Jaguar Continues Brand Suicide

December 4th, 2024

It seems that trying to Bud Light their brand was just the beginning of Jaguar’s brand suicide. For a couple of weeks, images have been floating around online showing some hideous pink monstrosity that was dismissed as merely concept art. Alas, it seems to be all too real.

It like a giant pink dildo had sex with the Batmobile from Batman: The Animated Series. It’s so gay that Elton John would tell them to tone it down. There’s no rear window or side mirrors (which will likely make the car illegal in most states).

Feedback is not enthusiastic.

This vehicular Pink Panther is falling flat on its face.

Jaguar’s alleged attempts to woo Generation Z with a Barbie-pink electric vehicle backfired spectacularly after Zoomers dubbed the luxury UK automaker’s creation “cheap” and compared it to a “pink Batmobile.”

Pictures of new Jaguar Type 00 concept, dubbed the Design Vision Concept, had leaked online ahead of its official release at Miami Art Week this week, the Telegraph reported.

Per the photos, the $126,519.50 vehicle featured a giant bonnet, slatted rectangular grills and no rear window while the leaping Jaguar logo has vanished from both ends, taking a back seat to a divisive, new round logo, the Daily Mail reported.

Jaguar had a great logo, and now they’re throwing it away in this idiotic woke rebrand.

However, the hot-omobile’s most noticeable feature was its “Miami pink” exterior, which evoked a boxier version of the Corvette from the “Barbie” movie. It also comes in metallic blue.

Gerry McGovern, the chief creative officer of Jaguar Land Rover, deemed the flamboyant concept car a “taste of things to come” at the Miami convention.

And that taste seems to be “coal covered in pink aluminum foil.”

Jaguar Managing Director Rawdon Glover notably dubbed the company’s new direction a “complete reset” meant to “inspire a new generation.”

Ironically, many of their so-called intended younger customers were quick to put the Type 00 model in the rhetorical car compactor.

“If you thought the Jaguar rebrand was peak cringe, you gotta look at their new car,” scoffed one detractor on X.

Snip.

“What on Earth is Jaguar thinking?” exclaimed gearhead Luke Malpas in one TikTok clip. “They’ve gone from being a staple of British engineering, creating some of the best cars we’ve seen on the road, to this”

“Go woke, you know the rest,” wrote podcaster Jay Anderson on X, while journalist Jordan Schachtel wrote, “Go DEI go absolutely broke. This is a mockery of the Jaguar brand.”

Some critics found the “Copy Nothing” slogan ironic, given that the new EV vehicle seemed to rip off many storied vehicle brands.

“Copy nothing except Rolls Royce, Bentley, and then put a Studabaker radiator on the back of the car,” snarked Canopy Capital Group CEO Eric Golden on X.

“Copy nothing? It’s a pink Batmobile,” scoffed another naysayer while decrying the vehicle’s departure from the brand’s iconic macho mobiles of old.

Some accused Jaguar of risking alienating their consumer base by attempting to appeal to people who will never buy their product.

“Someone on the Jaguar marketing team has greatly overestimated the size of the ‘vegan barista who wants to roll up to the drum circle in a luxury sports car’ market, I fear,” mused Lulu Cheng Meservey, a board member at tech company Shopify, on X.

“I have a feeling @Jaguar may be about to find out that there are fewer well-off, non-binary, woke lesbians of color than their echo chamber assured them there were,” sniped right-wing British Reclaim Party founder and “political correctness” foe Laurence Fox.

This is simply the latest evidence that Jaguar is doubling down on wokeness. “Santino Pietrosanti, UK Brand Director at Jaguar Land Rover, teased the upcoming rebrand for the company as part of its own ‘transformative journey.’ ‘We’re on a transformative journey of our own. Driven by a belief in diversity, inclusion, creativity, policy and, most importantly, action. We’ve established over 15 DEI groups such as Pride, which are here tonight, and Women in Engineering and Neurodiversity Matters,’ Pietrosanti said.” Absent from that rebrand checklist is respect for its existing (overwhelmingly male) customer base, who I seriously doubt are inclined to plop down six figure sums for ugly pink electric cars. And there aren’t enough wealthy Mary Kay saleswomen in the world to make up that deficit.

I’d previously said that Rawdon Glover needs to be fired to save the brand, but that clearly isn’t sufficient. Not only does Pietrosanti need to go, but everyone in the executive suite, everyone in branding and everyone in marketing who refused to push back against this insane, brand-destroying path.

And, of course, the entire DEI department. But that goes without saying for every company…

Syria’s Civil War Unfreezes

December 2nd, 2024

And the latest long-simmering hotspot to flare up overnight is (spins wheel) SYRIA!

Who had their chips on Syria?

The Syria civil war has more or less been frozen for the last, what, two years? That’s not the case anymore, as the anti-Assad forces just launched as massive attack that has Assad’s forces on their heels.

All those green flags are anti-Assad attacks. More from JihadWatch.

Syrian Islamist rebels appear to have made stunning territorial advances against the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad on Friday, re-entering the city of Aleppo for the first time in eight years amid the apparent collapse of government defenses in the area.

Unconfirmed videos on social media suggest that rebel fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other groups captured parts of western Aleppo, which was Syria’s most populous city prior to the country’s ongoing civil war, which broke out in 2011.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) emerged as an al-Qaeda splinter faction, although it now rejects affiliation with the terror group. The United States designated HTS as a foreign terrorist organization in 2018.

The offensive marks the rebels’ most significant advance, following years of stalemate in northwest Syria, with Turkish-backed rebels and HTS holding a narrow strip of territory around the provinces of Idlib and Afrin.

Turkey and Russia signed a ceasefire in 2020 after agreeing to turn Idlib into a “de-escalation zone” in 2018.

There are supposedly some pro-Assad holdouts in Aleppo.

The interesting thing about Syria is a that it’s a back-burner conflict that ties into all the other conflicts in the region. Iran backs Syria, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, against Egypt. Syria also backs Hezbollah, both against Israel and to maintain a level of control over neighboring Lebanon. Turkey backs some of the jihadist forces fighting against Syria, while others are backed by, I don’t know, pick a random Sunni dynastic petrostate and you’ve probably got fair odds of being right. Russia also backs Syria, and is also its number one arms supplier.

And what do Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Russia all have in common? They’ve all been getting heir asses kicked in regional conflicts, either by Israel or by Ukraine, both of which are backed by the United States.

Now must have seemed like the right time to settle Assad’s hash, with his catspaw Hezbollah absolutely wrecked by Israel and Russia too busy with their own conflict(s) to offer much if anything in the way of aid.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) split off from al Qaeda and has evidently ruthless destroyed any al Qaeda fighters it can find, so…yay? They’re still jihadist scumbags, and have split/merged/changed acronyms five or six times since I last looked at the Syrian Civil War.

A Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led Syria would probably be just as hostile to Israel…but not aligned with Iran.

Half a yay?

Russia responded to the collapse of Assad forces in Aleppo by…buggering out of Hama.

Is the Assad regime about to fall? Maybe, as military collapse can become contagious, but Aleppo is a long way from Damascus. Remember, the Islamic State was racking up victory after victory right up until it wasn’t.

I imagine Assad’s forces will be able to hold the capital, where resistance will stiffen up. Even before then, Homs probably won’t be a cake-walk either, but there’s also speculation that anti-Assad forces will try to take various Syrian post cities, which would put considerable economic pressure on Assad.

Assad looks to be in deep trouble, but he’s slithered out of sticky predicaments before. Odds are he’ll survive this time as well, though no doubt seriously weakened.

Ryan Long On “Activists”

December 1st, 2024

“Lazy Thanksgiving Weekend Video Blogging” continues here at BattleSwarm, with a random Ryan Long comedy bit on activists.

“I feel like vegans are the most hated activist group vegans get so much shit. People will be like ‘FUck you. You’re like that pedophile. They’re like ‘behind him there’s a vegan!'”

Plus a bit on cryptocurrency.

USA vs. Russia: Who Wins?

November 30th, 2024

A certain commenter on a certain thread asserted that the Russo-Ukrainian War continued because “Putin determined that he could thoroughly degrade the military power of the United States.”

Yeah. No.

Rather than a detailed, point-by-point refutation, I’m going to let Habitual Linecrosser do they heavy lifting on this one.

Plus Thanksgiving weekend is seriously impacting my blogging bandwidth, so it’s going to be a few days before you get any sort of LinkSwarm…

Prepper/Black Friday Shopping Guide

November 29th, 2024

Since I know many of you will be shopping on Black Friday, here’s A.) Listing some basic prepping and cold weather gear, and B.) Providing possible gifts or purchases for items I approve of.

I’ve included Amazon links, but for some items (like batteries), Sam’s or Lowes tends to offer better prices. But a lot of these do seem to have Black Friday savings prices.

The Basics

Here are some all-purpose tools everyone should already have, listed here for completeness sake.

  • First aid kit: There are a lot of different makes and models of these, and I think Sam’s offers a kit that’s a bit cheaper than this one. Has a little bit of everything. A good thing to keep in your car for emergencies.
  • Smoke alarm: Everyone should already have these, but if you don’t, or want more, this has a silence button so you can put it in your kitchen. These seem to be made in Mexico, but First Alert also makes stuff in China, so caveat emptor.
  • Carbon Monoxide detector. Doesn’t say, but I suspect it’s another item made in China. There are some combination carbon monoxide/smoke detectors, but I think you want to avoid the possibility of a single point of failure. You also need to replace these about every ten years anyway.
  • Fire Extinguisher: Every home should have at least one, and make sure it’s not expired. This is what I have (I think it’s made in Mexico), but fortunately I’ve never had to use it.
  • Water leak detector: A lot of people don’t have these, but I consider them essential basic gear, as they can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in water damage. I had one of mine go off a week before the ice storm hit because a shutoff valve I had closed to plunge an overflowing toilet had started leaking. Usual made in China caveats apply, but it’s very simple tech (two parallel wires on the exterior that water closes the circuit and sets off when wet). That link goes to a 5-pack of the brand I have, because I recommend putting one behind every toilet, under every sink you use, under your water heater, and next to your washing machine (I’ve had mine start rocking for an unbalanced load that pulled the drain hose loose). However, that 5-pack has gotten pretty pricey, so here’s an even cheaper five pack from another manufacturer (also made in China) that I have no experience with.
  • Speaking of plunging toilets, I imagine everyone already has a plunger, but if you don’t, here’s one, and you might consider one for each bathroom, or at least each floor. Also, the black bell shaped ones are a lot more effective than the small old red ones.
  • Speaking of things everyone should already have more of, everyone needs flashlights. This Goreit flashlight seems bright, cheap, and gets pretty good reviews. The highest rated flashlight on Amazon is the Streamlight 75458 Stinger DS, which is fairly pricey. I assume it’s brighter and with a longer life, and maybe you have a use case that justifies the cost. And speaking of ridiculous lights I have no use case for…
  • The IMALENT MS18 is evidently so insanely bright that it has its own cooling fan. Here’s a video of how insane it is. And if you have flashlights, chances are you’ll also need…
  • Batteries. D-Cells are still used in a lot of things, and you’re going to want, at a minimum, enough to reload every flashlight twice, which should be enough to get you through a couple of evenings of power outages. Check your flashlights every six months when you check your smoke and CO detectors. Speaking of which, those and the water leak detectors take 9 volt batteries, and you want enough around to be able to change out every battery in your detectors as needed. Those links go to Duracells, which I’ve been pretty happy with.
  • Car jump starter: Much better than jumper cables, and can save you money when you have a dead battery, or because it’s just not cranking in the cold.
  • Gas And Water Emergency Shut Off Tool. The Orbit 26097 provides a water shutoff valve, a gas shutoff valve, manhole cover lift tool, and a rubberized grip. You need one of these for the same reason you need a water leak detector, i.e. it will greatly limit damage before the plumber gets there.
  • Sawyer Products Water Filtration System: If you’ve ever been under a water boil notice, the Sawyer system is Good Enough to get you through, even if it is a slight pain to fill and squeeze the bag enough times for my dogs and I to drink (but still less of a pain that boiling water and waiting for it to cool).
  • Duct tape is useful to have year-round, but especially during an emergency, to patch a small leak or keep something together until the emergency is over and you can replace it. Link goes to 3M all-weather duct tape, which is better than the generic stuff for outside tasks, like sealing around the edge of a faucet cover.
  • 12 pack LED Tea Lights. This is a strange one. These mimic flickering candlelight, and I bought them for Halloween decorations, for which they worked well enough. I think they’re just bright enough and cheap enough for a few use cases around the house in an extended power outage. You can probably (just barely) read with them by holding them right next to the page, but I think they would be most useful for providing acceptable light in places like bathrooms, at the top and bottom of dark stairways, on dining tables, etc.
  • Cold Weather

    Here are some specific prep items for cold weather:

  • Faucet Covers. If you’re a homeowner, you probably already have those, but if not, here they are, and they seem to work better than a rag or dripping the faucet, and neither of my faucets busted in the ice storm. That link goes to the cheap Styrofoam version, but these plastic ones look a bit bigger and stronger.
  • O’Keeffe’s Working Hands cream: I walk my dogs 2-3 times a day pretty much every single day of the year, and I found my hands getting cracked and raw in the cold, even through gloves. O’Keeffe’s Working Hands fixed the problem. I frequently give this stuff out as Christmas gifts.
  • Carmex lip balm. A small, cheap jar that solves the chapped lips problem in winter. I know some people prefer Chapstick, but to me the main result of using Chapstick is that 30 minutes later you fell a need to use more Chapstick.
  • Kerasal Intensive Foot Repair for cracked and painful feet. Podiatrist recommended! Full review here.
  • De-icing spray. You can stand there for 15 minutes ineffectually scraping your frozen windows like William H. Macy in Fargo, or you can keep a bottle of this in your trunk.
  • Non-Prep “Stuff You Might Need”

    Here are things I’ve bought I’m happy with.

  • Have trouble getting to sleep at night? Have you tried Melatonin? All I can say is that it works for me (sometimes boosted with generic Acetaminophen PM, which you can buy cheap at Sam’s).
  • I’d been having trouble finding plain white T-shirts soft enough to sleep in, but these work really well.
  • Silicone oven mitts: My cousin used these last Thanksgiving and I was impressed with them. They work great and don’t seem to wear out as quickly as cloth mitts do.
  • If you haven’t seen The Death of Stalin yet, I highly recommend it.
  • Speaking of 1970s TV detectives, we’ve been working our way through the complete Rockford Files, and the set is a pretty good value for the money, if you don’t mind the paper sleeves.
  • If you like offbeat science fiction and fantasy, you might try this two volume Avram Davidson set, set up as print-on-demand books from the Avram Davidson society. At 100 stories, it’s a lot of bang for your buck.
  • Do you collect Arkham House books? probably a long shot for this blog, but if so, Don Herron and John D. Haefele’s Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years 1937 —1973: A Pictorial History & Guide For Collectors might be for you. A POD book, this is just what the title says, a pictorial history of Arkham House ephemera (catalogs, review slips, etc.) issued from the press’s founding up through 1973. The book is actually useful even if you don’t collect ephemera, as the full catalogs show when books went out of print and how much they were going for, etc.

  • I know I should be better at offering up Amazon offerings to rake in the filthy lucre, but I don’t tend to buy books and DVDs/Blu-rays from them. Mostly the things I buy from Amazon are vitamins and dog treats, which aren’t exactly exciting link fodder…

    A Babylon Bee Thanksgiving

    November 28th, 2024

    Happy Thanksgiving! A hope all of you have a great day eating too much food with your family and love ones!

    For those left-wing sorts, the Babylon Bee provides a handy guide (in their usual helpful way) for “How to Talk to Your Racist MAGA Uncle This Thanksgiving.”

  • “I’m a good, tolerant person and they’re all terrible, intolerant people. And how can I find common ground with these rednecks who are literally Hitler?”
  • “First, try slowly and articulately explaining to him how he is a racist, a bigot, a Nazi, and just an overall garbage person.”
  • “Sometimes your family might disagree with you and attempt to use far right tactics such as facts and logic.” So obviously you should run away and hide in your safe space…
  • Enjoy!

    Walmart Abandons Wokeness

    November 27th, 2024

    It’s pretty big news when the largest retailer in America abandons wokeness.

    Anti-woke crusader Robby Starbuck has been on a mission to shift the corporate landscape in America from insanity and rainbows to what he considers “sanity and neutrality.” He has successfully pressured companies such as Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Lowe’s, Ford, Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Jack Daniel’s, DeWalt Tools, Craftsman, Caterpillar, Boeing, and Toyota to move away from toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices.

    Now, Starbuck is at it again. He wrote on X that America’s largest employer, Walmart, has decided to end its woke policies after he “had productive conversations to find solutions” with management.

    He stated that the changes Walmart committed to “will send shockwaves throughout corporate America,” adding that their executives deserve “major credit” for wanting to end corporate wokeness.

    “This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America,” Starbuck said.

    Here are the changes Walmart committed to:

  • Surveys: Walmart will no longer participate in the HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index.
  • Products: Monitor the Walmart marketplace to identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children.
  • Funding of Grants: Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids.
  • Equity: We will not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative.
  • Supplier Diversity: We will evaluate supplier diversity programs and ensure they do not provide preferential treatment and benefits to suppliers based on diversity. We don’t have quotas and won’t going forward. Financing eligibility will no longer be predicated on providing certain demographic data.
  • LatinX: Walmart will no longer use the term in official communications.
  • Trainings: Walmart will discontinue racial equity training through the Racial Equity Institute.
  • DEI: Walmart will discontinue the use of DEI as a term while ensuring a respectful and supportive environment. Our focus is on Belonging for ALL associates and customers.
  • Starbuck continued:

    Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B. This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers.

    We’ve now changed policy at companies worth over $2 Trillion dollars, with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. I’m happy to have secured these changes before Christmas when shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies. Companies like Amazon and Target should be very nervous that their top competitor dropped woke policies first. I think Target specifically will suffer serious sales problems as a result and Walmart will benefit.

    Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies. Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.

    We are winning and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America.

    Kevin O’Leary on Fox Business had some choice things to say:

  • “Target is a great example. When they got into the gender identity stuff, they got slaughtered.”
  • “You’ve got to start punishing stupidity at the management level.”
  • They now teach Bud Light in schools as a cautionary example of what not to do.
  • Indeed, O’Leary called the Bud Light debacle “a complete combination of idiot management and the inability to read the room.”

    This particular turn of phrase stuck out to me, because I remember, very clearly, that the phrase “read the room” was used like a club  to justify whatever woke idiocy was coming down the pike at the time: Football players kneeling, defunding the police, treating #BlackLivesMatter riots as justification to break Flu Manchu quarantine, etc. It was a lie based on systemic preference falsification then, but more than true now, as America as a whole is done with wokeness.

    Walmart is a big, big domino, and expect most of American companies looking to toss all their woke idiocy on the dunghill of history, no matter how much their HR department might object.

    Pink slip by pink slip, progress is made.

    Babylon Bee On Democrats Rethinking Their Approach

    November 26th, 2024

    The Babylon Bee just dropped a video on Democrats “rethinking” their approach.

  • “The election did not go as we planned it.” “Only because the voters are racist, misogynist garbage.”
  • “I don’t understand. We all said that if Trump won, it’d be the end of democracy, and that there would never be another election.”
  • “So one group that we have to get better with is Latinx men. Okay. They don’t like us and they don’t like being called Latinx men.” “Stupid idiots.”
  • “We cannot just start calling them Latino and Latina. That would be buying into the patriarchal gender binary.”
  • “So is there another letter that we can tack on to Latin?”
  • “Latine. But we but we actually pronounce it Latiné. Like, with one of those Mexican line thingies on the top. Yeah, it’s not as cumbersome as Latinx, but it’s still forced and pretentious enough to make it clear that we’re better than anyone else that doesn’t say it this way.”
  • “A lot of people are frustrated with the performative announcement of pronouns, the drag queen story hours, the chopping off of children’s body parts.” “Stupid idiots.”
  • “You know, when people don’t agree with us we usually just yell at them. ‘You’re transphobic!’ Well, what if instead of that, we yell it even louder!”
  • “I’d rather lose being right, comforted by the knowledgethat everyone else is garbage, than win being wrong. I’d rather get the approval of Rachel Maddow, the ladies of The View, and those kids out there calling for the murder of the Jews than pander to a bunch of lousy racists for a couple of votes.”
  • ShoeOnHead Rips The Dems

    November 25th, 2024

    Back before I was suspended on Twitter (I’m still suspended, since the Twitter/X appeals process is broken), I followed ShoeOnHead, who frequently had sane things to say about the lunacy of the left. I think she blocked me because I noted she was wrong about transexism, but this nice rant showed up in my feed recently.

  • “New York was closer to flipping red than Florida was to flipping blue.”
  • Where she’s coming from: “I voted for Bernie in the primaries in 2016 and I watched as the Democratic party did everything in their power to destroy this man. Twice. So it is safe to say I am a little biased when it comes to the Democratic Party.”
  • “You idiots! You morons. You imbeciles! Kamala Harris? Really? That’s who you threw up there? The one who dropped out before Iowa? The one who got blown the out by Tulsi Gabbard. Why didn’t you hold a primary? Aren’t you the saviors of democracy?
  • “Oh, big congratulations to Tim Walz on being the first white male DEI hire. It didn’t work. The DNC completely neutered that guy, reduced him to this weird token white man. “Hello, fellow men. I do play football.”
  • A nice slam on the Liz Cheney/#NeverTrumper idiocy.
  • A discussion of how young came out in force to vote for Trump…and of feminists openly wishing for them all to die.
  • “‘We need a liberal Joe Rogan!’ You had a liberal Joe Rogan! His name was Joe Rogan!” Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson (among others) have made this point as well.
  • “Democrats can’t have a Joe Rogan, because everything that makes Joe Rogan Joe Rogan is not allowed on the left.”
  • Plus a discussion of populism.
  • I’d advise watching the whole thing. You probably won’t agree with everything, but you might with a good 80-85% of it…