Triumph

I think the key is to remember that anything you can think of, what they’ll actually do will somehow be worse.

I mean, the governor is commander of the Illinois national guard, so it would be easy to excuse service people who wanted to temp with the state guard.

But can He really come in many forms?

Bringing my terrible standing posture into sleeping positions sounds brilliant.

No, but Illinois has a provision for a “state guard” that the governor can assemble.

My understanding is that “dark matter” is a placeholder for “things are behaving in ways that would be explained by additional mass, but we can’t see any additional mass” and “dark energy” is “the universe is not only expanding, but that expansion is accelerating, and we don’t know why, so we’ll call it ‘dark energy’ because energy makes things happen”.

Gravitational lensing is pretty simple, no? Mass bends the path of light. When light is passing near a massive thing (star, galaxy), it changes direction. Then when we see that light, what we’re seeing is not only in a different place in the sky (probably behind the massive thing), but it may be distorted or enlarged because of the many slightly different paths the different photons have taken.

Carfax is not the authority on title status. They only get what’s reported to them.

Spend a few bucks and do a title search with the state.

Pretty much any economy is going to “work” as long as you have oil.

I mean to say that all these manufacturers have “shit on their prestige” many times, way before you were born.

And it’s not an airport, you don’t need to announce your departure.

Fair on the 1990s Lightning, and no, I don’t get my automotive history from bad movies.

Cadillac shat on its branding in the 80s with the Cimarron. Mercedes did a bad job with the ML320 in the late 80s. Ford’s malaise era Thunderbird was extra malaisey. BMW has always been kind of hit or miss, they’ve always tried to be closer to the bleeding edge of technology, and that doesn’t always work out. Chrsyler K cars were so famously disposable that you can’t even find them anymore, but none of their cars have really been super reliable since the 70s.

My point still stands. Your understanding of automotive history is bad, and you should feel bad.

Por que no los dos

The only thing in your list that’s accurate as “shit[ting] all over their own prestige they’ve built” for “the last several years now” is putting the Mustang badge on an electric SUV.

“Lightning” is a brand new badge for Ford; its use is not shitting on anything. Everything else you’ve mentioned has been going on for literal decades and is the source of a fair amount of that prestige, or in the case of the Dodge Dart badge being used on an economy car … that’s what the old Darts already were.

AMG has been the high performance division of Mercedes since 1993, after having built race engines since 1967.

BMW M is the same kind of subsidiary, having started in 1976.

Cadillac’s V-series is a high performance designation for those vehicles, tuned by the General Motors Performance division, today referred to as Chevrolet Performance. That division began as General Motors Performance Parts in 1967.

The Dodge Dart is a vehicle nameplate that started in the 1960 model year as a “lower priced full size model” - while being the smallest full size Dodge - then changing to mid size in 1962, then “compact” (for the time) from 1963 to 1976. A great deal of the history of the Dodge Dart is as an economy car. Of course, the 1960s and 70s had V8s available, with the 1968 L023 with a 426 Hemi as a standout, but the slant 6 was the bread and butter of the Dart through its entire early production run.

The Ford F-150 Lightning is a nameplate for the EV F-150 introduced in mid 2021.

At least you were right about the Mustang, though.

A guy I work with is in Germany. He came to the US for a work meeting. He intended to stay in the US for another week and a half, with plans to rent a car and drive … basically this route. With all sorts of sightseeing and tourist stops along the way.

Suffice it to say that he did not.

I do love me some rectangle ham.

It’s almost like the market for SUVs is much broader than for two seater sports cars (because ain’t nobody riding comfortably in the back of a pony Mustang).

Because it’s an electric SUV and not a pony car. It’s an entirely different vehicle, apart from the name slapped on it.

Group policy.

Because any time anything changes in Windows, people bitch about it.