Jaguar's New Model: The Bud Lite

Jaguar created easily the most absurd ad in history.

11/20/24 Yahoo Finance:

"Elon Musk has criticised a Jaguar advert that featured catwalk models in bizarre clothes but no cars.

"The British carmaker on Tuesday debuted a new advert featuring several models with asymmetrical haircuts and brightly coloured, haute couture clothing walking around a Mars-like landscape bathed in bright pink.

"Messages such as “create exuberant”, “live vivid”, “delete ordinary”, “break moulds” and “copy nothing” flash on the sccreen but no actual cars or references to Jaguar as a carmaker are featured."

Tragically,  Jaguar seems to have abandoned what they are good at: sports sedans.  This is why I have given up on replacing my 2014 XF with anything Jaguar.   Jaguar even managed to fix the longstanding problem of unreliability.   This and the 2005 X-type have been the two most trouble-free cars that I have ever owned.

They are not complete idiots.  The Middle Eastern version lacks the trans guy.  Who exactly are they trying to sell cars to?

It just gets better.  11/20/24 Forbes:

Bev Turner, a British television host on the conservative-leaning GB News channel, said the ad looked like Jaguar asked artificial intelligence to create the “wokest, most pretentious, gender-ambiguous piece of self-satisfied A-level art.”

And this one:

 

Fail-Safe (1964)

One of the deadly serious films that came out of the Cold War.  Looking over the cast is somewhat astonishing: Larry Hagman, Walter Matthau, my distant cousin Henry Fonda, and introducing Fritz Weaver.  Oh yes, the big surprise: Dom Deluise.  For you younguns', he was a comic actor long ago.

Larry Hagman plays Buck, the Russian translator for the President.  My, he was young. 

I had forgotten how powerful the last few minutes are.

Toy Gun Control

December America's First Freedom has an article by me: "Now They Want to Use Toy Gun Control as an Excuse for Actual Gun Bans."  I am rather proud of it.

Again: Do Not Worry

11/18/24 Guardian:

Two undersea fibre-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, including one linking Finland and Germany, have been severed, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors.

The episode on Monday recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious, including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Sea gas pipelines.

The 1,200km (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working at about 0200 GMT on Monday, Finnish state-controlled cybersecurity and telecoms company Cinia said.

A 218km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland island went out of service at about 0800 GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group.

Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable” and were investigating “an incident (that) immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage”.

UPDATE: Danish Navy seizes Chinese ship captained by a Russian for this.

Nothing to See Here, Just Move Along

11/18/24 CNN:

Sweden and Finland have updated guidance to their citizens on how to survive war, as NATO allies bolster defense measures against the backdrop of the Ukraine conflict.

Both nations joined the transatlantic alliance in the past two years, after Russia invaded its neighbor. Many European countries have since ramped up military spending to bolster long-term security in the region.

Booklets distributed to millions of households in the Nordic nations include instructions on how to prepare for the effects of military conflicts, communications outages and power cuts, as well as extreme weather events.

From stockpiling bottled water and sanitary products, to growing edible foodstuffs at home, government authorities offered tips on how residents could sustain themselves in the event of war. The brochures also include advice for parents and caregivers, instructing people to preserve diapers, medication and baby food.

The Swedish government will distribute “Om krisen eller kriget kommer (If crisis or war comes),” to all five million households over a two-week period from November 18, according to the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), a governmental agency that compiled the pamphlet.

The fifth version of the Swedish brochure, which was first published in World War II, will place “greater emphasis on preparing for war,” a statement from the MSB said on Monday. The digital version of brochure, released in October, has been downloaded about 55,000 times, the agency added.

I Think This is Still Saber-Rattling, But Make Sure You Can Prepare with Potable Water and Spare Foodv on Short Notice

 11/19/24 NBC News:

Russian President Vladimir Putin formally lowered the threshold for his country's use of nuclear weapons Tuesday, days after the United States allowed Ukraine to strike inside Russia using American missiles.

The Kremlin announced that Putin had approved an updated nuclear doctrine — a document that governs how Russia uses its nuclear arsenal — including the declaration that Moscow could unleash a nuclear strike if subject to an attack by a nonnuclear country that has the support of a nuclear state.

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed later Tuesday that Ukraine had carried out its first strike on Russian territory using U.S.-supplied long-range weapons, hitting a military facility in the Bryansk region with an ATACMS missile.

I suspect Russian ICBMs and SLBMs may well turn out to be in the functional state as their conventuional forces turned out to be.  Viktor Beleno's MiG Pilot recounts how ground crews used the MiG-25's ethanol coolant for drinking.  I doubt any part ofb an ICBM is drinkable or smokable (yes, I am imagining an ICBM transformed into a really, reaaly big blunt) but still....

Check Your State's Unclaimed Property Website

 I just found several thousand dollars belonging to my late father-in-law on California's website: stock brokerage accounts he failed to close when he left California, what seems to be funds left over from sales of houses in Orange County and even his Reseda house in the 1960s.

UPDATE: Further examination shows that some of these were another Richard Thorne.  The amount likely his is only a few hundred dollars, not worth the effort.