Archive for 2024

CENTRAL CASTING WOULD HAVE REJECTED HIM AS BEING TOO OBVIOUS FOR THE ROLE: UC Berkeley firebomb suspect, 34, lives with parents, has PhD.

Casey Goonan was arrested Monday morning at his parents’ $1.1 million home in Pleasant Hill on suspicion of a string of arson attacks at UC Berkeley from June 1 to 16.

Feds, cops and CalFire allege the 34-year-old, a Northwestern University doctorate of African American studies, firebombed a Berkeley campus police car and carried out three other arson incidents on university grounds June 1, as well as last Thursday and Sunday.

Charges are yet to be filed by the Alameda District Attorney’s Office. His attorney, Jeff Wozniak, confirmed multiple law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, raided the home where Goonan lives with his parents in Pleasant Hill at around 10 a.m. Monday morning. A bio from a 2018 academic journal states Goonan “considers himself a scholar-activist” and an aspiring professor. No social media profiles, including LinkedIn, could be found for Goonan.

“Casey got his PhD! Onto job apps,” Goonan’s mother wrote in a 2022 Instagram post. He previously completed his undergraduate degree at UC Riverside.

Another bio from 2019 described Goonan as an “abolitionist currently living and working in Chicago.”

In online articles, Goonan has described the United States as a “god-awful fascist hell hole” where social injustices are “concealed under the blinders of white supremacist American reason.”

If reason is white supremacy, what do we call white guys firebombing stuff to get their way?

But maybe his real crime was picking his targets poorly.

No enemies to the left!

MORE NUKES IS GOOD NUKES: Finally, a REAL Clean Energy Law. “John Starkey, director of public policy at the pro-nuke American Nuclear Society called the bill ‘monumental.'”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Hunter Biden revealed top CCP leader wanted him to visit China to ‘discuss business opportunities.’

Hunter Biden informed his business associates in late 2013 that a top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader allegedly asked him to travel to China to talk about future “business opportunities,” according to an email obtained and verified by Fox News Digital.

In December 2013, Biden accompanied his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, on a six-day trip around Asia that included China, South Korea and Japan. While in Beijing, Biden introduced his father to one of his Chinese business associates, who was accompanied by another associate, in the lobby of the hotel they were staying in.

During the China leg of the trip, Biden attended multiple events with his dad, including a lunch that featured some of the most powerful CCP leaders in China. On Dec. 5, Jonathan Li, the business associate who Vice President Biden was introduced to, emailed Biden asking him how his China trip was going, prompting Biden to email later that day that everything “went very well.”

“Do you know former Governor of Hong Kong- C.H. Troung (sp?),” Hunter asked. “He wants me to come to HK to visit to discuss business opportunities. He sat next to Dad at lunch w/ Premiere and implied we knew each other- but I don’t remember him.”

This ought to be the biggest corruption story in American history.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Juneteenth Is Our Second Independence Day.

Toward the end of my term as Secretary of State, I had the opportunity to visit the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Permanently displayed in the Rotunda alongside the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights is the Emancipation Proclamation. As I stood reading, I felt the presence of my ancestors. I said a little prayer of thanks to them—and to God—for the great fortune of being born American.

Most Americans are familiar with the Emancipation Proclamation. Issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, it declared freedom for millions of slaves living in the South. Today, however, many Americans remain unaware that two more years would pass before the enslaved living in Texas learned of their freedom.

It was on June 19, 1865, that Union soldiers arrived in the farthest territory of the Confederate states—in Galveston Bay, Texas—bringing with them the news that slavery had been abolished. Major General Gordon Granger read out General Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.”

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record puts it: America Celebrates Juneteenth, The Day Republicans Freed All The Democrats’ Slaves.

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: Google quits on huge, longtime San Francisco office in premium location.

Google is planning to move out of one of its massive offices on the edge of San Francisco Bay later this year, Google confirmed to SFGATE on Thursday.

As first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Google plans to depart from its 300,000-square-foot office in One Market Plaza’s Spear Tower within the next year. This is the first time in Google has been reported to be entirely leaving a building in San Francisco, even as the tech giant has moved to cut over a million square feet of office space elsewhere in the Bay Area. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)

“We’re focused on investing in real estate efficiently to meet the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont told SFGATE in an email Thursday. “We remain committed to our long-term presence in San Francisco.” (Lamont gave an identical statement to the Chronicle.)

The Chronicle reported that Google’s lease ends in April 2025, but Lamont told SFGATE the company would move out later this year. He did not immediately respond when SFGATE asked for clarification of the timeline for the company’s departure from Spear Tower.

Fortunately, San Fran’s politicians are laser-focused in ending the doom loop, and they demand the same of their would-be successors: San Francisco Mayoral Debate: Democrat Mayor Breed Asks Challenger to Name Three Drag Queens.

BEEGE WELBORN: I Don’t Want to Get Anyone’s Hopes Up, But…THERE’S BEEN TALK.

So, this is all just kind of fun speculation, mind you. Brought on, of course, not by my twisted imagination – even I have my limits – but by a convergence of events and signs from the Heavens.

First, what was that rumble from the turgid bowels of the WaPo?

Was Taylor Lorenz hacking up another hairball?

Gads, no.

It’s someone once mistaken for a respected columnist. And what she had to say was shocking in the extreme…but, oh, so tempting…

Democrats are wrestling with an age-old problem

Maybe Hillary Clinton could come to the rescue.

DON’T PLAY WITH THEIR EMOTIONS THAT WAY.

Oh, I could go for a little cruelty.

GOP SENATOR DEMANDS FOIA COMPLIANCE AUDIT OF NIH: Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Ks.) is serious about forcing federal bureaucrats to be transparent and accountable, as required by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Recent revelations about NIH executives making a mockery of the law prompted Marshall to demand the Inspector-General at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS-IG) do a full FOIA compliance audit of NIH going back to 2014.

Since FOIA audits are not typically part of the IGs’ job description, it remains to be seen how the HHS-IG will respond to Marshall’s demands. But even if the HHS-IG refuses the senator’s demand, Marshall isn’t going away on the FOIA issue.

NOT A SINGLE HOME CONNECTED: Americans still waiting on Biden broadband plan; rural high-speed internet stuck in Dems’ red tape.

Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.

Lawmakers and internet companies blame the slow rollout on burdensome requirements for obtaining the funds, including climate change mandates, preferences for hiring union workers and the requirement that eligible companies prioritize the employment of “justice-impacted” people with criminal records to install broadband equipment.

The Commerce Department, which is distributing the funds under the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, is also attempting to regulate consumer rates, lawmakers say. This puts them at odds with internet providers and congressional Republicans, who say the law prohibits such regulation.

The slow pace of funding allocation and compliance will push the project start dates for modernizing rural internet access to 2025 and 2026, according to a timeline officials outlined in a House budget hearing.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr said the program’s goal of providing high-speed internet to most underserved areas will not be fully realized until 2030, nine years after its enactment.

Okay, but to be fair, the Biden administration have prioritizing electric car recharging stations thus far, and look how many of those have been built!

Rarely has a cabinet secretary done so little with such vast resources.

On the CBS show “Face the Nation,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had to defend the Biden administration’s woeful record of building new electric vehicle charging stations that are key to unlocking its hoped-for EV nirvana.

Host Margaret Brennan asked how it could be that, with $7.5 billion allocated for this purpose two years ago, the administration has managed to build eight.

Not 8,000, or even 80. Eight.

But back to high speed internet for a moment. If only the administration knew some one in America with the required expertise in this department:

SKYNET SMILES: How killer robot dogs could become weapons of mass destruction.

Of all the inventions in the dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror, perhaps none is more terrifying than the robotic guard dogs in Metalhead. In the episode, from the fourth series of the programme in 2017, Maxine Peake plays Bella, a woman who, along with two companions, breaks into a remote warehouse to look for medicine. Instead, she finds an autonomous “dog”, armed with a shotgun, knives and shrapnel sprays. It quickly kills both of her colleagues and chases Bella over the moorland with ruthless single-mindedness. The film is a chilling vision of machines programmed to do one thing only. The dog does not think or feel; it just kills.

Such machines are no longer fantasy. Last month, it was disclosed that United States Marines special operators were testing robotic dogs armed with guns based on sentry automatic machine guns. Robotic quadrupeds have become increasingly common across the US military in recent years, for everything from bomb disposal to perimeter patrols, but arming them is a newer development.

Not to be outdone, three weeks later, the Chinese military released a YouTube video showing its own four-legged robot, armed with an assault rifle, working alongside its soldiers on exercises. “It can serve as a new member in our urban combat operations,” one soldier says in the video, while the footage shows the rifle firing off bursts, “replacing our members to conduct reconnaissance and identify [the] enemy, and strike the target.” The film makes it clear why such a robot might be useful, able to run into dangerous situations ahead of human soldiers. In another video, an army of similar machines does press-ups in sync.

That’s not creepy at all:

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Colorado’s Legal Pot Boom Goes Bust. “It seems like a long time ago when the hippies were saying, ‘Just legalize it, man, and we’ll close the deficit!’ But to be fair, the hippies were probably stoned out of their minds when they came up with that.”

SCIENCE!

Well, it’s too late now. No point worrying anymore. Maybe that’s why Chuck Schumer broke out the gas grill?

IN 21st CENTURY COLORADO, EVEN THE CAKES ARE TRANSITIONING: Colorado Supreme Court to hear arguments in transgender cake case.

The Colorado Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a lawsuit against a Christian baker who refused to make a cake celebrating a gender transition, one of three such cases from the state that have pitted LGBTQ+ civil rights against First Amendment rights.

Two cases have centered on baker Jack Phillips, who in 2012 refused to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. Phillips partially prevailed before the U.S. Supreme Court in that case in 2018.

Colorado is 104,094 square miles in size, and has a population of 5.84 million people. How on earth can it function with only one bakery?

ALL THE OLD MOVIES WARNED US: Edward Snowden Says OpenAI Just Performed a “Calculated Betrayal of the Rights of Every Person on Earth.”

Plus: “‘I do think that the biggest application of AI is going to be mass population surveillance,’ Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green tweeted, ‘so bringing the former head of the NSA into OpenAI has some solid logic behind it.'”

The governments of the West have, for some reason, been mobilizing for war against their own populations for a while. What do you think that reason is?

WEATHER HYPE: How a Heat Dome Creates Dangerous, Record-Breaking Temperatures. Basically, the story is about summer temperatures in the nineties:

A heat dome’s high temperatures are uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous to human health. A dome over the Pacific Northwest in 2021 caused an estimated 650 heat-related deaths in the U.S. and Canada. “There is a lot of heat stress on people, on animals, and a lot of potentially dangerous situations,” Oravec said.

Chicago broke its daily record temperature on Monday, hitting 97 degrees Fahrenheit, while forecasters said Pittsburgh is expected to hit three straight days of temperatures of 95 degrees beginning Wednesday. Hartford, Conn., is set to tie record temperatures of 95 Wednesday and 97 on Thursday, while Albany, N.Y., is expected to hit a record high of 97 degrees on Wednesday.

Although New York City isn’t expected to break any records this week, temperatures will be in the low- to mid-90s. The heat index, which is a combination of heat and humidity, could reach up to 105 degrees in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, according to the National Weather Service’s New York office.

Well, okay then, it’ll be hot. In the summer. Stop the presses.

IT’S PROBABLY ALSO THE WEED: That dizzy feeling isn’t the weed – Chinese pesticides used on pot farms linked to nausea, memory loss and even cancer.

Some chemicals have been smuggled in from China — a sign of the growing involvement of Chinese gangs in legal and contraband pot farming in the US in the wake of legalization.

An LA Times and WeedWeek investigation probed some of the most popular brands of vapes and pre-rolled weed in the Golden State.

Some 25 of 42 legal pot products bought from stores and tested at private labs showed concentrations of pesticides above state or federal safety levels.

Most of the pesticides found were in low concentrations that could harm people who used them regularly.

The full extent of the health threat may not be known for years, researchers warned.

These threats are usually overblown but smoking anything isn’t very good for anybody.

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