Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Consistently wrong since 2002

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

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86Comments

  2. 2.

    Another Scott

    Very nice.

    But, the CC text says, “I’m going to step off the Land now.” (Should be LEM.)

    Really? Come on, Google… :-/

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  3. 3.

    James E Powell

    It is very hard to explain to people today the way we all looked at and thought about astronauts back then. It may have been that last great consensus in American culture. And Duke Ellington! Walter Cronkite! There were giants among us, once.

    I watched the landing today on Apollo 11 in Real Time. I cried for all the reasons.

  6. 6.

    PaulWartenberg

    There’s a better livestream sim at https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

    I am going crazy today following the historic moments.

    I was born 10 months after it happened. Always felt I had missed out. Only historic moments in my own lifetime I could compare to this would be watching the Berlin Wall fall while living in Gainesville, waking up for some unknown reason to find out as it happened Princess Diana’s death, watching 9/11 while meeting at Broward Main Library, watching “Lazy Sunday” on SNL, witnessing Obama’s election night in 2008…

  7. 7.

    david

    Looks like that nutjob Naughton tweeted out his latest “painting”. And, of course,
    like Pavlovian dogs, Liberal twitter is retweeting it by the thousands.

    Who needs advertising when there’s a ready and willing source of free publicity?

  9. 9.

    hervevillechaizelounge

    Off topic and one thread late: could someone please explain the “granite countertops” republican conspiracy angle?

    I have googled to no avail.

    Thanks in advance!

  10. 10.

    laura

    I was nine, that summer – and the moon landing and tang and space food sticks, was the greatest, most positive thing to happen in an otherwise scary time. That summer, in Santa Rosa, the zodiac killer was on the prowl, the Black Panther movement to improve lives in the community was riven by the FBI and COINTELPRO, Charles Manson and the family crime spree was a constant headline and we had a couple of big earthquakes centered in town and our dog George was but one of many in our neighborhood killed by a strychnine poisoner.

  11. 11.

    Amir Khalid

    I remember listening to the morning news while getting ready for school (I’d just turned eight) and hearing about the moon landing.

  12. 12.

    Spanky

    @PaulWartenberg: Well for that matter, we (you and I) missed out on WWII and being called the Greatest Generation by some half-wit news reader. Assuming we survived.

    We also missed out on the Dark Ages, etc. And will probably miss the super bug that will wipe us out, though that’s always still a possibility.

    So … Cheers!

  13. 13.

    chris

    @Mary G: Yup. 8:30 here in Nova Scotia and we’re down to 82F. Sob. But the humidity’s down to 52% so we got that going for us, it was 75% this morning. The great Chinese hoax continues apace.

  15. 15.

    Spanky

    @germy: It was more complicated than that. Hopefully this will jog some memories, because mine is pretty faulty.

    It was in the days of Bush the Younger that there was a fight about sCHIP, and somehow a 12 year old (from Baltimore?) got involved, maybe simply by being an example given by the press as one who used sCHIP. Naturally, conservatives went nuts, doxxing him. One walked past his family’s row house and looked in the windows and saw … GRANITE COUNTERTOPS! Surely no family that could afford granite countertops needed sCHIP. Etc, etc.

    ETA: It might have been in the early Obama years. Too fuzzy to remember.

  18. 18.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @germy: It was Michelle Malkin who criticized some family with a child who needed expensive medical care.

    Why did the family have granite countertops? Dad was a contractor who could get them fairly cheap because he was a contractor.

  19. 19.

    Elizabelle

    @germy: Wondering if it was Michelle Malkin, but truly don’t remember and don’t really care.

    Do not recall who the victim of her ire was. Shirley Sherrod??

  20. 20.

    Sab

    I grew up just north of Cape Canaveral. My little town had its population triple when all of the space families moved in. When I was in grade school half of my friends had rocket scientists for fathers. Very stresful work for them. Men’s lives depended, and their calculating equipment was amazingly primitive.

  21. 21.

    Villago Delenda Est

    As I related over at Wonkette, I was 12. I saw the Apollo 11 launch live with my own eyes from my grandparents’ front yard on the 16th, the family visited the space center a week earlier, and I along with millions watched Neil Armstrong take that first step in glorious black and white.

  22. 22.

    CaseyL

    I remember the moon landing, but do not remember if I watched it live. My family had a house in Atlantic City and spent the summers there, on the beach and in the ocean all day, so we may have been too tired to watch. OTOH, all my family were/are space exploration fans, so maybe we did watch live.

    Somewhat relatedly: I just saw the teaser trailer for “Picard,” the latest Star Trek movie, and it looks amazing.

  23. 23.

    Another Scott

    @hervevillechaizelounge: RWNJ trolls cranked it up to 13 to attack expansion of SCHIP in 2007. NewRepublic has a summary.

    One reason I feel strongly about this is that I’ve seen it all happen before. As you may recall, back in 2007, a young boy from Baltimore named Graeme Frost was tapped to give the Democrats’ weekly radio address. Congress was in the middle of debating whether to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). Frost, who relied upon the program to cover ongoing medical treatments from a severe car accident, used his story to argue for the program’s growth.

    Within days, though, right-wing bloggers started digging into the Frost family story in order to prove he didn’t really need S-CHIP. To make their point, they published “revelations” based on hearsay, hasty public records searches, or mere suspicion. The Frosts had new marble countertops in their kitchen! They had enrolled their kids in one of Baltimore’s toniest private schools! They could have bought insurance if they wanted it!

    Few jumped into this fray with more zest than Malkin, who visited the Frost’s commecial property in Baltimore. When she failed to find the father, Halsey Frost, there, she drove by the family house. She didn’t call or knock on the door, claiming she wanted to respect the family’s privacy.

    The whole effort might have been a perfectly legitimate exercise in reporting if Malkin didn’t breathelssly report glimpsing a newish SUV in the driveway and repeat the other allegations swirling on the Internet. She also quoted an unsolicited letter from one of the Frost’s neighbors. The letter-writer called the Frosts “good people” but “terribly misguided, pathetically leftist buffoons.” The letter-writer later referred to Halsey as “an incredibly disorganized lovable goofball” who “just can’t seem to hold down a proper job or, when he’s tried, to run a proper company.” (Malkin didn’t indicate whether she confirmed the authenticity of the source.) All of this was designed to show that it was the Frosts’ own life choices, not circumstance, that made them dependent on govenrment-subsidized insurance.

    In the end, when actual reporters from real newspapers looked into the story, a rather different picture emerged. Although not destitute, the Frosts were hardly affluent. The kids attended private school on scholarship. The new SUV was a gift from friends, since the accident had left the kids too scared to ride in a car. As a small-business owner, Halsey couldn’t find affordable insurance, particularly given the kids’ pre-existing conditions and ongoing medical needs. In other words, without a program like S-CHIP, the kids probably couldn’t get decent insurance.

    Malkin’s coveage drew some criticism, but she never backed down. […]

    HTH.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  24. 24.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @PaulWartenberg:

    waking up for some unknown reason to find out as it happened Princess Diana’s death,

    Funny thing about that. I didn’t find out until 2 weeks later. I was on an expedition when she died, and didn’t find my roommates NYT front page with it emblazoned across the top of it for another week after I got back. TBH, I just thought, “OK….”

  25. 25.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    Trying without the links.

    From the Balloon Juice Lexicon:

    Twelve-year-old Graeme Frost spoke publicly with gratitude that S-CHIP helped with medical expenses after a car accident left him with severe injuries, and wished the same for other children. Wingnuts immediately piled on to this dangerous kid and trashed his family, going so far as to look in the windows and see – gasp! – countertops that appeared to be made of granite. This obviously made his family unfit to receive any public benefits. (The counters were concrete, but no matter, it’s still a scandal!) Now used to show the idiocy of the wingnuts trying to discredit anyone who says something they don’t like, using completely irrelevant and often false information.

  27. 27.

    Mark

    I was 23 at the time and excited. Now, years later, as an old man I fully appreciate the event, and I am truly, deeply thrilled. A friend was backpacking through Europe and happened to be in a bar in Venice full of locals who cheered loudly.
    Thank you, all NASA heroes!!

  28. 28.

    Ruckus

    @laura:
    I was 20. I was constantly thinking about war. And how not to die in it. And how a girl I went to church with, and school for 11 yrs could be involved in the Manson crap. Fun times.

  29. 29.

    debbie

    I found out my grandfather died while watching the moon walk. I was 16. I don’t remember being excited about the moon landing, but I was watching it the way I’d watched the Kennedy, King, and Kennedy assassinations coverage. Walter Cronkite, of course. I think my dad had soldered the dial to only CBS.

  30. 30.

    Mike in NC

    I hate the pointless and wasteful idea of going back to the moon, but Trump is literally a lunatic.

  31. 31.

    NotMax

    First Moon landing was the reason for the first TV ever there to show up at the summer camp where was working. We herded all the kids into the dining hall to gather round and watch fuzzy B&W coverage on the one station we could pull in with anything approaching consistency from around 100 miles away. Most of the younger campers fell asleep.

    Repeating from downstairs:

    For those who imbibe, the Moon Cocktail.

    Also too, more Moon-themed drinkies.

  32. 32.

    chris

    I was 14 and watched it in grainy black and white. I was sure that all my sci-fi/comic book dreams were going to come true until some party pooper adult started explaining distance/time and stuff to me. There may have been a slide rule involved. Fun while it lasted anyway.

    But I can still laugh, here is Serena in the best thing ever. So happy!

    To all the non-tennis-playing men who think they can win a point against Serena, watch this… ???? pic.twitter.com/GEDQb76KHt— EBC (@ItsBlackCulture) July 19, 2019

  33. 33.

    Another Scott

    @Ruckus: Wow. :-(

    I was 7. But even then, and more a few years later, I was wondering why we couldn’t “win” and whether I was going to be drafted.

    Men of your generation put up with an awful lot. I wonder how long it will take for the country to realize it in a deep way.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  34. 34.

    Amir Khalid

    @PaulWartenberg:
    Princess Diana’s funeral a week after she passed was a global TV event of a kind that simply wasn’t possible for the moon landing in 1969. People were gathering at satellite-TV displays in stores to watch the procession.

  35. 35.

    hervevillechaizelounge

    Thanks so much for the countertop info:) Balloon Juicers provide a form of institutional memory for RWNJ bullshit—I am constantly amazed by the breadth of everyone’s knowledge.

    It’s a little disheartening to learn republican bad-faith attacks have persisted for decades—yet the media still gives them the benefit of the doubt:(

  36. 36.

    Noran

    I was 10, living in New Jersey, and was thrilled to be allowed to stay up late to watch Armstrong actually step on the moon. Unfortunately, we had a fairly small black and white television with less than great reception, so I remember watching the images and being completely unable to figure out what I was seeing — is that the LEM? Is that his leg? What’s that small blobby thing?

  37. 37.

    Gravenstone

    @Another Scott: Malkin is a particularly aggressive kind of stupid. Thing I’ll forever mockingly remember her for was the “Obama flags” kerfuffle. Fucking idiot confused the state flag of Ohio (where she attended college!) with some imaginary flag that right wingers swore was intended to lionize Obama.

  42. 42.

    plato

    The Apollo 11 mission patch:
    No American flag.
    No space hardware.
    No Astronaut names.
    In that regard, unique among space emblems.
    Affirmation that walking on the Moon was an achievement of the human species, to be shared by all.
    pic.twitter.com/Fw7Y7EWR1m— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) July 20, 2019

  43. 43.

    Omnes Omnibus

    I was still four years old – I turned five about two weeks later. My parents and I were on a six week trip through the western US. My mom had the summer off as a teacher, my dad had just finished school and was scheduled to start a job in late August, and I was starting kindergarten in September. We were in Yellowstone for the landing and everyone in our campsite gathered around some family with a Land Rover/Land Cruiser type of vehicle that had a powerful radio. We didn’t the see landing but we listened to it.

  44. 44.

    Brachiator

    I had to keep a journal for my English class. I’m sure that my entry for the moon landing was said often in different ways. For thousands of years the moon inspired songs and poems and novels. But when the astronauts stepped down onto the surface, the moon became real estate.

  45. 45.

    Ruckus

    @chris:
    I’ve had a decent life, my hobby for 20 yrs was working part time in professional sports. And then I got a job, just when I needed it most working full time. I had participated in the sport when younger but the pros worked at a level that I could not comprehend. Serena is like that. You can understand the game, you can play the game but at their level you are completely lost. After I got out of the navy I lived near UCLA for a while and we would go on Thursdays to Pauley Pavilion and play pickup. I was actually pretty good – except for my height. My friends had no idea how I could play but every time we’d go some giant guy would come by to practice. I got to watch a bunch of extreme basketball up close. Sort of like those guys standing across from Serena. Without the bruises. My time working in pro sports was the same. Heroes could be great, they could be assholes, but they could participate at a level that defies comprehension.

  46. 46.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @chris: WRT the Serena thing, one if my good friends in law school had been a girls doubles state champ in IL. She was a leftie, but she would switch to right-handed so that she had to do some work to keep me from taking a point from her. Against Serena, I doubt that i could return a serve.

  47. 47.

    hilts

    @plato:

    Michael Collins explains: “We wanted to keep our three names off it because we wanted the design to be representative of everyone who had worked toward a lunar landing, and there were thousands who could take a proprietary interest in it, yet who would never see their names woven into the fabric of a patch. Further, we wanted the design to be symbolic rather than explicit.”

    Fellow astronaut Jim Lovell suggested the eagle, the national bird of the United States, as the focus of the patch. Running with that proposal, Michael Collins found a picture of an eagle in a National Geographic book about birds: “Water, Prey, and Game Birds of North America,” and traced it using a piece of tissue paper. He then sketched in a field of craters beneath the eagle’s claws and the earth behind its wings. This preliminary design did not satisfy the crew. Armstrong and Collins believed that it did not represent all they wanted it to convey. The olive branch was suggested by Tom Wilson, a computer expert and the Apollo 11 simulator instructor, as a symbol of the peaceful expedition. The crew was delighted with that notion and Collins quickly modified the sketch to have the eagle carrying the olive branch in its beak.

    h/t https://www.nasa.gov/feature/the-making-of-the-apollo-11-mission-patch

  48. 48.

    dmsilev

    Just saw the Apollo 11 film, made up of restored archival footage. It’s available on the various digital download stores (iTunes etc), but see it in a theater if you can. Great footage of all of the important parts of the mission.

    LA’s shiny new just-opened Alamo Drafthouse is nice, but still a bit of a work in progress.

  49. 49.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ruckus: One of the things that separates the good from the great is the amount of time devoted to practicing. I have seen it in music as well. I was a good violinist, but with my ability all the time in the world would not have advanced me beyond very good. Any extra time spent practicing resulted at best in linear improvement. For the greats, additional time worked with talent to produce improvements that were almost exponential. I got good enough to recognize where I fit in the grand scheme of things but also to really appreciate how good the greats really are and how long a road it takes to get there.

  50. 50.

    chris

    @Ruckus:

    a level that defies comprehension

    Yeah, wow! I was amazed by Serena’s precision (I am not much of a sports person) and delighted at how much fun she and the guys were having.

  51. 51.

    Ruckus

    @Another Scott:
    Part of what bothered me was the callousness with which young men were treated. I took my draft physical Sept or Oct of 1967 and two things stood out loud and clear.
    First, the blood and urine samples from all the guys getting a physical were just put in racks with no labels, nothing to ID the samples. Which meant that they weren’t getting tested, just tossed later that day.
    Second, as we stood in the hallway of the Armed Forces Enlistment Station, in our underwear, on the opposite side of the hallway were the lucky guys getting inducted that morning. Down the hall walks a Marine sgt, a drill instructor, and he talks at the guys across from us. “I’m going to walk down this line and count off every third guy. When I’m done every guy I’ve pointed out will step back against the wall.” He walks down, “STEP BACK. STEP BACK.” On down the line. When he’s done he says, “All of you in the middle of the hall, you follow that woman down at the end of the hall, you’re in the fucking Army now.” After they filed out he stated, “All of you up against the wall, you are mine, you are in the Marines. March into this room.” You could have heard a pin drop in that hallway after that, 80-100 guys completely silent, standing there in our underwear, holding the rest of our clothes. I don’t know about the rest of the people but that day was a real wakeup call to me, what my government thought about me, simply a body to do with whatever the fuck they wanted, dying being the second worse thing. Worse – being wounded badly enough say having your legs blown off. Or worse. I’ve seen worse at the VA. I saw worse at the Navy hospital I spent 2 months in 1973. Dying might have been a relief.
    War isn’t hell, it’s worse. For some it’s never over. I see it a bit in the kid at work who just got back a few months ago from a year in the Middle East. He’s good but he can spook easily without you even trying. Hell’s got noting on war.

  52. 52.

    hilts

    Last year, Vanity Fair ran an interesting background story about the mixtapes created for the Apollo 11 crew

    If you were going on a long trip, you made a mixtape for the ride. That’s how it worked in the old days, and the Apollo astronauts were no different. Except that most of them, being rather busy men, had their mixtapes made for them. They had a guy. And usually, this guy was Mickey Kapp.

    In the 1960s, Kapp was a young man working for Kapp Records, the independent record label that his father had founded in 1954. Kapp also happened to be friendly with several astronauts, many of whom were his contemporaries. From Apollo 7 onwards, NASA equipped every astronaut with a compact Sony TC-50 cassette recorder, a sort of proto-Walkman. Its primary purpose was not to play music but, rather, to serve as a convenient way for the astronauts to log mission notes verbally instead of with a pen and paper.

    “But they could put music on the tapes for the ride up, and then record over it with their notes later, because who cares?,” Kapp, now 88, told me in a recent interview, speaking by phone from his home in California. “So I would program their music.”

    https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/12/mickey-kapp-apollo-11-astro-mixtapes

    Mickey Kapp died last month, he was 88

    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mickey-kapp-dead-at-88-music-exec-gave-astronauts-space-travel-songs-1221535

  53. 53.

    debbie

    @chris:

    People were afraid of my serve back when I played tennis, but I would count myself lucky to even connect on one of Serena’s serves. I’d sure as hell wouldn’t let myself be hit by the ball, though!

  54. 54.

    Ruckus

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    That is a great take on talent.
    Anything that takes physical effort and skill, there are people with the gifts for that. The effort and sometimes risk that comes with that is immense but even with immense effort not everyone can pull it off. It makes being human so much more fun to know and get to watch up very close, someone with exceptional talent, grace and the result of exceptional effort.

  55. 55.

    smintheus

    We were all so terrified those astronauts would die. I just went through the photos at Buzzfeed and relived that terror to the point that when I got to the pic of Neil Armstrong smiling after the landing tears sprung into my eyes. And then again when I saw the photo of Buzz Aldrin’s wife almost doubled over in relief.

    I never got to see the landing, we had to listen to it on a car radio with my 4 siblings and I jammed into a small bench seat on a long drive home. I remember wondering as we listened to the fading radio whether the astronauts were squabbling in the back seat of the lunar module. As far as we could tell with that terrible reception, something was going wrong with the attempted landing. They just weren’t finding a place to touch down. It was terrifying.

  57. 57.

    CarolPW

    @hilts: There is a song released in 2018 that has lately been getting a lot of play on Sirius/XM Outlaw Country “When Charley Duke Took Country Music to the Moon.” It’s a hoot.

  58. 58.

    raven

    I was on R&R in Sydney.

    At an Apollo 11 twentieth anniversary dinner in 1989, Tom Reid recalled the extraordinary series of coincidences which had led to his little dish broadcasting to the world live TV of Armstrong’s first step. ‘It hadn’t been planned that way’, Reid said. ‘But that’s the way it was. And God dammit, we were ready!’

  59. 59.

    Ruckus

    @chris:
    Now think of the women who play against her. They don’t give up and they don’t get shown up like those guys. They give her everything they’ve got and she earns her place. She’s very, very good, she has been beaten on occasion. The competition at the very top of every ladder is intense and the top of that ladder is very tiny. If you ever get to even just see it up close, don’t miss that chance.

  62. 62.

    RAVEN

    @Another Scott: “Men of your generation put up with an awful lot. I wonder how long it will take for the country to realize it in a deep way”

    right

  63. 63.

    chris

    Mr. Pierce brings us back to reality.

    A reminder that, when JFK made the commitment to go to the moon, the top tax rate was 91 percent. When Apollo 11 landed, it was 77 percent.Now we “can’t afford” to pay for anything.— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) 20 July 2019

  64. 64.

    RAVEN

    @Ruckus: Every three huh, they did every other in Chicago in 66. My birthday is Nov 10 and I went in that day on my 17th. You know who else has a birthday on Nov 10?

  67. 67.

    Ruckus

    @RAVEN:
    No, I do not. I could look it up like NotMax but that would seem to take the fun out of it.
    Dad’s was Nov 7

  68. 68.

    RAVEN

    @Ruckus: Being from a Navy and Marine Corps family there was no small irony that I went in the Army on both of our birthdays!

  69. 69.

    schrodingers_cat

    I read about the Apollo mission in my class sixth geography book. And I decided that I wanted to go to the country that had the audacity to send human beings to the moon.

  70. 70.

    Bill Arnold

    Yesterday, via Paul Krugman[0]:
    Mnuchin, Pelosi Keep Communications Going on Debt Ceiling Deal (Jennifer Jacobs, Erik Wasson, Josh Wingrove, 2019/07/19)

    Trump called the debt ceiling a “sacred element” and told reporters at the White House: “I can’t imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge. I would have to assume we’re in great shape.”

    The Trump administration late Thursday gave Democrats a list of $574 billion in savings options from which to find $150 billion to offset Pelosi’s proposed spending increases over the next two years.

    I was laughing for minutes. :-) Perhaps DJT thinks he’s being sneaky and that the Democrats will lose if they apply the thumb screws (or something like that, iterated). Doesn’t matter.
    More seriously, Nancy Pelosi, this is your test. If you fuck this up, and don’t fully use your leverage over the D.J. Trump administration including S. Mnunchin, then you must go. (Personally I think abolishing the debt ceiling should be part of the package. Take DJT up on his comment, for starters.)

    [0] ETA:

    You have to be kidding. When Obama was prez, GOP demanded spending cuts as price of raising the debt ceiling. Now, with Trump in office, GOP is again demanding spending cuts as price of raising ceiling. No. If we hit ceiling, Trump owns it https://t.co/0rYHCU2q6Y— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) July 19, 2019

  71. 71.

    Another Scott

    @Ruckus: But how else will you learn things like this:

    November 10, 1580 – After a three-day siege, the English Army beheads over 600 people, including papal soldiers and civilians, at Dún an Óir, Ireland.

    So gentlemanly, those English soldiers… (!!!)

    :-/

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  72. 72.

    Bill Arnold

    @schrodingers_cat:

    And I decided that I wanted to go to the country that had the audacity to send human beings to the moon.

    It was nuts. Insanely dangerous for the astronauts. So much could have gone wrong or did go wrong and was jerry-rigged real-time, including Apollo 11. (Made me proud to be an Human/American. That, and the first Mars rover – Sojourner)
    These 6 Accidents Nearly Derailed Apollo 11’s Mission to the Moon (Laura Geggel, July 18, 2019)

  73. 73.

    SectionH

    I watched the lift-off with bated breath, got pretty emotional. Had watched most of the launches (watched Glenn’s ride in our school gymnasium in front of a really small TV, have been wondering if they had one for each grade…) In ’69 I was 17, back home from my freshman yr in college. But then, as the stupid joke about the ’60s goes, I was pretty stoned for the actual moon landing bit. But I still watched it on our grainy b&w TV.

    The past few days, I’ve listened to the real-time feed for the launch, and about 90 minutes past the launch, past their earth-orbit, to when they’d got their GO to head for the moon. I’m pretty sure all those communications weren’t available to us mere mortals back then. Just listening to how much they were navigating by best guesses had my heart racing (“Yeah I think that’s whatever star name it was” ). The real-time landing today had me in tears.

    Mr S didn’t want to pay attention. He was just like, it hurts too much. I got it. It does hurt to think about where we could be now, as humanity, if… if the haters weren’t fueled by people who’d rather rule in Hell.

  74. 74.

    randy khan

    July 20, 1969 almost certainly was the best day of my young life. I was at Yankee Stadium when they landed – at Bat Day, no less – and saw the announcement on the scoreboard, to great cheers from the crowd (a big one, too, since it was Bat Day). Then I got to be up way past my bedtime to watch the grainy, jerky video straight from the Moon. I was space mad, and it was just incredible to me.

  75. 75.

    J R in WV

    Yeah, if I had had a clue how hard it was, how close to death those guys all came, back then, I would have spent the whole month on the verge of tears. But we didn’t know.

    Raven, regarding the guys being split up between Marines and Army, I looked at that close up, and joined the Navy to avoid both of those outfits. Was 19 when I joined, as I still say, at the point of a gun. Just like the press gangs of the British Navy, join or die.

  76. 76.

    Aleta

    I know a guy who got a job as a young geologist fresh out of school and ended up doing things like help select the site for the Apollo 11 landing, and teach the astronauts what to look for in selecting moon rocks to bring back. He was there in the room while the astronauts were getting rocks; iirc, he gave some feedback about rocks to whoever was talking to them directly.

    Here’s something he said (not about Apollo 11, but about working together on the moon program).

    When I was in China recently, a colleague asked me what it was like being in competition with the Soviets [during] the space race. I can’t remember a single day when we sat around and talked about what the Soviets were doing. It was all about accomplishing President Kennedy’s challenge: the unbelievable feat of getting humans to the moon and safely returning them. Competitions and negative comments were all just put aside. And if you had something worthwhile to say, you were encouraged to say it. You were part of the team from the get-go. It was exhilarating.

  77. 77.

    Ruckus

    @RAVEN:
    Yeah I didn’t want to break his bubble.
    The word never, said as fucking never comes to mind.
    Had a Facetime break with my Marine buddy who spent 13 months in Chu Lai

  78. 78.

    Ruckus

    @RAVEN:
    Dad served in the South Pacific during WWII in the navy. That is the sum total of what I know about his service. I have pics of him in uniform but he never talked about it, even after I joined. I imagine a military brat would have a different take on it than me.

  79. 79.

    Ruckus

    @schrodingers_cat:
    When I was growing up I was one of the kids that wanted to go into space. Read every book about it that I could find, even though they were almost all fiction. Also that was before the word astronaut was even in common usage. But then my eyesight went bad and I lost most of my drive that I couldn’t realize my dream. Oh well life is full of bumps, dips, turns, disappointments and amazing surprises. Helps a bit if you are able to look for them.

  81. 81.

    Another Scott

    @Aleta: I knew a guy who was a machinist who worked on one of the astronomical instruments that’s up there. The astronauts were supposed to pull out some locking pin as part of the setup and alignment process, but forgot to do so. Instead they just manually moved it around until it was in the right position.

    They probably had a lot of things on their mind at the time. ;-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  82. 82.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Another Scott: I’ll see your 600 dead in a religious war during the 16th Century and raise you 5,000 to 30,000 dead in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France.

  83. 83.

    hotshoe

    @Ruckus:
    My father-in-law was in Army Engineers somewhere — or everywhere — in the Pacific in WWII.
    He refused to ever answer any question about what he saw.

    His son (before I met him) starved himself down to 110 pounds to get a medical deferment from Vietnam.

    This thread is a mixed blessing: memories of one of humans’ great achievements, the Moon program with its worldwide cooperation and good will, contrasted with yet another outburst of humans’ seemingly endless violence.

  84. 84.

    Ruckus

    @hotshoe:
    Amazing isn’t it? How good and how bad humans can be…
    We get 8 yrs of one of the best presidents ever, best president of my lifetime then his replacement is by far the worst. It’s not even a contest for worst, Trump wins worst hands down. And not only worst president ever, one of the worst human beings ever and that list is quite a bit bigger than 45 possibilities. Totally useless human fucking being.

  85. 85.

    Ruckus

    @hotshoe:
    A HS friend and his dad have a similar story. Dad flew P51 in WWII, said it was the greatest thrill in his life. Took up motorcycle racing after the war, said it was the closest thing he could do to flying a fighter. His son hired a lawyer to fight for his deferment – allergic to bee stings. He won. His dad backed him up in this, probably paid for the lawyer, I never asked. I did tell him once that I was pissed at him for about 5 minutes, I’m allergic to bee stings as well, have had to go to the ER twice to be fixed up and he never told me. Oh well, couldn’t have afforded the lawyer anyway. Also my sister knew a fella who had 2 doctorates trying to stay out, he ate ground glass before his physical at something like 26-27. Worked, he peed blood. Of course he almost died as well but he was 4F.

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