Should Mickey Mouse grab Minnie and run, as California now experiences a rare May [...]]]>
Should Mickey Mouse grab Minnie and run, as California now experiences a rare May rainy spell?
I shouldn’t joke. Dam failures are serious situations, like the near-disaster at Oroville in February 2017 when 188,000 local residents were forced to flee for their lives at the orders of the government. Luckily, the rains slacked off and the dam held.
No thanks to Sacramento. According to a study from the American Society of Civil Engineers ranking the states in 2017 for infrastructure spending, California ranked dead last.
Apparently newish California Governor Gavin Newsom has different spending priorities apart from public safety — like expanding taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens from kids (now costing $360 million yearly) to young adult aliens, estimated at additional $260 million.
Newsom does want to prepare for climate change, so perhaps he can be convinced that dam repair falls in that category.
Below, the Prado Dam seems a rustic affair, due for a tune-up. (Photo snapped from an overhead video of the curious place.)
The LA Times article was reprinted in the Watertown Daily Times, linked here:
]]>Engineers up failure risk for dam protecting Disneyland, dozens of Southern California cities, Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2019
LOS ANGELES — Federal engineers are raising alarms that a “significant flood event” could compromise the spillway of Southern California’s aging Prado Dam and potentially inundate dozens of Orange County communities from Disneyland to Newport Beach.
After conducting an assessment of the 78-year-old structure earlier this month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it was raising the dam’s risk category from “moderate” to “high urgency.”
“Our concern right now is about the concrete slab of the spillway and how well it will perform if water were to spill over the top of the dam,” said Lillian Doherty, the Army Corps’ division chief. “We will determine whether or not it is as reliable as it should be.”
Located beside the 91 Freeway on the border of Riverside and Orange counties, the dam impounds little to no water for much of the year. During periods of heavy rain, however, the structure is intended to collect water and prevent flooding along the Santa Ana River.
Doherty said her agency is working with a national team of experts to develop interim and permanent risk-reduction measures at the dam, as well as public outreach strategies to alert the estimated 1.4 million people who live and work in 29 communities downstream.
The sudden downgrade in the structure’s evaluation comes after major problems have been identified in other California dams.
In February 2017, a concrete spillway at the Oroville Dam disintegrated during heavy rains and triggered the evacuation of more than 180,000 people. The head of the California Water Resources Department, which operates the dam, was removed after an independent probe found the failure was the result of a lax safety culture.
That same year, the Corps of Engineers discovered that the 60-year-old Whittier Narrows Dam, about 40 miles to the west of Prado Dam, was structurally unsafe and posed a potentially catastrophic risk to more than 1 million people in working-class communities along the San Gabriel River floodplain.
In that case, engineers found that intense storms could trigger a premature opening of that dam’s massive spillway, swamping homes, schools, factories and roads from Pico Rivera to Long Beach. Engineers also found that the earthen structure could fail if water were to flow over its crest.
The Corps estimates it will cost roughly $600 million in federal funds to upgrade the Whittier Narrows facility, which has been reclassified as the agency’s highest priority nationally because of the risk of “very significant loss of life and economic impacts.”
Now, given concerns that Prado Dam poses a flood threat to much of Orange County, the agency is collaborating with Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, and several dozen municipalities, to develop emergency plans that could be implemented before repairs to the dams are completed.
Col. Aaron Barta said the retrofit operations on the spillways at both dams could begin as early as 2021. (Continues)
In a September 20 segment, Carlson examined the Google response to President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” (a temporary measure which was [...]]]>
In a September 20 segment, Carlson examined the Google response to President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” (a temporary measure which was quite popular among GOP voters according to a Rasmussen poll). But Google employees thought that shutting the door even a little on Western Civilization’s historic enemy was just mean.
Remember that under the Obama administration, Muslim immigrants got priority, so it’s only fair for President Trump to chill in response (Chart: Obama Admin. On Pace to Issue One Million Green Cards to Migrants from Majority-Muslim Countries, Breitbart.com, June 17, 2016).
Much of this criticism is based on the work of psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein (@DrREpstein), who has penetrated Big Tech’s propensity to manipulate in favor of liberal causes and politicians. One of the worst secret influencers is what Google search turns up. See Tucker’s interview with Dr. Epstein here: Big Tech Threatens to Secretly Undermine American Elections.
Back to Thursday’s report:
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Tonight, we have a development in our ongoing exclusive investigation into the behavior of Google. There are new emails first obtained by this show.
Now Google, as you know, is the most powerful company in the history of the world. Virtually all human information flows through its software. And for that reason, Google shapes much of how the world understands reality.
At the heart of Google’s business is its search engine which has a virtual monopoly on search in this country and others. Google search succeeds because it is blindingly efficient but also because it is perceived as honest. When you search for a term on Google, the most popular results come to the top. The process is straightforward and democratic: that’s what most people think. That’s how it’s perceived, and that’s why the world trusts Google.
But what if Google was lying to you? What if the results that you got were secretly weighted to get you to vote a certain way, to believe a certain thing? That would affect a lot of people and a lot of votes.
In fact, it would be impossible to have a real democracy under circumstances like that. A small number of incredibly rich people would be in charge of everything including your perceptions.
Well that is a major concern for all of us because Google is a very political company. We recently showed you email evidence of the Google effort to collude with a left-wing group in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Now tonight, we have internal documents that show that Google employees discussed corrupting the company’s search engine to push propaganda on hundreds of millions of unsuspecting users.
Here’s what happened. Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued his now-famous travel ban. Almost immediately after that, Google employees began plotting ways to undermine the President’s Executive Order. On January 29th, a Google Product Marketing Manager named Mackenzie Thomas sent an email to a group of fellow employees. “There is a large brainstorm going on throughout the marketing org” she wrote, brainstorming about how to respond to Trump’s order.
Among Thomas’ ideas was “To actively counter algorithmically biased results for search terms such as Islam, Iran, Mexico, Latino and so forth.” In other words, Google employees wanted to alter the search results to make them more positive in certain cases for political reasons. Thomas also suggested promoting links for making donations to organizations fighting the travel ban.
This, of course, would be completely dishonest and unethical behavior. But Thomas’ colleagues at Google seemed to approve of it strongly. Product Manager Rami Banna, for example, replied this way. “We’re absolutely in, Mackenzie, anything you need. We’ll put together a list of orgs with Meryl and HL team.”
Another employee named Stacey Chen added that group she thought Google should promote included the ACLU, the Immigration Defense Project, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and the National Immigration Law Center. All of those groups were at the time agitating against the President’s immigration ban.
Even at least one person on the chain seemed to realize how dangerous and out of the ordinary this conversation was. A Google employee called Clement Wolf commented that he was “very much in favor of Google stepping up” but was wondering “How partisan we want to be on this? To the extent of my knowledge, we’d be breaching precedent if we only gave highlights access to organizations that support a certain view.”
We contacted Google about these remarkable emails and the reply to us is here in full.
“These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented. Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology – not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump’s Executive Order on immigration. Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies.”
Left unanswered by Google was why anyone would believe that statement for a second. Nor did Google say anything about the employees on that email chain. Presumably, they still work at Google which is remarkable. If you ran a bank and caught your tellers brainstorming about how to rob the vault, would they still work for you? Remember that Google fired an engineer called James Damore last summer almost instantly.
The CEO flew back from family vacation to fire him. Why? Because Damore was caught expressing mildly conservatives ideas in a private memo. Here, Google employees are plotting to subvert our entire public conversation secretly. But that’s fine with Google. It shouldn’t be fine with any of us or with the U.S. Congress. Google executives are scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill next week. The scheduled topic is privacy. But it would be nice if at least one elected representative asked about this because it’s much scarier than anything Russia ever attempted.
Peter Schweizer wrote “Clinton Cash.” He now has a fantastic new documentary called “The Creepy Line” about big tech and he joins us tonight. Are you surprised by this?
PETER SCHWEIZER: Not really. It’s just further confirmation that Google has been cooking the books as it relates to search.
And you’re absolutely right. I mean this would be like a company having a brainstorming session on how we’re going to fiddle with the books in accounting. Then you’re going to step back and say “No, we were just having a brainstorming session.”
It speaks to the culture of the company. And the culture of the company is they are prepared to put their thumb on the scale and shift the debate in favor of the direction that they want to go.
CARLSON: But this is so corrupt that it’s — I was stunned by it, and I was worried that these emails were not authentic because it’s such a big . . . so search is the core of Google’s business. It’s many different things, Google, but basically, it’s a search engine. It was built on the back of one. And the promise has always been that they’re not lying to you. But they are.
SCHWEIZER: That’s right. And this is really the third strike as far as I’m concerned. The first strike, of course, is the commercial search. When travel websites and people like Yelp were complaining that they were, you know, tilting the algorithm, you know, against them to others, Google said “Absolutely not. We would never do that.”
We now know the Federal Trade Commission, the EU, and others have looked at this and said Google was fiddling with the algorithm. The second strike as far as I’m concerned was the work done by Dr. Robert Epstein which shows clearly in 2016 that search was tilted to favor Hillary Clinton. This is strike three. It shows that the culture of the company is such that they’re very happy having a free and open conversation about manipulating the algorithm on a highly political subject.
CARLSON: But I don’t understand. I mean so people go to jail for violating our campaign finance laws because they put an extra ad on some cable channel nobody watches. This is the most powerful company in the world.
How can we have a democracy in a country where Google can just get whoever it wants elected by lying to us through the search function?
SCHWEIZER: It’s a great example, Tucker, of regulations and campaign finance laws not keeping up at all with where we are in technology. Nobody could see when we pass laws about in-kind contributions to campaigns from companies that something like this would happen.
But this is the ultimate, the ultimate campaign contribution. This is not like, you know, Exxon giving gasoline to a political campaign. This is a company secretly tipping the scales in favor of candidates or causes or beliefs that they have. It’s done in secret. We don’t know how extensive it’s happening. And 80 to 90 percent of search in the world is basically done through Google, so they have complete dominance in this area.
CARLSON: And the Congress does nothing. And I can think of at least one Republican senator who I believe has been bought off by Google. I don’t think he’s alone. At some point it might be worth naming who those people are. Peter, great to see you.
SCHWEIZER: Thanks, Tucker.
But liberals insist that America is improved [...]]]>
But liberals insist that America is improved by the presence of jihad-pursuing muzlims and misogynous Mexicans. Many psychology realists beg to differ.
Diversity ideology is so strong among elites that they import historic enemies as immigrants; e.g. muslims in Norway burn the flag of the nation that admitted them, shown below.
The relevant segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight started with Democrat luminaries Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton all pledging allegiance to diversity as our strength, but Tucker responded with important questions — starting with a destabilizing level of immigration — that require serious answers from elite Washington:
SPARE AUDIO FILE:
How has our current immigration system made America more stable and more prosperous? In your answer, please explain what happened to the state of California — it used to be called the Golden State, had a thriving middle class, had the country’s best schools. Now the schools in California are a complete disaster, the middle class is vanishing and the nation’s largest mass of impoverished people remains behind to serve a tiny pool of tech oligarchs. How exactly did that happen?
Next, how precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific, as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better your neighbors or your co-workers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.
And if diversity is our strength, why is to okay for the rest of us to surrender one of our central rights — freedom of speech — to just a handful of tech monopolies? And by the way, if your ideas are so obviously true, why does anyone who questions them need to be shamed, silenced and fired? How about this question — after spending two centuries overcoming our country’s painful history of racial discrimination and hatred, why is it once again acceptable, even encouraged, to attack people on the basis of their skin color? And by the way, since we are asking, if it’s now possible to change your sex, is it possible to change your race too? If not, tell us why and be specific.
More challenges to bad liberal ideas and performance follow, but this discussion is about diversity which really needs to be dethroned, and Tucker Carlson is quite good at asking the right questions.
]]>
The dam’s safety is a huge concern for the thousands of residents in the area, but the whole situation offers a view into how poorly California is run by all-Democrat Sacramento.
Democrats aren’t much interested in the repair and general upkeep of infrastructure because politicians can’t show up for a non-existent ribbon-cutting ceremony as happens with new construction. Nope, maintenance just isn’t newsworthy. In fact, California is the Worst State in Nation for Infrastructure Spending according to continuing studies. Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) compiles an assessment of the nation as a whole and of the states in 16 major infrastructure categories, presented in its Infrastructure Report Card. The California page includes some interesting details:
California Infrastructure Overview
While the nation’s infrastructure earned a “D+” in the 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, California faces infrastructure challenges of its own. For example, driving on roads in need of repair in California costs each driver $844 per year, and 5.5% of bridges are rated structurally deficient. Drinking water needs in California are an estimated $44.5 billion, and wastewater needs total $26.2 billion. 678 dams are considered to be high-hazard potential. The state’s schools have an estimated capital expenditure gap of $3.2 billion. This deteriorating infrastructure impedes California’s ability to compete in an increasingly global marketplace. . .
California is a wealthy state with bad priorities as well as having millions of poor people, many of whom are imported — 27 percent in fact, as of 2015 according to PPIC. The same paper reported, “In 2015, 34% of California’s immigrants age 25 and older had not completed high school, compared with 8% of US-born California residents.” Naturally, the idiocy of allowing huge numbers of poor unskilled persons of various legalities into a modern society has a cumulative affect on spending: the Center for Immigration Studies reported in 2015 that 55 percent of foreigner households in the state use welfare, compared with 30 percent of American families. But immigrants are grateful Democrat voters, and California must have a surplus of them to maintain power.
And the dollar costs of illegal immigrants are indeed substantial to taxpayers. A recent study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated that the annual expenditure of California’s state and local tax dollars on services for unlawful foreigners is $25.3 billion.
So the disrepair of the Oroville Dam did not come from nowhere: it is the result of Democrat-run California’s spending choices to keep its foreign base welfared up while the vital infrastructure has been allowed to go to ruin.
]]>Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in price to $500 million, By Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News, October 19, 2017
OROVILLE — The cost of repairing the crippling damage to Oroville Dam’s spillways caused by last winter’s fierce storms has almost doubled, state water officials said Thursday.
Kiewit, the Nebraska-based construction firm that has the main contract to rebuild the main spillway and emergency spillway at Oroville, the nation’s tallest dam, estimated in its winning bid in April that the work would cost at least $275 million. But the price tag has now grown to at least $500 million, said Erin Mellon, a spokeswoman for the Department of Water Resources.
“When Kiewit put in the bid, only 30 percent of the project had been designed,” she said. “When you get on the construction site, there’s a lot more information that you glean.”
Jeff Petersen, project manager for Kiewit, said that once construction workers got on the site they discovered they had to dig much deeper to get down to bedrock than they had expected. That meant they are having to pour almost twice as much concrete this year — 870,000 cubic yards — as the company and the Department of Water Resources had planned.
Petersen said such discoveries are not uncommon on major dam projects.
“It’s like when you work on an old house or an old car,” he said.
Petersen said the project remains on schedule to hit a Nov. 1 deadline for repairs that will allow the main spillway to carry up to 100,000 cubic feet per second this winter. Seven hundred workers are rushing around the clock.
“I don’t want to jinx it,” he told reporters on a tour of the construction site, “but we’re five days ahead of schedule.”
On Thursday, the scene inside the main spillway — which is 3,000 feet long and 180 feet wide, twice the width of the Golden Gate Bridge — was abuzz.
Huge cranes swung steel beams and other materials overhead as fleets of giant dump trucks poured layer after layer of concrete, and bulldozers and mechanical rollers compacted it. Diesel engines roared from all directions, and the constant beeping of heavy equipment filled the air.
(Continues)
Tucker: it’s a big deal when a country’s [...]]]>
Tucker: it’s a big deal when a country’s elites reject their own people. It’s an even bigger deal when the people reject them. pic.twitter.com/2ieZ1Tqw3p
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 14, 2017
TUCKER CARLSON: Our country’s most powerful institutions have hated the rest of the country for a long time. When the people who run tech companies or Hollywood studios look out the window of their G5s they commute from Santa Monica to Teterboro, they see a population that’s fat, bigoted and dumb. They feel pure contempt for the people below them.
Well now at long last middle America is returning those feelings. A new poll by Pew finds that Republican-leaning voters have come to distrust the higher education establishment a lot: 58 percent of them believe colleges and universities have a negative overall effect on the country; just 36 percent think they have a positive effect. It’s a swing of about 20 points from just two years ago.
Okay you say, that’s just because stupid uneducated conservatives naturally hate schools they could never get into — right? Wrong. Actually Republicans with college degrees are even more hostile to college than those without them because they know how bad it is.
But if colleges have lost the confidence of non-liberals, consider the media: 85 percent of Republican voters say the national news media are hurting the country. Once again, a substantial swing from just a few years ago. Republicans aren’t that impressed by labor unions either, or banks remarkably.
The only institutions that are still viewed positively by both sides of the spectrum are churches and religious groups, and yet those institutions are the ones that are losing power in America.
Now these sentiments are not pointless trivia, not numbers that mean nothing a country can actually thrive without strong respected institutions it’s a big deal when the country’s elites, whether in media or business or education, reject their own people but it’s an even bigger deal when the people reject them.
Here’s the Pew research mentioned:
Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions, Pew Research, July 10, 2017
Republicans increasingly say colleges have negative impact on U.S.
Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.
While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views.
A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.
The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults, finds that partisan differences in views of the national news media, already wide, have grown even wider. Democrats’ views of the effect of the national news media have grown more positive over the past year, while Republicans remain overwhelmingly negative.
What’s interesting is how rapidly conservatives’ opinion of higher education has fallen — like a rock!
Why is that? Perhaps some citizens are alarmed at the news from America’s campuses which has increasingly been a disturbing mash-up of anarchy, race-segregated graduation and a leftist curriculum more akin to Marx than Milton.
A couple of examples spring to mind, in particular the orgy of destruction ($100,000 in damage) on the UC Berkeley campus February 1 to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking. Threats from the same anarchists against Ann Coulter’s scheduled speech caused that event to be canceled in April. And UC Berkeley was once known as the home of free speech on campus, aka the Free Speech Movement (FSM) led by Mario Savio and other students.
Rather than being places to explore a wide range of ideas, today’s campuses permit liberal values only with appalling levels of censorship. They are creating a generation of fragile kiddies who require a handy safe space where they can hide from challenging thoughts.
Also disturbing to friends of free speech was the protest at the University of Missouri in November 2015 where a professor of communications called for “muscle” to rid her of a student reporter with a camera (Watch.). These libs with tenure are thugtastic!
In May, Professor Bret Weinstein appeared with Tucker Carlson to discuss the prof’s disapproval of Evergreen State College’s strongly worded request that all white people leave campus on a designated day — he thought the order was racist for some reason. More recently, it was reported that other faculty wanted Weinstein to resign for being such a troublemaker.
That’s just a tiny slice of campus pathology today. So are colleges and universities merely negative influences on young minds, or are they downright evil??
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