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Archive for 2019
October 21, 2019
SOD OFF, SWAMPY! NOW AN INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT: Good for These Fast Food Workers Who Manhandled Global Warming Protesters. “Employees at an In-N-Out burger restaurant in Long Beach, California are being praised for adroitly handling ‘Extinction Rebellion’ protesters who thought they could barge into the establishment, create tons of noise, and disturb everybody within earshot all for the sake of raising awareness about global warming. Rather than acquiesce to these left-wing protesters’ demands, one In-N-Out employee simply picked up a grown man who was leading the demonstration and carried him out of the joint before calling police who promptly took over the situation.”
OPEN THREAD: Be here now.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Parents stand up to the failing education establishment and win. “State testing shows that Palm Lane Elementary School students are performing at levels unthinkable just one year ago. In 13 of 14 learning categories, students showed improvement for the first time in more than 10 years. In many cases, these gains were significant, with up to 41 percent increases in academic achievement. There’s a simple reason for this radical turnaround. A little more than a year ago, Palm Lane transformed from a neighborhood school, under the influence of the powerful California Teachers Association, into a non-union, independent public charter school.”
ON THE ONE HAND, THIS IS SILLY. ON THE OTHER HAND, MITT CHOSE THE FAKE IDENTITY OF “PIERRE DELECTO,” SO HE’S FAIR GAME. Mike Huckabee Compares Mitt Romney to ‘Perverts Like Carlos Danger’ For Secret Twitter Account.
WEWORK VALUATION CRATERS: “WeWork’s board is expected to meet tomorrow to weigh emergency-financing options including a takeover by SoftBank Group Corp. that would slash the co-working company’s valuation to about $8 billion and alleviate a looming cash crunch…It is even further from the $47 billion WeWork at which was valued in a funding from SoftBank in January.”
The lads at Zero Hedge are more than a little skeptical, dubbing WeWork’s suitor as “Japan’s venture capital debacle, SoftBank,” and adding:
In other words, SoftBank is throwing even more good money after a vanity investment whose value is arguably zero, but because SoftBank wants to be able to still show idiotic slides such as this one…
… without inspiring riotous laughter, it has no choice but to buy WeWork a few more quarters of breathing room, just so SoftBank isn’t forced to mark its investment at zero.
But wait there’s more: as the WSJ adds, SoftBank will also buy more than $1BN in shares from employees and investor. One wonders just how excited SoftBank investors must be about the prospect of bailing out deeply underwater WeWork employees… if not Adam Neumann: as we know, he already extracted $700MM from the company.
The unicorns are a nice touch. Speaking of which, based on earlier reports of Neumann in action, none of this is all that “unexpected” a development, as they say at Bloomberg.
BOB MCMANUS ON NYC: Anatomy of the city’s rampant educational fraud.
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: A California Fault Line Has Started ‘Creeping’, And We Don’t Know What to Expect.
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I WONDER IF CUBA OR VENEZUELA IS BEHIND THIS? Chile on edge as worst unrest in three decades claims 11 lives.
JUDGING BY ALL APPEARANCES, IT’S NOT BECAUSE MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER, BUT BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE GETTING DUMBER: The technological singularity, an age when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, is now expected to take place in 2035, 10 years earlier than initially predicted.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Polar bear expert purged. “Global warming campaigners have done an effective job at convincing the media and much of the world that polar bears are dying out. It’s not true. In fact, thanks to a hunting ban, polar bears are a major conservation success story. Their population ballooned from around 5,000 in the 1960s to (depending on whose estimate) from 22,000 to over 30,000 today. Today the North is loaded with fat, happy, fecund bears (sorry seals). It appears that telling the truth about polar bears made Dr. Susan Crockford, a respected, published Canadian zoologist, the victim of an ideological purge. First she was removed from the University of Victoria’s speakers bureau, and then not renewed to her position as an adjunct professor.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: You Won’t Have Alec Baldwin’s Trump Impression to Kick Around Much Longer. “Baldwin’s been singing this song ever since Trump won. Again and again, he insists he’s done playing Trump, and again and again, he’s not quite done. If NBC wants to keep paying him to do something that makes him so miserable, it seems like a suitable punishment. Besides, putting him in a TV studio gets him off the street, where he does much more harm to the community.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Trial vaccine wipes out breast cancer in Florida patient.
MITT ROMNEY’S GARY HART MOMENT: “In 1987, with rumors circulating of affairs, Gary Hart challenged the media to follow him around. They did and soon found out that he was having an affair with Donna Rice. In an article published Sunday, Mitt Romney revealed that he had an anonymous Twitter account. The reporters looked for Romney relatives who had few followers and soon found out that the account was named ‘Pierre Delecto.’ It’s now been made private, but people took screenshots.”
Related: Broke: Carlos Danger. Woke: Pierre Delecto. “It’s a funny story, but it doesn’t have nearly as much meat on the bone as Carlos Danger’s online adventures.”
WE’RE GOING TO TAKE THINGS AWAY FROM YOU, ON BEHALF OF THE COMMON GOOD: Hillary Clinton Steals Joke From Late-Night Show, Suffers Mockery On Social Media.
(Classical reference in headline.)
I KNEW IT ALL ALONG: There are few articles I have ever read that I wanted so badly to be true. “Pork Fat is Officially One of the World’s Most Nutritious Foods.”
“Pork fat was given the nutritional score of 73. It bested other healthy food items like squash, salmon, and walnuts.”
Lest we forget Hitch’s brilliant expose of the bad rap endured by our planet’s most tasty animal.
POLITICS NOW NATION’S FASTEST GROWING RELIGION.
I’m so old, I can remember when the Babylon Bee was still satire, before its transformation into America’s Paper of Record.
ZOOM: 2020 Porsche Taycan 4S Is a 563-HP Entry-Level Four-Door Rocket Ship. “The 4S is now the cheapest Taycan you can buy, starting at $103,800.”
BULLY: Elizabeth Warren Promises Quid Pro Quo with Israel if Elected To Stop Settlements in West Bank. “Just days after Mick Mulvaney’s controversial comments that military aid to Ukraine was held up in exchange for cooperation with a corruption investigation, Elizabeth Warren promised that she was open to making aid to Israel conditional on how the Jewish state handles settlements in the West Bank.”
Hey, it isn’t like she’s asking them to investigate criminal activity by well-known politicians or anything awful like that.