More on shedding useless academics

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The market has spoken

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Back in January I posted on a new listing in Havemeyer Park, and was not particularly impressed:

Oh, heck, I don't know any more

Coming to Havemeyer Park, 5 Northridge Road, a remodeled, redone cape, $3.495 million. Northridge isn’t one of the best streets in this development — it’s a busy road, and $3.495 seems like an aggressive price, but who knows? We’ll see what the market says.

And now we know: it has sold for $3.3 million — that should be close enough to $3.495 to satisfy the seller.

The builder paid $1.248 for this 1953 house a year ago June and blew it up to 5,200 square feet (some of which will be found in the basement) from its original 1,248. As you can see, this it not the previous owner’s grandfather’s house anymore.

It has the orange

and the zebra masquerading as a dead cow, but…

is the next victim?

The Patience of Joe

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Sotheby’s Joe Barbieri’s client purchased 555 Riversville Road for $16.125 million in January, 2006. The buyer subdivided its 31.6 acres into four lots: 7.9 acres; 8.71; 5.7; and 9.44, and put all four back on the market in November 2013 at $17.9 million for the full 31.6 acres, and finally withdrew it in 2016 after no buyer had appeared, even though its price had dropped to $12.995. The land surfaced again in August 2023 at $13.995 and stubbornly stayed at that price until today, when it’s finally been reported as pending.

Nice land, great views.

It even comes with a house, although that’s downplayed in the listing, so probably not the man attraction and is possibly headed for the dumpster

What a perfect opportunity to begin reforming California's higher education establishment — too bad it won't be taken

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Univerity of California - Irvine

48,000 California Student Workers Vote to Strike Due to Protest Crackdowns

The kids voted to authorize their union, United Auto Workers 4811, to strike when they deemed it appropriate. It shouldn't be too long given the crackdowns are continuing on campus. Police removed a pro-Palestinian camp at the University of California-Irvine Wednesday evening.

So why go on strike?

Rafael Jaime, the union’s co-president and a PhD candidate at UCLA, said the goal would be to “maximize chaos and confusion” at the schools that sent in the police to clear the pro-Palestine camps.

“Our members have been beaten, concussed, pepper sprayed, both by counter-protesters and by police forces. As a union, it is our responsibility to stand beside them,” the union said in a statement. “In order to de-escalate the situation, UC must substantively engage with the concerns raised by the protesters — which focus on UC’s investments in companies and industries profiting off of the suffering in Gaza.”

There's only one problem for the student union members: it's illegal for them to strike. The office of the president sent a letter to graduate student workers informing them that there would be severe consequences if they went on strike.

“The University’s position is that the Union’s strike is unlawful, and as a result, a work stoppage is not protected strike activity. This means that participating in the strike does not change, excuse, or modify, an employee’s normal work duties or expectations. And, unlike a protected strike, you could be subject to corrective action for failing to perform your duties,” the unsigned letter from the office of the president said.

Los Angeles Times:

The academic worker strike would be modeled after last year’s “stand up” strikes against Ford, Stellantis and General Motors and similar to recent strikes at Southern California hotels. The walkouts would not target all campuses at once, Jaime said, but one by one based on how receptive administrations are to pro-Palestinian activists.

UC Riverside and UC Berkeley have reached agreements with protesters to end encampments and explore divestment from weapons companies. Leaders at those universities have rejected calls to target Israel specifically or for academic boycotts against exchange programs and partnerships with Israeli universities.

While some Jewish students have supported pro-Palestinian protests, national Jewish groups have criticized the divestment push, saying it is antisemitic because it aims to delegitimize the only predominantly Jewish nation.

Another small problem for the student unionists: they already have a contract.

The strike vote “is not about economics. It’s not about a raise or more benefits. It’s political,” said Jeff Schuhrke, a labor historian who teaches at SUNY.

Among their demands is amnesty for students and faculty members arrested during the unrest. We can assume that means any expulsions would be rescinded and student records expunged.

More on what the baby anti-semites “demand”:
David Duane

The strike authorization vote, which passed with 79 percent support, comes two weeks after dozens of counter-protesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, for several hours without police intervention, and without arrests. Officers in riot gear tore down the encampment the next day and arrested more than 200 people.

The vote does not guarantee a strike but rather gives the executive board of the local union, which is part of the United Auto Workers, the ability to call a strike at any time. Eight of the 10 University of California campuses still have a month of instruction left before breaking for summer.

1) Amnesty for all academic employees, students, student groups, faculty, and staff who face disciplinary action or arrest due to protest.

2)Right to free speech and political expression on campus. 

3) Divestment from UC’s known investments in weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and companies profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza. 

4) Disclosure of all funding sources and investments, including contracts, grants, gifts, and investments, through a publicly available, publicly accessible, and up-to-date database. 

5) Empower researchers to opt out from funding sources tied to the military or oppression of Palestinians. The UC must provide centralized transitional funding to workers whose funding is tied to the military or foundations that support Palestinian oppression.

If those demands are not met, then, checks notes, 48,000 antisemitic and/or terrorist-supporting PhD candidates, teaching assistants, and others university employees will...continue the protests in which they've already been engaging. This time, though, their placards will be more professionally mounted to a stick.  

Even with the overwhelming call for a strike by UAW 4811, the larger body of the United Auto Workers are not going to walk off the assembly line, so your Ford five-door electric sedan grossly misnamed the Mustang Mach-E is safe to for you to continue to avoid buying...for now. But if this wing of the union does walk, and no one notices or cares, the rest of the union will have to get involved. Can you imagine selling that strike proposal out of solidarity to a line worker in Michigan or Ohio? 

As for me, I hope they go on strike. I'm pro-union in this case. Walk out. Yeah, I said it. If there's anything this state needs less of, it is 48,000 pretend intellectuals either with phony degrees or working to obtain a phony degree. If the walkout doesn't cause administrators to change course and clean house out of self-preservation, at least it will hasten their collapse. 

And if the larger U.A.W. has to get involved, I'm perfectly fine having the debate about unions now siding with the antisemites. If they do not get involved, and it becomes protracted for this one loony chapter, maybe that can bring about the demise of that particular union. I see nothing but upside to this happening. 

In fact, call for the strike right before the DNC Convention in Chicago. If you're going to strike, you've got to time it so that it has the desired effect. Perhaps the convention center workers in the Windy City can join the strike out of solidarity, and drag the hotel and restaurant workers out on the picket lines with them. 

August is going to be swell. 

“See ya”

Because the Biden administration believes its role is to protect and to serve - terrorists.

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Biden admin refuses to reveal terror watchlist nationalities because doing so would violate the terrorists’ “right to “privacy”

Fox filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in October requesting the nationalities of suspects on the FBI terror watchlist arrested at the southern border entering between ports of entry by Border Patrol.

Over six months later, CBP told Fox it will not provide the information, although it acknowledges the information is maintained in the Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS). 

The letter says it is applying exemptions to protect the disclosure of files that may create a "clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" and must balance a public's right to disclosure against an individual's right to privacy.

Betcha didn’t know that persons on our terrorist watchlist who are arrested for entering the U.S. illegally are entitled to a right of privacy that protects them from having the public know where they came from. Well, Biden says they do, and his handlers’ refusal to breach that imaginary right has nothing — nothing, I tell you — to do with sparing their candidate from the embarrassment that would ensue if it turned out these people were coming in from friendly Arab states and Eastern European criminal dens.

They waited out the market, and it paid off.

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3 Rnndom Road, listed for $3.795 million but gone in minutes, so the final price is sure to be higher. The owners tried for that same $3.795 in 2022 but the market was still coming back from the Great Lockdown then and they had no luck. So they rented it out instead, at $17, 000 per, and brought it back a few days ago. Well done.

listing agent daphne lamsvelt-pol describes this kitchen as “a chef’s dream”, and it probably is, compared to the kitchens and kitchen fuel used in her native holland. Here she is training in india learning how to prepare that fuel:

Price cut on Marks Road, Riverside

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(pre-renovation picture from the 2013 listing, offered just to show the general exterior)

3 Marks Road, from $5.195 million to $4.895. Once owned by neighbors and good friends, I thought the house was very nice then, and the current owners had Sound Beach Partners redo it in 2021, so all that’s good. My friends lived here for 15 years, and the current owners have been here since 2013, and that’s always an encouraging sign of satisfaction.

they have the orange, but substituting a couple of poor, dead ocelots for the traditional zebra may have been a mistake

Well, at least they're not even pretending to be neutral

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who, me?

Here are some highlights from the upcoming debate’s moderator, Jake Tapper:

Tapper spearheaded CNN's Russiagate coverage that dominated the early years of Trump's presidency. On January 10, 2017, just ten days before Trump's inauguration, Tapper co-authored a blockbuster report about the existence of the now-infamous Steele dossier and spent several months legitimizing its claims. 

Even after the release of the Mueller report that failed to find evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Tapper suggested Trump sounded like "the spokesman for the Kremlin" over comments Trump made about his May 2019 conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Throughout the 2020 presidential election, Tapper became more vocal about his animus towards the then-president. In March 2020, in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, he said Trump "continues to lie to the American people" about COVID testing at the time. The following month, Tapper retweeted a post from anti-Trump critic George Conway calling Trump "100% insane."

In October 2020, Tapper shamed Trump after he was diagnosed and hospitalized for COVID. 

"Make no mistake, this was not just reckless behavior, this was a demonstration of a wanton disregard for human life. President Trump, now in quarantine, has become a symbol of his own failures," Tapper told CNN viewers. 

Weeks later, after Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, Tapper declared "for tens of millions of our fellow Americans: their long national nightmare is over."

"It's been a time of extreme divisions, many of the divisions caused and exacerbated by President Trump himself," Tapper said in an impassioned monologue. 

"It's been a time of several significant and utterly avoidable failures, most tragically, of course, the unwillingness to respect facts and science and do everything that could be done to save lives during a pandemic. It has been a time where truth and fact where truth and fact were treated with distain," he continued. "It was a time of cruelty where official inhumanities such as child separation became the official shameful policy of the United States. But now the Trump presidency is coming to an end."

Much, much more at the link.