Archive for February, 2024

The Same Old Grift And Dance

Posted: February 8, 2024 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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Curley: [stops Moe and Larry] Hey! What’s this stuff [Brighto] for anyway?

Larry: Why, it’s a cleaner, ya chump!

Curley: I know, it’s auto polish.

Moe: You boys really wanna know what it’s for?

Larry & Curly [In unison] Yeah!

Moe: It’s for sale, now get busy selling it.

The Three Stooges, Dizzy Doctors 1937

When you’ve been blogging for as long as I have (15 years here plus 3 or 4 as a tech blogger for Hiwired) you tend to cover a lot of things. Sometimes you forget that while you might remember an argument you made in 2013 that ten years later most people haven’t seen it.

So when in the news today you see Stephen Cruiser ask about Karine Jean-Pierre understanding the state of Biden’s mental acumen or Ibram X Kendi pooh poohing a statement of fact as “White Savior syndrome” or Even sports talk people going on about Bill Belichick not having a job when they spent a year calling him to be fired one must remember a key fact.

This isn’t about a cause or an argument, it’s about a living. Their sources of income demand such a response because any other type of response risks losing said income.

I pointed this out a while back:

But what happens if your goal is achieved?

What happens if it turns out the water is, in fact clean, cleaner that it has been for decades?  What happens if the Polar Bear population and deer population are boom?  What happens if every 16 year old in the country has the right to declare themselves whatever sex they want on any given day?  What happens if the US pulls every single soldier out of Afghanistan?  What happens if pipelines are declared illegal or scientists develops a leak proof material able to even stand up to earthquakes?

Or worse,  what happens if science proves your fears unfounded, that the world isn’t warming?  What happens when January 27th 2016 come along and we’re all still here?  What happens if  statistics show your “oppressed” group is voting in greater numbers than ever before?

Do you bask in the glory of your victory?  Do you celebrate that all your hard work has been successful?  Do you breathe a sigh of relief that your children and grandchildren are not going to die a horrible death in a parched poisoned earth?

Hell NO!

You’ve achieved status, you’ve achieved power, you’re living comfortably.  You’re invited to the right parties, feted over by stars who think your cause is SO important and pols on the local, state and federal level care what you say and act accordingly.

So you find a different crisis, it doesn’t matter if water is clean, it isn’t clean enough, it doesn’t matter if the polar bears have recovered, they haven’t recovered enough, sure 16 year olds can declare themselves whatever sex they want, but what about 7 year olds?  Yeah we’re out of Afghanistan but what about Europe?  Yeah we stopped the pipelines, but the trucks are dangerous too?  Do we really trust those figures that say the world isn’t going to end?  We need a 50 year study of our own to be sure.

The really scary thing about that quote from 2013 is that the business about 7 year olds deciding their sex has come true.

So please remember when you see people talking nonsense about the border, or gender or oppression, remember that their goal isn’t to solve an actual problem, their goal is to maintain their wealth, income, social position or status.

Keep that in mind and you’ll get it.

How DARE Rowan (Mr. Bean) Atkinson Rain on Our EV Gravy Train!

Posted: February 7, 2024 by datechguy in business
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Captain Lockyer: I may have been misinformed. I understood Mr. Lafitte was in command in Barataria

Jean Lafitte: If you’re offer is good it will stand up under fire.

The Buccaneer 1958

I usually don’t pay attention to what is trending on twitter but when I saw “Mr. Bean” trending it jumped out at me. I presumed something had happened to comedy legend Rowan Atkinson so I clicked over.

Atkinson’s comedy has been making people laugh for decades. His TV series from the Thin Blue Line and Not the Nine O’clock news are guaranteed to raise a smile and his characters have been iconic from the incredible Edmund Blackadder, to Secret Agent Johnny English.  He even did one Doctor Who parody titled “The curse of fatal death” that was a spot on sendup of the series.

But of all the characters he has played the most iconic is Mr. Bean. The simple and to some degree simple minded fellow who tries very hard to get by in this crazy world of ours. It is the role he is most identified with.

Atkinson is also known to be outspoken on free speech and comedy defending both while others run and hide and has never been shy about his opinions. Six months ago he wrote the following op-ed on the subject of Electric Cars:

I love electric vehicles — and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped.

Sadly, keeping your old petrol car may be better than buying an EV. There are sound environmental reasons not to jump just yet.

Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.

I must admit that I was not aware of his background in engineering as you don’t see a lot of actors with this type of degree but it shows in this piece where he brakes down both the advantages and limits of current electric cars and brings up a subject that those pushing the cars (and getting rich off of subsidies) don’t mention:

In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70 per cent higher than when manufacturing a petrol one.

How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of ten years.

It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

He doesn’t bring up the fires and the cost of repair which are rather significant but he does note that better alternates are on the drawing board from solid state batteries to Hydrogen models but that in the meantime we end up with a lot of bad batteries left over. He then pivots to another point, usage:

Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model.

This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in.

When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years.

It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO2 emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced.

And he closed with this bit of advice:

Friends with an environmental conscience often ask me, as a car person, whether they should buy an electric car. I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of city centre motoring, they should consider a change.

But otherwise, hold fire for now. Electric propulsion will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn.

Read the whole thing, it’s a good solid argument that is made from the climate change perspective. 

Well apparently the folks in Britain who have known and loved Mr. Atkinson for decades have taken his argument to heart and that’s made some folks very mad

Pols and pressure groups are not amused:

The Lord’s environment and climate change committee has since been told the actor was partly to blame for ‘damaging’ public opinions on electric vehicles (EVs). 

It comes as new petrol and diesel cars are due to be banned from 2035 under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak‘s net zero strategy – a plan designed to encourage drivers to buy EVs. 

The Green Alliance pressure group said: ‘One of the most damaging articles was a comment piece written by Rowan Atkinson in the Guardian which has been roundly debunked.’ 

What seems to be the problem is that Mr. Atkinson made a solid rational argument concerning the actual goal our green friends supposedly have, that is reducing Co2 emissions and our green friends don’t seem to have any counter other than claiming it to be “debunked” which sound a lot like the vaccine companies talking when people were warning about the side effects of the shots.

The New article has this handy dandy graphic that makes Atkinson’s point for him

And again, note that Atkinson didn’t talk about things he could have brought up. High Cost, Limited Range, Lack of Charging stations, performance in cold, repair cost, battery fires or even the human cost of the child slave labor to get the lithium. 

Bottom line if they have a better and more rational argument rather than just an agenda to push there are certainly a whole lot of other prominent lefty stars out there that the public would trust who could deliver it for them. 

If they had one that is.

If not much easier to blame Mr. Atkinson for raining on their gravy train.

The Immigration Solution: ENFORCE THE LAW

Posted: February 6, 2024 by datechguy in crime, election 2024, politics
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Captain Jean Luc Picard: Professor, this situation is more serious than you realize. In less than five hours, those two planets will collide and a new star will form. Unless we move to a safe distance, this vessel will be destroyed.
Professor James Moriarty: I’m just a fictional character. I haven’t much to lose.
Captain Jean Luc Picard: But surely you wish to live like the rest of us?
Professor James Moriarty: Not alone. Not without the Countess.
Captain Jean Luc Picard:: We’ve discussed that. We are studying means of bringing her safely off the holodeck. But five hours is not enough time.
Professor James Moriarty: I’m not so sure. A deadline has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind.

Star Trek The Next Generation Ship in a Bottle 1993

We are Less than 10 months from the presidential election and that deadline has, in the wonderful way a deadline does, suddenly focused the mind of the left to the point where they are afraid that their open boarder policy plan to replace the existing electorate with one that might support them with the financial help our our enemies might actually produce an election backlash beyond the margin of fraud and remove them from power.

Since power is the primary goal of both the left and the deep state that tolerates them a “compromise” bill was put together. Said bill was crafted behind closed door because such a bill debated openly could not stand the scrutiny of light and then released all at once with billions of funding for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with the border, but a lot to do with the left’s objectives tossed in.

Alas in this computer age it didn’t take long for the text of the bill to be examined and the various provisions including allowing thousands to cross illegally daily, money to the left’s NGO’s we now have the spectacle of democrats DEMANDING the bill be passed at once and claiming that the GOP is not serious about the border if they don’t play along.

Now there of course is a very obvious solution to the problem at the border and that solution is this:

Enforce the already existing laws.

If the already existing laws are enforced the border problem is solved, however such an approach is not acceptable to the democrat left for some simple reasons:

  1. It doesn’t give sufficient opportunities for graft
  2. It doesn’t provide billions for their priorities that they can’t get passed otherwise
  3. Their goal is to APPEAR to address the border rather than actually doing so.

Thus a new bill that gives plenty of opportunities for graft (in the form of payments to the left’s NGO’s) and addresses democrat priorates ( again a source for graft) while actually codifying thousands of illegals crossing daily and most important of all gives them a chance to say: We Did Something to Fix it.

One of the advantages of age is memory and as I recall going all the way back to Reagan, deals have been made concerning the border with the left. These deals follow a familiar pattern where the left has repeatedly taken Amnesty and cash offered while failing to actually enforce laws concerning the border that they always vow to do in exchange for them. 

So let’s cut to the chase and ask a question so obvious that I don’t understand why it isn’t being constantly repeated.

Given that historically the Democrats in general and this Administration in particular have been unwilling to enforce any existing border law why should we believe that once all the funds the left wants from this deal are appropriated via law they would actually enforce any provisions concerning border security?

Spoiler alert: they won’t be!

So I submit and suggest that rather then giving them a billion dollar source of cover for the 2024 election the GOP needs to have a single message on the border:

ENFORCE THE LAW, PERIOD!

End of discussion.

Extinction vs. hope

Posted: February 6, 2024 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

By Christopher Harper

Extinction panic. That’s the latest worry that The New York Times says we must be concerned about. 

Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College in Maine, writes an extensive analysis in DaTimes:

“What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible. The irony, of course, is that this cynicism — and the unfettered individualism that is its handmaiden — greases the skids to calamity. After all, why bother fighting for change or survival if you believe that self-destruction is hard-wired into humanity?”

Harper [no relation] blames politicians left and right for what he calls “doom-mongering.” He writes: “One way to understand extinction panics is as elite panics: fears created and curated by social, political, and economic movers and shakers during times of uncertainty and social transition. Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change. Today, it’s politicians, executives, and technologists.” 

He cites several potential sources for extinction worries: Middle East war, “climate anxiety,” artificial intelligence, and China. “Climate is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies, and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.” 

Only once you dig into the analysis does Harper finally show his cards. His solution to extinction panic is to give the government more power. 

“We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I., and the like — to private businesses and billionaires,” Harper argues. “We need ambitious, well-resourced government initiatives and international cooperation that takes A.I. and other existential risks seriously.”

After COVID, people may be even more prone to worry about extinction and perhaps turn to the government for solutions. 

I hope people remember just how badly that solution worked!

Instead of wringing one’s hands, I suggest that people read a few books about faith and hope. Education scholar James Fraser has one that fits the bill.

Fraser’s History of Hope chronicles “American history through the stories of the individuals and movements that dreamed of a better future and then took action to make that dream a reality, arguing that the much-heralded American spirit was not born as a gift of our founding, but was forged through our adversity and triumphs.”

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