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Ummm Okay, Maybe Not

Corporate Wokism, Drive Time, Management

One has to laugh at this latest development:

Volvo has confirmed it has backtracked on its promise to sell only fully electric cars by 2030 due to a fall in demand for battery vehicles.

The Swedish company announced today it is now aiming for 90 to 100 per cent of its global sales to be either pure electric or plug-in hybrid by the end of the decade.

It comes in response to a decline in appetite for EVs across major markets, including a slowing uptake of battery cars among private buyers in the UK. 

Volvo executives said the delay to its EV schedule will ‘allow for a limited number of mild hybrid models to be sold, if needed’.

Let me be the first to say that “if needed” is going to become “vital to the company’s survival”, and the “limited number” will become most if not all of the entire product line.

In marketing terms, this is known as a “soft retraction” — note the shift from “all-electric” to “okay, we meant hybrids” — thus leaving space to keep using a normal internal combustion engine (ICE) instead of Duracell-only.

Gosh… let me see.  The original plan can be characterized as follows:

“We’re going to refocus our company’s entire product line into a technology that is unreliable, unsupportable and ultimately unsustainable, relying on a support system that doesn’t yet exist, all while hiding behind the twin figleaves of government mandate/coercion and feelgood eco-friendship”.

…because in cold hard business terms, that’s exactly what the “all-electric” policy came down to.

Were I a major shareholder in such a corporation, I would demand the resignation of the entire management group that initiated such stupidity.

Not for the first time, the oh-so politically-correct Swedes are getting their noses rubbed in the hard reality of their silliness (see also:  liberal immigration policy).

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of well-intentioned wokist assholes.

More News From Little Big Horn

Business, Economics

Nice of you guys to finally realize this:

Breitbart Business Digest: The Wheels Are Coming Off the U.S. Economy

The Manufacturing Sector Sees Slower Demand, Falling Production, Declining Employment

…now apply that metric to just about every other sector of the U.S. economy (i.e. retail and wholesale) for the complete picture.

There are a few relatively simple solutions to this, but here’s a clue:  they’re unlikely to be implemented in the numbers or at the scale required for them to work — and that’s under a Republican administration.  Under a Harris/Walz regime, not only will the solutions not be enacted, but the precise opposite will take place:  more government spending, more choking of key industries, more and higher taxes, and so on.

In the meantime:  buy ammo, not shares.

And send it to Gen. George Custer;  it sounds like he may need some more.

Quote Of The Day

Government Thugs, Marxists, Surveillance Society

From Insty, referring to this post:

“Let’s be honest, the people running the world are not only corrupt, but spectacularly incompetent.  For their lousy performance alone they should be tarred and feathered;  for their “impudence” in attempting dictatorship they deserve worse.  But it really seems that over the past few years the ruling class of the West has been preparing for war against its owns citizenry.  Again: Why?”

Because, Professor Reynolds, the socialist state has always been better at waging war against its own people than against foreigners.  The French Revolution’s Reign of Terror was not directed at the Germans, Spanish or the Italians, but against the very French citizens the Revolution had purported to liberate.  The Communist Revolution in 1917 Russia ended up slaughtering and imprisoning far more working- and middle-class Russians than had ever been killed under the Romanovs.

And it will be far easier for the West’s ruling class to oppress the populace than t would be to, say, oppress foreigners.  The ubiquitous surveillance cameras are in London, Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin — not in Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro or Manila.  And the coming clampdown on free speech will affect Musk’s TwitterX, Bill Whittle and me and the Readers of this website, not Burmese peasants or Masai cattle herders.

Not only was it untrue that Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia;  there’s a distinct possibility that Oceania had never been at war with Eastasia — the war being simply a propaganda concoction to justify the repression of the inhabitants of Oceania.

So when the lackeys of the ruling class — that would be, say, the police forces of Britain and the FBI here in the US — start muttering darkly about the “hard-Right” or “MAGA-followers” as they prepare for mass arrests and imprisonments, it’s us they’ll be coming for.

As for Glenn’s why? the answer’s simple:  because they can.  Glenn is a thoughtful, intelligent and civilized man, and he simply cannot comprehend the feral nature of those who would rule over us.

They — to a man —  are amoral cocksuckers.  And the sooner we recognize that and start treating them accordingly, the better.

Rank

Lists, Politics

…and that means not only an order, but also the smell.

“Kim, WTF are you talking about?”

Some smart guy (Robert Graboyes, at the splendidly-named Bastiat’s Window ) decided that Teh Experts cocked it up (surprise, surprise):

Two recent BW posts (“Polls, Pols, and Poli-Sci” and “Presidential Prodigiousness Potpourri”) lambasted the Bizarro World of presidential rankings from the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey. Some of the more ludicrous findings are summarized/caricatured in the graphic above. Several readers asked me to offer my own rankings. I can’t do a 1-through-45 list, but I can lump them into five tiers: (T#1) highly positive, (T#2) somewhat positive, (T#3) neutral, (T#4) somewhat negative, and (T#5) highly negative.

Go ahead and read it before continuing here.

My only quibbles are that Obama and Biden (the latter a.k.a. Obama The Much Lesser) didn’t end up in Tier 5, the absolute stinkers;  and that Calvin Coolidge wasn’t in Tier 1 (although I will cop to being a yuge fan of Coolidge, so I may be biased).

I can’t fault Graboyes’s methodology, however, in that he refused to take into account what the presidents did when not in the Oval office (either before or after), which is good.  His example:

Madison’s role in the Federalist Papers and Constitution make him a titan, but his presidency was mediocre.

He did include some non-Presidential material, though:

…Jimmy Carter, who has made himself a national pustule for over four decades.

By the same token, therefore Obama should be likewise excoriated because “national pustule” would be too kind a judgment on his post-Presidential shenanigans.

Feel free to discuss the observations of both Graboyes and mine, in Comments.

Age Limit

Old Age

Most people, men especially, consider themselves to be excellent drivers.  If truth be told, however, most people aren’t even good drivers, as witnessed by the appalling number of car crashes that occur every year on the roads and streets of the world.

I’m not even referring to crashes that occur through outright stupidity or recklessness, and I’m certainly not going to open the festering can of worms known as “Wimmen Drivers”;  not in this post, anyway.

I consider myself to be a competent driver in that I’ve only ever had a couple of serious accidents in well over four decades of driving — not serious in that people were injured, but serious enough that cars were either written off or close to being so.  And yes, some were technically the fault of the other driver, but once again, I can also assume at least a little culpability in that perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention to the traffic.

What bothers me — and I’ve noticed it a lot recently — is that as I’m getting older, my driving skill is declining.  Some of it is physical:  my neck and body are stiffer, making it more difficult, for example, to turn to look behind me;  and my reflexes certainly aren’t what they used to be either, which means I can’t drive on auto-pilot anymore and have to concentrate really hard on what’s going on around me.

The latter certainly came to mind when I read about this little tragedy:

A man and woman were killed after an Audi ploughed into them as they were visiting a popular seaside resort at the end of the summer holidays.

The pair, in their 60s, were walking in Anglesey when the car swerved to avoid a horse and carriage before ploughing into them. The driver, a man in his 80s, also died at the scene.

(I don’t know what the car’s make has to do with the story, but it is the awful Daily Mail, after all, so maybe a little gratuitous class hatred was needed to make the story a little more spicy.)

From an eyewitness:

One local said: ‘The Audi swerved to go around a horse and carriage, mounted the pavement and hit pedestrians who were walking past a house – they didn’t stand a chance.’

It seems pretty clear that the Olde Phartte was going too fast — this didn’t happen on a freeway but on a narrow city street, after all — and that he either didn’t leave enough room to brake, or else he lost control during the swerve and smashed into the luckless pedestrians before hitting the wall.  (And in a modern car (like the Audi), you have to be going really fast to be killed by crashing into a wall.)

Or else his octogenarian reflexes were like mud, and he left it all too late.

I know that Olde Pharttes get a bad rap for the heinous sin of Driving Too Slowly, but I’ve noticed myself slowing down a lot when I drive these days, because I’m fully aware that my reflexes are those of an older man, and not some young whippersnapper in his forties.

There’s a reason why modern F1 drivers don’t carry on racing into their fifties.  Even once-world champs like Fernando Alonso (43) and Lewis Hamilton (39) are quite aware that their days of F1 racing are very much numbered.  (I know:  the peerless Juan Manuel Fangio raced almost into his fifties, but the F1 cars of his day ran at less than half the speed of today’s.)

Anyway, I am (perhaps surprisingly) in favor of stricter driving tests for Olde Pharttes like myself.  When my current license expires, I will have to retake the practical and theoretical tests as though I were a newbie driver, and I will do so willingly.  Because I would hate to be like that 80-year-old in the above tragedy, killed (and killer) because I was, quite simply, driving beyond my capabilities.

As Dirty Harry (himself quite an Olde Phartte) said once:  “A man has to know his limitations.”  And I’m certainly aware of mine, when it comes to driving anyway.

It’s called maturity, and it’s well past time that I started showing some.

If You Build It, They Will Come

Taxes and Theft

…and if you try to steal it, they will leave:

Millionaires are looking to flee the UK in their droves to escape Labour’s tax raids – with a record number of wealthy Britons tipped to leave the country this year.

Advisers to the UK’s richest households told yesterday how phones are ringing off the hook as their clients rush for the exit, as Chancellor Rachel Reeves plans to hike levies in its autumn Budget on October 30.

It follows PM Keir Starmer’s speech this week in which he painted a woeful picture of the state of the country’s economy, referring to financial ‘black holes’, as he braced the UK for a difficult Autumn budget. 

The smart ones left long ago — some as much as a year before this new lot of Socialists came to power, I’m told — and most of the really smart ones made plans for this eventuality even earlier than that.

You see, not only are The Rich quite intelligent (trust fund babies and nobility aside), they also have access to all sorts of intelligence that others don’t.  At Rich Fart #1’s afternoon cocktail party, for instance, one of the topics might be a sharing of information as to the best bolt-holes to flee to when the financial SHTF, along with the best methods to implement such flight.  And Rich Farts #2-7 hand over details of which lawyers, tax experts, bankers and so on would be the best to facilitate said flights.

They’re so far ahead of the game, in other words, that they’ll be gone long before H.M. tax sharks send out the list of desirable legislation for the Socialists to pass.  Hell, I bet that most have gone — or at least, their money’s gone — already.