Your Sunday Morning Turboprop Noise

C-130 flight demonstration at Farnborough:

Caturday

Chip the hunter!

The Allure of Public Executions for These Clowns; GoFraudMe Ed.

Burlington County Prosecutor Scott Coffina on Thursday said an "extremely successful" GoFundMe campaign that raised over $400,000 for a homeless veteran was a scam.

New Jersey couple Katelyn McClure and Mark D'Amico created the GoFundMe campaign on Nov. 10, 2017, saying homeless veteran Jonny Bobbitt Jr. had given his last $20 to McClure for gas after her car broke down. The campaign's original target goal was $10,000 and said money would be used to help Bobbitt with rent, a vehicle and up to six months of living expenses. In the next two weeks, the campaign went viral and was shared widely in the media and online in the US and internationally.

"The entire campaign was predicated on a lie," said Coffina in a release posted Thursday on Facebook. "Less than an hour after the GoFundMe campaign went live, McClure, in a text exchange with a friend, stated that the story about Bobbitt assisting her was 'completely made up.'"

It all might have succeeded if the homeless dude hadn't sued because he wasn't getting enough of a cut. Once he did that, the cops started looking into the whole affair.

Pro tip: If you're engaged in defrauding people, don't sue your co-conspirators. It's like trying to press charges because your dope dealer sold you a bag of oregano.

Preying on people's good natures to scam them with fake charitable causes ought to be a heavy felony to begin with and then ramp up from there. There will be online fundraisers for good causes that people won't donate to because of these three criminals.

Corporate Inanity; S&W and ABC

First, ABC. If you watch Good Morning, America's second hour this week, you will have seen that a good part of it has been nothing but a Disney infomercial. Look, I understand that GMA is the softest of the three morning news shows, and that a goodly percentage of its hard news s rewarmed shit from the previous evening's news show, but even with that, the amount of corporate toadyism going on is a bit much.

Now, Smith & Wesson: One of the worst features of a 21st Century S&W revolver is the frelling internal lock. It's a poor design, to say the least. There are credible reports of spontaneous activation with lightweight J-frames and with guns firing heavy magnum loads. There are a number of S&W fans who scour the the used gun cases because they don't trust the lock.

What's even more inane is this: I offer, for your consideration, two S&W guns manufactured in this decade:

The gun on top is a Model 60-15. You can see the activation hole for the internal lock just above the cylinder release.

The gun on the bottom is a M&P Shield. It has no internal lock.

The trigger pull for the striker-fired Shield is lighter than the double-action of the Model 60. It is shorter, too. But there's no lock.

I suppose that one would have to be either a S&W executive or one of their lawyers for this to make any sense. For it sure doesn't make sense to me.

Because It's Friday

UP 3985 in Kentucky:

3985 has been in storage for repairs for the last eight years. UP plans to start that work after they have placed 4014 on the road.

The Greedy Fucks of Facebook

It's pretty damn hard to read this lengthy story about how Facebook's senior management failed to respond to the prevalence of fake accounts, especially from Russia, and not conclude that their blindness was willful. Sheryl Sandberg, who is the #2, comes across as being particularly aggressive in trying to ensure that nobody at Facebook looked into things and, when they did anyway, that nothing would come of it.

Meltdown in Old Blighty? &The Fall Guys; Khashoggi Ed.

British PM Theresa May has negotiated a draft Brexit agreement with the EU. At least three of her cabinet ministers have quit today in protest.

One of the intractable issues seems to be the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. Setting up a hard border between the EU and Great Britain would require re-establishing the fences, patrols and checkpoints between Ireland and Northern Ireland. But that may violate the Good Friday Agreement, which effectively ended the Troubles.

Whether or not May's government falls is something we may know this week.

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Saudi Arabia's public prosecutor has concluded a senior intelligence officer ordered Jamal Khashoggi's murder, and not Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
...
The prosecutor has charged 11 people over the murder and is seeking the death penalty for five of them.

Yeah, sure. The Saudis have changed their stories on this faster than Trump shifts his lies. This latest iteration of whodunit seems calculated to both insulate Prince Bone Saw and to give O3 Trump the fig leaf that he needs to push back against congressional sanctions against Mr. Bone Saw and his cronies.

Kind of Hard to Not Use the Words "Attention Whore;" Lewinsky Ed.

Monica Lewinsky said Monday that she decided to participate in a new documentary series about her infamous 1990s affair with then-President Bill Clinton so that she could ensure that her experience "never happens to another young person in our country again."

So, for two decades, Lewinsky has wanted to be a rivate person, notwithstanding her 1999 interview with Barbara Walters and her starring in a documentary in 2002.

When she walked out of an interview two months ago, one has to wonder whether she chose to do so because she already had a deal with A&E, instead of any actual butthurt.

One might reasonably suppose that we're going to be hearing about this, off and on, for the next forty years.

It would be interesting to know who put up the money for this.

"Shoot the Black Guy! Shoot the Black Guy!"

A police officer fatally shot an armed security guard who was wearing a hat with “security” emblazoned across the front and holding a man down following a shooting inside the suburban Chicago bar where the guard worked, says an attorney for the guard’s family who filed a federal lawsuit.

Jemel Roberson, 26, was pronounced dead shortly after being taken to a hospital early Sunday following the shooting at Manny’s Blue Room in Robbins, just south of Chicago. Four other people were shot and wounded, including a man who authorities believe fired a gun before officers arrived, Cook County sheriff’s spokeswoman Sophia Ansari said.

When police arrived at the scene, Roberson was holding “somebody on the ground with his knee in his back, with his gun in his back,” witness Adam Harris told WGN-TV.

“Everybody is screaming out, ‘He’s a security guard,’” Harris said.

Roberson, a father of a 9-month-old boy, was licensed to carry a firearm, Ansari said.

This is not a new problem.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the police union has severed ties with the lawyer who couldn't get one of their members off for shooting a guy sixteen times.

Well,Shit, Stan

Stan Lee, the creative dynamo who revolutionized the comic book and helped make billions for Hollywood by introducing human frailties in Marvel superheroes such as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk, died Monday. He was 95.

Comic book movies were fairly sucky before Stan Lee took them up. I can't imagine DC Comics doing Deadpool.

Bye, Stan. You'll be missed.