Mark Zuckerberg’s Disaster Is Taking Silicon Valley With It.

With a single earnings report and a disastrous conference call, Mark Zuckerberg wiped out $240 billion in value from his company. Meta’s was the largest one-day loss by a U.S. company ever, and the ripple effects were closer to tsunamis throughout Silicon Valley. The list of tech losers reeling from the Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) reckoning is long and full of familiar names: Spotify was 16 percent lower; Twitter was down about 6 percent; and even companies that were relatively safe, such as Apple and Microsoft, saw hundreds of billions of dollars erased from their market value. Every percentage point here is a huge sum of money gone, at least for shareholders. Why did this happen? Who is responsible? Has the bell tolled for Big Tech?

To answer that last question first, yes and no. Many of Facebook’s problems are of Zuckerberg’s own making. It wasn’t even six months ago that the billionaire tech developer decided not only to change the company’s name but to go even further — to hijack its reason for existing and create a whole new digital reality, the metaverse, amid one of the most damaging, long-lasting scandals of the company’s existence right here on planet Earth. (More on that later.) Meta spent more than $9 billion to build this metaverse last year, it was revealed in securities filings. This is an astronomical sum, especially since Zuckerberg has tried to warn investors that it could be as late as 2031 before he really gets it right. It’s the kind of leap of faith that, ironically, tends to get a more sympathetic hearing from smaller, scrappier companies, such as Magic Leap, that have far less money and resources at their disposal — except that the money comes from venture capitalists who can handle companies going bust, not the public stock markets that fuel people’s retirements.

But there are other, structural reasons for Meta’s rout, and the weight of those changes has suddenly registered with the rest of the world. The first is Tim Cook, the head of Apple, the largest company in the world. Last year, Apple allowed its users to opt out of getting followed around the internet by advertisers, kneecapping Facebook’s whole business model. Facebook is one of the avatars of surveillance capitalism, an economy that diminishes privacy in order to make a company more money. By last summer, consumers had decided they didn’t want to be tracked, with only 25 percent saying, Yeah, sure, follow me around. Now not only does Facebook get almost all of its money from advertising, but people who have iPhones — and Apple products more generally — are a much more appealing audience for advertisers since they tend to have more money than Android users. During the last three months of 2021, when inflation picked up and advertisers started to pull back on spending, Apple’s move hit Facebook hard and signaled to the rest of the world that online advertising will be going through a hard time.

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Quote O’ The Day

“Harry Reid fundamentally & permanently altered the Senate, created America’s current political landscape, paved the way for Donald Trump, & made it possible to put Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, & Barrett on the Supreme Court.”

In other words, the scumbag demoncrap Reid managed to do more damage to his partai’s plans than any opponent. Ahhhhhh HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Modern high technology strikes again; with a swift kick to the seat of the pants.


Amazon’s outage just locked people out of their homes, scrambled their refrigerators, and shut off their Christmas lights.

Does aaaaaaanyone else find this to be, I don’t know, the least little teensy weensy bit concerning?


How Amazon Outage Left Smart Homes Not So Smart After All

The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridgesroombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.

The disruption, which began at about 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co.’s parks.

Affected Amazon services included the voice assistant Alexa and Ring smart-doorbell unit. Irate device users tweeted their frustrations to Ring’s official account, with many complaining that they spent time rebooting or reinstalling their apps and devices before finding out on Twitter that there was a general Amazon Web Services outage. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down.

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Lefties Freak out on Conservatives for Doing Exactly What They Told Them to Do

and someone asked for an example of the leftist echo chamber?

Using their own rule book against them.
Rule #5 “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”


Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers

If you see Joe Biden’s picture on a gas pump these days, it’s not a tribute to his amazingly successful energy policy.

The stickers — with Biden pointing to the $3.50 a gallon gas price and saying “I did that!” — are part of a Republican guerrilla campaign to undermine the Democratic administration. They’ve gone viral online.
And it’s cheap and easy. A 100-pack of the stickers is going for just six bucks on Amazon. You might see the derisive stickers up in New Hampshire, the swing state Biden is set to visit on Tuesday to promote his $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that just passed Congress.

The Democratic president may not get the overwhelmingly positive reception he was hoping for, though.

New Hampshire is a blue state that’s in danger of going red in the 2022 mid-term election and, like the colorful leaves that fall before winter, it’s often a harbinger of chilly political winds to come. Biden’s approval rating in the Granite State is the same as it is nationally — abysmal. And the passage of the infrastructure bill won’t change that, no matter how much the Democrats and CNN celebrate it.

The gas pump stickers are similar tactics to what Democrats did to Republican presidents like Trump. Remember those “Not my President” bumper stickers? So in a way Republicans now are just returning the favor.
Biden opponents have also adopted the “Let’s Go Brandon” chant to taunt the president. It’s a PG way of saying something much more crude that has the same number of syllables, but it’s a clever tactic and it drives Democrats crazy.

This is what passes for grass roots political strategy these days. The “Let’s Go Brandon” chant and “I Did it” stickers went viral on social media platforms like TikTok.

New Hampshire is a hotbed of politics, because of the first in the nation primary. Voters have become accustomed to getting up close to presidents and candidates and aren’t afraid to confront them in person.

That’s why Biden’s visit contains some risk, although he’ll be protected in his trip to Woodstock, far out of major cities like Nashua and Manchester.
Biden is also planning to spend some quality time in the little middle class enclave of Nantucket over the Thanksgiving holiday. Nothing like going to an ultra exclusive vacation island to showcase how the infrastructure bill will help the little people in the middle of an economic crisis.

Air Force One is expected to fly right into Nantucket’s tiny airport, and Secret Service will be crawling all over the island, which I’m sure the locals will appreciate.

Portland Police Struggles to Recruit Officers to Combat Rising Murder Rate

Recruitment for Portland police’s revived Gun Violence Reduction team is at a dismal level as violent crime continues to surge in the riot-torn city.

The revelation comes on the heels of the June 16 resignation of the Portland Police Bureau’s entire Rapid Response Team, known commonly as the “riot squad” responsible for policing riot-related violence, after an officer was indicted.

According to the Wall Street Journal, retirements and resignations are also rising at local police departments across the country. There was an 18 percent increase in resignations and a 45 percent increase in retirements from April 2020 through March 2021 compared with the same period one year ago, according to a June survey by DC-based think tank Police Executive Research Forum.

And, in the Rose City itself, since 14 job openings were announced in May, only four police personnel have applied to work with Portland’s new version of the Gun Violence Reduction Team. The unit was disbanded in 2020 amid an effort to defund the police and has recently been reinstated, although there have been several changes which appear to be unappetizing for prospective job applicants.

“Portland officers say such positions, once considered prestigious, are now less desirable, given the increased scrutiny that accompanies them,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “The new unit has its own citizen-advisory board, instituted after the old unit was criticized by city leaders for racial profiling. A job description says qualifications include the ability to fight systemic racism.”

Daryl Turner, the person in charge of the union representing Portland police officers, stated: “They’re demonizing and vilifying you, and then they want to put you in a unit where you’re under an even bigger microscope.”
Following calls to defund the police, the Portland City Council last summer voted to slash $15 million from the city’s police department, including the 38-person gun violence reduction team, which was criticized for alleged racial profiling.
In 2019, 52 percent of the team’s stops were of black people, who make up 5.8 percent of the city’s population. After the team was disbanded, homicides rose. Portland police officials then proposed creating a new team in spring 2021.
There have been 53 homicides so far in 2021 and Portland is on pace to surpass its all-time high of 70 homicides in 1987, according to Portland police officials. The trend is unraveling Portland’s decades-long history of having one of the lowest homicide rates among major American cities, the Wall Street Journal reported.

With Its Power Grid Under Pressure, California Asks Residents to Avoid Charging Electric Vehicles.

Amid a West Coast heat wave that includes triple-digit temperatures, California’s power grid operators have called on residents to not use as much electricity so as to put less strain on the state’s beleaguered grid.

In the past week, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) told residents several times to voluntarily conserve energy, including asking them on social media to stop charging their electric vehicles (EVs) during peak usage times. The operator also warned users to “[avoid] use of large appliances and turning off extra lights.”

“This usually happens in the evening hours when solar generation is going offline and consumers are returning home and switching on air conditioners, lights, and appliances,” wrote the ISO.

And on June 18, the California Flex Alert Twitter page wrote that “now is the perfect time to do a load of laundry,” and urged residents to “remember to use major appliances, charge cars and devices before #FlexAlert begins at 6 p.m. today.”

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The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak:

The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.

The possibility that the pandemic began with an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is attracting fresh attention. President Biden has asked the national intelligence community to redouble efforts to investigate.

Much of the public discussion has focused on circumstantial evidence: mysterious illnesses in late 2019; the lab’s work intentionally supercharging viruses to increase lethality (known as “gain of function” research). The Chinese Communist Party has been reluctant to release relevant information. Reports based on U.S. intelligence have suggested the lab collaborated on projects with the Chinese military.

But the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19.

In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell. Since 1992 there have been at least 11 separate experiments adding a special sequence to the same location. The end result has always been supercharged viruses. . . .

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.

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AhhhhhhHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH


Atlanta councilman Antonio Brown, who voted to defund police, has car stolen

An Atlanta mayoral candidate who voted to defund millions of dollars from the local police department’s budget reportedly had his car stolen by a group of young thieves this week.

City Council Member Antonio Brown had just gotten out of his white Mercedes coupe to speak to fellow community leader Ben Norman in northwest Atlanta’s Dixie Hills community Wednesday when he spotted four or five kids — the youngest only 6 or 7, WAGA-TV reported.

The children were walking around a store — and within seconds were inside Brown’s car, he said.

“One kid was in the driver’s seat,” Brown told the outlet. “Ben attempted to open the door to get him out of the car. He fought with Ben. I then engaged and tried to get him out of the car. The three other kids were trying to figure out how to get in the car or stay out of the car. He started to hit on the gas. Ben let go.”

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And then the marxist demoncrap goobermints complain when the businesses close, like they’re supposed to accept such loss.
It makes you wonder if the unintended part of ‘unintended  consequences’ actually is.


‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.

Walgreens has closed 17 stores in Democrat-run San Francisco due to rampant shoplifting problems created by voters.

If you love watching Democrats get exactly what they voted for, read on… Feel-good stories don’t make me feel any gooder than this beauty…

By a margin of 60 to 40 percent, the idiots of California basically legalized shoplifting. Proposition 47, which passed in 2014, no longer made it a felony to steal if the value of what you steal doesn’t exceed $950. It’s also no longer a felony to receive stolen property valued at less than $950. And so…

Instead of being punished as a felon, you are hit with a misdemeanor, and in many cases not even that.

As you can imagine, this has turned into a free-for-all for shoplifters and a stone cold nightmare for retailers.

The result?

According to this headline in the far-left San Francisco Chronicle… “Out of control’: Organized crime drives S.F. shoplifting, closing 17 Walgreens in five years.”

To which, I can only say LOL.

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‘Pretextual stops’ were deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. Almost anywhere else, the stops are usually used as a pretext to search for drugs since the gun laws in most states are nowhere as strict as in NY City.


Up in smoke: New weed law leads to drop in gun busts, NYPD sources say

New York’s recent decision to legalize weed has led to an alarming drop in gun arrests — at the same time shootings are surging across the Big Apple, The Post has learned.

Under NYPD enforcement guidelines outlined in a March 31 memo that cited the new pot law ban, cops are banned from searching a vehicle’s trunk just because they smell pot during a traffic stop.

The “sweeping changes” — which took effect immediately — also prohibit cops from searching anyone just for toking up “almost anywhere that cigarette smoking is allowed.”

But large numbers of gun busts have typically been made by cops who smell fresh or burnt marijuana after pulling over a car, according to NYPD sources.

Last year, 33 percent of all gun-possession arrests resulted from vehicle stops, with a majority of those also involving weed, a source familiar with the matter said.

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I can see an ‘unintended consequence’ to this ruling, can you?


Statutory Duty to Aid People You’ve Injured May Apply Even in Self-Defense Cases
So holds a New Jersey appellate court.

A New Jersey statute, 2C:12-1.2 (“Endangering an injured victim”) provides,

[a.] A person is guilty of endangering an injured victim if he causes bodily injury to any person or solicits, aids, encourages, or attempts or agrees to aid another, who causes bodily injury to any person, and leaves the scene of the injury knowing or reasonably believing that the injured person is physically helpless, mentally incapacitated or otherwise unable to care for himself….

[c.] It is an affirmative defense to prosecution for a violation of this section that the defendant summoned medical treatment for the victim or knew that medical treatment had been summoned by another person, and protected the victim from further injury or harm until emergency assistance personnel arrived. This affirmative defense shall be proved by the defendant by a preponderance of the evidence.

In State v. Sanders, decided yesterday by the N.J. intermediate appellate court, the court (in an opinion by Judge Greta Gooden Brown, joined by Judges Jack Sabatino and Heidi Currier) held this applied even when the person had injured “another” in self-defense. Julian Sanders was prosecuted for first-degree murder, weapons possession, and endangering an injured victim:

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Rules for Radicals #4 – “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”


Woke Companies Must Provide Their Products, Services to POC for Free

American companies appear to have forgotten their role. Instead of providing products and services, they have appointed themselves to all manner of inappropriate roles. From attempting to directly influence individual state laws to indoctrinating their employees with the anti-American, inherently racist Critical Race Theory, many major corporations from Coke to Disney insist that America is racist, that we owe reparations to black people, and that we need discrimination now to address the discrimination of the past.

Okay, let’s go with that. Since major corporations have decided to enter the political arena and to engage in social engineering on behalf of People of Color (POC), let’s hold them to it. Why wait for the government to force taxpayers to foot the bill and to put things right? These companies need to start NOW, paying up and settling the debt they insist they owe to POC.

Remember Cloward-Piven? This is that, but aimed at the latest unelected, self-appointed government bodies: woke companies. We must insist that these companies begin providing–for free–any and all services and products to ALL POCs immediately. We must demand that no nonwhite person ever has to spend a penny on any Disney product, service, venue. Every POC must be welcomed at Disney hotels, where they eat and drink for free, and at Disney parks and venues, where they enjoy everything for free.

The same goes for Coke: all Coke products must be free to all POC all the time. Coke must ship their products (at their own expense of course) to every household with even one POC in residence. This must be done immediately. If the POC enjoy the product, they can sign-up for weekly or monthly deliveries of free Coke products. If a POC wants a Coke product immediately or doesn’t have a residence or can’t figure out to fill out the reorder form, they can go to their local store, and get whatever Coke product in whatever amount they want. The store will send the bill to Coke, who must pay it in full and in a timely manner.

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So, either they were working on a big firecracker for the 4th, or, they were working on an IED. Just to point out that more than a few people doing one or the other have occasionally missed a step and detonated the thing a leeeetle too early.


3 Dead After Black Powder Device Explodes Near Illinois Park

The three died from injuries they received in the explosion, LaSalle County Coroner Rich Ploch said. Autopsies were planned.

Three people have died after a black powder device exploded along a bank of the Illinois River in the northern part of the state, authorities said.

First responders were called to an area west of the Starved Rock State Park boat ramp where they they discovered three dead males around 7:20 p.m. Thursday, authorities said.

“With assistance from the (Illinois) State Police, the Kane County Bomb Squad Unit & the FBI, it was determined that the individuals appeared to have ignited a type of black powder substance along an area near the river bank,” LaSalle County Coroner Rich Ploch said…

Tesla on autopilot attacks tree


Two killed in huge blaze after driverless Tesla crashes into tree

Two men perished inside a Tesla Model S that was zooming along a Texas roadway with no one behind the wheel — when the car crashed into a tree and sparked a massive fire.

The smash-up happened around 11:30 p.m. Saturday night in The Woodlands, a neighborhood in Houston, with the blaze continuing for four hours.

One of the men was found in the front passenger seat while the other was in the back seat, Harris County Constable Mark Herman told KHOU 11. The pricey automobile has an “autopilot” function, though it wasn’t immediately clear if it was in operation.

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About that $15 per hour minimum wage……….


Taco Bell opens its first digital-only restaurant in the US

NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Taco Bell is opening its first digital-only restaurant in the U.S. on Wednesday in NYC’s Times Square.

To purchase a Chalupa or an iconic Mountain Dew Baja Blast, customers will be able to use one of the 10 automated kiosks inside the new Midtown Manhattan location.

Taco Bell

A look inside the digital-only Taco Bell. Photo credit Taco Bell

The restaurant will also serve alcoholic beverages, which must be purchased the old-fashioned way by speaking with an employee who can verify that the customer is over the age of 21.

The location, inside the iconic Paramount Building, also features a separate entrance for mobile and delivery order pick-ups from the cubbies.

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