Number 5. Breitbart. Chicago teens attach Tesla during street takeover.
I do not think the issue is that I am aging, although that is certainly true. I just think there are lot of people who are truly confused about what they are supposed to believe and how they are supposed to act.
(I am NOT one of them, thank you very much!)
The Tesla electric vehicle is a source of a great deal of this confusion.
In the first place, the Tesla is a car, which is the quintessential expression of American independence. Hop in your ride and blast down the highway. Go where you want, and when, and if you need to be someplace you’ll show up when you show up. It’s the American way.
So the car is good.
But wait! That totally flies in the face of our national consensus, which maybe 5% of us agree with, that the rugged individualistic American spirit of independence is responsible for most of what is wrong with the world.
So the car is a reflection of what is bad.
But wait! This car is electric. The Tesla is single-handedly saving Mother Earth from begin sucked dry by the proliferation of gas guzzlers, such as my Chevy Suburban and my Chevy 3/4-ton pickup truck, my neighbor’s 1-ton chevy pickup, my other neighbor’s 1970s muscle car, his neighbor’s 1-ton Ford pickup, and so on down the block.
So the Tesla is good.
But wait! The Tesla is a creation of Elon Musk, who was not a bad guy, for a South African, until he became the Chief Twit and turned then Twitter into X. (Which I still have a really hard time with… but it’s his company, not mine.) And then he decided to make the new X a place where you don’t have to be woke to be heard.
So Musk is bad, which must mean his Tesla, so good for the environment, must be bad, too.
Confusing!
And so it is no wonder the teenage crowd in Chicago last weekend was perplexed about how to respond when they saw a Tesla in the midst of their street takeover.
A street takeover is apparently one of the things city kids do instead of going to bed at night so they can get up and go to work the next morning.
The street takeover involves very powerful muscle cars with internal combustion engines and big slick tires (there goes that conflict alarm bell again) cutting donuts indiscriminately at intersections, under street lights, in something of a testosterone-and-fossil-fuel fueled duel. (That’s hard to say.)
Smoking tires, racing engines, cars fishtailing wildly, pedestrians leaping for safety… just good, hometown entertainment on a slow night, while uniformed foot patrol police watch benignly from 20 yards away.
And then the Tesla, driven by a guy who probably just wanted to get home — and boy, did HE take a wrong turn! — creeping through their midst.
With all the mental and psycho-spiritual conflicts at play here, the crowd couldn’t decide: Tesla good? Tesla bad? It would take a serious flowchart on a whiteboard to chart it out.
So they just started kicking the car instead. That was easier.
It says something about the mentality of the crowd that they attacked a moving car with bare hands. Not a crowbar or sledgehammer among them. Personally, I wouldn’t take on a moving Tesla with anything short of a 2 1/2-ton wheat truck. A guy could get hurt.
Number 4. The Federalist. VineSight flags social media posts as toxic misinformation.
it’s a good thing we have a foreign high-tech outfit aligning itself with domestic Big Tech platforms to identify misinformation. Otherwise, we would not have a chance to distinguish the truth from a lie.
A Tel Aviv company with offices in New York is VineSight, a company using artificial intelligence to spot misleading information that might mislead someone into believing something that VineSight and Big Tech are pretty sure is a lie.
VineSight’s press release claims their AI platform is being used by Fortune 500 organizations, including social media providers, to identify misinformation, and then label or remove the offending speech. In particular, their technology customers use the VineSight platform to keep a message deemed inappropriate from going viral.
This AI platform is marvelously advanced, blowing right through all-knowing to the level of all-discerning. The following statements have all been flagged as misinformation by the interface.
China emits the most CO2.
Climate advocates are hypocrites.
Electric vehicles repeatedly catch on fire.
EV battery factories need fossil fuels to run.
China is building new coal plants.
Biden’s green policies benefit China.
Allowing immigrants to vote insults Americans.
See what I mean? These are not examples of free speech, or opening statements designed to promote intelligent evidence-based conversation. No, saying these things are subversive, hateful acts of violence.
And while this article does not go further, we all know what actions The State must take when subversive, hateful violence is perpetrated.
Number 3. The Gateway Pundit. Hamas: Foreign hostages were taken by accident; to be returned soon.
Careful readers of The Alligator News Roundup will observe that I have not covered what is one of the biggest stories of the year, that being the Hamas invasion of Israel, with accompanying brutalization, murder and kidnapping.
My tools are mockery and sarcasm, and those simply have no place in this scenario.
However, here is a piece you might find compelling. The 250 hostages being held against their will by Hamas in Gaza range in age from 5 months to 95 years.
A Monday statement from Hamas includes the following:
This is a diverse group under temporary custody. These individuals are our esteemed guests, and our primary goal is to ensure their safety.
We will release individuals when on-ground conditions permit.
We are committed to bring happiness to every Palestinian household in this sacred cause.
You might want to click the link to this article and see the photographs of 42 of the 250 esteemed guests who have now been identified.
These all appear to be young women aged 20-30.
See their pictures, and then ask yourself why they are being held.
I’m moving on to the next article.
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s heart is in the right place, but she is losing out to her handsome poofy-haired colleague in California, who said the same thing except by 2030. And… California won’t allow ICE (internal combustion engine) passenger cars even to be sold in the state then.
Ms. Grisham had better pick up the pace.
Last year, New Mexico government employees drove over 16 million miles. Of those, a measly 36,000 were by EV, and that apparently only by the Governor’s staff car. (That would be a touch over 2 tenths of one percent.)
According to a local energy advocacy group, the state owns many electric vehicles, but state employees — decidedly NOT team players — chose to drive the ICEs instead. One wonders why that would be the case.
You don’t suppose it’s possible that, when a state employee drives a state-owned EV on some important errand (such as cruising slowly past the homes of known gun owners who defied the same governor’s last order telling them to leave their guns behind when they ventured out of doors) and then returns the car to the fleet garage, that he or she would neglect to spend the obligatory two hours to charge it up again before leaving it for the night?
So, in a breath-taking display of solid leadership, we’ll just take their precious little ICE cars away from them. By 2035. Lagging behind Governor Irksome.
Err — Newsom.
Number 1. CNBC. Electric vehicle boom could put major strain on U.S. power grid.
Perhaps Gov. Lujan Grisham could research this a little more before she turns New Mexicans loose with their new EV fleet.
Over the last 10 years, demand for electricity in the U.S. has only increased by 5%. In the next 10 years, it will need to grow by 38%, mostly due to the forecasted (and much ballyhooed) arrival of EVs.
So how will the grid — the distribution system of mostly overhead lines and cables — accommodate that demand?
Well… stay with me here.
First, all that power that must be generated will have to come from somewhere. The most logical source to charge up the batteries for the national ultra-clean EV fleet would be more and bigger conventional power plants, which will require massive increases in the use of fossil fuels in order to eliminate the use of fossil fuels.
That sounds vaguely ridiculous.
Let’s use alternatives instead, such as wind and solar, with propellers and panels operating around the clock, regardless of weather. If we could base this on yet-to-be-invented Perpetual Wind and Dark Sunlight, they might have a chance.
Okay, let’s go with that assumption. (Forget what I said about something sounding ridiculous.)
Now that that problem is solved, you have to move this new electricity through everyone’s neighborhood so they can charge their cars. That means lots and lots of high-voltage electric lines, probably overhead, behind your house.
Doesn’t matter if you don’t want an EV and you keep driving your ‘64 Impala gasser… your neighbor has an EV and he needs the line that runs past your house.
In California, a Public Utility Commission forecast shows that state will require $50 billion to upgrade their electrical network to accommodate the power needs.
So, with the judicious application of new inventions and unlimited capital, we might have a chance to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
Or we could go back to nuclear power, despite the risk of core meltdown. (Ask yourself how many nuclear disasters the U.S. Navy has experienced since the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, was launched in January 1955. If you said something other than zero, you might be incorrect.)
Another way to approach this is that we could challenge our original premise, that fossil fuels are killing the planet. Maybe that one bears a little more clear thinking.
I am reminded here of Genesis 8:22 As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.
Enjoy your weekend!
Curt
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