So long as we're looking at California's spending preferences ... (Sorry — we're not allowed to see my desired picture, because it would violate XGrok's woke standards)

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No problem, however, with a white man dancing in front of three other fat whites. Phew!

The Washington Free Beacon February 3, 2025

'Indigenous Knowledge' Pseudoscience Thrives in Newsom's Government

"Indigenous knowledge," a pseudoscience that posits Native Americans possess an innate understanding of how the world works, is thriving in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom's (D.) administration has contended that "Western science" must embrace "the generations of knowledge held by Indigenous communities," according to a Washington Free Beacon review of state documents.

Since Newsom entered office six years ago, the California state government has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars on programs promoting the idea, which the state also refers to as "traditional ecological knowledge," and has leveraged it across several government functions, including wildfire mitigation, energy development, wildlife recovery, and land conservation, the documents show. The Newsom administration has made indigenous knowledge a central pillar of its climate agenda in particular.

The extensive taxpayer-funded indigenous knowledge efforts in California, which are detailed in an intricate web of state initiatives, reports, programs, and laws, highlight just how far a fringe academic theory has proliferated throughout Democratic Party-controlled governments. While scientists describe it as "dangerous" and a rejection of the scientific method, the Biden administration forced indigenous knowledge into agencies across the federal government, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Department of Defense.

Newsom's embrace of indigenous knowledge has been similarly enthusiastic.

"Western science has overlooked the generations of knowledge held by indigenous communities, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial," states a draft copy of California's 2024 climate adaptation strategy released last year. "Seeking and elevating Traditional Ecological Knowledge can augment conventional research methods to better understand how California’s climate and environment have changed over time."

That strategy, the Newsom administration said, will be implemented over the next three years. According to the California Energy Commission, as part of that implementation, the state will develop its fifth climate change assessment, which will expand reliance on indigenous knowledge through its Tribal Research Program.

The Tribal Research Program establishes a new indigenous council to guide state climate policy, creates a report to summarize state-wide climate change impacts on tribes, and funds a grant-making initiative that provides $3.6 million for tribal-led climate change research that has an "indigenous knowledge focus." The purpose of those grants is to help the state government tackle a variety of "climate" issues like wildfires.

Separately, in April 2024, the Newsom administration distributed $107.7 million for 33 tribal projects, ostensibly to help implement traditional ecological knowledge and tribal expertise, though Newsom also portrayed the funding as a form of reparations. "These awards are an acknowledgment of past sins, a promise of accountability, and a commitment to a better future—for the land and all its people, especially its original stewards," Newsom said.

In the most recent example of the state's reliance on indigenous knowledge, the California State Board of Food and Agriculture formally recommended that state officials incorporate so-called regenerative agriculture techniques into food-related policies and programs. Such techniques, according to the board, have been embraced by Native American tribes for generations and help mitigate climate change.

Leaving aside the questionable theory that Indians environmental “science” has anything to offer modern Californians, we can ask about its relevance. The population of these savages was 310,000 in 1769, the year the Spanish founded the first mission in the Golden State, and had dropped to less than 150,000 by 1844, when John Fremont arrived to save the benighted souls from the yoke of Spanish servitude and bring them civilization.

California’s current population is 39 million (plus however millions of illegals hid when the census taker came by). How the experience and “environmental wisdom” of 310,000 stone age people can be scaled up to provide guidance for the running of a 21st century society of 39 million people is something only a Californian mind could grasp.

Golden shower: as Californians brace for cuts in government services and handouts, their legislature finds a new way to spend money on illegals

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piss off, peasant

And these numbers were calculated before the recent wildfires caused billions of dollars of damage to homes and businesses

And the response:

The Washington Free Beacon, February 4, 2025:

Newsom Set To Sign $50 Mil 'Trump-Proofing' Plan After State Dems Vote Down Amendment Blocking Aid for Illegal Immigrant Felons

California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) is set to sign a $50 million plan aimed at suing the Trump administration and blocking its mass deportations. State Democrats passed the plan on Monday—after voting down an amendment that would have blocked state funds from benefiting illegal immigrant felons.

The legislation will send $25 million to the California Department of Justice to sue the Trump administration and another $25 million for nonprofit legal services, including deportation defenses. The vote was initially scheduled for last Thursday, but Democratic leaders abruptly canceled the proceedings after Republican assemblywoman Leticia Castillo threatened to force a public debate on an amendment to block funds from bankrolling immigration legal services for convicted felons. The Democratic assembly speaker’s office said lawmakers were going to "look closely" at the plan to make sure its defenses were "airtight" and would "protect all Californians."

But the legislation didn’t change. When Castillo presented her amendment, Assembly budget chair Jesse Gabriel (D.) called it "unnecessary," and Democrats voted to discard it without debate.

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Legislators have added millions more for nonprofits, including those that defend illegal aliens from deportation and help move their families into the United States. Under their plan, some $10 million would go to the California Department of Social Services to fund nonprofit grants or contracts for immigration legal services and removal defense. The department last year shelled out $37 million in grants to pro-immigration nonprofits like Al Otro Lado, Catholic Charities of Los Angeles, and Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Washington Free Beacon has reported.

Another $5 million would go to the nonprofit California Access to Justice Commission to expand its grants to legal aid groups. The commission’s top-funded nonprofits have included the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, which works to release detained illegal immigrants, and Centro Legal de la Raza, a nonprofit firm that sues to fight detention of illegal immigrants as well as landlords and employers over alleged violations.

An additional $10 million, earmarked for the California State Bar’s Legal Services Trust-Fund Commission, could help illegal immigrants as well. The legislature has designated this money for legal services for indigent people at risk of detention, deportation, eviction, wage theft, and more. The commission already sends money to pro-immigration nonprofits like the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Law San Francisco, Al Otro Lado, and the LGBT Asylum Project in San Francisco, which says its clients come to the city’s Castro District, a gay tourism hub, "to find a sanctuary."

I can hardly wait for Trump’s response to Noisome’s and his fellow justice warriors’ cries for help.

There's the real story, and then there's the secondary one

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Here’s the real story: character revealed.

And the lesser one; lesser, because the presence of turds in the punchbowl like this guy has long been known. Still, it’s nice to know that he’ll be leaving the government soon, and with the collapse of the Washington NGO industry, he may have to learn to mine coal if he wants to eat.

THIS Is Why You're Fired: James O'Keefe Exposes DHS Official Planning to Sabotage Trump and Noem

It took a while — okay, a whole lot of while — but Old Mill Road has gone to contract

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101-103 Old Mill Road, 8 acres, two seperate 4-acre lots, priced at $6.5 million, reports a contract. Ascot Gid first set this listing afloat on the Sea of Merchandising back in July, 2024, at $7.9 million, but though can’t control the wind, you can always adjust the sale.

the zebra being in use at another listing and thus unavailable, gideon had this poor old dog stuffed and brought in for the photo shoot; cruel, but effective.

How Can We Miss You When You Won't Go Away?

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CIA offers buyouts to entire staff in effort to slash spending and ensure agency aligns with MAGA agenda

The Central Intelligence Agency has offered buyouts to its entire workforce in an apparent bid to align with President Donald Trump's ambition to purge government departments.

CIA agents who accept the buyout conditions would receive eight months of pay, along with all their benefits and entitlements, in exchange for their resignations. 

A CIA spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that the decision to offer the buyout broadly across the whole department was part of an effort to 'infuse the agency with renewed energy.'

The agency is also freezing job hiring, and any conditional offers already sent out have been paused. Many of those are likely to now be rescinded, insiders warned.

The report of buyout offers is in line with a massive makeover of the U.S. government embarked on by the Trump administration, which has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.

… A CIA spokesperson said: 'Director Ratcliffe is moving swiftly to ensure the CIA workforce is responsive to the Administration's national security priorities.

'These moves are part of a holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy, provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position the CIA to deliver on its mission.' 

Maybe Trump can arrange for Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks to serenade them as they leave.

John Tierney was writing about this many, many years ago: the antiquated system of that time has only grown older and more feeble

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America’s Air-Traffic Control System: An International Disgrace

After the Reagan Airport disaster, will we finally reform the FAA?

We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace.

Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.

The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.

The basic problem, which reformers have been trying to remedy since the Clinton administration, is that the system is operated by a cumbersome federal bureaucracy—the same bureaucracy that’s also responsible for overseeing air safety. The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself.

Nearly all  other developed countries sensibly separate these roles, so that a federal aviation agency oversees an independent corporation that operates the control towers and the rest of the system, functioning as a public utility. This independent operator can be a state-owned company (as in Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and Scandinavian countries), a nonprofit corporation (as in Canada), or a company with private investors (as in the United Kingdom and Italy).

In 2017, the Trump administration and Republican congressional leadership tried creating a similar system in the U.S., operated by a not-for-profit corporation. The bill was backed by some Democrats and by a broad coalition that included even the union representing air-traffic controllers, which had previously helped block reform but finally decided that this was the only way to fix the system. The legislation also enjoyed support from unions representing pilots and flight attendants, the major airlines, and a bipartisan array of former officials at the FAA and the Department of Transportation.

The bill went nowhere, partly because many legislators, especially Democrats, wanted to retain Congress’ control over the system—and the campaign contributions and pork-barrel opportunities that came with it. But the effort was doomed mainly because of opposition from private plane owners, who pay a pittance for the services they use. Though the legislation guaranteed that they would not be charged new user fees, their lobbyists scared enough lawmakers to quash it.

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Eliminating diversity mandates is just one small step in the right direction. The system will remain mired in mid-twentieth-century technology until it’s run by an independent corporation accountable to regulators but freed from congressional micromanagement, annual budget battles, and the federal bureaucracy’s convoluted hiring and procurement regulations. Experience in Canada and other countries shows that an independent corporation, able to issue its own revenue bonds because it’s funded directly by user fees instead of taxes, can modernize air-traffic control far more efficiently and cheaply than a government agency.

Reforming the system is an ideal issue for the new administration, particularly Elon Musk and his team at DOGE. It would help drain the D.C. swamp, shrink the federal budget deficit, improve aviation safety, reduce flight delays, conserve fuel, lower carbon emissions, and save money for airlines and passengers. It’s inspiring to dream of sending Americans to Mars in a new Golden Age, but the ones flying closer to home are still stuck in the Stone Age.

Reported at the bell

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159 Bedford Road, $2.950 million, is now pending. Started off in May at $3.495, and was purchased via a non-MLS deal in 2004 for $2.895 million; there’s a reason why transactions that aren’t exposed to the full market don’t always produce the most accurate market value.

It’s a bit surprising this took so long to find a buyer, because the stager installed the three essential elements: The Orange, The Zebra, and The tipi. Go figure.

NEXT TIME: