News Digest

Virtue Shopping

You’ve been waiting breathlessly for this, I’m sure. According to Bloomberg, you’ll soon be able to figure out the “true carbon footprint” of everything you buy. With My Carbon Action app from Finland, you’ll have all the information you need to “adapt” your lifestyle to the goal of “keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius.” The app combines credit card, banking, and retail data “to provide real-time calculations of how a given product affects the climate.” The app will reveal the environmental impact of your individual purchases — down to “the level of individual steaks or tomatoes.” But that’s not all! It will then “propose actions” to reduce carbon impact. “Typical suggestions may include taking a shorter shower, hopping on the bus instead of the car, turning down the thermostat, and going vegan for a week.” I know you’re saying, “Sign me up.” What could be better than an app that nags and scolds you and tells you you’re doing it wrong? We all need more of that in our lives.

Taxi, Tax-ze

What a bunch of hacks. New York City’s taxi commission is now advising cabbies on pronouns, reveals The New York Post. The regulators want taxi drivers to question fares how they identify — which basically boils down to lgbtq queries. “Using someone’s preferred pronoun is a simple way to show respect,” according to “inclusive language tips” from the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s tlc Office of Inclusion emailed to 200,000 licensed drivers last month. “Ask the passenger what their pronoun is. Do not assume someone’s pronoun because of their appearance … If you do not want to ask, you can ask how they preferred [sic] to be called or use the gender-neutral pronoun such as they; or ze.” This, according to tlc spokesman Allan Fromberg, is how drivers can make passengers feel “welcome and comfortable through customer service.” Which, as anyone who’s ever been slammed through the streets of New York in a taxi knows, is of the utmost importance to every cabbie, be they they, ze, he, or she.

TOY STORIES

Assault Nerf

According to cbs’s Rochester, NY affiliate wroc-tv, Nerf-gun proliferation is finally getting the leftist activist response it deserves. A bunch of busybodies — excuse me, I mean “consumer watchdog” representatives — wrote a stern letter to Hasbro, demanding that the world’s biggest toy company stop selling “assault-style” toy weaponry. The triggered ladies who run the Empire State Consumer Project escp say “extreme Nerf machine guns for children” remind them of “mass shootings.” Despite the complete absence of Nerf Blaster crime sprees.

The escp letter slams a lighthearted Hasbro commercial depicting family members trying to wow a kid with gifts of ever-bigger Nerf guns. “Not at all funny,” sniff watchdog ladies Judy Braiman and Carol Chittenden. “These emblems of mass destruction take [toy guns] to the next, horrifying level.” The women demand to know: “Who would this [Nerf-toting] child be shooting with his cache of assault [foam] weapons?” Well, I have a recommendation.

Lego My Leadership

The [UK] Financial Times — the oh-so-serious global business publication — reports on the latest method to “build better leaders” and “sharpen your business strategy”: playing with Lego bricks. Organized by the Global Peter Drucker Forum, “Lego Serious Play” supposedly “provoke[s] managers into alternative ways of visualizing, understanding, and tackling complex strategic problems.” Theoretically, building Lego models brings the “benefits of play to bear on organizational challenges.” Uh-huh.

Management columnist Andrew Hill tried it out and announced that he “took some significant steps towards solving the climate crisis” via “a large pile of assorted Lego.” As Hill and a group of fellow manager types assembled plastic pieces, they figured out global warming in less than three hours, he says, by “imaginatively modeling the principal problems and jointly coming up with possible remedies.” Oh, goody! But then his team dropped a brick. “When we turned away from the Lego and tried to sum up our conclusions on a flip chart, the creative energy died as we struggled to find the precise words for what we had been discussing easily seconds earlier.” They hit a Lego brick wall. Playtime was over with nothing to show for it. Guess we’ll all have to wait for the global solutions emerging from the next management-seminar fad, tiddlywinks.

RUSSKIES’ BEASTIES

Mos-Cow Mooed

Everything’s cool on the Moscow front — if you’re a bovine fitted with a virtual reality [VR] headset. According to The Moscow Times, these Russian cows are just chilling out with species-specific visuals of a summer field. It’s supposedly part of an ongoing experiment to test the effect on milk production. “Experts noted reduced anxiety and improved overall emotional mood in the herd” when they were virtually grazing in the virtual field. The experiment is being conducted on a farm in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, according to Interfax. Farmers worked with developers and specialists in cattle-vision research to create software that exploits the “better perception by cows of shades of the red part of the spectrum and weaker green and blue tones.” The Moscow regional agriculture administration released this photo of a Holstein Friesian “wearing a black headset on an overcast day … gazing at a green pasture.”

But who can believe this? It totally sounds like Russian disinformation. What if this VR stuff is a cover story — and these cows are really being trained by Vladimir to hack U.S. voting machines? Hmm? Alert Nancy Pelosi: “All roads lead to Putin.”

Beware the Bear

The [UK] Daily Mail reports that a remote Russian village is “under siege” — from over 50 polar bears. “All public events in Ryrkaypiy in the Chuktoka region have been canceled, and children were given extra protection traveling to and from school.” Now, you might think that means the polar bear population is rebounding, which would be good news to the polar-bears-are-dying-on-shrinking-icebergs crowd.

You would be wrong. According to environmentalists, the polar bears are descending on Ryrkaypiy because “weak Arctic ice has left the bears unable to roam.” No, I have no idea what that means. The Russian branch of the World Wildlife Fund wwf blames — guess what? — climate change: “In the absence of ice cover, animals are forced to go ashore in search of food.” So, apparently, they’re roaming. Bottom line, it doesn’t matter what happens — “too few” polar bears or “too many” polar bears — the environmentalists will ascribe it to manmade global warming and demand world communism.

Bummed

Why do cities run by liberals all end up as homeless magnets? Portland, Oregon is demonstrating why. Their latest proposal is to “welcome” the “unhoused” (their term) — everywhere. According to abc affiliate katu News, Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission is considering “mandatory rest spaces” for the homeless. As Hot Air explains, this would “change the building codes so that all new structures (including private property…) include spaces for people to ‘rest’ and ‘feel welcome and safe.’” katu reports that “some worry a change … to allow people to ‘rest’ on private property could lead to camping.” Really? Do you think?

Hot Air makes the commonsense point: “If you’re making the investment to construct a new home or business in Portland, you really don’t want to open up on day one with an invitation for a homeless encampment … literally right on your doorstep.” My advice: if you’re constructing a new home or business in Portland, sell.

Buzz Off, Bezos

Check out this Breitbart headline: “Jeff Bezos: ‘Move All Heavy Industry into Space’ to Save Earth.” Last November, the Amazon ceo and Washington Post owner was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame for the space flight company he founded in 2000, Blue Origin. According to The Times of San Diego, Bezos told the crowd: “I believe that one day, earth will be zoned residential and light industry. We’ll move all heavy industry into space. That’s the only way, really, to save this planet.”

Bezos has been on this blastoff kick for a while. Last July, he told cbs Evening News: “We are in the process of destroying this planet … Eventually, it will be much cheaper and simpler to make really complicated things in space, and then send those objects back down to earth — so that we don’t have the big factories and pollution-generating industries that make those things now on earth.”

Then, at his Hall of Fame induction, the world’s richest man declared, “You want a dynamic civilization that continues to use more and more energy and more and more resources and build amazing things. And to do that, you have to move out into the solar system.” You first.