If they do, it appears Russia attacked a treasure trove of voters recently.
Seriously, if Russia's best missiles can't avoid hitting such obviously non-military targets as graveyards, maybe they need to stop launching them; it is as if every launch is a war crime.
A study from my alma mater, Michigan State, has concluded that for a more electrified future with up to two million EVs on the road, about 66,000 more chargers will be needed in Michigan. Interestingly, that's about the number EVs on the road in Michigan right now.
But for perspective, there are just short of 200,000 gas stations in the U.S, and just over 6000 in Michigan serving about 2.7 million passenger vehicles, plus trucks, motorcycles, and other uses. Now if I do the math for my own vehicles, I find that about every 300-400 miles, or ten hours of driving, I will need to spend about ten minutes or less fueling the vehicle. So I have a drive: fuel ratio of about 60 or more. Each vehicle will require about 7 hours at the pump each year, so those 6000 gas stations will be used about 700 hours per year, or with five pumps per station, each pump will be used about 2.5% of the time.
In contrast, best practices for an EV indicate that for every 200-250 miles (you never want to run an electric until the batteries run out) or 5-6 hours of driving, you will recharge (level 2 charger) for about....6-12 hours. So your drive:fuel ratio drops by a factor of 100. Even if you use "superchargers", you end up with a drive: fuel ratio of only about 10:1.
So if Michigan indeed ends up with millions of EVs, and each one gets driven 300 hours per year, that requires 3-500 hours per year of charging. If you have a mere 66000 chargers, that means, with two million cars, the amount of charging hours needed exceeds the available chargers by a wide margin. Even if only 25% of charging is done outside the home, that means that charging infrastructure would be subject to long wait times. 10% is probably the upper bound for what could be tolerated.
Long and short of it is that the MSU study underestimates the infrastructure for EVs by a wide margin, even assuming large numbers of home charging units--and renters will often not be able to have these, because what landlord is going to approve the installation of a 240V charging unit. Maybe it's time for advocates of EVs to start calculating metrics honestly.
Vladimir "Hitler" Putin has gifted a Ural motorcycle to an Alaskan "concerned" about things, and just for kicks, I looked up what it is.
Yup, it's a knock-off of a 1941 BMW R71 originally used by the Wehrmacht. In its current incarnation, it makes a mighty 41hp (Harleys and Hondas start at about 90hp +), meaning that Ural certainly hasn't been wasting money on R&D. Maybe de-Nazify Russian motorcycles?
If we simply return the wannabe Soviet Union to the trade conditions the old Soviet Union had, I think we can break its back in a hurry. There is no reason to ease sanctions as long as Vladimir Putin and his cronies are in power.
Hunter Biden, who may or may not have actually been at some of the parties the Trumps attended while dating, has alleged without providing evidence that it was none other then Epstein who introduced them, and that the Trumps were in thick with Epstein.
The Trumps have responded rather predictably by filing a defamation lawsuit against Hunter, but I'm thinking that since Hunter can't draw on political patronage anymore, their chance of recovery parallels that of the Macrons suing Candace Owens. When compared to the Trumps, Biden really doesn't have two nickels to rub together, and while they might make his (and their own lives) miserable by suing him, their better approach is to simply stand by their own stories of how they met and courted--it's salacious enough as is--and suggest that a guy hooked on crack just might not be able to process evidence well.
Sometimes the best response to lewd allegations is simple dignity. I wish the Trumps would learn about it a little.
.....after seeing this brilliant episode of Chinese seamanship; a Chinese Coast Guard vessel collides with a Chinese Navy destroyer while pursuing a Philippine Coast Guard vessel at top speed. It's a perfect, clear day, glassy seas....and one has to ask "did no one post a watch, or look at radar, to see what other ships might be in the vicinity?".
As things are, two Chinese ships are out of commission for a while, which is just fine by me, and the navies of the world, especially those of Taiwan, Australia, Great Britain, and the United States, have been put on notice that Beijing does a lot better at putting steel into salt water than actually using that steel as a warship.
In related news, a brand new Russian tugboat has sunk in the shipyard, just like a North Korean frigate did last month. We might suggest that totalitarian government and competence don't exactly go together.
While reading through the Babylon Bee's list of ten top quotes from Kamala Harris' new book, it occurred to me that nobody has ever seen Ms. Harris together with Margaret Hamilton.
Sadly, my youngest son and wife noted that I do a pretty good job of imitating the Wicked Witch of the West, too, but they were heartened to know that if they needed to scare away neighborhood children, Jehovah's Witnesses, or Mormons, I could help. However, they're still concerned about roving bands of Democrats, who for obvious reasons are immune to Kamala's/Margaret's cackle.
My wife and I have become aware of new AI-enabled scales in the health club to which they belong, and they have somehow learned Italian. So when I stood on the scale, it honestly (if a bit insultingly) said "Grasso" (fat), and when my very slender 13 year old stood on the same scale, it said "magro" (skinny).
The scales got a little bit cocky, though, when they were put into the women's locker room, and apparently about a dozen of them got smashed to atoms before they learned to just say "bellisima".
Now I will concede that I do not speak or read Russian, so I am at the mercy of the translators, but if their work is correct, Ria Novosti, a state controlled media outlet in Russia, is apparently endorsing the extermination of Ukrainians.
Pro tip for the Russians; when your rhetoric sounds like Hitler, but in Russian, you're the country that needs to be de-Nazified. Or, rather, de-Stalinized, and the world needs to remember that the number of avoidable deaths due to Stalin is 2-3x larger than that for Hitler. The hammer and sickle should be no more acceptable in polite society than the swastika, in my view.
H/T WND. The American Academy of Pediatrics is apparently endorsing the end of conscientious objections to childhood vaccinations, apparently forgetting that in the past five years, multiple vaccines have been found to pose serious dangers to a portion of those taking them--for example, the link between COVID vaccines and myocarditis. One would think that failures like this would impart a bit of humility at the AAP, but apparently not.
Really, this has been my complaint with public health officials and vaccine advocates for over a quarter century; it never seems that they simply present the benefits and risks, and let us make our own decisions. Rather, it's generally been "do this or you're stupid", followed by attempts to make them mandatory, even when the vaccines are new and relatively unproven.
All too often, our public health authorities seem to be their own worst enemies. You've got this, you've got the push for pediatric transgender interventions (leading to a LOT of permanently mutilated young people), and finally we had the disastrous public health approach to COVID that did things like put COVID patients into nursing homes--the most vulnerable place in the world. Hopefully public health officials and the AAP learn their lesson and start actually working from data and evidence before their credibility is completely squandered.
I never met him except through his songs, but on Saturday, the eminent parody writer Tom Lehrer died in his Massachusetts home at age 97. So in his honor, sing a few bars of Fight Fiercely, Harvard or Bright College Days, or even better, take a bag of peanuts to the local green space and sing this.
Apparently French President Macron and his wife are suing Candace Owens for claiming that France's First Lady was not, in fact, born a woman. And while I understand the motivation, I'm not quite sure that this is the right approach, because Owens' way of doing things thrives on outrage. She survives a ton of scandals (support for Weinstein, Putin, Holocaust denial, defense of Kanye West, etc..), and despite her notoriety, probably doesn't have that much money for the Macrons to grab. Why waste the effort and ironically help Owens?
Personally, if I were Madame Macron, I'd be tempted to bring up picture of my children and say something like this--and with a huge smile:
Madame Owens, these are pictures of my children, which could not have been conceived with eggs from my very female ovaries, nor could they have come out of my very female uterus through my very female vagina if I had not been born with two X chromosomes.
Of course, as I've hinted above, Owens has survived quite a few scandals already, so she may be relatively impervious to things like this, but I have a hunch that laughter will be a more effective strategy than outrage.
Sunny Hostin of "The View" argues that the cancellation of a mediocre late night show amounts to a severe hazard to the Constitution. Suffice it to say with such an erudite understanding of the First Amendment, it would be a good idea for Notre Dame Law School to cancel her law degree, and for the jurisdiction that gave her her law license to revoke that as well.
Just like Steven Colbert, Hostin needs to learn that while the First Amendment does protect your right to say incredibly stupid things, it does not grant a right to have one's job despite doing so. To be fair, though, the entire reason for being for "The View" seems to be "Let's make massive profits by saying stupid things to foolish people.", so to a degree, I can understand her confusion.
The kerfuffle about former President Biden's use of "autopen" to sign pardons and other documents is interesting, and probably the big thing to address here is to what extent executive privilege protects the process. Overall, if Cabinet members are in the discussion, the privilege is fairly absolute, but it's less certain when it gets down to the level of ordinary White House staffers--an infamous example being when White House staffers were called to testify in L'affaire Lewinsky.
Also of interest is that executive privilege is stronger when there is a claim of national security. So for all those autopen-signed pardons, I'd argue that the paperwork flow is far less privileged than for other functions. It is, really, more akin to L'affaire Lewinsky than Biden and his handlers would like to admit.
All in all, my view is that if the President did not sign off on those pardons, they are null and void--and thus a special prosecutor ought to examine all of them. Ouch, for President Biden, and for all those freed by his actions.
Apparently Russia is releasing a "Aromat Putin" to boost patriotism, but somehow I'm thinking the dreaded smell of a feedlot or mortuary would be a more appropriate thing to bottle in his honor.
Doubt that? Well, Russia apparently has been forced to import a million workers to keep factories running, a number that correlates well with Ukraine's estimates of Russian casualties. Now some of this is "we need more workers for increased military production", but I'd guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that a startlingly high proportion of casualties are fatalities, and those that are not are creating invalids.
Whether he likes it or not, Vladimir "Smells like death" Putin is destroying his country.
Russian "third rated war criminal" Sergey Lavrov commits to providing enriched uranium to Iran, strongly encouraging that rogue regime to put it into nuclear weapons and use them on Israel.
Next time he meets with Marco Rubio, Lavrov needs to be asked why his boss appears to be all in favor of another Holocaust. Lavrov knows full well that Iran, like its sponsor Russia, is all about attacking civilians, so he has no plausible deniability here.
Here's hoping and praying that Putin, Medvedev, and Lavrov soon have an adverse interaction with the Mossad.
