As a serious book collector and owner of two large dogs, I’m not a “van life” candidate. But this is a seriously cool and well-thought out conversion of a Dodge RAM ProMaster 3500 extended cab cargo van into a mobile full-time living space.
It’s pretty amazing that all that took only 4 months and $6,000.
A few things I would change:
If I were going to use it in Texas, I would need some sort of AC, even though I know those can be energy hogs, but there appear to be some options out there.
The propane set up for two stove burners and water heater for showers is cool, but I might want to opt for a microwave, tankless water heater and hot plate (though I know the first two of those can be energy hungry) just to simplify my energy logistics chain for true off-grid living.
I would need dedicated, concealed storage space built in for a few guns.
I’d need at least one bookcase (with retraining straps to keep the books from flying off in turns, naturally), because Me.
Possibly uses:
For real SHTF scenario, this sort of setup provides a pretty strong basis for a bug-out van that will let you live off the grid for quite a while. Drawbacks: It’s not a hybrid, so you can’t move the van off solar power once the gas runs out. You would probably want to add a switchable extra tank at a bare minimum for that use case, if not going with some sort of hybrid or solar conversion case. And it’s not armored against small arms fire, so some work in hardening parts of the van for that situation might be in order. Lots of weight/energy/cost tradeoffs to consider.
If you have a job where you have to be physically present at a high-cost location to work (like Silicon Valley), this looks like a really solid alternative to paying $3,000 a month in rent. And if you were an oilfield worker, this would let you really save money. (Again, you’d really need that AC if you were living in Odessa.)
A group seeking to ensure that elections are run fairly said this week that an in-depth analysis of mail-in ballot images it obtained through a court order shows that the hand-count audit in Fulton County, Georgia, last year “was riddled with massive errors and provable fraud.”
The analysis turned up at least 36 batches of mail-in ballots, containing 4,255 votes, that were added redundantly to the audit results, Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia (VoterGA), charged. Nearly 3,400 were for Democrat Joe Biden.
The team examining the ballots also found seven audit tally sheets (pdf) they believe were falsified to contain fabricated vote totals. In one example, the group said, a batch containing 59 ballot images for Biden and 42 for former President Donald Trump was reported as 100 for Biden and 0 for Trump.
The analysis revealed that 923 (60 percent) of the 1,539 mail-in ballot batch files contained votes that were incorrectly reported in the county’s official 2020 election result compared to the audit totals, according to VoterGA.
“We believe that there is massive audit errors,” Garland Favorito, founder of the group, told a press conference in Georgia on July 13.
The group received the images as part of a court case after it petitioned in late 2020 to get clearance to inspect all mail-in ballots cast in the county in the 2020 election, alleging that fraud took place. The petition cited witnesses to the alleged fraud, including Favorito and other poll watchers and workers.
Individuals and institutions were allowed to choose to align their investments with their values. They could sleep at night knowing that their capital was not supporting causes with which they disagreed, morally or politically. The only cost associated with this socially conscious undertaking was a hit to investment returns, which was inevitable but was accepted voluntarily as the price of peace of mind.
But these days, that’s simply not enough for the Big Sisters of Social Justice Warriorhood. Why make something voluntary when they can force it down your throat? Hence the push for Environmental Social Governance (ESG), a backdoor way to impose far-left values on corporations without having to deal with shareholders at all.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) is the biggest trend in finance and business. Index funds focused on sustainability oversee $250 billion of assets. Corporate leaders signaled their alignment with ESG when more than 180 CEOs signed the Business Roundtable statement on business purpose.
In contrast to the older ethical investment movement, which accepted that morally constrained investment strategies incur costs, ESG proponents claim that investors following ESG precepts earn higher risk-adjusted returns because companies with high ESG scores are lower-risk. Thus, their stock price will outperform, whereas those firms with low ESG scores are higher-risk, leading them to underperform.
This supposition conflicts with finance theory. Once lower risk is incorporated into a higher stock price, the stock will be more highly valued, but investors will have to be satisfied with lower expected returns. Unsurprisingly, claims of ESG outperformance are contradicted by studies.
Claims that ESG-favored stocks outperformed during the Covid-19 market meltdown disappear once other determinants of stock performance are controlled for. ESG factors were negatively associated with stock performance during the market recovery phase in the second quarter of 2020.
The corollary of the ESG thesis—that low-ESG-rated “sin stocks” are condemned to underperform the stock market—is decisively refuted by the data. When institutional investors “went underweight” by selling down their holdings in tobacco stocks, it made them cheaper for other investors to buy and make money, especially when they subsequently outperformed the market.
The profit opportunities that ESG creates for Wall Street, however, are clear. BlackRock charges 46 cents annually for every $100 invested in its iShares Global Clean Energy ETF and just 4 cents for its iShares fund linked to the S&P 500.
The Trump Department of Labor’s controversial rule on ESG in corporate retirement plans became final in October 2020. In effect, the rule calls Wall Street’s ESG bluff: “You claim ESG investing boosts investment returns net of costs; Show us on the basis of generally accepted investment theories.” Rather than use the Congressional Review Act to nullify this rule, the Biden Department of Labor says it won’t enforce it.
ESG is supposedly about the objective assessment of investment risk. The stated purpose of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), a body supported and funded by Michael Bloomberg, is to provide a disclosure regime that better enables investors to assess risk, climate risk being a major one.
At the same time, the SASB aims to harness the power of capital markets for political ends. Just as the Covid pandemic was sweeping the globe, Bloomberg declared climate change the biggest threat to America and the world. “How do you replace dirty energy?” he asks. “Stop rewarding companies from making it.” ESG thus becomes politics pursued by other means.
Climate risk is primarily about the potential costs of future climate regulation, but the cookie-cutter climate disclosures required by ESG standard-setters are systematically misleading because they treat the world as a homogenous regulatory space. Climate regulations are made by states and vary from the stringent and unachievable in parts of Europe to the virtually nonexistent in many other parts of the world.
Requiring corporations to bind themselves to unilateral greenhouse-gas targets imposes a penalty in competing against companies less beholden to ESG ratings (the unlevel playing field). Forcing corporations to lose market share and shrink their operations constitutes a covert form of divestment. Shareholders lose for no climate gain.
Regulation by governments is not only more efficient but also possesses democratic legitimacy. Proponents claim that ESG is necessary to achieve inclusive capitalism, but political power wielded by a handful of billionaire Wall Street oligarchs provides a pretty good definition of insider capitalism.
The weaponization of finance by billionaire climate activists, foundations, and NGOs threatens to end capitalism as we know it by degrading its ability to function as an economic system that generates higher living standards. This usurpation of the political prerogatives of democratic government invites a populist backlash.
The Real Clear Foundation report leans heavily on the environmental end of things, but ESG also has a strong Social Justice component, as this clip from Joe Rogan’s interview of VJ/Podcaster Adam Curry discusses:
ESG is yet another attempt to impose top-down wokeness by subterfuge on people and institutions that would never voluntarily agree to it.
Thousands of people took to the streets at several locations in Cuba including the capital Havana on Sunday to call for the end of the decades-old dictatorship and to demand food and vaccines as shortages of basic necessities have become commonplace and COVID-19 cases have soared in recent weeks.
From the Malecón, Havana’s famous boardwalk near the old city to small towns in Cienfuegos province and Palma Soriano, the largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, videos live-streamed on Facebook showed thousands of people walking and riding bikes and motorcycles along streets while chanting “Freedom,” “Down with Communism,” and “Homeland and Life,” which has become a battle cry among activists as it turns the revolutionary slogan “Homeland or Death” on its head.
“We are not afraid!” chanted Samantha Regalado while she recorded hundreds of people walking along a narrow street in Palma Soriano.
JUST IN – Mass protests erupt in several cities in #Cuba over the poor state of the socialized medical system. Protesters demand freedom from communist dictatorship.pic.twitter.com/NOSdVgP0By
Hundreds of Cubans have gathered in front of a public monument to Raul Castro to protest and chant “LIBERTAD” (freedom). I have never seen anything like this. We’re witnessing history.#SOSCuba🇨🇺 pic.twitter.com/bw9Qz5VlXQ
Video streamed on Facebook by Antonio Miguel Cobas Jalowayski around 1 p.m. in Palma Soriano showed hundreds of protesters calling for freedom and shouting “down with the dictatorship” and “down with Díaz-Canel,” but also demanding medicine, vaccines and “the end of hunger.” A crowd is seen pushing a police car and shouting “the dictators just arrived,” in reference to the police. Later, one protester is heard saying, “this is a pacific demonstration.”
Facebook user Carlos Alberto Ceballos Brito published a video around the same time showing a crowd gathering in Alquizar, a town in Artemisa province, also protesting against the government and chanting “down with Diaz-Canel” and “Patria y Vida”. Another video published on Facebook shows a similar protest in nearby Guira de Melena. In all cases, the crowd used strong language to refer to President Miguel Díaz-Canel, whose popularity is sharply falling as life in the island deteriorates.
Cuba is in the throes of its worst economic contraction in over three decades as chronic inefficiencies and paralyzing bureaucracy have gradually eroded the country’s production capacity, including in the essential food ad agriculture sectors. Trump-era sanctions have reduced access to vital economic lifelines like remittances, and foreign investment has plunged. Painful currency reforms this year have sent inflation soaring, and long lines for food have again become commonplace.
Now Cuba is struggling to control transmission of the coronavirus and is setting record highs almost daily in the past few weeks. Cuba decided to make its own COVID-19 vaccine and didn’t seek to buy shots from other countries. But plans to vaccinate the population with a homegrown shot has been plagued by delays.
Earlier this week, calls for the government to accept humanitarian aid had increased as Cubans began documenting on social media the collapse of the health system in Matanzas, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the island.
Wait, Cuba’s socialized medicine isn’t superior to that in the U.S., despite leftists lecturing us on this point incessantly? Imagine my shock.
This is impossible. Numerous bluecheck leftwing media personalities have assured us for years that #Cuba’s socialized medicine is far superior to our own…https://t.co/TFuJvqJepo
The government responded by sending more doctors to that province and setting a bank account to receive aid, but the account is in a Cuban bank under US sanctions. Although Cuban officials said this week the country is open for donations, historically, the government has refused or seized the humanitarian aid coming from Cuban exiles.
In a separate video posted on Facebook on Sunday, activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara called on Cubans to head to the Malecón boardwalk to gather in protest against the island’s authoritarian regime.
“I’m going to the street, I’m going to the Malecón, no matter the cost,” he said.
Otero Alcántara went on hunger strike earlier this year to draw international attention to increased repression of artists and activists, who have stepped up calls for more civil liberties. He was forcibly removed from his home and hospitalized.
Later in the afternoon, Cubans were sharing videos of the police response. A Facebook video posted by user AntenaCubana shows people in Palma Soriano throwing stones at the police while a person is heard saying the police had been beating the demonstrators.
Speaking of the police:
🚨BREAKING🚨
Cuba’s communist regime is mobilizing its infamous Black Berets to shut down the uprising that is currently underway across the island. This is going to get violent.
It would be great to see ordinary Cubans overthrow the Communist dictatorship, but we’ve seen mass protests in communist countries peter out before (such as in Venezuela). Also, the Obama Administration retreads in the Biden Administration will hardly be enthusiastic about helping the Cuban people overthrow the regime Obama famously cuddled-up to.
Funny how Obama and company never sought to stage a “color revolution” in Cuba, isn’t it?
Greetings, and welcome to the return of the Friday LinkSwarm on Thursday! My Mac is working, my house is clean, and I have a newly painted master bathroom with a new floor and a new toilet.
Some links are new, some from a week or two ago.
Minneapolis: “Black Lives Matter activists block city council member’s car until she signs statement that charges against rioters will be dropped.”
“Peter Daszak – whose ‘EcoHealth Alliance’ funneled U.S. taxpayer cash to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – defended SARS gain-of-function experiments that potentially rendered the virus ‘capable of directly infecting humans’ in a Nature article unearthed from November 2015.”
Know who else was funding Peter Daszak’s research? Google.
The unearthed financial ties between EcoHealth Alliance and Google follow months of big tech censorship of stories and individuals in support of the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory.
The Google-backed EcoHealth Alliance played a critical role in the cover-up of COVID-19’s origins through its president, Peter Daszak.
Daszak served on the wildly compromised World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 investigation team. He championed the efforts to “debunk” the lab origin theory of the virus, despite mounting support for the claim…
The more we learn about Peter Daszak, one of the main villains of the COVID epidemic, the worse it gets.
Daszak is president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization mostly funded by the US government. EcoHealth passed some of that money on to the lab in Wuhan, China.
It was Daszak who organized the letter in The Lancet from February 2020 dismissing as “misinformation” claims that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Virology Lab. The letter created the illusion of consensus, which internet companies proceeded to enforce through censorship, and the media reinforced by constantly interviewing Daszak himself.
There might be journalistic value in hearing from the Chernobyl plant director about all those clouds floating over Ukraine. But if he suggests the rash of mysterious sores and cancers were due to a faulty shipment of microwaves recently arrived in Pripyat, you’d probably think he was engaged in a bit of “motivated reasoning.”
Apparently not the World Health Organization, which invited Daszak to join their microwave hunt in Wuhan.
In the last two days, Daszak has been removed from The Lancet’s own UN-backed commission investigating COVID’s origins, though whether he removed himself or was fired remains unclear.
Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated on Tuesday night in an attack on his home, the nation’s prime minister announced.
First lady Martine Moïse was hospitalized for gunshot wounds she received in the attack. Unidentified gunmen broke into the president’s residence on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince during the night and opened fire on the couple.
“A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” Prime Minister Claude Joseph said in a statement. “The country’s security situation is under the control of the Haitian police and the armed forces of Haiti. . . . Democracy and the republic will win.”
Moïse has ruled by fiat for the past two years after Haiti failed to hold elections and the parliament dissolved. Meanwhile, a new prime minister, Dr. Ariel Henry, was scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday.
Opposition figures said Moïse should have stepped down on February 7 of this year to complete a five-year term, and after Moïse refused to leave office thousands of Haitians protested in the streets. The government responded by arresting 23 people, including a senior judge and police official, whom Moïse accused of conspiring to assassinate him.
He might have been right! But it’s not like Moise was some sort of Jeffersonian paragon:
Haiti has experienced growing instability during the administration of President Jovenel Moïse, withunrest, high rates of inflation, and resurgent gang violence. The government’s failure to hold elections in October 2019 resulted in the terms of most of the Haitian legislature expiringon January 13, 2020, without officials elected to succeed them. Moïse is now ruling by decree. The judiciary is conducting ongoing investigations into Moïse’s possible involvement in various corrupt activities, which the president denies. Haitian Senate and Superior Court of Auditors investigations allege embezzlement and fraud by current and former Haitian officials managing $2 billion in loans from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe discounted oil program.
Speaking of getting whacked: “John McAfee Found Dead In Prison Cell After US Extradition Approved.” Ahem:
Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: "We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself". I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm.$WHACKD available only on https://t.co/HdSEYi9krq:) pic.twitter.com/rJ0Vi2Hpjj
It took 18 months of steady abuse by rioters and their overlords at city hall for Portland cops to say “no mas” and tap out. As one retired Portland police detective said, “If anyone did to a horse or a dog what has been done to PPB cops for 18 months, that person would have amassed hundreds of counts of felony animal abuse, but it’s perfectly OK to do it to cops, wholesale, and with an army of anarchist pals.”
The police officers in the Portland riot squad, officially called the “rapid response team (RRT),” still work for the agency, but will no longer volunteer themselves for the duty that resulted in “nearly all” members being injured with “broken bones, torn ligaments, and cartilage, traumatic brain injuries, hearing damage, damaged eyesight, lacerations and burns,” in the words of the resignation letter sent to the chief by the squad’s leader.
Expect more of this.
Snip.
The chaos started at the top by assuming rioters were victims and cops were criminals.
In their letter, RRT leader Lieutenant Jacob Clark said rules on the books for dealing with protests and riots didn’t change, but interpretation of those rules changed often and were in conflict with interpretations by council members, the city attorney, and others. Worse, the changes in the interpretations were applied retroactively and officers, staying within the limits of the law, were suddenly written up under a new interpretation of the rules.
Snip.
You can trace the walkout by Portland cops directly to efforts that began with George Soros.
Singer John Legend and BLM co-founder Shaun King followed Soros’s lead and poured money into the campaigns of district attorney candidates who believe cops are the problem, not the solution to keeping order. In fact, keeping order isn’t really a thing for these activists.
In both cities, Leftists poured money behind DA candidates who promised to free criminals and do what they could to stick it to cops and police departments. Portland got Mike Schmidt and LA got carpet bagger George Gascon. These DA’s, aided by unhinged city council members – Jo Ann Hardesty in Portland, Kshama Sawant in Seattle, and their allies in city bureaus – have created less safe cities.
Seattle’s city attorney and King County prosecutor’s lack of prosecutions against actual criminals – because woke ideology – has turned the Emerald City, like Portland and San Francisco before it, into a homeless encampment with no rules, free-flowing drugs, and free rent.
Portland Police union head Daryl Turner is interviewed following the resignation of Portland’s entire riot-response trained police team. pic.twitter.com/dD53nkAGlJ
Nine months after the declaration of a national emergency due to the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. births fell by 8% in a month.
The December drop marked an acceleration in declines in the second part of the year. For the full year, the number of babies born in the country fell 4% to about 3.6 million, the largest decline since 1973.
Michael “Creepy Porn Lawyer” Avenatti sentenced to two and a half years in prison over Nike extortion case. Let’s take a stroll through memory lane over the endless MSM fawning over Avenatti:
May we always remember and cherish the time Ana Navarro compared Michael Avenatti to the Holy Spirit pic.twitter.com/y63JoX4leq
s I previously reported, earlier this year, the University of Texas at Austin (UT) went off the deep end of all things “woke” and politically correct.
Despite warnings from alumni, faculty, and organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars, UT quietly adopted a “Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity” that is genuinely chilling. Among other questionable practices, this plan institutionalizes the Critical Race Theory version of “equity” (equality of results, as opposed to equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and meritocracy) as the paramount driver of decisions on hiring, promotion, tenure, leadership positions, and even teaching awards and endowed chairs at UT. It also creates a bureaucracy of diversity commissars in each college to enforce the new orthodoxy and mandates re-education of virtually all faculty in the new catechism.
UT insiders tell me this plan was the brainchild and pet project of UT Vice Provost Edmund Gordon, a pronounced CRT advocate. UT’s adoption of this extraordinarily ill-considered plan was the last straw for me (and, based on responses I have received to my article, apparently many other UT alumni as well). UT President Jay Hartzell’s response to this criticism has been to ignore it, which seems to be his preferred modus operandi. President Hartzell’s calculus appears to be that, with the Texas legislature now safely adjourned from its biennial session. UT can continue on its merry way, unmolested by the unenlightened peasantry.
He may be in for a rude awakening.
Russia unveils world’s largest submarine. I’m sure it will be well-engineered and quite capable (Soviet subs were), but I’m betting those “Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedoes” are almost pure vaporware.
“Hedge Fund That Bet Against GameStop Shuts Down As Backers Pull Money.” “White Square Capital, run by a former Paulson trader, has announced that it will return capital to shareholders. Some of the FT’s sources said the decision was likely due to heavy losses stemming from the firm’s GME short.”
A heart I transplanted recently on the Organ Care System. Amazing technology to benefit our patients on the waiting list. Recipient is doing great! pic.twitter.com/8Zr2MxI1ZX
Joe Rogan guest Michael Pollan notes that caffeine was unknown in Europe until the 1650s, when coffee, tea and chocolate all arrived:
“Before caffeine, it was a very different world, and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all the time. People drank morning, noon and night because it was safer than water.” They gave kids hard cider for breakfast!
So a drug comes on the market that encourages sober, linear thought, and shortly after that the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution ensue.
I hope you’re enjoying America’s 245th Birthday today. In celebration, enjoy some vaguely-related videos. Here are some fireworks fails, complete with lots of cussing:
This is a video about Sharks! More specifically, about Sharks! the art project, and about the war between conceptual artists and a London-area conservation planning bureaucracy:
Plus a side story about how The Guardian is garbage.