C'mon, sure you can adjudge a pedophile guilty by his cover — or mugshot, as in this case

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Aaron Wood allegedly engaged in an online conversation with an undercover officer he believed was a teen boy

No need to bother reading the evidence against him — I didn’t. My Crim Law Prof. Loftus Becker would be ashamed of me, but ….

Gee, where have I heard this before?

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Ford Motor Company is doubling down on a comprehensive quality transformation to end years of persistent reliability struggles. For several consecutive years, the Dearborn automaker led the U.S. automotive industry in total recall campaigns and warranty expenditure. The financial burden and reputational impact prompted leadership to initiate a structural overhaul across engineering, procurement, and assembly operations.

Under Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley, the company has begun shifting away from short-term fixes toward systematic process changes. Recent third-party evaluation reports show early indications of progress, with Ford making measurable strides toward top quality metrics in several vehicle segments. However, executive leadership emphasizes that fully rectifying institutional quality gaps will require sustained discipline across multiple product cycles.

Speaking at the recent 2026 Automotive News Conference, Farley explained that execution now hinges on a “complete obsession with details” across every phase of design and production. He stressed that earlier quality breakdowns often stemmed from rushed launch schedules or overlooked minor component variations during assembly. The revised mandate requires engineering teams to resolve potential failure points long before assembly lines begin rolling.

Blah, blah, blah

2020:

Consumer-driven Six Sigma saves Ford $300 million.

Ford Motor Co. made "Quality Is Job 1" a household slogan in the 1980s as it introduced revolutionary new products and used Total Quality Management to drive down costs and capture market share. Lately, however, the No. 2 automaker has been plagued by quality gaffes that have cost it dearly in customer satisfaction and market share. In fact, according to a recent J.D. Power & Associates survey, Ford has fallen behind arch-rival General Motors Corp. in overall quality and now ranks last among the big-seven automakers.

15 paragraphs of the simply marvelous work Ford had been doing in 2020, and then this concluding paragraph.

….  Ford's experience with Six Sigma proves that even a huge organization can be nimble enough to quickly implement a major restructuring in the way it thinks about the customer, approaches quality improvement and utilizes its most valuable resource -- its people. With the help of Six Sigma, Ford may yet make Quality Job 1, again.

Twenty-six years later, Ford has yet to accomplish that.

Does anyone else remember Renault’s 1967 apology ads that admitted they’d been selling crap to Americans for years but promised they’d mend their ways? Apology not accepted, and they no longer darken our shores. Ford continues the tradition.

“In France, a man will spend his Saturday afternoons tinkering with his car. He considers it a labor of love. We didn’t realize that in America, you don’t work on your cars on weekends. You want them to work for you.”

99 Porchuck has found a buyer; color me wrong

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99 Porchuck Road, $3 million, is pending after just 16 days. I’ve never thought much of the lot this house was built on, and have said so over the years:

2018: Eight-plus years to foreclose on a worthless POS

2019: A curious decision to build

My dire predictions were borne out back then: Listed at $2.095 in 2019, it sold 481 days later for $1.545:

A price cut, and a sale after series of price cuts

So I was naturally sceptical when it reappeared on the market this September priced at $3 million, but this time I was wrong about its appeal. Ya just never know.

Fools wade in where anglers ....

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Okay, horrible pun, but, sheesh: 19 Old Club House Road, a 1965 tear-down nestled on the Shorelands flood plain, was listed at $3.250 million on September 10th and must have received a torrent of offers, because it reset the bidding and raised its price today to $3.6 million. The new bidders might want to check out how the builder of 4 Little Cove Lane’s making out with his own project, but I’m sure they’re confident that, this time, it will be different.

(One of) the infuriating things about trying to discuss stories like this with the occasional liberal I encounter is that they've never read them, and simply don't want to hear about them.

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More:

“The doctors who prescribed them would get 6% of the sales cost. And so, they were incentivized to prescribe more expensive products. In Europe, they spend 35 cents a cubic inch. We were spending $135, and that went up to $2,000 a cubic inch.”

“So 2019, we were paying $200 million. Last year we spent 14 billion. All stolen. It’s all stolen. And we were on track to spend 23 billion this year.”

“We put an end to it, and we now have driven that cost down to somewhere around a billion dollars.”

To its credit, and to my astonishment, the NYT reported on this fraud way back on April 10, 2025: Medicare Bleeds Billions on Pricey Bandages, and Doctors Get a Cut; my impression of my liberal friends’ awareness of stories like these is that it doesn’t exist — they mutter, “But, Trump!” and move on.

Unrelated, except that it’s another story they won’t hear about

South Korea to invest up to $200B in Alaska LNG pipeline, US power plants, Trump announces.

The investment also includes a natural gas plant in Texas and eight new nuclear power plants across the country, Trump said during remarks in the Oval Office.

Trump said the deal came as part of a trade agreement between South Korea and the U.S. in which the U.S. would lower the Asian country’s tariff rate to 15 percent in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in investment.

Trump particularly touted the Alaska pipeline investment, known as Alaska LNG because it would transport liquefied natural gas, as allowing the U.S. to export more gas.

“The United States is already the largest natural gas producer and exporter in the world, and this pipeline will help us expand those exports even further,” he said.

Fortunately, there’s a sound track for this

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Christa Pike still alive, ‘snoring’ after 2 lethal injections as Tennessee governor halts all executions

It’s Tennessee, so a country music classic seems appropriate to the occasion.

Botched execution aside, Miss Pike, like most criminals on death row, doesn’t seem the kind of person who’d be missed.

From the Tennessee Supreme Court decision confirming her sentence detailed Pike’s horrific acts;

“On January 11, 1995, Pike, a student at the Job Corps Centre in Knoxville, told her friend Kim Iloilo, who was also a student at the facility, that she intended to kill another student, Colleen Slemmer, because she ‘had just felt mean that day’.

…. “At approximately 10:15 p.m., Iloilo observed Pike, Peterson, and Shipp return to the Centre. Slemmer was not with them. Later that night, Pike went to Iloilo’s room and told Iloilo that she had just killed Slemmer and that she had brought back a piece of the victim’s skull as a souvenir.

“Pike showed Iloilo the piece of skull and told her that she had cut the victim’s throat six times, beaten her, and thrown asphalt at the victim’s head. Pike told Iloilo that the victim had begged ‘them’ to stop cutting and beating her, but Pike did not stop because the victim continued to talk.

“Pike told Iloilo that she had thrown a large piece of asphalt at the victim’s head, and when it broke into smaller pieces, she had thrown those at the victim as well. Pike told Iloilo that a meat cleaver had been used to cut the victim’s back and a box cutter had been used to cut her throat.

“Finally, Pike said that a pentagram had been carved onto the victim’s forehead and chest. Iloilo said that Pike was dancing in a circle, smiling, and singing ‘la, la, la’ while she related these details about the murder.

“When Iloilo saw Pike at breakfast the next morning, she asked Pike what she had done with the piece of the victim’s skull. Pike replied that it was in her pocket and then said, ‘And, yes, I’m eating breakfast with it’.”

A University of Tennessee employee found Slemmer’s body on January 13. The employee testified that it was so badly beaten that he had “first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal.”

It did not take long for authorities to turn their attention to the 18-year-old Pike who, upon being interviewed, waived her rights to silence and gave a complete statement admitting to her involvement.

She told police she used a box cutter and meat cleaver and that she had asked Slemmer to accompany her to the Blockbuster store before lying about a “bag of weed” she had hidden in the park.

“According to Pike, as she slammed Slemmer’s head against the concrete, Slemmer repeatedly asked, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’,” the court documents read.

“As Slemmer ‘screamed and screamed’, Pike recounted how she began to hear voices telling her that she had to do something to prevent Slemmer from telling on her and sending her to prison for attempted murder.”