Two Groups of Stories on the Theme of “Leftist Chickens Coming Home to Roost” (posted 1/26/24)

First, electric vehicles are blowing up, both literally and financially.

Now I have no problem with electric vehicles on their own. I admire Elon Musk a lot, the Tesla I rode in was an impressive bit of technology, and I like the idea of burning less gasoline.

But I’m also a big fan of dealing with reality on reality’s own terms, and the reality is that right now, EV technology is not competitive with gasoline cars.

The facts have been obvious for a while, and I’m sure you’ve all heard them: the batteries are made of all of the most toxic and expensive materials on earth, controlled by Chicoms and brought to our shores after having devastated a vast swath of the earth through various mining processes; they are financially non-viable; they require a huge infrastructure of charging stations that doesn’t exist, and won’t for a long time.

Plus the electricity that powers them mostly comes from coal and nukes, which makes Liz Warren stand beside a littered highway with a tear running down her translucent cheek, just like another fake Indian named “Iron Eyes” Cody.

(Look him up.) (Also: #wemustneverstopmockingher)

Ooh, and EVs sometimes catch fire, and when they do, they burn like the eternally smoldering tire fire on the Simpsons.

Also, as we learned this month, when it gets really cold out, EVs can get you a half-mile out of town before dying. Like you then will, by freezing. And then you’ll be found two days later by a guy named Gus, or possibly Hank or Butch, driving a snowplow.

And that snowplow will be powered by gasoline, as God intended.

But other than all that, EVs are great!

“But Martin,” you are not asking yourself, because you’ve got the kind of top-shelf mind that has led you to join the CO nation, “if EVs are so obviously not ready for prime time, how come they are such a gigantic thing in our society?”

The answer is simple: Bidenomics!

Which is to say, intervention in the economy by a bunch of arrogant boneheads who throw billions of our dollars at their favorite hobbyhorses and green boondoggles, believing they can cram an entire new industry down everybody’s throats.

Fortunately, there’s a little something called the semi-free market. And that market has been speaking on the subject of EVs lately.

Here are just a selection of recent headlines:

“EV Sales in Europe Slaughtered, US May be Next.” This article reports that the sales of EVs in Europe dropped from 193K in December of ’22 to 160K in ’23. The numbers look even worse in Germany (the largest EV market in the EU by far), which saw a sales drop of 50%. And both the EU and US have recently cut tax credits which they previously used as a form of welfare to rich folks to goose EV sales.

Many articles report on American cities who threw millions of taxpayer dollars into buying electric bus fleets, only to discover that they’ve bought a Nadler in a poke, so to speak.

Asheville, NC is just one example. After spending $5 mil on 5 buses in 2018, and another $600K on chargers, electricity, battery leasing, and overages in maintenance costs, they’ve now got 3 of the 5 buses out of service and waiting for repairs.

Also, when it got cold last month, the range of the two working buses dropped to 78 miles between 3-hour charges.

Zero Hedge reports that Ford has cut production of their electric F-150 Lightning trucks in half, due to low customer demand. As a result, Ford is laying off 1400 autoworkers at a plant in Dearborn, MI.

You may remember the story of that vehicle from when Joe Biden took a test drive of it in May of 2021, in a poorly conceived publicity stunt.

After fake-jogging for a few steps across the factory floor, he tripped over a sandbag, and when two secret service guys had helped him to his feet, he had somehow got his head stuck in the right armhole of his jacket.

After Jill and a nice lady from Visiting Angels (sing it with me: “America’s Choice in Home Care!”) managed to get his head unstuck, he straightened his tie, shook hands with the ghost of Henry Ford, and climbed into the F-150.

He promptly bonked his empty head against a door post, accidentally turned on the windshield wipers, and then the wiper fluid sprayer.

Then he rolled his window down, and before he had even moved, said, “Sssiss thuckerin’ thucotash,” which the sycophantic White House press corps reported as, “This sucker’s fast.”

Then he rolled the window up on his necktie – fortunately, the resulting cessation of oxygen going to his brain produced absolutely no detectable effect in his cognitive function – and put the truck into what he thought was “drive.”

Annnnnndddd… it silently rolled backwards, crushing a mid-level Ford executive’s legs.

Who deserved what he got, for voluntarily standing within 100 yards of a vehicle driven by Ol’ ”Dead-From-the-Neck-Up” Joe.

In other green energy news, City Journal recently reported the cancellation of several huge wind projects off the shores of New Jersey and MA, because even with gigantic taxpayer subsidies, their boondogglery ™ had become so obvious and painful that even those blue state goofballs had to slink away in shame.

Second, the mainstream media has started imploding faster than the market for EVs.

You can see it in television, starting with the increasingly speedy descent of network ratings. A story from earlier this month started with a teaser question: Of the top 100 most-viewed programs on the networks in 2023, how many would you guess were football broadcasts?

I’m a big football fan, but even I wouldn’t have guessed that it was 97! Three college games made that list, plus the Super Bowl’s pre-game show, and then 93 NFL games! The remaining three programs were the Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Academy Awards, and one show identified only as “political programming.”

That’s a huge indictment of how badly the once-dominant (now dormant) primetime lineup has gotten.

You can also see the failure in the political channels, and most enjoyably at the execrable CNN.

The NY Post reported that during prime time last week, CNN was beaten by the History Channel (which is lately made up of 40% programming about Hitler and WWII, 50% about aliens and mythical lost civilizations, and 10% history), and “an obscure cable network” that shows old Western tv shows and films.

Which makes sense, because who amongst us wouldn’t rather watch long-dead tv cowboys on Gunsmoke and Bonanza than watch the recently-dead lying dog-faced pony soldier in the White House?

(Plus those programs show a lot of Indians being shot off horses by toxic white male gun nuts who identify as males, which makes Grandma Squanto cry. #youknowthething)

But you can see media implosion even more clearly in print, where blue-on-blue violence has cropped up in newsrooms all over the country, as papers are forced to lay off workers after years of leftist reporters working hard to drive away most of their readers.

The most recent wave of layoffs has hit the LA Times, where the “journalists” have been dividing their time between hating conservatives, and propagandizing on behalf of Ken Doll Newsom and the Dem machine that has sent hundreds of thousands of former Californians fleeing in search of lower crime and a better quality of life.

Like that which can be found in the Gaza Strip, for example.

The Times laid off 13% of its staff last year, and still managed to lose $1 million dollars per WEEK. So when they announced another round of “massive layoffs” this month, the propagandists who work there naturally thought, “Hey, these capitalist bosses are already making negative $50 million per year from our labor. It’s time for us to go on a one-day strike.”

That’s actually a thing that just happened.

But before you settle on that little stroke of genius as the funniest media story you’ve heard lately, don’t sleep on the geniuses over at Sports Illustrated.

Because I was one of those weird young men who liked sports and girls, I used to regularly read SI. I kept up on the NFL news, dipped into some basketball coverage during the glory years of Jordan and the Bulls, and even followed a little baseball news.

And every year, when the Swimsuit edition came out, I… let’s say “closely examined”… that issue.

In my defense, this was back in olden times, when we hadn’t yet explained to our young males that the female body is not really a good thing to look at, or even notice. And that “trans-women” were women, and they should be able to kick the crap out of actual women in women’s sports.

And that if I were to throw up in my mouth at the thought to doing to a “trans-woman” what I fantasized about doing to – oh, let me just pick a few names out of the dim recesses of my memory and say Christie Brinkley or Cheryl Tiegs or Kathy Ireland – that revulsion would make me a “transphobe.”

Well, in recent years SI has gone away from the content that millions of us used to read in our formative years. They’ve run articles written by AI. (I’m old, so I don’t really understand what that means, except that it can’t be good.)

They’ve replaced sports coverage that actually focused on sports with leftist social commentary on how racist and sexist and evil America is, and how we should all admire a whitey-hating, mediocre quarterback like Colin Kapernick.

Who, I feel compelled to remind all football fans, was beaten out for his starting job by the immortal Blaine Gabbert. (Yes, THAT Blaine Gabbert. Who you will never see in Canton, Ohio, unless he’s selling programs in the parking lot outside the football hall of fame there.)

And if that wasn’t bad enough, SI also desecrated the swimsuit issue in recent years by featuring “trans” guys and what’s euphemistically called “plus-size models” on the cover!

I’m not making that up. They replaced Cheryl Tiegs with some poor delusional dude with all the sex appeal of Charles Nelson Reilly in a one-piece, and they replaced Christie Brinkley and Kathy Ireland with some gals the size of a Brinks truck and the nation of Ireland!

Aannnnnndddddd… a week ago the owner of SI announced that they are firing the entire staff of the magazine, which is likely going to go out of business shortly.

Unexpectedly!

Okay, I’ve already gone on too long, so here’s a teaser for Monday’s column: I’ve got a couple of stupid criminal stories, a feel-good story about how Florida is providing a blueprint to other states in fighting voting fraud, and the weirdest story you’ve ever seen involving horrific MI governor Whitmer and a talking potato.

I’m going to conclude this column with the inspiring recent quote from golfer John Daly. If you don’t follow golf, Daly is a lovable, overweight eccentric who could hit the ball a mile without much control, and who would smoke and drink beer during a tournament.

Seriously, the man is a legend. “Hold my beer and this lit cigarette while I drive this golf ball 375 yards, either driving the green on a par 4 or killing a senior citizen two fairways over with a head shot.”

Daly was recently asked about a “trans-female” golfer — i.e. a male golfer in lady’s clothes — who just won a women’s tournament, and is now seeking admission to the LPGA tour. 

Daly responded that, “If I’d put on a dress and called myself a tranny, I would have won 100 tournaments on the LPGA tour. That guy’s about as feminine as a Ford F-150.”

Yes, if you’re talking about the EV version.

Hamas delenda est!