This sounds like a very worthwhile effort

 

Recently, while browsing about the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, I came across an organization called Emergency RV.  They describe their mission as follows:

EmergencyRV is a charitable organization initially established in response to the massive and deadly November 2018 Campfire, which decimated the entire town of Paradise, California and left more than 50,000 residents traumatized and displaced. 

For founder Woody Faircloth and his then six-year-old daughter Luna, watching events unfold on television from Denver was not enough. Determined to help, the father and daughter set out to raise funds to purchase an RV and deliver it by Thanksgiving to a family in need.

Word of their kind act spread quickly and within days, press requests, RV donations, offers of legal services, and funds poured in. Before the Faircloth’s knew it, they were delivering another RV and then another. Since then, EmergencyRV has helped hundreds of victims and expanded its mission to help many more victims of wildfire and other natural disasters.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Emergency RV has placed a number of travel trailers at sites where the owners' homes were severely damaged or destroyed, leaving them nowhere to live.  You'll find details of some of them at the organization's X.com feed.

I'm going to donate to them - not an RV or travel trailer (because I don't own one), but money to help buy one and/or pay for their other expenses.  I'd like to suggest to you, dear readers, that this might be a cause well worth our support.

Peter

Get woke, go broke - automotive edition

 

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy highlights an interesting financial conundrum.

The entirety of Ford’s normal vehicle profits was undone by its losses on electric vehicles.

Ford’s 2024 Q3 Earnings Presentation delivers the details: The year-to-date losses on Ford’s EV business (what the company calls “Ford Model e”) totaled $3.7 billion. Profits from Ford’s “Model Blue” division, which sells traditional internal combustion vehicles, also happened to be $3.7 billion.

This past quarter, Ford reported losses of $1.2 billion on its EV business. Energy reporter Robert Bryce calculated that Ford likely lost almost $60,000 for every electric vehicle it sold this past quarter. “Ford has been hemorrhaging cash on EVs for the past two years,” Bryce wrote. “It lost $4.7 billion on EVs in 2023 and $2.2 billion on EVs in 2022.”

General Motors and Stellantis are having their own problems with EV's, of course.  Only massive government subsidies are enabling automakers to avoid the reality of the US market.  As the Mackinac report points out:

A Gallup poll from March found that 48% of respondents would not consider buying an electric vehicle– a number up 7% from the year prior. while a McKinsey reported in June that 46% of Americans who owned electric vehicles were very likely to buy a gas-powered vehicle next time.

There's more at the link.

Without government tax incentives and subsidies, electric vehicles would be dead on arrival.  They can't be produced at a low enough price to persuade people to buy them - let alone their problems with sufficient range, extraordinarily expensive battery replacements, and the like.

Give me an EV that has a practical range of 400-500 miles between recharges (further would be better), while carrying a full load of passengers and/or cargo, in high summer in Texas or deep winter in Montana, with the A/C or heater running full blast, while towing a trailer.  Also, let there be an abundance of high-speed recharging stations to allow for long road trips.  If EV's can handle that load and those conditions, I'll take a long, hard look at them.  Anything less than that, and it's no dice.

Peter

Conspicuous Christmas consumption?

 

Those who are foodies will know of Fortnum & Mason, the upper-crust department store in England.  So-called "hampers" of food and celebratory goodies have been their staple for more than three centuries.  I've never been able to afford one of my own, but I've helped friends eat theirs from time to time.

On an idle whim I figured I'd look at F&M's super-deluxe top-of-the-line Imperial Christmas hamper, only to find out that it's not one hamper, but five.  Talk about sticker shock - it costs just under $9,000!  Click the image below for a larger view.

You'll find all of the products photographed and listed in loving detail at the hamper's Web page.  It's interesting to read it from a Christian Christmas perspective;  Christ has been taken completely out of their Christmas, replaced by conspicuous consumption and indigestion!  Oh, well . . . if that's their thing, so be it.  I'm going to enjoy a much more relaxed Christmas with my lady and our friends - without bankrupting any of us!

Still, it was fun to see how the top half of one per cent of the population lives.

Peter

This! Exactly this!

 

The left's age-old tactic of smearing, vilifying and targeting those they consider potentially dangerous is getting very old.  Too many people are shaking their heads and saying "Where there's smoke, there's fire", ignoring the fact that precisely the same attacks have been made against anyone and everyone the progressive left (not to mention RINO's) don't like.

Enough!

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green puts it in a nutshell:

That's precisely what we need to do, for every Congressional representative and every Senator.  What did now-Senator Schiff cover up about his "activities" with an unconscious black youth who subsequently died?  Why have so many of our political leaders paid off accusers, rather than allow us to find out what really went on?

Let the sunshine in.  Publish the entire Epstein visitor list, plus every video he took.  Publish the entire list of P. Diddy's sex party guests, along with every video showing what they were doing.  Expose every allegation of illegal or unethical behavior by any and every politician, and let the people of this country decide who they want to represent them.

Unless and until that happens, disregard any and every unproven allegation that doesn't have solid, substantive evidence to support it.  They're no more than propaganda.

Peter

I did not know that

 

Larry Lambert, writing at Virtual Mirage, explains why Big Pharma is so upset at the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being appointed as the Secretary of Health & Human Services.

Why are there so many pharma ads on TV? A TV news president admitted to RFK Jr. that any host allowing him to speak negatively about Big Pharma on air would be FIRED because “this is where our advertisers are.”

Jaws dropped when former pharma insider @CalleyMeans told Tucker Carlson on his show, “The news ad spending from pharma is a public relations lobbying tactic, essentially to BUY OFF the news… The media plays referee because they’re funded by so on all levels.”

Only two countries allow pharmaceutical ads on TV: the United States and New Zealand. And those ads make a big chunk of money. RFK Jr. was told by a network executive that “during non-election years, during some months, up to 70% of his news division revenues are coming from pharma.”

When evidence about the dangers of smoking began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s, news organizations hesitated to expose Big Tobacco because they depended on the industry for its ad revenue. The same conflict exists today with the pharmaceutical industry and TV news. This is why the mainstream media is in full-blown panic over RFK Jr.’s HHS appointment. They know that once he gets in, he is going to end pharma ads on TV, which will be a devastating blow to their wallets.

That makes sense when one thinks about how often we're bombarded with advertisements for the latest and greatest drugs and medical treatments.  In my younger days I wasn't exposed to that, except for advertisements for over-the-counter nostrums to deal with coughs, colds and flu.  It was a culture shock to arrive in the USA and find advertisements for rather more intimate medications to treat anything from ingrown toenails to terminal Stage 4 cancer in various organs.

So, if Mr. Kennedy can kill off pharmaceutical advertising, he can also kill off most of our annoying, overbearing, self-obsessed, incestuous television news and entertainment media?  Sounds like a win all round to me!

Peter

Where is our relationship with China going?

 

In a very interesting speech at the National Conservatism 4 Conference in Washington, D.C., Asia Times Business Editor David P. Goldman had quite a lot to say about China's plans, progress and possibilities.  I'll embed the 15-minute video below, followed by an excerpt from an abridged transcript of his speech.  I very strongly recommend that you read/watch at least one, if not both.

From the transcript:

The world’s scarcest resource is young people who can work in a modern economy. Empires of the past fought over territory. China’s goal is to control people. 

In 1979 China took a nation of farmers and turned them into industrial workers, and multiplied GDP per capita 30 times. Now it plans to turn a nation of factory workers into a nation of engineers — think of South Korea. That’s a messy and costly transition. But China is doing it.

In 2020 I wrote of China’s plan to Sino-form the Global South. It knows a lot about getting people who make $3 a day to make $10 or $20 a day.

China’s population has been in decline, but its highly educated population is growing:

Ten and a half million university graduates, up 60% in 10 years, 2X our total – and a third are engineers. That’s more engineering graduates than the rest of the world combined. 

South Korea quintupled industrial production between 1990 and 2010 while its factory workforce fell by a fifth.

Will China collapse? Compare the US and China aggregate debt burden: the US is 262% of GDP, and China is 278% of GDP –

But China lends the world a trillion dollars a year and we borrow a trillion dollars a year. Countries with positive growth and big current account surpluses don’t have financial crises.

. . .

The other big thing China got right is the transformation of the Global South. It doubled exports to the Global South since Covid – now exports more to the Global South than to all developed markets. Assimilates billions of people into its economic sphere. It did this with 200 soldiers deployed outside China versus our 230,000. 

We spent $7 trillion on forever wars. China spent $1 trillion on Belt and Road Initiative investments. Who got more influence?

Forty countries have applied to join the BRICS group.

This isn’t about authoritarianism versus democracy. China’s exports to democracies like India grew as fast as exports to Russia. The Chinese are incurious about how barbarians govern themselves. They want to make the world dependent on Chinese technology and supply chains.

There's much more at the link.  It's essential reading to understand how strong China has become in the world economy, and how much ground we have to make up to catch up.  Of course, China faces internal problems of its own, including a shrinking workforce, debt crises and others - but it's built up an economic "cushion" that's enabling it to tackle those problems step by step, rather than having to deal with them all at once.

I hope the Trump administration is aware of these issues, because they're going to drive US foreign policy for years to come, whether we like it or not.  We may have different priorities, but we're going to have to spend so much time reacting to China's priorities that we may not have much available to act on our own.

Peter

Heh!

 

Chris Muir's Day By Day cartoon strip is not one of my favorites.  It's often crude and raunchy, rather than funny.  However, sometimes crude can be very funny, too.

Witness his cartoon for November 7th this year, discussing President Trump and the possibility of his face being added to the Mount Rushmore memorial.  It's not family-friendly, so I won't embed it here, but if you don't mind his rather raw humor, click over there and take a look for yourself.  I have to admit, it made me laugh, too!

Now, who to hire as the sculptor?

Peter

Just a reminder...

 

... courtesy of Francis Porretto at Liberty's Torch.  Click the image for a larger view.

That hyperbolic trajectory of our national debt means that unless our government manages to halt, then reverse, its trajectory, it won't really matter who's in power, or which political party is in charge.  The result will be the same:  economic collapse.

That's what President Trump has to fix if any of his policies are to succeed.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 236

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

And now for something completely different . . .

As regular readers will know, I underwent a surgical procedure on my kidney earlier this week.  Progress appears OK so far.  At any rate, on a whim, I went to YouTube and searched for "kidney music".  To my utter astonishment, there's quite a lot of it!  Here are four kidney songs, in no particular order.

First, here's comedian Tim Hawkins with "One Is The Loneliest Kidney", sung in honor of his friend Mark Hall, who had just lost a kidney to cancer.

Next, from the satirical TV series 30 Rock, here's "Kidney Now".

For jazz fans, back in 1947 Eddie Vinson wrote "Old Kidney Stew".  Here it's performed by the George Van Wagner Blues Band.

And for country music aficionados, here's Billy Ray Osborne with "You Ain't Nothin' But A Kidney Stone".

After hearing those, I'm going to have to make a steak and kidney pie, just for nostalgia's sake!

Peter

True dat

 

From Ashley St. Clair on X:

Whether or not one supports President Trump, it's hard to argue with that!

Peter

Post-surgery, Niagara Falls is in full spate

 

Well, I can say for sure that the surgery on Wednesday accomplished quite a lot.

Prior to the procedure, the urologist had indicated that there were still blockages preventing my kidney from draining.  The constant pressure of fluid inside the organ had produced what's called hydronephrosis:  the kidney had swelled and contorted, putting a lot of stress on it, and preventing that half of the urinary tract from working properly.  She drove a camera up the ureter, the tube transporting urine from the kidney to the bladder, and found that kidney stone fragments were actually embedded in its walls.  She thinks they'd been broken up by earlier procedures, but had not been properly removed or flushed out, so as they ground their way down the ureter they'd become caught up in scar tissue (also the fruit of those earlier procedures) and attached themselves, becoming ureteral stones.  Due to their number and position, they had continued to partly block the ureter and prevent kidney drainage, thus perpetuating the problem.  (I'll be having words with the local urologist who performed those earlier procedures, and didn't do a very good job, to put it mildly!)

She took a laser to them, and up into the kidney as well, "dusting" every stone and blockage she could find.  She also installed an extra-large ureteric stent, to allow any remaining fragments to drain down the ureter into the bladder without attaching themselves to anything.  For the first twelve hours or so after I woke up, it did indeed feel like sand or fine gravel was coming out along with the urine, but by midday yesterday that had (thankfully!) almost completely passed.

I'm here to tell you, things are sure draining now!  I wrote earlier about the absorbent underwear I use after such procedures (because with a ureteric stent, one has no control over urine flow - when it comes, it comes, and you normally don't have time to get to a bathroom).  They have a maximum absorption capacity of about a quart.  Well, in the first 24 hours after the procedure, I went through six of them!  Even if not all were filled to capacity, that's still a lot of liquid, and it's had a dramatic effect on my pain levels.  I hadn't realized just how much stress a contorted, swollen kidney puts on any and every physical movement involving the abdomen.  I'd say it added at least 25% to my permanent pain level, caused by my spinal injury and nerve damage all those years ago.  With the sudden decrease in pressure, I'm finding it much easier and less painful to lift my legs, maneuver my body into a car seat, and that sort of thing.  I'm also regaining my appetite.  I took my wife out for a steak last night, to celebrate the improvement.  She says she hasn't seen me eat so much at one sitting for at least six months.

So, I've still got a ways to go, but this latest procedure has already greatly improved my situation.  I'll be going in again in about four weeks' time to have the stent removed, and also to undergo more tests to determine whether the drainage has done the job, or whether further intervention will be needed.  Needless to say, I'm hoping it won't;  but if it is, I think I'll be in very good hands to get it done.

Blogging will be irregular today, because I'm kinda worn out, and will catch up on sleep as and when I can.  However, so far, so good.  Thank you all very much for your prayers and good wishes.  I greatly value them.

Peter