The California media is finally reporting what common folks knew for two years. Unnecessary lock downs put the children behind. It’s apparent that California’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which included shuttering schools and forcing students into sporadic forms of on-line instruction, had the effect of widening the achievement gap. Not only did California kids score very low, vis-à-vis other states, in the most recent round of federal academic achievement tests, the National Assessment of Education Progress, but there were sharp differences in how individual school districts fared.
So how does the media say it can be fixed? California’s school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic widened the state’s “achievement gap” and addressing the crisis should be a major issue for the Legislature. They learned nothing.
Foxconn continues to add customers to build in Ohio. Foxconn Photo
For my lurkers, any luck selling your dumps yet?
Foxconn Ohio opened its doors Wednesday to a delegation of Taiwanese investors to demonstrate the company’s current production activity and potential of its 6.2 million-square-foot manufacturing plant.
Indeed, Foxconn, the largest electronics contract manufacturer in the world, has already identified areas where it could expand at its Lordstown campus should the massive plant reach capacity.
Foxconn executives said the plant could add another 1.4 million square feet in the front and rear of the assembly complex, as the tech giant courts customers that would use the facility to build EVs for the North American market.
James Wu, spokesman for Foxconn Group, said the Lordstown plant is critical to pursuing the company’s EV strategy in North America. “This is going to be very important to realize our goal to have a 5% global share in 2025,” he said.
Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Technology Group, purchased the plant from Lordstown Motors Corp. in May for $230 million. Since then, the company has signed contract manufacturing agreements with Lordstown Motors to produce the all-electric Endurance pickup, and Monarch Tractor to build its Mark V EV tractor.
Also, the company has secured a memorandum of understanding to build pre-production and prototype models for California-based Indiev Inc.’s Indi One electric vehicle. And, in May, Fisker Inc. confirmed it wanted to build its Fisker Pear EV at Lordstown per a framework agreement it signed earlier with Foxconn.
The Lordstown Motors Endurance in production at Foxconn’s plant in Lordstown.
On Tuesday, the German auto news outlet, Automobilwoche, reported that Volkswagen is in discussions with Foxconn to build the Scout EV. Such a deal could bring production to Lordstown, since the plant is specifically designated to produce EVs on a contract basis.
“Starting in 2023, we should see this factory running,” Wu said. “In 2024, we should see quite a significant amount of EV cars made here. We are quite excited.”
Wu said that Foxconn is able to provide customers with contract design and manufacturing services, or CDMS. “In EV sectors, we try to showcase our CDMS business model. We can provide, including the car design, components, modules, assembly – these kinds of total solutions,” he said. “We are in negotiations with several potential customers.”
About 25 representatives from banks, investment groups and the news media based mostly in Taiwan visited the plant on Wednesday. The event was to inform the group of Foxconn’s progress since it entered the EV market in the United States. “We wanted to introduce this factory to our investors and media to make them comfortable and confident in our EV strategy,” Wu said.
The Foxconn plant is currently building the Lordstown Motors Endurance. On Tuesday, the Lordstown Motors announced that it had started commercial deliveries of the vehicle. It also announced the Endurance had received certification from the EPA and the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, and completed all of the necessary crash tests.
The Taiwanese delegation received a firsthand look at how the Endurance is built during a brief plant tour. The visitors were permitted to observe the stamping plant, body shop and general assembly areas.
Ian Upton, Foxconn Ohio’s director of production control, said the stamping plant contains five press lines, four of which have the capability to produce between 400 and 450 stamped components per hour. “Depending on the parts we’re making, we can stamp a right-hand and a left-hand door at the same time,” which means 800 and 900 parts per hour.
The fifth press is a transfer line, Upton said, that runs at a higher speed but stamps smaller parts. The entire stamping operation – which takes up 800,000 square-feet – produces most of the metal parts visible on the Endurance pickup.
Production of the Endurance is in its infancy, though, and Lordstown Motors has said that it plans to manufacture an initial batch of just 500 units, most of which would be produced during the first quarter of 2023.
“We have an awful lot of room for growth in terms of volume in the future,” Upton said.
Foxconn Ohio’s body shop occupies approximately 1.2 million square feet of space in the plant, Upton said. “It takes all the parts we make in stamping, as well as some purchased components, and then we start welding the vehicle together,” creating the steel frame of the truck.
The framing area, for example, attaches the two metal body sides to the floor pan. “This station is exceptionally important,” he said. “If things are not square, if things are not dimensioned properly, the doors will not fit properly, the doors will not close properly,” Upton explained. “The entire interior of the vehicle will not be able to be assembled properly.”
Both the stamping and body shop operations are highly automated, Upton said. “In the stamping plant, the only time human hands, with proper protection, touches a part is at the end of the line putting it into a storage rack.”
All of the welding in the body shop is also automated and performed by robotic welders, he added. This improves quality control, repeatability, and is easier on operators. The paint shop is also fully automated.
Upton said it’s possible to run various models through the body shop, since the robots could be programmed to pick tooling that is specific to the vehicle in production.
Securing this tooling and other components, however, often depends on Foxconn’s contract client and where they stand in their development schedule, Upton said. Lordstown Motors, for example, faced serious headwinds because of supply chain issues.
“We will not source the components for Lordstown Motors,” he said.
However, as new platforms are introduced in the future – such as Foxconn’s Mobility In Harmony, or MIH, platform – Foxconn would then be considered as a supplier. The company could also serve as a Tier One supplier to clients. “We are building a common MIH platform. That is a huge amount of leverage,” Upton said.
Once the body and trim work is finished, and the pickup moves through the paint shop, the frame is fitted and married to the chassis in the general assembly area. The chassis – which contains the vehicle’s understructure including the battery and hub motors – are assembled in another part of the plant and carried by automatic guided vehicles, or AGVs.
Using AGVs makes sense for now, since the Endurance is being produced in low volumes, Upton added. “When we get a high-volume customer in here, we’ll be putting in an entirely new chassis line.”
Jerry Hsiao, Foxconn chief production officer, said that the Lordstown plant and the region are steeped in manufacturing talent and today employs approximately 400. The majority of the plant’s leadership is made up of former employees of General Motors Co., which owned the Lordstown plant for more than 50 years before ending production and selling it to Lordstown Motors Corp.
“The most important thing to me is people,” Hsiao told guests. “Here, they know how to build a car.”
Internal Twitter deliberations surrounding the censorship of the New York Post‘s reporting on Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” reveal the company’s management engaging in willful ignorance of the facts of the story in order to justify censoring it on the platform.
Matt Taibbi, the journalist tasked by Elon Musk to reveal the internal communications, explains that Twitter management at the time used the company’s hacked materials policy “as an excuse” to squelch the Post’s reporting, but knew it “wasn’t going to hold.” The reason it “wasn’t going to hold” was because the Post explained that the reporting was based on a hard drive abandoned at a computer repair shop, not “hacked material,” and produced a federal subpoena given to the repair-shop owner to bolster the claim.
Former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth messaged colleague Vijaya Gadde, “The policy basis is hacked materials — though, as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear. Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016, we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.”
Another member of management, Brandon Borrman, then asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
Jim Baker, Twitter’s then-Deputy Legal Counsel and former senior member of the FBI, adds, “[We] need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that conclusion is warranted.”
Baker then admits, per the Post‘s reporting in the story in question, that there is evidence “indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.”
But during the time this communication was underway, Twitter did not contact the New York Post to inquire about whether the reporting was based on hacked material, and the story in question explained exactly how the Post obtained the material it was reporting on.
In the story headlined, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” published on October 14, 2020, it says that the correspondence between Burisma board member Vadym Pozharskyi and Hunter was “contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.”
The Post published that it had the entire hard drive, which was originally obtained by a computer repair shop in Delaware.
“The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store’s owner,” the Post wrote in the initial story.
The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.
The shop owner couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother and former Delaware attorney general.
Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop’s owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.
But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.
Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.
The Post also published an image of a federal subpoena, showing the computer was in the FBI’s possession, after being turned in by the computer repair shop owner, who has now been publicly identified as John Paul Mac Isaac.
Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News.
WOW! When I read about this on Breitbart, I thought of the folks on those obscure white progressive channels where death threats and violence were the norm. You know the ones. 20-25 people make a hundred comments. But to see Facebook do this?
While social media giants are known for acting quickly and without hesitation to censor certain information being posted during election season — such as the bombshell news story about Hunter Biden’s infamous “laptop from hell” — Facebook reportedly failed to block ads containing death threats to election workers ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Facebook failed to block 75 percent of ads “explicitly calling for violence against and killing of US election workers” ahead of the midterm elections, according to an investigation by Global Witness and the New York University Tandon School of Engineering’s Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) team.
“The ads contained ten real-life examples of death threats issued against election workers and included statements that people would be killed, hanged or executed, and that children would be molested,” the report said.
But yet folks are upset cause Twitter is allowing some Conservatives back on.
Another reason Republicans red wave was a small one. We saw how the Black and Latino vote increased for Republicans this past election. And we saw how 5 million more people voted for Republicans in the Congressional races but outside the red districts that didn’t help much. Why?
Midterm election turnout among black voters appears to be 25 percent lower than white turnout, marking the lowest share of the black electorate since 2006, a New York Times analysis revealed Wednesday.
Granted the large majority would have voted Democrat but if the Republicans got 10% of that 25, you would have seen some big changes in the house, Arizona, and NY governors races.
But the whites who voted in those blue areas were happy with the status quo. So wnen Republicans get back that white vote and continue to grow the black and brown vote, then you will see more Republican office holders in blue districts
We see that CNN is continuing to get rid of the rubbish or move them to time slots to where only their family members will watch. Now if only MSNBC gets the hint and does likewise. One affirmative action babe who had zero audience does not count.
Arizona's Mark Kelly, seen here waving to supporters, celebrated an Election Day victory. Ruddy posits incumbents like Kelly did well because voters like the status quo. (AP)
ChristopherRuddyis the CEO of Newsmax Media. Fastest growing cable news channel. He had a piece yesterday where he got it mostly right on what happened election day. I’ll post that but will leave out the rest cause he went out into loony tune land for the most part from where I left off. I’ll have a reason or two of my own at the end.
Since Election Day 2022, almost everyone has been playing Monday morning quarterback.
Today, it’s my turn.
Republicans seriously underperformed and the establishment/media points the finger at two big factors: Donald Trump and abortion.
Specifically, voters were turned off by former President Trump and they reacted negatively to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
If you look at election results across the nation, neither holds up as the real culprit.
In Florida, we saw Gov. Ron DeSantis, a MAGA candidate if ever there was one, win by a record 19 percentage points.
In recent elections, Florida had been a close state in terms of the “red vs. blue” dynamic.
Still, DeSantis won so big, he even carried Democrat stronghold counties like Miami-Dade and Palm Beach.
DeSantis was also a strong pro-life proponent, last year signing a strict heartbeat bill banning abortions after 15 weeks.
In bellwether Ohio, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who also signed a law banning abortion after six weeks, won reelection by 26 points.
And then in Democratic Wisconsin, pro-Trumper and pro-lifer Sen. Ron Johnson won reelection.
Even in liberal, extremely pro-choice New York, Republican Lee Zeldin moved the needle 17 points from Trump’s loss in 2020, coming within five points of beating Democrat Gov. Hochul.
Zeldin was both pro-life and pro-Trump, even seeking the former president’s endorsement in the race.
More astounding, the GOP won 11 House seats across New York state, including several in suburban districts with those allegedly angry-over-Roe women swing voters.
As it turned out, 10 of the 11 New York Republican congressional winners were pro-life, and almost all were pro-Trump.
So, what really happened on Election Day?
I believe the Republicans completely misread the electorate.
The GOP actually believed their own press releases (and yes, polls) and thought voters were just as furious as they were with Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and their friends.
From here I give my thoughts and opinions. Everything Mr. Ruddy said was true. But when it came to abortion, the Republicans who lost in the blue districts should have went with Senator Grahams 15 weeks. Saying it was state rights was taking the easy way out. ” I don’t want to talk about it.”
Finally the Republicans weren’t able to make the case that the economy, the border inflation, and the fiasco in Afghanistan was Biden’s doing and weren’t able to tie their opponent to those disasters. Why? Cause they didn’t say what they would do to fix things. Just said blame Joe.
Investor slides shared by Musk say that the daily inflow of new users has reached two million, while “user active minutes per day” likewise reached eight billion. The company now has more than 250 million monetizable daily active users, Musk says. All three metrics exceed previous company records.
Purported hate speech impressions have been lower since Musk acquired the platform. Musk, who claimed he purchased Twitter to promote free expression and peaceful dialogue across the political spectrum, revealed last week that the company is still defining hate speech with “the same list of terms” implemented before the acquisition.
Musk also hinted at a number of new offerings from “Twitter 2.0,” including enhanced video content, long-form tweets, encrypted direct messages, and entertaining advertisements.
Musk has remarked that widespread coverage of the acquisition and his subsequent attempts to reform the company, including negative reports from mainstream outlets, has contributed to usage reaching record levels. He said his number-one priority is the removal of child exploitation ( I think I know of 4 or 5 people who were part of this. White Progressives. ) content from Twitter, which previous management neglected to accomplish. Several advertisers paused campaigns on the platform two months ago after a report showed that child sexual abuse material had appeared alongside major advertisers’ profiles.
I have seen my likes and followers grow, so I’m happy the direction Twitter is going in.
Coal that will be burned to generate electricity moves down a conveyor belt at the American Electric Power Co. (AEP) coal-fired John E. Amos Power Plant in Winfield, West Virginia, U.S., on Wednesday, July 18, 2018. American Electric Power Co., Duke Energy Corp., and others say they can't recoup money they spent to meet requirements to cut mercury and other air toxics from their facilities and therefore want the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to retain the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule as is. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Thirteen attorneys general and Consumers’ Research on Tuesday filed two motions to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to stop Vanguard from purchasing shares in publicly traded utilities.
Both motions argue that Vanguard’s Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment advocacy puts politics before consumers and that FERC should reject Vanguard’s authorization unless Vanguard can prove that its policies will not impact energy consumers. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, the three largest asset managers, apply for blanket authorization before FERC every three years. The attorneys general and Consumers’ Research intervened to block Vanguard’s authorization.
ESG investing is the latest vector through which large corporations, especially the big three asset managers, can exert their undue influence upon publicly trade companies to have them adopt left-wing causes such as green energy or diversity requirements the companies otherwise would not adopt.
Kentucky Attorney General said in a written statement that Vanguard’s commitment to net-zero emissions requirement for public utilities would only hurt consumers:
Kentucky joined a coalition of attorneys general, led by Indiana and Utah, in challenging Vanguard’s application to extend its blanket authorization under the Federal Power Act for the acquisition of certain securities of publicly traded utilities. Consumers across our country are already feeling the sting of skyrocketing electricity bills, and Vanguard’s request to extend its authorization, coupled with its commitment to imposing net-zero requirements on publicly traded utilities, would only increase these costs. Kentuckians and Americans deserve access to affordable and reliable utilities, and we will oppose any effort that will undermine Kentucky’s economy, destroy good paying jobs, and make it harder for Kentuckians to heat their homes and feed their families.
Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, a consumers advocacy group, said that BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street use to leverage the utilities’ shares to force them to adopt left-wing policies that spike energy bills:
We took this action on behalf of American energy consumers because time and time again we see massive wall street firms pretending to “passively” manage their shares, but instead they use those assets to bully utility companies into adopting radical left-wing policies that drive up electric bills and risk the stability of our power grid. Affordable, reliable energy production is the foundation of America’s economy and the quality of life we enjoy. FERC’s job is to defend utilities from exactly this type of reckless interference. They should act to protect these utilities and American consumers from fat cat wall street wreckers who blithely endanger our electricity supply.
The attorneys general wrote in their motion to intervene to FERC that Vanguard may have “breached” its promises to the commission by engaging in environmental activism:
The Commission granted the 2019 Authorization based on assurances from Vanguard that it would refrain from investing “for the purpose of managing” utility companies.4 Vanguard also guaranteed that it would not seek to “exercise any control over the day-to-day management” of utility companies nor take any action “affecting the prices at which power is transmitted or sold.”5 Now, Vanguard’s own public commitments and other statements have at the very least created the appearance that Vanguard has breached its promises to the Commission by engaging in environmental activism and using its financial influence to manipulate the activities of the utility companies in its portfolio.
While Consumers’ Research notes in its motion to intervene that BlackRock is the most “notorious spear carrier” concerning corporate activism, the group noted that Vanguard also plays an instrumental role in advancing climate change policies on a corporate level.
Consumers’ Research elaborated:
In publications on its website, Vanguard details its “important role” in promoting “meaningful progress across both [its] actively managed and index-based products” such that portfolio companies adopt its climate goals.15 To be sure, it is not the case that Vanguard pursues its environmental agenda only through special “ESG” investment vehicles, while passively managing its other funds. Rather, according to Vanguard, even those funds “without explicit ESG mandates [] nonetheless align to net zero [carbon] objectives because of the existing philosophy and process used by the investment managers.”16 Even supposedly passive index funds are managed by Vanguard’s “investment stewardship teams” that pressure portfolio companies to adopt “emission reduction goals.”1
Consumers’ Research concluded in its motion to intervene, “With each passing day, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street exert greater influence on U.S. energy markets under the guise of “passive investing.” Because Vanguard should not have a blank check to dictate energy policy in America, Consumers’ Research moves to intervene, protests, and urges the Commission to deny the Application.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Arresting criminals.
ICE/JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
In all of his craziness Last year ( February 2021 ) Biden declared that ICE agents could not arrest or deport most of the illegal aliens in the U.S. unless they are considered a threat to public safety, a threat to national security, or arrived sometime after November 2020.
Well the Supreme Court has agreed to hear oral arguments where states are seeking to block President Joe Biden’s so-called “sanctuary country” orders from being implemented.
In August 2021, Judge Drew Tipton of the Southern District of Texas issued a nationwide preliminary injunction, halting the implementation of the orders, after Texas and Louisiana sued the Biden administration. That injunction was put on hold by a three-judge panel in September 2021 but the full 17-judge Fifth Circuit vacated that decision.
Tuesday, SCOTUS will hear arguments from the Biden administration where they attest that the orders have only “incidental effects” on states in terms of needing more public resources to deal with a growing illegal alien population that is largely exempt from arrest and deportation.
“… a State may not sue the federal government based on such indirect, derivative effects,” the Biden administration is set to argue:
Federal policies routinely have incidental effects on States’ expenditures, revenues, and other activities. Yet such effects have never been viewed as judicially cognizable injuries. As the recent explosion in state suits vividly illustrates, respondents’ contrary view would allow any State to sue the federal government about virtually any policy—sharply undermining Article III’s requirements and the separation of powers principles they serve. [Emphasis added]
Meanwhile, the states will argue that the orders are unlawful for three reasons:
First, it is contrary to law because sections 1226(c) and 1231(a)(2) mandate detention, as this Court has repeatedly stated. DHS identifies no INA provision that prevents this Court from reaching that conclusion. Second, the Final Memorandum is arbitrary and capricious because it failed to consider important aspects of the problems criminal aliens create, including recidivism and States’ reliance interests. Third, the Final Memorandum is procedurally invalid because it was not adopted through notice-and-comment procedures, which are required where agency action substantively changes a regulatory regime. [Emphasis added]
