THE COUNTRY IS ABOUT TO BE IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS:
A colleague just shared an email from a major university's public policy school, which is planning a "self-care suite" for students the day after the election featuring Legos, coloring, and milk & cookies.
Folks, this isn't funny anymore. It's disturbing to treat adults like…
— Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) November 4, 2024
The kicker? This is Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif Has XY Chromosomes And “Testicles,” French-Algerian Medical Report Admits.
A BREAK FROM THE ELECTION DOOMSCROLLING [VIP]: Social Media Is Not All DOOM
BAD NEWS BEES: Endangered bees stop Meta’s plan for nuclear-powered AI data center. “The blow comes as rivals Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all struck deals recently with nuclear power plant operators to fulfill rising energy demands from data centers as they race to train and maintain power-hungry AI models. One AI query consumes up to 10 times the energy of a standard Google search.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Rage Against The Machine To Play At CIA Fundraiser.
KRUISER, JUST BACK FROM AN EXTENDED STAY IN MICHIGAN: Michigan Election Preview: Pay No Attention to the Polls Behind the Curtain.
GUYS, WE’RE HERE FOR YOU IN SOLIDARITY. TAKE ALL THE DAYS YOU NEED, STARTING RIGHT NOW. FIGHT THE POWER! New York Times’ tech staff threatens strike during Election Day crunch.
Management says that the Guild has bogged down negotiations with what the paper sees as outlandish, even illegal, proposals. As Semafor previously reported, the Guild proposed a ban on scented products in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement, as well as mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings discussing events in the news.
The ghosts of H.L. Mencken and Lou Grant are roaring with laughter right now. Except for “accommodations for pet bereavement.” Clearly the otherwise tough techie Timesmen need space to mourn for the vicious state-mandated murder of Peanut.
SANCTUARY IS FOR OTHER PEOPLE:
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Rich whites with Harris signs are terrified after receiving letters thanking them for accepting "to house a migrant family" pic.twitter.com/mKMkhCGRbp
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 3, 2024
“Scare tactic?” No, dear — you just got called out on your hypocrisy.
MAD DEMS:
Jon Hamm's face is like "wait, you shot someone?" https://t.co/ZULC6ZSoNU
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) November 4, 2024
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:
Kamala tries to get the audience to chant and it was an epic fail. This is so difficult to watch. The cringe is off the charts.
ZERO charisma
ZERO leadership abilities
ZERO social awarenesspic.twitter.com/jujgNdmfXx— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 4, 2024
JIM TREACHER: R.I.P’Nut.
THE “CNN” PART IS USUALLY A STRONG INDICATOR: I Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry at CNN’s Final Election Projection.
THE LATE QUINCY JONES, A MAN OF MANY TALENTS:
The death of Quincy Jones, at the considerable age of ninety-one, represents not just the passing of a great American musical icon, but the departure of a truly remarkable man from the stage. The winner of an astounding twenty-eight Grammy awards, he excelled in so many different areas of music — from record production and film soundtrack composition to big band jazz and multi-instrumental playing — that it would not have been particularly surprising to discover that he had written operas or symphonies on his days off. That he accomplished endless feats over his seventy-five-year career, which included playing with everyone from Billie Holiday and Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, was almost taken for granted in his lifetime, but now that he has quit us, it is only appropriate to acknowledge just what an astonishing figure Jones really was.
There is an irony in his highest-profile achievement being as a producer, rather than a performer or composer in his own right, and that his work on Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Off The Wall and Bad turned Jackson into the most successful pop star that there had ever been. Even after all the endless (and often justified) controversy that involved Jackson, Jones’s peerless work on these multi-million selling albums, including steering Jackson to the most lucrative record of all time, in the form of Thriller, will deservedly be remembered as long as albums are bought. It made Jones an extremely rich man, and gave him the luxury of only pursuing projects that he wished to take on for the remainder of his life and career: these included everything from a self-parodying cameo in Austin Powers in Goldmember as himself to recording the score for Spielberg’s film The Color Purple.
We forget that the record industry was in a pre-MTV sales slump when Jones began work on Jackson’s Thriller. He had quite a brief for his engineers at the beginning of the project, telling them, “OK guys, we’re here to save the recorded music industry.” Mission accomplished!
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Ballistics for Dummies: A Beginner’s Guide to Bullet Flight.
#1 RELEASE IN MEN’S ATHLETIC HOODIES: GIANTHONG Tactical Hoodies For Men Quarter Zip. #CommissionEarned
WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF TRUMP ELIMINATES THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT? Short answer: probably not much, if all the programs just move to other departments, which is the most likely outcome. Hard to see that it would be worth the political capital unless massive program changes are made.
(I also have to wonder how much of the failure is a direct result of ED’s building being an example of absolutely soul-crushing Soviet-style brutalism. The interior is even worse than the exterior. I wish I were exaggerating.)
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China reveals a new heavy lift rocket that is a clone of SpaceX’s Starship.
When Chinese space officials unveiled the design for the country’s first super heavy lift rocket nearly a decade ago, it looked like a fairly conventional booster. The rocket was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides.
Since then, the Asian country has been revising the design of this rocket, named Long March 9, in response to the development of reusable rockets by SpaceX. As of two years ago, China had recalibrated the design to have a reusable first stage.
Now, based on information released at a major airshow in Zhuhai, China, the design has morphed again. And this time, the plan for the Long March 9 rocket looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.
Based on its latest specifications, the Long March 9 rocket will have a fully reusable first stage powered by 30 YF-215 engines, which are full-flow staged combustion engines fueled by methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of approximately 200 tons. By way of comparison, Starship’s first stage is powered by 33 Raptor engines, also fueled with methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of about 280 tons.
The new specifications also include a fully reusable configuration of the rocket, with an upper stage that looks eerily similar to Starship’s second stage, complete with flaps in a similar location. According to a presentation at the airshow, China intends to fly this vehicle for the first time in 2033, nearly a decade from now.
Yeah, the Communist Chinese are copycats — but they’re smart enough to ditch old ideas and steal our best stuff.
Meanwhile, Congress insists on saddling NASA (and taxpayers) with the outdated and unaffordable SLS.
IT’S NOT GOOD HAVING A RULING CLASS THAT HATES ITS CITIZENRY. I Am Tired of ‘Leaders’ Who Hate Me.
HOW LONG CAN COLLEGES PUT OFF DEFERRED MAINTENANCE? Not many people get to run institutions with lifespans that can be expected to be in the hundreds of years. It’s not too much to ask them to put more focus on keeping them up.
BY THE NUMBERS: I Don’t Want to Jinx Anything but Trump’s Looking Good in Pennsylvania. “Before I share this afternoon’s potentially blockbuster numbers, I want you to write it 100 times on the blackboard: “I will not get cocky.” Also please note that text formatting for our THM mobile app and notifications is the only reason I didn’t put “potentially” in italics, boldface, and all caps. Because all of the things you’re about to read are only POTENTIAL indicators of a Donald Trump win in Pennsylvania.”
THE RIGHT DOES SEEM BETTER PREPARED THIS TIME AROUND BUT THERE’S NO WAY TO BE SURE UNTIL IT’S OVER:
Election workers around the country have cameras in jurisdictions where it’s legal to record.
If there’s fraud, we’ll catch it.
I’m on the ground somewhere right now, in disguise.
If you’re lying stealing, or cheating, please know that I will make you famous.
Say when.
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) November 3, 2024
BRENDAN O’NEILL: Kemi Badenoch isn’t the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy.’
We need to talk about what Dawn Butler. Following the election of the first ever black leader of a major party in this country, Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’. It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago.
Yes, when Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader of the Conservative Party, Labour’s Butler took potshots. She retweeted some tips for ‘surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory’ written by Nels Abbey, a London-based Nigerian journalist. He branded Badenoch ‘the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class’. She’s the chief representative of ‘white supremacy in black face’, he sniped. And Butler pressed retweet, hand-delivering to her 240,000 followers this repugnant reduction of a black politician to a witless stooge of whiteness.
Talk about putting the “international” back into international socialism — why is UK’s Labour Party stealing their racist insults from the L.A. Times? “[Larry] Elder, who would have become the state’s first black governor had he won, was smeared continually by California media at the behest of the left in the most absurd and often quite offensive ways. The Los Angeles Times ran an opinion column in August headlined ‘Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.’ Another Los Angeles Times columnist linked Elder to the politics of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.”
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