Category Archives: History

Design Regulations

How they ruined American cars:

Car homogenization has become something of an Internet meme. It turns out that all new cars more or less look alike. I had begun to notice this over the years and I thought I was just imagining things. But people playing with Photoshop have found that you can mix and match car grills and make a BMW look just like a Kia and a Hyundai look just like a Honda. It’s all one car. Truly, this cries out for explanation. So I was happy to see a video made by CNET that gives five reasons: mandates for big fronts to protect pedestrians, mandates that require low tops for fuel economy, a big rear to balance out the big fronts, tiny windows resulting from safety regulations that end up actually making the car less safe, and high belt lines due to the other regs. In other words, single-minded concern for testable “safety” and the environment has wrecked the entire car aesthetic. And that’s only the beginning. Car and Driver puts this as plainly as can be: “In our hyperregulated modern world, the government dictates nearly every aspect of car design, from the size and color of the exterior lighting elements to how sharp the creases stamped into sheetmetal can be.” You are welcome to read an engineer’s account of what it is like to design an American car. Nothing you think, much less dream, really matters. The regulations drive the whole process. He explains that the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards with hundreds of regulations – really a massive central plan – dictate every detail and have utterly ruined the look and feel of American cars. There is no way out, so long as the regulatory state is in charge.

Gee, someone should write a book about this sort of thing.

The Steele Dossier

The “verified” document that wasn’t.

Someone’s (more than one someone) got a lot of ‘splaining to do.

[Update Monday morning]

How the FBI broke its own rules:

In the fall of 1975, FBI agent John Connolly met with Bulger in the agent’s car on an abandoned Boston street corner. What would follow was the FBI’s greatest scandal involving a confidential informant subverting the vast powers of the government in order to target his enemies. This stain on the history of the Department of Justice should have led to effective reforms but instead it only foreshadowed more of the same.

Well, to be fair, it was politically convenient to do the same thing with Steele.

[Update a while later]

Spy versus spy versus spy: How Comey, Clapper, and Brennan are turning on each other.

I hope they all rot in jail.

[Late-morning update]

Trey Gowdy says that there is a potential game changer if certain transcripts are released.

And thoughts on a tale of two coups:

The fact that the losers in this election appear to have attempted to undermine the winners is an extremely bad precedent because it leads to the winners deciding to take it out on the losers next time around and that in turn leads to people not relinquishing power short of being turfed out with violence – see Venezuela and any number of Latin American, Central Asian and African dictatorships. In fact allowing the losers to come up with one way after another to try and delegitimise an election they lost is bad on its own because the ability to “throw the bums out” is a key feature of democracy. If voters can’t trust that their votes will be respected they are likely to resort to other methods of expressing their displeasure with the current set of rulers and that is something that these rulers may come to regret. The good news is that the New AG seems to be doing his job and turning over any number of stones that various parties would have preferred remained unexamined.

Let’s hope.

The Democrats

start to perceive the debacle they face:

<blockquote>All Americans, even the president’s most strenuous supporters, should be comforted that the majority of Democrats can still think and count. It is a party infested with lunatics, but not controlled by them. This is in the same reassuring category as the Mueller investigation’s conclusion that no one in the United States colluded with Russians to influence the result of the 2016 election.

Beneath the initial success of the Biden campaign, the Democrats are sharply divided between those who are still trying to place their bets on the presidential unsuitability of the incumbent, those who seek a radical démarche to the left and over the political cliff, and those trying to get back to essentially the old slightly-left-of-center coalition of Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson.

President Clinton, and even, with a stretch, Mrs. Clinton, were also in that tradition, but the ominous approaching clouds of investigative curiosity about the Clinton Foundation and the malodorous ethics of the 2016 Clinton campaign have caused the Clintons’ party to stampede from under them.

Even Barack Obama, who was cozily settling into a good 30 years as a respected ex-president, is already in the crosshairs of the investigation, conducted against the Clinton campaign, of illegal espionage on the Trump campaign through fraudulently obtained FISA warrants and planted agents and sting operations. The rabidly Trumpophobic texting between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page reveals that “the White House” was closely monitoring the investigation of the Trump campaign, which raises the question of the involvement of the former president in illegal surveillance.
Mr. Obama’s name is still bandied about with respect by most of the Democratic candidates, especially Mr. Biden (“Barack and I . . .”), and he is still better esteemed by most Americans than the other ex-presidents. But apart from the admirable and necessary shattering of the bar of color, his entire legacy has been discredited: the mad obsession with unproved climate alarmism, the foolhardy Iranian nuclear treaty, and the Obamacare shambles.</blockquote>

Trump should win handily.

[Sunday-morning update]

Link was wrong, fixed now. In response to a comment about Trump’s approval, it may be that the polls are wrong because people are afraid to be honest with the Woke Warriors.

As an example, there was another surprise, in Australia, which should give Biden pause.

And maybe there is starting to be a pattern to these wrong polls.