Here’s the Alligator News Roundup for Friday June 30, 2023.
Number 8. Not the Bee. We have reached peak “not the bee”. This right here isn’t satire.
Nothing could be more appropriate to kick off our honest discussion of academic studies performed honestly than this discussion of an academic report on honest academic studies that was performed dishonestly. Try to follow me, here, into this web of lies. Professor Francesca Gino, behavioral scientist at the prestigious Harvard Business School, has been placed on leave pending the outcome of a fraud investigation related to her allegedly dishonest study of – wait for it – honest behavior.
The professor, author of 135 published articles since 2007, and named one of the Top 40 Business Professors under 40, has been accused of falsifying study data in at least four papers she co-authored. Her extensive research involved tests of subjects to determine patterns of cheating related to tax evasion and game playing. So at least the professor’s cheating was on-topic.
The apparently fabricated results of her research allegedly cheated her co-authors out of an honest report on the science of dishonesty. Which all may make a certain twisted sense, if you live in that world.
You have probably seen other reports of electric vehicles spontaneously combusting through a malfunction of the massive lithium batteries they carry. When one of these cars catches fire, it is virtually impossible to extinguish without massive amounts of water. In several cases, an EV fire is apparently put out, only to burst into flames again as something inside continues to smolder.
When lithium components catch fire, they don’t just burn; they explode into flames. Consider the possibilities for the EV bicycle. Yikes.
Lithium exploding into fire was the case at a Livent Corporation plant in Bessemer City, North Carolina, this week. That facility manufactures lithium ingots used in the production of batteries, and the conflagration was so great, there is juicy video of idle firefighters standing at a distance, perhaps reduced to muttering “burn baby burn.” Conveniently, the adjacent highway was closed to traffic due to the blaze, allowing passers-by to get great pics which they can now post on social media, and which can be used in subsequent IRS investigations targeting EV-deniers.
No, we haven’t seen the term “EV-denier” yet, but given our direction with everything else, I suspect we’re on the cusp, and I’m pretty sure it will carry federal penalties.
In the latest effort to save us from ourselves, or at least to signal that we are moral enough to desire to save us from ourselves without actually saving anyone at all, The New York City Department of Environmental Protection and Racketeering Shakedown issued another in a long string of “common-sense” rules meticulously, thoughtfully and thoroughly crafted by unnamed environmental justice activists. The new rules require professional engineering reviews of mom-and-pop pizza parlors to determine the degree of lethality of the smoke from their kitchens.
Actually, no one really cares whether the smoke, or the pizza, is lethal or not. The point is to require each restaurant with an oven more than 7 years old to install a $20,000 air filtration system to reduce carbon emissions by 75%. If a professional engineer, hired at the restaurant’s expense, determines that installing the new filtration system is not feasible given the layout of their physical premises, then a reduction of 25% will somehow be acceptable. Under these quite stringent guidelines, a simple statement from the engineer explaining why the filter cannot be installed at all, and no carbon emissions will be reduced at all, will also satisfy the new rule to reduce carbon emissions by 75%.
Say what??? There’s no opportunity for corruption there!
With 1,600 pizza restaurants in the five boroughs, it is estimated that only 100 will require such air filtration upgrades. The arithmetic escapes me, but I wonder how much carbon reduction is likely in a city of 9 million residents and 5 million cars when you filter the air from only 100 pizza ovens.
Someone does not have enough to do there in New York.
Number 5. Motor Biscuit dot com. Chevrolet just killed the $40,000 Silverado electric truck.
For those of you saving up to join the EV revolution by getting that sexy new Chevy Silverado half-ton pickup, you might need a larger piggy bank. The Work Truck, or WT, as it is attractively and cleverly known, had been advertised at a measly $40,000. The possibility that it had a cruising range of less than 6 miles and a battery life of about 8 days might not have given you pause, but now the model 3WT has been replaced in the Chevy lineup by the model 4WT, and the price tweaked slightly, to $79,800, an increase, of, give me a second, 99.5%.
The EPA has not yet certified the 3WT and so it is not being made and may never be, so the good news is that you cannot actually order one anyway.
And now, from the sane half of the country, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach announced that a new law, passed by veto-proof majorities in both houses of the Kansas legislature, requires that government documents legally modified to express that the possessor’s gender identity is different from his or her actual biologically identified sex at birth, must be changed back, and thus bring the gender claim back into alignment with, say, the reality of human pro-creation.
Democrat Governor Laura Kelly, unable to veto given the overwhelming margin, has not yet announced whether she will require her administrative officers to actually comply with the new law. One might think there should be no question whether the chief executive responsible to legally execute the laws legally passed by the legal legislature will carry out those duties, but you must understand there are deep emotions and heartfelt issues of “who am I” sorts of questions at stake here. Which may take precedence over mere Kansas Statute.
At least 8 other states have adopted similar laws this year, but the Kansas version covers a broader array of places where the biological sex identification is applicable, such as locker rooms, prisons, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers. If I were the one to have to verify the sex of a person requesting access to any on that list, I would frankly much rather simply check the government-issued ID than check anything else.
It’s a good step toward biological sanity. So let the lawsuits begin!
Not to be outdone by east- and west-coast rival universities who always seem to attract all the cool kids, TCU has introduced “The Queer Art of Drag” to their richly thoughtful and deeply philosophical Women & Gender Studies curriculum, helping prepare students for a productive adult life of cross-dressing, heavy makeup, elaborate wardrobing, grooming of minors and quite probably pedophilic predation. Which still carries a serious legal penalty in every state.
Along with the course requirement to produce and perform a solo drag performance before an audience of on-lookers who hopefully do not know their mothers, students are expected to internalize such uplifting and confidence-building readings as “The gender binary is a tool of white supremacy,” and “How drag villains became the far right’s ultimate villains.” These and other self-victimizing literature and media are sure to meet the goal of the course to “abandon the sterile and diagnostic attitudes toward gender that characterize dominant cultural logics.”
Those “dominant cultural logics” would be the patriarchal and useless values that made a world so prosperous, unenslaved, healthy, well-fed and safe that unscientific and morally odious opinions can be celebrated at major American state-funded universities without fear of arrest and persecution by the Brownshirts. Oh wait, the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany were eradicated by, oh yes, I forgot, citizen-soldiers of democratically elected countries dominated by those very same reprehensible dominant cultural logics now under attack.
If this is confusing, it’s not the fault of the political right. They didn’t start it.
Number 2. Washington Examiner. Michigan can now censor you if you hurt someone’s feelings.
In a show of bold leadership and courageous determination to defend the indefensible, the Democrat-dominated Michigan State House passed HB 4474, which identifies “feeling threatened” as a reason to have an offender thrown in the clink.
The bill defines “intimidation” as “willful conduct that would cause an individual to feel frightened or threatened.” Such as presumably when a Michigan man holds a door open for a Michigan woman at a Michigan convenience store, and she stares soulfully into his heart of hearts and feels that he is not as pure as, say, Jesus, and then she can get a lawyer to sue his aggressive bitter misogynist carcass and put him in a Michigan prison for up to 5 years. Where because of that experience, he will quite possibly turn into an aggressive bitter misogynist.
“Because it’s all about hate speech,” said a supporter of the bill who declined to be interviewed on camera because of, quote, “all those creepy men in business suits with briefcases and nice cars who are married to suburban women and have kids and go to church, and who knows what they’re really thinking!” unquote. When queried as to the relationship between objective hate speech and subjective feelings of a physical threat, she abruptly called her lawyer, who was on speed dial, and then photographed the reporter for her subsequent police report.
Macabre doesn’t exactly capture the unfortunate timing of listing a help wanted ad for a deep-sea pilot by OceanGate Expeditions, the company owning and operating the Titan submarine, while that very vessel and its occupants were in the process of being crushed to death by excessive pressure 12,000 feet below sea level.
The job description doesn’t sound all that bad. The “Submersible Pilot/Marine Technician” responsibilities include managing and operating a fleet of manned submarines and support vessels. The company is looking for a committed and competent individual with strong mechanical and interpersonal skills who can work on sensitive marine equipment.
Such as, for example, a $49 game controller running a submarine with a second-hand carbon fiber hull made from discontinued materials offered at a discounted price by Boeing, because the carbon fiber originally intended for airframe construction had exceeded its sell-by date.
Perhaps OceanGate will accept new applications to fill recent vacancies not only in the pilot ranks but also in the chief executive office.
And that’s the Alligator News Roundup for this week. See our website at alligatorpublishing dot com. Don’t miss the merch in the Store tab!
Go to church this weekend! Read your Bible! And pray that God, in His mercy, might hold back His wrath for yet one more season!
Curt
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