Friday, January 2, 2026

Wildly varying dealer prices for the same vehicle

 

This very interesting video shows what happened when 100 Ford dealers were asked to quote a best and final price for an identical model of pickup.  The first year, relatively few responded.  The second year (after Ford had taken notice and presumably talked to its dealers) a lot more responded - but the price variance in both years, from lowest to highest offer, was astonishingly high, well into five figures.  Take a look.




I knew dealer margins varied, but I had no idea their pricing structures were so very different, nor did I realize how much the price goes up when dealer add-ons are included.  The section on fees and regulatory charges was also eye-opening;  I'd assumed that dealers would not dare meddle with statutory costs like that, but it looks like I was wrong.

I'm sure the facts and figures disclosed in the video will be encountered at any manufacturer's dealers, not just Ford's.  Nevertheless, I hope Ford notices this video and does something about what it reveals - because business practices like these do it no favors at all in the eyes of the public.

I'm certainly going to follow the video's advice if I ever buy another vehicle from a dealer.  Obviously, it applies more to new vehicles, but I'm willing to bet some of it carries over to the used market as well.

Peter


Oh, nicely played, sir!

 

It seems Ukraine's secret services (whatever they call themselves) have scored one for the home team against their Russian equivalents.


As far as the Russians were concerned, they had got their man.

Denis Kapustin, one of the most prominent anti-Putin Russians fighting on behalf of Ukraine, was reported dead on Dec 27, assassinated by a drone on the southern front.

He had long been hunted by Moscow and the price on his head reflected this: Russian intelligence services had offered $500,000 (£370,000) to anyone who killed him.

Russia paid this out after news broke of the successful hit this week. But what Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services did not know was that they had handed the money directly to Ukraine.

. . .

Mr Kapustin re-emerged – alive and unscathed – in a video posted by Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR).

“Welcome back to life,” Gen Kyrylo Budanov, head of HUR, said with a wry smile. He congratulated Mr Kapustin and his team on a successful operation to deceive their Russian adversaries.

It turns out HUR, along with the RDK, had hatched a plan to fake Mr Kapustin’s death and claim the $500,000 bounty from Russia for themselves, to be used in Ukraine’s war effort.


There's more at the link.

I wonder how many drones Ukraine will buy with that money?  Last I heard, I seem to recall that their locally-manufactured FPV drones were about $4,000 per copy.  If so, $500,000 will buy 125 of them . . . enough to administer rather a lot of explosive headaches to Russian forces across the front line.  I wonder what the soldiers on the receiving end will have to say about their intelligence service's donation to the enemy?  If we could hear them, we might learn some interesting new Russian words . . .

Peter


Thursday, January 1, 2026

A criminal investigation I'd like to see to start 2026 on the right note

 

This headline yesterday boggled my mind.


DOJ's Inventory Of Unreleased Epstein Files Soars To 5.2 Million Pages


Remember February 2025?


Today, Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), declassified and publicly released files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his sexual exploitation of over 250 underage girls at his homes in New York and Florida, among other locations ... Attorney General Bondi requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response, the Department received approximately 200 pages of documents...


I don't know what bureaucratic battles Attorney General Bondi has had to fight with an entrenched anti-Trump Justice Department and a Deep State dedicated to fighting him and his minions at every turn.  Her public statements have all been along the lines that she's going to (and wants to) release all the relevant documents.  She may be the victim of bureaucratic sabotage, more sinned against than sinning . . . but her public image has become one of ineptitude, incompetence and waffling.

Who hid the existence of so many documents from her, and why?  Where were they kept, and why were they not catalogued in the FBI's systems so that they could be readily made available?  Why have we found out about them only in dribs and drabs, never all at once so that we knew the scale of the problem?  In particular, why has it taken almost a year to uncover the existence of this latest, massive "document drop"?

I understand that most, if not all, of these documents are coming out of the Justice Department's Southern District of New York.  If that's the case:

  • Who was/is responsible for reporting their existence when the Attorney General of the USA demanded that information?
  • Who has signally failed in their duty to obey the orders of their ultimate superior and deliver the documents in a timely and usable fashion?
  • Why has he/she/they not been at least administratively disciplined, if not criminally charged, for their dereliction of duty?  And why has the Southern District not been cleaned out wholesale, top to bottom, and more reliable personnel appointed to it?  If a major division of a large private corporation had behaved in this fashion, you may be sure heads would have rolled a long time ago!

Attorney General Bondi's credibility has been severely affected by failures to charge various individuals and address known issues over the past year.  The latest development over the Epstein documents threatens to completely derail her government career.  She may become poisonous to the political touch for her supporters.


WHY IS NOTHING BEING VISIBLY, IMMEDIATELY DONE, OPENLY AND WITHOUT EQUIVOCATION, TO RESOLVE THIS ISSUE ONCE AND FOR ALL?


One hopes the President will act swiftly to address the matter.  These problems are doing him no favors at all, and are tarnishing his administration as a whole.  What's more, many of us who supported him want - demand - answers now.  We're tired of waiting, and see no good reason why we should wait.  If there's nothing to hide, why is it being so carefully - and so successfully - hidden?



Peter


A blessed and happy New Year to us all, and Happy 250th Birthday to the USA!

 

Well, once more round the calendar we go.  Our country has been in existence for 250 years in 2026.  I wonder if we've got another 250 in us, at least in our present form?  The celebrations should (I hope) be good.  We need something to cheer us up.

Here's a reminder from Stephan Pastis to not take the passage of time too seriously.  Click the image to be taken to a larger view at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.



Let the kvetching commence!



Peter


Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Sure makes you think, doesn't it?

 

Found on social media, in multiple locations and variations:



That's one so-called "conspiracy theory" that immediately sounds suspiciously as if it might contain more truth than falsehood.  Were the Hortmanns murdered to send a message to their fellow politicians in Minnesota that disloyalty to the "machine", the "system", call it what you will, would be mercilessly avenged?

What say you, readers?  I've never been a conspiracy theorist, and hope never to become one, but this seems far more persuasive than mere coincidence or happenstance.

Peter


So much for tolerance

 

Brandon Smith, whom we've met in these pages on several previous occasions, points out that our excessive and inappropriate tolerance has led to the exploitation of our culture by the Third World, at grievous expense to ourselves.


The “melting pot” has been poisoned with a rancid cocktail of nefarious agendas. Any positive vestiges of the ideal have been lost. Any value the melting pot might have once had is gone. All that is left is an army of parasites looking for blood; a swarm of mosquitoes rushing in to latch onto a vein. Few if any of these people or institutions care about the “American Dream”, they only see the US as an easy target ripe for conquest.
. . .

No other culture on Earth worships tolerance like westerners do, and there’s a good reason for that. In the case of the US, our ancestors ... garnered us enough riches that we can afford to virtue signal, but not for much longer.

The people that want to give our civilizational wealth away are people who lack respect for the trials and tribulations required to obtain it.  They have no clue what it will take to earn that success back.

Another problem is that our tolerance often goes unappreciated because it is not a virtue for any other culture, either. The third world sees tolerance as weakness and opportunity. Many foreign social belief systems, from Judaism, to Hinduism to Islam, carry an ancient code of tribalism, an insider/outsider mentality of supremacy which is admonished in modern western thought but tolerated in immigrants.

For third worlders, a culture which is tolerant is fair game for exploitation and perhaps even invasion. You will consistently see foreign groups in the US argue that they are indeed American, but at the same time they will declare allegiance to their nation of origin. Their love of America is based on their love of the WEALTH they can derive from America. They’re laughing all the way to the closest Western Union.

Most have no interest in our principles and our heritage. They see America as an economic zone, a global commons with resources to be tapped. In other words, foreigners see immigration as a fishing business, a means to gain access to a largely unprotected wealth pool created by a culture with more historic merit and more success. They have been gathering their nets for quite some time.

In 2024 the US government under Joe Biden spent over $72 billion on foreign aid with another $26 billion in supplementals. India and Mexico transfer around $100 billion total in remittance from the US each year (foreign workers sending money back home). A number of officials with ethnic roots in these countries regularly argue in favor of continued visas and mass immigration while claiming it’s “for the good of Americans.”

Again, their loyalty is to their culture of origin first and America last.

For progressives and globalists immigration is also about wealth, primarily the redistribution of it from middle-class and upper-class Americans into foreign coffers. They see the common American people (conservatives) as a thorn in their side that needs to be removed. The draining of our buying power and living standards is a stepping stone to cultural deconstruction.

Mass immigration is a tool for social change. Multiculturalism erases national pride and the concept of protected borders. For if we are overwhelmed by the third world, who is going to care about maintaining the borders of our nation anymore? We might as well let the whole thing collapse, right?

They openly admit to this agenda, it’s not a secret. The question is, what are we going to do about it?


There's more at the link.

I'm very much in favor of tolerance, provided that those to whom it is extended reciprocate by assimilating into our culture and national norms, and actively seek to give back to the society that has accepted them.  Tolerance is very much a two-way street.  I've tried very hard to live that since coming to the USA myself, almost thirty years ago.  I hope I've succeeded.

However, many immigrants from the Third World have not done so . . . precisely the opposite, in fact, as exemplified by recent revelations about Somali fraudulent activities in Minnesota and Ohio.  For them, I daresay our tolerance has played out its string - and not before time.  Let them take such attitudes and practices back to Somalia, where they belong.

Peter


Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Immigration from the Third World

 

We've all heard variations of the meme that "If you import the Third World, you become the Third World".  To a large extent, it's true - just look at the crime, welfare and health statistics of most enclaves of such immigrants and they tell their own story.  Unfortunately, it's regarded as racist to point out that reality.

Lawdog has written a blunt, in-your-face summary of Third World reality.


When you import the 3rd World, you get 3rd World values


He's only the latest to point out that reality - and although he's writing about Somalia, you can extend his conclusions to cover the whole of tribal Africa.  I've written about that at length myself:  see my article "What to do about Africa?" for an in-depth discussion.  (For an overseas perspective, The Spectator's Australian edition published earlier this year an article titled "Importing the third world: The cost of accepting immigrants who don’t share our values is too high".  It's also worth reading.)

Like Lawdog, I grew up in Africa, and I've worked in most sub-Saharan African states.  I entirely agree with him.  The whole continent is a colossal mess, and probably will remain so, because nobody is ready, willing or able to impose a working system of ethics and social standards upon the existing morass.  It's no wonder so many are trying to flee the continent by any means possible, even risking their lives to do so - because staying put will be just as great a risk to their lives, if not greater.  Many will quite willingly commit murder if that's the only way to get here.  I know.  I've seen it happen.

Far too many of our illegal immigrants come from backgrounds like this.  Only by removing them from our midst will our own crime, welfare and health burden be eased, because they're a very large part of the reason why it's so heavy.

Peter


A vaccine in a beer?

 

Apparently that's more than just a theoretical idea.


Chris Buck stands barefoot in his kitchen holding a glass bottle of unfiltered Lithuanian farmhouse ale. He swirls the bottle gently to stir up a fingerbreadth blanket of yeast and pours the turbulent beer into a glass mug.

Buck raises the mug and sips. “Cloudy beer. Delightful!”

He has just consumed what may be the world’s first vaccine delivered in a beer. It could be the first small sip toward making vaccines more palatable and accessible to people around the world. Or it could fuel concerns about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Or the idea may go nowhere. No matter the outcome, the story of Buck’s unconventional approach illustrates the legal, ethical, moral, scientific and social challenges involved in developing potentially lifesaving vaccines.


There's much more at the link - too much to summarize here.  I highly recommend clicking over there and reading the article for yourself.

This is both exciting and worrying.  It's exciting, in that it may offer a way to distribute important vaccines in a timely and palatable way without needing medical facilities or personnel to do so.  On the other hand, it's worrying in that a vaccine that's more politically correct than medically necessary (for example, the infamous COVID MRNA vaccines) could be foisted upon us without any warning or opportunity to avoid ingesting it.  The consequences might be disastrous, but we wouldn't know about that until it was too late to avoid them.

This isn't the first attempt to devise ways to distribute vaccines through our food supply.  Remember the vaccine-loaded salads issue a few years ago?  That posed exactly the same conundrum.  One wonders what's next - and whether or not we'll be told about it before it's used, so that we can make our own choices about what we want in our bodies.  If the bureaucrats have their way, I daresay we won't.

Peter


Monday, December 29, 2025