That’s One Spin

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Battery car sales seem to be falling off in California.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday that Tesla sales fell significantly in the back half of 2023, declining by 10% in the final quarter alone. This sales drop came despite California’s previous pledge to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles in the state by 2035.

The LA Times is busily spinning the reason for the fall-off. The outlet is claiming

“controversial pronouncements” from Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

It added

There’s no survey to prove it, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest liberal-leaning California car buyers are done with Elon Musk’s abrasive personality and his stands on political issues.

No data; LAT just Knows Better.

And this:

If enough buyers here are truly fed up enough with Musk to influence their purchasing decisions, Tesla’s sales could continue to suffer.

On the other hand, Greg Bannon, AAA‘s Automotive Engineering Director, told the LAT

The government and automakers have spent billions on something consumers may not want.

Of course. Who is this Bannon guy, anyway? It couldn’t possibly be that consumers, even in California, are increasingly becoming less enamored of battery cars.

Mm, mm. Nope.

Why Wait?

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House Education and Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R, NC) has subpoenaed multiple leaders at Harvard University for their failure to produce documents the Committee has been trying to get through more cooperative channels for some time. These docs are related to Harvard’s performance in correcting antisemitism that’s rampant at the school.

The subpoena requires that documents in 11 key areas, show what actions the university has taken, or will be taking, to ensure that Jewish students “feel safe and welcome on campus,”  be produced NLT 5 pm on March 4.

My question is why the long deadline?

The Harvard management team knows where the documents are, those people have had all this time already to get the documents gathered up, and those people can deliver the documents in a couple of hours. They don’t need more than two additional weeks to do what they’ve been required to do, and have known that they’ve been required to do it, all this time.

Kick the UN out of New York City?

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That’s what Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren suggests we do following exposure of the UN’s UNRWA’s active participation in the Hamas terrorists’ butchery in Israel last October and the UNRWA’s ongoing active participation in support of Hamas in the war that Hamas is continuing following that attack.

I think it’s high time that the United States told the UN that it’s “persona non grata” in the city of New York.
I don’t understand why New York should host an avowedly antisemitic organization. They should relocate to a more minimal place like Damascus or Tehran.

I agree with Oren’s reasons, but I don’t agree with his solution.

We should continue to keep our enemies close, and that includes keeping the UN in New York City. Aside from having these enemies speaking nearby where Americans can hear them despite the press’ efforts to put lipstick on those pigs, those diplomats and their associated spy personnel represent an equally nearby opportunity for intelligence collection by our intelligence agencies.

That’s worth the cost in irritation over the UN’s blatant bigotry.

That Isn’t the Problem

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Gen-Z males (on the admittedly limited basis of this article, I can’t call them men) think they have a dating problem, and The Free Press‘ news writer thinks it’s a demographic problem. “Sam,” an otherwise unidentified DC graduate student (unidentified because he’s that timid, see the following), had this:

“Dating right now is just walking on eggshells, honestly,” Sam, a 25-year-old graduate student in DC, tells me.
He said he hides his pro-life, non-MAGA, traditional Republican leanings by default—out of fear his dates, who are almost always on the left, might ghost him.
“You just have to assume that most girls are progressive and constantly try to make sure you don’t say the wrong thing[.]”

No, that’s not the problem. Unless “Sam” is just looking for a hookup with a flesh and blood f*k doll (in which case, ghosting is a non sequitur), his problem is that he is, to use the clinical term, a chickenshit. If those women are going to ghost him (the horror) over his right-leaning beliefs or over the differences between his and those women’s beliefs, they’re too shallow or too intolerant, or both, and in any event they’re not good enough for him. He should welcome their departure from his present and future company.

To the extent the news writer’s feverish characterization is accurate, it’s because these Gen-Z males are such beta and gamma males.

They’re also an insult to pro-life, non-MAGA, traditional Republicans, being as they are too weak to stand by their leanings.

This IRS Needs to Go

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First, it was the Internal Revenue Service targeting Conservative organizations that were applying for tax-exempt status by slow-walking approvals or outright denying approval on purely political grounds. Then it was the IRS “leaking” of a plethora of Conservative and Republican Americans’ personal tax information. There were, too, a host of similar IRS failures between those and since.

Now we get the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration report that shows that this IRS misbehavior is longstanding and a feature of the agency. Here are a few of the things TIGTA found.

  • 19 contractors’ most recent background investigations were not favorable as of July 13, 2023. However, these contractors still retained their access to one or more sensitive systems because the IRS did not take action to suspend or disable the contractors from the IRS’s systems, as required
  • 279 contractors and employees no longer with the agency still had access to at least one sensitive computer system. “Actions were not always taken to timely remove users once they separated from the IRS”
  • For some sensitive systems, the IRS does not have adequate controls to detect or prevent the unauthorized removal of data by users

The IRS managers don’t even know what systems they have in operation.

  • the IRS struggled to come up with a complete list of sensitive computer systems, eventually identifying 319.
    To perform this evaluation, we [TIGTA] requested information from the IRS that identifies all sensitive systems. However, our ability to obtain a complete and reliable inventory of its sensitive systems was an ongoing challenge throughout this evaluation.

In fine, as TIGTA put it,

The fact remains that for some sensitive systems, the IRS does not have adequate controls to detect or prevent the unauthorized removal of data by users[.]

Plainly, the IRS’ managers aren’t even pretending to try to install controls.

We need a Federal Revenue facility to oversee Federal tax collection and collected revenue handling, even under a vastly simplified Federal tax code. But this agency is beyond repair. It must be disbanded entirely with its personnel returned to the private sector—most especially not reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government—and replaced with a new, streamlined Federal Revenue facility.

TIGTA’s report can be read here.