HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Five-mile asteroid impact crater below Atlantic captured in ‘exquisite’ detail by seismic data.
Archive for 2024
October 4, 2024
UNEXPECTEDLY! Kamala Harris’s gushing tribute to Dick Cheney backfires spectacularly: ‘The single most evil man in the 21st century.’
‘Dick Cheney not only committed war crimes and helped kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but he also caused the deaths of thousands of American soldiers,’ wrote journalist Mehdi Hasan.
‘They should send Liz Cheney to Michigan to campaign for Kamala in Dearborn and Detroit. She can explain why she and her dad still support Guantanamo, CIA black sites, torture, rendition, drones and the war in Iraq,’ wrote journalist Glenn Greenwald.
‘Yeah imagine how much worse off we would be without the service of Dick Cheney,’ wrote right-leaning podcaster Saagar Enjeti sarcastically.
President Joe Biden also praised Dick Cheney on Friday after he watched Cheney and Harris campaign together.
‘I know her dad. … We argue like hell but I always admired his courage and honesty,’ Biden said, and added, ‘She and her father have character. Character dammit is what we need in this country!’
You’ll want to be sitting down when you learn that the (p)resident was singing a very different tune about Cheney back in the day: “Biden Wanted Cheney Out Too,” CBS reported on October 1st, 2006:
On CBS News’s Face the Nation Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said he thinks Rumsfeld should lose his job because of what he sees as mismanagement of the war.
Biden also said that, in an Oval Office meeting, he told President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that he wanted Cheney to step down for the same reasons.
“The present said to me, quote, ‘Why do you keep picking on Rummy?’ I looked at the president, and I said, ‘Mr. President, with all due respect’ – and I looked at the vice president – ‘Mr. Vice President, I would call for your resignation as well, were you not a constitutional officer,'” Biden told host Bob Scheiffer.
“And the president said, ‘Why would you say that?’ And I said, ‘Mr. President, not one piece of advice either Don Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney has given you has turned out to be correct with regard to Iraq.’ And the president just seems completely wedded to the notion,” Biden said.
Biden said that the president has to change the course in Iraq. Despite the presence of more than 600,000 troops in the war-torn nation, violence is increasing.
But when Schieffer asked if Biden thinks the vice president should resign, Biden said no.
“I was making the point that these guys just don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “And no one takes them seriously anymore except the president, apparently.”
On the eve of the election in 2008, Reuters reported Biden saying that “Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.”
It’s astounding that Kamala expects hyper-online Dems to forget all of the branding her party and its media wing did during the first decade of the 21st century, and that her core voters would suddenly believe that Hitler has left the bunker, been rehabilitated, and given a shiny new suit.
THIS WOULD BE SO MUCH EASIER IF BIDEN WOULD STOP TRYING TO MAKE LAWS: After Greenlighting Student Loan Debt Relief by Georgia Court, Missouri Judge Blocks It Again.
THE NEED FOR THIS ARTICLE IS BREAKING MY HEART:You May Not Know His Name, But You Probably Have Heard His Songs
I would have said “certainly.”
(Second try on the link, this should work better. Sorry.)
ULA VULCAN ROCKET’S SECOND LAUNCH KIND OF SUCCESSFUL. The rocket made it to orbit with its mass simulator, but one of the solid rocket boosters may have blown its nozzle clean off (video here, and here, yikes). This flight was supposed to certify the Vulcan for national security missions. Might be hard given the SRB problem. On the other hand, if it can blow a nozzle off and still work, maybe that’s a positive?
SPACE: Vulcan competes second flight despite SRB anomaly.
United Launch Alliance’s second Vulcan Centaur lifted off Oct. 4 on a test flight needed to certify the vehicle for carrying national security payloads, but may have suffered a problem with one of its solid rocket boosters.
The Vulcan Centaur lifted off at 7:25 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The liftoff took place near the middle of a three-hour launch window after an initial half-hour delay to provide additional time for pre-launch checks.
The first countdown attempt was halted 1 minute and 51 seconds before liftoff. Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said on social media that a “transient on a redundant data system” triggered the hold, and controllers resolved the issue and reset the countdown for the second attempt, which resulted in liftoff.
ULA said that the vehicle’s performance was nominal in the early stages of flight. However, the separation of the two GEM 63XL solid rocket boosters (SRB) took place nearly 30 seconds later than the timeline the company provided before launch. About 35 seconds after liftoff, there appeared to be material coming off one of the boosters, whose plume changed appearance, suggesting damage to the SRB’s nozzle.
Other reports claim the engine bell might have blown or burned completely off. But the Centaur second stage successfully reached orbit.
SONNY BUNCH: Megalopolis Review.
I honestly have a hard time choosing which of the bonkers performances I most enjoyed. [Adam] Driver has made something of a career out of delivering bonkers performances for aging auteurs: as a Sancho Panza stand-in for Terry Gilliam; as Enzo Ferrari for Michael Mann; and now as Cesar Catilina for Coppola’s decades-in-the-works dream project. Aubrey Plaza’s depiction of Wow Platinum is weirdly timely, given that the character is a CNBC reporter who uses her smoldering sexuality to get the goods and marry rich. When she can’t land Catilina, she instead opts for his insanely wealthy uncle, Crassus, whom Jon Voight plays for an hour with the sort of manic energy he brought to his 10 seconds of screen time as a masticating lunatic on that one episode of Seinfeld.
Crassus’s other nephew, Clodio, is played by Shia LaBeouf as a sort of cross-dressing Donald Trump double, rousing the rabble and indulging in populist rhetoric to do … something. The politics of this film are not particularly well thought out; despite Clodio’s villainy, one could easily make the case that it’s a fairly straightforwardly fascist tale about the needs of a brilliant leader to guide the dull masses and the corrupt elite out of the muck in which they wallow and into a brighter future, democracy be damned. I haven’t even mentioned Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman and Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire and Kathryn Hunter, all of whom deliver performances at roughly 110 percent of their required wattage.
Megalopolis isn’t a good movie, precisely—I think it fails on relatively fundamental levels as both standard storytelling and airy metaphor—but I’m glad it exists and happy to know that the thousands of dollars of Coppola Merlot I’ve consumed over the years helped in some small way to will this unwieldy monstrosity into existence.
Heh, indeed. It’s been a very long time since a movie has come along with such divisive reviews. QED:
● The New Yorker: “Megalopolis” Is Francis Ford Coppola’s Artistic Rejuvenation.
● SFGate (One of Coppola’s hometown newspapers): ‘Megalopolis’ is a piece of s—t.
WELL, THAT SETTLES THAT! Whoopi Goldberg Claims Hollywood Doesn’t Have A Liberal Bias.
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Found a New Way to Ride Out Hurricane Helene. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news and this week we have Florida Man’s living room kayak adventure, how he turned a surfboard into a rescue boat, and I don’t even want to know what that was Tennessee Man got caught doing.”
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Good friendships crucial to happiness of young adults.
HOWEVER MUCH YOU HATE THE MEDIA, IT IS NOT ENOUGH:
A Yazidi woman kidnapped from her home by ISIS terrorists in Iraq when she was just 11 years old has been reunited with her family after years stranded in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Iraqi and Israeli officials said Thursday. https://t.co/r1jQzHxxO3
— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 3, 2024
Community Notes remains undefeated.
MORE FLOODING NEXT WEEK?
Very complex situation in the gulf. My call is a threat of category 1.5-2 hit on our scale Later Tuesday or Wednesday on the west coast of FLA south of where Debby and Helene hit Tremendous amounts of rain are on the way even if a lesser event, but this looks serious even if… pic.twitter.com/1HDEGNRQYu
— The American Storm (@BigJoeBastardi) October 4, 2024
I DON’T TRUST THE POLLS: Here’s Why Trump Is ‘Favored’ to Win, Despite National Polls Showing Him Down.
I MISSED THIS ON TUESDAY BUT IT ISN’T LIKE ANYTHING HAS IMPROVED SINCE THEN:
🚨Federal debt explodes on 1st day of the new fiscal year, jumping $204 billion to new record of $35.669 trillion, but it gets worse: Treasury also had to draw down its cash balance by $72 billion – that's over $275 billion in the red FOR JUST ONE DAY: pic.twitter.com/lPgbmiIyzX
— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) October 2, 2024
Something that can’t go on forever will stop.
MORE LIKELY SHE FOUND A NEW PAYMASTER: Liz Cheney Has Lost Her Mind.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Waterpik Cordless Pulse Rechargeable Portable Water Flosser. #CommissionEarned
THE DINOSAURS MUST REALLY HAVE BEEN ASKING FOR IT: Asteroid that eradicated dinosaurs not a one-off, say scientists. “Detailed scans of an underwater crater off the coast of Guinea in West Africa suggest that it was created when another large asteroid smashed into the planet around the same time at the end of the Cretaceous period.”
WHY IS MIT SUCH A CESSPIT OF ANTISEMITISM? Jewish MIT alumni seek thieves who disrupted event, stole pizza.
THE SURVEILLANCE STATE IS HERE: Big Brother Is Watching Your Car, Your License Plate, Bumper Stickers, Yard Signs…
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Those Non-Endorsements Are Piling Up For Kamala. “We’ve been seeing this from one union after another, including large segments of the auto workers. Democrats have been taking these endorsements for granted for years, but now the actions of Biden and Harris seem to be coming back to bite them. Donald Trump has been out on the campaign trail portraying himself as the candidate for the working class. He has made significant inroads in that sector of the electorate. The union leadership ranks haven’t been able to bring themselves to endorse a Republican… at least, not yet. But the rank-and-file workers are clearly in the mood for a change to the status quo.”
As I’ve said before, the GOP is now the multiracial party of the working class. The Democrats are the party of the billionaires and corporations, and their hangers-on.
WILL THE REAL KAMALA HARRIS PLEASE SHUT UP?
Here's the exact quote: "There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking, so yes. And starting — and starting with what we can do on day one around public lands, right? And then there has to be legislation… I have a history of working on this issue." https://t.co/Lu5Bpr75Gu
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) October 3, 2024
TWO MEN SAY THEY’RE JESUS. ONE OF THEM MUST BE WRONG. Shot: Mayorkas Warns of Funding Shortfall for Rest of Hurricane Season.
Chaser: FEMA: We have plenty of money.
Hangover:
Now you see, this gaslighting may have worked during Twitter 1.0. Annnnd this is why you people hate X so much.
(1/2) pic.twitter.com/yzRFkEUJZZ
— Courage Is A Habit (@CourageHabit) October 4, 2024
UPDATE: A friend comments: “The big, unspoken problem here is one word. Competence. Our Federal government is no longer competent. It’s been massively politicized. The Obama era accelerated an already left leaning government bureaucracy into one that is incompetent at anything except punishing its perceived enemies in ways that make Nixon look positively saintly.”
Plus, from the comments: “One might ask how they are running out of money in day 4 of FY2024/2025.”