Enlightening These Down, Here

Gaveling These Down, Here

Play Football, Scramble Your Brain

That's the upshot of a new study:

Since the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered:

Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with C.T.E.?

New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.

Researchers considered every former N.F.L. player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.

The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5 percent — had C.T.E.

The actual prevalence could be far higher. The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too.

That doesn't take into consideration those who played college ball and didn't go on to the pros. When I watched World Cup games and saw some dude taking a header on the ball, my thought was that guy's setting himself up for CTE down the road.

A dozen years ago, I went to a hairdresser whose grade-school son played tackle football. I wondered if they were setting their son up for future brain damage with repeated head impacts on a developing brain. But I kept my wonderings to myself.

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.