Archive for 2019
December 27, 2019
EVERY VEHICLE SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS! Rivian’s “Tank Turn” Will Allow for Some Seriously Tight Off-Road Donuts.
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: From the ridiculous to the heartwarming and back again, it’s a very special Christmas spirit edition.
Plus, for PJMedia’s VIP members: Navy Saved Money with Touch-Screen Controls, Sailors Paid with Their Lives. “Sanchez had planned to have the system’s programmers ‘give the system a full check, a full clean bill of health,’ but the collision occurred, killing ten of his sailors, before that could happen. What did happen was just ugly. On August 21, 2017, the McCain was sailing the crowded shipping lanes 20 miles from Singapore. Sanchez was on the bridge, monitoring the situation, with Bordeaux in charge of steering the ship (via touchscreen controls) while another sailor manned the virtual throttle. But something went wrong, whether with the under-trained sailors, the touchscreen controls, or the system itself. Whatever the case, the McCain did not respond correctly to course adjustments.”
If you aren’t a VIP member but are considering becoming one, the promo code VODKAPUNDIT it still good for a nice little discount.
THANKS, BARACK: 2014 Flashback: Obama Marks End of Combat in Afghanistan. 5 years ago.
A NEWSPEAK TERM TOO FAR: The Atlantic Magazine Pronounces ‘Latinx’ a Linguistic Flop.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Exercise may reduce risk for cancer by as much as 25 percent.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s poorest struggle to take care of their dead.
JEFF DUNETZ: Giuliani Claims He’s ‘More Of A Jew’ Than George Soros: Liberals Freak (But He’s Right). Well, Rudy never worked with Nazis to confiscate Jewish property, so he’s got that going for him, which is nice.
DECOUPLING: Sonos raises prices on pro products as production moves out of China. “Sonos telegraphed this move earlier in the year, telling analysts on earnings calls that it would be moving production out of China and prices might be affected. The company tells me the move is less about tariffs, which it called a ‘one-time hit,’ and more about diversifying production for the future.”
I suspect the price hikes might be temporary (unless Sonos finds they don’t affect sales), as countries like Malaysia and Vietnam improve their industrial base the way China did.
LIEAWATHA KEEPS LYING: Elizabeth Warren’s Brother Says She’s Lying About Their Father’s Occupation on Campaign Trail.
PRETTY SURE I DON’T NEED THAT COVERED: Starting in June, Millions of Americans – Including Men – Will Receive a Separate Insurance Bill for Abortion Coverage.
LET’S TALK ABOUT GHASTLY DISHWASHERS:
“Why is Trump talking about dishwashers?” asks Slate. “It’s part of Trump’s core campaign message: nostalgia for a fictitious era in American history where everything was better, simpler.”
Maybe. But there’s also this reality: he is 100% correct about this whole topic. It’s a big and important one too.
American dishwashers used to work. They were wonderful labor-saving devices. They kept our kitchens cleaner. They sanitized the dishes, helping to stop cross-contamination and generally improving health over the iffy process of handwashing. Also, as with all household appliances, they made life better, reducing one more chore that was widely seen as women’s work.
Then one day they just stopped doing the work.
What happened?
Older models of dishwashers used 15 gallons of water. Today the typical “Energy Star” model will attempt to wash with three gallons. Sorry but that’s just not possible, no matter how many fancy tricks you try.
Dishwashers used to wash all the dishes in under one hour. Now they take two hours, three hours, and four hours, and still don’t get the dishes clean. So much for saving on energy. Less water, sure, but more electricity — and what does it mean to save resources when the thing doesn’t work?
All of this is directly due to government regulations.
Of course. To be fair, when products get worse, that’s usually the reason. See also gas cans.
Plus: “These regulations have caused an infuriating and devastating degradation of the quality of appliances and the quality of life in our homes. Trump is a smart politician. He specializes in finding issues that no one else is talking about how they directly affect the quality of life.”
WORST HITLER EVER: The Reverse Blood Libel. “But if he hates Jews, Donald Trump has a funny way of showing it—through acts that strengthen us and strengthen the nation-state of the Jewish people.”
Read the whole thing.
BABY YODA ON BOARD: Disney+ is coming to Teslas ‘soon.’ “At some point in the not-too distant future, you’ll be able to enjoy The Mandalorian in your car.”
THIS IS A BAD COMBINATION: Heavy drinkers more likely to be prescribed Xanax, Valium. But a lot of heavy drinkers are self-medicating for anxiety or insomnia, so it kind of makes sense.
DOES ALASKA’S SENATOR THINK HER NAME IS ‘LADY MACBETH?’: Maybe she does, but the folks at Issues & Insights aren’t having it.
COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Trump supporter allegedly assaulted at Colorado Springs impeachment rally.
AND THAT’S HOW IT OUGHT TO BE: George Korda: UT President: The university doesn’t referee free speech.
Conservative students and faculty at the University of Tennessee who fear that speaking their minds will spark backlash and retribution from politically and socially-liberal students and faculty should consider Randy Boyd, UT System president, their 9-1-1 call.
“We encourage people to speak their minds regardless of position, in all cases, all the time,” Boyd said Dec. 22 in an interview with me on “State Your Case,” the radio show I host from noon–2 p.m. Sundays on WOKI-FM, Newstalk 98.7.
“We just hope that they can do it civilly and professionally,” he said. “As long as that’s done, we encourage the free speech of conservative, liberal, any view whatsoever. I’m hopeful no one feels afraid to share their views. If they ever do, my e-mail is .
“They can e-mail me or just call me and I’ll be glad to talk to them and encourage them and support them in any way they feel necessary to be able to share their views.” . . .
The world into which UT students will emerge is a tough one demanding resiliency, Boyd said. Graduates will encounter environments in which everything won’t be shaped for the individual to be protected from thoughts and ideas that don’t conform to their worldview.
“As we know, when they leave their communities and they leave the University of Tennessee they’ll be going into the world where it’ll be challenging and it’ll have a lot of people with different points of view,” Boyd said. “We want to provide a university that provides a safe place for them to learn and grow but also – an area in which we need to improve – we want to be able to teach resilience. Because it’s a tough world out there and we need to make sure they’re prepared for the world after the university.”
His answer led me to ask this question: “If somebody says ‘I don’t agree with gay marriage, I think it’s wrong,’ and somebody else says ‘I feel threatened and unsafe by that,’ where does the administration get involved in refereeing that sort of thing?”
Boyd said the administration officials don’t get involved in throwing a flag on free speech.
That’s certainly an improvement over Long Island University President Kimberly Cline.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE, PART DEUX: Crime isn’t dropping in NYC. They’re just not calling it crime anymore, thanks to “reform.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE. Mashable: 2010s = 1984: The decade we finally understood Orwell.
To be a totalitarian, he knew from his contemporary totalitarians, you had to seize control of truth itself. You had to redefine truth as “whatever we say it is.” You had to falsify memories and photos and rewrite documents. Your people could be aware that all this was going on, so long as they kept that awareness to themselves and carried on (which is what doublethink is all about).
The upshot is, Winston Smith is gaslit to hell and back. He spends the entire novel wondering exactly what the truth is. Is it even 1984? He isn’t sure. Does Big Brother actually physically exist somewhere in Oceania, or is he just a symbol? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Winston is what passes for well-educated in his world; he still remembers the name “Shakespeare.” He’s smart enough not to believe the obvious propaganda accepted by the vast majority, but it doesn’t matter. The novel is about him being worn down, metaphorically and physically, until he’s just too tired and jaded to hold back the tide of screaming nonsense.
Don’t call him Winston Smith. Call him Mr. 2019. Because it’s looking increasingly like we live in Oceania. That fictional state was basically the British Isles, North America, and South America. Now the leaders of the largest countries in each of those regions — Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro — are men who have learned to flood the zone with obvious lies, because their opponents simply don’t have the time or energy to deal them all.
As Tom Wolfe famously wrote about the far left versus the center-left LBJ administration in “The Intelligent Coed’s Guide to America,” as collated in his 1982 anthology of his nonfiction, The Purple Decades:
“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” [Gunter Grass] said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
* * * * * * * *
By 1967 Lyndon Johnson may have been the very generalissimo of American imperialism in Southeast Asia—but back here in the U.S. the citizens were enjoying freedom of expression and freedom of dissent to a rather astonishing degree. For example, the only major Western country that allowed public showings of MacBird—a play that had Lyndon Johnson murdering John F. Kennedy in order to become President—was the United States (Lyndon Johnson, President). The citizens of this fascist bastion, the United States, unaccountably had, and exercised, the most extraordinary political freedom and civil rights in all history. In fact, the government, under the same Johnson, had begun the novel experiment of sending organizers into the slums—in the Community Action phase of the poverty program—to mobilize minority groups to rise up against the government and demand a bigger slice of the pie. (They obliged.)
And, speaking of community organizers, socialism, and Mashable’s aforementioned “obvious lies,” Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” for 2013 goes entirely unreferenced in their look back at the 2010s, which apparently started less than three years ago:
As Michael Barone noted in 2013, “More than all past presidents, Obama uses 1917 Espionage Act to go after reporters.” And yet, in Mashable’s article on the past decade, CTRL-F, “Obama” brings up zero returns.