THERE’S PLENTY OF ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: How Artificial Intelligence and Telematics Will Improve Driving.
January 9, 2025
STRATEGERY:
If I'm following correctly, the British government:
1. Gave up an island it owned for no reason other than woke virtue signaling
2. Realized it needed the military base on that island
3. Is now desperate to buy a lease from the new owners to operate that base, at any price,… https://t.co/gigAyBrhXj— Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (@pegobry_en) January 9, 2025
Britain is a madhouse.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Etekcity Upgraded Smart Scale for Body Weight. #CommissionEarned
YES. Big Pistols vs. Small Pistols: Sure, they’re easier to carry, but they’re also harder to shoot well.
MY P226 Legion RX with the optical sight is a tack driver. But it’s pretty hard to carry.
PRIORITIES:
New: California lawmakers in the Assembly have gaveled into the special legislative session to help the state prepare for legal battles with the incoming Trump administration.
Democrats moved forward with the bill to get $25m to CADOJ—-will have budget hearing Monday.
— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) January 9, 2025
Not even a peek at rebuilding some of the state’s water infrastructure?
BE PREPARED FOR COLD: AstroAI 27″ Snow Brush and Ice Scrapers for Car Windshield. #CommissionEarned
HMM: Why Is Diet Root Beer Up 131% Even Though Aluminum Is Down? “This may count as an ‘old man yells at cloud’ moment, but before the Flu Manchu lockdowns and the resultant supply chain breakage, HEB’s house brand of Diet Root Beer went for $2.25 a 12-pack. Now, here in early 2025, it’s going for $5.20. I calculate that as a 131% inflation rate over five years, considerably above the official 21.9% phony baloney ‘let’s lie for Biden’ rate. So what gives?”
ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE LONG A CHANCE:
You have zero experience being a Native American but were the first tenured Native American at Harvard, give him a chance.
— The Redheaded libertarian (@TRHLofficial) January 9, 2025
Well played.
JONATHAN TURLEY: RIP, Snail Darter: The Species that Shut Down the Tellico Dam May Not Actually Exist.
The controversy began in 1967 when the Tennessee Valley Authority started constructing a dam on the Little Tennessee River, roughly 20 miles outside Knoxville. Environmentalists and locals opposed the project and, in 1973, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee named David Etnier went snorkeling with his students and found a possible solution. He spotted a small fish and called it a “snail darter” because of its movements and eating habits. He reportedly announced “Here’s a little fish that might save your farm.”
Dr. Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College, represented the snail darter before the Supreme Court. He did an excellent job and, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam” to protect the endangered snail darters.
That was then.
The Times now quotes Thomas Near, the curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum who leads a fish biology lab at the university, that “there is, technically, no snail darter.” Worse yet, it was actually just another member of the eastern population of Percina uranidea, or stargazing darters, which is not considered endangered.
Near and his colleagues have published the results in Current Biology.
In other words, years of litigation and millions of dollars were spent on what was a false claim, and the courts accepted the claims hook, line, and sinker.
As David Frum began the chapter titled “Dam Yankees” of his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), “An early flag of the American Revolution displayed a coiled rattlesnake (and the fierce motto ‘Don’t Tread on Me’) to symbolize the country’s fierce determination to rule itself. Two hundred years later, the animal with the best claim to represent the American character was not the rattler but a small freshwater fish: the snail darter…The fish might not have been much to look at, but it had a sure sense of timing.”
SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Elon Musk has ripped the cloak of deceit off one of Britain’s most disgusting scandals.
This may be hard to comprehend, dear reader, but the people of that enlightened land did not protect their daughters. I’m sorry to say they abandoned them to their fate. Police, whose duty it was to look after the most vulnerable, either arrested the girls, dismissed their pleas for help or left them with their tormentors. For that famously kind and decent land had fallen under a strange enchantment, which was called multiculturalism. It said that, no matter how wicked or cruel the men were to the children, you must never speak of it. The dark spell, and what a powerful spell it was (enough to vanquish justice and compassion), caused any who dared to say that Pakistani Muslim men were targeting white girls to become the bad people. Because all cultures are equal, you see, even ones that don’t believe in equality or which agree that girls who aren’t virgins are whores and deserve to be punished.
And those who struggled against the powerful spell that stifled their countrymen were called racist. And to be racist or bigoted or “far-Right” was to be far more hateful than any hatred inflicted on female children, or so the people of the good and fair country were told by their leaders.
And when the monsters swore at the children whom they were raping, saying, “White slag!” “White c—!” – well, that wasn’t at all racist. Because multiculturalism and the BBC say it cannot be so.
A few brave women (Julie, Ann, Maggie, Sarah) who woke from the enchantment and warned young girls were in danger from British Pakistani men were banished and forced to apologise for being “reckless in my choice of words”. Or they lost their seat in the shadow Cabinet.
And the evil – a vast, suppurating evil such as the land had not known for a thousand years – continued to blight that good and fair country. The authorities colluded to make sure the hatred must never speak its name, and the girls carried their lonely torment within them and their rapists got access to the babies they had impregnated them with. (Oh, yes, they did. So strong was the multicultural enchantment it made people surrender the values they had been born to.)
And the monsters were not banished from the good and fair country, not one of them sent back to countries that were neither good nor fair, in case their human rights were breached.
Then, one day, the richest man in the whole wide world came along and broke the dark spell. Elon had read court transcripts telling what those monsters had done to the female children, and he could not believe such unfathomable depravity had taken root in the good and fair country. Because of his great wealth, Elon could not be intimidated into agreeing that thousands of white girls should have been used as a peace offering to placate the gods of multiculturalism. His righteous wrath shamed the cowardly leaders of the land and in their panic they cried “Misinformation!” But the people were having none of it. For they were awake now and they saw what horrors the brutes had been allowed to get away with. As the wicked enchantment lifted, the malevolent myth of multiculturalism was unmasked, the country slowly but surely recovered its senses and demanded the guilty be found and punished, even unto the highest in the land.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Julie Bindel: I was called racist for exposing the grooming gangs… but this atrocity has still not gone away.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Nancy Pelosi’s Stock Portfolio Crushes the S&P 500 by Nearly 200%.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Adam Carolla’s DEI Firefighter Story Goes Viral. “I graduated North Hollywood High with a 1.7 GPA and could not find a job. I walked to a fire station. I was 19 and living in the garage of my family home and my mom was on welfare and food stamps. I said, ‘Can I get a job as a fireman?’ and they said, ‘No, because you’re not black, Hispanic or a woman and we’ll see you in about seven years.’”
Related (From Ed): If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t miss Carolla’s epic rant on the near-term future of southern California:
Epic Adam Carolla rant from a hotel after the LA wildfires forced to evacuate from his home, where he predicts Hollywood leftists will be so frustrated by the rebuild effort that they will not vote Democrat:
"You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. You all… pic.twitter.com/YhNqBnJJR9— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) January 9, 2025
I’m much more doubtful that the fires will transform southern California into a hotbed of Republicanism than Carolla (see also: Californians’ willingness to go along with indefinite Covid madness), but it will fascinating to watch the repercussions of the fires play out. Including, as Duane Patterson speculated, “in the future, what do you think Democrats in Sacramento think of the land opportunities now that everyone’s been burned out? Do you think they’re going to rush in and permit exact rebuilding promptly when there’s all sorts of acreage now available for low-income, high-density housing?”
HOW IT STARTED:
Today it is precisely the most rational, intellectual, secularized, modernized, updated, relevant religions—all the brave, forward-looking Ethical Culture, Unitarian, and Swedenborgian movements of only yesterday—that are finished, gasping, breathing their last. What the Urban Young People want from religion is a little Hallelujah! … and talking in tongues! … Praise God! Precisely that! In the most prestigious divinity schools today, Catholic. Presbyterian, and Episcopal, the avant-garde movement, the leading edge, is “charismatic Christianity” … featuring talking in tongues, ululation, visions, holy rolling, and other nonrational, even antirational, practices. Some of the most respectable old-line Protestant congregations, in the most placid suburban settings, have begun to split into the Charismatics and the Easter Christians (“All they care about is being seen in church on Easter”). The Easter Christians still usually control the main Sunday-morning service—but the Charismatics take over on Sunday evening and do the holy roll.
This curious development has breathed new life into the existing Fundamentalists, theosophists, and older salvation seekers of all sorts. Ten years ago, if anyone of wealth, power, or renown had publicly “announced for Christ,” people would have looked at him as if his nose had been eaten away by weevils. Today it happens regularly … Harold Hughes resigns from the U.S. Senate to become an evangelist … Jim Irwin, the astronaut, teams up with a Baptist evangelist in an organization called High Flight … singers like Pat Boone and Anita Bryant announce for Jesus … Charles Colson, the former hardballer of the Nixon administration, announces for Jesus, and the man who is likely to be the next president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, announces for Jesus. Oh Jesus People.
—Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York magazine, August 23rd, 1976.
How it’s ending:
UPDATE: Audio and video of Brooks and Yearwood performing “Imagine” is now available for those brave enough to listen.
TIME FOR ZUCK TO PUT HIS BUCKS WHERE HIS MOUTH IS: Pro-Life Accounts Demand Meta Lift Suspensions After Free Speech Promises.
Several pro-life Facebook users are demanding their accounts be restored after Meta promised this week to support free speech on its platform.
In a letter obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire, the legal counsel for LifeNews and its founder Steven Ertelt, as well as pro-life mother Abby Covington, requested Meta “immediately” restore their disabled accounts.
“If Meta is truly committed to the free-speech principles that it recently announced, it will act swiftly to reinstate Mr. Ertelt’s, LifeNews’s, and Mrs. Covington’s accounts,” reads the letter from their legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
Stay tuned.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: So I Just Discovered Another way California Sucks.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Drinking coffee in the morning cuts risk of premature death, study indicates.
WINNING:
🚨BREAKING: Massive Title 9 victory:
Virginia's suit against the Biden Administration (together w. 5 other states) has resulted in suspension of illegal Title IX rule across the country. This is the 1st clear nationwide injunction against a re-write of decades-old civil rights… pic.twitter.com/nUr1DiJ4N4
— Sarah Parshall Perry (@SarahPPerry) January 9, 2025
More to come…
BIDEN’S CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST: Consumer Credit Card Debt Unexpectedly Plummets At Rate Signaling Deep Recession.
We have repeatedly warned that with their savings – and especially “emergency covid savings” – gone or nearly gone, Biden admin savings data manipulation notwithstanding… US consumers had no choice but to max out their credit cards in order to “extend and pretend” their moment of purchasing greatness, or as we called one month ago, their last hurrah (see In “Last Hurrah”, Credit Card Debt Explodes Higher Despite Record High APRs As Savings Rate Craters), a hurrah that would last very briefly as it was only a matter of months if not weeks before said cards were denied.
Well, it appears that said denial hit much sooner than expected, and according to the Fed’s latest consumer credit data, in November consumer credit across US households tumbled by $7.5 billion to $5.102 trillion, a 1.8% annual rate of contraction and usually something one only sees in the middle of recessions (or worse).
What is remarkable is that as shown on the chart above, while non-revolving debt (i.e. student and auto loans) rose modestly, it was revolving, or credit card debt, that cratered by a whopping $13.8 billion the biggest drop since the covid crash shut down the economy and the prospect of future income for millions of Americans (hence the collapse in spending). In fact, it is safe to say that any and every time revolving credit has collapsed this much, the US was on the cusp of, if not already in a recession.
We’ve been in a jobs recession for years, something the Biden cabal papered over with massive federal spending and data manipulation.
But even multitrillion-dollar deficits and a partisan bureaucracy can paper over only so much.
DISPATCHES FROM THE REICHSTAG:
Former President Barack Obama casually and amiably chats with Adolf Hitler as the latter is set to assume power in 11 days, end American democracy, and impose a white nationalist dictatorship. https://t.co/4tbj46yVk8
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 9, 2025
(Note previous Hitler left of Obama.)
As Byron York asks, “Where did all the fascism talk go?”
UPDATE: Previous Hitler playfully taps God and/or the second coming of FDR on the belly:
The belly tap is remarkable pic.twitter.com/bxj3wEETh2
— Reese Gorman (@reesejgorman) January 9, 2025
HA-HA, NO: Did the Crusades Spoil ‘Five Centuries of Peaceful Coexistence’ With Islam?
This is an excellent podcast from Raymond Ibrahim.