Sniffing These Down, Here

Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

DH.88 "Grosvenor House". It doesn't end well.

Spoiler Alert

Popular Mechanics was wrong. It only took one century.

Whether it was Edward Teller in 1959 or other studies in the 1980s, those fuckers have known all along what they were doing and they continued despoiling the planet for fun and money.

If your granddad or great granddad worked for them, consider going and spitting on his grave. The line to piss on Dick Cheney's should be monumental as things get worse.

And they will.

To everyone who voted for Trump knowing his hostility to renewable energy and his devotion to fossil fuels, I have one respectful entreaty:

Criticizing Government Policy is Now Defamatory to the Orange Blowhard?

That's his legal stance, or so it would seem.

President Donald Trump is threatening to sue a left-leaning think tank unless it retracts a report that said his National Guard deployments to various cities did not reduce crime as he said.

The letter gave the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress until the end of business Friday to issue the retraction or face a $5 billion lawsuit. The center declined.

The nonprofit’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, said in a statement that the lawsuit “is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.”

The report, published July 13, criticized the administration for taking credit for a historic drop in violent crime at a time when that decline was already underway. The analysis concluded that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard “had no measurable effect on violent crime trends.”

One thing Delusional Donnie hasn't yet grasped: Claiming "financial harm" means that a victim of Trump's lawsuits gets to do financial discovery of Trump's affairs. Trump sued the BBC with the same bullshit claims and they're alreadly asking to depose Trump's family members and dig into his financial records.

If you want to read the CAP's report on Trump's Potemkin-like deploymet of the National Guard, it's available here.

As to "reputational harm", that's laughable. Most everyone outside of the MAGAts know what Trump is a fascist buffoon whose built his wealth on a longstanding pattern of fraud and deceit. If Putin is the richest corrupt leader on the face of the Earth, Trump is the richest fraudster and grifter. The CAP and the BBC didn't get Trump convicted on 34 felony counts of fraud, he did that all by himself.

Caturday

Chip poses on a daybed.

Trump Threatens to Bomb Wall Street

He's threatening to bomb somebody over interest rates.

Wall Street? London?

He is deeply unwell, besides his being a malignant narcissistic sociopath.

Next Up: Cavalry Will Revert to Using Horses

An Army unit based in Europe that was specializing in drone warfare has been directed to end its efforts to learn and use the battlefield technology and return to being a traditional infantry battalion, officials said Thursday.

For more nearly a year, soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade have been experimenting and building their own drones, as well as participating in drills on waging unmanned warfare after Ukraine pioneered such tactics in its yearslong conflict with Russia. Last November, 600 soldiers formed a battalion that specialized in drone warfare and was set up to be used as a dedicated unit that could deploy anywhere drones were required.

Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army’s acting chief of staff, has ordered the battalion to refocus on its core mission of being an airborne infantry unit, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Army deliberations.

This decision would seem to be short-sighted, if not downright insane. Kegsbreath and others can bury their heads in the sand and pretend that drones will go away, but on a modern battlefield, as we're seeing in Europe, soldiers moving without heavy drone coverage will be annihilated.

Smooshing These Down, Here

Trump, Our Communist President

He seems to be operating a command economy:

The ranchers overwhelmingly supported Trump and he is, of course, fucking them over without a thought. Just like he does to farmers and everyone else and, by this time, one would have to question the mental acuity of those who support Trump (if they're not billionaires).

Another way of putting what he is doing, by someone who would seem to want to be anonymous:

Comrades! Glorious News! By decree of the People’s Beef Committee, 300,000 metric tons of ground beef shall enter tariff-free for 90 days, priced 25% below the capitalist market. Thus shall the workers eat, the ranchers prosper, and the Great American Herd rise again!

This is separate, of course, to all of the companies that Trump is having the government take partial ownership of, including ones where his kids own a stake. Or his attempt to fiddle with the interest rates of bonds.

Every thing that Trump complains that other people are doing or want to do is a tacit confession.

Because It's Friday

A Shay:

One thing that made the Shay (and the other logging locomotives) practical is that, unline a convential steam locomotive, there was no "hunting" from the moting of the cylinders. So they were a lot easier on the tracks.