A huge amount of NIH-funded scientific research is just labs tweaking a variable or two on the same experiment they’ve been running for years, because they know it’ll get them another round of funding. This is exactly the waste fraud and abuse DOGE should be going after. A lot more meaningful than Politico Pro subscriptions or Colombian trans operas. Furthermore, the cuts so far are to the exorbitant additional fees taken by the universities that house the labs, including private ones like Stanford and Yale. These can run to a third to a half to even 60% of the grant amount. This is what makes basic science profitable to universities. But at the end of the day it’s taxpayers subsidizing colleges, some of which have multibillion dollar endowments hidden in tax havens in the Bahamas.

I’ve gone to Texas to interview lifelong Latino Democrats who switched to GOP, and I’ve interviewed black voters in Oakland who voted Trump or very reluctantly voted for Harris. Obama came up again and again as one of the major reasons they became disillusioned with the Dems.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1862508228833161601

Here's how two black voters in Oakland experienced the Obama years. One specifically pointed to his failure to support cramdown during the financial collapse as key to her falling out with him. If this doesn't directly bear out what Sirota is saying then I don't know what would.

When I first learned of the Ninth Circuit banning homeless encampment sweeps as a violation of the 8th amendment, I assumed that there was some legal complexity to "cruel and unusual punishment" that I didn't understand. I'm reading the SCOTUS ruling, and that is not the case. The court notes that "In the 18th century, English law still 'formally tolerated' certain barbaric punishments like 'disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive.'" The 8th amendment was written to guarantee they would never emerge in America.

This is just a jaw-dropping example of how city governments transfer wealth from working residents to staffers of non-profit groups that do nothing but shuffle money while spouting activist rhetoric. Malcom Kyeyune calls this NGO racket "make-work for the PMC." This San Francisco program was funded with $110M in taxes, in part diverted from SFPD, to funnel money to non-profits, consultants, and to the very city agency tasked with disbursing the funds in the first place.

The homeless encampment problem in Sacramento makes San Francisco look like Mayberry.

When neighbors who have been threatened, harassed and vandalized call the city to complain, they get lectured about their privilege.

This by Yoel Roth sounds very sad and sympathetic until you recognize that "moderation" and "trust and safety" mean censorship, and often government censorship. Then suddenly the whole story takes on a new cast. nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opi… Amazing that even after a federal judge ruled that Roth engaged in govt censorship, and with that case almost certainly going to the Supreme Court, the New York Times lets him write an entire op-ed that doesn't even *acknowledge* that that's the basis of the criticism of him.

Oakland NAACP calls on local elected officials to declare a state of emergency around crime. Almost too many noteworthy lines to choose from:

"Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney's unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who… https://t.co/PvJZgnwM3btwitter.com/i/web/status/1…


"We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too."

Nature Medicine's complicity in suppressing scientific inquiry into the lab leak hypothesis is getting well-deserved attention. But there's another case of a science journal engaging in even more flagrant deception, this time directly at Fauci's behest. After the advocacy group White Coat Waste Project revealed in 2021 that Fauci's NIAID had funded barbaric experiments on beagles, a chorus of media outlets and factcheckers, led by WaPo's Dana Milbank, "debunked" the story.

This story is jaw-dropping. Just one detail among dozens: https://t.co/MEHgeK3Wha https://t.co/SAVIFCJk96businessinsider.com/color-of-chang…

https://twitter.com/ColorOfChange/status/1463168221230600207

Social justice is an industry. But to say it's just about raking in cash is to miss the whole picture. Many of these non-profits have paltry budgets and pay their staffers poverty wages. The benefits are psychic, not monetary.

This is quickly becoming another Vietnam for the US government, with the obvious difference of not having US soldiers on the ground, which means Americans don’t see the brutality and don’t experience the pain, keeping domestic opposition almost nonexistent.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1677107682174464001

I find it surreal that in my ultra-liberal town, there are still Ukraine flags flying in people’s lawns as the US considers flooding the war zone with cluster bombs.

Oakland.

Welcome to the Terrordome.

The two worst reporters at the Chronicle blame Whole Foods for the failure of its flagship store on 8th and Mission, including, shockingly, their security guards.

https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1650882164869722114

I've reported on this Whole Foods and the store made a point of hiring security guards from the neighborhood (which contradicts another point they make in the piece, that the store didn't hire locally).

This morning, @mtaibbi and @ShellenbergerMD testify before Congress about the largely unknown network of censors housed in NGOs, university institutions, tech platforms and government agencies who have been manipulating the public discourse for years. public.substack.com/p/exposed-amer… The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika all have ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies.

Here's a story about San Francisco, and how it's governed. Just read this headline.
sfchronicle.com/sf/article/hom… Keep reading.

These are moms of kids killed by gun violence in Oakland demanding the reinstatement of their fired police chief.

I'd dare the antifa and red rose emoji types to call them "bootlickers" but they actually probably would. "(The Mayor) has continued to bring division where the relationships (with the police) were mending, and we were getting the support from the Chief to support our efforts to prevent violence."

By “the attacks on immigrant communities” Raju is referring to deporting cartel-backed meth and fentanyl dealers.

It’s a grave insult to immigrants in SF that politicians like Raju casually conflate these predators with law-abiding foreign-born housekeepers and other workers.

https://twitter.com/manorajupd/status/1631686325551403013

This is just flagrant disinformation. There’s no evidence that Honduran nationals who deal in the Tenderloin are here against their will. Why would the Sinaloa cartel need to force people to work for them? They make >$1,000/day.

https://twitter.com/manorajupd/status/1631686335407980544

This is literally a protest to protect cartel-backed fentanyl and meth dealers.

https://twitter.com/thecoalitionsf/status/1630331464301826049

And here is a San Francisco Supervisor promoting her appearance alongside three more Supervisors in support of protecting cartel-backed fentanyl and meth dealers.

https://twitter.com/hillaryronen/status/1630696145587703808

In Oakland, birthplace of the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement, the new Mayor's firing of the city's black native son police chief has galvanized Oakland's black community leaders against anti-police activists. By @ShellenbergerMD and me. public.substack.com/p/in-the-birth… During the summer of 2020, downtown Oakland was engulfed in anti-police marches that frequently devolved into riots and arsons. As a City Council member, Mayor Sheng Thao complied with the demands of activists and voted to cut the then-Mayor's proposed police budget by $18M.

San Francisco Supervisor @HillaryRonen wants to legalize prostitution in California and create a red-light district in SF.

“If we do that, this gives total leeway to the traffickers to exploit minors,” said Elizabeth Quiroz, who was sex trafficked in SF. public.substack.com/p/san-francisc… Supervisor Ronen's proposal is in response to the intensifying street prostitution problem on Capp Street in her district. But the sex trafficking that fuels that problem was exacerbated in the first place by @Scott_Wiener's bill that decriminalized it. public.substack.com/p/why-street-p…

In December, CBP in Miami interdicted and seized a literal *ton* of fentanyl.

2 mg of fentanyl is a potentially lethal doze. 1 kg (a little over 2 lbs) can kill half a million people.

This was 2,000 lbs.

By @ioangrillo.
ioangrillo.substack.com/p/exclusive-re… More on interdiction by Ben Westhoff, with some interesting pictures of intercepted drugs: benwesthoff.substack.com/p/fentanyl-cri…

For the last week, @ShellenbergerMD and I have been tracking the story of a 14 year-old girl who was being sex trafficked in San Francisco. This morning, the private investigators who were searching for her, with SFPD, rescued her from sexual enslavement. public.substack.com/p/14-year-old-… The girl, an orphan and a runaway, was only 13 years old when she started being pimped out. Prostitution is practiced more or less out in the open in the Bay Area, especially since CA Sen. @Scott_Wiener authored a bill, now law, decriminalizing street prostitution.