olivermarks

@Raed667 ' alt-right dog whistle' ,'rant' ,'spewing unhinged racism'. Not hearing it, could you explain how and why you feel this?

Cancelling a cartoonist because he was shocked nearly half of 'black' people polled had racist views of 'white' people and decided he would stop supporting 'black' causes is not exactly earth shattering if you live in the bay area.

Racialization of everything has caused tremendous polarization, which combined with an epic level of drug fueled crime (some of it very violent) has made people of all types very paranoid. Very unhealthy and fueled to a large extent by well meaning 'compassionate' suburbanites who have no clue what is going on out there except via their boob tube.

@goldenchrome - Facebook:

“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”.

Italian philosopher & Minister of Public Education under Mussolini Giovanni Gentile, who was arguably the architect of 1930's Italian fascism.

Biofuels are already being manufactured, are being used in motor racing with sophisticated octane blends and in road cars.

Short explainer video

https://coryton.com/lab/videos/how-can-we-decrease-carbon-em...

Longer discussion

Sustainable fuels; what are they & when will I be able to buy some?

https://youtu.be/TyUiHafCdvM

70 million people died over six years in WWII, the vast majority Russians. 1930's USA has little bearing on European geopolitics and the creation of golden era superman comics.

An animated data-driven documentary about war and peace, The Fallen of World War II looks at the human cost of the second World War and sizes up the numbers to other wars in history, including trends in recent conflicts.

https://youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU

'Jews, along with Blacks, were seen as outsiders to be marginalized by large sections of the dominant US culture at the time'.

I know this is the popular broad stroke concept of between wars American culture but in reality it was a lot more varied. The 'United States' was anything but united in that era. Huge numbers of blacks where migrating north to Chicago to work in manufacturing, different states had very different relationships with ethnicities and religions. NYC was always a very Jewish city for example.

Another example of rejecting assimilation and celebrating other cultures were the German American Bund as you note, with large rallies etc celebrating the German National Socialist movement by German immigrants.

Basically better kerning and font weight changes, nothing too scary for the huge committees of empty suits to be presented to, meet over and approve

@rafram I don't think there is any doubt people who are jewish have had an important cultural influence on US media - Robert Crumb, MAD magazine etc - and some of their cultural background plays a part in that...but the whole idea of the 'new world' USA was assimilation in that '30's era, not celebrating ethnicity and past backgrounds.

'Jewish immigrants essentially invented the superhero genre' is a real stretch in this context. There were plenty of other cultural influences, particularly Japanese, in book and comic form that predate and were major influences on the US golden age of comic book explosion in popularity.

Why are the kid's religious beliefs worth mentioning in this article?

Couldn't agree more @seandoe.

It's also incredibly insulting and disrespectful to Dahl to meddle with his work.

The endless critiquing & editing types should instead write new books and see if anyone's interested in their 'new' ideas.

It all reminds me of the 1980's era of putting antibiotics in plastic children's toys in case they might chew on them and get 'contaminated' by germs. We have to build up resistance along with critical reasoning skills but there's lots of evidence the kids just built up a lot of resistance to the antibiotics and the germs were good at building up immunities.

In the Victorian era 'Father Christmas' was conceptually green, skinny and 'good'. His opposite was Krampus who was bad, with lots of scary images of him carrying off terrified children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus

Over time Coca cola et al made Santa's imagery fat, jolly, 'unopposed' and therefore meaningless, and now that tradition is reduced to a saccharin sweet gift giving orgy to children.

We are having similar conceptual erasure imposed on us in so many areas of society this decade and it is not going to end well.

That's a glass half full perspective! How come so many fish and animals are still dying or are dead in the area?

It sounds as though Israel might have though...

Also the phytoplankton in the oceans that process the air we breath.

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankto...

Apologies for offending your religious beliefs but there are an awful lot of now very rich snake oil salesmen out there who are doing a lot more for their cronies wallets than for the planet.

Be more mindful of where trillions of tax payer money is 'invested' would be my advice and try to see both sides of the religious divide.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11653723/How-Al-Gor...

'Climate change' is a hysteria because there is so much money involved in green tech. anyone with an ounce of common sense is an environmentalist, but there have been so many predictions of impending doom (which is your fault, repent and atone for your sins) that the genuinely important issues tend to get buried in the tsunamai of doomy junk science that is drip fed to Guardian readers and anyone else who will listen.

There is a real danger of the $$ cult of climate change $$ undermining important environmental issues.

I think the grandparent was really referring to extremities at the tips of the two wings - the cargo culting 'democratic socialist' movement the DNC pays lip service to, and the extremes of nationalist'USA first' 'patriots' the RNC pays lip service to and the DNC's coastal media corp friends love to endlessly frightened their viewers about.

Exactly.

Two wings of the same party. At this point because the DNC are currently so powerful they are parochially dominant (and extremely corrupt), the pendulum will swing soon and the power will shift to the RNC (who will no doubt also be extremely corrupt).

The unelected bureaucrats actually run everything in the US and at a state level. In California where I live we currently have a supermajority Dem state government, but regardless of this a handful of unelected bureaucrats from the Gray Davis era run everything in Sacramento behind the scenes.

The idea the DNC 'left wing' is pushing to restrict the local elite's power and tax them is laughable. They just have a few noisy straw men to placate voters and fill their air waves. (I'm a registered Dem FWIW. I loathe the party these days).

We need a big parochial political shake up!

The argument against hyper capitalism causing more and more derailments is credible if you look into 'precision scheduled railroading' practices, aka shaving expense by eliminating unnecessary costs and 'optimizing Assets'.

Sadly this has little to do with 'conservatives' or 'the left' and a lot more to do with our apolitical global oligarchy who own the politicians in power and many lobbying groups including 'climate change' and environmentalists who are strangely silent on this major disaster as they were when the Nord Stream pipeline was destroyed.

Where are the environmentalists? This is a huge catastrophe that will have long term repercussions across a wide area.

Are all the climate change organizations/lobbyists actually corporate sponsored and don't want to rock the boat?

There is little information on why so many trains with hazardous cargos are derailing in north America. This could be sabotage by malevolent actors.

'Yet the reality is that the return of brown fuels is a subplot in a much grander story. By making coal, gas and oil scarcer and dearer—prices remain well above long-run averages, despite recent falls—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given renewable power, which is mostly generated domestically, a significant strategic and economic edge.'

Classic Rothchild/Agnelli Economist - never mind the 'heat or eat' struggling humans, this is really helping the 'renewable power' industrialists...

Professor Mazzucato's argument is that the big three are weakening government's ability to innovate because that function is outsourced.

Although she is confident this can be remedied by bringing more innovative projects in house the reality is the same as in large companies: entrenched cultures, fiefdoms, silos, budgets make change very hard due to entrenched interests.

It takes outsiders to be the Piñata in the room at some point, they can say things FTE management can't. I'm a consultant, my beef with the big three is the 'nobody gets fired for hiring Mckinsey/Deloitte/x' syndrome.

You will get a lot of cut and paste boilerplate slide deck read outs from the big players, smaller more specialized consultants tend to provide a lot more value for much lower costs.

Ironically government departmental efforts at innovation/change/evolution are typically expensive, big players too...

The word 'troubling' in the article sub head should be 'illegal'.

>'There's a small market for converting vintage cars to EVs. The cars are already unsafe, so it's a way for enthusiasts to save a car's body long after the drivetrain has failed'

This is wildly inaccurate. There was a trend for a few people customizing popular classic cars into electric drivetrains. The reality is any desirable VW Beetle, Porsche, Jaguar etc has a huge parts aftermarket for full restoration back to 'brand new' originality. Converting a classic car to be electric typically devalues it (classic cars are an asset class).

The challenge when putting heavy batteries in an older vehicle that was designed for a heavy engine at the front or back is that it changes the suspension, steering and handling characteristics, while the extremely rapid acceleration possible with any electric vehicle means the braking system design may need to be radically altered. We see way too many 'aesthetic' conversions of classic cars that are beautiful death traps in the hot rod world, and now in the EV bodge up world too.

The good news is that carbon neutral synthetic fuels are rapidly maturing and arguably have a better carbon footprint than manufacturing millions of short life span BEVs.

https://coryton.com/lab/videos/how-can-we-decrease-carbon-em...

Hybrid is clearly the way to go until SMR's and a 1st world electric grid are successfully operating in California.

I was in a home brew electric car club back in 2012 era, people had the entire pickup bed of trucks full of batteries with a deganging lever like a giant train brake to disengage the batteries in the event of thermal runaway.

Asking people who aren't interested or experienced with cars to 'convert' for 2k is going to end up with a lot of cowboy jerry rigged opportunist fire hazard vehicles on the road. Portantino's proposal is naive and highly irresponsible IMO.

People who are serious about EV conversions use excellent companies like EVWest.com you can do the conversion math there...

Focus on practical efficiency and not the virtue signaling answering of your own question with a silly ridiculing answer would be my recommendation.

I'm not 'against wind power', but I am very wary of surveillance capitalism, which was my point about electrification of everything and the vast and very powerful forces in play to promote that.

Massive astroturfing on the other side of the fence by Ørsted also, who have been spraying pr money around liberally.

Don't forget Big Tech is much bigger than Oil & Gas in our era. Everything electrified means everything can be monitored and controlled. 'Fossil fuel funded' is PR speak. So is Ørsted's sponsorship of cable news packages.

Greenwald resigned form the intercept, which he founded in 2020 because they sold out to big tech political interests.

Meanwhile the whales are losing out.

total nightmare all around

How do you know 'academics and reporters' are 'telling the truth?

Academics tend to be driven to where the grant funding points them, while the line between public relations and journalism has never been more blurred.

Some kind of real time AI analysis of all available data points would be really valuable for 'truth' were that ever possible...