A Russian spacecraft docked to the International Space Station (ISS) didn’t just bring supplies to the ISS—it also brought a foul odor. The unpleasant aroma was strong enough to prompt astronauts to close the hatch connecting it to the rest of the space station and initiate anti-contamination procedures.
The Progress 90 cargo ship arrived at the Russian Poisk module at 9:31 a.m. ET on Saturday, November 23, delivering about three tons of food, fuel, and supplies for members of the Expedition 72 crew on board the ISS. After opening the hatch between Progress and the Poisk module, the crew noticed a noxious smell and droplets coming from the cargo ship. The Roscosmos cosmonauts closed the hatch immediately, fearing a possible contamination hazard, RussianSpaceWeb.com reported based on communication between mission control in Houston and the ISS astronauts.
NASA confirmed the report, adding that the foul smell does not indicate a safety concern for the ISS crew. “Space station air scrubbers and contaminant sensors monitored the station’s atmosphere following the observation, and on Sunday, flight controllers determined air quality inside the space station was at normal levels,” NASA wrote on X. “There are no concerns for the crew, and as of Sunday afternoon, the crew is working to open the hatch between Poisk and Progress while all other space station operations are proceeding as planned.
The cargo ship is supposed to stay docked for about six months. Let’s hope the stench doesn’t linger with it.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have been locked in a bitter rivalry for supremacy in space exploration. Donald Trump’s return to the White House could boost Musk’s ascent.
As it stands, Musk’s SpaceX is the competition’s undisputed leader: It regularly sends astronauts into orbit, while Bezos’ Blue Origin has yet to launch anyone beyond the outer edge of space.
But Bezos’ company, even if far behind SpaceX, is seen as its closest American competitor, and the two companies have clashed in court over billions of dollars in government funding. More recently, their battle has become increasingly bitter, as the billionaires themselves traded barbs on Musk-owned X.
Now, as Musk spends weeks palling around with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after the election, their proximity has the space industry fearing that Musk could rig the space race in his favor by diverting billions of dollars in government funding to SpaceX. The chief threat to SpaceX’s peers is that Musk will aim to create a monopoly in the private space industry.
Blue Origin has yet to put a single kilo of mass into orbit, much less catch up to the reusability standard set by Falcon 9 almost eight years ago. Meanwhile, with Starship, Musk is working on reducing the cost to orbit by two orders of magnitude.
Politico is indulging in the stupidest kind of scaremongering in a story that was probably shopped around by the same “space industry lobbyist granted anonymity” it quotes spouting off nonsense like this gem: “You’re talking about two of the most unpredictable people in the world getting together. It’s not like chocolate and peanut butter, and you get a great combination. You’re talking about world dominance here.”
This next graf is the big tell:
On Capitol Hill, Blue Origin is trying to raise alarms about potential unfair advantages in the space race. The company has been arguing that any policy that crowds out competition and capacity in civil or military space business could hurt the country’s space program and national security, according to the person who works with Blue Origin. Another person familiar with Blue Origin’s Washington strategy said the company has been trying to remind those on the Hill that its technology will be flying soon and intends to be a competitor.
Blue Origin hasn’t been able to compete so the company is crying to Capitol Hill — and garbage publications like Politico are happy to help.
THEY LITERALLY DON’T THINK THOSE SHOULD BE ALLOWED: X Is the Nonpartisan News Source, Which Drives Liberals Nuts. “Twitter was crucial to the success of the MAGA movement not because Elon Musk made Twitter/X a MAGA haven–look at those poll numbers, and you can see that Democrats and Republicans are here in equal measure–but because the news media was so like Pravda that having a space where people could see a more synoptic view of the world destroyed the Truman Show the media was trying to create.”
Related:
The media wants you to think @elonmusk has turned X into a conservative echo chamber.
“Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness,” [Sarah McBride responded] on X.
“This is a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing,” McBride added. “We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.”
Ed [Morrissey]: Er … who’s manufacturing culture wars? The people who insist that males should have access to women’s spaces on the basis of self-identity, or the people who oppose it? Because it looks a lot more like the former than the latter, and voters seemed to agree in this last election.
I’m happy to have them concentrated where I don’t have to see them.
ONE THING THE NEW TRUMP ADMINISTRATION NEEDS TO DO IS FIRE FOR GROSS INCOMPETENCE ALL THE DOJ LAWYERS WHO DECIDED TO PROCEED WITH THIS CASE: US Government lawfare against Space X.
On October 18, the spacecraft did not respond. Voyager 1 uses an X-band radio transmitter to communicate with the Deep Space Network. The mission team knows its spacecraft and worked out that the command might have triggered the fault protection system, leading to a lower rate of data transmission with a change to the signal from the X-band transmitter.
The team searched for that signal and were able to find it. The situation was a bit of a hiccup, but didn’t seem to cause any alarm. Not like last year, when the spacecraft started producing gibberish.
With that in mind, the team started to look deeper. Then, on October 19, in a concerning development, the signal stopped altogether. Luckily, Voyager 1’s onboard computer somehow found a solution – a truly left-field one.
“The flight team suspected that Voyager 1’s fault protection system was triggered twice more and that it turned off the X-band transmitter and switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band,” NASA’s Tony Greicius writes in the Voyager Blog.
“While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.”
The team has confirmed that the S-band transmitter is working well, even after all this time and at such an incredible distance. They are currently working to restore the spacecraft to its normal operations.
Parts of America still work — after almost 50 years and 15 billion miles.
Last year, Harrison Ford looked like his old self in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” The de-aging effects weren’t perfect, but it still felt like Doc Brown’s DeLorean had taken us back to 1981.
Magical.
“Here,” based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, takes that visual approach to a new level. However, much like “Dial of Destiny” the film supporting it can’t measure up.
Director Robert Zemeckis reunites “Forrest Gump” alums Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for a cloying drama set in one expansive room.
Really. That’s both a spoiler alert and a warning.
“Here” literally spans millions of years. The story opens with dinosaurs rumbling over a green expanse of land. We fast forward through the centuries until we end up watching that very space taken up by 20th-century Americans.
Yes, Zemeckis and co. are needlessly flexing the production’s CGI budget here for no discernible effect.
We land on several overlapping stories, including the saga of Richard and Margaret (Hanks and Wright). We watch Richard, or Ricky as a boy, grows up before our eyes. The action plays out in the family’s living room, where a long, cozy sofa dominates the room.
Get used to that setup. It’s the only one you’ll see.
F/X gurus de-age both Hanks and Wright to convincingly show them as a young couple, a budding family and, years later, a duo struggling in their empty nest years. It helps that the static shot means few close-up shots.
The trailer sold Here as an intriguing family movie perfect for the holiday season, but according to Toto, it’s a CGI de-aging movie that’s filmed almost entirely on one set? At least Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman had plenty of gangster action in a multitude of locations, in addition to all of the de-aging effects, before its painfully inert last hour.
The plan to increase the number of rocket blasts into space up to 50 a year was rejected by the California Coastal Commission on Thursday despite assurances from Space Force and Air Force officials that they would increase efforts to monitor the effects that rocket launches have on nearby wildlife.
The military also vowed to mitigate the reach of sonic booms that often span across 100 miles of coastline, an issue that has caused controversy.
Members of the California Coastal Commission commended Space Force and Air Force representatives for reaching an agreement, but some cited their concerns about Musk, the owner of SpaceX, before rejecting the plan.
Among the issues raised were Musk’s decision to insert himself in the presidential race, his spreading of conspiracy theories, the labor record of his companies and derogatory comments he has made about the transgender community.
“We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race,” commission Chair Caryl Hart said.
The California Coastal Commission denied the request for explicitly political reasons.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Secretive space plane X-37B to test ‘first of a kind’ maneuvers for shifting orbits. “The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-7) will begin executing a series of novel maneuvers, called aerobraking, to change its orbit around Earth and safely dispose of its service module components in accordance with recognized standards for space debris mitigation.”
When it comes to choosing where to operate a business, location is often the most important criterion. But if you ask chef Peter Hemsley of upscale seafood restaurant Aphotic, it is beyond that in San Francisco. Just 19 months ago, the chef opened Aphotic in a cavernous, inky black space near the intersection of Folsom and Third streets in SoMa. By the end of the year, it will be closed.
Hemsley is adamant that it wasn’t the food or even the $215 price tag on the 11-course tasting menu that caused the restaurant to fold. He blames the city.
“If I could have found a better location, I would have,” Hemsley told The Standard. “But it’s expensive and hard, and, for those who can’t, the lesson is: Don’t invest in San Francisco, because you won’t make it.”
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In the Instagram post, Hemsley expressed in candid terms exactly why he decided to throw in the towel. On top of industry-wide issues, including the rising price of ingredients and labor, Hemsley called Aphotic’s location on the southwest side of the Moscone Center the “ugly butt end of a desolate convention center suck hole” — a juicy quote that understandably showed up in headlines.
Hemsley told The Standard he saw the writing on the wall in recent weeks. It’d been a slow spring and summer, but as the usually busy fall season set in, reservations weren’t picking up. “I knew that forecasting into the spring and summer of yet another year, it probably wasn’t going to work and that this was the time to call it,” he said.
It’d be easy to write off Hemsley as bitter. But there is evidence to back up his experience. Tourism industry experts confirmed last month that 2024 has been a big letdown for San Francisco. This year, the Moscone Center will host just 25 events, down from 34 in 2023. Matters are on track to improve only marginally in 2025.
High-spending international tourists, the kind who might have splurged on a fancy dinner at Aphotic, haven’t returned to the city. Hemsley points out that he’s not the first to note the impossibility of keeping a restaurant alive in SoMa these days — even at a more approachable price point.
It really is a doom loop — the more the negative headlines keep piling up about Frisco, the less tourists want to visit, and the more the city contracts.
Exit quote:
I asked Hemsley what he thinks the city could be doing to support small-business owners. “No city official ever reached out to us to see how we were doing or to congratulate us or to let us know what their plans were or any multitude of things that they could do to help out small businesses,” Hemsley said. “So I think that lets you know about the mindset of the city.”
Well to be fair, SF politicians have much more important priorities these days than keeping their city’s businesses alive and tourists flying, bringing their disposable income with them:
What did Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, Idi Amin and Caligula have in common? That’s right: they were all able to speak.
This quite obviously proves that free speech is a tyrannical concept, one that can lead directly to murder, terrorism, genocide and — worst of all — misgendering.
And so it is a relief to see that one of Keir Starmer’s key priorities as prime minister is to crack down on online speech. Already he has ingenuously granted early release from prison for drug dealers, sex offenders and violent criminals to free up space for bigots who have said nasty things on social media.
The government has repeatedly pointed out that the riots in the UK were directly caused by bad words on the internet. One of those arrested was an elderly retired midwife from Devon, who had accidentally read an inflammatory Facebook post whilst browsing for cupcake recipes. Within ten minutes, she found herself punching Persian toddlers and throwing grenades at a mosque.
For all the endless whingeing of free speech extremists, Starmer appreciates that words must be controlled to ensure that his subjects behave themselves. Surely most reasonable people would rather have their liberties restricted than live in a fascist state?
The next step is to see Elon Musk extradited. It was bad enough that he renamed Twitter as “X”, which is just a swastika with a few bits chopped off. But he has also allowed users to say whatever they like. As a result, wrong opinions are being duplicated at an alarming rate.
The U.S. doesn’t know if the sub was carrying nuclear fuel at the time it sank, but experts outside the U.S. government said that was likely.
Undersea technology has long been an area of U.S. advantage, but China has been pushing hard to narrow the gap.
China has been moving to diversify the production of nuclear-powered submarines. Production has been centered in the northeastern city of Huludao, but China is now moving to manufacture nuclear-powered attack submarines at the Wuchang Shipyard near Wuhan.
Beijing had 48 diesel-powered attack subs and six nuclear-powered attack subs at the end of 2022, according to a Pentagon report issued last year on China’s military power,
That report said that China’s aim in developing new attack submarines, surface ships and naval aircraft is to counter efforts by the U.S. and its partners to come to Taiwan’s aid during a conflict and to achieve “maritime superiority” within the first island chain, a string of territory from the Japanese archipelago through Taiwan and the Philippines to the South China Sea.
The Zhou-class vessel that sank is the first of a new class of Chinese nuclear-powered subs and features a distinctive X-shaped stern, which is designed to make the vessel more maneuverable.
The sub was built by China State Shipbuilding Corp., a state-owned company, and was observed alongside a pier on the Yangtze River in late May when it was undergoing its final equipping before going to sea.
After the sinking, large floating cranes arrived in early June to salvage the sub from the river bed, according to satellite photos of the site.
Exit quote: “In addition to the obvious questions about training standards and equipment quality, the incident raises deeper questions about the PLA’s internal accountability and oversight of China’s defense industry, which has long been plagued by corruption.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Biden Admin to SpaceX: Drop Dead! “Biden-Harris would have us lose the New Space Race — putting our entire national security at risk — in a fit of partisan pique against the man whose other company, X, had the temerity to restore free speech to just one social media platform.”
Dubious charges of Nazism are a dime a dozen in U.S. political rhetoric, but I use the term advisedly—and literally: How else to describe Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Darryl Cooper? In it, the amateur historian argued that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War” and that the Nazi death camps were the result not of malice, but a logistical mishap: a failure to plan for the Wehrmacht’s oversupply of POWs. “Nazi Germany,” Cooper said, “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners. [They] went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.”
Carlson, a journalist I used to admire, hailed Cooper as the “best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today,” and lent him the same credulous, uncritical treatment he now seems to reserve for all the crackpots who frequently grace the podcast he hosts on X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter. As Cooper insinuated that unnamed “financiers” leaned on an indebted Winston Churchill to prolong the war, Carlson didn’t bother to ask, To whom, specifically, are you referring, Darryl?—like a curious journalist could be expected to do.
Long before he appeared on Carlson’s show, Cooper had made known his nutty views about the Jews as well as his sympathy for the Third Reich. In July, he declared that the Nazi takeover of France—which resulted in the deportation of 75,000 Jews to concentration and death camps—“was infinitely preferable in virtually every way” than the admittedly offensive drag queen “Last Supper” staged at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July.
Two months earlier, Cooper posted a rant on X in which he urged Christians to “reckon” with the fact that “no god in any religious tradition is as consistently brutal and bloodthirsty as the Yahweh of the Old Testament”—a rehash, in other words, of Marcionism: a second-century gnostic heresy that posited that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a capricious demon and not the God of Jesus. In 2019, Cooper agreed with an online interlocutor that “non-racist fascist” is a “decent description” of his politics.
As of this writing, Carlson’s interview with Cooper has garnered some 26 million views on X, boosted by Elon Musk, who called it “very interesting” and “worth watching.” (He later deleted the post.) The denizens of the Barbarian Right space seem to have gotten what they wished for out of the Cooper interview. “A lot of good points,” said one. “Only thing missing is naming the group behind the majority of subversions.” Another chimed in: “The mass migration into Europe and America is a Jewish-led operation.”
Unfortunately, the news media in this country has increasingly isolated itself from most of this country which has allowed an elitist attitude to emerge within the industry. It became more prevalent during the Trump era. We know Trump is crazy and dangerous, but the people are too stupid to figure it out on their own, so we need to do everything possible to help defeat him, even if it means shielding the public from what he has to say. Journalists repeatedly lobbied social media companies to remove Trump from their platforms — with many of them finally acquiescing post-January 6 — and encouraged corporate advertisers to pull paid ads from conservative or Trump-related content on social media and television. Many stopped carrying his speeches and events live so that viewers could not see for themselves what he had to say. All of his words were filtered through a biased media that wanted to present him in the most unfavorable light possible. Private persons who chose to support Trump anonymously online were harassed and “canceled” by news organizations, a warning that ideological dissent to the regime would not be tolerated.
Few of these journalists have ever stopped during this process to consider that their opinion of Trump might be wrong — or wonder why their strategy to silence him hasn’t meaningfully diminished his support. Instead, they have doubled down.
Earlier this week, a Washington Post reporter took it to the next level by openly suggesting the government get in on the game. During a White House press briefing, the Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson asked if the government has a “role” in tackling “misinformation” and if President Joe Biden planned to “intervene” in Trump’s X Space.
“I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue. It’s a — you know, it’s an America issue. What role does the White House or the president have any sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of inter — intervening in that. Some of that was about campaign misinformation, but you know it’s a wider thing, right?” Wootson asked.
The Biden administration has already been accused of illegally colluding with social media companies to censor content it deemed “misinformation” (unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs in this case lacked standing). Directly preventing a political opponent from speaking on a social media platform would be even further beyond the pale and it is frankly horrifying that a journalist, whose job is protected by the same constitutional amendment that shields the speech of everyday Americans from government censorship, would even suggest such a thing.
That the question was asked with little pushback from Wootson’s mainstream colleagues suggests to me that the American media has been emboldened in its illiberal ways. The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. The media don’t seem to care that their trust with the American people is at an all-time low or that many of them have had to lay off staff. They have apparently decided it is more important to use their platforms and power to gatekeep “acceptable” ideas in society.
While attempting to censor Trump into silence, the WaPo is pretty laid back about receiving radio silence from Harris: Questions we’d love to ask Kamala Harris.
Since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has neither given a sit-down interview nor held a news conference. Her campaign’s website lacks an “Issues” page (there’s only a biography). We get it, tactically: It’s tempting for Ms. Harris, as it would be for anyone in her position, to stay as vague on the issues as possible, for as long as possible, to avoid giving fodder to the opposition or dividing her supporters. Ms. Harris is confident she’ll win if the campaign is about the many flaws of former president Donald Trump.
And the Post will be perfectly happy if Harris never does an interview with them. And why not? The silent treatment has to be much more enjoyable for Democratic Party operatives with bylines than the constant abuse they received from her nominal boss over the decades. (Besides, have you heard about how badly Kamala treats her staffers?)
UPDATE: One prominent WaPo journalist weighs in editorially on Biden — and presumably the person that Democrats have chosen to replace him as well:
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Sun blasts out most powerful flare of current solar cycle, sends massive coronal mass ejection into space. “On Tuesday (July 23), Europe’s Solar Orbiter (SolO) spacecraft witnessed an extremely powerful X14 class solar flare erupt from the far side of the sun. Although it was not the most powerful flare ever recorded, which was estimated at roughly a X45 back in 2003, solar flares of this magnitude can result in longer-lived radiation storms and even world-wide blackouts if they are directed at Earth. The X-class are the leaders on the classification scale, and blast out energy 10 times more powerful than M class flares, which is second on the list.”
JK Rowling is furious. And who can blame her? The recently published Cass Review has proven what she has been saying – and demonised for – for years. On Wednesday, the author and philanthropist posted on X to suggest that she wouldn’t forgive the actors-cum-activists she made famous for turning on her.
Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe (who played Harry in the blockbuster films) and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) have both previously condemned the franchise’s creator for daring to point out the dangers of gender ideology. Now, in light of Dr Hilary Cass’s damning report, Rowling has said: ‘Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single-sex spaces.’
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Watson or Radcliffe will be apologising to anyone. The pair have been committed to pushing gender ideology ever since they publicly broke with Rowling in 2020, issuing robotic soundbites in support of trans rights.
Last year, Glenn wrote on his Substack that Leftist politics “is something that the manipulative old sell to the gullible young. Hence leftists’ nonstop efforts to produce more gullible young people…Modern society has extended adolescence well into the 20s for many people and, I want to stress, that’s not by accident. Separation of young people from the larger society helps create a captive cadre of voters, protesters, campaign workers, etc. There are, of course, other forces promoting this separation besides left-politics (companies like to market to young people for the same reasons of hive-mindedness and gullibility) but it’s worth keeping in mind what’s going on here, and why.”
Much of that applies to the trans movement as well, which is yet another subset of leftist identity politics.
Rowling, in having a significant say over the casting of the first Harry Potter film, which gave numerous young actors either a start, or a tremendous boost in their careers. Perhaps they should have heeded her thoughts on other issues as well.
The SpaceX boss said the next Starship launch, which is expected to take place in early May, will focus on bringing the craft back to Earth safely from orbit for the first time.
On Wednesday, SpaceX completed a second static fire test of its latest Starship rocket at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
“Getting ready for Flight 4 of Starship,” Mr Musk posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday.
“Goal of this mission is for Starship to get through max reentry heating with all systems functioning.”
[Kayla Aliese Carter] believes it’s not enough to be not racist, one must be actively antiracist and working to “dismantle this s–t.” Some of her posts contain defenses for violence, asking, “Why do Black people always have to rationalize our violence and anger?
“Remember we are at war against colonialism,” read a post on Instagram from Feb. 2021. She captioned it with, “We can’t forget.”
The header for her X account says the following: “I can’t wait for society to collapse so MY ideology can rise from the ashes!”
“Today I cohosted and occupied space with dozens of people who have committed their lives, businesses, and money to Black liberation. On all days, every day, each day. Light workers. Already planning (BEEN PLANNING) for how we will eat and live and grow after we burn it all down,” she wrote in May 2020.
A short while after the bombing of Dresden, [Robert Ley, head of the National Socialist Labor Front] wrote a ranting article under the title “Without Baggage,” in which he bizarrely celebrated the destruction of Dresden as liberating Germany from the “burden” of its architectural heritage, and by implication its freethinking, humanist past.
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After the destruction of beautiful Dresden, we almost breathe a sigh of relief. It is over now. In focusing on our struggle and victory we are no longer distracted by concerns for the monuments of German culture. Onward!…Now we march toward the German victory without any superfluous ballast and without the heavy spiritual and material bourgeois baggage.
Elon Musk, accompanied by his son and notable figures including Ben Shapiro, Rabbi Menachem Margolin and Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev, visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland on Monday.
The visit, which included a wreath-laying ceremony at the Wall of Death and a service at the Birkenau memorial, was reported by The Forward.
This visit aligns with Musk’s attendance at the European Jewish Association’s annual conference in Krakow, taking place ahead of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. Rabbi Margolin, chair of the Brussels-based organization, had extended the invitation to Musk during a livestreamed ‘Spaces’ call on X focused on antisemitism and free speech. During the call, Musk tentatively agreed to the visit, recognizing its significance in understanding the impact of the Holocaust.
Even in 2024, some still need plenty of help in that effort:
Dan Greenburg, who gained a national following with his irreverent, mordantly funny books about sex, marriage and Jewish mothers, then reached a far younger audience with chapter books about paranormal adventures and a math-averse superhero named Maximum Boy, died Dec. 18 at a hospice center in the Bronx. He was 87.
The cause was complications of a stroke he had last year, said his son, journalist and author Zack O’Malley Greenburg.
A onetime industrial designer with a fondness for tongue-in-cheek humor, Mr. Greenburg wrote more than 70 books but was probably best known for his first, the 1964 bestseller “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual.” The satirical self-help guide sought to answer such pressing questions as “How many miles away should you allow your child to move?” (the answer came in the form of a math equation: “Distance = M.P.H. x Lambchop Defrosting Time”), elucidated culinary techniques like the “Proper Form for Administering the Second Helping” and featured a glossary for terms such as “unmarried surgeon: the answer to a mother’s prayer.”
“Give your son Marvin two sports shirts as a present,” Mr. Greenburg advised in one chapter. “The first time he wears one of them, look at him sadly and say in your Basic Tone of Voice: ‘The other one you didn’t like?’ ”
While Borscht Belt comedians had long poked fun at the image of the anxious, overbearing Jewish mother, Mr. Greenburg’s book reached a wider audience, selling more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone. The book “established the Jewish mother as a nationally and internationally recognized stereotype,” according to “You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother,” by Joyce Antler. It was adapted into a hit 1965 comedy album by actress Gertrude Berg, and two years later it made its way to Broadway in the form of a short-lived musical revue.
Greenburg’s book eventually became a springboard for one of the funniest hours of television ever produced: When the Jewish Mother Was an Icon.
A half hour before the taping started on November 12, 1970, Mel Brooks went into the bleachers in the studio at WNEW, New York City’s Channel 5, and warmed up the crowd. It was like he was back to his days as a tummler working the crowd in a Catskills resort. “He was in the audience doing shtick,” Greenburg remembered. “He was so on it was unbelievable.” Laughter rumbled through the set by the time [David] Susskind started his introductions at the top of the program. Usually unflappable, Susskind was breaking up as George Segal lovingly blew thick clouds of cigar smoke into the host’s face.
Within moments, Brooks went into overdrive. He announced in all the years he lived with his mother, he had never seen a piece of furniture. Sheets to keep the dust off had always covered it. “But what’s criminal is that my mother has four great paintings that we’ve never seen,” he proclaimed. When Goldberg talked about how the small Jewish population was dispersed in his hometown of Kansas City, Brooks said: “I bet they all get together for pogrom—gathered in one big Jew cellar while the Gentiles go thundering by!”
Susskind started [David] Steinberg off by asking if his mother were still alive. The comic stared into space as if he were trying to remember. He then described a dream in which they were in a ballroom on a luxury liner. “We danced until dawn,” he said. “I’m three and she’s 52 and I’m just about to get her into my crib—and I wake up.”
Brooks topped him later by claiming he had left the Jewish faith because the sign of the cross was easy to make in a time of panic. He demonstrated how a Star of David would require both hands. “Two triangles,” he said. “That’s a lot of work!”
The show became a joyride powered by a relentless, unpredictable Brooks, who could fill any pause in the conversation with a routine or a song. The performance had the technical crew in the show’s control room rocking with laughter. Assistant director Jim Shasky said the camera operators on the studio floor laughed so hard they were unable to keep their shots steady. “The live audience really set the tone,” said Herman. “I remember one of my assistants, a redhead, was the only person not laughing. She was a nice non–Jewish girl from California. I don’t think she knew what was going on.”
“It was anarchy,” said Segal, who sent the studio audience into convulsions when he got up from his chair to do a song from his days as a Dixieland jazz bandleader and stepped on the cord of the lavaliere microphone that hung around his neck. He started to choke when the cord tightened like a noose. When Susskind got face to face with Segal to help him, the actor looked in the host’s eyes and said softly, “What are you doing later?”
But it was Brooks who kept on taking command. He thought of the rest of the panel as straight men, and they knew it. “They were all funny,” he said. “As far as I was concerned they were very, very good, but I was better. It was just give me the mike and stand back and I’ll take care of the evening.”
“Mel has got that streak in him, that ‘I’m taking this over no matter what,’?” Segal said. “Welcome to the Mel Brooks Show. But that was okay. He was being Mel and that was the best part of him really. I don’t know what you call that kind of aggression, but it certainly worked on that show. Mel was totally comfortable with David Susskind. David kept giving him rope and Mel kept advancing.”
“Mel and I were sort of discovering each other there,” said Steinberg. “You could see me half improvising and finding material I didn’t even know I had on the show. At some point I realized all I wanted to do—whatever subject David Susskind hasn’t found, I wanted to find another one for Mel.”
* * * * * * * *
Brooks didn’t recall any immediate response to “How to Be a Jewish Son.” After viewers clamored for Susskind to run it again, the show was repeated annually around New Year’s Day. Its popularity and legend grew along with Brooks as he became a major comedy box office attraction as a director and performer during the 1970s with Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, and Silent Movie. “Suddenly I’d hear about the show from one person and another,” he recalled. “It was very much like The Producers,” referring to his first film, released in 1968. “It made an explosion when it opened, and it was kind of quiet and little by little it gathered its own steam and its own force and moved forward. It got to be legendary. The same thing happened with this show. You never know what’s going to happen. Who knew that this little roundtable interview show, certainly not a great forum for my talent, would be one of the best things I ever did in my life? It would launch me as a first-rate comic personality. Who the hell knew? It was amazing.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a complete unedited version of the show online, but it’s been uploaded to YouTube in a series of 15 minute clips:
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Dec. 12 reaffirmed its 2022 decision to reject SpaceX’s application for nearly $900 million in broadband subsidies.
Following SpaceX’s challenge of the initial decision, the FCC said in a statement that Elon Musk’s space company failed to “meet basic program requirements” in its bid to receive funding through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program.
The program is meant to expand broadband access in rural areas.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket launches from Starbase during its second test flight in Boca Chica, Texas, on November 18, 2023. SpaceX on November 18, 2023, carried out the second test launch of Starship, the largest rocket ever built that Elon Musk hopes will one day colonize Mars, while NASA awaits a modified version to land humans on the Moon. It comes after a first attempt to fly the spaceship in its fully-stacked configuration back in April ended in a spectacular explosion over the Gulf of Mexico.
The FCC said that, after passing an initial application stage, SpaceX later failed to demonstrate to the agency that it “could deliver the promised service.” The agency said in its statement that funding the request would “not be the best use of limited” resources.
Starlink — I’m a customer — is tailor-made for rural areas. Anyone in its coverage area (that’s pretty much the entire US) with $600 to spend on equipment can have access almost immediately without any wait for someone to lay cable.
You have to figure that cutting Starlink out of Biden’s much-hyped rural access program is nothing but punishment for Musk’s Twitter/X purchase.
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