Archive for June 22, 2024

I was reading a piece about the potential sale of the money losing Washington Post when I noticed something I had missed: (emphasis mine)

Anyone who has paid much attention to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos over the years knows that he isn’t afraid to shut down something that isn’t working. In 2015, Amazon pulled the plug on its Fire smartphone, after announcing a $170 million writedown on unsold devices. In 2019, Bezos finalized a divorce from his wife of 25 years. In 2022, Amazon announced it would close down all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores and retail shops. In 2023, Amazon discontinued its Amazon Smile program that let customers direct a portion of their purchases to charity. Earlier this year, Bezos announced he was ending his residency in the state of Washington after nearly 30 years, and moving to Florida. 

“Embrace failures” is part of Amazon’s “Day 1 culture,” along with “high-velocity decision-making.” Implicit in that is recognizing when something is not working and isn’t worth keeping trying to get working, rather than indefinitely pretending that sometime in the future it will start working. 

This is how bad the difference between blue and red states are, that ultra rich ultra liberals don’t want to live in ultra blue states anymore. That old villain reality is kicking in.


On the plus side for the Washington Post CNN is doing much worse:

Throughout the week of June 10, CNN was only able to attract an average of 396,000 viewers throughout the total day.

That is astonishing.

During its dreadful primetime hours, CNN dropped below 500,000 total viewers for the week to a pathetic average of just 477,000.

This is apparently what happens when you decide to abandon straight news and decide to fight for the Nevertrump niche with MSNBC. Nolte sums up the reality nicely:

It’s one thing to cast the truth aside and revel in your Orange Man Bad hatred when the economy is booming…It’s one thing to enjoy the MSNBC and CNN lies and hoaxes aimed at the MAGAtards when the world’s at peace, gas costs $2.35 a gallon, and eggs are 99 cents a dozen…All that CNN and MSNBC insanity and dishonesty is pure entertainment when illegals aren’t flooding your city and your mortgage hasn’t doubled…

Apparently the nevertrump market can’t support both CNN & MSNBC as the niche simply isn’t big enough, darn that nasty reality!

As one person put it:


A while back I covered a hate crime hoax in the next town during the Obama years that went national until it fell apart (no apologies of course and no national coverage of the reverse). Instapundit when writing about the hoaxes notes that the demand for hate crimes exceeds the supply now there is a new documentary about the phenom titled Demand for Hate:

They focus on a hate hoax out of UVA, Hollywood in Toto notes the reaction and the key line of the picture:

The filmmakers tried to interview Zyahna Bryant, the activist who helped rally the Left against Bettinger, UVA officials and University President James Ryan to glean their side of the story.

They all declined. Their silence speaks volumes. So does the lawsuit that gives the film a marginally happy ending.

“Demand for Hate” offers a single quote to sum it all up, courtesy of Jim Bacon from The Jefferson Council.

“There’s not enough racism to go around.”

That’s the reality, it’s also why activists end up going after No U-Turn Signs to keep things rolling.


Reality is also hitting automakers like Ford who with the Biden admin’s pushing spent a lot of money on electric car are finding that like the proverbial dog who doesn’t like the dog food people don’t want electric cars:

Slowing demand for Ford’s F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck is delaying the start of full production at the company’s new West Tennessee factory and pushing vehicle deliveries to dealers until early 2026, according to the state senator representing the community home to the new facility.

State Sen. Page Walley, a Savannah Republican, told the Lookout his understanding is that full production of the truck at the BlueOval City campus in Stanton was pushed back earlier this year by nine months from its initially scheduled full production start date.

Based on “what’s happening, with (Ford’s) read on the economy,” the company might need “a little bit longer runway” before full production takes off, Walley said. 

The real problem is that people who actually try electric cars aren’t all that enthused:

In general, more consumers are willing to consider buying an EV for their next car, with 38 percent of non-EV owners planning on buying a plug-in hybrid or full battery electric vehicle for their next purchase—a slight increase from 37 percent in 2022, according to Automotive News. Still, that dwarfs the number of Americans who will likely buy a combustion engine vehicle for their next car.  

Even more surprising was the number of EV owners who plan on going back to gas for their next car. According to McKinsey, 46 percent of EV drivers in the U.S. said they’re likely to go back to a traditional engine in their next vehicl

In a bad economy the reality of getting from one place to another trumps false green dreams.


It’s been rather funny watching the reaction of the ultra leftist “just stop oil” campaign to the anger over their defacing Stonehenge one of the key historical sites of the world.

They can’t seem to understand why people are so upset at what they did when the world as the claim is at stake:

I did give an explanation to their question

You might recall Rush Limbaugh’s “Al Gore Doomsday Clock” which ran out about 7 years ago Instapundit linked to the last word on this yesterday:

Same grift as a TV preacher, different marks.