Really interesting Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir explaining why we are involved in AI
He says Silicon Valley people may have a 180 IQ but they are goats! Kek
1:23
https://rumble.com/embed/v3wnkrz/?pub=4
Baffled means Collusion, the new definition
Europe gripped by once-in-a-decade snow event as freeze heads to Britain
The last time Europe had this much snow cover was in 2010 - more than a decade ago.
By Cally Brooks: 09:59, Sat, Dec 2, 2023
The UK is set to be submerged in snow as 60 percent of Europe is covered in it for the first time since 2010.
Temperatures have drastically dropped across Britain this week, with snowfall in some parts of the UK and frosty conditions elsewhere.
Across Europe, countries have been battling heavy snowfall, with weather maps showing a large percentage of snow coverage across countries like Scandinavia and Russia.
According to Met4Cast, the last time Europe had this much snow cover at this time of year was in 2010.
And it's not likely to stop anytime soon, with more snow forecast in the coming days.
"We could see some snow overnight Saturday into Sunday in the Midlands, but it’s patchy and uncertain,” said Operational Meteorologist at the Met Office, Tom Morgan. “Monday is the most likely day for disruption from snow.”
IAC: Fred gets emotional as Sam brings back stock cubes
Thousands of towns and villages in Moldova, Ukraine and Bulgaria were left without electricity on Friday. In Moldova, four people were reported dead, with two bodies being recovered from cars that had been buried in snowdrifts.
In Ukraine, severe snowstorms impacted travel and left 10 people dead across the Odesa, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Kyiv regions.
1,500 villages and towns were left without power as they battled the snowstorm, leaving 2,500 people in need of rescue and around 850 cars needing to be towed.
Bulgaria was also badly affected, declaring a state of emergency as winter storms left more than 1,000 villages without electricity.
Parts of the UK experienced snowfall on Friday, with Glasgow Airport forced to close amid flurries. The Met Office has issued a yellow weather warning for the entire east coast of Britain as temperatures are set to fall as low as -10C.
The UK Health Security Agency has issued amber cold health alerts in five regions North East and Yorkshire and the Humber, the East Midlands, West Midlands, North West until December 5.
Warnings for ice are also in force across parts of Northern Ireland and southwest England until 10am.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/1841344/uk-cold-weather-europe-snow-event-map
https://x.com/ScottMGreer/status/1731149229677056236?s=20
Why Cornel West is Broke
Legal and tax documents filed over six decades help explain how Cornel West squandered millions of d… [+] PAUL SANCYA/AP
Dec 1, 2023,06:30am EST
Newly uncovered divorce filings reveal allegations of a “secret life” and help explain why the presidential candidate, who has earned millions of dollars over the years, has hardly anything left.
By Jemima Denham, Contributor, and Zach Everson, Forbes Staff
Cornel West has been a fixture of American society for more than three decades, publishing books, teaching at Ivy League institutions, commenting on cable news, collaborating on music with Prince—even popping up in sequels to the Matrix. Ubiquity provided liquidity, with West earning an estimated $15 million or so over the last 30 years. But oddly, as he mounts an independent run for president, his net worth resembles that of a first-year adjunct professor. “I live paycheck to paycheck,” says West.
A review of federal filings and property records confirms that West’s net worth is near zero. Other outlets have previously reported on his troubles paying taxes over the years. But no one so far has explained how someone so successful became so broke. With West in position to affect who becomes America’s next president, Forbes set out to answer that question, digging into heaps of legal and tax documents filed in various jurisdictions over six decades. Turns out much of the damage was self-inflicted.
West burst onto the national scene in the 1990s with Race Matters, a compilation of essays that sold more than 500,000 copies. He traveled the country to deliver speeches, hauling in more than $500,000 a year. Much of the money flowed to him with no taxes deducted. West blew it—on many things, especially women—leaving little left for Uncle Sam by the time tax season arrived. The liens piled up: $144,000 in 1998, $105,000 in 2000, $205,000 in 2001 and so on. “Almost like a reptile biting its tail,” he says now.
West lived in a Four Seasons condo in Boston, which he later admitted he could not afford, and rode around in a Mercedes or Cadillac. One of his four ex-wives accused West of maintaining a covert apartment in Boston for $5,000 a month to use as a love den. She also alleged that, despite not having any health conditions, he later took a medical leave from his job at Harvard to live a “secret life” with another woman in New Mexico.
In court documents filed in 2002 and 2003, West did not deny burning money on affairs, at least one of which produced a child. (He acknowledged he had an 18-month-old daughter at the time.) And in his 2009 memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, West confirms some of the less-salacious details. But when asked in November to respond to claims he’d “hid or wasted” close to a million dollars, at least some of which went to support extramarital affairs, West offered via email that “The allegations were too ridiculous to attend to–then and now, my brother!” He did not respond to a follow-up inquiry that detailed his ex-wife’s specific allegations.
In 2002, he blamed his financial troubles on other factors, such as his soon-to-be ex-wife’s propensity to spend money on Chanel clothing, upscale dining and antique furniture. More recently, after news about his tax liens surfaced, West elaborated on the genesis of his debt problems, suggesting the student loans he incurred as an undergraduate put him in a “black hole” that he could never escape.
That’s nonsense. After three decades in the public eye, West has earned more than enough money to pay back his student loans. Without enormous earnings, West would not owe the federal government so much in unpaid taxes (he still has about $483,000 in outstanding tax liens today). The real explanation for West’s financial problems: recklessness. Despite his professorial appearance—West is famous for his toothy smile and W. E. B. Du Bois-inspired, three-piece suits—he has spent and lived wildly, impregnating and abandoning multiple women, leaving him with significant divorce and child-support payments, some of which he failed to pay. If government leadership is largely about managing money and maintaining relationships, it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the field who is less prepared for the job than Cornel West.….
https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fjemimadenham%2F2023%2F12%2F01%2Fwhy-cornel-west-is-broke%2F%3Fsh%3D76b701a055aa
==Replace American Jewish Communal Leadership
Look around at the disarray and the betrayal of Jews by alleged friends and allies, and you’ll see a bitter truth: Our leadership has gone bad==
BY ALANA NEWHOUSE
NOVEMBER 08, 2023.1/3
Years ago, I read a 1923 short story by Dovid Bergelson that has haunted me ever since. Titled “Among the Refugees,” it revolves around a tormented Jew originally from a region called Volhynia, who has moved to a squalid boarding house in Berlin. One day, into the room across the hall from him moves the notorious pogromist from his hometown, the person responsible for, among many other horrors, his grandfather’s death. The villain isn’t hiding or obscuring his identity; in fact, he’s brazenly using his own name.
The distressed young man realizes the opportunity that has come to him: He must kill this devil. But he does not have a weapon, and has no family or friends to turn to for help. One day, he bumps into a man he knows from Volhynia, a man named Beryl, who has connections to the respected leaders of the Jewish community in town: “He’s always involved with Jewish groups here. He associated with them, and they associate with him … Who should I turn to if not him?” he thinks. He asks Beryl to beseech the elders to get him a gun so that he can rid the world of this murderous enemy of the Jews.
The next day, he meets Beryl, who ushers him off to the planned secret rendezvous. There, he is taken into a room with the Jewish leaders, who have brought not a weapon to be used on the enemy but a psychiatrist—to be used on him. In their eyes, this young Jewish man’s instinct for personal and collective self-defense is not heroism; it’s hysteria.
That the story takes place—and was written—between the wars, before the horror of the Holocaust, adds to our terror as modern readers—turning it from a story ostensibly about a revenge killing into one about Jewish communal self-defense. How on earth could those so-called leaders be so blind, so dismissive of the concerns of someone so close to the ground, so outrageously entitled?How indeed.
Now that pogromists are parading in the streets, smashing windows and noses, and cheering on Jewish genocide, it’s easy for Jewish leaders to wave the biggest blue-and-white flag they can find and vow to take “immediate and concrete action,” whatever that is. But look around at the disarray and the chaos and the betrayal of Jews by alleged friends and allies, and you’ll see a bitter truth: Our communal leadership has gone bad.
Bad leadership failed us on college campuses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into “advocacy” while sucking up to university administrations and leaders turning once-illustrious institutions into festering swamps of antisemitism.
Bad leadership failed us on the international scene, complicit in the single greatest blow America has ever dealt to Israeli security, the Obama administration’s Iran deal, while mumbling stupidly about bipartisanship. They swaggered about D.C. declaiming their political clout and influence, yet they were unwilling, when the hour of need arose, to withdraw their support for those intent on giving a genocidal, Holocaust-denying regime hundreds of billions of dollars, regional legitimacy, and the power and motivation to resume exporting death and destruction against its enemies, the Jews first and foremost.
Bad leadership failed us on the political front, rushing to embrace obvious Jew-haters. Like New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, for example, which was eager to engage Alexandria “the U.S. tested chemical weapons in Vieques as a dress rehearsal for Israeli war crimes in Gaza” Ocasio-Cortez in a fawning dialogue while simultaneously hosting seminars on “white supremacy” and cracking down on Orthodox communities that dared to defy the state’s draconian COVID restrictions.
Bad leadership failed us by failing to prioritize our own, very real needs, abandoning its core mission—to serve and protect Jews—in order to imagine itself instead as yet another tile in the mosaic of the Democratic Party’s contemporary coalition of grievances. Earlier this year, when a Tablet staffer asked a senior executive at a very large American Jewish organization what their group’s top priority was for the year, this person replied, without missing a beat: “Ukraine.” What?
In every precinct and every channel, these leaders not only failed to see what was coming down the pike; they also did their best to sideline and even demonize those who did—snidely dismissing our clear-eyed observers, like Bari and Liel, who’ve grown hoarse from sounding the alarm about intersectionality and antisemitism in left-wing spaces, or Lee, Tony, and Mike, righteous gentiles who’ve spent years warning about the insane and irreversible dangers—to the U.S., to Israel, and to American Jews—of playing footsie with Iran…
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/replace-american-jewish-communal-leadership-adl
Replace American Jewish Communal Leadership
2/2 or 3
Some of these misguided communal leaders have been chastened by recent events.Andres Spokoiny, of the Jewish Funders Network, spent years using social media platforms to argue that these concerns, particularly about antisemitism in liberal circles, were overwrought. Two weeks ago, in a public forum, Liel asked him point-blank about the large philanthropies he had engaged turning sharply against Israel when it mattered most, like the Ford Foundation—whose CEO, months after appearing as a featured speaker at JFN’s conference, issued a stunningly terrible statement in the wake of the Hamas attacks. Spokoiny answered briefly, clearly, and convincingly. He said he had been wrong, that he had learned his lesson, and that he would not be fooled again.
Others, though, are more sure of themselves than ever. Appearing on Eli Lake’s podcast, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt was asked why the organization under his leadership dedicated itself to decrying right-wing antisemitism and running cover for a censorship and surveillance effort that undermines the First Amendment, not to mention the centurylong Jewish commitment to it?
What did Greenblatt—whose ADL published a guide to America’s leading antisemites that did not include Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar but only a handful of meaningless right-wing bloggers; who stood shoulder to shoulder with Al Sharpton, America’s most prominent living pogromist, to demand that social media outlets censor speech, including of a president elected by 60 million Americans; and who repeatedly championed the Black Lives Matter movement even when it was abundantly clear that it was both financially corrupt as well as deeply anti-Israel—have to say in response?
“We definitely do not play this left-right game,” Greenblatt replied, before going on to blame the media for making up lies.
Of course, it’s not hard to know why. Greenblatt can’t give up on this intersectional racket, since it’s responsible for nearly doubling the ADL’s coffers under his reign. But that’s business, not communal leadership—and we, the community, must finally accept that.
Two weeks ago, a friend was on multiple calls with other Jewish communal professionals where people were trying to square our new reality with the mixed-up ideas they had come to believe were our communal priorities. “We need to hold space in the Jewish community for Jews who are struggling in this moment because they don’t support Israel.” Do we? It seems to me this is an opportunity to bring clarity to what has been obscured, by answering charges like this one as directly as possible: “It is very important that we not misrepresent ourselves, because then these people will ultimately—rightly—feel gaslit. We are Zionists, and we believe that Zionism is central to our work. If this makes our spaces not right for certain people, we need—for their sakes and ours—for them to know it now.”
If we want more morally focused leaders, we need to start being more active followers. Stop reflexively writing checks to legacy organizations whose real work you don’t actually understand. Start demanding to see charters and mission statements, and demanding that they be changed immediately if somewhere along the way they lost the thread of concern for Jews, Israel, and America. And if the leaders at these organizations themselves seem unclear about or uncommitted to the priorities you believe should be paramount right now, fire them or jump ship. Empower new people and new organizations with the smarts and strength and vision to truly lead.
Now is not the time to forgive and forget, because we have no way of knowing if the worst is behind us or not. And I, for one, will not end up on some shrink’s couch, wishing for the gun that never came.
Barron is 6’8”
I tried to download the video but no sound again. Go to the twitter link, i love President Trump and his family!
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1731133789701898676?s=20
See theres no sound
The Curious Fraud Case Against Trump Just Got ‘Curiouser’
1/2
“Curiouser and curiouser.” Those words from Alice in Wonderland seem the only apt description of the case unfolding in the New York courtroom of Justice Arthur F. Engoron over the alleged fraudulent practices of former president Donald Trump, his family and his business.
The charges brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James were curious from the start. James had run for office on the pledge that she would hunt down Trump, a promise that apparently thrilled many New Yorkers. However, she brought a civil case based on Trump over- and under-estimating the values of his properties.
As some of us have previously stated, there do appear to have been assets that were inflated or deflated in value. That may be a common practice in New York real estate, but it is not a good practice. Indeed, I believe a penalty is warranted for such practices, but those should be uniformly imposed and would be a fraction of the fortune sought by James in this case.
The evidence shows that banks made money on these loans, which were paid off either early or on time. In fact, none of the banks complained about the Trump organization’s estimations, which were accompanied by a warning that the banks should not rely on those estimates.
Moreover, James is seeking to kill a corporation once viewed as iconic in New York, not just by denying the certificates for the Trumps to do business in the city but by imposing $250 million in penalties for money that no one actually lost.
That all became curiouser this week when two bankers were called by the defense. Rosemary Vrablic and David Williams worked on Deutsche Bank loans to the Trumps for years, and they testified that the banks made millions and viewed Trump as a much-sought-after "whale" client — what Vrablic described as a “very high net-worth individual.”
Williams testified that net worth is "subjective" in such documents as property valuations and are offered as mere "estimates." It is not uncommon for a bank's estimates to differ from a client’s.
Vrablic wrote emails at the time about the benefits to the bank in dealing with the Trumps, as well as pitches to the family that the bank was happy to extend conditions which allowed added benefits of "flexibility, rate and service" to get the business relationship.
Justice Engoron seemed irritated by the testimony, however, and when Trump counsel asked why the bank was so eager to secure future loans, Engoron snapped back: "They're trying to make money. Why wouldn't they be interested?”
The real question here is James’ overriding interest in killing the company. Engoron has already declared that Trump is guilty of fraud, and he is now weighing the massive penalties sought by James — and eagerly supported by many New Yorkers.…
https://themessenger.com/opinion/donald-trump-fraud-trial-engoron-letitia-james-bankers-testimony
2/2
That eagerness could prove the court's undoing, however. Some of Engoron's earlier orders are currently under review. Yet it is James’ demand for the effective dissolution of the corporation and $250 million in penalties that could push this case beyond the curious to the unconstitutional.
It is relatively rare for civil damages to trigger constitutional review, and it is still far from clear that this case will rise to that level. The New York law is unique in allowing massive penalties without the loss of a single dollar by a bank. However, James wants dissolution and crippling damages, and that could trigger a higher-court review.
In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case, BMW of North America v. Gore, striking down a punitive damage award. The case involved the practice of the company to repair and repaint cars damaged in transit without telling the customers. The jury in the original trial awarded $4,000 in compensatory damages for the lost value to the car in not having a factory paint job and other damage; it then imposed $4 million in punitive damages for the company’s dishonesty. Even though the Alabama Supreme Court previously reduced the punitive award by half, the U.S. Supreme Court still found that the award violated the Due Process Clause as "grossly excessive.”
While the High Court agreed on the need for punitive damages to deter future misconduct, it found the ratio between compensatory and punitive damages to be too great.
One distinction between that case and the Trump proceeding is that the Supreme Court found no intentionally false statements by BMW — but effective dissolution of Trump’s business and a quarter-billion dollars in damages may raise analogous concerns over excessive penalties.
In the Trump case, the banks made money. It would be akin to the car owner's value going up with the paint job but still hitting BMW with punitive damages.
James is known for her embrace of nuclear options when it comes to political opponents or groups. She previously sought to persuade a court to force the dissolution of the National Rifle Association. The question is, what happens if she finally has found an enabling judge in Engoron?
The testimony of the bankers highlights how out of proportion this effort has become. One would expect the banks to have sought action as the aggrieved parties if they had suffered losses as a result of Trump misconduct. They did not. While they discontinued working with the Trumps after the start of the New York criminal and civil actions, they have remained silent.
It all reminds one of another great work. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, The Adventure of Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes investigated the disappearance of a racehorse. Holmes noted to the local inspector "the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
When the inspector objected, “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” Holmes replied: “That was the curious incident.”
The lack of any barking by the banks is just another curious element in a case against Trump that gets curiouser and curiouser.
( https://themessenger.com/opinion/donald-trump-fraud-trial-engoron-letitia-james-bankers-testimony
Jonathan Turley, an attorney, constitutional law scholar and legal analyst, is the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at The George Washington University Law School.
Anons how do you do the embed
Thats weird!