They can learn to code

Biden will happily eliminate hundreds of thousands of high paying oil industry jobs because better opportunities await in applying weatherstripping.

“Vice President Biden, i’d like to ask you, three consecutive American presidents have enjoyed stints of explosive economic growth due to oil and gas production,” Tim Alberta said. “As president would you be willing to sacrifice some of that growth, even knowing potentially that it could displace thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers in the interest transitioning to that greener economy?”

“The answer is yes,” Biden responded.

Biden continued…

“The answer is yes because the opportunity for those workers is to switch to high paying jobs,” Biden continued. “We should, in fact, be making sure right now that every new building built is energy contained, that it doesn’t leak energy, that in fact we should be providing tax credits for people to be able to make their homes turn to solar power. There are all kinds of folks — right here in California, we’re now on the verge of having batteries that are about the size of the top of this podium that you can store energy when in fact the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. We have enormous opportunities.”

Oil patch workers earn well into the six figures; how much will they earn installing non-existent batteries?

Here we go again

Everyone gets a participation trophy!

Dems get started on next Trump impeachment

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Having just made the historic step of impeaching President Trump, the freshman Democrats in Congress knew exactly what they wanted to do next: “Let's impeach him again!” they cried.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did not seem pleased by this. “You had your impeachment; now let’s move on to other things.”

“We want more impeachment!” the freshmen yelled.

….

Pelosi took a deep breath. “Here’s what’s going to happen: We’re just going to sit on this since the Senate would acquit him in like five minutes, and then we’re moving on to focus on 2020.”

“If they acquit him,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “we’ll impeach with the same charges again!”

“That would be double jeopardy,” Pelosi pointed out.

“I’m not seventy so I don’t watch Jeopardy and I don’t know what that means,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.

“How about we impeach him for stuff about Russia?” Representative Rashida Tlaib said.

“It needs to be more specific than that,” Pelosi stated.

“Things about Russia,” Ocasio-Cortez suggested.

Full story at the Bee, of course

If not a bargain, at least a pretty good price

17 Hawkwood Lane, discussed here back in September when it dropped to $1.599, has sold for $1.425 million. These owners bought it for $2.925 in August 2006 from owners who’d paid $3.175 the previous December 2005. Ouch.

When is a residence an investment?

No piggy bank, this

Probably never. 147 Byram Shore Road, priced at $5.995 in August, 2017, gradually dropped its price over the years to $4.595, and finally has a deal pending. Owners paid $5.373 in 2005, expanded it by 1,000 feet and performed a complete renovation.

One approach to deciding between buying or renting a house is to check for annual appreciation and average days on the market for the neighborhood. 5% appreciation, say, with an average DOM of maybe 90 days would indicate a decent buy, one with reasonable liquidity.

A cumulative negative return of 15%, as here, and a DOM of 874 makes clear the difference between a financial investment and a place to call home. You want an investment, put your money in an index fund, and use what’s left for housing expenses.

"A maximum of three years"? Not even close to sufficient

“Have a safe trip, Inshalla”

Wannabe terrorists takes plea deal for sabotaging plane

A California mechanic who worked for American Airlines for more than 30 years has pleaded guilty to tampering with an aircraft in a deal to avoid a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to reports.

Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, 60, admitted using a piece of foam to sabotage the plane’s air module system — which reports aircraft speed, pitch, and other flight data to pilots — on a July 17 flight from Miami to the Bahamas with 150 passengers aboard the aircraft.

“I do admit the guilt,” he said through an Arabic interpreter in Miami federal court Wednesday, according to the Miami Herald.

During a detention hearing in September, federal prosecutors said Alani displayed support for ISIS by making statements about wishing Allah would use “divine powers” to harm non-Muslims while sharing ISIS videos on his cellphone.

Alani also reportedly told arresting agents he had an “evil side.” He was not charged with any terrorism-related offense, according to the outlet.

“He made a terrible mistake,” his attorney, Jonathan S. Meltz said Wednesday, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Terrible, terrible lapse in judgment, but it does not make him a terrible man.”

Alani faces up to three years in prison. His sentencing is set for March 4.

A “mistake”? Abdul-Majeed must moonlight for the FBI.

It occurs to me that this photo can be repurposed to depict Nancy Pelosi after her impeachment triumph

Now what?

Modern journalism at its finest, impartial best

So much solemnity

“Happy impeachment from the WaPo team!”

"Merry Impeachmas from the WaPo team!" WaPo Congress reporter and CNN political analyst Rachael Bade remarked in the post, in which she was seen with colleagues Paul Kane, Mike DeBonis, as well as Seung Min Kim and Karoun Demirjian, who also are CNN analysts.

Bade deleted the tweet roughly an hour after it was posted.

Obama adviser Ben Rhodes: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Conservative students "swatted" in firearm hoax, college dean congratulates the perpetrators

Police work

It happened at a Minnesota college named St. Olafs, but it could as easily have occurred at an institution people have heard of

Several conservative students at St. Olaf College had their lives turned upside down Sunday after a false report that alleged that they had guns and ammunition in their dorm prompted campus public safety officers to enter their home and ransack it.

***
The entire leadership of the College Republicans at St. Olaf College lives together in a shared pod-style dormitory comprised of several bedrooms with a common living room. It was this pod searched by officers Sunday afternoon.

The officers emptied wastebaskets and closets, and left a mess behind. Needless to say, there were no firearms.

And here’s the dean’s response:

Life imitates the Babylon Bee

Look! The voting’s started!

Yesterday I complained that the Bee was abandoning satire and going to straight news by “reporting” that McConnell was using the distraction of impeachment to place a flood of young, conservative jurists on the federal bench, with lifetime tenure.

Today, McConnell did just that:

Meanwhile in the U.S. Senate: 'Cocaine Mitch' Spent Impeachment Day Cranking Out Trump Judges.

Two unrelated, but equally disturbing notes

The center cannot hold

ANDREW DAVIS:  A House Divided: Impeachment As The New Normal. “Impeachment is the figurative ejector seat in our democracy. It was designed as a measure of last resort to protect the nation from its president. Does anyone really believe this phone call passes muster? We have now chosen to employ impeachment twice in twenty-one years, after using it only once before in the history of our nation. We have impeached two out of the last four presidents. Let that sink in. This is a dismal reflection on the state of our politics.”

ADVERSARY TECHNOLOGY:  Washington Post Hacked into a Chevy Volt to Show How Much Cars Are Spying on Their Owners.

For now, exactly what information goes where is a bit of an unknown by anyone other than the automakers themselves. As Fowler writes, “My Chevy’s dashboard didn’t say what the car was recording. It wasn’t in the owner’s manual. There was no way to download it.”

To figure this out, Fowler had someone hack into the Volt. He discovered that the car was recording details about where the car was driven and parked, call logs, identification information for his phone and contact information from his phone, “right down to people’s address, emails and even photos.” In another example, Fowler bought a Chevy infotainment computer on eBay and was able to extract private information from it about whoever owned it before him, including pictures of the person the previous owner called “Sweetie.”

While GM was the subject of Fowler’s experiments, it’s not the only company collecting data on its drivers. In 2017, the U.S. Government Accountability Office looked at automakers and their data privacy policies and found that the 13 car companies it looked at are not exactly using best practices. For example, while the automakers say they obtain “explicit consumer consent before collecting data,” the GAO says they “offered few options besides opting out of all connected vehicle services to consumers who did not want to share their data.”