Formerly, an old bar known as KCs Corner. Washingtonville, Pennsylvania, a small village in Montour County, was founded around the time of the Revolutionary War.
The former bar’s building was abandoned and condemned and the town council hired a contractor to take it down. However, demolition work revealed that, underneath the shabby modern exterior, there was a 1700s log cabin constructed of hand-hewn hickory logs.
There is some speculation that this cabin may actually be the colonial Fort Bosley, built to defend settlers against Indian raids, whose precise location has long been disputed, and which some people believe was destroyed by fire in 1826.
They are now planning to somehow preserve the cabin.
The Nomenklatura live conveniently in Atherton, Portola, or Pacific Heights, but the proletariat get to catch 2:30 AM buses to work from the 110° every day Central Valley. Protocol:
It’s 2:30 a.m. in the Central California farm town of Salida, and the only sound is the tech bus pulling into an unmarked lot surrounded by barbed wire. Men and women in work boots board in the moonlight. Next stop is 11 miles away in Manteca, and then it’s another 55 miles to Fremont on the San Francisco Bay, where — an hour and a half hour later — the 4 a.m. shift at the Tesla factory starts.
Welcome to life on Silicon Valley’s new frontier. When tech companies first introduced private shuttles for their employees more than a decade ago, they served the affluent neighborhoods in San Francisco and the Peninsula. Now the buses reach as far as the almond orchards of Salida and the garlic fields of Gilroy.
Tech companies have grown tight-lipped about the specifics of their shuttle programs in the wake of high-profile protests in San Francisco. But Protocol was able to locate enough stops for company shuttles to confirm that some tech shuttles now drive all the way out to the Central Valley, an agricultural hub once a world away from the tech boom on the coast.
“That just tells you the story of the Bay Area,” said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of regional think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. “We’re going to be in these farther-flung places, and that’s our reality because we’re not going to be able to create affordable housing.”
Tech shuttle sprawl speaks to the unique pressures that the industry has put on the region. High tech salaries have driven up housing prices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and the East Bay, forcing white- and blue-collar workers alike to move farther away from their jobs. The crisis is compounded by anti-development politics that make it hard to build new housing and patchwork public transit systems that make it difficult for commuters to get to work without driving.
The mismatch between jobs and housing has become so extreme that Google and Facebook have proposed building thousands of apartments or condos on their own campuses.
In the meantime, those companies — plus Tesla, Apple, Netflix, LinkedIn, Genentech and others — are trying to solve the problem with long-distance buses. They all now offer shuttle service to at least the extended suburbs of the East Bay, according to interviews and reports Protocol consulted. Their longest routes now stretch north across the Golden Gate Bridge, south to the surf town of Santa Cruz, and east to the Central Valley — a total service area approaching 3,000 square miles.
You missed visiting bombed-out, rubble-strewn Berlin post-1945? Don’t worry. You’ll have another chance, just a few short years down the road, to see entire empty neighborhoods comprised of falling-down, abandoned buildings.
New York City had square miles of buildings like that, back in the 1970s, thanks to Rent Control.
When Government Price Controls gift tenants with give-away rents and buildings’ incomes fail to suffice to pay taxes and buy heating oil, their owners have no choice but to walk away. Nobody wants to abandon valuable real estate, but when the Government expropriates all the income and destroys a property’s value, abandonment becomes inevitable. In NYC, countless thousands of buildings, entire neigborhoods, were once boarded up and abandoned. Berlin’s turn is obviously coming.
Germany’s capital is taking extreme measures to stay (relatively) affordable and not go the way of San Francisco or London. Beginning in early 2020, Berlin’s left-leaning government will freeze rents for five years. Landlords will be required to show new tenants the most recent rental contracts to prove they aren’t jacking up prices. They’ll also have to follow new rent-cap rules, which for many landlords could mean lowering rents by as much as 40%. Those who don’t comply will be hit with fines as high as €500,000 ($553,000) for each violation.
Even more radically, tenant groups and thousands of activists are demanding that large corporate landlords be expelled from the city altogether, their property expropriated. The goal is to get the government to buy back roughly 250,000 properties—almost one-eighth of Berlin’s housing stock—and turn them into public housing. And while the move may sound far-fetched, it’s won support from anywhere from 29% to 54% of Berliners, according to yvarious polls. Two of the city’s three ruling political parties have even endorsed a nonbinding public referendum on whether to force big landlords to sell their real estate to the government. (The biggest party, the Social Democratic Party, or SPD, is against the move, as is German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. They’ve signaled their intentions to challenge the new regulations in court.)
Berlin’s landlords, big and small, are reeling. The city’s publicly traded real estate companies, whose share prices fell for most of the summer after the government announced the planned freeze in June, complain that Berlin’s new regulations will scare off needed capital. Fewer companies will invest in modernizations to make buildings more appealing or energy-efficient, they say, and construction of new units may suffer, which would exacerbate Berlin’s shortages. “Almost 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seems that some people want the former conditions back,†Michael Zahn, chief executive officer of Berlin’s largest publicly traded landlord, Deutsche Wohnen SE, said in an earnings call in November, referring to the former East Germany’s all-controlling government. “Tenants and landlords will face great uncertainty. That’s a poison pill for investment.â€
I’m an inquisitive person, and I take a particular interest in Onomastics, the study of the origin of names.
This year, we’ve got a contender for the democrat party’s nomination for the presidency named “Peter Buttigieg.”
It seems to me that everyone ought to be muttering under his breath: “What in hell kind of name is Buttigieg?”
Why! he’s Maltese.
His father, Joseph Buttigieg, immigrated to the US from Malta in the late 1970s, and should never have been let into the country in the first place, since he was the classic example of Russell Kirk’s “spoilt priest,” a seminary drop-out who became a Marxist and whose major academic achievement was a translation of the Prison Notebooks of the odious Antonio Gramsci, advocate of communist conquest of the West via the systematic subversion of the culture via a “Long March Through the Institutions,” produced while marching personally through the University of Notre Dame.
As to the etymology of Buttigieg, and the question of that family’s historical social status, good old Wikipedia has the answer:
Buttigieg (Maltese: ButtiÄ¡ieÄ¡) is a Maltese surname, derived from Sicilian Arabic أبو الدجاج Abu-l-dajÄj [Bu-dajaj], meaning chicken owner or poulterer (literally, “father of chickens”).
Arabic? Who knew that Maltese people had Arabic names? I thought they had avoided conquest by the Moors. Not so, apparently. It turns out that the Muslim converts of North Africa conquered Malta circa 800 A.D. Malta was reconquered in 1091, and re-Christianized, by the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Consequently, Malta is the only part of Europe speaking a Semitic language. (!)
So the next time any conservative happens to be present at a speech by the former Mayor of South Bend, I recommend playing aloud the soundtrack of:
Who knows? There may well be a profound atavistic response.
——————-
Note that Buttigieg originates as a Sicilian Arabic name.
Facing torture while being interrogated as to the whereabouts of his son, Dennis Hopper’s character, in “True Romance” (1993), insults, and unbearably provokes his captor, by commenting on the Arabic Conquest of Sicily, and thus at the intentional cost of his own life, stylishly one ups his captor, and avoids giving up his son in a scene written by Quentin Tarrantino.
When we were litle kids, back in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, we found this plant abundantly present on waste ground. We referred to its fruit as “Inkberries.” They were believed to be deadly poison. Childhood folklore held that you only needed to eat a single berry to die. So we picked lots of the fascinating berries, crushed them in containers and dared each other to try eating “Inkberry soup.” No one did.
It never occurred to us to do anything with the plant’s ordinary, boring green leaves, but Abby Carney, in Saveur, tells us that Poke salad is really a long-time staple of Appalachian-cum-Afro-American rural cuisine, valued for its flavor as well as regarded as having medicinal properties.
All we did was pick the berries, make poison with them, and throw them at each other.
Despite the fact that the kudzu-like Phytolacca americana sprouts up all across North America, poke sallet, a dish made from the plant’s slightly-less-toxic leaves, is a regional thing, popular only to Appalachia and the American South. The leaves must be boiled in water three times to cook out their toxins, and, as aficionados will tell you, it’s well worth the extra effort.
But if pokeweed is so toxic, why did people start eating it in the first place? In a word, poke sallet is survival food.
According to Michael Twitty, historian, Southern food expert, and author of The Cooking Gene, poke sallet was originally eaten for pure practicality—its toxins made it an allegedly potent tonic. “Back in the old days, you had a lot of people who walked around barefoot,” Twitty said. “They walked around barefoot in animal feces all the time. Most of our ancestors from the Depression backwards were full of worms.” So then, poke sallet acted as a vermifuge, a worm purger.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center cites research showing that raw pokeweed has medicinal properties that can help cure herpes and HIV. That said, there are no clinical trials that support the use of the cooked dish as such, or as any kind of medicine, but its devotees swear by its curative qualities. Pokeweed remains a popular folk medicine, but it hasn’t been widely studied, so its healing properties remain, officially, purported.
I asked a longtime friend who is a USG China-watcher for a no-kidding assessment of current energy usage in PRC. Energy usage is a vital sign for the economy:
China imports are down 20% with about a year and a half strategic stockpile in tanks inland and ships in port (China has a strange habit of keeping oil at sea). In fact, their oil use is down so severely that Saudi Arabia and Russia are coordinating their reduction in oil production (which is totally ridiculous because they are both one commodity economies and are directly confronting one another for customers to balance their national budgets).
This is from Chevron yesterday:
Working to lift markets this morning is the talk of supply cuts coming from OPEC+. Signs point to OPEC+ being willing to deepen cuts amidst the decreased demand caused by the coronavirus. OPEC+ is gathering for an urgent assessment of how Asia’s coronavirus may hurt oil demand; technical experts from the OPEC+ coalition will meet at the cartel’s Vienna headquarters to evaluate the disease’s impact.Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz spoke by phone and discussed the grim situation of the global hydrocarbon market, the Kremlin said in an emailed statement; both leaders confirmed their readiness to continue cooperation to keep the global oil market stable.
Crude is recovering most of yesterday’s losses this morning, but markets are still reeling from last week’s declines.
Concern continues over the effects of the coronavirus on oil demand in China and Asia, but traders seem to have priced most of those concerns into the market already. The major remaining variable is how long will the crisis continue.
Crude prices are up this morning. Crude is currently trading at $51.07, a gain of 96 cents.Fuel prices are up. Diesel is trading at $1.6049, a gain of 2.7 cents.
Gasoline is trading at $1.4892, a gain of 1.6 cents.
Basically, China was already using less energy from the tariff war and now the virus has literally shut down the Yangtze River from Wuhan eastward to Shanghai (basically Saint Louis towards New Orleans– that’s how serious it is).
Keep in mind, the impact of China’s decline in energy use is driving oil prices down to the point many important national budgets cannot meet their obligations, which will put people in the streets protesting already compromised governments (Russia is the most vulnerable, then places like Venezuela are put in even more trouble, and the whole Belt/Road thing will fall apart).
The old well doesn’t look like much – a wooden crate-like object, dilapidated, crumbling a little. But according to new research, it’s really special. A tree-ring dating technique has revealed that the oak wood used to make it was cut around 7,275 years ago.
This makes it the oldest known wooden structure in the world that’s been confirmed using this method, scientists say.
“According to our findings, based particularly on dendrochronological data, we can say that the tree trunks for the wood used were felled in the years 5255 and 5256 BCE,” explained archaeologist Jaroslav PeÅ¡ka of the Archaeological Centre Olomouc in the Czech Republic in a press statement last year.
“The rings on the trunks enable us to give a precise estimate, give [or] take one year, as to when the trees were felled.”
The well was unearthed and discovered near the town of Ostrov in 2018 during construction on the D35 motorway in the Czech Republic. Ceramic fragments found inside the well dated the site to the early Neolithic, but no evidence of any settlement structures were found nearby, suggesting the well serviced several settlements at a bit of a distance away.
It was filled with dirt, so an archaeological team carefully excavated and extracted it. It consisted of four oak poles, one at each corner, with flat planks between them. The well was roughly square, measuring 80 by 80 centimetres (2.62 feet). It stood 140 centimetres tall (4.6 feet), with a shaft that extended below ground level and into the groundwater.
Even in waterlogged conditions, the state of preservation of the wood was exceptional, showing marks from the polished stone tools used to shape each piece.
“The construction of this well is unique,” PeÅ¡ka said.
“It bears marks of construction techniques used in the Bronze and Iron ages and even the Roman Age. We had no idea that the first farmers, who only had tools made of stone, bones, horns, or wood, were able to process the surface of felled trunks with such precision.”
And that amazing state of preservation also allowed for dendrochronological (based on tree rings) and radiocarbon dating, based on radioactive isotopes of carbon.
According to these techniques, the trees that supplied wood to the flat planks on the sides of the well were felled around 7,275 years ago. That’s probably when the well was constructed. But two of the poles told a different story.
Both were felled earlier – one around 7,278 or 7,279 years ago; and the other around nine years before that. This, the researchers concluded, meant that the two posts must have been used previously, and repurposed into posts for the well.
One of the side planks also had a different age. It was quite a bit younger, felled between 7,261 and 7,244 years ago. This is likely because of a repair to the well at some point.
The Telegraph has today another of those stories that makes you want to launch some Hellfire missiles from a drone at another elite university.
Cambridge University Students’ Union has said that having military personnel at freshers’ fair is “alarming†for attendees and could “detrimentally affect†their mental health.
Students voted to ban any societies from bringing firearms along to the fair after Stella Swain, the welfare and rights officer, argued that some people may find them “triggeringâ€.
The motion said that the presence of firearms and military personnel at the fair shows “implicit approval of their use, despite the links between military and firearms and violence on an international scaleâ€.
Ms Swain, who proposed the motion, pointed out that CUSU had previously committed to supporting efforts to “demilitarise†the university, and that freshers’ fair should not be a place for “military organisations to recruitâ€.
“The presence of firearms and military personnel at freshers’ fair is alarming and off-putting for some students, and has the potential to detrimentally affect students’ mental welfare,†the motion said.
Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of the British Forces in Afghanistan, labelled the motion as “pathetic, to say the very leastâ€.
Victoria Taft, at PJ Media, says what a lot of Americans are thinking this morning: “These are the people who want to make our health care and all our economic decisions for us?”
The Iowa caucus data operation just crashed and burned. That means that it could take days to get find out who actually won the Democratic contest – the first of the 2020 presidential election cycle.
Gobsmacked candidates have come out to throw confetti, drop balloons, and declare “on to New Hampshire!”
There’s nothing else to do except to declare victory and move on. No one really knows, right?
Joe Biden’s lawyers have sent the Iowa caucus organizers a sternly worded letter ordering them not to reveal the winner until the results are cleared with them.
Speculation has begun in earnest. Bernie Sanders can’t help but think that mainstream Dems are after him again and will do anything to keep him from the party nomination. Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s data czar and strategist from 2016, has had suspicion cast on him since he participated in conceiving of the Iowa caucus data platform with Harvard University. Or, of course, Democrats could blame the Russians again without allowing the FBI another look-see under the hood. That’ll be good for another impeachment of Trump in a second term, right?
In the short term, bring on the boo-birds.
It will take a while before the Democrats live this one down.
The Guardian reports on the latest form of self improvement catching on among female cloud people.
Freshly made pasta is drying on the wooden bannisters lining the hall of a beautiful home in Denver, Colorado. Fox-hunting photos decorate the walls in a room full of books. A fire is burning. And downstairs, a group of liberal white women have gathered around a long wooden table to admit how racist they are.
“Recently, I have been driving around, seeing a black person, and having an assumption that they are up to no good,†says Alison Gubser. “Immediately after I am like, that’s no good! This is a human, just doing their thing. Why do I think that?â€
This is Race to Dinner. A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,†Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.â€
Rao and Jackson believe white, liberal women are the most receptive audience because they are open to changing their behavior. They don’t bother with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. White men, they feel, are similarly a lost cause. “White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now,†Jackson says.
White women, on the other hand, are uniquely placed to challenge racism because of their proximity to power and wealth, Jackson says. “If they don’t hold these positions themselves, the white men in power are often their family, friends and partners.â€
It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they’d be asked, one by one, “What was a racist thing you did recently?†by two women of color, before appetizers are served. But Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US.
The women who sign up for these dinners are not who most would see as racist. They are well-read and well-meaning. They are mostly Democrats. Some have adopted black children, many have partners who are people of color, some have been doing work towards inclusivity and diversity for decades. But they acknowledge they also have unchecked biases. They are there because they “know [they] are part of the problem, and want to be part of the solution,†as host Jess Campbell-Swanson says before dinner starts.
