It’s just too Cool!
Bullet Points:
** Chinese MRE Review – In this case, the reviewer didn’t die. In another case, a reviewer did, but was the proximate cause of death the Chinese MRE? Chinese MREs are more of a PR thing than an actual field ration from what I’ve been told.
** US Navy uses a drag tranny to convince enlistments. A report from the Daily Caller on Monday revealed the Navy thought hiring a drag queen to convince young Americans to join was a good idea. Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, a biological male who goes by the stage name “Harpy Daniels,” announced on TikTok back on Nov. 2022 that he was the Navy’s “Digital Ambassador.”
** More Pay-to-Play in the Biden Crime Family – It’s how the Biden Mafia operates.
** President Joe Biden’s Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is seemingly unaware that China controls the world’s critical minerals supply chain — the very raw materials needed to produce batteries for electric vehicles.
** Rescue at Sea – Imagine losing your rudder out at sea and sending out a distress call. And then the largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship in the world comes to your rescue. Or in the words of the sailors on the sailing boat: “This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it?”
This all happened off the coast of France last week. To our knowledge, it is the first time that an east Indiaman, and the first time for Götheborg, engaged in such a rescue. Now we also have the images and story from the sailing vessel that was rescued.
Ford Laments
Economics, technology, and costs of production are not driven or dictated by ideology, unicorns, rainbows, or wishful thinking. [Remember the ol’ USSR?] It is driven by some very basic economic principles and facts which you ignore at your peril. Ford Motors is finding that out the hard way.
“….A little over a year later, Ford Model E is a pit of losses, while Ford Blue remains the cash cow of the whole group. Ford has just released its first-quarter results. For the first time, the carmaker has detailed its earnings by division.
It appears that the Ford Model E recorded a loss before interest and taxes of $700 million. This is $100 million more than in the fourth quarter of 2022. The margins are also in the red. The EBIT margin (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes), which allows investors to assess the true costs of the activity, is -102.1%. This is more than twice as much as in the fourth quarter of 2022, a period during which the EBIT margin was -40.4%.
On the revenue side, the sales of electric vehicles amounted to $700 million in the first three months of the year, which is less than half of the $1.6 billion in revenue generated by Ford Model E in the last quarter of 2022.
One fact is striking: Ford only delivered 12,000 electric vehicles in the first quarter, which means that the carmaker lost $58,333 for each clean car sold during this period.
Ford explained this poor performance by higher costs, mainly higher engineering, and spending-related expenses, commodities, and other inflationary pressures. Weak sales volumes are due, the carmaker said, to scheduled downtime at the Cuautitlan assembly plant in Mexico, to increase the Mach-E capacity to 35 jobs per hour.”
You should probably also put the term “clean car” because recent studies of the pollution created by creating, charging, and eventually disposing of these vehicles and the necessary supporting infrastructure may outweigh their environmental benefit.
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Identify the Tanks
Identify the Tanks:
rear partially obscured and in front of this: ISU-122
left: IS-2
ISU 152 – close, and yes, an IS-2
In that article on the Götheborg, the sailors said, “This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it?”
I get that feeling at least once a day seeing the news headlines or hearing them on the radio. I usually say, “what planet is this and how did we get here?” Then my wife accuses me of crashing our saucer into Lake Michigan.
The photo at the top of the article is epic.
I know what you mean
I’m just happy we’re out of SoCal……and so’s my son!
Navy recruiting – doubling down on what drove the potential recruits away in the first place. Sounds like a winning strategy.
Join the Navy and “transition” (and be sodomized) doesn’t sound like something with universal appeal.
The Village People did a MUCH better job :)
That’s what I was thinking.
Go YMCA instead of Navy?
Heh. That’ll be stuck in my head all day now.
LL – VP has a song called “In The Navy”. I’m guessing you have heard of it, so I’m not getting the YMCA detour.
I wonder how much of the eastern higher power prices is tax?
I think that’s base KwH exclusive of tax.
Out here in The East, where people are imbeciles, we mandate “100% Green energy”, which drives electric costs through the roof.
It also has zero effect, because all the electricity goes into the same lines, so that in R.I. all the power you get actually comes from the Manchester Street generating station in providence, and the various smaller peaking plants around the State which all burn natural gas, despite the “fact” that we “sell all that power elsewhere, and import green electricity from [mostly Quebec Hydro] ” .
There are wind, solar PV, a small amount of local hydro in State, but if it amounts to more than 5% of the energy budget I’ll eat my hat.
Those prices are definitely “before”, with all the crap we load onto the electric bill, we are paying like 45 cents a kwh.
-Kle.
Chinese MRE-While in living in Singapore we had a Christmas luncheon consisting of bring your favorite dish. Most of the attendees were of Chinese origin so the meal was basically Asian. The winners among the locals were “chicken feet dim sum style” and “fried chicken feet”. The other Gwai Lo (foreigner) and I were happy to pass up our portions and let the other participants enjoy. Point is, if the PLA can add those two items to their menu they’ll score some big points with the troops.
Cletus Valvecore
Depends on what part of China the particular troop calls home. Northerners eat more like normal human beings and are not generally fans of chicken feet, duck assholes, sloth toenails or similar dubious delicacies. But I’ve been told (by functional FOB Chinese) that I’m purely crap at being a chinaman, so what do I know?
Functional FOB is the guy (or gal) who’s been in the States for years, usually does some back-room tech job (definitely not customer facing), and barely speaks English (might read and write just fine, but the spoken is terrible because it’s rarely used). F-FOB socializes only with other Chinese and has no interest in the host country. Not as bad as lots of other stupid, violent immigrants with their hands out, and clearly not as bad as those high-IQ ones who want to change/improve (code for “destroy”) standard US (read “white”) culture, but still, not exactly people whose presence benefits society.
For some reason the mainland types want to see you eat pig blood soup or sautéed pangolin brains. Or they put baby scorpions in the rice or feed you house cat. It’s exotic (and expensive) Chinese not peasant food.
Are you serving me house cat?!! Chigga, please. As the distinguished foreign guest I expect certified-virgin ocelot raised on a diet of organic, free-range albino nutria. Plain Felis catus is an insult!
They’ll TELL you that it’s an ocelot or a baby snow leopard or jaguarundi, but it’s a calico kitten.
I live in the Philippines// We like grilled Chicken feet… We cell them Adidas.
Ford – glad I rolled my pension over and sold most of the stock. No surprise on EV sales. BUT their ESG scores are super-duper. Which probably still pleases William Clay to no end. I wonder if another Mulally is around somewhere.
you’ve come a long way baby: ” Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.”- Winston Churchill
The buttons were and maybe still are on both hips of the trousers in the Cracker Jack dress uniform…