“More” EU?

Well now, looks like that Zero Emissions or whatever is getting a little pushback in, of all places, Europe:

Farmers across Europe are rising up against the EU, with angry agricultural workers in Spain being the latest who are set to join the growing tractor protest movement.

By using their heavy machinery to block roads in and around major capitals on the continent, farmers in Germany, France and other EU nations have expressed their anger over rising costs, EU environmental policies and cheap food imports which they say are leading to a deterioration in working and living conditions.

…as Jeremy Clarkson discovered on the TV show about his farm in Britishland (which, by the way, has inspired his European counterparts).  Then this:

But as farmers in France, Belgium and Italy staged protests on Monday and Tuesday, and as Spain’s three main agriculture unions said they would soon join them, French president Emmanuel Macron risked inciting further fury by brazenly telling the disgruntled growers: ‘You need more Europe, not less.’

Just another globalist woke asshole who needs to be tossed out on his ear (cf. Fidel Trudeau, FJ Biden, etc.).

In the meantime, I’m watching the whole thing unfold…

See Ya

Looks as though Sports Illustrated has decided to cut the fat:

No, not that fat.  This fat:

The owner of Sports Illustrated has ended the employment of the publication’s entire staff, leaving the very existence of the nearly 70-year-old magazine in doubt.

Then follows a while bunch of publishing industry gobbledegook (good luck trying to understand this nonsense — it reads like the article’s author didn’t understand it either):

The licensing group that owns the sports mag has terminated its agreement with The Arena Group to continue publishing the magazine three weeks after Arena missed a $2.8 million payment, a deficit that breached the magazine’s licensing deal, according to Front Office Sports.

Authentic bought SI out from Meredith in 2019 for $10 million. If it continues publishing, the magazine will turn 70 years old this August.

An email announcing the decision says in part, “We were notified by Authentic Brands Group (ABG) that the license under which the Arena Group operates the Sports Illustrated (SI) brand and SI-related properties had been officially revoked by ABG.”

Got all that?  There will be a test.  Not that it matters, because here’s the crux of it:

“As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.”

Crap magazine, terrible writing, stupid stories, and let’s not forget the idiotic decision to put fatties in the Swimsuit Issue instead of hotties like oh, Leryn Franco.  Ergo, from this:

…to this:

“Oh noes… why did people stop buying our magazine?  They must all be Christianist Trumpists!”  or some such twaddle.

SI  never recovered from the loss of writers like Pete King, Frank DeFord and Rick Telander, to name just some.  And the arrival of Internet reportage shot them in the gut, just as what happened to many print magazines in other industries.

Won’t be missed.  Mediocrity and crap hardly ever is.

Immaculate Conception?

For those who scoff at the concept of “immaculate conception”, please explain this little situation:

A party-loving student had no idea she was pregnant, believing she had simply ‘become a bit fat’ at university by drinking ‘almost every night’ – until she suddenly gave birth.

Niamh Hearn’s life turned upside down in August 2022 when the then 20-year-old was admitted to hospital with suspected appendicitis – and left hospital with a newborn baby.

The now 21-year-old, who lives in York, admitted to binge drinking and smoking throughout her pregnancy — attending a festival and a pub crawl all while unknowingly pregnant with her son.

So far, so good;  until you see the pics of said totty.  (warning:  extreme foulness in link, you have been warned)

I know that some (okay, lots of) guys will make the old flesh insertion into pretty much anything, especially after a few shots of tequila etc.

But seriously?

The only good thing is that Mummy Dearest is unlikely to go after child support, because she won’t be able to narrow the field, so to speak — but if she does, and Daddy is exposed, his punishment will be a lot more than financial.

Yikes.

Carnies and Hucksters

Longtime Reader GT3ted sent me an email of the latest Sotheby’s auction catalog — the topic of this coming Saturday’s post, by the way — and when I commented that the prices seemed unusually-astronomical, even by Sotheby’s standards, he replied:

Yes, I thought the suggested bid ranges were high as well, But remember these are the the typical auction company’s “Projected” bid ranges which are often optimistic. And Sotheby’s does seem to have a better-than-usual lineup this year. The whole point of the catalog is to bring in as many Big Dollar buyers as possible since they need multiple buyers to run up the prices. Or at least the appearance of multiple bidders.

The Winter Arizona / Scottsdale Hype is strong thanks to “Bidenomics” / a soaring stock market and nervous investors looking for a place to park some equity before the possible collapse of the more traditional equities market place.

The world of high-end auctions is still just smoke and mirrors run by used car salesmen and ex-carnies all looking for the next greater fool, just at a much higher level.

It’s a very cogent statement.  But even among them what has more money than common sense, this (for example) seems egregiously overpriced:

Now let it be known that I loves me some 70s-era Bronco, but I would humbly suggest that even a handbuilt-from-the-ground-up item such as this isn’t worth anything like two hundred big ones.

It’s not an original — it’s a Kincer creation — and there’s another outfit that handmakes “classic” Toyota FJ45s, at similar nosebleed prices, and still another that does likewise with 1970s-era Mercedes G-wagens.  While I understand that hand-built cars involve an astonishing amount of labor — in some cases, hundreds of hours — I would suggest that it’s a fool’s gambit to try to recoup (and even profit from) the job.  As any amateur restorer will tell you, one never recoups the cost of restoration, and I just can’t see that restoring old cars as a production enterprise makes it worth the work and expense…

…unless, of course, the target market is not the brand’s loyal devotees but (as Ted puts it) Big-Dollar Buyers (“whales”, as the casino industry derisively calls them), for whom the car is not an object of desire but an investment.

And all investments, as any fule kno, carry risk.

Caveat emptor imprudens.

All that said, there are some juicy cars indeed in the Sotheby’s catalogue, but you’ll have to wait until Saturday to see them.  Just ignore the prices, and drool.

Cold Reality

In case any of my Readers didn’t get the memo, we just had one of those cold snaps down here in north Texas, where we get a little Arctic air sent down from our neighbors up north.  For three days, daytime high temperatures never went above freezing (32°F Murkin, 0°C for those of the Napoleonic Persuasion), with wind chills (once again, courtesy of the Canuckis) dropping the “felt” temperatures by another ten or so degrees.  Night-time temps?  You don’t wanna know.

I know, I know:  “That’s Minnesota from November through May” etc. etc.  I used to live in Chicago, remember, where I knew all about cold weather.

The difference is that up north, they know how to handle such temperatures, whereas we don’t.  Builders, for all sorts of economic reasons, seldom install double-glazed windows, even for cooling the searing summer temperatures.  (I remember a window guy asking me why I wanted double glazing on the northerly and easterly sides of the house, “cause there ain’t much call for ’em round here”.)  Insulation — wall, roof and so on:  wouldn’t last the first two weeks in Chicago without somebody dying of cold, but it’s perfectly acceptable down here.

All of which is fine and good, until the deadweight of Gummint gets involved.  Everyone knows of the current feelgood fad of Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©, whereby eeeevil power sources such as oil and natgas have to be Done Away With, replaced by the usual unicorn-fueled farts of solar- and wind power generation, and Texas has lamentably not been spared this bollocks.  Indeed, the laughably-named ERCOT institution has failed, every single year, to actually fulfill their remit and guarantee that the electricity supply would remain constant throughout the past decade, and has actually had the temerity to beg Texans to be sparing of their electricity use during summer where (in case nobody has noticed) things get fucking hot outside and in winter (when we get annual visits from the Polar Express or Blue Norther) to varying degrees of severity and duration.

And I shouldn’t have to tell anyone that Texas is blessed with huge energy reserves — oil, natural gas and coal (sadly, very dirty-burning coal, but better than nothing).

We didn’t experience an electricity outage this time — more, I suspect, by luck than by planning and calculation — but honestly, it gets on my nerves that every winter I have to make sure that I can survive a cold spell by laying in supplies of whatever’s necessary to prevent dying of cold.  And I bet there are a whole bunch of fellow Texans who feel the same, or more strongly.

It’s not like this is some unknown, out-of-left-field occurrence, either, because examples of government idiocy and inadequacy abound, such as with our Neighbors To The North:

Ryan Maue is a US weather and climate guy.  From early last week he was forecasting the incoming polar vortex would bring abysmal cold to virtually all of North America.  Unlike climate activists, he’s not an alarmist except when as he jokingly put it, the real ‘climate emergency’ that would unfold would be temperature in the minus 40s — which is the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit — and colder!

That’s exactly what happened in Alberta on January 12, 2024. The polar vortex moved in and settled over most of the prairies and Northern BC and temperatures dropped like a stone. Maue checked in on “our Canadian friends” in Edmonton, reporting on Jan. 12th at 10:30 reporting: “Bit of a struggle today with the temperature. Currently -48°F (-44 C) with a wind chill of -67°F (-55C).”

That’s the bleak reality.  Here’s how it gets even worse:

January 12, 2024, is the day decarbonization died in Alberta.

People with EVs were caught out as the cars couldn’t hold a charge and could only get half the range, as Global News reported.

As Brian Zinchuk of Pipeline Online reported, wind farms in Alberta quietly all went to sleep as temperatures hit minus 30C the night before. Why?  Because in extremely cold weather, infrastructure like wind turbines with exposed blades and internal mechanics way up high face the risk of embrittlement and… shattering. Even though there was some wind, the risk was too great to continue operations, meaning that almost all of Alberta 4481 MW of wind power became useless. About that same time, the sun went down. Meaning that all of Alberta’s 1650 MW of solar power vanished for the night.

Meanwhile, the remaining coal-fired power plants, which have 820 MW maximum capability, have been running flat-out, presently at 817 MW as I write this at 12:14 on Saturday January 13, 2024 — another frosty day in polar vortex deep freeze, with temperatures across the province ranging from minus 40 to minus 50 degrees Celsius.

Last night, a grid alert was posted by the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), meaning the system was at capacity. 

And the reason for the crisis?

The magical thinking of climate activists has been to replace fossil-fueled electrical power generation along with fossil-fueled cars and trucks with renewables and batteries instead, including EV vehicles. Furthermore the climate activists also want to decarbonize home heating, by switching from natural gas to electrical heating or heat pumps.

I should point out that, without exception, these so-called “climate activists” don’t have to live with the consequences of their fairytale nostrums.  They live in areas where such catastrophes are unlikely, and in economic conditions which insulate them [sic]  from any unpleasant outcomes.

The whole house of cards that is climate alarmism is falling — not fast enough, mind you, but falling nevertheless — and the only question remaining is how best we can prod Gummint into shit-canning the whole experiment.  (I’d suggest random hangings, but no doubt someone will have a problem with this.)

When even the Germans are starting to wake up

In the meantime, I’m bracing for the next cold snap.  You know, the way Third World countries’ populations have to do when faced with weather extremes.

It’s just unfortunate that I happen to live in a (once-) First World nation.


Incidentally, I’m not the only Texan who feels this way: