TOO DARN HOT: New Tesla Fire Manifests in Belgium. “A Tesla Model S suffered a total meltdown after being connected to one of the company’s proprietary Supercharger stations in Antwerp, Belgium. While details are scant, local reports state the driver simply went to charge his automobile and returned to a burning wreck a short time later.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
June 3, 2019
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Biological Man Who Beat Women in Cycling Complains About ‘Toxic Masculinity.’
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for June 3, 2019.
JIM GERAGHTY: The Right’s Grifter Problem.
Ed posted a blind link to this earlier, but if you think the problem is a small one…
Back in 2013, Conservative StrikeForce PAC raised $2.2 million in funds vowing to support Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign for governor in Virginia. Court filings and FEC records showed that the PAC only contributed $10,000 to Cuccinelli’s effort.
Back in 2014, Politico researched 33 political action committees that claimed to be affiliated with the Tea Party and courted small donors with email and direct-mail appeals and found that they “raised $43 million — 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs.”
Back in 2015, RightWingNews reviewed the financial filings of 21 prominent conservative PACs and found the ten 10 groups at the bottom of their list spent $54.3 million only paid out $3.6 million to help get Republicans elected.
Read the whole thing.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Ten Plagues of California Are Turning The Golden State into a Third-World Hell Hole. “Statewide, California’s problems aren’t limited to trash dumpers, the homeless, rat infestations, and infectious disease… as if that weren’t already too much Third World fun in the once-Golden State. Stories about San Francisco’s Human Poop Hurdle Olympics are now de rigueur, and you’d better watch where you stick the landing or a used syringe might stick you.”
SONNY LOHMAN: Somalis have Changed Minneapolis.
Now, due to continuing refugee placements as well as chain migration there are an estimated 80,000 Somalis living in the Twin Cities metro area, or more like 79,000 if you subtract those who’ve left the country to join terrorist organizations like ISIS.
Anyhoo, here’s a week Minneapolitans had with their Somali neighbors last month:
On Wednesday, May 15th a couple of University students were attacked on campus at the East Bank Train station by two Somali thugs. It was an attempted robbery that the guys rebuffed sustaining injuries that required a hospital visit.
On Thursday, May 16th two Somalis burned down the pavilion at Lake Calhoun [or Lake Bde Maka Ska if you’re a virtue signaler) an eating and hanging out meeting place in the heart of the city enjoyed by generations of Americans around the prettiest city lake you’ve ever seen. This is in the most expensive neighborhood in Minneapolis.
Much, much more at the link.
Diversity might be our strength or whatever, but before long they’ll be pining for “Minnesota nice” up there — if they aren’t already.
THE LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS IS STRONG IN THIS ONE: Bernie Sanders Says ‘There Is No Middle Ground,’ Then Blames Trump for Division.
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry. “It’s a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table unpaid to musicians.”
In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren’t.
Metadata sounds like one of the smallest, most boring things in music. But as it turns out, it’s one of the most important, complex, and broken, leaving many musicians unable to get paid for their work. “Every second that goes by and it’s not fixed, I’m dripping pennies,” said the musician, who asked to remain anonymous because of “the repercussions of even mentioning that this type of thing happens.”
As a music fan, I’ve mentioned it often. Apple Music and Spotify’s metadata is so unreliable that it breaks the “brilliant playlists” I use to arrange my collection by genre or era. You can fix it by going into the ID tag of each song file, but not only is that a pain, but your fixes don’t stick if for any reason the streaming service has to update or change the song. As a user, it wasn’t worth the effort, so I gave up on streaming.
Artists can’t afford to do that, however, now that streaming is the music publishing industry’s primary income. And that puts ripped-off artists in a real bind.
WHAT THE HELL HAS BEEN GOING ON AT BOEING? U.S. regulators say some Boeing 737 MAX planes may have faulty parts.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Touchy Uncle Joe was MIA from the Dem’s California freak convention.
I wonder why Joe skipped, oh, wait I know why: “Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former Maryland Rep. John Delaney were roundly booed for warning their party against going to far to the left in 2020.”
“Some Democrats in Washington believe the only changes we can get are tweaks and nudges. If they dream at all, they dream small,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in her speech at the Democratic convention.
“Some say if we all just calm down, the Republicans will come to their senses,” she said. “But our country is in a time of crisis. The time for small ideas is over.”
Never let a crisis go to waste, I’m sure.
BLUE CITY THIRD-WORLD BLUES: Woke Los Angeles is the New Typhus Hotbed: Homeless Catastrophe Makes City of Angels Unlivable.
When state officials inspected the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Division station last November, they uncovered rodent infestations and other unsanitary conditions at the facilities responsible for protecting skid row and other parts of downtown.
The conditions have now become the source of growing anger inside the station, with some officers threatening to seek transfers and city leaders scrambling to address the problems.
The issues at the Central Division come amid larger concerns about disease and filth across downtown, notably a vermin infestation at City Hall last year. One city employee was diagnosed with typhus, a disease that can be spread by rodents. City Hall workers said they saw fleas, rodent droppings and plants eaten by vermin in the building.
The growing piles of uncollected trash aren’t exactly helping.
I WOULD CERTAINLY HOPE SO: U.S. Air Force F-35s, F-15s and F-16s Might Soon Have Laser Weapons.
WIPE THEM OUT, ALL OF THEM: GM fungus rapidly kills 99% of malaria mosquitoes, study suggests.
LIFE UNDER LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Hospital shortages a death sentence for Venezuelan children.
Gilberto Altuve places his son Erick’s toys on a white cloth alongside cards from friends and the mask he used while waiting for a desperately needed bone marrow transplant that never came.
He died aged 11 on May 26 while waiting in a Venezuelan hospital, after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in February.
He was not the only child in May to lose his battle with the disease. So too did Giovanny Figuera, Robert Redondo and Yeiderberth Requena.
And:
Venezuela president Nicolas Maduro blamed the unpaid Italian debt on a Portuguese bank blocking payments due to US sanctions aimed at trying to force him from power.
But Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaido claims the initiative had already run into problems in 2016 due to “a lack of supplies and bureaucratic obstacles.”
US sanctions were only applied in 2017.
If you’re opposed to socialism, it’s because you don’t love children and other living things.
THE CHICAGO WAY: Jussie Smollett Is A Victim, Act II.
Lots of good background in this one I hadn’t seen before.
May 31, 2019
FACE, MEET PALM: Post-EmailGate Hillary Clinton to Speak at Cybersecurity Conference.
This is not, repeat not, a satire piece.
I had originally thought to lead this with a fox/henhouse reference, but “fox” seemed particularly inapt.
CLASS ACT: Trump Honors Air Force Graduate Who Beat Cancer During School. “President Donald Trump honored Cadet Parker Hammond on Thursday for beating cancer while attending the Air Force Academy.”
COLD WAR II: Dozens of Confucius Institutes still operate across US.
U.S. intelligence agencies have labeled Confucius Institutes as threats because of their associations with the Chinese Communist Party, according to reports obtained by the Washington Free Beacon last year.
“The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached’ funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light,” the unclassified portion of the report reads. “It has used this tactic to reward pro-China viewpoints and coerce Western academic publications and conferences to self-censor. The CCP often denies visas to academics who criticize the regime, encouraging many China scholars to preemptively self-censor so they can maintain access to the country on which their research depends.”
Last year, Congress responded to these fears by passing a bill, first introduced by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, restricting Department of Defense funding for Chinese language learning from colleges that host Confucius Institutes. President Donald Trump signed that legislation into law.
Despite legislative efforts, 91 Confucius Institutes remain across the country, according to data supplied by the National Association of Scholars. While a majority of the institutes are hosted on college campuses, a handful of the institutions are at K-12 schools.
Interactive map at the link.