to live there.
Is that right?
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I remember walking through one of my daughter’s neighborhoods where there were signs that said you could get a loan for 125% to buy a new home. It was a far cry when we were required to have a whole lot of money down. I am sure many thought it was a good idea.
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