Not so homeless in Los Angeles

Images and video show homeless in Los Angeles syphoning water and power in camps sprouting throughout the city's streets - with some of the brazen encampments even boasting working washing machines.

Homelessness is a dominant issue in the state's upcoming mayoral election, with a large field of candidates promising to do more on an issue that has placed Los Angeles in an unwelcome national spotlight.

Sagging tents, rusting RVs, and makeshift structures have become commonplace along Hollywood Boulevard to Venice Beach - and even in the shadow of City Hall.

Over the past year, the camps have become increasingly bold, putting up full-sized tents and cordoning off entire streets, much to the chagrin of outraged locals.

Now, citizens have snapped evidence that the urban outposts are stealing water and power from the city to maintain a surprisingly lavish lifestyle while living out on the street, taking water from hydrants and electricity from any outlet they come across.

That same day in seedier South-Central, evidence of another, even more shameless encampment surfaced on social media - one also with a working washing machine and even a oversized tent that an onlooker noted was blocking a local business.

'1 bedroom tent with garden & working washing machine blocking a business driveway. Welcome to Los Angeles,' the user wrote, in a post that shared video of the washing machine in the middle of a clothes cycle.

On the 'door' to the unseen inhabitant's evidently homey tent, complete with a set of house plants adorning its entrance, a sign urged onlookers: 'Don't be hatin!'

Such sightings have become increasingly common since the pandemic, when the City of Angels, like many other liberal-run cities across the country, descended into a den of debauchery and crime that it has yet to crawl out of.

This comes as the city's wealthiest residents have been forced to fight a proposed 'mansion tax' on properties over $5million, further inflaming their dissatisfaction with city leadership.

One photo snapped by an awestruck bystander showed one such encampment in Hollywood, where multiple people were seen washing what looked to be their cars and motorcycles with syphoned water from a nearby hydrant.

Multiple cars were parked in the makeshift camp site - which also sported multiple working washing machines and several tents.

The photos, shared to Twitter by @LeatherJoseph on Monday, seem to suggest the camp's inhabitants are also stealing electricity from a nearby street light, to power their appliances and vehicles.

The city's current crime-ridden state has spurred countless locals and even celebrities to flee the Golden State for a better life, with the most recent being actor Mark Wahlberg, who is fleeing his longtime home in LA in favor for a life in nearby Nevada.

The likes of Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, and Matt Damon have also participated in the mass exodus - as well as hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens - citing a combination of over taxes, crime, and the state's notorious ever-worsening homeless problem.

Moreover, the state recently experienced its first population decline in decades last year, when roughly 250,000 residents were reported to have left the city - many instead electing to buy property in less costly locales such as Texas and Arizona.

Mayoral candidate Rick Caruso has made keeping Hollywood 'in Hollywood' a huge point of his campaign - though he appears to be fighting a losing battle to woke progressive Karen Bass.

Caruso is running against Democrat Karen Bass in the November election on a platform of tackling crime, homelessness and bringing an end to a steady stream of 'career politicians' such as DA George Gascon, whose 'soft-on-crime' policies he says have ruined the city.

Caruso has also criticized the city's treatment of local businesses, who instead of being rewarded for putting their money into the city, are now faced with aggressive homelessness that likely scares away customers.

He cited how current Mayor Eric Garcetti's office has so far failed to address that issue, as well as the hundreds of other camps currently operating in plain sight across the city.

'Look at [Netflix CEO] Ted Sarandos. Here's a guy who said, "I'm going to make a commitment and have my headquarters actually in Hollywood," and made a big, incredibly wonderful commitment to the city. And what has the city done?' Caruso asked during a recent appearance on The Ankler.

'The city has allowed encampments all around that headquarters.'

He added that such encampments is deterring the city's professionals from returning to work at the office, slowing the city's post-pandemic recovery to a virtual standstill.

'People are coming to work, and I've talked to the executives in there, coming to work carrying human waste on their shoes because there's so much human waste on the sidewalk, because we've allowed people to live in the most inhumane situation.

'It's incredible what all of our elected officials have allowed to happen. We're allowing people to live and die in the streets in their own waste. And then we allow that to happen in front of one of the great companies of Hollywood.'

Caruso was a Republican for years before registering as a Democrat earlier this year, ahead of the mayor's race.

He insisted in his interview - and has done throughout his campaign - that party affiliation is irrelevant.

'None of these issues are Republican or Democrat issues. None of them are. These are human issues. These are issues that are affecting all of our lives every single day.

'When crime is spiking, when you've got homicides that are at a 15-year high and it's only getting worse, when you have hate crimes that are up 160 percent, when you have homelessness now at 44,000 and people dying in the streets, these are life and death issues that transcend any kind of party.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11353093/Brazen-homeless-camps-LAs-squatters-using-WASHING-MACHINES-stealing-water.html

*************************************************

Former Levi’s top exec reveals how woke mobs took over corporations

Jennifer Sey was Levi’s brand president and on track to be the jeans company’s CEO. But when she complained online about extended school closures and their effect on children, she was attacked and falsely labeled a “COVID denier” who wanted to get former President Donald Trump re-elected. Levi’s management gave her a choice: Shut up or leave. As she explains in her new memoir, “Levi’s Unbuttoned,” Sey felt she had to quit her dream job on principle. In this exclusive excerpt, Sey explains how many of today’s CEOs — lacking any backbone, yet desperate to be seen as “good” — cave to performative woke mobs.

“Woke capitalism” is corporate America’s attempt to profit off Millennial and Gen Z activism, often passive keyboard activism.

It exploits social-justice politics and transforms it into social-justice consumerism — and ultimately, investor profit. Companies purporting to care about “progressive values” are really doing nothing more than striking a superficial pose meant to signal virtue while distracting from any company’s true motive: financial gain for shareholders.

All of that is true. But there is more to it, in my opinion.

First, you’ve got CEOs and executives who want to distance themselves from the greedy image of past business leaders. They want you to know that they are not like the ruthless banking moguls and oil tycoons from years gone by. They aren’t destroying the planet, and they aren’t taking advantage of consumers with sub-prime mortgages. They aren’t stealing or grifting, they’re helping! They aren’t in it for themselves, they care about you!

Tech companies are well known for their “change the world” cultiness. You don’t just work at Google. You’re connecting people to information that is life-changing, driving the digital revolution at the end of which we’ll all be so much better off than we are now.

Corporate leaders want us to believe that they are do-gooders, not money grubbers. They’ll get rich, too, but they don’t want you to think that is their mission. And, more importantly, they don’t want to think that about themselves. They believe they embody the best qualities of Andrew Carnegie (so generous! so benevolent!), Henry Ford (a visionary who cared about his employees!) and Theodore Roosevelt (a progressive man of action!) all rolled into one.

Business executives would have us believe that they are our saviors. Bill Gates is eliminating malaria and saving the children in Africa. Howard Schultz is running for president to save our democracy. Elon Musk is not only saving the planet with electric vehicles, he is exploring new frontiers in space and defending free speech for the masses.

Somehow, some way, despite all the evidence of greed and corruption, business leaders have managed to re-brand themselves as altruists. Never mind that in 2020, CEOs made 351 times more than the average worker at their company — up from 21 times more in 1965. Indeed, in the last 30 years, their average compensation has grown over 1,000%, even as they have burnished an image as humanitarians.

How? In partnership with a complicit press that buys into their companies’ expensive “we’re do-gooders” marketing campaigns, these CEOs have p.r.-ed themselves to philanthropic, good-hearted hero status. This phony message has been amplified and embraced by consumers around the world, despite all the evidence that shows that these so-called do-gooders are really no good at all. It boggles the mind, but it’s a testament to the power of marketing.

There was a time when doctors and lawyers were the pillars of the community, and that’s what every mother wanted her child to be. But now, business leaders seem to have taken that mantle. While Steve Jobs is widely known as kind of an a–hole, he’s also viewed as a visionary who changed the world. I can’t tell you how many business leaders use his quote “Stay hungry. Stay foolish” as their email sign-offs. It clothes naked capitalism with profundity and meaning.

CEOs and C-suite executives were always rich. But now they’re rich and beloved, and perceived as well-meaning and heroic.

In this new Gilded Age, journalists — themselves often politically biased and ethically compromised — have continued to spread the fiction that corporate leaders and entrepreneurs are not just “good” people but near god-like figures. The public eats it up, because it helps to fill the gaping religion-size hole in our increasingly secular culture.

And today’s ostentatiously woke CEOs are more than happy to play along, eager to prove that they are not just guys out to make a buck. Woke capitalism signals that their guiding intention is to make this a better, more just world, even as it distracts us from their only true intention: enhancing their companies’ bottom line, and their own.

Of course, the beauty of it all is that simultaneously it endows consumers with a false sense of nobility, encouraging them to believe that buying the right stuff is actually activism. “You like T-shirts? Here — buy this organic cotton T-shirt that also shows you support the LGBTQ+ community because it has our logo but with a rainbow!”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against capitalism. Far from it. I’m against the charade that is social-justice capitalism.

I want to buy stuff because it’s the best stuff on the market. Win me over with your excellence. I’ll even pay more for it. I’ll express my political affiliation with my vote, not my sneakers or soft drink of choice.

But in the age of armchair, keyboard activism, woke capitalism lets consumers badge themselves as progressive activists without actually having to do anything. It’s magic!

https://nypost.com/2022/10/24/former-levis-top-exec-reveals-how-woke-mobs-took-over-corporations

************************************************************

The Right Resistance: Donald Trump didn’t just change the GOP, he vastly improved it

Since it’s election time and politicians from both parties are campaigning on platforms of improving voters’ lives, it’s fitting to ask whether the Republican Party itself is better off now than it was before Donald J. Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator with wife Melania by his side and proceeded to change the world one truthful assault and insult (to the establishment) at a time.

Most conservatives and Republicans would reply with an emphatic “Yes!” to the above query and the discussion would then switch to the ways Trump made a difference since he burst on the scene. They’re too many benefits to count, or at least too numerous to lay out in a reasonable length opinion column. Books have been written on the subject and no doubt dozens, if not hundreds (or thousands?) more will follow in the years and decades to come.

What is indisputable on all sides is the notion that the Republican Party of 2022 looks, sounds and feels different/better than the old one did under the guidance of presidents George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush. We can also lump GOP presidential nominees Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney into this group as well as a good many of the party’s congressional leaders and past presidential candidates.

The Republican Party has changed alright, and by the looks of it, will never go back to its old default position of permitting the media to trample all over its leaders and beliefs. The GOP also (hopefully) won’t return to its previous non-stop parade of sellouts and capitulations. Current senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has done his best to maintain the half-hearted party attitudes, but Donald Trump – and his growing band of MAGA brand promoters – is working to fix that problem, perhaps as soon as next January.

What else has changed? Six things, apparently. In a piece titled “Six ways Trump has changed the GOP”, Max Greenwood wrote at The Hill:

“Former President Donald Trump has dramatically reshaped the Republican Party in his own image, leaving marks that have outlived his presidency — and could potentially outlive him.

“It’s not unusual for a president, current or former, to hold sway over his party and its voters. But Trump’s impact on the GOP stands out for its breadth; Trump has influenced the party and its members on everything from policy to rhetorical style, as Republican officials and candidates look to recreate the movement that helped propel Trump to the White House six years ago.

“Here are [six] ways Trump has significantly changed the GOP: [He’s turned it more against mainstream media; He’s made attacking opponents a signature; He’s sparked opposition to institutions; He’s fueled skepticism in the country’s elections; He’s made fealty to him a necessity for party survival; He altered the GOP’s view of the world].”

At the outset I’ll point out that making “lists” of ways that Trump did this or that is a terrific means for lazy reporters with writer’s block to fulfill his or her daily or weekly allotment of writings and still get a lot of people to click the links. Almost every time I see this type of column, the premises are usually highly disputable and, again, basically designed to paint Trump as either a buffoonish amateur or unflinching dictator.

As I’ve argued many times, Trump’s name by itself turns heads. Both fans and enemies alike love reading about the former president, and it’s that kind of instinctive attraction that’s allowed him to remain part of the conversation long after he departed Washington. Former presidents usually go into “retirement” and seek a golden years’ respite from the spotlight. Not Trump. Anyone who thought he would follow the example of his predecessors surely hasn’t studied the political or entertainment aspects of his career.

With that being said, I’ll add my own commentary to Greenwood’s “Six ways Trump has changed the GOP” propositions: 1. He’s turned it [the party] more against mainstream media

Is this really true? For as long as I can remember Republicans have railed against unfair media coverage, but it took a man like Trump to actually call the fourth estate out in direct terminology on their bias. Past surveys revealed that nine-out-of-ten media members consider themselves (or have voted for) liberal Democrats, and their personal slant shows up in their reporting.

Trump refused to play along with the manipulation games, instantly labelling anything he considered blatantly untrue as “fake news”. And he’d say it to the speaker’s face, too. Trump had little patience for the schmoozing and subtle manipulation of facts to support a liberal narrative – like “the Trump campaign colluded with Vladimir Putin to tip the 2016 election” and often turned interviews with hostile journalists into a verbal combat sport.

This “change” was more than welcome. Rather than watching the media relentlessly pecking at him as though he were poor, defenseless George W. Bush, Trump fought back. And won, at least with the people who paid attention to the particulars.

2. He’s made attacking opponents a signature

Even before Donald Trump arrived in 2015 to kick the GOP “up a notch”, a new breed of conservative fighter was emerging in Republican ranks.

Radio legend Rush Limbaugh helped bring about the GOP’s House majority in 1994 by highlighting the work of Newt Gingrich, who certainly was no stranger to attacking opponents. Gingrich and his core group of House conservatives, including Dick Armey, formulated the “Contract with America”, a set of ten ideas that the authors deemed “majority issues”.

While it may be true that Republicans didn’t attack each other as much in those days as Trump laid into his opponents during the 2016 campaign – and ever since – I wouldn’t say condemning each other is a GOP “signature” now. The Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinzingers of the world deserve every bit of negative energy they’ve received, not because they disagreed with Trump on policy, but because they made it personal. And petty. Sad.

Today’s Republican Party is much better off than before Trump because overall, they’re more unified and less content with having their policy positions smeared by Democrats and the media as racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc., or to be called “semi-fascists” by jerks like Joe Biden just because they aren’t onboard with the liberal transgender fixation.

3. He’s sparked opposition to institutions

Like the previous item, Trump didn’t necessarily change Republicans’ “opposition” to institutions as much as he brought their suspicions to the forefront.

Americans don't love the U.S. government nearly as much as the media insists that they do. Americans love the Constitution and American traditions, not institutions, especially when said foundations have been corrupted. Some institutions within the government, like the military and the FBI, used to enjoy stellar reputations for effectiveness and nose-to-the-grindstone impartiality, but both (and many, many, others) have been despoiled by careerists with attitudes that they’re bigger and more important than the law and citizens’ rights.

Americans don’t send their sons and daughters into the military to be reprogrammed into “woke” robots spouting newly reformulated jargon, and the FBI has been wholly taken over by the Merrick Garland Department of in-Justice to the point where the drive to catch real criminals has been supplanted by elites pursuing political vendettas. Did Trump steer people away from the institutions, or did the institutions themselves change from within? You decide.

4. He’s fueled skepticism in the country’s elections

Really? Donald Trump alone changed the GOP into the party home of election deniers?

The irreplaceable Victor Davis Hanson wrote a column last week highlighting all the times Democrats denied or rejected the results of past elections. From the incredibly close 2000 presidential election to the non-disputed (by sane people, that is) Trump victory in 2016, many, many Democrats have gone on record indicating that a particular result was illegitimate and they wouldn’t abide by it.

Trump was just the first prominent official to make a public stink about election fraud and integrity at a very high level. Besides, Trump wasn’t the only one planting doubt into the minds of conservative voters regarding the electoral system. Such wariness was already there. Democrats have often refused basic integrity measures such as paper ballots, same-day voting and Voter ID. All of these suspicions pre-dated Trump. Democrats seem to think voter rolls don’t ever need to be scrubbed and illegal aliens should be given the franchise, too.

Democrats’ push for amnesty and citizenship for illegal aliens is about voting, period. The deeply flawed current electoral system invites more skepticism, not less. Until there are unquestionable accountability measures put in place, the reservations will remain.

5. He’s made fealty to him a necessity for party survival

This is another media created myth that isn’t backed up by facts. Journalists and liberal talk show hosts hold up Liz Cheney as the poster child for an unfortunate office holder whose electoral viability was destroyed by Donald Trump, but it was her own doing that put Liz on the primary chopping block in her home state (Wyoming).

Cheney made the mistake of siding with the enemy (Democrats) in voting to impeach Trump for something that he didn’t do – incite an armed “insurrection” against the government. Lots of people were and still are ambivalent about the former president, but this doesn’t mean they believe he’s a saboteur or a traitor. Far from it. Trump spoke eloquently about America and went out of his way to help disadvantaged people.

Liz Cheney crossed the line, as do any other Republicans who make it personal about Trump and his agenda. It's okay to disagree with Trump on policy, but don't attack him or his voters. Lindsey Graham is a good example of someone who publicly disagrees with Trump on some issues (such as Ukraine and Russia) but still remains in the man’s good graces. There are others, too.

Trump’s been burned far too many times from within the GOP. Demanding a little loyalty isn’t too much to ask in return for peace within the party.

6. He altered the GOP’s view of the world

Hear! Hear! It’s about time! For far too long Republicans were automatically associated with endless “stupid wars” and boundless military adventurism that was the product of neoconservative ideology and strongarmed political tactics. Trump put an end to it, as well as shamelessly promoting the notion that the American government should represent the interests of Americans first before they consider citizens and governments of other nations.

What’s wrong with that? We aren’t citizens of the world and conservatives value borders, sovereignty and their own God-given constitutional rights. Who cares what’s going on halfway around the world in terms of energy policy or trade philosophy?

Trump brought a new attitude to the GOP, and the fact that most current party members back him up on it is a good thing, not something to criticize.

Donald Trump didn’t change the Republican Party as much as he improved it. All Republicans ever needed was a leader like Trump (or Reagan before him) who knew how to sell the party’s ideas while simultaneously branding the Democrats as socialists, corporatists, globalists and “woke” climate hypocrites whose sole mission was to transform the once great nation into an unrecognizable dystopia. Think about that the next time the media argues that Trump has only hurt the GOP.

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/the-right-resistance-donald-trump-didn-t-just-change-the-gop-he-vastly-improved-it

****************************************************

The elite keep getting it wrong

It’s time to take a good hard look at the cadre of mainstream, legacy journalists and psephologists as well as the public health clerisy, that constitutes ‘the expert class’. It might not have escaped your notice that these members of the cognoscenti have gotten so much wrong these past few years it would be embarrassing, or at least it would if the journalistic class bothered to report on it.

Let’s start with the pollsters and journalists. Back in mid-September in these very pages I predicted the Republicans would take the Senate and do so with a net two or three pick up (so, would end up with 52 or 53 of the 100-member Senate). And this despite the fact only 14 of the 35 Senate seats being contested this mid-term year are ones currently held by the Democrats, and those 14 are all in states won by Joe Biden in 2020. If you go back to September you’ll see that virtually all the pollsters and near-on every single member of the legacy media (here as well as in the US) were predicting the Dems would retain the Senate.

I didn’t believe it for two reasons. Firstly, I didn’t believe independent voters in the US could or would endorse what they’d seen from this Joe Biden administration, probably the worst in well over a century. Just consider the open southern border that has seen over four million illegal aliens pour in since Joe took over. Consider the skyrocketing gas and oil prices, largely driven not by Putin and the Ukraine war but by Biden’s massive restrictions on new (and some existing) domestic exploration. Consider the inflation rate. Consider the Democrats thuggish and heavy-handed pro-lockdown, pro-masking, pro-mandates approach to Covid. The list goes on and on.

But perhaps more relevantly to my prediction, I have read various people point out that US pollsters have been way off since at least 2016. The pattern we’ve seen is consistently that most US polls overstate the position of Democrat candidates and do so significantly right up until the last week or two before the election. Then the polls move noticeably towards the Republicans.

If you’re feeling charitable this might be put down to the difficulty of getting Republicans to answer pollsters, something that might explain why nearly all polls over-sample Democrats. (Look at the small print and you’ll see what I mean.) If you’re feeling conspiratorially minded, though, you might instead put it down to journalists and pollsters hoping to suppress the Republican vote by convincing them their candidate has no chance and then moving at the very end to protect their reputations as pollsters. (‘See, our final polls were pretty accurate.’)

Anyway, back in mid-September the talk and polls were all about a Democrat recovery and an easily retained Senate, not to mention all sorts of talk about how the Trump-endorsed candidates were so weak. But not now. With just under a fortnight to the elections the Republicans are surging everywhere. Winning the House is virtually a sure thing. Meanwhile, every currently held Republican Senate seat has a Republican with a lead or tied (even Dr Oz in Pennsylvania). And the currently held Democrat Senate seats in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona all have Democrats tied or behind. Should those all flip it will be a Republican wave.

But the momentum is such right now that it could even be a tsunami – throwing into play the chances the Republicans pick up Senate seats in New Hampshire and in ultra-liberal, west coast Washington and more. Meanwhile the gubernatorial races are looking cataclysmic for the Democrats. Ron DeSantis in Florida, back in 2018, barely won by 30,000 votes out of 8.5 million or so cast. Right now he’s massively ahead in the polls (such are the rewards of being brave and resisting despotism during the pandemic). This while long-time Democrat strongholds are in play. A future star Republican Kari Lake (she tells the press they’re biased and then backs it up chapter and verse) looks like winning in Arizona. The lockdown despot and Dan Andrews-type wannabe Governor Gretchen Whitmer is in big trouble in the safe Dem state of Michigan. Heck, the Republican looks to have a shot at unseating the incumbent Governor in New York of all places.

So either something earth-shattering happened in the last four or five weeks. Or, and this will shock you I know, the pollsters and journalists lean so far left they see everything through a ‘what will best help the Democrats’ lens. Either way, the cognoscenti expertocracy is failing us here. Maybe that explains why journalists are coming dead last in surveys of the most-trusted occupations in the US.

Speaking of failures by the expert class, let’s now turn our attention to the public health clerisy in this country. It was to these medicos that our woeful political caste abdicated virtually all decision-making during the pandemic. Last week a self-styled ‘Independent Covid Review’ led by Peter Shergold reported back on how we did in Australia. It found that no schools should have been shut; some of the lockdowns and border closures were avoidable; key groups were excluded from financial support; and generally was not overly complimentary. But let me be abundantly blunt here. This report is as tepid as they come. The data is now clear there should have been no lockdowns, no mandates, no police thuggery, no outspending Trudeau, the list goes on. So say so.

Here’s the problem. All these reports done by the great and the good all start with the premise that in the face of radical uncertainty (no one knew how bad the virus was going to be) the government had to take steps and err on the side of doing something big to keep people safe. It’s from that premise that even this report makes its criticisms. But in my view that core premise is simply wrong-headed. In the face of radical uncertainty there is no plausible ground for thinking the default position should be some regulatory equivalent of the precautionary principle – ie opt for what looks like the zero-risk position – requiring big-state actions. In fact, the best-supported approach in the face of radical uncertainty is to continue on with what the till-then accumulated data indicated was the best road and wait for new data. (Data, not models, to be clear.)

That, readers, is basically what three of the world’s top epidemiologists recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration. And it is exactly what we in Australia (and most of the non-Swedish world) did not do. The costs are now proving to be astronomical, even in terms of cumulative excess deaths where we are worse than Sweden. So this report points in broadly the right direction but, really, it is pathetically weak in its criticisms. We lived through thuggery, the worst inroads on our civil liberties in 300 years, massive impositions on the young and poor to benefit the old and rich, and virtually no MPs (Libs included) said a word. Our expert class was wholly useless as were our politicians. (My kingdom for a DeSantis.) Their first principles were catastrophically wrong. And we here in the pages of the Speccie Australia were saying it from day one, not in an enervated report long after the fact that is far, far too tepid.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/doubting-the-cognoscenti/ ?

****************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*****************************************