Blake Scholl, of Boom Supersonic, said that the demand to cut back on flights for the sake of limiting CO2 emissions is “depressing”.
He said: “There are some people who look at this and say, ‘Well, I guess we should all have less things. We should use less energy, we should go to fewer places.’ There’s been a lot of virtue-signalling and it’s very depressing.
“I believe in a future of abundance. I believe the north star is human flourishing and that we should build a future in which more people can go to more places more often.”
Mr Scholl, who spoke at last month’s Farnborough International Airshow where Boom unveiled the cockpit for its proposed 64-seat, 1,300mph Overture jet accompanied by four former Concorde pilots, argues that so-called flight shamers are ultimately seeking to stifle human progress.
He said: “Can you imagine this conversation on Zoom? It’s so much worse. I want our kids to grow up in a world where they’ve gone to other continents, they’ve broken bread with other people, they’ve experienced our shared community.
“To do that we need flights that are faster, we need to be at a price point people can afford, and, yes, we need to care for the planet.”
This looks much more like the 21st century I was promised as a kid than today’s subsonic commercial aviation:
On Monday’s Good Morning America, ABC senior White House correspondent Selina Wang not-so-subtly refused to acknowledge the anti-Semitism behind the far-left meltdowns over Vice President Kamala Harris having Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as one of her nominees for a 2024 presidential running mate, instead chalking up opposition to coming from pro-Palestinian Arabs hating Jews.
The framing below from Wang in her segment on the 2024 election was almost certainly on purpose and wildly obtuse.
As an American, I am horrified at Walz’s selection. He is small-minded, mean-spirited man. In one way, he will fit in with the Harris ticket: he ran a basement campaign for re-election in 2022, refusing to show up for debates with Republican Scott Jensen after the first one went badly. So Jensen was left debating an empty chair.
Walz’s character defects are considerable, but let’s leave it at this: he was largely responsible for the George Floyd riots that devastated Minneapolis and other cities, because he dithered for days rather than calling out the National Guard. By his own admission, he held off out of sympathy for the rioters’ cause.
Ed Morrissey, another longtime former Minnesota resident, adds:
This is such a puzzling pick on many levels. Josh Shapiro governs successfully in the kind of blue-collar state that Harris needs to win in order to succeed in November. Minnesota’s electorate is largely controlled by progressives in and around Academia in the seven metro counties. Walz is a former teacher himself, which Democrats think will play as somehow “blue collar,” but will instead look exactly like the progressive clique that many parents are now fighting in school districts over educational curricula.
Ed writes, “This doesn’t even look like Harris’ own choice, as Salena Zito briefly argues:”
Then 2 things are true. 1st picking @GovernorShapiro would’ve been about expanding the coalition picking Walz is about a base election. @GovTimWalz is deep blue progressive, often called a prairie progressive. 2nd this was Pelosi’s pick & she has been at the controls all along. https://t.co/V9E8CfC89Y
“On the first point, both of the nominees chose to focus on their base. However, Harris started out in a deep hole and had a chance to climb out of it with a dynamic partner that could appeal across party lines. Walz has no appeal at all,” Ed concludes.
UPDATE: The deep complicity of both the governor and veep during the 2020 riots allows for Trump to run some sort of modern reboot of Nixon’s “law and order” ad from 1968. As Charles Glasser wrote here in August of 2020, “[I] cannot stress enough how powerful and resonant this ad was in 1968. Ben Rhodes was right: The young reporters in the MSM don’t know anything, and I’d add neither do their readers. This ad could run today and still be effective. If you support Trump, you should be demanding that they start producing ads like this.”
In any case, the choices to plug into the headline are rapidly narrowing: Kamala Harris vice president choice narrows to Walz, Shapiro, sources say. “Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has narrowed her search for a vice presidential running mate to two finalists, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, three sources with knowledge of the matter said on Monday. Harris, the U.S. vice president, is expected to announce her selection by Tuesday, ahead of her first scheduled public appearance with her running mate that evening at Temple University in Philadelphia.”
A recent survey has revealed that the New Jersey accent is among the most challenging for artificial intelligence systems to comprehend.
According to a study by Guide2Fluency, the New Jersey accent ranks high on the list of dialects that pose difficulties for AI voice recognition systems. The survey assessed various regional accents across the United States and their impact on AI accuracy.
The research highlights that accents from New Jersey, along with those from Boston, New York, and the Southern United States, are particularly troublesome for AI. This finding raises concerns about the inclusivity and effectiveness of AI technology in accurately processing diverse speech patterns.
The study involved testing several AI voice recognition systems with audio samples from speakers with different regional accents. The results indicated that the New Jersey accent frequently led to higher error rates in transcription and comprehension.
But what is a “New Jersey accent?” Despite its relatively small size, my old home state has many, many accents:
And I suspect that there could be even more difficult accents for Siri to understand. Such as this classic moment with Terence Stamp and Bill Duke from Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 film, The Limey(language alert):
Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is a must-win state for Kamala, and it has an oil boom going on. Promising to kill off all those high-paying, blue collar, oilfield jobs is a winning message in San Franciso and Boston, but it doesn’t play so well in western Pennsylvania. So Kamala is trying the always difficult “Trust me, I’m lying” approach, hoping she can fool the blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, while also hoping her radical left-wing base knows she is just lying to get elected, and that they’ll still vote for her despite Kamala now being on the record as pro-fracking.
Vice President Harris has reversed her position on fracking, signaling a move to the center on the issue. The rightward shift comes as she tries to court swing voters in states like Pennsylvania.
As with all of her flip-flops, the media will be eager to let proceed forward, unburdened by what has been.
Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.
At least one Uniformed Division officer was initially assigned to investigate the cocaine incident. But after he told his supervisors, including Cheatle and Acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe, who was deputy director at the time, that he wanted to follow a certain crime-scene investigative protocol, he was taken off the case, according to a source within the Secret Service community familiar with the circumstances of his removal.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi did not immediately return RCP’s request for comment.
The discovery of the bag of cocaine posed an unusual problem for Cheatle, who resigned in the face of bipartisan pressure after the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Finally! A stock market I like! I almost salivate when the stock market crashes as hard as it is right now, because it means good companies are suddenly selling for 10 percent off.
It’s almost always the case that an inverted yield curve eventually leads to a recession, and with our Fed-induced yield curve inverted for more than 500 days now we shouldn’t be surprised to see the economy slowing. There have been signs of slowing in the data in recent weeks in manufacturing and consumer demand, and keep in mind that the job market is always a lagging indicator, so last week’s weaker-than-expected jobs number may be the signal that we’re going into recession for real.
Over the weekend I noticed one particular story that suggested the party might be over: Warren Buffett has been selling some large amounts of his leading holdings (especially Apple and Bank of America), building up a huge cash hoard ($277 billion) and, most significant of all, bringing Berkshire-Hathaway stock buybacks to a screeching halt in the last quarter.
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. released a bizarre video on X Sunday, in which he tells comedian Roseanne Barr about the time he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park a decade prior.
In the video, RFK and Barr are situated around a dinner table in a home, as the independent candidate tells his story. He explains that he’s trying to get ahead of a story The New Yorker is working on.
RFK says he was taking a group of people falconing in Goshen, New York, about a two hour-drive north of New York City.
RFK tells Barr he was on his way there when a woman in a van in front of him hit a young bear and killed it.
“So, I pulled over and picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear… and put the meat in my refrigerator,” RFK says, as a visibly shocked Barr listens. He notes that the practice is legal in New York State under certain conditions.
RFK says he continued hawking with his group of acquaintances and ended up staying late. Instead of going home, RFK says he had a dinner obligation in New York City.
RFK then admits, without elaborating, that he had to go the airport after dinner and couldn’t go home.
“I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad,” RFK says.
As Kate Hyde quips, “All of a sudden we’re supposed to act surprised that a Kennedy would leave a dead body behind.”
In any case, I really much preferred this story when it was an old Woody Allen standup joke from the ’60s.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: The Technocratic Temptation. Just sweep everything away and build from scratch….What could possibly go wrong?
Right now, I’m happy to ally with people who want to jettison the precautionary mindset that demands ever-increasing regulation and continually multiplies veto players. But eventually we’ll have to fight about just how much leeway the would-be builders get.
Many of our current problems stem from the backlash against the sweeping redevelopment efforts done by government at all levels in the mid-20th century. We replaced the top-down redesign of cities with procedures that made voluntary building more difficult. Simply going back to the “good old days” doesn’t solve the underlying problems of knowledge and permission. For that, you need to leave most building to markets and demand a high burden of proof—and true market pricing for eminent domain purchases—from government projects.
When today’s critics equate techno-optimism with techno-fascism, this is what they’re afraid of: Progress means smart people sweeping away whatever you value and deciding how everyone will live. Don’t be like that!
My favorite image of technocratic progress glamour, from a 1930 radio ad. See The Power of Glamour for more.
As I wrote in April, it’s all fun and games until you turn 30, your lifeclock starts blinking, and it’s time to don the doomsday hockey masks of Carousel:
Something extraordinary happened in the UK this week: the murder of three working-class girls was turned into a moral panic about working-class communities. Ruthlessly, with something approaching relish, the media elites dragged the public gaze from the frenzied stabbing of girls in a seaside town to the supposed frothing bigotries of the seaside town itself. In elite circles, angst over the evil visited on the children of Southport gave way to a foreboding over what lurks within Southport. In those terraced houses, with their white working-class inhabitants, so susceptible to online lies, so given to racial animus. These people want us to fear not the wicked individuals who terrorise our towns, but the towns themselves.
It has been a chilling spectacle. I am struggling to recall the last time the moral narrative around a horrific event was so mercilessly rewritten by those with cultural power. The week started with the grim news that a young man had invaded a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport in north-west England and used a curved kitchen knife to assault its attendees, leaving three girls dead and others seriously injured. And it ends with the elites focussing their fury and energy almost exclusively on the civil unrest that followed that act of barbarism. On the ‘moral deviance’ less of the killer who laid waste to three precious lives, than of those small sections of working-class society that erupted in fury at his killing. The establishment is back in its comfort zone – fretting over the alien morality and unwieldy energy of the white working class.
As this awful week draws to a close, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are ruled by people who fear the anger of the masses following acts of inhumanity more than they do the acts of inhumanity themselves. You can deplore the riotous disorder that followed the Southport massacre, as I do, and still ask why that disorder elicited a more zealous reaction from the opinion-forming classes than did the slaughter that provoked it. To my mind, the street violence in Southport, Hartlepool, Sunderland, Manchester and central London was wholly destructive. Groups of men hurled projectiles at cops and, most despicabably, threw bricks at mosques. This was a betrayal of the quiet dignity the good people of Southport have shown following the horror that befell their community. And yet it is curious, concerning in fact, that this criminal behaviour seems to be occupying Britain’s moral guardians and policymakers more than the murderous nihilism inflicted on Southport’s girls.
The country is like a melting-pot, yes — but a melting-pot of molten anger. The government has laid the blame with everyone from “the far-right” to “the Russians” but this is to woefully and willfully misunderstand the unprecedentedly fractious and factional nature of modern Britain.
Vast levels of immigration — bringing cheap labor for the rich and decreased wages for the poor — is at the core of much of this anger. “White Riot, I want a riot of my own,” the left-wing Clash sang back in the day, but now any white rioter will be called “right-wing” simply because of the color of their skin.
This is exacerbated by the two-tier policing we have had for some time here. When non-whites riot, police tend to retreat, whereas when whites riot, police tend to charge. Prime Minister Starmer’s first in-office nickname is “Two-Tier” Keir — not an auspicious start for a man who promised to bring national unity.
White working-class boys are currently the most likely to fail at school and the least likely to succeed in life, yet they are told that their skin color confers “privilege.” Now they’re being told by the liberal establishment that their riots are the “wrong” kind of riot — but after applauding the riots of Black Lives Matter, it’s hard to put the genie back into the bottle just because he’s paler than they would prefer.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I disagree with Brendan O’Neill that “quiet dignity” is an appropriate response to atrocities. The government should fear the mass of ordinary citizens, especially when it’s treating them with such contempt.
Although the real buried lede here is San Fran Nan defending Teddy Roosevelt. Doesn’t she know that after decades of being the Democrats’ only acceptable Republican president, her party completely memory holed him during their cultural revolution in the summer of 2020?
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