For some reason, I’m on the email distribution list of “For the Love of Old Houses,” and one thing that this has confirmed for me is the old adage: “The three most important ingredients in evaluating real estate are location, location, and location.”

The house pictured above was built in 1919 near the ocean in Carmel, CA, about 100 miles south of San Francisco. It’s on the market for $7.995 million.  Now, consider picking this up, moving it almost anywhere else in the United States, and trying to get even half of that.

Conservatives like to say the bloom is off the rose for California and other “woke” parts of the country.  Tell that to investors in Chevron, Meta/Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, Well Fargo, Apple, Disney, Intel, Google, Northop Grumman, and Oracle. These companies are a big part of the reason that, if it were a country, California would be the fourth largest economy on Earth.

It’s true that California is often the locus of innovations that make our lives longer and healthier, not to mention more productive and convenient.  And perhaps that has given us a reputation for being progressive.  Ya know what?  We’re actually proud of that.

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The good people at Inside the Movement write:

(We’re) the action toolkit for the climate movement. Come find your place (and your voice!).  Here’s how you can join us:

All this and more — Inside the Movement.

FWIW, I love keeping track of and promoting what these folks are up to, and I heartily recommend that readers do the same.

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The New York Times reports as follows:

Election Updates: Trump falsely claims the Biden administration was ‘locked & loaded’ to kill him.

We all know that there are tens of millions of hateful morons who will believe anything Trump tells them.  But fortunately, “tens of millions” isn’t going to get the job done in November.

In 2020, the former president got 74.2 million votes and still lost by almost exactly 7 million ballots. And that was before Trump was hit with indictments from four different jurisdictions totally 88 felony counts.

In many ways, we’re a pathetic nation.  Can anyone imagine Germany, or France, or Japan electing a criminal conman to lead them?  Yet our pitiable nature only goes so far, and that’s not nearly far enough to put Trump back in the White House.

 

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From this:

While former president Donald Trump won the Kentucky primary, thousands of Republican voters cast ballots for candidates who have dropped out of the race.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has already won enough delegates to secure the nomination, and each of his rivals has dropped out of the race. However, some moderate Republicans still refuse to vote for Trump. Instead, they are casting their ballots for other candidates like Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador who ended her campaign in March.

The bad news is that, regardless of how many Republicans dislike Trump due to his criminality and opposition to the principles of democracy, Kentucky is going to vote overwhelmingly in his favor.  States that rank close to the bottom in terms of education, healthcare, and economic opportunity would vote for Adolph Hitler or Ivan the Terrible over a moderate Democrat like Joe Biden, and there’s not a goddamn thing anyone can do about that.

Fortunately, the U.S. electorate is composed largely of folks who uphold true American values: honesty, fairness, rule of law, and above all, democracy.

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The United States boasts the lowest inflation rate of the OECD nations, and that rate is holding steady at about 3.5%.

Yet the common American is having trouble affording basic goods and services.  Perhaps that’s because of record corporate profits, a phenomenon that the business world seems to be acknowledging.

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Thorium

Can solar and wind scale fast enough to keep climate change in check, by decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors?  That’s a controversial matter.  What’s not at all controversial is that nuclear power, if it can be implemented safely and cost-effectively, renders the scalability of renewables moot.

Of course, that is a big ask, considering that we’ve been promised nuclear energy that is “too cheap to meter” since the 1950s.

Below is what could be called a “Goldilocks video” when it comes to explaining a complicated subject like nuclear physics: rich and well-presented, but without being overwhelming.

The element thorium, atomic number 90, represents an opportunity for nuclear power to be implemented with no chance for weapons proliferation, meltdowns/explosions, or issues with waste disposal.

Here’s how:

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What the author of the meme here says is true–not only of some of us, but of damn near all of us.

Of course, there are “old-time” religious institutions whose adherents build their lives around the word of the bible.

I say: no big deal. Live and let live.  Are we really that desperate for controversy?

 

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It seems that there are Americans who don’t know that each and every country around the globe, more than 200 in total, had its own response to COVID-19, and that Dr. Fauci had nothing to do with the decisions in all but one.

I was curious to know what actions France took, to select a nation at random.  Interesting stuff.

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For a moment, think of all the world’s scientists and the disciplines across which they operate (see below).  Then ask yourself what percentage of these people work under coercion, censorship, fake data, manipulation, cherry-picking, and fear mongering.

I know dozens of people personally who work in these fields, and it’s hard for me to accept that the fellow in the photo with the tats and the gun knows more about the subject than I do.

Did I just write “gun?” What value does that add to this guy’s point?

 

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As we all know, a pro football player told the graduating class at Benedictine College that women should aspire to be homemakers.

This would have been newsworthy if the sponsoring body were not a small, deeply religious school in Kansas.  Does anyone think that biblical teachings on the role women play match our society’s norms in the 21st Century?

Let’s just be glad he didn’t talk about woman as the property of men, women remaining silent in church, stoning adulteresses to death, etc.