Since I may be two-thirds of the way through a Christmas miracle, I decided to watch Miracle on 34th Street.
Compare and contrast with our current culture.
Category: Culture (Page 2 of 13)
Mary and I visited the Notre Dame cathedral in 1991, back when you could still do fun stuff like hang from the clapper of a giant bell.
Our tour guide was impressive. He switched from English to German to French so smoothly, often in the same sentence, that everyone could follow what he was saying without having to repeat himself.
Jaguar ad implores the audience to “live vivid”.
More like livid. That’s what Jaguar owners, car guys and British people are. Livid, as in furious, angry or enraged.
Livid also means “darkish, purple color” or black and blue, like a livid bruise. Which is what Jaguar will be left with after nobody buys the new models. To make it worse, Jaguar is pausing their manufacturing to retool to build the new EV models. This is the new Jaguar concept car.
The EV market is rough. Tesla sells half of all EV cars, with customers generally preferring hybrid cars to avoid the problems that come with a battery-powered car.
Jaguar is owned by Tata Motors. Tata is a large, diversified Indian company. Tata bought Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) from Ford for $2.3 billion in 2008. JLR has performed well for Tata, but with this Jaguar re-branding, that may change. Land Rovers sell well, and if that brand isn’t ruined, Tata can survive the death of Jaguar.
Here is the Jaguar ad that will kill the brand.
Caitlin Jenner recently posted this YMCA video because he shows up in it.1
I’d never seen this music video before, and that’s surprising because I was a fan of The Village People. I even bought the Macho Man 8-track.
At the time, my oldest sister told me that one of the Village People was gay. She was being informative or mean-spirited, I don’t know, but I found that difficult to believe. Like, what are the chances that a construction worker, soldier, Indian chief, policeman, motorcycle punk2, or cowboy, would be gay?
Turns out, the chances are about a 100%.
Apparently only the cowboy and Indian were gay, but teh gays sure liked that song.
1 The subject and pronoun don’t match in that sentence, but that’s not my fault. This human was the man, Bruce Jenner, at the time. I didn’t make up this stupid linguistic fur ball.
Along the same line, I don’t apologize for using “queer” in the title. The politically correct, “LGBTQIA2S+”, is intentionally unwieldy and absurd. Anyone attempting to stay current with the label is bound to be wrong because any letter can be added and the new members of that group will be furious. The Q is in there, so they can’t be too offended that it applies to all of them.
2 What I thought was a motorcycle punk, is the “Leatherman” character. I thought the character was similar to the Eric Von Zipper character in the beach movies of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
I may seem astoundingly unsophisticated, but that’s what it was like before the internet. There was no way to look anything up.
When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were many Twitter posts from celebrities and influencers describing poignant reactions from their young children. The posts were too on-the-nose, and people called bullshit. This time, it’s “Just So” stories purported to have been written by high school girls or teachers.
Newsweek: Political realignment
This article in Newsweek is evidence that the elite class are finally starting to figure out why they are wrong all the time. The authors did make a fundamental mistake. Trump caused this political realignment. John McCain, Mitt Romney and other establishment Republicans were comfortable managing the decline of America. My younger brother called them puppet-dickheads.
This last week, during an interview with Republican Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance, ABC’s Martha Raddatz tried to dispel concerns about Venezuelan gangs infiltrating Aurora, Colorado by stating that only “a handful of apartment complexes” in the city were affected. Listen more closely, and that benign-sounding dismissal is actually more sinister than it seems.
Euronews: Fire station burns down.
Germans are known for being smart and industrious, and not questioning their leaders. This leads them to getting too swept up in ill-advised causes.
A fire alarm system wasn’t installed in the building because experts did not consider it necessary.
A new fire station in Germany that was destroyed in a fire, causing millions of euros in damage, did not have a fire alarm system.
Germany has building codes. Someone made the decision to exempt this new fire station from customary procedures. Nobody objected.
Buried in the news report:
The fire broke out on an emergency vehicle belonging to the fire department, which contained lithium-ion batteries and an external power connection.
Lithium batteries burn very hot and are difficult to put out. When an electric car burns, fire fighters don’t extinguish the burning battery, but keep the fire contained. Why did the fire department need an electric vehicle? Because Germans are suppressing the smart part of their brains, and embracing the EV cult.
Here is respected physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, explaining “Why I’m embarrassed to be German”.
NYT: Manufacturing isn’t coming back.
NYT: Manufacturing isn’t coming back.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are vowing to engineer a manufacturing renaissance. Such promises evoke 1950s-era memories of strong communities full of ordinary Americans, many without college degrees, earning attractive pay and benefits for their hard work.
The author believes the US cannot get back to the fully functioning country we had in the 1950’s. That is a widely held opinion, so talking about this article is as good as any other.
Manufacturing bottomed out at around 10 percent of nonfarm workers by 2019. The numbers employed in manufacturing started to recover under President Biden and may continue to rebound.
The author shows her bias. If the bottom was in 2019, then it started to recover after that. Biden took office in 2021, so it wasn’t his policies that turned things around.
While women and immigrants helped offset the slowing growth of the native-born population, it hasn’t been enough: Two-thirds of respondents to a National Association of Manufacturing survey this past spring said that their biggest challenge was attracting and retaining employees.
Attracting and retaining employees is simple. Pay more and improve the working conditions.
Daily Mail: People faint at opera.
Its provocative scenes left theatre goers reeling, with 18 suffering with nausea and shock and requiring assistance over the first two performances. In three cases, a doctor even had to be called.
This report is surprising, because it’s assumed that audiences are more savvy or cynical now. Nobody was coerced or tricked into attending this opera. Decades ago, my nephew Brian and I attended a machine gun shoot in Knob Creek, Kentucky. When the “Commence Fire” command was given, the amount of firepower unleashed from the firing line was astounding. One might swoon if the title of the event wasn’t so clear. It was great fun.
Fox News: San Jose State Trans volleyball player.
The Utah State Aggies are the latest women’s volleyball team to choose not to participate in a scheduled match against San Jose State University due to a biological male playing on its women’s team.
It’s good to see female athletes finally showing the courage to stand up to the crazy Progressive ideology. Trans players in women’s sports is an issue that men can’t do anything about. When the players don’t tolerate it, change can happen, but not before.
Blaire Fleming is 6′ 1″. According to this site 7% of American men are that tall. About 1 woman in 10,000 are that tall, and I bet Blaire Fleming can bench press more than any of them. The NCAA women’s volleyball net height is 7 inches lower than the men’s net height because of the sex difference in height.
I don’t want to see a man smash a volleyball into a woman’s face at point blank range, but my opinion doesn’t count. The NCAA wants that to happen, and it’s up to the female players to allow it or not.