Kent Bickell

I just banned new oil and gas drilling throughout Los Angeles and we'll be phasing out existing wells. For generations, Black and Latino communities have carried the burden of neighborhood drilling. Your ZIP code should never dictate your health! We are confronting this systemic injustice head-on, because of vital partnerships with Council President Marqueece Harris Dawson (mhd.la2024), Councilmember @katyyaroslavsky, Councilmember @adrin_nazarian and our frontline community leaders, organizers, and activists. Let's keep moving LA forward together! Vote on or before November 3rd.

QUIT YOUR BITCHING!!!!!! Grandpa didn’t have a $90 month internet bill, a $130 phone bill, seven app subscriptions at $72 month, an Amazon addiction for $200 month, he didn’t have Netflix, Paramount or HBO for another $112 month and his haircuts didn’t need a ‘stylist’! I’m worn out hearing people moan, “Our grandparents could buy a house on one paycheck, but now we can’t even afford rent on two!” Yeah, maybe because Grandma wasn’t dropping half her income on $14 iced lattes and avocado toast shaped like art projects. Back then, if they wanted coffee, they boiled it at home in a dented pot. It tasted like burnt rubber and regret — but it woke you up and cleaned your pipes. And Grandma wasn’t “out to brunch.” You think she had time for mimosas and hashtags? She was making something called whatever’s left in the fridge and feeding six people with it. Don’t even start with Uber Eats. You think Grandpa was out here paying $38 to have a burger delivered three blocks away? Please. He grilled mystery meat on a rusted barbecue, and everyone called it dinner. Now people cry about being broke while sitting in a house full of gadgets. Two SUVs in the driveway, six streaming services, three air fryers, and matching tattoos that cost more than their light bill. You think Grandpa had a tattoo? He did. It said “Korea, 1951,” and it came with trauma, not Instagram likes. And the kids—Lord help us. “We can’t make ends meet, but Brayden needs the new iPhone!” No, he doesn’t. You’re handing an $1100 device to a child who still eats crayons and forgets to flush. When we were kids, there was one phone. It hung on the wall like a family relic. The cord stretched just far enough for you to whisper secrets before someone yelled, “Get off, I need to make a call!” And guess what? We lived. The TV? One. In the living room. With three channels and a dial that clicked like a safe. And if Dad wanted to watch bowling, you were a fan of bowling, end of story. Now there’s a flat screen in every room, the baby’s got an iPad, the dog’s got a camera, and everyone’s wondering why they can’t afford rent. Because you’re living like rock stars on retail salaries, that’s why. Grandpa wasn’t leasing Teslas or buying $12 smoothies called “Green Zen Awakening.” He drove a truck that coughed smoke, rattled like a storm, and smelled like oil and hard work. They lived within their means. Whatever Grandpa brought home on Friday — that’s what they had. They weren’t keeping up with the Joneses; they were keeping the lights on. So yeah, Grandpa bought a house on one salary. But he also didn’t have a gym membership, three delivery apps, and emotional support crystals on his nightstand. His only support system was Grandma, who told him to quit whining and mow the yard. Nowadays, everyone’s broke, anxious, and “manifesting abundance” while ordering tacos on DoorDash for the fourth time this week. It’s not the economy — it’s the lifestyle. Wake up, turn off your subscriptions, make your own coffee, and maybe—just maybe—you’ll smell the truth.

Grace Hopper once dismantled a Navy computer with a screwdriver — just to prove it wasn’t “too complicated” for a woman to understand. Then she rewired the entire future of computing. She was 37 when she joined the U.S. Navy during World War II. Too old, too thin, and far too bold — they said no at first. She kept showing up. Eventually, they handed her a uniform and a problem: the Mark I computer. It filled an entire room, made strange clanking noises, and no one fully understood how it worked. Hopper didn’t just understand it — she taught it to speak English. At a time when programming meant punching holes in cards and speaking only in machine code, Grace Hopper believed computers should serve humans, not the other way around. She invented the first compiler — a translator that let people write instructions in plain English. That idea became COBOL, the first widely adopted programming language for business. It still powers banks and systems today. She coined the term “debugging” after pulling a literal moth out of a malfunctioning machine. But it wasn’t a joke — it was a metaphor for her career. Find the glitch. Fix it. Move forward. Grace Hopper stayed in the Navy until she was 79. She gave her final interview in uniform, sharp as ever, holding up a tiny piece of wire that represented a nanosecond. This is how far light travels in one-billionth of a second,” she said. “Now you have no excuse to be slow.”She was rebellious, relentless, and wildly ahead of her time. They called her “Amazing Grace.” She preferred Admiral. Ever use a computer? You’re standing on her code.

I can watch the 1973 Belmont over and over again.

If Musk really wants to help kids out, he should PAY HIS TAXES!

A Statement of Conscience on October 7 I will not start by saying ‘as a Muslim’ or ‘as an imam’, but as a human being. On October 7, over 1,200 innocent people were killed in a single day. Families were shot in their homes. Young people out dancing were hunted across open fields. Over 250 people, including children and the elderly, were dragged into Gaza as hostages. I think of a mother hiding in a safe room with her baby’s mouth covered. I think of a father listening as the line went quiet. I think of families who waited month after month for someone to come home, only to receive a coffin. I didn’t need my faith to recognize the evil of what happened. My heart told me first. But I’m a Muslim and an imam, and I owe the world one honest sentence: what was done that day was a crime against God. God teaches that whoever kills one innocent soul, it is as if he had killed all humanity. This day has an author: Yahya Sinwar. He planned it, ordered it, and knew what would follow. Every death of that day and war he started rests on him and Hamas leaders who sat in tunnels and foreign hotels and called slaughter a victory. It rests on every Palestinian leader who cheered, excused, handed out sweets, or said nothing. They chose this. They own it. But Sinwar did not invent himself. He was the fruit of a tree planted almost a century ago by the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas named itself in its founding charter as the Brotherhood’s branch in Palestine. The Brotherhood’s poison is slow. It arrives through study circles, youth camps, charity boxes, and kind words to lonely young men. Drop by drop, it teaches him that his religion is a political party, his neighbour is his enemy, the Jew is the cause of his sorrow, and God is pleased by rage. By the time the gun arrives, the soul is already taken. I have seen this poison in mosques where sermons became rallies and young men could recite slogans but not sit still for a verse on mercy. Every people that let the Brotherhood in has paid in blood and ruined generations. It has never built anything it did not first set on fire. Behind Hamas stands another hand: the IRGC. It was the IRGC’s money, weapons, and training that turned a hateful idea into an army. One calls itself Sunni and the other Shia, and they may curse each other’s creeds, but they are united in what they worship. It is not God. It is power. The same IRGC that armed the killers of October 7 shoots Iranian girls for showing their hair, hangs young men for asking to be free, and has left graves from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut. They speak in God’s name. So did Pharaoh speak in the name of heaven. So let me say this clearly. Hamas and the IRGC are not merely enemies of Islam. That would be too small a charge, as if their crime were only against us. They are enemies of God. God is the Giver of life, yet they deal in death. God calls Himself the Most Merciful, yet they have made cruelty a sacrament. God honoured the children of Adam, yet they look at a child and see a target or a shield. To murder what God created and sign His name to it is the oldest blasphemy. And we Muslims have been too quiet. Some of us were afraid. Some told ourselves it was not our business. Some, God forgive them, felt something other than horror that morning and never confessed it. Silence was the soil this poison grew in. I will not add to it. So on this anniversary, let us say plainly what our scripture already says. The Jews are not our enemies. They are our cousins in Abraham, and their dead were created by the same God who created us. Today belongs to them: the murdered, the hostages, and families who still set a place at the table. To them I say: I am sorry for what was done to you by men who used the words of my prayers. You’re not alone in your grief or remembrance. The enemies of God are those who murder in His name. We know their names. It is time we said them from our own pulpits, in our own voices, before they speak for us again. Imam Tawhidi

Gallup Poll: Proud to be an American? 2001: Republicans: 90% Democrats : 85% 2026: Republicans: 93% Democrats: 27% The Democrat Party has increasingly become un-American.

‼️If Trump’s recent post about “economic operation” on Islamic regime in Iran, left you impatient, this post might help. What is happening right now is one of the most important and effective preparatory stages before the next round of military strikes. It is designed to force the regime toward surrender and to create the conditions for a bureaucratic collapse and transition rather than chaos. Let me explain: The Islamic Republic is, at its core, a plunder-oriented and clientelist structure. Historically it most closely resembles the early Arab conquests of Iran and the Mongol invasions, systems organized around extraction rather than governance or belief. The central prize has always been Iran’s oil. Unfortunately, that oil wealth has never been linked to the welfare of the Iranian people or to any measurable competence in running the country. The money simply flows. Even under sanctions, extensive shadow networks, in China, Iraq, UAE and UK, kept the revenue moving. This revenue was divided among competing power cartels that Khamenei carefully managed and balanced for decades. Because these cartels are bound together by marriage and blood ties, their members remain confident that power will eventually rotate and that their own turn at plundering the oil wealth will come. At the same time, over those same decades, Khamenei used the rents to co-opt a much wider layer of society. Bureaucrats, managers, contractors, industrialists and others were bound to the system through money, licenses, contracts and privilege. Genuine ideological believers in Iran probably number under five percent. Yet because almost nothing can be done without proving loyalty to the IRGC and its networks, a far larger share, perhaps approaching half the population in practical terms, has its livelihood indirectly tied to the status quo and therefore benefits from the regime’s survival. The regime is not the pure ideological state many imagine. It is profoundly corrupt. Ideology’s real function has always been twofold: to mobilize the masses when needed and to provide a veneer of legitimacy for repression and terrorism. The ideology itself is a mid-up patchwork, selective Islam, the Karbala story, anti-Imperialism and anti-Israeil rhetoric and borrowed radical tropes. It is so incoherent that even many who publicly claim to believe it do not. This includes people at the very top: they chant “Death to America” while their children and their money live in the US. The mid-level bureaucratic class, in particular, has essentially no belief in it at all. What @SecScottBessent and the Treasury are doing now is closing the remaining sanctions-evasion arteries. The shadow routes that kept the money flowing are being shut down so that, finally, there is no meaningful revenue left. In the next phase I expect Israeli strikes to remove the remaining hardline ideological commanders within the IRGC. The people required to announce the regime’s dissolution will be the corrupt economic players who remain. They will only take that step once they are certain the plunder has permanently ended. When they do, the broader bureaucratic and mid-level classes, whose loyalty was always purchased rather than ideological, will finally lose hope and become ready for a managed transition. Consider the recent example of Syria. Ba’athist ideology, in both Syria and Iraq, was itself a mixture of anti-imperialist and anti-Israeli rhetoric; the only real difference was that instead of a religious component it was pan-Arab and secular. Assad’s regime was structured in a comparable way. The fact that a regime calls itself ideological should not frighten anyone into believing it can never surrender. Damascus fell through a bureaucratic collapse with almost no serious resistance, and Assad simply fled. If you follow events on the ground, the trajectory is already visible. @POTUS 's plan is not a full-scale invasion. Simply arming the people is also not a viable solution. Iran possesses a golden opportunity that almost no other country in a comparable situation has ever had: a clear, legitimate and widely desired alternative with a proven and distinguished record, presented by prince @PahlaviReza. A bureaucratic collapse is entirely achievable, provided the preconditions are understood and deliberately prepared. Believe that Trump and the competent people in his administration understand this reality. Watch closely: they are systematically cutting the regime’s lifelines one by one. Soon only an empty shell will remain — and that shell will collapse with a single kick from the Iranian people. Trump promised them "help". He will deliver it. Be patient and trust the process. Javid Shah