[American Greatness] Few Romans in the late decades of their 5th-century AD empire celebrated their newfound "diversity" of marauding Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals.
These tribes en masse had crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube borders to harvest Roman bounty without a care about what had created it.
Their agendas were focused on destroying the civilization they overran rather than peacefully integrating into and perpetuating the Empire.
Ironically, Rome’s prior greatness had been due to the extension of citizenship to diverse people throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia.
Millions had been assimilated, integrated, and intermarried and often superseded the original Italians of the early Roman Republic. Such fractious diversity had led to unity around the idea of Rome.
New citizens learned to enjoy the advantages of habeas corpus, sophisticated roads, aqueducts, and public architecture, and the security offered by the legions.
The unity of these diverse peoples fused into a single culture that empowered Rome. In contrast, the later disunity of hundreds of thousands of tribal people flooding into and dividing Rome doomed it.
To meet the challenge of a multiracial society, the only viable pathway to a stable civilization of racially and ethnically different people is a single, shared culture.
Some nations can find collective success as a single homogenous people like Japan or Switzerland.
Or equally, but with more difficulty, nations can prosper with heterodox peoples—but only if united by a single, inclusive culture as the American melting-pot once attested.
But a baleful third option—a multicultural society of diverse, unassimilated, and often rival tribes—historically is a prescription for collective suicide.
We are beginning to see just that in America, as it sheds the melting pot, and adopts the salad bowl of unassimilated and warring tribes.
The U.S. is now seeing a rise in violent racially and religiously motivated hate crimes.
As the sun plunges into the west
And the woke start to wake and get dressed...
[peers at script through the glare
there in Washington Square:
VIRTVS NOSTRA DIVERSITAS EST]
Totally holding a grudge about that missing Cohan statue.
Posted by: Harry Greremble5424 ||
10/28/2023 18:16 Comments ||
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#3
peers stares, dammit. Sorry, Mr. Heston.
Posted by: Harry Greremble5424 ||
10/28/2023 18:21 Comments ||
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[Bulls, Bears & BS] Bonds continue to break down in anticipation of the U.S. Treasury's Quarterly Refunding Announcement due out next week. We are now getting to the point at which a panic could hit bonds, which would trigger an aggressive drop in stocks. This week we delve into these issues as well as what's happening in gold and oil.
Thanks for listening! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
[Washington Examiner] If electric vehicles are as good as the Biden administration would have us believe, why are they so unpopular?
Two new reports this week show the folly of the government trying to force EVs onto unreceptive drivers. The cars are hideously expensive to produce and don't sell even after they are subsidized.
GENERAL MOTORS SCALES BACK ELECTRIC VEHICLE TARGET
Consider the Oct. 25 study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It analyzed "how regulatory credits, hidden costs, and subsidies disguise the real cost" of EVs. In 2021, $22 billion of government subsidies paid for by American taxpayers hid nearly $49,000 of the cost of producing each EV. To repeat: $49,000 of hidden costs per vehicle. "These costs are borne by gasoline vehicle owners, taxpayers, and utility ratepayers, who are all paying a hefty price for someone else’s EV," said Jason Isaac, the foundation’s energy policy specialist.
Even massively subsidized, average electric cars cost $22,000 more than ordinary cars with gasoline engines. These expensive and unwanted vehicles don't make up for their extra costs by being cheaper to operate. Back-end operating subsidies, which are different from manufacturing subsidies, reduce the direct cost of electricity to drivers to make it like buying gas at $1.21 per gallon, but the hidden costs of charging equipment and charging losses make the real cost $1.38 per gallon.
It's also not even clear if the nation has the electricity capacity to handle the shift to a market only selling electric vehicles, as President Joe Biden is trying to mandate by 2035. This is especially so with Biden’s restrictions on the development and distribution of coal and natural gas. Volatility of, and strain on, regional and national electric grids could become a serious problem if all cars need to be regularly recharged.
The Texas study does not even include costs for battery replacements and disposal. Nor does it venture to suggest that the mining of lithium for batteries can keep up with demand. It doesn't look at the environmental costs of lithium mining, which can pollute air and water with heavy metals, massively erode soil, use copious water and energy in mining, and disrupt wildlife habitats.
Even with all the subsidies and mandates, consumers aren’t buying the EV fairy story. On Oct. 24, General Motors CEO Mary Barra published a letter to shareholders in which, amid a lot of happy talk about the company’s profitability, she admitted that the electric vehicle business was lagging.
"We are also moderating the acceleration of EV production in North America," she wrote, "to protect our pricing, adjust to slower near-term growth in demand, and implement engineering efficiency and other improvements that will make our vehicles less expensive to produce, and more profitable."
#1
Not bad for participants in the green new deal grift.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/28/2023 7:39 Comments ||
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#2
Announced by GM that Bolt owners will no longer automatically get new batteries, but $1400 towards software that will limit charges to 80% and then monitor battery performance over about 6200 miles. If ok will allow full charge ability. But if you take that you have to sign away any rights to pending class action litigation.
And I remember when GM built good stuff. No longer.
#3
...but $1400 towards software that will limit charges to 80% and then monitor battery performance over about 6200 miles.
Based on conversations I've had with folks that own these contraptions, the trick is to sell them before they reach 80,000 miles.
After that, they just cost you more than the thing is worth.
So 2-3 years tops for a new EV in my market area.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
10/28/2023 8:41 Comments ||
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#4
I have 130,000 miles on my Tesla and it still works fine.
Posted by: Ed ||
10/28/2023 9:18 Comments ||
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#5
"We are also moderating the acceleration of EV production in North America,"
Truly a masterpiece of corpobabble. Translation into English: "We're going to stop making these things until either people start buying them (unlikely) or until federal subsidies and tax breaks ramp up even further."
Posted by: Tom ||
10/28/2023 11:47 Comments ||
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#6
"Cost Of Driving Electric Vehicle Equal To Paying $17.33 Per Gallon Of Gasoline, Study Finds"
[Hot Air] The first obstacle for any product is building a customer base. Getting their product into the hands of enough satisfied people who help drive demand for more of your widget, whatever it may be. If your widget has a practical application to everyday life, and does some aspect of it in, say, more comfort, or faster, or more efficiently, then you have a leg up on the competition as well, and you can milk that puppy all the way to like bank.
Past examples would be restaurant chain Chipotle’s bouts with food poisoning scares. What did sammich, soup, and muffin competitor Panera do?
Business is a brutal sport when you already have a product a majority of your customers want and you are only trying to lure them to choosing yours.
Where business turns into a death match is when you’ve bought into manufacturing a product which already had limited appeal, but, even as your competition and costs increase, it’s losing what little appeal it had to begin with. This is the conundrum now facing the electric vehicle industry. As the buying public becomes more familiar with EVs — their manufacturing process, pluses and drawbacks — electrics seem to be losing even their shiny luster of new and cool. As it stands now, EVs are at risk of becoming a niche market instead of dominating the roads as envisioned.
People aren’t buying the hype or the vehicles, as EV truck makers are discovering.
#2
Hybrids like the Prius had some promise. Tesla was always going to be a niche that survived of subsidies. These new mandates are a Wylie Coyote scheme.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
10/28/2023 8:41 Comments ||
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#3
When Henry Ford build the Model T, he priced it so his factory workers could afford to buy one (along with most of the rest of the world.)
Now who can afford a Ford? What happens to the 'affordable' car?
#4
It's becoming apparent that EVs are a relatively small niche product. They appeal to rich greenies who want to feel good about themselves. Apparently no one else. And that market appears to be getting close to saturation, if it's not there already.
Posted by: Tom ||
10/28/2023 11:48 Comments ||
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#5
Without Govt. stepping on the scale (subsidies, tax breaks), they wouldn't sell any
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/28/2023 14:29 Comments ||
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#6
@#3^
Well, Ford employees make enough to afford one.
IIRC, for years Colt tied the price of 45's to the wages they paid for master gunsmiths. (Those days are long gone.)
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/28/2023 16:28 Comments ||
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[ZERO] Carlson begins by laying out the significant disconnect between Washington DC and the average American citizen's struggles - particularly how skyrocketing food inflation and housing inaccessibility for the younger generation, is fermenting a dangerous brew of widespread public disenchantment.
Thanks to political deecisions such as draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the nation has been left vulnerable to deeper economic shocks. The public sentiment, particularly in rural areas, echoes this anticipation of a looming financial crisis, making the societal divide even more palpable.
"If something really dramatic in your country happens, like young people can't get married, you know, or buy houses, or have any hope for a future that approaches the middle-class upbringing they had, then you've got a huge problem, and someone should be responding to that."
"One thing Americans are not used to is being poor...but what if we ran out of money at the very same moment that American society is more fractured, our social fabric is in tatters, and we've let in millions upon millions of people who have no affinity for the United States," Carlson posited. "If your economy is like on the brink of collapse, you know, if your country is literally bankrupt, someone would say that, and if food inflation gets so crazy that people are actually complaining about it... it doesn't make me an expert on the people or anything, but I do live among people who aren't rich, and they're like legit upset about what groceries cost."
SURVEILLANCE OVERREACH AND THE EROSION OF CIVIL LIBERTIES
Drawing parallels with East German surveillance tactics, Carlson slammed the measures the state employs under the guise of national security. This overreach, he warned, erodes the personal freedoms of citizens, setting the stage to foment civil unrest and potential authoritarian control, under which genuine public grievances are suppressed rather than addressed.
"When your country is at war, civil liberties disappear, and we saw this in the last 20-year war on terror, and I supported all that stuff, and I have egg on my face. I'm worse than that; I'm ashamed of the measures that I supported," Carlson said, adding that there are "angry people who feel like they have no recourse, who don't think elections are real... they have real grievances, legit grievances, and the only way to tone those grievances down is not by creating some East German surveillance state, which we have done, or throwing people in prison for loitering outside the capital, which is their house after all. That doesn't work long term."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Dmitry Kosyrev
Lots of selective memories...
[RIA] Amazing words can be read in this article : Israel must follow the laws of war and international law, as well as based on moral and strategic considerations. If it doesn’t follow, the United States will not support Israel.
What about Hamas? The laws of war only apply when they apply to both sides.
What's happened? Do the laws of war and international law still exist in this matter? Events of recent years tell us that it is not. And then an American woman who recently started working at Human Rights Watch explains: there are such laws, the United States just didn’t want to follow them.
The organization itself... how to put it mildly, with a complex track record. But this particular woman and this article in Foreign Affairs are a separate and good case. Prompting for a very pleasant excursion into history.
Pleasant because the forefather of the adoption of the laws of war in modern international law is Russia. And personally Tsar Nicholas II. This is a long story, and it is called the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. It was Russia who proposed to hold both, also sketching out the agenda, and both were chaired by a Russian representative. At the first, the Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land was adopted, at the second it was highly specified - it included a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the right of the population to wage guerrilla warfare, and prohibited the use of weapons and substances that cause unnecessary suffering.
They outlawed the destruction and seizure of enemy property without military necessity, and the killing of prisoners of war. Robbery and confiscation of private property was prohibited, and all possible measures were ordered to be taken to protect and preserve cultural monuments and medical institutions. It was then that the concept of a war crime arose - a violation of the very rules of war.
Yes, yes, we started it. The Hague is the foundation of international law on this topic, and subsequent conventions or decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal proceeded from that primary source.
And all these provisions were included in the “Order of the Russian Army on the Laws and Customs of Land War” of 1912, an appendix to the Field Service Charter. There we read that troops must respect the life and honor of the inhabitants of the enemy side, as well as religion and rites of faith. And that wounded and sick military officials are picked up from the battlefield without distinction of belonging to any army.
Prisoners must be treated humanely and maintained in the same way as the ranks of the Russian army are maintained. During hostilities, it is prohibited to use poison or poisoned weapons, to wound or kill an enemy who has laid down arms and surrendered, to attack or bombard cities, villages, dwellings or buildings not occupied by the enemy...
And “Nakaz” is still working! In recent years, Russia has twice emphasized and demonstratively shown that a modern war can be waged in accordance with the rules of such a war. Syria: humanitarian corridors for civilians to leave the combat zone, refusal to attack civilian infrastructure, technologies for conducting negotiations on these topics, and much more. Ukraine: no attacks on civilian infrastructure, hospitals or cultural sites, humanitarian corridors, humane treatment of prisoners.
And this annoyingly exemplary behavior of a Russian soldier in war is a threat for some so serious that (taking into account our behavior in Syria) an American-Ukrainian propaganda machine was created in advance, working on the principle of one hundred and eighty degrees - that is, taking real facts and twisting them inside out.
Why, in fact, is our adherence to international documents a threat? Here we again turn to the article with which we started the conversation. It's actually about how Americans fight. Here again is a mirror reflection of acceptable methods of warfare or operations against terrorists. It turns out that the Americans can do this - Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria: bombing Mosul and Raqqa, destroying houses, water supply systems and other infrastructure. And all this and much more is listed in the article to proudly recall one amazing fact in which the author of the article is involved - her name is Sarah Yager.
It turns out that before HRW, she worked at the Pentagon as a human rights adviser, and as a result of this work, last year, in the event of war, an action plan was adopted there to “mitigate damage” for civilians. And the current one is a document allowing the State Department to block the transfer of weapons to countries that cause harm to civilians during hostilities. And now Sarah says that Israel is the very case when these documents should be applied.
Yes, but what about Ukraine - it can break all the laws, rules and conventions?
Who is it that’s been firing missiles into schools, apartment buildings and power plants?
Or does anyone think that a false, inverted picture of what is happening there can, with enormous effort, be forever maintained on the air? Or will the United States now fight according to the rules, but its proteges can do anything? Questions, questions...
#3
Before the 19th Century the practice of 'rules of warfare' were a custom not encoded in law. In the 19th Century, countries of Western Civilization started to develop the concept of 'laws of war'. The result was the Geneva and Hague Conventions. Something those 'imperialistic colonizing white supremacists' came up. The basic legalistic concept is that it binds each party to an agreed set of rules of conduct. If one side is not bound as such, neither is the other.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
