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And Speaking Of Commies…
I see that the strike at GM has ended:
Negotiations between General Motors and the United Auto Workers reached a tentative contract deal on Wednesday that could end a month-long strike that brought the company’s US factories to a standstill.
Good. Now they can go back to making mostly crappy cars* that few people want to buy.
Driven up by the longest economic expansion in American history, auto sales appear to have peaked and are now heading in the other direction.
I would be curious to see how the auto sales numbers break down between new and used cars. Also, between cars and trucks/SUVs. Anyone have any ideas or info on this?
But here’s an interesting statement as to perhaps a good reason why GM is tanking:
GM and other car makers are also struggling to make the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles.
…which very few people want to buy. Nothing like a sinking company investing in products that people either don’t want, don’t need or hate the thought of.
Maybe they should trash all their current car designs and go into the retro/mod business:
Hell, they probably would; except that, knowing GM, they’d make them electric-only and ergo doomed.
* Except for maybe some Cadillac models and the Corvette. Note that I’m specifically excluding GM trucks, which are generally quite good, from the above comments.
Escalation
Oh, this is nice.
“Fair warning. Several community organizations are planning to shut down your showing of the Jordan Peterson propaganda film. While many of us aren’t Christian and some even flat-out condemn the religion, we do not want any harm to come to your place of worship or those within. However, we cannot allow fascism to continue to rise and will not tolerate its presence in our city, whether it is on the streets or on the waterfront or in a church. Read some history books, read about eugenics, read about sex and gender and then compare it to Peterson. Pray on it if you must. Do the right thing. As much as we joke about it, we really don’t want to have to bring out the guillotine to fix society.”
Way I see it, it’s a little difficult to guillotine people when they’re all holding loaded AK-47 rifles. But hey, whatever floats their delusional boat.
Still, if these pricks can label Jordan Peterson — who must be one of the gentlest souls on the planet — as a Nazi, you really have to ask yourself who, in fact, should be lining up for decapitation.
Target Practice
The Forgotten Communist Traitor
…forgotten, that is, except by people like this guy. And me. But along the way, in reading about this bastard, we see the following:
Leftism in America isn’t really a political commitment, though of course the left takes and supports a recognizable range of political positions. Leftism is, first and foremost, a fashion accessory that indicates a certain type of social status, similar to a Gucci handbag or a Rolex watch. It is a way to define oneself, and proclaim one’s solidarity with a self-conscious elite, and one’s social superiority to a hated group of outsiders. In America, the higher one rises in position, wealth, power, and status, the more leftward one’s political commitments move. This is counterintuitive at first glance, but it is nevertheless true. All their rhetorical arm-pumping about equality, revolution, income-redistribution, and hatred of Wall Street notwithstanding, left- liberals are primarily the representatives of the ruling class in America. They are not an absolutely dominant ruling class, but that is not for want of trying. They very strongly believe that they have the right and duty to govern all the rest of us.
More importantly:
The defense [of Hiss by the Left] is perfectly understandable if we read it as a claim to aristocratic privilege: Hiss is a member of the governing elite; by definition he can do no wrong! This is the same claim made by any mandarin class, whether the Prussian Junkers in Wilhelmine Germany, the landed gentry in Victorian England, the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union, or the upper-level managerial class in American corporate life today. People in such aristocracies sincerely feel that they have an inherent right to rule, and cannot be brought to book; they are a protected class immune from prosecution.
What happened in the Alger Hiss case was really important per se. But what it reveals about the Left — then and now — is more important still. Read the whole thing. (It’s quite long, but if you read nothing else today…)
Marxist Economics
From POTUS-wannabe Pocahantas comes this policy proposal:
Democrat presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren wants to use federal excise taxes to reduce gun and ammunition sales.
Her gun control, made public in August on Medium, shows Warren believes the current ten percent excise tax on firearms is too low. She wants to raise that tax to 30 percent while increasing the tax on ammunition to 50 percent.
Because excise taxes are paid directly by the consumer–the taxes are added to the price of the goods–this means a $500 gun would immediately cost $515 and the price for a $20 box of ammo would immediately rise to $30.
Warren claims this taxation policy would “bring in new federal revenue” that can used for “gun violence prevention.” And she simultaneously suggests the tax would raise the price on guns and ammo to a level sufficient to stifle sales.
So using her “economics” it would go something like this:
- Currently, 1,000 rounds of 7.62x39mm (eeevil AK ammo) @ $300* yields $33 (@11%) in excise tax revenue
So therefore Madame Marxist suggests that with her plan:
- 1,000 rounds of eeevil AK ammo @ $300 would yield $150 (@50%) in excise tax revenue… whoopieeeeee a net gain of $127
stolentaxed by the gummint.
Except of course that in the real world, AK ammo sales would fall to 100 rounds and yield only $15 in excise taxes (a 50% loss in revenue). “Yay yay yay, but ammo sales have fallen!” she would pronounce. But why would sales fall so precipitously, she asks? Because of the higher tax?
Because, you Commie coksucquer, during the months before you could enact this poxy tax increase, we AK owners would buy countless millions of rounds of ammo, so that we’d have enough stored for the lean years — just like we did before the term of that other socialist asshole Barack Obama — and resume buying once an actual American became president again.
Ditto all those eeevil AR-15s and AK-47s you hate so much: we’d buy so many before you could touch them, the gun factories would have to institute 365-day / 24-hour shifts just to cope with the demand.
I swear, I’m a huge fan of the First Amendment and I like to hear politicians spell out their proposed policies; but I would also propose that anyone using idiotic economics theory (like the above) to create policy should be forced to wear a dunce cap and be beaten with wet spaghetti — just because of their naked stupidity.
And this phony bitch wants to run things?
* (example) Wolf Performance (WPA) is $304 / 1,000 at Cheaper Than Dirt at time of writing.