On October 5, 1910, the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown and a republic declared.
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A New Republic Created
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Flood and Fire
Tesla, the maker of some of the most popular, eye-catching, and prestige electric vehicles of our time, offers advice to folks who may experience “submersion events” with their automobiles. The company “recommends moving EVs to higher ground ahead of potential” unholy baptisms and warns owners to keep a safe distance as well as notify “first responders if one notices ‘fire, smoke, audible popping/hissing or heating coming from your vehicle,’” summarizes The Epoch Times.
This is sparked, I’m sorry to say (and pun) by hurricane victims in Florida, at least six of whom had their houses catch fire after their electric vehicles caught fire after their vehicles were submerged in water. Florida’s chief financial officer and fire marshal Jimmy Patronis put the number higher, at 16, of burning “EVs in the Tampa Bay area alone, including Pinellas County.”
“So far.”
When it floods, it burns.
“The governor had warned EV owners in Florida to get their vehicles to higher ground ahead of Helene’s arrival,” explains Jacob Burg, in the above-mentioned Epoch Times piece, “as contact with saltwater can short-circuit the batteries, causing a catastrophic chain reaction known as thermal runaway in which heat energy is released from the battery to cause a fire.”
I’ve been seeing quite a few reports that EVs don’t do well in extreme conditions. The cold, for one, where the batteries don’t work properly, and the heat, for another, when they can too easily catch fire. And now this “submersion” menace.
Electric vehicles sure do appear to demonstrate a technology still in its infancy.
One the government shouldn’t be pushing on us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney
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Bliss Perry
Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to the good of the community.
Bliss Perry, The American Mind (1912), pp. 81 – 82.
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SpaceShipOne
On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to fly into space, thereby winning for Mojave Aerospace Ventures the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight.
California Governor Newsom wants to outlaw all political speech annoying to himself. If legislation he’s just signed is allowed to stand, he’ll be well on the way to doing so.
One target of California’s two new laws, the Babylon Bee, is filing suit against them.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the Bee, says that the subjects of the lawsuit, California’s AB2839 and AB265, “censor speech through subjective standards like prohibiting pictures and videos ‘likely to harm’ a candidate’s ‘electoral prospects.’… AB 2655 applies to large online platforms and requires them to sometimes label, and other times remove, posts with ‘materially deceptive content.’”
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon observes that, contrary to the wishes of “self-serving politicians [who] abuse their power to try and control public discourse and clamp down on comedy,” the right to tell jokes they dislike is secured by the First Amendment.
The vague nature of the laws would enable California officials to “police speech they disagree with,” according to ADF and Captain Obvious.
One of the laws requires a disclaimer to be attached to satirical content, a mandate that also violates the First Amendment.
The immediate incentive for fast-tracking the censorship bills into law was a parody video of Kamala Harris that includes a simulation of her voice. The video does bill itself as parody but that is obvious regardless. This video “should be illegal,” Newsom asseverated.
No, it shouldn’t.
Anyway, watch the hilarity on YouTube … while you can.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Joseph Butler
Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?
Bishop Butler, epigraph for The Moral Economy (1909) by Ralph Barton Perry.