I hope this monument to opulence fails miserably and the developers lose their shirts.
There’s no way they won’t damage or destroy that reef.
The first big storm is going to destroy much of the sand island.
But, 10% are special protection zones! Won’t matter, they can’t survive if huge amounts of the non protected reef are destroyed.

Not to mention sea level rise will put it underwater quickly, it’s barely above current sea level in the plans.

Look at Mexico, dozens of comparatively tiny resorts not even on the reefs, but on land, and that reef is not 10% what it was in the mid 80’s. Building ON the reef is guaranteed to destroy it, as is tourism.

I hate when companies are allowed to build on natural wonders to exploit the beauty, they invariably destroy that beauty within decades. That entire reef/coastline should be off limits to construction so the two desert properties have an attraction. When the reefs die from sun tan lotion poisoning, bleaching, sand displacement, accidents with supply ships, the first major fuel spill, etc, that place will be a $5 billion waste, abandoned to the desert.

Remember the “islands of the world” project in Dubai? This sounds even less thought out than they were, more ecologically disastrous, needing more infrastructure to be built, requiring ships to bring fuel as there’s no nearby port to run pipelines from (guaranteeing oil spills). All for what? So billionaires can get off their yachts for a while in luxury?

Wiki-Significant changes in the maritime environment [of Dubai]. As a result of the dredging and redepositing of sand for the construction of the islands, the typically crystalline waters of the Persian Gulf at Dubai have become severely clouded with silt. Construction activity is damaging the marine habitat, burying coral reefs, oyster beds and subterranean fields of sea grass, threatening local marine species as well as other species dependent on them for food. Oyster beds have been covered in as much as two inches of sediment, while above the water, beaches are eroding with the disruption of natural currents.

That was a $12 billion project to exploit the pristine coast and beautiful waters that no longer exist, the islands themselves are sinking and eroding, most were evacuated or never used at all, the water is now mud colored, the reefs are gone. An unmitigated disaster. This sounds extremely similar.

Oppose this and similar projects.

Average gas prices are temporarily $.06 higher than 2008. Oil prices are dropping fast. Oil companies aren’t pumping oil they have and aren’t near top production levels at refineries, but are complaining they can’t have more preserve land and offshore preserves to drill on.
You want to compare to 2020, and you want to ignore the absolute disaster of leadership that made the economy so bad that gas prices dropped significantly and oil went to -$40 a barrel at one point. You want to forget the -36% gdp and 750000 dead Americans, and between $10-16 TRILLION dollars in wasted money it took to have those lower gas prices (with no where to go because everything was closed, and nothing to buy because all supply chains were broken).
For a family of 4, the debt left by Trump’s Covid failures is well over $200000. How many tanks of gas would that have bought you?
Yes, I maintain my position that the pandemic response team global response unit could have likely identified and stopped Covid in the very early stages and evaded even an epidemic in China had they not been eradicated, and you can’t prove different. That puts it all on you know who’s shoulders.

BTW, liberal California is poised to rebate every taxpayer $400 to cover increased gas prices thanks to our functioning economy and budget surpluses.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7604733/

With all the Trump and Trumpist failures, I think it could be a total ass kicking BY Democrats. The shine is off the Trump penny, and everyone outside the cult can tell it’s just a blank slug painted copper…that includes many in your party, causing a deep divide for Democrats to exploit. Numerous Republican candidates are being challenged in court to bar them from public office for being part of an insurrection….including Trump in 6 states. Can’t win if you can’t hold office. D’oh!

Are you sad about duckduckgo? It seems your ilk are outraged that the platform has decided to limit (not even censure) Russian propaganda, moving it away from the top of their news feeds, and without their Russian propaganda spoon fed to them, they’ve started throwing tantrums and stomping away in search of a site that will tell them the lies they want to hear. Such infants. Are you one? Be honest. (Ha, like you would)

pure hate porn.

vichy americans.

back bending, soul-selling, truth denying, exploitative snake-oilers.

but jesse's mom still loves him. doesn't agree w/him and wishes he'd listen more - but still cares for her little boy.

all these types - fox, the blaze, daily wire, & ilk - have put money ahead of country, fellow citizens or personal honor. purveyors of intellectual stupidity. like Amway of the airwaves.

door-to-door whores.

so don't listen to them.

Your video, VLDL: Exploiting your follower to carry loot, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

what utter horse manure. Everyone that is successful must be an exploiter... every worker is downtrodden...

Harry Reid nuked the filibuster to approve Federal level justices. McConnell just exploited what the former Majority Leader did.

When under pressure from Republicans and Trump in the first two years of Trump's term to do away with the filibuster and allow the all-Republican government to do what the all Democratic one is hoping to do now, McConnell wisely chose not to.

Whether you care for McConnell or not, or if you care for the minority party or not, doing away with the filibuster to allow the party currently in charge to ram legislation through is only going to set precedent for the same thing to happen when the situation changes.

Democrats may think that forcing through HR1 will mean that the Republicans will never control the government again, but that is not going to happen. Americans are fickle and turn on the government in power at the drop of a hat. Case in point, Trump should have never won a term as President in a normal world. People hated Hillary so much that he did.

Turning the Senate into a smaller House of Representatives relying simply on a majority vote for everything would create situations where either side will ram through sweeping changes (or erase those of the previous side) every 4 years or so. What will we do in 2024 if somehow Trump or his lackeys get elected and he has access to a fully Republican senate, congress, and scotus, with no filibuster unlike 2016-2018?

Let’s hope so. He knows what he’s doing. If Obama is really pulling the strings then I assume you won’t be insulting Biden anymore since he’s not really in charge, right? Derp.

I disagree, but ok, kill off “conservative” media and we’ll get rid of the half that’s all lies, media issues solved. Just get rid of all opinion programming and channels masquerading as news and the effect is the same.

But to be sure, they didn’t cause all the division, but they did help Trump exploit and amplify it by misdirecting republicans so thoroughly that pederastic vampire cabals that get political power and youth through infant blood cocktails and the fictional recreational use of adrenochrome sounds real and reasonable to half of them... (ridiculously taking fantasy scenes from Clockwork Orange and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as factual accounts, recreational use has never happened and the few clinical studies indicated it causes Schizophrenia and other obvious mental disorders) ...so idiotic they convinced conservatives a foreign president who has been dead over 8 years actively interfered in the last election....so deceptive they gladly and knowingly repeated the lies Trump fed them about election fraud as if they were fact to the point they were sued for billions in damages their lies caused American companies while not reporting that every agency tasked with election security contradicted their specious and spurious claims....with evidence to back them up unlike the claims of fraud.
Without the division right wing nut job conspiracy theories (and those who believe, repeat, and amplify them) have done, yes, America would be rocking. Sadly, you and your ilk have not returned to reality yet....tens of millions of you are just waiting for Q to tell them why reality is wrong and they’re correct.

"Never underestimate the stupidity of American blowhards."

Y'all approproated that from H. L. Mencken.* Thought of that too. But sometimes, folks can surprise a body.

EX: mininum wage ballot ininitive, a few election cycles ago, came up in 5 RED red states and they passed easily. even when the state govenments wouldn't do so at gun point. sometimes folks know what's what and go w/it.

just saying things can go so bad for so long, good things can slip in w/o anyone noticing. progress in america has never came in waves but in sporatic pulses.

heck. the GOP was a progressive movement at conception. some of that progressness flowed into the turn-of-century. got nat'l parks from teddy. (think of that? a Republican supporting land - for everybody - just to look at and not exploited? it's true!)

hope for hope's sake, s'all.

'Lightn' Hopkins said (or close to), "If'n your first though is 'I can't'; then don't even try". I say we should try. It can be done.


*he also said, "On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." spot-on.

What a great story! My ex was a huge fan of the "Hoarders" type tv shows, and I always felt they were incredibly sad, exploitative shows. Entertaining sure, but in the same way as rubbernecking at a bad car accident. I'm really happy this woman was able to channel her hoarding mentality in such a societally beneficial manner. I grew up Catholic so have always had an affinity for the concept of saints - I feel she qualifies as a secular American saint.

Except, this time the armed public seems to be joining the tyrannical government as it turns away from the constitution.

So now any 17 year old with patriot fantasies and enough allowance money to buy a weapon becomes a constitutional scholar who can decide what's best for the country? I'd rather rely on our constitutional checks and balances. Even though current events are revealing flaws that can be exploited by a determined political faction, it's better than an angry, propagandized, armed mob.

Oh Jesus, bobski, now you just deny it happened based on one prageru video that conveniently omits what happened 68-72...the time period in question?!? And you complain about CNN?!?

Your proof it didn't happen, Republicans didn't completely control the south until 94?! What nonsense. That's not proof of anything of the sort, implied correlation isn't causation. Republicans were about to disappear in the south in 68-69, that changed by 72.

Perhaps you've forgotten that, in 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for decades of exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Learn some truth, not some far right propaganda that intentionally omits the time period being discussed in it's best arguments, offering red herring suppositions at best. Duh.

Good lord, what's the point of the garbage show? It's TLC, so I assume its exploitative in some way...

Watched it on youtube earlier. The sad thing is that we have allowed so many things to be built by china that no one is willing to just cut them off for this type of shit.

Once we would do something about this, but today we let Uighurs be the new Jews and China gets to be a Germany that no one wanted to punish.

I am not one bit surprised that shitty companies like Nike, VW, and others that love to put out 'WOKE' commercials have no issue with exploiting slave labor on the down low.

I don't disagree with you there, but fail to see how that would excuse leaving Trump in office....abandoning all hope and learning Mandarin. Biden is far from perfect, and old enough that who his VP is matters, but compared to Trump it's night and day.

Yes, we are likely headed into depression. One team has a chance of shortening it, one will certainly make it worse.
Yes, the pandemic is still in phase 1 of many, but one team sees a problem to tackle, another just sees an optics issue to deflect from.
Yes, there's a huge cultural divide, one team seeks to minimize it, the other exploit it.

I have zero hope Biden will solve our n national problems, nor any doubt Trump would exacerbate every one until there's no nation left. Trump might be a symptom,but so is suffocation. Sometimes you must deal with the symptom first to have a chance at fixing the cause.

Trump is no longer the candidate of change, he's the establishment. They won't vote for him to fix their lives after he ruined them, imo.

I agree, we are headed in the direction of dissolution.

The civil war was plenty bloody, but we have avoided responsibility for most of our sins, agreed.

Yes, 90% reduction if we acted 2weeks sooner is criminally negligent imo. We really dropped the baby on this one....bigly. It's going to get worse.

"This business will get out of control, it will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."
https://youtu.be/kvNAid29vv8

Yet the Dems run the most insipid candidate since Dukakis and not because he's the best candidate, but because it's his turn.

The worst part is the DNC is looking at a truly momentous election where they could lay the foundation for a generational political shift in the US the same way Reagan did in 1980, but they utterly fail to understand why some of the same people who voted for Trump in '16 voted for Obama two elections earlier and have decided to play party politics instead.

The worst thing that could happen to the Dems right now is to win this election. The GOP is going to blame them for the wreckage left by Trump, pile on Biden every chance they get, and exploit the DNC's blindness to push the Dems into political oblivion.