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Tim Scott announces his engagement. His fiancee is white. Maybe that's why this was such a secret for so long. I dunno, I assumed he was gay.

Lots of stuff from last week, but still relevant.

Commercial real estate is imploding as workers desert the unsafe, barbaric shithole cities.

Commercial real estate implosion: Blackstone is desperately trying to shift Manhattan office tower at HALF price after 26-storey building's value tumbled from $605MILLION to $150MILLION

World's biggest private equity fund takes a $450million hit on prestigious New York landmark amid a collapse in the commercial property market

Comes as landlords across the country write down their portfolios in the wake of high interest rates and an exodus of office workers

The price of office space has fallen 35 percent since 2022 leaving US banks vulnerable to billions of dollars in shaky loans

By Dominic Yeatman For Dailymail.Com

The world's biggest private equity fund has become the latest victim of America's hollowed out office culture after it marketed its landmark New York building for a quarter of what it paid.

Blackstone paid around $600 million for the 26-storey tower at 1740 Broadway in 2014 but is now offering it to anyone willing to pay the $150million left on the mortgage.

It comes just a week after Shorenstein put the 62-storey Aon Center in Los Angeles on the market for $153.5 million, down from the $269 million it paid ten years ago.

Persistent high mortgage rates and the millions of Americans still working from home have been blamed for the collapse in prices and an office vacancy rate reaching a record 19.6 percent in major cities earlier this month.

'I think this is an existential moment,' said RXR real estate boss Scott Rechler.

'This post-COVID world of higher interest rates, the changing nature of how people work and live, we're not going back to where we were, and it's going to be turbulent.'

The collapse has been pronounced in the biggest cities with DC facing a 21.1 percent vacancy rate and San Francisco's 34 percent.

It has led to a 35 percent fall in office prices from their peak in early 2022 and left banks vulnerable to billions of dollars in shaky loans.

About $117 billion worth is expected to be due this year and needs to be repaid or refinanced, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

117 billion here, 117 billion there, and suddenly you're talking real money.

Also from last week, but better late than never: A UK civil servant blew the whistle on the actual pro-terrorist extremism that civil servants are being taught in the name of... "counter-terrorism."

And of course -- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

A former civil servant has written about her experience of a civil-service counter-terrorism course at King's College London. It makes for disturbing reading.

Writing in Fathom earlier this month, Anna Stanley recalls an academic expert on extremism telling attendees that author and journalist Douglas Murray and comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan were examples of 'far right' extremists. The lecturer then told attendees that society needed to find 'ways to suppress' such figures. He complained that just de-platforming them 'would cause issues', because 'they have millions of followers'.

It gets worse. While this extremism specialist was only too happy to call for tough action against the likes of Joe Rogan, who is not 'far right' in the slightest, other lecturers on the course were restrained and even sympathetic towards Islamist extremists. Though the course took place before the atrocities of 7 October, it is still shocking to read of extremism experts encouraging civil servants to consider Hamas as 'freedom fighters'. After all, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group under UK law. Yet lecturers were warning civil servants of the risks of making 'moral judgements' about Islamist terrorists.

Stanley's experience of the King's College course illustrates the double standards at work in our elites' approach to terrorism and extremism. As William Shawcross explained in the UK government's review of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy last year, there tends to be an 'expansive approach to the extreme right-wing', capturing a variety of influences 'so broad it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing-leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation'. At the same time, wrote Shawcross, there tends to be a much narrower approach to Islamism, 'centred around proscribed organisations, ignoring the contribution of non-violent Islamist narratives and networks to terrorism'.

Yes, and it all started with Obama, who restructured American "counter-terrorism" efforts away from looking to stop Muslim terrorism and to focusing nigh-exclusively on normal patriotic Americans, redefined by Obama and his foreign friends as "potential terrorists."

Again from last week -- but with a New Salience due to the newest round of media layoffs -- the coming apocalypse in employment for alleged "mind workers."

Who are largely just stupider, lazier organic-analogs of AI anyway.

In "The True Believer," Eric Hoffer wrote, "Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status."

We're about to find out just how right he was.

From the 1970s to roughly now, offshoring and automation gobbled up blue-collar factory-type jobs.

....

This went on for decades in industry after industry, with everything from textiles to semiconductor manufacturing closing or moving offshore.

White-collar types were notably unsympathetic, for the most part.

Berkeley professor and Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich declared the future belonged to the "symbolic analysts" -- people who, in the words of a Steve Earle song, use their brains and not their hands.

Laid-off coal miners in the last decade were contemptuously told to "learn to code."

But the worm has turned. Google is looking at laying off 30,000 people it expects to replace with artificial intelligence.

The Wall Street Journal reports that large corporations across the board are planning to lay off white-collar workers.

Investor Brian Wang notes ChatGPT is already causing white-collar job loss.

In fact, ChatGPT can even code.

Sometimes its code is quite good. Sometimes it's not so good.

(Though God knows, the latter is true of much human-generated software code too.)

It can write press releases, ad copy, catalog descriptions, news stories and essays, speeches, encyclopedia entries, customer-inquiry responses and more.

It can generate art on demand that's suitable for book covers, advertisements and magazine illustrations.

Again, sometimes these items are quite good, and sometimes they're not, but there's a lot of less-than-stellar human work in those categories too.

Learning to code is bad advice now.

And the kicker is, AI is getting better all the time.

...

People losing their jobs to AI is just the tip of the iceberg.

In the next decade, lots more people -- possibly (gulp) including professors like me -- will be facing potential replacement by machines.

It turns out that using your brain and not your hands isn't as good a move as it may have once seemed.

People who work with their hands have some advantages.

If you want something done in the material world, you still need people.

...

Unlike blue-collar workers, who got little sympathy, these laid off white-collar workers will have more clout.

Expect them to create much more of a stink than those laid-off steelworkers managed to back in 1977.

Quoted by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, leftwing hack and Nepo Baby Matthew Yglesias frets that having a media packed stem-to-stern with crusading puritanical progressives isn't an unmitigated good for the left.

The people who produce the news are primarily young college graduates living in big cities, a demographic that skews way to the left of the electorate. And the audience for this news, though less ideologically skewed than the producers, is still significantly to the left of center.

That dynamic is a powerful force multiplier for platforming and disseminating new left-wing ideas, including ideas that go from edgy to dominant -- like "gay couples should be allowed to get married" -- as well as ideas that provoke massive backlash the minute they get any purchase -- "maybe cities don't need police departments." It's a major structural feature of the media landscape that helps explain why the general policy trajectory over the past generation has been toward the left.

A CNN Oompa Loompa slobbered over Kamala Harris, and wondered, almost tearfully, how anyone could possibly dislike Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris said that it must be because of sexism and/or White Men Failing to Position Her For Success.

Middle Aged Hairy Potter has thoughts:

David Harsanyi @davidharsanyi

Scary. If he's elected he might start throwing candidates off ballots, pressure tech companies to censor the opposition, and ignore the Supreme Court.

Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck

You could teach a psychology class just based on this insane clip.

1. When she says a Trump win would mean "domesticating the judiciary and Congress" -- what she means is that it won't be stacked with far left nut jobs and common sense will be represented.

2. You have to be absolutely insane to say Trump winning means the end of contested elections when Biden and the Democrats have literally fixed the Dem primary to ensure there is no contested election against him.

3. She doesn't realize the argument she's making is boxing her and her nutty friends in. If they're going to spend the entire election saying that it's an election that will decide whether Americans want a strongman dictator then don't whine when he wins and finally uses power the way Democrats have because I guess America chose that and you respect America's choice, right?

These people are broken beyond repair.

More from Chad Felix Greene at Twitchy.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:20 PM

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