2007 was the crazy Bush days. In 2008 Bush wanted a missile defense shield in Poland, pointed at Russia, and made a point of declaring Ukraine would join NATO.
745 karma · joined October 16, 2024
Lookup videos on YouTube of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Donated in the 1880's, it used to be 35 acre urban park oasis. Now it is a rodent infested drug haven. Between 4 PM and sunrise, the area is taken over by unlicensed street vendors and drug dealers, all of whom are controlled by Mexican cartel gangs using sidewalk landlords. You can purchase fentanyl in bulk, and walk one mile down the street and sell it for three times profit.
The surrounding area is mostly apartments, with no positive tax revenue base, residential or commercial. It has a population density four times Manhattan, New York, 50,000 in one square mile. 67% of residents in the community are unauthorized immigrants. 67% of children don't have a father. Most apartments are shared by two families. Only 20% of residents vote.
90% of fire department calls are overdose and illegal open bonfires set by homeless. 49% of street lights are disabled, the city estimates three years to fix. Building owners have to paint their exterior walls every day to remove gang signs. The Home Depot most profitable product is paint, even though it is id-restricted and locked up. Most of the people in the park long term are repeat criminal offenders. The city has converted the area into a de facto dumping ground for people released from jail.
Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass lives nearby.
A few weeks ago ICE made a cameo walk through trolling appearance for a few minutes, and everyone freaked out. Of course they didn't really do anything. How could they? It would require at least 500 police to sweep an area that large. Many in the park have weapons.
Bonus fact: The Tijuana River is actually in the US. It exits into the San Diego Bay watershed at Imperial Beach. 70 million gallons per day of untreated sewage, and several hundred million gallons of treated effluent per day. Even with the one water treatment plant in Tijuana Mexico, (population 2.3 million) funded by the US, and a second that the US had agreed to fund, this will not reduce the illegal sewage discharge, which is estimated to increase to 200 million? Oddly, it hasn't affected home prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Park
How MacArthur Park Became LA's Most Dangerous Spot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0odHsJvSHZE
What Happened to MacArthur Park? The Rise and Fall of LA's Urban Oasis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssU3tdAAH4
El Tijuana River National Estuarine "Research" Reserve https://maps.app.goo.gl/9gouGc9ge4ikYfgZA
Another form of stored energy uses thermal. A large scale project to plug ~50,000 idle and abandoned oil wells in Kern County, California.
Probably worth noting that for states and utilities, consumer solar without batteries has become a liability and doesn't scale up. So effectively, all future consumer solar installations in California will likely have batteries. So there will be batteries at the consumer point, and centralized large scale battery farms like this one to address peak demand and prevent situations where blackouts may need to occur.
https://eepower.com/news/engineers-repurpose-oil-wells-as-so...
The consumer market in the US no longer trends off government models though. Thin and mini models seem to be more popular, and since most consumers rarely fire their weapon, maintainability and reliability are secondary. The P365 is the most popular in the US at the moment, but it probably has a low duty cycle.
The process removes the top 12" and replaces with with clean fill. The governor granted an exemption from California Environment Quality Act (CEQA), and recent legislation passed will streamline or waive the process for all future development. The material will go somewhere, the question is which NIMBY is the recipient.
Probably worth noting that before the CEQA revamp legislation this year, 50% of all California construction development was challenged/thwarted with lawsuits by the same people for multiple or no reasons. That usually resulted in one or two years of delays, with the cost added to the construction. The price to build "affordable" housing in California is $700,000 to $1,000,000.
https://www.pacificresearch.org/newsom-right-to-waive-ceqa-f...
https://serverfault.com/questions/1172216/issue-with-samsung...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-health-dro...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5536733/...
https://www.wiz.io/blog/s1ngularity-supply-chain-attack
"contained a post-installation malware script designed to harvest sensitive developer assets, including cryptocurrency wallets, GitHub and npm tokens, SSH keys, and more. The malware leveraged AI command-line tools (including Claude, Gemini, and Q) to aid in their reconnaissance efforts, and then exfiltrated the stolen data to publicly accessible attacker-created repositories within victims’ GitHub accounts.
"The malware attempted lockout by appending sudo shutdown -h 0 to ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc, effectively causing system shutdowns on new terminal sessions.
"Exfiltrated data was double and triple-base64 encoded and uploaded to attacker-controlled victim GitHub repositories named s1ngularity-repository, s1ngularity-repository-0, or s1ngularity-repository-1, thousands of which were observed publicly.
"Among the varied leaked data here, we’ve observed over a thousand valid Github tokens, dozens of valid cloud credentials and NPM tokens, and roughly twenty thousand files leaked. In many cases, the malware appears to have run on developer machines, often via the NX VSCode extension. We’ve also observed cases where the malware ran in build pipelines, such as Github Actions.
"On August 27, 2025 9AM UTC Github disabled all attacker created repositories to prevent this data from being exposed, but the exposure window (which lasted around 8 hours) was sufficient for these repositories to have been downloaded by the original attacker and other malicious actors. Furthermore, base64-encoding is trivially decodable, meaning that this data should be treated as effectively public."
The US is actually in a weird place where it has more oil (and natural gas) than any other country by far, but has competition everywhere when selling it and now refining capacity will soon drop to the point where the US will need to import millions of gallons of refined petroleum products per day, probably from Mexico and Asia, with tariffs.
https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/first-forensic-confirmation-of...
https://citizenlab.ca/2023/09/blastpass-nso-group-iphone-zer...
https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/forcedentry-nso-group-imessage...
https://citizenlab.ca/2020/12/the-great-ipwn-journalists-hac...
If I am a doctor on a task force, I'm not wasting my time doing that paperwork. Also, this essentially means that nearly every doctor would be in scope.
https://eepower.com/news/engineers-repurpose-oil-wells-as-so...
California has thousands of abandoned (orphaned) oil and gas wells, with more than 5,500 identified as "likely orphaned" in 2023, and an additional 70,000 economically marginal and idle wells that could become orphaned in the future.
Kern County, California has 75% of the state oil wells, and the largest solar farms. Even after the 70,000 wells are idled, Kern County will continue to produce enough oil to meet all internal demands in California, although the state no longer has the refining capacity or anywhere to lay off the oil.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-08-06/major-c...
And no one knew a single thing about it until the incident. That is the current network management state of the art, let Cloudflare deal.
https://krcrtv.com/news/local/trinity-county-urges-congress-...
https://www.floridamemory.com/fpc/memory/onlineclassroom/rai...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GxIeCe7bkAEwXju?format=jpg&name=...
Grocery stores have a low profit margin. In 2020 it was 3%. In 2024 it was 1.6%. That is not a good number. Assume this number is two times worse in California or other areas with spontaneous looting. Lots of empty shelves with pictures of products you can pick up at the counter.
https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts/grocery...