Well, there's always Binney Park

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Posted in the comment section by Snotty Philistine: *

*A sobriquet stemming from the time a homeowner, angered by comments here about the price he’d placed on his newly listed home, called us collectively a bunch of “Snotty Philistines of Questionable Intelligence”. Time passed, and events proved that price to have been aspirational; he never wrote back to apologize, but one reader appropriated name for himself. Tee hee.

No, their popularity isn't declining, it's just that their appeal is becoming (even more) selective

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About Those 'Luxury EVs'

It turns out no one wants them.

For what these folks in the upper tiers are willing to spend on their vehicles, they'd rather have something that zoom zooms with a throaty roar. And however sexy the EV, they are failing to convince the consumer to purchase them.

When Porsche AG prepared investors for its stock-market debut three years ago, its finance chief vowed that the company’s electric vehicles would soon out-earn its roaring gasoline counterparts.

Now, battered by waning demand for its Taycan EV and rising production costs, the German manufacturer has shelved plans for a battery-powered luxury SUV, delayed several other electric models and announced plans to add more hybrid and combustion-engine vehicles to bolster its lineup.

Porsche’s struggles are symptoms of a worrisome trend for the auto industry. Manufacturers around the world are failing to convince their richest customers to switch to cars that run on batteries rather than gasoline — even after pouring billions of dollars into developing them.

[snip]

“Many customers are petrol-heads — they want the sound and character of a V8, V12 or a high-revving V6,” said Tom Jaconelli, a director at UK-based dealer Romans International. “Car culture and community events still revolve around combustion cars, and for now EVs don’t really excite enthusiasts in the same way.”

Okay, the macho “throaty roar” set is one segment, but even the more sedate of the rich have objections to battery cars — they hate to wait, or suffer from range anxiety:

Uber British luxury brand Bentley is also rethinking its approach to the electrification of the entire line. The legendary car maker is going to 'refocus,' which is always code for 'abrupt change in plans because we may have screwed up.' Bentley wants to be able to 'take our customers with us.'

...As part of its ‘Beyond 100’ strategy, Bentley originally wanted to convert its entire model range to electric drive by 2030. This goal was already postponed by five years last year. Now, the British luxury brand has announced that it will refocus on combustion engines in the medium term.

“Electrification is still our goal, but we need to take our customers with us”

“There is a dip in demand for luxury electric vehicles, and customer demand is not yet strong enough to support an all-electric strategy. The luxury market is a lot different today than when we announced Beyond100,” Walliser told the British trade magazine.

“A dip in demand” — uh huh.

For the German brands, this was a luxury lesson price-wise, too, at a time when the European auto manufacturers are being buffeted by Chinese competitors and pricing/manufacturing pressures alike.

Porsche pulls back from EV strategy, hitting VW with $6B loss

Porsche announced on Friday a dramatic pullback from its electric vehicle strategy, dealing a $6 billion blow to parent company Volkswagen and marking the fourth time this year the luxury automaker has cut its financial guidance. The Stuttgart-based company will delay the launch of several all-electric models and extend the production of combustion and hybrid vehicles well into the 2030s, responding to weaker-than-expected EV demand and mounting global pressures.

  • Slave labor is far cheaper, and Chinese EV prices reflect that

There is also the problem of EVs being remarkably easy to knock off. For years, the luxury models were all foreign brands to China, like the Porsches and Mercedes. But no one learns faster and makes better copies than the Chinese. Now, those traditional car brands have fallen away, with the Chinese imitations rocketing up the charts to supplant them in popularity and sales. This, too, is hurting the bottom line.

According to at least one survey, 96% of American EV owners also own a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine (ICE). It’s one thing to convince more Americans to buy an expensive toy —we love toys — but it’s turning out to be a tough slog to get them to abandon their ICEs altogether. Of course, eliminating range worry will undoubtedly speed up that otherwise-dormant transition:

It might have been kinder to just give them “Israeli pagers”

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Greta Thunberg and the members of her freedom flotilla have been blasted by Abba on repeat after radios on board the vessels were hijacked.

The Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), which believes the incident to be the work of an Israeli attack, were subjected to hours of relentless playing of ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ by the Swedish pop band – in a possible nod to Ms Thunberg’s nationality.

Multiple ships in the activist’s flotilla were understood to be targeted by the attack.

“They’re jamming our radio,” Yasemin Acar, a member of the GSF, claimed in a video while Abba blasted in the background.

I’m not entirely familiar with ABBA’s oeuvre, so I had to look up “Lay all your love on me” — Israel may well be guilty of a war crime in this instance.

Of course, the classic, all-time-best video about one of these so-called aid flotillas was made many years ago, in 2010. Watch:

Presumably, these were a part of the billions of dollars Schumer and his party are demanding be restored to "health care"

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Certainly, they weren’t complaining while the thefts were occurring on their watch — how much of a piece were they skimming off, that their outrage at its curtailment is so loud now?

Elon Musk's DOGE Uncovered the Biggest Health Care Heist in American History

Virginia Taft:

…. If you didn’t hear about the bust of 324 people; the U.S.-based cartel shell medical supply companies; the pill mills pushing opioids; the doctors on the take; or how law enforcement captured many of the bad guys at the U.S. border and airports as they rushed to escape, that’s understandable. The feds revealed this potential $14.6 billion "depth charge" planted inside the Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance programs in June, while  most people were away on summer vacation. [Or perhaps because the media monkeys were too busy creating stories about heartbreak and sorrow of “victims” to report it — Ed]

Why did transnational organizations go after these particular programs? "Criminals go where the money is," Acting Health and Human Services Inspector General,Juliet Hodgkins said at a news conference about "the largest health care fraud takedown in American history." There's more than $1.4 trillion spent by these government programs per year, and the bad guys have tried, by hook or by crook, and even with the aid of AI, to set into motion plans to steal nearly $15 billion. They got away with just shy of $3 billion before they were caught, and their other frauds were frozen in their tracks. 

If this bust looks to you like it had Elon Musk's old Department of Government Efficiency fingerprints on it, you'd be right. Using AI and law enforcement tactics, the DOGE team worked with HHS, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, and an all-hands-on-deck array of federal agents from the DEA, FBI, and health care agencies to track down all fraud leads, according to Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As a result, the feds are setting up a healthcare data fusion center to detect where fraud spikes are occurring in near real time.

"DOGE is involved," Oz told reporters in June. "The president has been very clear that he wants this fraud, waste and abuse crushed. That's the word that's used." He continued, "DOGE is not just about cutting waste and fraud within government. [It] has been actively involved at CMS in helping us address places where fraud is existing that we never thought to look." 

….

According to the DOJ, overseas cartel thieves set up a sophisticated network of medical supply companies that "submitted more than $10 billion in fraudulent healthcare claims to Medicare." The bad guys used stolen identities of at least one million Americans found in data breaches and sold on the dark web to make the reimbursement requests. It's unclear if the thieves used the unique Medicare and Medicaid identifying numbers to steal the money.

Other scams used a network of Phoenix-based sober living houses to demand government payments for people who never got addiction treatment at the facilities. The facilities, run by ProMD, received $560 million before the feds caught on to the scam.

In Atlanta, medical professionals ordered skin grafts for dying patients who didn't need them. By the time the grift was discovered, they'd scammed Medicare out of $760 million. 

People from as far away as Estonia have been arrested. Seven people were found trying to scuttle over the southern U.S. border but were stopped before they got away. Another bunch were caught trying to leave the country from U.S. airports. 

The bad actors from Russia, Pakistan, and Eastern Europe used the American health care system like their "personal piggy bank," the Department of Justice's Acting Criminal Division leader, Matthew Galeotti, said. He said that "this was a staggering breach of trust" and they "will prosecute these criminals as aggressively as we would any drug dealer because that's exactly what they are."

Musk, who stepped away from the White House after a rift with President Donald Trump, is the one who conceived and executed the DOGE project, and he’s a damned American hero. Let's give that guy a medal for saving American taxpayers yet another tranche of billions.

From your lips to God’s ear, Senator

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White House: Nice Swamp Ya Got There, Chuck. Shame If Something Happened to It. 

ED MORRISSEY  10:40 AM | September 25, 2025 

Two days ago, Chuck Schumer threatened Donald Trump with a good time. Now, the White House threatens to make the good time permanent. Literally. 

The deadline for a government shutdown is fast approaching, and Schumer tried to play hardball this week. He and Hakeem Jeffries demanded a meeting with Trump to negotiate, which Trump initially accepted, but canceled after the pair demanded a massive list of concessions before the meeting took place. Schumer then told the press that Trump was "chicken" and that any shutdown would be his fault -- even though the House had already passed the clean CR that Schumer had demanded when Joe Biden was president-ish.

Of course, even with the spin, that stlll leaves Trump in charge of any shutdown. As I explained on Tuesday, that would give any aspiring swamp-draining president plenty of opportunity to hammer Democrats' constituencies, but even I may have underestimated Trump's ambition. The Wall Street Journal reports today that they will use any shutdown as an opportunity for permanent mass firings, not just furloughs:

The White House’s budget office directed federal agencies to draw up plans to permanently reduce their workforces if there is a government shutdown next week, raising the specter of mass firings on top of the customary furloughs during a lapse in funding. 

The new memo sent by Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought sharply raises the stakes for funding talks and increases the pressure on Senate Democrats, who are demanding that Republicans restore hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare spending as a condition of their support for keeping the government funded.

…. Vought makes clear, too, that the cuts will get targeted in accordance with Trump's priorities:

The OMB memo instructs agencies to design reduction-in-force plans for employees who work for programs that have no current funding and have no outside funding source, and that are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.” This would be in addition to any temporary furloughs that happen during a government shutdown. 

The memo from Vought says that any cuts made after the funding deadline would be permanent.

In fact, Politico notes that some Democrats are beginning to wonder what their feckless leader thinks he's doing. They also note that Schumer made the exact opposite argument just six months ago:

The memo appears to vindicate warnings issued by some Democrats — most prominently Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — during the last shutdown standoff in March. Schumer at the time moved to allow a GOP-written spending bill to pass, arguing that a shutdown would be a “gift” allowing Trump and his deputies “to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.”

A stunning, coveted chefs' kitchen will lure them in from New York every time

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12 Turner Drive, new construction comprising 11,830 sq. ft ( 5,000 of which is buried underground) on barely an acre, is listed a $11.995 million and reported under contract today.

I might question the accuracy of describing a house on an acre of land an “estate”, as this listing agent does, even if it is “stunning”, “timeless” and “showcases a chef’s kitchen”, but I suppose if you’re coming from a 750 sq.ft. studio apartment with a hot plate for a dish bucket drying rack, perhaps it does. In any event, it worked.

Reminder: U.S. taxpayers "contribute" more than one-quarter of the UN's $9 billion budget

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NY Post Editorial September 24, 2025

Nepo baby* Violet Affleck proves Trump right about the United Nations’ uselessness

UN officials couldn’t have done more to prove President Donald Trump right about the world body’s deep worthlessness when they put nepo baby Violet Affleck on the global stage to blather about the need to filter air.

That’s right: At the UN’s Healthy Indoor Air session Tuesday, Violet Affleck — just 19 and with no qualification beyond being the daughter of actors Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner — railed about the dangers of airborne viruses and the importance of mask mandates amid the “ongoing pandemic.”

“Adults,” she huffed (through a KN95 mask), are “ignoring, downplaying and concealing both the prevalence of airborne transmission and the threat of Long COVID.”

It’s pure lunacy. 

The pandemic ended years ago. Figures from New York’s Health Department show the infection rate in the city is 1 in 100,000 and often less. COVID no longer ranks as a major cause of death in the US.

Even if COVID was still a threat, the best science determined that masks aren’t effective at stopping the coronavirus’ spread: The definitive Cochrane review found they made “little to no difference” in curbing its contagiousness.

Heck, even the left’s COVID idol, Anthony Fauci, admitted that “from a broad public-health standpoint,” masks work only “at the margins”; he and other US public-health authorities dishonestly exaggerated their effectiveness all along.

Hilariously, the UN had promised “high-level speakers” at the “healthy air” event, implying those with deep expertise and published, peer-reviewed research.

Not a woman not yet 20, with an obvious germ obsession, after having suffered a post-viral condition in 2019 — pre-pandemic!

What a joke. 

On the same day. Trump was rightly asking if United Nations does anything of value.

And, no, hosting dog-and-pony shows symbolically rewarding Hamas’ terrorism by recognizing a Palestinian state doesn’t pass the bar. 

The institution has “such tremendous potential,” insisted Trump, yet not only is it “not solving” problems, it’s “actually creating new” ones.

Such as inflicting young Miss Affleck’s nonsense on a global audience. 

* “A nepo baby is an informal, often derogatory, term for a person, particularly in the entertainment industry, whose career and success are believed to be significantly aided by family connections and privilege rather than solely by talent or hard work. The term is a portmanteau of "nepotism" and "baby," referring to the practice of using family connections to gain preferential treatment or opportunities. While the term can be used to describe anyone who benefits from nepotism, it gained significant popularity through social media discussions about Hollywood and celebrity culture.”  

This poor little hysteric is a freshman at Yale — it appears that nepo babies are rewarded with more than just film roles.

This article's from December, 2023, but keep it in mind as this year's hurricane season and media hype both heat up

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The climate scaremongers: Hurricanes aren’t getting more frequent . . .

THE official end of the Atlantic hurricane season last Thursday, November 30, brought claims that it was the ‘fourth busiest on record’, with lurid accounts of terrible storms. For instance, USA Today‘s headline read ‘Atlantic hurricane season 2023 was filled with monster storms’. 

None of this is true.

There were seven hurricanes in all, three of which were Category 3 and over (on a scale of 1-5). Both numbers were spot on the 30-year average. Hurricane frequency this year ranks only 33rd highest since 1851, and there have been 55 other years with the same number or greater.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/the-2023-atlantic-hurricane-season-was-average-not-4th-busiest/

In other words, it has been a perfectly normal year.

The claim of ‘fourth busiest’ stems from the number of ‘named storms’. As well as hurricanes, these include the much weaker tropical storms, which can have average wind speeds of as little as 39mph, much less powerful than many of the winter storms which head our way across the Atlantic. When we look at trends in these tropical storms, we see that they have doubled in number since the 1990s:

https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/comparison_table.html

But this does not mean that more storms are forming. In a remarkable lapse in its editorial standards (!), the BBC explained all this a couple of years ago:

‘Over the past 10 to 15 years, though, named storms have formed prior to the official start about 50 per cent of the time. And the way they are defined and observed has changed significantly over time. “Many of these storms are short-lived systems that are now being identified because of better monitoring and policy changes that now name sub-tropical storms,” Dennis Feltgen, meteorologist at the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) told BBC Weather. The number of named storms has increased over the decades, but there is no real evidence this is the result of a warming world.’

In fact there was a step change in policy in 2002, when the US National Hurricane Center began naming all sub-tropical storms. Previously these were given only a number.

Before the satellite era, of course, most of the storms now named would not even have been spotted in the middle of the ocean.

In short, we now name more storms than before 2002, but there is no evidence that more storms are actually occurring. And when they tell you it was the fourth busiest season on record, they actually mean the fourth busiest since 2002!

(I should point out that the named storms do not include the storms which the Met Office gives silly names to – these are known as extratropical storms.)

 . . . or more powerful

MANY people believe that hurricanes are either becoming more frequent, more powerful, or both, because the media tell them so. The BBC, for example, still broadcast a video produced in 2022 on their weather page, which wrongly claimed hurricanes are getting stronger.

The real world data shows there is no basis for any of these claims.

The best long-term record we have is for hurricanes which have made landfall in the US. The US Hurricane Research Division have records dating back to 1851, and they believe that this database is probably pretty complete since 1900, by which time most of the Atlantic and Gulf coast had been populated.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/the-2023-atlantic-hurricane-season-was-average-not-4th-busiest/

The data is perfectly clear: there has been no increasing trend in the frequency of either all hurricanes or the stronger ones (Cat 3 and over).

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US federal agency who deal with all climate matters, recently confirmed this:

‘There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in US landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes.’ 

This year there was just one hurricane in the US, well below the 30-year average of 3.8.

Many hurricanes meander around the Atlantic without ever hitting the US, and it is only since full satellite coverage began in the 1980s that we have been able to track them from start to finish. For this reason, long-term comparisons are not only worthless, but highly and deliberately misleading.

You can see the stark difference between the hurricanes/storms which were tracked in 1923 and this year:

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/tafb_latest/tws_atl_latest.gif

Apparently they did not have storms in the mid-Atlantic in those days!

Hurricane scientists have, however, put a lot of work into filling in the  gaps, re-analysing historical meteorological data. Based on much research, NOAA confirm that: ‘Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for changing observing capabilities over time), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.’

I doubt whether you will see that reported by the BBC!