INSIDE SAN FRANCISCO’S OPEN-AIR DRUG MARKET:

A new “linkage center” aimed at connecting homeless street addicts with drug rehab facilities opened in San Francisco on January 18 – but distressing images show an open-air illicit drug consumption site that is now littered with needles and crowded with addicts shooting up in broad daylight. Images show a woman slumped over in a wheelchair, her pants down around her ankles, preparing to inject a needle into her thigh. The woman sitting on the ground next to her has a needle to her neck. Many others are sitting on the ground among trash, empty food containers and dirty blankets, as they fumble in with drug paraphernalia in the cold weather. The center is part of San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s Tenderloin Emergency Intervention plan introduced last year. The linkage center is located at 1172 Market Street, in the United Nations Plaza. The supervised drug consumption area is an outdoor fenced section of the linkage center – just blocks away from the city’s courthouse, San Francisco City Hall and the Civic Center.

AOC – Capitalism is ‘Not a Redeemable System for Us’:

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said capitalism was “not a redeemable system” for Americans and represents a ‘pursuit of profit’ at all costs run by an elite minority. The New York democratic socialist slammed the U.S. economy during an interview with Yahoo Finance’s Andy Serwer, explaining that it was controlled by a small group of capitalists who make money and “don’t have to work.” “They can control our labor. They can control massive markets that they dictate and can capture governments,” Ocasio-Cortez, 32, said. “And they can essentially have power over the many. And to me that is not a redeemable system for us to be able to participate in for the prosperity and peace for the vast majority of people.”

Ocasio-Cortez also said that capitalism was flawed at its core, saying, “To me, capitalism at its core, what we’re talking about when we talk about that, is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost.” She said that under the economic system, a nation’s power is held by an elite and wealthy minority, calling out billionaires Charles Koch and David Koch, whose family owns more than $100 billion and have a hold on the fuel and oil industries. “If it ultimately comes down to a billionaire or the Koch brothers or the Koch family having control over the vast majority or large plurality of our oil assets in the United States, if it’s a handful of very wealthy families having control over – you know, private families having control over means of production, that is essentially the capitalist system that we live in”, she said. “It is a small group that is of privatized control over what we eat and how we fuel our society.”

Middle Class, Millennials Hard Hit by Housing Market:

The middle class is having an increasingly difficult time buying homes in the current market, potentially worsening the prospects of millennials and young families to make such an investment. A study from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) was released Monday, as The Wall Street Journal reported, showing how the rise in the cost of homes and a steep drop in the number of houses being sold have had an effect on many Americans when it comes to buying houses. The study showed that at the end of 2021, there were around 411,000 fewer houses on the market that were thought to be affordable for households making between $75,000 and $100,000 than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. “At the end of 2019, there was one available listing that was affordable for every 24 households in this income bracket. By December 2021, the figure was one listing for every 65 households,” the Journal noted. The NAR study didn’t just look at the regular methods of accounting for “housing affordability,” but it also considered the supply of houses for sale at different costs. It discovered that “housing affordability” got worse over the past two years for everyone except for Americans at the top of the income bracket. Every income group suffered, however, as the number of homes being sold went down.

Examiner – Lens:

Parents expressing their opinions in Virginia.

Memphis BLM Founder Pamela Moses Sentenced to 6 Years for Illegally Voting:

The founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Memphis has been sentenced to prison for six years for illegally registering to vote in Tennessee, prosecutors said. Pamela Moses, the 44-year-old activist, was ordered to spend six years and one day behind bars Monday for registering to vote despite felony convictions in 2015 that made her ineligible to do so, Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich said. In handing down the sentence, Judge Michael Ward accused her of deceiving the probation department to obtain the right to vote. In 2015, Moses pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence and forgery, both felonies, and to misdemeanor charges of perjury, stalking, theft under $500, and escape. She was placed on probation for seven years and deemed ineligible to vote in Tennessee because of the tampering with evidence charge.

Is YouTube Bigger Than Netflix:

Google acquired YouTube for $1.65B in 2006, but didn’t break out earnings for the streaming service until 2020. For the latest quarter, YouTube ads brought in $8.6B. Here’s the wild part: That’s an annualized run rate of $34B, which outpaced Netflix – a $30B run rate – for the 1st time. With a mostly ad-based business, YouTube is usually left out of the streaming subscription wars conversation…but it’s clearly the video leader. As one point of comparison, a study of Android users found that in 2020 the average monthly time spent on YouTube was 23 hours (vs. ~6 hours for Netflix). Meanwhile, YouTube itself has more active users (2.3B) than any social site other than Zuck Daddy’s Facebook (2.7B). And while we’re at it, here’s another wild stat: YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world (you can guess the first).

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Examiner – 20 Years – A Look At 2002

The LBN Examiner was founded on June 1, 2002, an incredible 20 years ago. Let’s take a look back at what was going on in 2002:

** On February 8, the XIX Winter Olympic Games opened in Salt Lake City, Utah.

** On February 15, Walt Disney released “Return to Never Land,” an animated film sequel to 1953’s “Peter Pan.”

Examiner – Did You Know:

** Did you know that 12 members of the White House staff read the LBN Examiner every week?

Now you can invite your friends and family to sign up for free (if they’ve got the guts): www.LBNExaminer.com

Examiner – A Look Back:

The late, great author Joan Didion.

LET’S GET RIGHT TO IT by Nellie Bowles:

** Inflation, still going: Inflation rose to 7% in December, the highest in 40 years. Beef prices are up 18.6% from the previous year. Oranges: 9.9%.

** Pope Francis, future Common Sense contributor? The Supreme Pontiff this week came out strong in a statement that I can only read as an explicit endorsement of this newsletter. He denounced cancel culture in his “State of the World” speech. “I consider this a form of ideological colonization, one that leaves no room for freedom of expression and is now taking the form of the ‘cancel culture’ invading many circles and public institutions,” he said. “Under the guise of defending diversity, it ends up canceling all sense of identity, with the risk of silencing positions…a kind of dangerous ‘one-track thinking’ is taking shape, one constrained to deny history or, worse yet, to rewrite it in terms of present-day categories.”

** COVID drugs are being doled out by race: States are allocating scarce COVID treatments like monoclonal antibodies based, in part, on race, with a preference toward non-white patients. New York state policy makes minorities effectively automatically eligible, while other patients have to meet specific health requirements. The Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium writes about the schemes to determine who gets prioritized. “In Utah, ‘Latinx ethnicity’ counts for more points than ‘congestive heart failure.’ And in Minnesota, health officials have devised their own ‘ethical framework’ that prioritizes black 18-year-olds over white 64-year-olds.”

Examiner – Irrational Skepticism:

The CDC has begun to publish data on COVID outcomes among people who have received booster shots, and the numbers are striking.

Examiner – Lens:

Bruce Bozzi, formerly of the Palm restaurants, has a new liquor brand, Mujen Spirits, and podcast with celebrity guests.

Examiner – (Notable) Remarks:

** I Ditched My Smart Watch, and I Don’t Regret It. My rock bottom was when I caught myself at a nice dinner, transfixed by my phone under the table. I was opening the app for my smart watch, checking whether the numbers it assigned to my “training status” had improved since I finished my run an hour ago. The numbers hadn’t budged, so I closed the app and refreshed it, frowning a little. Was it broken? My companion asked what I was doing. “Nothing,” I lied. At first, I loved that smart watch, which I used to get faster at racing marathons. Suddenly, I had metrics on things I didn’t even realize my body did: lactate thresholds, VO₂ max, heart rate variability. Each evening I had a full report, telling me what this device thought of my performance. Soon I couldn’t stop thinking about the numbers on the watch. I was addicted. —- Lindsay Crouse, writer and producer in Opinion in the New York Times who writes on gender, ambition and power – Her best marathon time is a 2:53

** We don’t hear much about good cops these days. Their stories get lost amid the scalding episodes with trigger-happy, racist and sadistic cops. The good ones get tarred with the same brush, even though the last person who wants to get in a squad car with a bad cop is a good cop. It takes a catastrophe, like 9/11, or an attempted coup like January 6, or a heartbreaking funeral with a sea of blue, like Friday’s ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the murdered 22-year-old New York City police officer Jason Rivera, to remind us that we should be proud of good cops even as we root out bad ones. —- Maureen Dowd, New York Times

** In secret meetings two years ago this month, members of Congress were briefed on what the rest of America would soon learn: A deadly virus was spreading rapidly overseas and headed for the United States. Some lawmakers acted immediately – not in the public’s interest, but in their own. They sold stocks weeks before markets crashed, when the scale of the threat posed by the novel coronavirus became broadly known. A global pandemic was unfolding, and these lawmakers were fretting as much about the health of their financial portfolios as about the health of their constituents. —- Russell Berman, The Atlantic

** Wikipedia is governed by consensus. This means the majority of people who edit the site determine the type of content that goes into it. Many of the editors have a left-leaning bias. As such, the decisions will lean towards this bias. According to a 2010 study, the majority of Wikipedia editors are between the ages of 12 and 29. This would be Millennials and GenZ, who, according to CNN, tend to be more left-leaning. —- Mike Wood, acclaimed Wikipedia expert

** Again, the American right is today routinely compared to Nazis, fascists and Klansmen. Why would good liberal Democrats accept an electoral victory and future rule by Nazis and fascists rather than seek to overturn it, by whatever means necessary? —- Patrick J. Buchanan

** One of the more familiar experiences on Twitter is being called a grifter, a person who issues takes entirely geared toward more clicks, readers, dollars or followers. It’s an exhausted slur, but, to be honest, there are weeks when I kind of wish I were one. No conflicts. No agonizing. No need to reconcile your priors with reality. —- Andrew Sullivan

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Examiner – Investigates:

** The Cato Institute has published its annual ranking of the most and least free states. The least free states, as in previous years, were New York, Hawaii, and California. The freest states were New Hampshire, Florida, and Nevada, also unchanged from previous years. These three were followed by Tennessee and South Dakota. The authors said that “for the average American, freedom has declined generally.” This was due to federal policy that includes encroachment on policies that states controlled 20 years ago.

Examiner – Readers Speak:

Should individual states be allowed to set rules for federal elections?

Examiner readers from all 50 of the United States and 26 foreign countries have spoken.

“Intel for Influencers” – Who Reads the LBN Examiner?

Singer-songwriter Paul Anka along with 12 members of the White House staff, 3 Nobel Prize winners, over 100 Academy Award winners, 6 U.S. Senators, and over 300 Grammy Award winners.

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Examiner – Reader Poll:

Agree or Disagree with These Bold Predictions for 2022

Send in your vote, agree or disagree with these fascinating predictions for 2022:

1. The S&P 500 will rise, with Goldman Sachs predicting a +9% gain for 2022.

2. Only 10% of firms will go fully remote, with 30% returning to the office and the remainder (60%) struggling to figure out a hybrid model.

3. Burnout among medical professionals will decline with advances in health care AI.

4. Inflation expectations remain high for 2022, according to a Bloomberg survey of 47 economists, as the world works through supply chain constraints.

5. Apple will acquire a film/TV studio to better compete with its streaming competitors.

6. The acute phase of the pandemic will end at some point in 2022, according to Bill Gates. His optimism relies on continued improvements with vaccines and treatments.

7. Passwords will go away as new forms of multifactor authentication (MFA) hit the market.

Send in your reply to: LBNExaminer@TimeWire.net

Examiner – Reader Comment:

** This is how sick we have become. Cincinnati Public Schools announced that staff and students will have the day off February 14, the day after the Bengals play the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LVI. —- Gloria L., Cincinnati, Ohio

Amazon Recommends Business Book Classic “Broken Windows, Broken Business”

Amazon, the world’s largest bookseller, has recommended the revised edition of the business book classic “Broken Windows, Broken Business – The Revolutionary Broken Windows Theory: How the Smallest Remedies Reap the Biggest Rewards.” For more information click here – Broken Windows

Examiner – A Different View:…

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