Steven

green grass, blue sky, smell of rain

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[Steven @Steven3lf]

@MikeMcMahonCHN You ever seen a goalie cover a puck and as the refs hand is moving to blow the whistle the puck gets tapped in. That’s why the rule exists. Game is too fast sometimes

[Brian Shortsleeve for Massachusetts @ShortsleeveMA]

The people voted for a full audit. Not a partial audit. Not a politician-approved audit. A full audit.

Nothing has changed. The Legislature is still trying to avoid fulfilling the will of the voters. 72% of Massachusetts voters demanded transparency. Beacon Hill's response? More loopholes. More carveouts. More games.

If they have nothing to hide, why are they working so hard to keep auditors out?

[Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance @MassFiscal]

There is a reason the fight over the audit law has dragged on for over a year, despite being approved by 72% of voters.

The original ballot question was clear and it passed overwhelmingly.

Massachusetts voters did not ask for a negotiated audit, a limited review, or for the Legislature to define its own terms.

The people approved an independent audit of the Legislature.

Now, the response from Beacon Hill is a bill that:

• Narrows the scope of what can be examined
• Allows the Legislature to decide what records will be provided
• Prevents courts from stepping in when disputes arise

Who has ever heard of an independent audit where the entity being audited gets to decide what can be investigated?

At the same time, lawmakers are presenting this as a “transparency package.”

But even they acknowledge that many of the “new” public records provisions simply codify documents that are already available today.

So what is actually changing? The audit.

And that is exactly where the restrictions are being added.

As Auditor @DianaDiZoglio warns in this clip, this is not an expansion of transparency. It is a restructuring of a voter mandate into something Beacon Hill can define, limit, and control.

For the people of our state, the core question is straightforward:

Should the Legislature be able to redefine a law that 72% of voters already passed when it becomes inconvenient?

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

There is a new scam going on in this home inspection industry

- Large corporations are buying up all the small home inspection companies
- They don’t care about making money off inspecting homes, they want the data

Why? This is where it gets borderline criminal

Home inspections are supposed to be confidential, but what they’re doing is buying all the companies to own the data

Then they are going to sell that data to insurance companies and lenders

Now with this new information the insurance company finds out, they're going to start charging you $3,000 (or whatever) extra a year to insure that house

Here’s what I’ve found

Large corporations and private equity firms are aggressively consolidating the home inspection industry primarily by buying inspection software platforms like Spectora, HomeGauge and larger inspection companies

A home inspection report contains highly detailed property specific information like roof age and condition, electrical and plumbing issues, foundation problems, HVAC status, environmental hazards

This is extremely valuable for:

- Insurance companies (risk assessment and underwriting).
- Lenders (property valuation and loan risk).
- Home warranty providers, contractors, and data brokers

Home inspections are supposed to be confidential between the buyer, inspector, and sometimes the real estate parties.

However, many inspection software companies’ terms of service allow data aggregation and sharing

That’s the loophole they found. That’s the scam

[A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc]

Did you know physician owned hospitals had better patient outcomes, so hospital lobbyists made the Democrats ban their competitors to support the Affordable Healthcare Act?

[Gummi @gummibear737]

Yes please!

[Anthony Rubin @anthonyjrubin]

The fraud I witnessed while producing this story was so blatant that it is unbelievable no other journalist had already reported on it

In Lawrence, Massachusetts, where this fraud was discovered, blue shipping barrels can be seen for sale on every street. It is impossible to miss.

These barrels are used to ship food, purchased with EBT and collected from charities, back to the Dominican Republic.

In the same city, you can witness Dominican shipping companies picking up food from homes on a daily basis.

The only way it would make economic sense to ship food from Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the Dominican Republic, is if the food was obtained for free.

The whistleblowers we worked with also informed us that there is housing fraud taking place, where Dominicans, who are receiving housing aid, rent out the same houses that they are getting via government assistance, while they live in the Dominican Republic.

If the current administration is serious about stopping fraud, this matter must be immediately investigated.

[ThePatrioticBlonde™🇺🇸 @ImBreckWorsham]

Meanwhile.....Don Jr. just married the daughter of Epstein's personal banker......

[Fall River Reporter @FallRiverReport]

In Massachusetts, $10 worth of gas usage can cost you $101. In this example, the public benefit tax is 50% higher than the usage and the cost to delver the gas was 7x the supply that was delivered.

"How is this legal?!" Photo by Kerri Poppins.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

James Madison described the powers of the federal government as “few and defined” and those reserved to the states as “numerous and indefinite.”

We’ve been dangerously drifting from that understanding since the 1930s.

The drift has been most evident in areas now most fraught with waste, fraud, and abuse.

If we honored the Constitution’s limits on federal power, there’d be very little waste, fraud, and abuse in our national government.

Share if you’d like to see a “constitutional reset,” in which any government function that’s not obviously and necessarily federal under the Constitution would be returned “to the states respectively, or to the people,” as the Tenth Amendment specifies.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "Your cows are putting carbon into the atmosphere."

Farmer: "Where did they get it?"

Activist: "What?"

Farmer: "The carbon. Where did the cow get it before it put it anywhere."

Activist: "From... eating?"

Farmer: "From eating grass. And where did the grass get it."

Activist: "The soil?"

Farmer: "The air. The grass pulled it out of the air last spring. The cow ate the grass. The cow breathed some of it back out. It went back into the air it came from."

Activist: "But it's still going into the atmosphere."

Farmer: "It's going back. There's a difference between a thing going somewhere and a thing going back. You've described a circle and you're frightened of it."

Activist: "Then just don't have the cow."

Farmer: "The grass still dies in autumn. It rots where it falls. The carbon goes back into the air either way, just without anyone getting fed in the middle."

Activist: "It's not that simple."

Farmer: "It's grass, cow, breath, grass. Or it's grass, rot, air, grass. Same circle, fewer dinners. If that's complicated for you I'd stay away from the water cycle. That one's got clouds in it."

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This is horrifying and every American needs to hear this

California resident exposes what’s really going on with Flock Cameras in America

“I want to be clear what these cameras actually are, and I say that with somebody with 20 years of experience in IT. I've served as the chief network architect for Fortune 500 companies, I've designed data centers, and today I work on cloud infrastructure for one of the largest loan origination companies in the country. I'm not speculating on how this technology works. I've read their patents and I know how it works.

Flock advertises these cameras as simple license plate readers. But their own patents tell a different story.

They're AI-powered surveillance machines that capture every passing vehicle and person and transmit that data to a private corporate cloud, making it queryable by a multitude of state and federal agencies. The city of Corona does not control that database, and Corona residents have no public record rights against a private company's servers. Our daily movements are being harvested by a $7.5 billion corporation, that only answers to venture capital investors, not to us. Flock did not reach that valuation on their per-camera subscription fees. That math doesn't add up

The city council should also understand who they're doing business with. Flock CEO was asked whether the company had any federal contracts. He said no. That was a lie.

Public records revealed that Flock had been secretly running a pilot program giving the US Border Patrol access to local police camera data without the knowledge of the cities that paid for the cameras.

Now consider who's behind the company and where your data flows. Flock integrates directly with Palantir, a data fusion platform, with a $30 million contract with ICE. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, is also one of Flock's primary investors. These are not separate companies with separate agendas. They are connected actors that are building a connected infrastructure.

Palantir's own CEO stated publicly just this month that his technology is being used as a political instrument, designed to reduce the political power of certain voters. And that's the ecosystem that our Corona cameras are feeding into.

We're not anti-police at all. We're against mass surveillance of innocent residents by a company with a documented record of deception, built by investors with a stated political agenda. We're asking the City Council to start auditing the queries made against Flock's database, to disclose any data sharing agreements, and to take a vote to cancel the Flock safety contract”

I looked more into this and he is 100% right

Patents describe broader object detection, including tracking people and pedestrians, patents like US11416545B1. The system uses a centralized cloud database for nationwide queries

Data goes to Flock’s private cloud, AWS-based, encrypted. Nationwide lookup is common, 75%+ of customers are enrolled enabling cross-jurisdictional searches. Residents have no direct public records access to the corporate servers.

This creates a mass surveillance network feeding a private company’s infrastructure

If you ask me this is laying the infrastructure for a mass surveillance network in America. We are being lied to. Cancel all contracts nationwide

[JohnFGately @johnfgately]

Hey Boston media lets not say too much about the civilian who helped stop the Memorial Drive shooter today. People might get the wrong idea that good guys with guns keep us all safer. Can't let people get that idea. #2A

[Commonwealth Unity PAC @CWUnityPAC]

How is it possible that the richest state in the country cannot afford a middle class life? Two working parents in Massachusetts need a combined income of $202,000 a year just to get there. The average family earns $182,000, falling $20,000 short. More than 4 in 10 residents barely make enough to pay their bills each month. Almost half believe their kids will have it worse. Wages went up. Costs went up more. Every single year, thanks to Governor Healey.
https://t.co/XRyavs9J2A

[Steven @Steven3lf]

@starlingeliass @OnlyInBOS You mean they are like bicycles

[Steven @Steven3lf]

@James_XLI @OnlyInBOS You’re just too old

[Steven @Steven3lf]

@TheKuhnerReport WEF 15 minute cities coming sooner than you realized

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Make sure you’re sitting down for this…

The organizer of the “Muslims only” waterpark event in Texas…

Also runs a LEARING CENTER

You literally cannot make this stuff up

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

This photo was taken TWO WEEKS AGO.

The Amish, who YES are WHITE, are STILL in Western North Carolina rebuilding after Helene.

Hundreds of bridges.
Hundreds of homes.
By hand. FOR FREE. With NO cameras.

Zero mainstream media coverage.

GOD BLESS THE AMISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!