90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Chevron selling Bay Area headquarters, paying for employees relocate to Houston

Plenty of tech companies have moved their headquarters out of the Bay Area in recent years, from startups like Coinbase to industry pioneers like Hewlett Packard and Oracle. Elon Musk has been one particularly outspoken voice decrying California’s business conditions. Now, one of the East Bay’s legacy companies is joining the trend.

Chevron announced it is shuttering its San Ramon global headquarters and even encouraging some employees to move to Houston, the Wall Street Journal reported. The oil company will cover relocation costs for those voluntarily leaving for the Texas office, which has been growing and employs nearly 6,000 people. Meanwhile, the San Ramon office buildings have experienced dwindling numbers in recent years.

When Chevron vacates the 100-acre campus in 2023, freeing up prime real estate for the area’s growing life-sciences industry or developers looking to build apartments, it hopes to move into a smaller space in San Ramon, which will remain its headquarters, the Wall Street Journal said.

There are deep roots in California for Chevron going back to the late 1800s. While company leadership has pushed for a permanent move to Texas in the past, the oil company’s legacy in the state coupled with the location of its Richmond refinery in the East Bay has kept the company in California, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

"The current real estate market provides the opportunity to right-size our office space to meet the requirements of our headquarters-based employee population," a spokesperson told SFGATE. "The move is expected to occur during the...

The U.S. Army announced on Thursday it is removing its requirement for potential recruits to have a high school diploma or GED certificate to enlist, in an effort to improve recruiting numbers.

The Army has met 40 percent of its recruiting goals this year, Military.com reports:

[T]he service announced that individuals may enlist without those previously required education certifications if they ship to basic training this fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1.

Recruits must also be at least 18 years old and otherwise qualify for a job in the active-duty Army. They also must score at least a 50 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an SAT-style quiz to measure a potential recruit's academic ability.

A 50 on the test is a relatively low score, with 31 being the minimum to qualify for service.

The Army's "sister services" seem to have a similar issue with low recruiting numbers "hitting the entire Defense Department," according to Military.com.

Military Throwing Cash at Recruiting Crisis as Troops Head for the ExitsFor now, the services are leaning on record-level enlistment and retention bonuses meant to attract and keep America's military staffed and ready -- bonuses that continue to climb.

WWW.MILITARY.COM
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/05/13/bigger-bonuses-pentagons-top-weapon-combat-recruiting-crisis-troops-head-exits.html

Why do you think they are having a hard time convincing...

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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1763

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Hot Pick Of The Late Night

Girls With Guns

The Other McCain has: Rule 5 Sunday: Eugenie Bouchard

Proof Positive has: Best Of Web Link Around

The Woodsterman has: Rule 5 Woodsterman Style

EBL has: Rule 5 And FMJRA

The Right Way has: Rule 5 Saturday LinkORama

The Pirate's Cove has: Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup

Visage à trois #326

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #494

Former White House Staffer Confirms Jan. 6 Committee Lied About DOJ Attorney

‘This isn’t about truth, but about making it impossible for conservatives to successfully enter and leave government.’

Over the weekend, former Department of Justice lawyer Ken Klukowski called on the Jan. 6 Committee to release the full transcript of his deposition testimony to correct the lies they told about him to the American public. Now The Federalist has exclusively obtained a statement from a former White House staffer confirming Klukowski’s claims.

Last Thursday, the Jan. 6, 2021 show trial continued, with the Democrat-stacked committee presenting testimony concerning a draft letter Jeff Clark, a former assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, proposed sending to the Georgia legislature.

That draft letter, dated December 28, 2020, stated the Department of Justice was investigating the 2020 election and recommended the Georgia legislature convene a special session to “evaluate the irregularities in the 2020 election including violations of Georgia election law,” and “determine whether those violations show which candidate for President won the most legal votes in the November 3 election.” The draft letter then suggested the General Assembly could appoint an alternative set of electors based on its findings.

The draft letter’s signature line included spaces for Clark, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue. But when Clark pitched the idea of sending the letter to Georgia officials, Rosen and Donoghue rejected the idea out of hand, because it was “not the department’s role to suggest or dictate to state legislatures how they should select their electors,” and “for the department to insert itself into the political process this way,” Donoghue told the committee, “may very well have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis.”

Donoghue was blunter with Clark in person, with Donoghue testifying he told Clark, “What you are doing is nothing less than the United States Justice Department meddling in the outcome of a presidential election.”

While last Thursday’s hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee centered on Clark and his efforts to have the letter sent to the Georgia legislature, the committee connected another DOJ attorney to Clark’s efforts, Klukowski—and did so by blatantly lying to the American public.

The Jan. 6 Committee Is Lying

Klukowski called out the Jan. 6 Committee’s fraud over the weekend in a public statement that began: “The January 6 Committee falsely accused me on Thursday of being a go-between in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. That accusation is false both in its broad outlines and its details. Since the Committee first contacted me, I have cooperated without hesitation, provided it with hundreds of documents, and sat for many hours of recorded depositions. The information produced from those efforts fully contradicts the Committee’s statements regarding my actions, yet the Committee has chosen to keep such information to itself rather than share it with the public.”

The former DOJ lawyer then detailed in his public statement four false accusations levied against him by the Jan.6 Committee. First, Klukowski exposed Rep. Liz Cheney’s false portrayal of him as being sent by John Eastman to work under Clark. While Cheney fraudulently told the country that Klukowski “was specifically assigned to work under Jeff Clark,” Klukowski provided the committee documents establishing that his transfer to “the Civil Division of the DOJ was in the works since July 2020, long before Jeff Clark was...

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."

— Adam Smith

The Left has been tempting fate since January 2021—applying its nihilist medicine to America on the premise that such a rich patient can ride out any toxic shock.

Our elites assume that all our nation’s past violent protests, all its would-be revolutions, all its cultural upheavals, all its institutionalized lawlessness were predicated on one central truth—America’s central core is so strong, so rich, and so resilient that it can withstand almost any assault.

So, we can afford 120 days in 2020 of mass rioting, $2 billion in damage, some 35 killed, and 1,500 police injured.

We can easily survive an Afghanistan, and our utter and complete military humiliation. There was no problem in abandoning some $70-80 billion in military loot to terrorists. Who cares that we tossed off a billion-dollar new embassy, and jettisoned a $300-million refitted air base, as long as our pride flags were waving in Kabul?

Certainly, we can afford to restructure all our universities, eliminate free expression and speech, and institute Maoist cultural revolutionary fervor in our revered institutions of higher learning—once the world’s greatest levers of scientific advancement and technological progress.

We can jettison merit in every endeavor, from banning the world’s great books to grading math tests to running chemistry experiments. And still, a resilient America won’t notice.

We assumed that our foundational documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—our natural bounty in North America, our cherished rule of law, our legal immigration traditions that drew in the most audacious and hardworking on the planet, and our guarantees of personal freedom and liberty led to such staggering wealth and affluence that nothing much that this mediocre generation could do would ever endanger our resilience.

But such inheritances are not written in stone. America, as the world’s only successful multiracial democratic republic, was always fragile. It was and is always one generation away from disappearing—should any cohort become so foolish as to mock its past, dismantle its institutions, revert to tribalism, redistribute rather than create wealth, and consume rather than invest.

We are that generation. And we have an accounting with nature’s limitations, given there is always a corrective, not a nice one, but remediation nonetheless for every excess.

Our major cities are no longer safe. Somehow, the Left has nearly wrecked San Francisco in less than a decade. A once beautiful and vibrant city is lawless, dirty, toxic, often boarded up, and losing population. It has turned into a medieval keep of well-protected knights in secure fiefs while everyone else is engaged in a bellum omnium contra omnes.

We know it is so because California public officials talk of anything and everything—Roe v. Wade, transitions to electric cars, hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 relief for illegal aliens—to mask their utter impotence to address feces in the street, the random assaults on the vulnerable, and the inability to park a car and return to it intact.

Ditto the Dodge City downtowns of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington, and a host of others. In just four or five years, they have given up on fully funding the police, aggressive prosecutors indicting the violent, and ubiquitous civil servants ensuring the streets are free of trash, vermin, flotsam, jetsam, and human excrement.

There are natural reactions to such excess. The most terrifying is that our once-great cities, especially their downtowns, will simply shrink into something like ghost towns—our versions of an out-West Bodie, or an abandoned Roman city in the sand like Leptis Magna, or a Chernobyl.

But the culprit will not be a played-out mine, or encroaching desert, or a nuclear meltdown, but the progressive leadership of a worn-out, bankrupt people who no longer possess the confidence to keep their urban civilization safe and viable. And so, they either fled, or joined the mob, or locked themselves up in fortified citadels, both in fear to go out and terrified of losing what they owned.

We are seeing that deterioration already in our major cities. Stores are boarded up. Women cease to walk alone after sunset. Police officers walking the beat are now rare. Hate crimes, smash-and-grab robberies, and carjackings go unpunished. Streets are filthy and littered. Commerce and human interaction cease at...