Your Sunday Morning Misc. Warbird Noise

Stuff from OSH-24:

The Tariff Airplane

Tariffing everything isn't going to go well for the 787:

Moronic Right Wing Pundits

If you care to, you can find all sorts of shit on X and Untruth Social and other places by right-wing jagoffs who are proclaiming that manufacturing jobs are great for men and that's why we need to bring them back.

I will place one bet: The percentage of those keyboard-warriors who have ever worked in a factory, let alone held a union card, is probably no greater than 3%, if even that.

If they had, they might have learned a few things. First off, most manufacturing jobs are mindlessly repetitive. You do the same task, over and over again, eight hours a day, 270 days a year.

Second, some are dangerous. If your mind wanders while doing that same task over and over, you could get hurt. You could hurt someone else. You might make bad parts. If you're lucky, the company has the latest in machinery equipped with safety guards and if you're really lucky, nobody has fucked with them because they make operating harder. Yes, there were guys who bypassed the two-hands-no-tie-down interlocks so they could adjust the workpiece as the press came down and who lost fingers or hands for that. (On top of that, they then got fired for deliberately operating unsafe equipment.) If you're further lucky, the company furnishes you with the PPE to be safe, but that's far less likely going forward, as OSHA's been pretty much demolished.

Third, some of them are really filthy jobs. They are the kind of jobs where the old workers' houses had showers in the basement; the husband would come home, go into the basement, strip, shower and put on clean clothes before going up into the house. Regardless of how good your PPE is, some of that gets into your body.

Fourth, they are hard on your body. You'll retire with worn-out joints, a bad back, arthritic hands and all the other joys of abusing your body for forty years.

I worked a couple of vacation terms at a chemical plant, the first time between high school and college. There was another kid who was doing the same, except that he liked the money they paid so he didn't go on to college. When I went back there the following year, he was still there. The older men and women on the floor uniformly thought that he was an idiot. One asked me what sort of fool would choose to work there on the factory floor when they could go to college and get a job where they worked at a desk, made good money, and came home as clean as they were when they began their day.

Manufacturing, in the way that the damn pundits think, isn't coming back. The vulture capitalists, like Chainsaw Al Dunlap and Mitt Romney, among others, sent those jobs overseas in order to make shit cheaper, both in costs and quality, so they could make even more obscene amounts of money. The only way those jobs are coming back if there is a global deflationary crash so severe that people will work for shit wages just to survive.

And that, Gentle Reader, may be the plan.

A Culture of Cowardice

Capitol Hill Republicans, corporate America and White House allies are terrified about what’s next in President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war. But they fear Trump’s wrath even more.

The tariffs may be illegal, but nobody is going to take the Malignant Felon to court because they're afraid of him.

Same goes for academia. he's cowed all of them.

This is the question that I have, especially for academia. Some of those schools are a few centuries old. They're going to be here in a couple of generations. And when that time comes, when the questions are asked about this era: "Where were you? What did you do to stand up for the cause of freedom?"-- What are you going to say? That you ran and hid and acted as though Trump was an EF-5 tornado and there was nothing you could do? Or did you stand up to an old, malignant, grievance-fueled psychopath and fight?

Almost every school has, somewhere, a monument to those students who went off to fight for our freedom and who didn't come home alive. Maybe the administrators and board members should go and stand in front of those monuments and reflect on their actions and inactions in opposing the Demented Dictator of Mar-a-Lago.

Caturday

Office cat:

Trump Take Global Prosperity

From elsewhere:

It appears this is the fourth worst back to back day for the DJIA in American history with a two day combined -8.65% loss, only trailing the 1929 crash, 1987 Black Monday, and the 2008 crisis.

Unlike 1929, 1987 or 2008, one man did this. One old, deranged, syphilitic, narcissistic sociopath did this. While the global economy began crashing because of his sabotage (and as the bodies of four dead soldiers arrived back in the U.S.), he was watching a golf tourney at his private club.

Trump, the Day After Announcing His Batshit Tariffs

Because It's Friday

Poofing These Down, Here

Yep, He’s Demented

Look at the full list of countries being tariffed.

Those aren't based on countries, those are based on top-level Internet domains. The British Indian Ocean Territory, for example, example, that is pretty much the naval and air base at Diego Garcia. Which exports nothing. Heard & McDonald Islands are uninhabited. Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands are Norwegian. but they are all Internet domains.

Those idiots had no knowledge of what they were doing; instead, they used AI and some LLM to generate the list and the tariffs. It is economic policy, run by clown shoe-wearing chuckleheads, who haven't even reached the peak of Mount Stupid on the Dunning-Kruger curve. It would be one thing to crash the globally economy by maliciousness. But it is something else entirely to be crashing it because of sheer and utter stupidity.

Jeebus, Boeing

The flight up on Starliner to the ISS was bad. As in between the devil and the deep blue sea bad.

Our Long Postwar Run of Health and Prosperity is Over

The Syphilitic Sociopath has continued on his path to destroy the global economy, while Brainworm Bobby has gutted the process to approve new drugs.

This trade war is beyond stupid. The FOFF talks about the late 19th Century being a "golden age". It might have been for the very rich. It certainly wasn't for those who weren't, with lengthy recessions and depressions. Working conditions led to unionization and violence when the factory/mine/mill owners used private goons, plice and the National Guard to crack down on strikers.

I'm not sure what the hell will happen with new drugs. The laws and rules requiring FDA approval of new drugs are still in place, but the people who check and approve or disapprove new drugs have been shitcanned. I'm not sure if the inspectors who check food-processing plants have also been fired, because there is just too much chaos for me to track. But I'll assume, for the sake of argument, that they have.

So we are going back to Demented Donnie's 19th Century: Economic turmoil for all but the ultra-rich, adulterated food and untrustworthy medicines.

Don't blame me. I voted for the black lady who didn't want to crash the global economy and make everyone sick.

If True, This is Some Nazi Shit

A forensic doctor who examined the bodies of some of the 15 paramedics and Palestinian rescue workers shot dead by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave in southern Gaza has said there is evidence of execution-style killing, based on the “specific and intentional” location of shots at close range.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the Palestinian Civil Defense and UN employees were on a humanitarian mission to collect dead and wounded civilians outside the southern city of Rafah on the morning of 23 March when they were killed and then buried in the sand by a bulldozer alongside their flattened vehicles, according to the UN.

Executing medics is shit that one would expect from the Germans in WW2 and the Russians in the current war.

I've been of the opinion that, after the Iraq War, Americans have little cause to call others out for war crimes. But this is way too much to let pass.

Judge Nixes the Felon's Move to Extort Mayor Adams

A federal judge dismissed New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case on Wednesday, agreeing it was the only practical outcome while blasting the Justice Department’s “troubling” rationale for wanting the charges thrown out — namely so the Democrat could help President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The judge, though, denied prosecutors the option to refile the charges after the mayoral election. Judge Dale E. Ho’s order to dismiss the case “with prejudice” spares Adams from having to govern in a way that pleases Trump or potentially risk having the Republican’s Justice Department revive the charges.
...
“Dismissing the case without prejudice would create the unavoidable perception that the mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents,” the judge wrote

"Perception," hell, that was the truth of the matter. "Everything heser smacks of a bargain" were the judge's words.

Adams is, in my opinion, as crooked as the day is long. But so is Deranged Donnie. The move to dismiss the case without prejudice was clearly the move of a blackmailer; the judge did the right thing in squashing that.

Mugging These Down, Here

MAGA hat in Greenland:

The Joys of Hiring Idiots

One of the side benefits of hiring women and minorities is that the white guys who cruised through life on their gender, skin color and good looks were somewhat pushed out. The Syphilitic Sociopath reversed that trend. And that's a reason why we're getting shit like this:

National security adviser Mike Waltz used his personal Gmail account for government communications, The Washington Post reported, citing documents it reviewed and interviews with three U.S. officials.
...
According to The Washington Post, Waltz had his schedule and other work documents sent to his personal Gmail account.

A Waltz staffer reportedly used his Gmail account to have "highly technical conversations" with staffers at other government agencies about military positions and weapons systems being deployed in an ongoing conflict.

These are guys for whom OPSEC are just five letters that may appear in a spoon of alphabet soup. The FSB and the MSS must be laughing themselves silly on a daily basis with this group of clownshoe-wearing chuckleheads in charge of American security.

Then there is the point that they are deliberately circumventing records retention laws by using non-governmental email systems for official correspondence. But that's the Trump-effect: the laws apply to the little people, not to them.

Chambering These Down, Here

Unconscious irony is one of Little Marco's talents: