Archive for 2024
February 15, 2024
A HALF STEP TOWARD EVS IS PROBABLY ENOUGH: Tested: 2024 Lexus RX450h+ Serves as Plug-In Practice: The plug-in-hybrid version of the RX is a half step toward EVs.
BOB COTTROL IS A FRIEND, BUT THEY LEFT OUT NICHOLAS JOHNSON: Gun Nation, One Nation: Celebrating America’s Black Second Amendment Scholars.
Cottrol has a new book out — with another friend (and former student) Brannon Denning — To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment.
I also recommend Nicholas Johnson’s Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms.
TOTALLY LEGIT: Nathan Wade Details the Trips He Took With Fani Willis.
READER FAVORITE: TruVision Readers Computer Reading Glasses – Blue Light Blocking Readers. #CommisionEarned
THE LEFT HAS NO PROBLEM WITH SEXUAL VIOLENCE INFLICTED ON THE CORRECT PEOPLE: She Can’t Even Condemn Rape. “Yesterday, Rashida Tlaib took a clarifying vote in which she stood her ground alone, bravely, I am sure she thinks. She refused to condemn the rape of women by Hamas.”
A HUGE QUESTION: If God exists, why does He allow evil in the world? Cold Case Christianity’s J. Warner Wallace, who saw more than his share of heinousness with the Los Angeles Police, applies his manifold detective skills to this perennial issue on HillFaith.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Armenia warns that Azerbaijan is planning a ‘full-scale war.’
READER BOOK PLUG: FROM Jason Hanson, Double Track. #CommissionEarned
OH, THAT HOLOCAUST ENVY: An Alarming Lesson in Anti-Jewish Resentment.
[I]n Maryland, we just got a chilling reminder that the worldview that nourishes such fads—whether DEI or intersectionality or race theory or “privilege” discourse—has spread far and wide and holds up the Jew as the ultimate public enemy.
At issue is a Maryland House bill that would establish a grant program for Holocaust education in schools throughout the state. The grant money would go to fund teacher training and class materials.
State education grant programs aren’t terribly oppressive. But they do cost money. And that is money poorly spent, according to opponents of the bill who spoke at a recent committee hearing. One parent objecting to the legislation is worth quoting at length, as an example of the raw anti-Semitism at the heart of the competitive victimhood that governs progressive-minded institutions.
He started off addressing “the black members of this board,” and launched into a tirade we have all heard before and will hear again, though we’re hearing it a bit more often these days. “It would be absolute treason, after 250 years of the Holocaust, of what we went through in chattel slavery, to allow people to come and take our suffering, put a few shekels on it, and benefit off of what we went through,” said the man, himself African-American. “This is the United States of America. We were the ones who went through the Holocaust. There was no Jewish suffering in this place—in fact, they helped to bring us over here, to the native Americans and the Hispanics.… It is treason to your ancestors to let someone take your suffering, and to do this to benefit them to tell a story that is ahistorical.”
Last month, Brendan O’Neill charted The rise and rise of Holocaust envy:
Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is not famed for its astuteness. These omnipresent public-school leftists, who rock up to every radical demo to holler facile chants in fake accents they learnt from EastEnders, are about as far from scholarly as you can get. Yet a few years ago they did something that was world-beatingly dumb, even by their famed low standards. They handed out a leaflet about the Holocaust that described it as an unspeakable tragedy in which ‘thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered’. Spot the omission?
Yes, they forgot the Jews. They forgot the Jews. It was 2008 and the SWP was skulking around a festival organised by the far-right British National Party (BNP). They handed their leaflets to anyone who’d take one. The leaflet denounced the BNP for ‘deny[ing] the Holocaust’, which was apparently an act of mass murder against gay people, trans folk and the disabled. No one else. Just them. The irony of the SWP slamming the BNP for ‘denying the Holocaust’ while simultaneously erasing from the record the six million souls obliterated by the Nazis was too much to take.
Their omission of the very people the Holocaust was designed to destroy did not go unnoticed. Even other radical leftists were appalled. The SWP seems to have discovered a ‘Jew-free Holocaust’, swiped the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Perhaps the SWP is keen to appeal to people who think it was ‘all right that Hitler killed six million Jews, but think it too much that he also killed LGBT people’, the AWL said. Then came the AWL’s keenest observation: yes, the omission of the Jews was probably ‘a slip’, it said, ‘but for such a slip to pass unnoticed through writer, typesetter, printer, organisers and distributors, without anyone at any stage picking it up, must say something’ (my emphasis).
* * * * * * * *
Where once racists accused the Jews of inventing the Holocaust, now the demand is that the Jews share the Holocaust. Yes, the Jews can have remembrance of their genocide, says [Anshel Pfeffer of Haaretz,] but first they must agree to ‘share it’ with other victim groups.
Flashback: Whoopi Goldberg’s Ignorance About The Holocaust Is What Happens When Intersectionality Rots People’s Brains.
READER FAVORITE: Back Brace Posture Corrector for Men & Women. #CommissionEarned
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Ocasio-Cortez says Trump win would result in ‘grave impacts’ on democracy.
—The Hill, yesterday.
Yes, who knows what level of government force he would use to coerce people to his whims? Oh wait:
“[T]he Green New Deal would mean big changes. But how big? And how would those changes be made? Steve Inskeep, a journalist at NPR and host of the Morning Edition program, asked AOC if her plan requires ‘massive government intervention.’ ‘It does. It does. Yeah. I have no problem saying that,’ she responded, according to the transcript.”
—”44 Things You Should Know about the Green New Deal,” the Foundation for Economic Education, May 24th, 2019.
And what would Sandy’s massive government intervention have entailed in 2019? The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal. Banning cars? Check! Banning planes? Check! Gutting every building in America? Check! Banning farting cows? But of course!
IT’S OFFICIAL: Everybody Knows Biden’s Brain Is Pudding. “I probably shouldn’t use language better suited to an elementary school playground when discussing the mental fitness of The Most Powerful Man in the World™, but after four years of telling people exactly what they’re finally admitting, that kind of language is about all I have left.”
CHRISTIAN TOTO: The Left Slams Jon Stewart for Mocking ‘Elderly’ Joe Biden.
“The Daily Show” star retired from his faux anchor seat in 2015, a time before his party embraced too many extremes to tally. We can start with open borders and name check Defund the Police for a sampler of uncorked thinking.
That version of Stewart leaned to the Left, and hard, but he saved some energy for mocking his fellow Democrats.
Occasionally.
That’s no longer acceptable to the modern Left, and he learned that lesson the hard way.
Twice.
It’s different now because shut up, hater.
DETAILS BEGIN TO TRICKLE OUT: Chiefs Super Bowl celebration shooting believed to have stemmed from personal dispute, law enforcement officials say.
Wednesday’s mass shooting that left at least one dead and 30 injured in Kansas City is believed to have been the result of a personal dispute in the area, and not an attack on the celebration itself, according to several law enforcement officials.
One of those officials said the three people currently in custody are all believed to have been involved in the dispute, and that initially, 10 people were questioned. The status of the other seven who were questioned is unclear.
Kansas City Police and city officials will update the investigation during a news conference scheduled for 10:30 a.m. local time.
In the meantime: A married mom of 2 was killed at the Chiefs parade. Why won’t the media or police reveal the IDs of the accused shooters?
This is par for the course when a black teen (or a trans person who hates Christians) is a mass shooter.
And I guess I wouldn’t be upset if the standard was the same – if everyone expected it to be days before we get IDs so we don’t slander someone who might be innocent.
But we all know what happens when a random white guy is the shooter (bonus points if he voted Republican).
The narrative doesn’t write itself, you know. Otherwise:
Regarding that last item: Kansas City mayor sues to block Missouri law requiring higher police spending.
—NPR’s KC affiliate, August 17, 2022.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: This May Be the Stupidest Thing Barack Obama Ever Said.
HANGOVER KICKS IN: Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros.
For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over.
It’s no coincidence that there’s been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they’re returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase — and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we’re right about at that point.
Comfort is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness. The weight of the device, and the fact that most of it is front-loaded, has been another complaint. Parker Ortolani, The Verge’s product manager, told me that he thought using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye. At least one other person noted they had a similar experience with redness. (To be fair, VR headset users have anecdotally reported dry eyes and redness for years.)
“Despite being as magical to use as I’d hoped, it was simply way too uncomfortable to wear even for short periods of time both due to the weight and the strap designs. I wanted to use it, but dreaded putting it on,” says Ortolani, who also posted about returning the device.
“It’s just too expensive and unwieldy to even try to get used to the constant headaches and eye strain I was experiencing. I’ll be back for the next one.”
As Bloomberg warned last year: “Apple hasn’t really found a killer app that will make the roughly $3,000 headset a must-have item:”
When Apple Inc. set out to develop a headset about seven years ago, it hired a former NASA engineer who had used augmented and virtual reality to explore Mars. The big question at the time: Why would an ordinary consumer need such a device?
As the company gets ready to unveil the product in June, that question is still hanging in the air. Apple hasn’t really found a killer app that will make the roughly $3,000 headset a must-have item. Instead, it’s trying another tactic: throwing everything but the kitchen sink at consumers.
Apple plans to pack the headset with a variety of features — games, fitness services, even an app for reading books in virtual reality — and hope that buyers find something they like.
It’s not such a wild approach. After all, Apple did the same thing when it unveiled its watch. In 2014, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook pitched the original Apple Watch as a highly accurate timepiece, a fitness tracker, a way to send personal messages to other wearers — and much more. In his presentation, he talked about using it as an Apple TV remote, an iPhone camera view finder and a walkie-talkie.
“The list of features is a mile long and I’m certain when developers get their hands on the developer kit, the list will get even longer,” Cook said at the announcement.
It soon became clear, though, that some features weren’t winners. Apple initially promoted the capability to send your heartbeat to contacts — something that didn’t catch on. It also had a Glances option for swiping through widgets; that system is now gone. And even telling the time isn’t really a core feature anymore, despite the product’s name.
The fact is, Apple had little idea which options would resonate. In the end, it focused on health tracking, notifications and complication-rich watch faces — but only after customers zeroed in on those features as their favorites.
“Nine years later, we’re about to see something similar play out with the Apple headset,” Bloomberg predicted. In Soviet America, beta testers pay you!
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The brutal reality of plunging office values is here.
Across the country, deals are starting to pick up, revealing just how far real estate prices have fallen. That’s spurring widespread concern about losses that can ripple across the global financial system – as underscored by the recent turmoil unleashed by New York Community Bancorp, Japan’s Aozora Bank and Germany’s Deutsche Pfandbriefbank as they took steps to brace for bad loans.
In Manhattan, brokers have started to market debt backed by a Blackstone-owned office building at a roughly 50 per cent discount. A prime office tower in Los Angeles sold in December for about 45 per cent less than its purchase price a decade ago. Around the same time, the Federal Deposit Insurance took a 40 per cent discount on about US$15 billion in loans it sold backed by New York City apartment buildings.
It’s a turning point for the market as the Federal Reserve ends the fastest pace of interest-rate hikes in a generation – providing more clarity to real estate investors on where borrowing costs stand. Some property owners will have little choice but to sell as their debt come due: More than US$1 trillion in commercial real estate loans are set to mature by the end of next year, according to data firm Trepp.
A commenter over at VodkaPundit told me a while back that nobody knows the true value of any piece of commercial real estate until it’s been three times. It can be a painful discovery.
THAT’S BEEN BIDEN’S M.O. FOR THREE OR FOUR YEARS NOW: Biden’s Hissy Fit on Mayorkas Impeachment Is a Hilarious Self-Awareness Fail.
HOLIDAYS IN HELL: Fake Mexico tour agency accused of chopping people up with machetes. “The suspects operated a call center in which they offered sports equipment and tour packages to tourists, but then failed to deliver them. On the second floor they had a complex operation in which drug deals were allegedly made over the phone and delivered by motorcycle.”