Another Indoor Mall Bites the Dust

The end of an era.

It was called Crenshaw Center. The first suburban shopping mall in Los Angeles. It was an open-air shopping center that included Broadway and May Company department stores. My mother’s favorite place to shop in the 1950s. Now it is a larger enclosed mall, re-named Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, that is probably going to close.

It won’t be the first mall to close in the Los Angeles Orange County metropolitan area. The Laguna Hills Mall in southern Orange County closed on December 31, 2018 and is being demolished. The Hawthorne Mall closed in 1999. The Westside Pavilion on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles is now being remodeled for Google offices. The Promenade Shopping Mall is Woodland Hills has only four businesses left including an AMC theater is about to be torn down and replaced with housing, offices, and stores and is planned to complete in 2035.

Even after the corona virus has been concurred will we return to the malls? I doubt it.

Companies and People Are Leaving California

Over the past several years, a disturbing trend has been developing in California. Once known as the bastion of commerce, manufacturing, and business growth. The Golden State is saying goodbye to dozens of businesses every year, and the numbers seem to be increasing as companies are leaving California.

California has lost huge players like Toyota, Comcast, and many others is cause for the state to sit up and take note. The exodus is especially dramatic in 15 California counties, with Los Angeles being the worst.

It’s not just businesses. It’s the many rich who are exhausted by the ever higher taxes and the ever increasing cost of living. Elon Musk has decided to move to Austin, Texas. He is the second richest person in the world. His two major companies are still in California but the message is clear. It’s too expensive to live in in this state. I agree.

I know many of the people personally and through social media sites who have moved not only to other states but to other countries.

What I find most disturbing is the shrugs of our elected leaders when they learn of the departure of those big businesses and wealthy people. It seems they have raised taxes to discourage businesses from remaining here.

One can only wonder why our elected leaders are so quiet.

Working on a Coup

A coup or coup d’état is the removal of an existing government from power, usually through violent means. Typically, it is an illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power by a political faction, the military, or a dictator.

CNN report this evening: President Donald Trump convened a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, including lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter said, describing a session that began as an impromptu gathering but devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump’s aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn’s more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.

Flynn had suggested earlier this week that Trump could invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election that he lost to President-elect Joe Biden — an idea that arose again during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the people said. It wasn’t clear whether Trump endorsed the idea, but others in the room forcefully pushed back and shot it down.

The meeting was first reported by the New York Times.

A “take-over” is a synonym for coup.

Democracy is a Representative form of government. The Antonym is Dictatorship.

Donald Trump dreams of a bloodless coup. It appears he is willing to accept a Coup d’état if he doesn’t get his way peacefully.

Bidenism

I have started a new blog titled Bidenism.  It will be a continuous tracking of the Joe Biden presidency.  As followers of this blog already know I have been critical of Joe Biden.  His history as a senator has not been supportive of minorities.  He opposed forced busing and the 1994 crime bill that he sponsored resulted in long incarceration of minorities for what most people consider minor offenses.

I will try to be even handed but I will apply criticism when necessary.

Bidenism (wordpress.com)

The Impact of Jews in the Year 2020 – It’s More than a Happy Hanukkah!

 This makes my heart burst with pride as Moses led our people out of bondage these scientists are going to lead the world out of the pandemic. Happy Hanukkah!

http://Embed from Getty Images

Feeling good about the info below, I thought you might be interested –

Mikael Dolsten, Chief Scientific Officer at Pfizer, is Jewish. He grew up in Halmstad, Sweden, the son of a Jewish father with prewar roots in Sweden and a Jewish mother who escaped Austria in the early days of WWII. He visited Israel several times as a youngster and did a year of his doctoral work at the Weizmann Institute. There he learned cutting edge immunology which led him to pharmaceutical science. Dolsten has referred in interviews to rising anti-Semitism in Sweden.

Pfizer CEO Albert Borla is a Sephardic Jew from Thessalonika, Greece, a city whose Jewish population was almost completely wiped out during WWII. The Borla family’s history in Thessalonika goes back 5 centuries, and Borla visits his remaining family members there yearly. He now lives in New York City.

The Chief Medical Officer for Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass.- based company, is an Israeli immigrant named Tal Zaks. Previously, he served as head of Global Oncology at Sanofi Pharmaceuticals. Zaks received his M.D. and PhD. degrees at Ben Gurion University and conducted post-doc research at the NIH.

The scientist responsible, with a colleague, for the pioneering breakthroughs that allowed the development of an mRNA vaccine (the novel approach used by Moderna and Pfizer for dealing with COVID-19) is University of Pennsylvania’s Drew Weissman. A Professor of Medicine at Penn, he received his BA and MA degrees at Brandeis and MD/Microbiology and PhD at Boston U. Weissman once worked with a fellowship at the NIH under Dr. Fauci.

Final related notes: President-Elect Joe Biden this week named his new head for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”): Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Professor Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. She works as a physician at a Jewish camp for a week each summer. Also in the clan is Jeff Zients, who will be Biden’s overseer for the entire federal coronavirus response. Zients led the successful effort to fix the government’s Health.gov website when it became damaged during the launch of the Affordable Care Act.

And remember that we are less than 2% of the US population.