Good ol’ Mississippi. As we always say of it, somebody’s gotta come in last.
The Mississippi Senate has passed a bill that will stop electric car companies from opening their own dealerships in the state, ensuring that the state famous for being last place in many rankings of all 50 states remains there… [W]hen confronted with a rapidly growing industry – which is currently eyeing the South for billions in investment with new battery and car factories, bringing long-term job prospects and prosperity along with them – Mississippi looked at their neighbors, and at their own last-place rank in everything, and said: “Nah, we’re good here.”…
[Mississippi also imposes] an annual $150 tax on electric vehicles, far above the amount of taxation that a hypothetical similarly efficient gas vehicle would have to pay. This charge is approximately equivalent to the amount of gas taxes a similarly efficient gas vehicle would pay if it drove 100,000 miles in a year. Meanwhile, gas vehicles benefit from tens of thousands of dollars of incentives over their lifetime, in terms of ignored health and environmental costs of pollution, which harm the health of Mississippians and everyone else in the world.
Pity this simple man who thinks his smart, hardworking, working class son getting admitted to one of the two or three best undergraduate institutions in the world is something to be proud of. His bitter son has endlessly tried taking the wind out of that parental sail, instructing him in Yale’s “hostility to the Almighty and disparagement of America.”
Yea, woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.
But after all these years, Dad still won’t listen, still fails to perceive a Yale education as pure “indoctrination,” a re-education camp in hate America first. His son pats himself on the back for having withstood undergrad andgrad school at Yale with his love of country intact!
Though UD wonders about the sort of masochistic orientation that would not only stay in a cesspool for four years (had he not yet heard of transferring?), but extend the agony by staying there for law school.
UD knows it’s none of her business, but did Ron also have his girlfriends tie him down and beat him with a copy of Soul on Ice?
The mystery of the awful 2021 Tesla crash, about which I wrote here, has been solved.
A final report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found that a 2021 fiery crash that killed two people in a Tesla was a result of the driver speeding and being intoxicated… NTSB’s investigation determined the probable cause of the crash was “the driver’s excessive speed and failure to control his car, due to impairment from alcohol intoxication in combination with the effects of two sedating antihistamines, resulting in a roadway departure, tree impact, and post-crash fire.”
You can take the Texas good ol’ boy out of twentieth century car technology, but you can’t take him out of revving the engine plus polypharmacy.
And by the way – I don’t think all abortion providers are Planned Parenthood affiliated, are they? I think a better name for this denomination would be Church at the Abortion.
If [John] Eastman is ultimately disbarred, it would be a sudden end to an ignominious legal career. He is not very good at reading the Constitution or the law. In 2020, well before he began plotting to overturn that year’s election, he published a widely derided op-ed in Newsweek suggesting that vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris might be ineligible for that office because she was supposedly not a U.S. citizen at birth. You do not need to be a former Clarence Thomas clerk or a former Chapman University law professor, as Eastman is, to Google “Kamala Harris birthplace” and read “Oakland, California,” thus making her a natural-born citizen.
Eastman then suggested, however, that birthright citizenship itself might not be constitutional, a theory that characterizes much of his approach to the law during the 2020 election. The answer to any legal question is whatever John Eastman wants it to be, and if someone as misinformed as, say, the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees, they are also wrong and should correct themselves accordingly. This approach led him to conclude in an infamous set of memos after Election Day in 2020 that the Twelfth Amendment allows the vice president to throw out individual states’ electoral votes at his discretion and personally declare a winner. The point here is not to be right or correct—fortunately for Eastman, because he was neither—but to give a legalistic guise to a coup attempt.
Royalty is ridiculous – this we all, including royals, know. Glued to their gowns the gapers may be, but the Disnoid trashiness of the spectacle in its modern pointless form is the main thing, especially after the death of Elizabeth, the only royal who seemed to mean something (but what?). The old kings (Juan Carlos, Gustaf of Sweden) are the moral degenerates you’d expect the idle meaningless rich to be ; younger kings (Charles, Felipe) are visibly embarrassed/annoyed by the whole enterprise. They want to mean something, but the whole point of royalty is that they are never allowed to.
The least unpleasant place to be in this dead living world is very safely distant from the throne itself. Baby Edward is clearly the happiest of the Windsors; when he ventures out on his few vague royal thingies no one knows who he is, and this lack of crowd and media interest allows him to pursue a modest and contented private life without, for instance, worrying hysterically about the physical safety of his children every moment they are on display in a world of violent crazies targeting royals just because. Remember the HUGE fuss Prince Harry recently made about royal security for his lot. He was right to fuss. Royals are serious targets – from the media (that’s how Harry lost his mother) as much as from crazed individuals with guns and knives. His grandmother was attacked while on horseback during a ceremonial function; a berserk man got into her bedroom. Etc.
The royal world’s most unpleasant place to be features in the title of the destined to be much-read SPARE by Harry.
You can see the problem currently in three royal houses: England, Denmark, and Norway. Harry claims that at his birth his father washed his hands of the insultingly stupid Diana, remarking that “my work here [shtupping Diana enough to produce an heir and a spare] is done.” This, and the internationally broadcast death of one’s mother in a traffic tunnel, cannot be a solid foundation for a happy life. Harry has suffered bitterness, resentment, and mental instability for years, and it’s not his fault that the strong-willed, highly intelligent, and absolutely non-royal woman who has stabilized him repels his royal family. If he can come to terms with having very little relationship with that family, he will continue to generate his own family, friends, and meaningful projects stateside.
The spare in Denmark is super-pissed because his mother the queen, in a gesture lots of other contemporary royal houses are also making, has stripped his four children of prince and princess titles, reducing them to the risibly low count/countess. The gesture acknowledges the pointless expensive absurdity of modern royal houses, and seeks to make them much smaller objects of republican discontent. Prince Joachim is taller, smarter, and more articulate than the crown prince, clearly believes he himself should be king on his mother’s death, and has not at all hidden his rage at his mother’s swipe at his kids. He’s moving his family to (where else) America, and seems disinclined to look back.
Norway is the most … baroque example of surreality among the surviving royal houses of Europe. The rightful heir to that throne, if you don’t count her lack of a penis, is Martha Louise, the elder of the king’s two children. Her brother seems a presentable, somewhat full of himself, king to be; but you can’t blame Martha for being a little annoyed about how things worked out. She too lives in the United States, with her New Age Shaman husband to be. Her failure to be lifted up to the throne of Norway has meant the freedom to pursue a large set of incredibly stupid beliefs and rituals in Los Angeles.
A tumultuous to-do rages at Leiden University over a painting depicting six male former trustees huddled together smoking cigars. A few weeks ago, one wag – a professor attending a meeting in the faculty conference room where the whimsical, perhaps somewhat annoying, portrait hangs – suddenly got up and turned it around on the wall. Everyone in the room had a good laugh … and … cut!
But … no cigar. Anti-cancel-culturists called the joke a vicious gesture, while anti-puffing-patriarch forces said hey good idea bury the fuckers.
And so it as Kurt Vonnegut put it goes.
The president of the university (see my headline) decided the whole thing was a fine community-discussion opportunity plus let’s put it in context.
UD has a suggestion about the latter, which is why not hang a counterfactual in the same room depicting abstemious female trustees in a quilting circle.
‘A former Harvard admissions officer told a federal jury on Friday that the school’s ex-fencing coach, Peter Brand, “made the difference” in the admissions outcomes of a wealthy Maryland businessman’s two sons.
Brand, who was fired by Harvard in 2019, is facing trial alongside telecommunications executive Jie “Jack” Zhao for allegedly accepting more than $1.5 million in bribes to get Zhao’s sons into Harvard College as fencing recruits.
Prosecutors say Brand accepted an array of kickbacks from Zhao in exchange for getting his sons into Harvard. As part of the alleged scheme, Zhao purchased Brand’s home at a premium, made college tuition payments for Brand’s son, and covered the cost of Brand’s new sports car…
Jurors … heard on Friday from a Needham town employee who raised alarm when Zhao purchased Brand’s 1,364-square-foot home for almost twice its assessed value.
Chip Davis, the city’s former chief assessor, said the sale price was “very surprising.”
“Even if there’s a 5-10 percent change” between the assessed price and the sale price, “we go and inspect,” he said. “This was dramatically higher than that.”
After the sale, Davis said, he knocked on the door of Brand’s home for an in-person inspection. He found that the house’s condition suggested its value was “pretty close” to the 2015 assessed value of $549,300 — rather than the sale price of $989,500…
In his May 2016 notes, Davis was perplexed by the sale price, according to an exhibit shown to jurors Friday.
“Sold to buyer from Virginia for 990k??? Place is vintage 1960s in bad shape???” Davis wrote. “Makes no sense.”
In fall 2017, Zhao sold the home for $665,000, taking a 32 percent loss on the transaction. Davis returned for another visit triggered by the sale price. “Makes no sense,” he wrote again in his notes…
Zhao’s attorney suggested Zhao may not have known how to assess the house’s worth and noted property values in Needham change year to year.’
