Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Not all heroes wear capes.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

… gradually, and then suddenly.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / SpaceX Looks Like a Go

Reader Interactions

196Comments

  1. 1.

    Elizabelle

    Any space buffs out there?  Hate to stomp on Avalune’s wonderful essay, but how often does a space launch happen?

  5. 5.

    Elizabelle

    @Baud:   I know.  And they’re masked.

    Go science!!  And please let this go off flawlessly.  We need some good news.

    Beautiful day for a launch.

  15. 15.

    Elizabelle

    Looks flawless so far.  Lovely to hear the engineers and team clapping and exulting.

  18. 18.

    Elizabelle

    That is the cleanest looking capsule interior, too.  It’s decades of advance since the space shuttle and the previous space program.

    Astronauts look sleek and comfortable.

    And they’re miles away from Toxic Tang.

  21. 21.

    MisterForkbeard

    I’m sad we lost the view of the falcon 9 just as it landed. But it landed! So cool.

  22. 22.

    Elizabelle

    They would land off the coast of Ireland if they aborted at this stage.

    The speed of this bird.

  23. 23.

    Elizabelle

    And the Falcon Nine has landed safely.  It’s recovered.

    Wow.  Just wow.

  26. 26.

    Leto

    @Elizabelle: my last base was one of the main telecommunication hubs for most of the Mercury/Apollo missions. The base just down the road, RAF Fairford, was one of the shuttle alternate landing abort spots because the strip was 2 1/2 miles long (longest in Europe). As much as we like to celebrate the “American Spirit”, it’s an international effort to get this up and going.

  29. 29.

    Tony Jay

    How they land that reusable 1st stage on the deck of a pretty small ship after its just thrown a capsule INTO SPACE is just…. Wow.

    Musk may be a silly and vain bloke in a lot of ways, but bloody hell he’s putting his money to work.

  32. 32.

    Yutsano

    @Tony Jay:  To be fair, it hasn’t been shown how much work Elon puts into SpaceX beyond the money component. I’ll definitely credit the company here, because having a launch on American soil feels pretty good. :)

  33. 33.

    Elizabelle

    About 23 hours to the Space Station.

    @HeleninEire:  We lived in Hawaii when John Glenn orbited.  I remember all of us on the block, kids and adults, craning our eyes to orbit.  It was dinner time.

  34. 34.

    ArchTeryx

    This is one of the extremely, extremely rare times that I can actually say, “Team America, fuck yeah!” and mean it.  Great, great achievement here, no matter what you think of Elon Musk, public-private partnerships and the political baggage of this launch.

    I don’t give a whoop about all the credit-takers.  I celebrate for the rank and file engineers, controllers and astronauts that literally rode the dragon back to orbit.

  35. 35.

    Elizabelle

    Leland is on NASA TV!  The cool black guy with the dogs in his official photo.

  36. 36.

    MisterForkbeard

    Oh look, it’s time to fluff Trump and Pence. This is where I stop watching.

  37. 37.

    Elizabelle

    “Nine years since launched American astronauts from American soil.” — the NASA Administrator.

  38. 38.

    Elizabelle

    @MisterForkbeard:   Yes.  May I add to this lovely thread:  fuck Trump.  Now and until he leaves this earth.

    That’s a really bad decision by NASA.  I think they are losing a lot of viewers.

    Maybe we can tune back in to see if Leland is there again.

  41. 41.

    HeleninEire

    @Elizabelle: When we landed on the moon I was in 2nd grade. They loaded us all into the “all purpose room” and we listened in to NASA.

  42. 42.

    Elizabelle

    @ArchTeryx:   It’s lovely to see Team NASA in 2020.  They are very young, very diverse, and I noticed a mask in the control room.  (Quick view, so couldn’t say if most of them were masked …)

  43. 43.

    ArchTeryx

    @Elizabelle: Every one of them was masked up.  Doubly a feather in their cap that they executed this launch in the middle of the nCoV outbreak.

  44. 44.

    Elizabelle

    @HeleninEire:   So cool.

    If the first landing, that was in July 1969, wasn’t it?

    I remember the A/V equipment from the 60s, in schools.

  45. 45.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Elizabelle: Yep. There was an article yesterday about how Trump has planned to politicize the launch and turn it into a giant PR opportunity, and how that had been scrubbed because of the launch delay.

    Looks like NASA still got their script from the Administration to personally praise Trump and Pence.

  47. 47.

    Leto

    @Tony Jay:

     

    but bloody hell he’s putting his money to work.

    Haha oh come on, you know he’s not doing that. He’s a great hype man, capable of assembling good talent, but outside of the initial seed money, he ain’t spending his money on this. Why would he when taxpayers can shoulder the burden to help launch his private company? It’s the next great public to private wealth transfer.

    Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies

    Two choice quotes:

    Musk and his companies’ investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost.

    “Government support is a theme of all three of these companies, and without it none of them would be around,” said Mark Spiegel, a hedge fund manager for Stanphyl Capital Partners who is shorting Tesla’s stock, a bet that pays off if Tesla shares fall.

    Also the talking head atm, I think it’s the head of NASA (trumpov idiot), just said Trumpov is the only sitting president who’s witnessed the launch of a brand new rocket that’s never launched before… the ghosts of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson would like a word…

  49. 49.

    Elizabelle

    I want to see some articles, soon, on the internationally born, and the second and third generation immigrants, who helped to put this capsule into space.  You know they are there.

    Many of them trained at our fine US universities.  Write it up, news media.  Show what we lose when autocrats like our traitor in chief try to stop international cooperation on education.

    Also the wonderful people from all over the US. And the world.  Science rocks.  There’s an alternative to being a moron in camo taking your own state legislature hostage.

  50. 50.

    RobertDSC-Mac Mini

    Happy it went off clean. Happy to see Americans launch from America back into space.

  55. 55.

    Yutsano

    @Leto: I made the mistake of tuning in when the head of NASA was on his knees in front of Dolt45. Click! And he was sucking up to almost his entire cabinet too! Gross!

  56. 56.

    gkoutnik

    On July 20, 1969, the day after my 19th birthday, along with a messhall full of Boy Scouts at the camp where I worked, we listened while Neil Armstrong set foot on another new world. We stayed up all night after that, drinking coffee and talking about what it meant. We decided they should turn and face Earth, and tell us that they weren’t coming home until we ended the war in Vietnam.

    Also: Musk is an immigrant.

  57. 57.

    Tony Jay

    @Baud:

    @Yutsano:

    I don’t have any illusions that Elon Musk personally knocks up each Falcon rocket using the ineffable power of his revealed genius (though I’m sure he’s told an endless array of very slim brunettes that he’s done exactly that). I am, however, genuinely impressed that at least one billionaire is doing something important with his money rather than buying up former democracies to sell off for parts.

    Well, at least until a couple of dope-smoking science-bros make it all pointless by inventing instantaneous interstellar wormhole travel in their backroom lab. Then we can do the whole thing by train. But until then, this is great to see.

  59. 59.

    Leto

    @Elizabelle: one other semi-fun fact (sort of to me at least): when I was an instructor for my career field I had a student come through who was sort of close to my hometown. We got to talking in class, and I was discussing some space related things that are components of our job. Turns out this student was the nephew of Mission Specialist Ronald McNair. When he told me that, I kind of choked up a bit because of what Challenger had meant to me as a kid. Idk, it’s just one of those weird life stories.

  60. 60.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @MisterForkbeard: It won’t post until June 29, two days after the book comes out. I have it drafted. I have to pull myself together and send it to him.

    WaterGirl says I should post on why I’m all worked up about the Scalzi thing. I’ll do that in the next couple of weeks. I’m grateful my tiny publisher is trying to set up promotion for the new book, but it turns out I have to write some stuff and do some stuff.  A week from today, I’m a guest on a podcast. I’ve never done that before.

  61. 61.

    Elizabelle

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:   All the more reason to vote this asshole out.  Save science!  Save the world!  Save our sanity!  (And our livers.  And our teeth.)

    @Yutsano:  Yes.  And that is when I clicked the NASA window shut.  All those cronies and crooks.  Is it safe to go back now?  Can we just celebrate — science?

  63. 63.

    WaterGirl

    @Elizabelle:

    May I add to this lovely thread:  fuck Trump.  Now and until he leaves this earth.

    My catholic upbringing leads me to feel the need to add:

    Forever and ever.  Amen.

  64. 64.

    Elizabelle

    @Leto:  That’s wonderful.  And lovely to remember Ronald McNair.  Who has a library named after him (in South Carolina??).  I was thinking of Christa McAuliffe and the lost from previous missions.  Can remember a lot of their faces, if not names at this point.  They are ingrained to memory through the shock of their loss.

  65. 65.

    Redshift

    Watching the launch with my NASA Twitter friends was great! I’m so glad everything went smoothly. Tuned out before Trump, so I just caught some gagging from others who weren’t so fortunate.

    Apparently #LaunchTrump was trending on Twitter for a while this afternoon. ?

  66. 66.

    Elizabelle

    @WaterGirl:   Thank you for putting up this thread.  It was fun to celebrate a superb launch with fellow jackals.

    Now:  back to Avalune’s dog!  At some point …

  70. 70.

    Elizabelle

    @Redshift:   #Launch is such a nice alternative to #Fuck.  Same sentiment, just gentler.

    I wonder if the orange one is staying at Mar a Lago tonight, so he does not have to be around those scary protesters on the streets of DC.

  72. 72.

    smedley the uncertain

    @Elizabelle: You reminded me that my immigrant father  helped build the Saturn V rockets that took us on our first space ventures.  I just got up to look at the Apollo 11 medallion given to him for his efforts.

  74. 74.

    JPL

    @Elizabelle: Decatur, GA    Ronald McNair Middle School.    Maybe SC also, but I do know there is a local school named for him

     

    lol Wikipedia tells me that there are several schools named after him.

  75. 75.

    WaterGirl

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    WaterGirl says I should post on why I’m all worked up about the Scalzi thing. I’ll do that in the next couple of weeks.

    I am sort of gearing up to start an ad-hoc Celebrating Jackals series, for when jackals have something to celebrate.  I thought Dorothy could be our first.  The idea came to me when The Mighty Trowel and Dorothy both announced something within a week or two of one another.

    Is that something folks would be interested in seeing?

  76. 76.

    JoyceH

    Hey? Let’s stop being a failed state ruled by a mad warlord and go back to being a spacefaring civilization! Who’s with me?

  77. 77.

    Leto

    @Elizabelle: there is, and agreed: I remember all of their faces and most of their names. I was watching it live in Mrs Whyte’s 4th grade class. I think of it as a kind of flip side to Apollo 11.

  79. 79.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s really exciting! Getting to write on Scalzi’s site is a pretty great PR opportunity for SciFi writers. I’ve discovered several really good series and novels by reading what authors have to say there.

    And to think, when you’re famous we can tell people “We knew her back when she was just a jackal” :P

  85. 85.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @MisterForkbeard: I hope the book sells. My publisher is what the UK calls a social enterprise, meaning they try to operate in a socially conscious way. For instance, they currently have a book on depression (Down Days) available for free because they know people need it. They’re non-profit to such an extent that my editor (who also owns the press) doesn’t pay herself. As it happens, I’m lucky enough not to need the money, but I want them to do well because they do good.

    @Leto: Yeah, I suspect that’s a universal tech thing. My engineer husband uses the terms too.

  87. 87.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    My buddy reminded me this was on. Glad I didn’t miss it. I put on MSNBC and they were showing the orange menace and pence for some goddamn reason. I switched over to the Discovery Channel and they were showing what mattered.

  88. 88.

    Elizabelle

    @smedley the uncertain:   I love how the press will be masked and smart while covering …. Americans.  I bet they love being around scientists and other smart folk.  Less chance of being covered with spittle and derision.

  91. 91.

    Kent

    @Elizabelle:Any space buffs out there?  Hate to stomp on Avalune’s wonderful essay, but how often does a space launch happen?

    Unmanned launches happen all the time.  Manned launches with astronauts on board are MUCH less common and haven’t happened in the US since the space shuttle was retired.  The Russians and I think Chinese have been doing some in the interim.

  92. 92.

    JoyceH

    @JPL: simple. It’s just that for days and weeks at a time, Trump completely forgets that he has a young son. (And Melania is careful not to remind him.)

  94. 94.

    NobodySpecial

    Meh, I love the idea of sending people into space, but having a private company send NASA astronauts up is the equivalent of airlifting troops via UPS. It speaks more to the failure of government to resist capitalism than it does any achievement.

  95. 95.

    Leto

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: it took me going to Italy, learning Italian, to really start to question the whole “male/female” thing. I mean, I get it wrt connector ends. But in languages, why is this labeled “male” and this “female”? One of the few times I’m glad English is just kind of a “fuck you, it’s this way” language.

  96. 96.

    ArchTeryx

    @NobodySpecial: It keeps the engineers employed.  That’s enough for me on this day.  Fighting the creeping privatization of our government won’t happen until Republicans and their handmaidens are consigned to the dustbin of history, right alongside the Whigs and the UK Labour Party.

  97. 97.

    PenAndKey

    @Tony Jay: “Well, at least until a couple of dope-smoking science-bros make it all pointless by inventing instantaneous interstellar wormhole travel in their backroom lab. Then we can do the whole thing by train.”

    Meh, I think I’d prefer the voidhawks. Though if any grad students want to make history by beating the first humans to Mars by minutes after the professionals took the long flight and were about to land I’d be totally cool with that. I’d still want a voidhawk though.

  101. 101.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Leto: I was once at a tech comm conference in Canada, where we were talking about gender neutral language. The Francophones had a real issue to deal with. Every noun was gendered. I don’t know what you do with that.

  105. 105.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @WaterGirl:

    There’s a history of extremely befucked father-son dynamics in that family, going back generations and continuing into the foreseeable future. If these people weren’t so dangerous, I’d be sad for them.

  106. 106.

    Leto

    @Omnes Omnibus: well, you know… all those teeth… /s

     

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: yeah, the “romantic” languages: Spanish, French, Italian. When I was asking Antonella how did computer, or internet, pic up the gender modifier they did, she didn’t know and said, “It just is because it is.” Sums everything up :P

  107. 107.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Elizabelle:

    Melania’s son!

    Remember that thing he did in the Oval that time a few years ago where he kept awkwardly saying that Melania had a son and that’s why she cared about … something, I can’t remember, something or other. But it was like he had no awareness or caring that he was the father, and he seemed not to know Barron’s name. It was a supremely weird moment. Among countless weird moments.

  108. 108.

    Tony Jay

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    Heh. My friend is a helicopter engineer up in Aberdeen. Quite often he’ll dip into technical terminology to explain why his supervisor is a complete dick for giving him stupid jobs to do, and yes, those exchanges are often filthier than the set of a late-night comedian in a smoky working-man’s club.

    “You did what to a flange? With a plunge-nipple? You sick bastard!”

  111. 111.

    Elizabelle

    @SiubhanDuinne:   It is so strange.  Melania’s — and Barron’s — day of separation and freedom is soon at hand though.  And to that, for all of our sakes.

  112. 112.

    Tony Jay

    @PenAndKey:

    Voidhawks = Yes.

    Torture-loving shapeshifting ghosts possessing the bodies of millions = Not so different to the world of today, in many respects.

  113. 113.

    Elizabelle

    @Baud:   And “la verge.”  Which can be a prick or a wand, your choice.

    Here, may we thank Omnes Omnibus for making us feel about 12 years old.  Googling those words.  LOL.  At least we had a better president back then, no matter WHO was in office.

  114. 114.

    David Evans

    @NobodySpecial: The ability to land and re-use the first stage, which only SpaceX is currently doing, makes the economics of space flight much better than it would otherwise be. NASA is presenting this as a decision to let commercial launchers handle the increasingly routine business of low-Earth orbit supply, while NASA can concentrate on the Moon and Mars and on the science missions.

  115. 115.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Elizabelle: I didn’t assign the genders to French nouns.  Although, if I had, I might well have done it that way just to fuck with people.  Take that, you little shits.  What’s more have some irregular verbs while I’m at it.  Don’t forget to tell everyone your language is logical and follows very simple rules.

  117. 117.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Elizabelle:

    I wish Barron well. He always seems kind of fragile to me, or maybe vulnerable is a better word. I hope he isn’t too tainted by his father and brothers. I hope he ends up okay.

    ETA: I really don’t give much of a fuck about Melania, though. 

  118. 118.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Tony Jay: [A]t least until a couple of dope-smoking science-bros make it all pointless by inventing instantaneous interstellar wormhole travel in their backroom lab. Then we can do the whole thing by train.

    Aha, Peter F Hamilton fan sighting! Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained…

    (I have to admit it had quite slipped past me that if you could keep two gates locked in alignment you could do it all by rail. Clever!)

  119. 119.

    PenAndKey

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’m learning French now. If anyone tries to tell me it follows logical rules I’m just going to point to their number naming conventions and raise an eyebrow in their general direction.

     

    @Uncle Cosmo: I’ve been reading his books since I was a kid and discovered Reality Dysfunction and never once encountered another fan of his works. So, of course, I’d find two here.

  121. 121.

    Elizabelle

    @SiubhanDuinne:   I hope Barron winds up a phenomenal memorist with a chip on his shoulder to write off.  The truth about dear old Dad.  (TOTUS being in prison orange and divested of his ill-gotten gains, at that point.)

  122. 122.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @PenAndKey: It does follow logical rules.  Except for the irregular verbs and the exceptions.  Bouf, ç’est très simple.

  123. 123.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @WaterGirl: Forever and ever. Amen.

    You meant Per omnia saecula saeculorum – or you would have if you hadn’t awakened to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church at some point after Vatican II. As a kid I was so bored by the Latin Mass I actually memorized some of the patter – though I escaped the clutches of Holy Mother Church about 6 weeks after Confirmation, a few months prior to the Ecumenical Council, and have never seriously entertained going back. Not even for Pope Frankie.

  124. 124.

    WaterGirl

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Remember that thing he did in the Oval that time a few years ago where he kept awkwardly saying that Melania had a son and that’s why she cared about … something, I can’t remember, something or other. But it was like he had no awareness or caring that he was the father, and he seemed not to know Barron’s name. It was a supremely weird moment. Among countless weird moments.

    That is one of the more horrifying things I have ever read. That’s supremely creepy.

  125. 125.

    Yutsano

    @Leto:

    I was watching it live in Mrs Whyte’s 4th grade class.

    Jeebus you’re a baby! :P I was in middle school. We were in the library (I was studying Russian alphabet) when one of the librarians wheeled a TV in. When we asked what was up she just said in a flat tone: “Challenger just exploded.” I honestly don’t remember if we went home early or what. We just watched the loop over and over.

  126. 126.

    Gravenstone

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    A lot of doctoral programs will have no students if the administration stops foreign enrollment

    Which will fuck up a lot of ongoing research. Because it’s the grad students who do that grunt work.

  127. 127.

    JPL

    @SiubhanDuinne: Supposedly she is a good mother and was involved with his school when they lived in NYC.   Also there might be a reason why trump is an anti-vaxxer.   He needs someone to blame

     

    Also it would not surprise me is his children had to sign a nda

  128. 128.

    WaterGirl

    @SiubhanDuinne: It’s not possible to come through unscathed with a parent like that.  If Melania was a person that could be so nurturing and protective and be the rock you would have to be to bring a child through that unharmed, she could not possibly remain married to Donald Trump.

  130. 130.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Ron Reagan turned out fine, although to be fair, his father — for all his faults and obvious shortcomings — wasn’t a total sociopath.

  131. 131.

    Yutsano

    @WaterGirl:  Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est…

    My mother was never super hardcore Catholic. But my grandmother was. Not quite enough to get permission from my mother to give us First Communion when we were living with her, but I’m certain there was a conversation. Besides, you can’t come out of getting a music degree without learning a fair bit of Italian and Latin.

    BTW English has only one gendered noun.

  132. 132.

    Amir Khalid

    @PenAndKey:

    I’m not going to tell you that French is logically consistent. In fact, I think no living language can stay that way, as it mutates over the centuries. I can tell you to brace yourself for its complexity: I had a French grammar which listed 22 different tenses.

  133. 133.

    Martin

    SpaceX is the real deal. They figured out what technical accomplishments they needed to make the economics work and they met those. They recognized they couldn’t out-cost-plus Boeing, so didn’t try, and now Boeing/ULA is in real trouble because at the very least, their 10 figure price tags for single launches aren’t viable any longer (SLS is headed for 11 figures).

    It’s a nice combination of leaning into technology that has matured faster than NASA realized, leaning on software to solve problems – something Boeing is catastrophically bad at – and simplifying the stuff that could be. It’s impressive as hell, TBH.

  134. 134.

    ArchTeryx

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yep.  They burned themselves to the ground with Jeremy Corbin.  What rises from their ashes hopefully will be capable of actually keeping the fascists in their own country at bay.

  136. 136.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JPL:

    The idea that Trump would make his KIDS sign an NDA is so off-the-wall bonkers bizarre, it might just be true. Wow.

    I’m sure Melania was active in the PTA or whatever. I’m sure she’s an attentive mother.

  141. 141.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Leto: yeah, the “romantic” languages: Spanish, French, Italian.

    You might want to add Portuguese and Romanian to that list. Just for completeness’s sake.

    Also, regarding gendered nouns, you might also want to add German and the Slavic languages, which have not two but three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic), which have two or three, depending. Latvian and Lithuanian also have grammatical genders.

    In fact grammatical gender is the rule, rather than the exception, in European languages. The only ones that lack it are the Finno-Ugrics that were dragged in from central Asia, Basque (which no one knows where the hell it came from) – and English. Among the Indo-European tongues, ours is the odd one out.

  143. 143.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JPL:

    Also there might be a reason why trump is an anti-vaxxer. He needs someone to blame

    I’ve speculated for years that the son might be on the spectrum. I really don’t know that much about autism, and in any case I prefer not to say a lot of things in public about minor children of prominent people. But yes, I’ve wondered the same about Trump’s anti-vaxx stance, especially during the 2016 campaign.

    Funny he’s so gung-ho about a Coronavirus vaccine. It’s almost like he hasn’t really thought it through.

  145. 145.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    Apparently Trump and Pence entered their rooftop observation site for the launch to the tune of Village People’s “Macho Man.” I don’t even know where to start.

  146. 146.

    Sab

    @Yutsano: We have or had lots of gendered noun. ( Actress, aviatrix, wife, bitch, doe, buck, heifer. ) Pronoun, yes I agree.

  147. 147.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Elizabelle:

    I hope Barron winds up a phenomenal memorist with a chip on his shoulder to write off.

    My money’s on Tiffany, if anybody does that. She seems the least offensive of the grown spawn. If she’s tried to exploit the presidency the way her larger adult and unemployable siblings have, I haven’t seen it.

    (my other bet is that Melania and Barron will go straight from the will reading, assuming they’re in there, to the nearest Europe-bound plane)

  149. 149.

    raven

    We decided we needed to do something special for our anniversary so we went to see our dear friends who live way out in the country. I’ve posted the article that the daughter who is an expat in Australia  wrote about her dad and it turns out this was also the 8th anniversary of him passing away. We didn’t know that it was today and it made it even better that we went to see them. The other daughter is just entering a Ph D program in Marine Biology and she’s going to be able to do her work from there for now despite an awful internet connection. Nice day.

  150. 150.

    Sab

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: When my RWNJ after two years of defending Pompeo persisted, I had to accept that I do not know him anymore and I do not want to even think about him ever again.

    That’s hard and harsh but he and his ilk are doing a lot of harm. He wasn’t raised that way. Just got in with a bad crowd of money people in his impressionable thirties and it’s hard to breakway in your sixties.

  151. 151.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @NobodySpecial:

    Agreed.

    @ArchTeryx:

    I know I’m going to get pilloried for this, but Obama pushed for this in his space policy while he was president:

    On 1 February 2010, United States President Barack Obama proposed in a speech that NASA exit the business of flying astronauts from Earth to low-Earth orbit — the locus of human spaceflight ever since the last Lunar crewed mission in 1972 — and move it to private companies who contract with the government to provide cargo resupply services to the ISS.

    The proposal acted on the findings of the 2009 Augustine Commission and built on the success of the Commercial Resupply Services that outsourced American cargo delivery to the International Space Station.

    It didn’t start with him and he was hamstrung through much of his presidency by a wingnut Congress, but he didn’t have to push for privatization of crewed spaceflight. And yes it’s framed as only to LEO, but I doubt that’s where it will stay. But he did, because he agrees with it

  154. 154.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @MattF:

    A brief passage from The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L. Sayers:

    “Jack has the honour of ringing the oldest bell we have,” added the Rector. “Batty Thomas was cast in 1338 by Thomas Belleyetere of Lynn; but she gets her name from Abbot Thomas who re-cast her in 1380—doesn’t she, Jack?”

    “So she do, sir,” agreed Mr. Godfrey. Bells, it may be noted, like ships and kittens, have a way of being female, whatever names they are given.

    :-)

  155. 155.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: … it always startled me how casually they talked about male parts and female parts.

    Oh FFS, why? It’s highly efficient and effective shorthand. “Male part” =”part that gets stuck into something” and “female part” = “part that something gets stuck into.” And everyone knows immediately what is meant. (Even kids did, before our repressed culture decided to try & hide “the facts of life” from them til they were “old enough.”)

    Similarly with “right-hand” vs “left-hand” rotation: Hold a screwdriver in either hand & rotate it around its long axis. It is much easier to do this in one direction instead of the other**, and the preferred direction depends on which hand. So the preferred direction in the right hand became known as “right-handed,” a brief and physiologically intuitive way of stating a not-all-that-simple concept.

    ** Which just FTR is why it’s much more difficult for a baseball pitcher to throw a screwball than a simple curveball, but I digress…

  157. 157.

    Redshift

    @SiubhanDuinne: Trump doesn’t show any signs of caring about any other human, even his children, so I think it’s unlikely that’s where his anti-vaxxer streak came from. I think it’s more likely connected to being a birther. Conspiracy theory followers cross-recruit. Could go either way, though. (Can’t remember if he was involved in earlier conspiracy theories.)

    And yes, he obviously was a birther partly for political purposes, but he has the con man’s trait of believing his own bullshit, so he probably convinced himself it was true too.

  158. 158.

    MattF

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yes, but grammatical gender and semantic gender are quite different things. In fact, I don’t think English has grammatical gender at all, but for ‘ship’ it’s at least arguable.

  159. 159.

    Ken

    @Elizabelle: I wonder if the orange one is staying at Mar a Lago tonight, so he does not have to be around those scary protesters on the streets of DC.

    Naw, if he’s staying a Mar a Lago it’s so he can bill the taxpayers for another few hundred thou. Avoiding the protestors is just a side benefit.

  160. 160.

    Fair Economist

    @Amir Khalid: French tenses aren’t daunting for a native English speaker. Almost everything corresponds to an English tense, or to a standard construction. For me the hardest part of French is that they omit the last syllable of so many words. It’s like a spoken shorthand, and similarly hard to understand.

  161. 161.

    Redshift

    @Omnes Omnibus: I think the distinction, properly, is about having gendered nouns for things other than gendered creatures. But perhaps there’s some other class of English nouns I’m overlooking.

  162. 162.

    Ruckus

    @Yutsano:

    You are both children. I was contemplating enlisting in the military or being drafted any day and I was 20 at the time……..

  165. 165.

    J R in WV

    @JPL:

     

    Explain to me why trump wouldn’t bring his son to witness the liftoff?

    Because Trump never thinks about anyone but himself. Barron isn’t something Trump ever thinks about. And I do mean some thing. To Trump, there is only one person, Trump. Everyone else in the world is a thing. Even his children!

  166. 166.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @NobodySpecial: It speaks more to the failure of government to resist capitalism than it does any achievement.

    No, it does not. It “speaks more” to the recognition that when a service or activity becomes routine enough that its costs and risks are clearly defined, it is cheaper for the government to contract it out, even surrendering a profit to the contractor. When the service or activity is exploratory, with no reliable way to make a buck on it but a generally agreed sense that at some (possibly far-off) time it may prove to have been worth doing for the general good, then the government takes the activity unto itself, because no corporation – no sufficiently capable assemblage of capital answerable to shareholders – would touch it with a 3.048-meter pole.

    Musk is essentially an un-capitalist, driven by some personal aspirations that can’t possibly make him as much as just sticking his bazillions in an index fund.

    Set your personal time-sense to 1950 AD & go scrounge up a copy of Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold The Moon & you’ll understand.

  167. 167.

    Martin

    @MattF: Ship isn’t gendered. That sailors traditionally referred to ships as ‘she’ doesn’t confer gender on the noun. It’s not grammatically incorrect to refer to a ship as ‘it’ or even ‘he’, same as referring to a tractor or a hammer as ‘him’ confers masculinity on those nouns.

  168. 168.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: there’s a rumor that Melania and the kid live with her parents in a house in the DC suburbs, but I can’t imagine something like that could actually be kept secret

  169. 169.

    Sab

    @Leto: I watched Alan Shepherd go by from my playground in coastal central Florida in the early 1960s. Probably a third of my classmates had fathers who were rocket scientists. I think that is why I can’t do math or even higher arithmetic. The competitition was friendly but intimidating.

  170. 170.

    Yutsano

    @MattF:

    but for ‘ship’ it’s at least arguable

    “it’s a good ship” doesn’t sound quite right. Instead it’s much more common to say, “She’s a good ship” which also has the benefit of defining, especially in the modern era, what ship means. You will sometimes hear people say it for ship, but around anyone with any nautical knowledge ships are feminine. It’s about the only legacy of gender we have*.

    *there is another feminine noun in English that pertains to objects but it’s obscure. So much so I can’t think of it right now.

     

    @Martin:  We’ll agree to disagree, but I’m right. Actually, if you want to watch language nerds fight, bring this up. But make the popcorn first.

  171. 171.

    Fair Economist

    @scav:

    Old English had 3 genders until the 1200s or so. We went offroad.

    That’s because modern English is really a creole of Middle French and Old English. As often happen during creole formation, genders got lost and conjugation and declensions simplified because the source languages clashed.

    You won’t see many people calling English a creole language because creole are considered less prestigious languages and of course we can’t have English be *that*.

  172. 172.

    Ken

    @scav: Old English had 3 genders until the 1200s or so. We went offroad.

    “English is the result of Norman knights attempting to get into the skirts of Saxon barmaids and is no more or less legitimate than any of the other results.”

    It’s hard to keep a gender system going when the two languages don’t agree on the number of genders, much less on the gender of any particular noun. Same thing happened with the noun case system, with the result that English only has the genitive (‘s), except for the pronouns.

  175. 175.

    Redshift

    @Fair Economist: To quote James Nicoll:

    The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

  176. 176.

    MattF

    @Martin: Actually, I agree with you. The counter-argument, fwiw, is that referring to a ship as ‘she’ is conventional, which edges into grammatical. If there were any other nouns that this ‘rule’ applied to, it would be a good argument. But there aren’t and it’s not.

  177. 177.

    Yutsano

    @Sab: When I was learning German, “das Mädchen” definitely had me scrambling my brain. It took until much later when I had my Japanese teacher tell me “There is no why! That is just how it works!” It relaxed my brain quite a bit.

  178. 178.

    Origuy

    Proto-Indo-European, like many modern languages, distinguished between animate and inanimate nouns. Somewhere along the line, animate languages became considered male and inanimate became female or neuter. There’s a hypothesis that this happened around the time that people stopped being nature worshippers and began being monotheistic. I’m not sure anyone will ever confirm this.

    English probably lost its genders between the time of the Norman Conquest and the time of Edward I, who started using English as the court language. The theory I favor is that the Old English speakers and the Old Danish speakers of the Danelaw developed a creole that became Middle English. Creole languages often have simplified grammar.

  179. 179.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Sab: Well, people complain about society hypersexualizing young girls.  The Germans, at least, are resisting it.

  180. 180.

    Martin

    @NobodySpecial: Uh, absolutely not.

    Spaceflight was historically a government enterprise because it was economically unviable. But SpaceX figured out the economics of it, which brought costs down substantially, and increased access to space by not keeping supply behind a government set of priorities. I mean, the shuttle was designed the way it was not because that was what would work best for satellite operators, but so that they could put KH-9s in orbit using it (which they never did – they all went up on Titans).

    SpaceX designed around low cost and rapid cadence, rather than capturing the maximum cost-plus contract they could. They never in a million years would have even attempted recovery of the first stage on government contracts because the government has more money than risk, didn’t think it was realistic, and didn’t think it was worth paying for. But recovery has completely thrown the global launch market into chaos. India is the only nation that can get close to SpaceX costs, not even China with their government subsidies. India is famously frugal even in their space program, still hauling things around with wooden carts rather than specialized machines.

    And it’s not like ULA is really any less private. Yeah, they have the government specify the design rather than specify the goal, but by freeing up design, they’ve actually expanded  the goals they can reach for.

  181. 181.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @scav: We went offroad.

    Alone, of all the Indo-European languages in Europe. Go figger.

    Then again, English is also the only European language whose structure and vocabulary were entirely interpenetrated and in some instances supplanted less than 1,000 years ago by the substantially different language spoken by the conquerors of Britain. It’s left the mother tongue a remarkably versatile means of expression – most things can be expressed in at least two ways, in short words (with Anglo-Saxon roots) or longer words (with Romance-French roots), promoting subtlety and differentiation.

    (But the price for that is, we cain’t rhyme hardly anything for shit, and we can’t spell for shit either.)

  182. 182.

    smedley the uncertain

    @Elizabelle: Dad came to the US in the late 20’s.  He trained in Scotland as a Marine Engineer.   All Marine engineers come from Scotland. “‘Beam me up Scotty…”  Any hoo, he wound up years later in Huntsville, Al during Von Braun’s time converting the German technology to our use..  I have a picture of him standing inside of of the Saturn V exhausts .  He’s hard to see in that huge cavern.  Me, I’m in WNY.  Thank you for asking.

  183. 183.

    Ken

    @Fair Economist: That’s because modern English is really a creole of Middle French and Old English.

    Though by that time Old English had shifted considerably, what with invading a land occupied by Celts and Romans, and being invaded in turn by Scandinavians.

  184. 184.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ken: Speaking of, I think I am going to go watch some more episodes of “The Last Kingdom.”

  185. 185.

    Martin

    @MattF: Except there are. If you misgender a french noun, it’s simply grammatically wrong. But referring  to the US Teddy Roosevelt as ‘he’ would not strike anyone as being wrong, let alone referring to it as ‘it’, let alone naming it after a male.

    But I similarly gender other nouns all the time, as I expect you do as well. I pulled that shovel out of the lake, cleaned him up, and he’s good as new now. Hurricane is not a neutered noun now that we give them both male and female names and can say Boy, when Andrew came ashore, he did a hell of a lot of damage.

    Personification is not equivalent to gender in language. The french personify ships as ‘she’ even though bateau and navire are both masculine. It originates from the idea that sailors desire the ship that contains them will protect them as a woman protects her fetus. That’s why ships are almost universally personified as female regardless of the noun’s gender in the particular language or even the utility of the ship (warships, for example). That’s why planes have been similarly personified usually as female.

  186. 186.

    Amir Khalid

    @Sab:

    Wen I was teaching myself German, I learned that nouns ending in a diminutive, in this case -chen, are neuter. But I find it hard to go from the antecedent noun Mädchen to the pronoun es (it) as grammar demands; my natural inclination, like anyone else’s, is to use sie (she).

  188. 188.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Martin:

    I don’t particularly like the likes of Elon Musk having so much say in our crewed space program and leading development. He’s an asshole egomaniac.

  189. 189.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Redshift: ” We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

    One of my favorite language books, Colloquial German (originally Beyond the Dictionary in German) notes that whereas the English beg, borrow or steal words from other languages to express concepts foreign to then, Germans have historically chosen instead to cobble new words together from their own vocabulary. (The appendix that discussed this propensity climaxed with the hypothetical construction of the word Farbfernsehgeräteschauleiter, which, it claimed, would sound to German ears as a perfectly reasonable way to describe “the manager of a display of color television sets.”)

    Dr McClain, my late lamented Modern German Literature prof, told us the following little tale as he was explaining why none of our syllabus came from the Third Reich:

    When the Nazis seized power, one of their early goals was to “Teutonize” the German language by replacing all the foreign words that had crept in with good Aryan terms. One of the first words that drew their aim was der Nase, “nose” (Latin nasus). So as good Germans, they set about constructing an alternative, & what they came up with was die Gesichtsvorsprung. (Gesichts = possessive case of “face”; Vorsprung, “projection,” from vorspringen, “to project [out]” – literally, “the projection out of the face.”)

    They introduced this as the word that all loyal Germans should use – & sofort (as the Germans would say) it became the talk of the town at cafes, restaurants, railway platforms, gatherings of all sorts. As the butt of a joke. No, better, it was the joke: “Have you heard the new word for Nase? It’s Gesichtsvorsprung!” And people were, to be blunt, ROTF. All across the Reich.

    When this got back to the authorities, they … very quietly dropped the whole project, and never went near the language again for the rest of their not-short-enough days. I mean, jawohl, you could lock up a few wiseguys, or a few hundred, or even a few thousand – but everybody was laughing at them.

    Dr McClain concluded by noting that it had taken the combined might of nearly all the remaining industrialized world six years to defeat the Nazis on the battlefield – but the German people had managed it in a couple of weeks, by doing the one thing authoritarians cannot stand: Laughing derisively at them.

    (o/t, but I like telling that story…:^D)

  190. 190.

    NoraLenderbee

    Mark Twain on German genders:

    Where is the cabbage?

    She is in the kitchen. The cook is chopping her up for soup.

    And where is the beautiful and accomplished young lady?

    It has gone to the opera with its fiance.

  191. 191.

    Captain C

    @Ken:

    “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

    –James D. Nicoll

     

    ETA:  Redshift beat me to it.

  192. 192.

    Cermet

    Our country is burning, a disease is burning through us, the very world is burning and getting ever hotter, and this billionaire asshole and his toy rocket gets  a post.  Be proud of this because … this isn’t NASA nor the 60’s anymore. The chance we had for that future is long gone and fortunitly, died in Vietnam. We are a better people now, for sure but only the worse is being shared.

  196. 196.

    JAFD

    @Yutsano: It may be noted that blast furnaces are also regarded as female, and, indeed, named. Andrew Carnegie’s first, ‘Lucy’, is now a historical monument in Pittsburgh.
    The reason why is left as an exercise for the reader.
    And, to quote an old and very politically incorrect joke
    Q: Why are steam locomotives like women ?
    A: Because they each have a tender behind.

    I’ll let myself out now….

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