Flight Recorders on Military Aircraft?

U.S. Army investigators have recovered flight recording devices from two helicopters that collided last week in Interior Alaska, killing three soldiers and injuring another.

The AH-64 Apache helicopters collided April 27 about 50 miles east of Healy while returning from training at an aerial gunnery range in the Donnelly Training Area southeast of Fairbanks.

Wouldn't those things be a security risk during a war? I would think that the Army wouldn't want an adversary getting their commie mitts on a flight recorder during a war. Even moreso if they have cockpit voice recorders.

The TOFF Loses in Court, Again

A judge has dismissed former President Donald Trump's lawsuit against The New York Times. Trump sued the paper after it published a 2018 story on Trump family business dealings and Trump's "dubious tax schemes during the 1990s." Trump's lawsuit, filed in 2021, accused the paper and three of its reporters of conspiring with his niece, Mary Trump, to get his tax records through illegal means. He sought $100 million in damages.

"The crux of [Trump's] claim is that a reporter for The Times caused his niece, Mary Trump, to take 20-year-old tax and financial documents held by her lawyer and disclose them in violation of a 2001 settlement agreement," noted Justice Robert R. Reed of Manhattan's Supreme Court.
...
"Courts have long recognized that reporters are entitled to engage in legal and ordinary news-gathering activities without fear of tort liability — as these actions are at the very core of protected First Amendment activity," Reed wrote.

The judge ordered Trump to pay the legal fees of the three Times reporters he sued and the paper's legal fees.

No doubt that he'll be on his failing Nazi Twitter platform to complain that the courts are being so, so unfair to him.

More From Thomas the Grifting Engine

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

Up to four years at private school, all paid by Crow, to the tune of 150 large. Between the two, the Thomases made well over half-a-million a year. They should have been able to cover the kid's tuition. But why do that when some billionaire is going to do it "out of the goodness of his heart"?

In a pig's eye. But you know, as do I, that Thomas can grift away to his heart's content and nobody is going to do fuck-all about it. Ol' Harland could be dropping off briefcases of cash, each month, and nothing would ever be done.

Those fuckers on the court are American royalty. They are untouchable.

Teething These Down, Here

“Clang! Clang! Clang!” Go the Cell Doors

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was convicted on Thursday of orchestrating a plot for members of his far-right extremist group to attack the U.S. Capitol in a desperate bid to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 presidential election.

A jury in Washington, D.C., found Tarrio guilty of seditious conspiracy after hearing from dozens of witnesses over more than three months in one of the most serious cases brought in the stunning attack that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, as the world watched on live TV.

Heh. Goombye, Asswipe.

Derby Day

This Saturday, full of horses, pomp and circumstance, a tradition partially based on slavery, with lots of mostly white people wearing fancy getups.

There is something similar to that going on in Bloodye Olde Englande on the same day, except for the racing. But, from my perspective, we fought two wars so that we don't have to put up with that shit.

The other day, I walked a forest preserve in southern New England. The land is somewhat hilly, with lots of rock coming through the ground. There are ancient stone walls there, from when the land was farmed. But it got me to thinking: The land was farmed, in part, because the previous inhabitants were all but exterminated in one of the bloodiest wars in American history (going by percentage of the populations killed). After that, those stone-laden fields were farmed by generations of farmers, who endured back-breaking labor to eke out a living from the land. They were as tough as woodpecker lips.

What overfed, sclerotic bureaucrats an ocean away thought that such people would be easily cowed?

The Dumbest Executives on Earth Work for Fox News Corp.Prove Me Wrong.

Text messages that helped lead Fox News to part ways with star host Tucker Carlson included one in which he declared that Trump supporters beating a protester was “not how white men fight,” according to The New York Times.

The text was one of a trove of messages from Carlson and other Fox News hosts uncovered in a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network for airing false allegations that the company’s machines were used to steal the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump.

it took until that email came out that it dawned in the consciousness of those idiots that their star loudmouth was a misogynistic and racist troll who dabbled in conspiracy theories and that maybe, just maybe, he did believe some of the shit he spewed five nights a week? What the fuck, they never watched his show? they never saw the work of any of the comedians who mocked him? Instead of watching what aired on their cable channel, were they spending their nights doing cocaine with Spawn of DJT?

As for the rest of us: After the stuff that has come out as a result of DVS's lawsuit, anyone who doesn't realize that Fox is not a news channel, that all it does is feed propaganda and pablum to its core vewers, who are too addled/programmed to handle the truth, is either willfully blind or has had several lobotomies with both electrodes and ice-picks.

Wrenching These Down, Here

Tacopina Knows He's Screwed the Pooch; Grumpy Trumpy Felon Ed.

Former President Donald Trump's lawyer Joseph Tacopina has requested a mistrial in the E. Jean Carroll rape case, accusing the judge of acting unfairly in favor of Carroll.

My guess is that Tacopina filed the motion because his client told him to. Whining about people being so, so unfair to him is a hallmark of the World's Oldest Toddler.

If not that, it could be because Tacopina may believe that his overly aggressive cross-examination of Carroll isn't playing well. That might have worked fifty years ago, but times have changed.

Nothing is New Under the Sun; Gunnie Ed.

Lights on pistols? I give you the Wespi Pistol Light:

In some ways, it was more like a laser sight. The Wespi light had a black dot at the center of the light beam. It may have had black bars at four edges of the light cone to aid in sighting.

Activation apparently was even easer than a Crimson Trace laser sight. When the gun was levelled, the light came on, due to an internal mercury switch. When it was lowered and holstered, the light switched itself off.

I read about it in an old book about handgunning, Pistol and Revolver Shooting, by A. L. A. Himmelwright. The device came out just before the First World War.

My guess is that it was both expensive and too delicate for professional use, so it faded from use in the 1920s. But I don't know for certain.