Tab Clearing...

• Leadership lessons from Star Trek: TNG.


• Facebook Destroys Everything.


• Clothes With History.

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Postings...

• Super badass twin turbo V-8 ragtop Benz.


• Resurrecting a camera.

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Point, Counterpoint...

Jaguar's rebrand has run afoul of the culture wars, with Fox News calling it "Bud Light 2.0" which is kinda funny. I'm sorry, but the average Fox News viewer is going to boycott the new Jaguar for the same reason I am: Aren't neither of us the target demographic for the new over-$100k Jag EV.

The most sensible "con" take I've yet run across has been from Mr Jalco, a graphic designer, illustrator, and sometime auto writer and YouTuber:

Now, before we dive too deep, there are two things we need to establish. Firstly, I love Jaguar. I think they’ve made some of the most beautiful and iconic cars of the 20th century, and the potential offered by their brand and racing heritage is beaten only by Ferrari or Porsche. Secondly, I am absolutely not talking about their yet to be revealed new cars here. I haven’t seen them – hardly anyone outside the internal team has – so cannot and will not judge them. This is purely about the brand ident they have so far released, what it tells us about their direction of travel as a company and the quality of the creative thinking inside the company.

It's an excellent deep dive that explains "brands", "branding", and the uphill row Jag has to hoe to reposition itself in the market, to mix my metaphors as thoroughly as Jaguar has mixed the cases in its typography.

On the "pro" side of the ledger is this well-argued piece by Alex Goy at Driven:

As well as dragging some of the worst of humanity out of the woodwork, it also brought out a group of concerned Jaguar fans. For them, Jaguar’s been doing broadly the same thing since before they were born. The brand’s heritage, even post Ian Callum reinvention, has been the steadfast hook upon which Jaguar’s hat swung. Images of the E-Type (which has been out of production for nearly 50 years) are everywhere, and rightly so, the Morse (which hasn’t been on our screens for nearly 25 years) Mk II is used as a shining example of how great Jag used to be. The tales of derring do, of record breaking, of Le Mans, Geneva, and the Mille Miglia are staggering, and they hold a special place in a lot of hearts.

Keeping things the same as they’ve always been leads to two problems. Firstly, a lot of people want to let others buy new, and then snap ‘em up in 15 years time for £1,500 - which won’t help Jag now. Far from it. In 2023 Jaguar sold 64,241 cars. To put this into perspective - over 75 million cars were sold globally in 2023. Porsche shifted in excess of 320,200, BMW’s M division flogged over 200,000, and Genesis put over 150,000 new cars in homes during the same year. Lots of people are saying they want the old Jag, but the numbers show they didn’t want to pay for it.

Of course, the car hasn't even been revealed yet, and we're all talking out of our fourth point of contact until sales figures start coming in, but if the purpose of advertising is to get people talking about you, the new ad campaign has succeeded at that.

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Posting Through It...

The graphs at this article are fascinating. Like you can literally see where he got divorced.

To work out what subjects preoccupy Mr Musk and how his views have changed over time, The Economist analysed his activity on Twitter (as it was) and X (as it became in 2023). Using artificial intelligence to trawl through his 38,358 posts between December 2013 and November 2024, we found that he is posting far more often and with a far more political bent. Climate change and clean energy used to be the realm of policy on which he opined the most, but he now bangs on much more about immigration and free speech (see chart 1).

It's safe to say that Elon Musk has the all-time worst case of Poster's Madness in the history of ever.

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Written Elsewhere...

• My 200th post at Cars Gone By: A 1966 Mustang GT convertible.


• On the reasons behind the enduring popularity of the 1911.


• The U-Shaped Utility Curve of All the Things.

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Know Nukes

With all the data center construction that's accompanied the AI... boom? bubble? ...the demand for power is off the charts and this is leading to talk, wild speculation, and outright misinformation about nuclear power and potential reactor construction.

Here's a dude who knows something about the topic talking about small modular reactors:

Tech giants are signing deals with nuclear power companies to supply energy to their data centers. Many of these deals revolve around unproven Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). This is a relatively new term for most people, so I figured it as worth it to dig in a little to help it make sense.

First to get the hysteria out of the way. No, Microsoft and Google will NOT be running nuclear reactors. No, AI will not be running nuclear reactors. These SMRs will be operated by highly trained operators licensed by the NRC, just like I was on my reactor. Every licensed operator is personally responsible for ensuring nuclear safety. Like go to prison personally responsible. It doesn’t matter who’s name is on the front gate.

Go thou and RTWT.

And remember, any talk about running a technological civilization on clean power that doesn't involve nukes is fundamentally unserious.

Gun Geekery...

The patent that made the micro-nine possible...

Micro pistol and micro poker.

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Precision Targeting

Does something in your neighborhood Facebook group or favorite fandom Subreddit really get you spun up about something political? Maybe it was supposed to.

The new disinformation being peddled by foreign nations aims not just at swing states, but also at specific districts within them, and at particular ethnic and religious groups within those districts. The more targeted the disinformation is, the more likely it is to take hold, according to researchers and academics who have studied the new influence campaigns.

“When disinformation is custom-built for a specific audience by preying on their interests or opinions, it becomes more effective,” said Melanie Smith, the research director for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization based in London. “In previous elections, we were trying to determine what the big false narrative was going to be. This time, it is subtle polarized messaging that strokes the tension.”

Iran in particular has spent its resources setting up covert disinformation efforts to draw in niche groups. A website titled “Not Our War,” which aimed to draw in American military veterans, interspersed articles about the lack of support for active-duty soldiers with virulently anti-American views and conspiracy theories. Other sites included “Afro Majority,” which created content aimed at Black Americans, and “Savannah Time,” which sought to sway conservative voters in the swing state of Georgia. In Michigan, another swing state, Iran created an online outlet called “Westland Sun” to cater to Arab Americans in suburban Detroit.

Sowing discord on the social media channels of opposing nations is becoming an art form.

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Smoothbrains at Threads...

"Not a sports car any stretch of the definition"?

What kind of pig-ignorant mouth noise is that?

It is the definitional example. The MG-TC is the type specimen of sports cars. All other sports cars are shadows cast on the cave wall by the TC.

That's the sportsest sports car that ever sportsed!

To this day I remember the time I parked my Porsche 924S next to an original gangsta TC in the parking lot of the Blockbuster in Midtown ATL and just sat there and swooned over it until the owner came out.

Hand to God, he had stringback gloves. A flat cap, too. Dude had the Official MG-TC Uniform!

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Tab Clearing...

• Tribal Lore of the People of the Gun: A great list of essential reading from Gorillafritz. If you don't know where yo've come from, it's hard to figure out which way you should be going.


• A weird longing for the communist past among some Russians, and the weird love of Russia from some Americans are two things I just do not understand. The Cold War sucked.


• Bobbi fell into a burning (jalapeño) ring of fire.

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Info Flow

"It isn’t necessary to buy politicians if you can launder narratives through the information ecosystem and have politicians repeat them."

There's a weird pattern to information churn, especially in the Very Online Right, these days.

Stuff gets posted in Facebook groups or forums or wherever, and the various influencers, podcasters, vloggers, et cetera trawl these spaces to find stuff that's generating buzz or is outlandish enough that it will draw clicks. 

Then these social media influencers amplify it, generally in as clickbait-y a way as possible, to grab eyeballs and ad revenue. This causes it to buzz even more on social media and it gets noticed by staffers in various politicians' offices, who pass on to their bosses that "People seem to really be riled up about this. You need to jump on this bandwagon!"

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Meme Dump...

Random Gun Stuff...

• The Case for Pocket Poppers: Not everything needs to be a Glock 19.


• Why "Well, I know a Green Beret, and he said..." may not have much relevance to private citizen defensive firearms use.


• What's the difference between porting and compensators?

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Tab Clearing...

• We "dial" and "hang up" phones, have web "pages", and "roll up" the windows in our cars.


• Russian hackers breach Verizon's PTT network.


• "Hey, buddy, do you have the time?" On distracting questions.

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Going off half-cocked...

*rubs temples*

He was charged with the misdemeanor crime of Battery against the woman, as well as the misdemeanor crime of Assault on an Unborn Child.

The headline and article are poorly and unclearly written, but for heaven’s sake, people, would it kill you to do a little journalism of your own before setting your hair on fire and running in circles?

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Tab Clearing...

• Head of RT admits in interview that there are more clandestine influence operations where that one came from.


• A tour of Fort Wayne... the one in Detroit, that is.


• Beware of acorns!

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Meme Dump...

Meme Dump...

Meme Dump...

Tab Clearing...

• The only skyscraper designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is up for sale. Opening bid is only six hundred grand! It has a really baller penthouse apartment with built-in furnishings designed by Wright, too. I dunno what the nightlife is like in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, but I bet you can see clear to the horizon.


• How do you say "Join the army or go to jail" in Russian?


• Try something new. You might have a good time!

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