Having decamped to the west coast of Florida for week I have seen a bunch of Georgia senate commercials for Kelly L. They are really silly, hitting all the buzzwords and images that are supposed to capture her opponent’s political philosophy. Liberal I guess is a dirty word and a picture of Ms. Ocasio surely says it all. How did a first term congresswoman from the Bronx come to represent all that is evil in American politics?
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Good tune. But doesn’t anyone else like the old instrumentals? The Ventures, Dave Allan and the Arrows, Duane Eddy, Sandy Nelson, The Surfaris and etc etc etc. Even Mancini’s Peter Gunn is awesome.
Damn, when Blue’s Theme played on the radio, I felt like an outlaw. Fortunately, I never had the red lights flip on behind me when that song was playing. I would’ve floored it and headed for the gravel roads. That’s all I listen to when I listen to oldies…just the instrumentals
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The Falcon 9 still wastes the 2nd stage. The Starship reduces the cost to the ISS to about 2 million a flight. It is a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than the least expensive flight to the ISS.
That said I am not sure manned spaceflight is going to be as common as we used to imagine because the human body isn’t evolved for it.
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And all that WITH a layover in Orlando. Hard pass.
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Yes, every rube he fleeces reinforces his belief that he is a winner and the rube is a loser.
He does this to fill the insatiable emptiness caused by the lack of proper parenting.
< rhetorical >
If reincarnation is real, then does someone with this behavior come back as a maggot growing in the entrails of a fluke, or a fluke growing in the entrails of a maggot?
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How much would they have to move in order to make a portion of the moderate Democratic voter base disloyal?
How much movement on taxes, for example? Or on environmental policy? Or on health-care policy?
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The Republicans were told as much after Obama’s first win. But then the Tea Party happened and they began to fear a Ross Perot debacle that would make them bleed from the right. This gave their far right a lot of influence. Especially after Obama won his second term.
They’ve been digging this hole since Nixon and nothing short of a complete collapse will make them change course. In heavily gerrymandered states, Democrats are gaining the high offices of the states. This is a counterweight to Republican minoritarian overreach. But not a sufficient one to right the scales.
Democrats need to use their voter majorities in these states to win more state judge races. If, like in NC, State courts start striking down gerrymandered maps, the jig is up and the Republicans either reinvent themselves or perish.
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There’s now abundant evidence that at least 81,000,000 people in the US are now in on this conspiracy against Trump. Why doesn’t the Elite Strike Force legal team mention that in court?
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Until we have enough understanding and engineering to provide a local gravitational field approaching 1.0 g (think Star Trek), we’ll need to use rotational motion to provide a centrifugal acceleration near 1.0 g. Our space-borne habitat will be on the wall of a rotating cylinder (or sphere, if you want “gravity” to be less as you approach the rotational axis).
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My point is there is a lot going on in the world that the media doesn’t spend time talking to us about because they spend all their time talking to us about a clownish Donald Trump or a bunch of reality show level unimportant culture war issues.
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The WP and the NYT covered it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/09/sapcex-starship-explodes-on-landing/
But Josh mostly sticks to political news, especially if it involves Trump.
It isn’t just Josh. He is doing political reporting all the time and he says as much. It is almost all of the broadcast media. Hours and hours of Trumpian bullshit on Fox, MSNBC and CNN all day every day. Network news rarely covers things that aren’t being covered on the cable news. I know Trump sells, but why doesn’t anybody see something other than the shiny object Trump puts in front of them every day.
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Or the way it’s done on The Expanse - just keep accelerating at 1g. Of course, we don’t have anything with the power and efficiency of their “Epstein Drive”…
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Definitely! And on the so-called 24x7 cable news programs, it’s as if they can only cover one little thing per day, and ALL THE SHOWS need to obsess about it. That’s why I’ve been trying to hit “BBC America” at least every few days. A wider perspective.
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I have reread this post at least 20 times because it has triggered optimism in spite of it’s considerably negative tone. It took a while, but I can finally put my finger on it:
Education for every child
Job opportunities for everyone
Those are two pillars that both sides claim to want.
Pensions abandoning fossil fuels is a serious opportunity to pivot towards the opportunities that await us by investing green.
You can go to Pennsyltucky and West Virginia, absolve them of their sins and sell them on a future with opportunity.
Future democratic candidate:
“Do you remember when we were chastising you all for clearing mountain tops for coal and destroying environmental gems? Good times right? [/s] No, I know they weren’t because many of you knew deep down that it was true, and it ate at you. It was your job. It’s how you fed your family and paid the bills. You do what you must to survive and I understand that, no, I admire that. Deep down we are all the same. We want to be good to others and treated well in return. We want to live within our means and have the means to do so. We want to wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose, and the pride of knowing that we will meet it. Most of all, we just don’t want to let those we love down. Falling short. Failing.”
[future candidate says we all fail at times. Speaks of a past personal failure affecting those he most loves. And than relates to their own experience. Their own trauma. And how deeply their scars have rooted and then pivots]
“Yes, we fail. Because we are human. We fail because we try. We fail because we don’t try too. But with resilience, we get up and try something different. We break the mould and look for opportunities.
And those cleared mountain tops look like a pretty good place for some wind farms. Wind farms that will bring clean, green energy here and to the surrounding areas. Wind farms that will bring construction jobs. Wind farms that will bring maintenance jobs. Wind farms that will make a scar go away and, if we get this right, wind farms that will bring the manufacturing of their component pieces here. You can do this. We can do this. A better tomorrow starts today.”
End of fantasy.
@ronbyers it seems discobot ignored who I replied to.
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And that Epstein Drive killed Epstein. 
And they eventually got it well above 10g, which required some kind of chemical stimulus to keep folks from passing out under the “heavy” load. That, and even 10g would require a long time to approach relativistic velocities needed for interstellar travel in anything other than a “generation ship”.
The Expanse is great.
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@ronbyers
It seems discobot ignored who I was replying to
Yes. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “nonviolent” coup when a Republican leader in Pennsylvania is legitimately concerned about her house being bombed if she defies Trump’s seditious demands.
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