Newly-released government photographs show unquestionable proof that an alien flying saucer crash-landed in the desert:
Mind you, the desert in question is Isidis Planitia on Mars, and the flying saucer is ours…
This image of Perseverance’s backshell sitting upright on the surface of Jezero Crater was collected from an altitude of 26 feet (8 meters) by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 26th flight at Mars on April 19, 2022. Engineers working on the Mars Sample Return program requested images be taken from an aerial perspective of the components because they may provide insight into the components’ performance during the rover’s entry, descent, and landing on Feb. 18, 2021.
Space robots are cool, and we should do more of them. I get the romance of manned space travel but we have a lot to sort out before it’ll be anything other than a one-way ticket to Tumor Town, and in the meantime, there’s stuff to explore. Just as soon as we sort out nuclear propulsion…
Consider this a lunch-ish-time open thread.
Tom Levenson
We just dump our garbage anywhere, don’t we?
dmsilev
Damn litterbugs.
Edit: Apparently Tom and I think alike.
NotMax
@Tom Levenson
Hey, we left poop on the Moon, also too.
dmsilev
OK, a bit more seriously, some mad props to the team that designed and built the Ingenuity helicopter. It was mostly meant as a proof of concept, yes controlled flight in the thin Martian atmosphere is possible. The mission goals were basically “do a handful of hops, demonstrate we can control the thing, and take a few pretty pictures”, and then let the helicopter watch mournfully as the rover drives off into the sunset (the copter can’t talk to Earth on its own, it just has some short-range radios for talking to the rover). Instead, a year or so later, it’s performed well enough that it can hop-scotch along and keep up with Perseverance as it goes about the main science mission and yes, send back neat pictures like this. Which aren’t just pretty pictures of NASA littering the Mars desert, there’s real information to be gleaned about how well the various bits of the descent stage held up and that can help inform the design of future Mars probes.
Geminid
This reminds me of the alien I saw in Roswell, New Mexico. He was green and fifteen feet tall, and he was holding up a Dunkin’ Donuts sign.
trollhattan
If you recall the fiery speech by Michigan state senator McMorrow last week, she did one of the Sunday news shows. Let’s get her in the Big Senate.
Jerry
I like it when people pronounce robot as ro-butt. That is all. Good day to you all.
trollhattan
@NotMax: Bet it’s freeze-dried like the food it was fashioned from.
Alison Rose ???
@Tom Levenson: Murrica!!!
Madeleine
@trollhattan: And which of the current Democratic Senators would you suggest that she primary? I’d suggest the Big House instead, but in Michigan that’s a totally different thing.
NotMax
@trollhattan
FYI.
Why NASA Is So Eager to Study Moon Poop
Damned at Random
Gotta love aliens. They conquered the vastness of space to find another species in the early phases of space exploration – and their first idea is “let’s shove a probe up their anuses”
Ben Cisco
So, in Alabama political news:
The good – there are, apparently, SIX Democratic candidates running for governor.
The not-great – I’ve never heard of ANY of them and have yet to see an ad for any, even online.
The bad – NINE contenders on the GQP side, including the incumbent Gov. Meemaw.
The worst – I’ve seen ads from half the GQPers and they all seem determined to out-Trump each other (including, strangely, the aforementioned Gov. Meemaw – she’s really lost it). Apparently she’s convinced that Joey B is running for governor.
Recent polls show Ivey with a lead over two of the GQPers, Tim James and Lindy Blanchard. None of the Dem candidates are mentioned, not surprising given the lack of name recognition (2018 runner-up and Tuscaloosa mayor Walt Maddox declined to run this time).
Maddox managed a 40/59 split. This one isn’t shaping up to be that close…
Last time out, popular Tuscaloosa mayor
Ken
Debating whether I want to watch this, and suffer the inevitable moment near the end when the host turns to the camera and says “Now for an alternative point of view, a famed tik-tok influencer and Republican consultant who says that all Democrats are pedophiles and must be executed.”
NotMax
@Ken
“Who joins us live from his/her high school cafeteria.”
//
scav
@dmsilev: Tom L speaks for many.
JoyceH
I saw something on the news mentioning the plans to return to manned space flight and landing on the moon in the next several years, and I had known it’s been a long time since we’ve been to the moon, but hadn’t realized it’s been FIFTY YEARS. Something like 2/3 of the population weren’t even born yet the last time we went to the moon.
Yutsano
@Tom Levenson: Wait until the Martians send us the cleaning bill.
TonyG
I know nothin about nothin, but it seems to me that there’s no reason to sacrifice human lives with human space travel. Let the robots do it. (Of course, if Elon Musk wants to go to Mars I would strongly support him in that effort.)
lowtechcyclist
Damn straight!
Not only that, but in addition to having to shield the astronauts from vacuum and cosmic radiation, a Mars mission would have to pack a year or two’s worth of oxygen, water, and food for all concerned, which would be very expensive in terms of fuel to propel all that additional mass out of Earth’s gravity well and across the interplanetary void.
We humans just aren’t very hardy with respect to the environment of outer space. So for the time being, space is for robots.
So let’s do lots of space robots. Not only are they cool, but they can go to so many places that humankind won’t set foot on in the next few decades. We’ll have robots investigating the Kuiper Belt before we land a person on Mars. We already have, actually, if we count Pluto and its satellites as Kuiper Belt objects.
NotMax
Surprising Martian teens haven’t yet come along to tag the stuff. “X-plam Was Here”
@Yutsano
Unpublished manuscript:
John Carter, Janitor of Mars
:)
lowtechcyclist
@Ben Cisco:
Always makes me think of Animal Crackers.
trollhattan
@Ken: Not to worry. This time.
Gary K
@NotMax: My inner 4-year-old really wanted to read about “poop monsters.” Thanks!
CaseyL
When I first saw the photo of the broken probe, it made me sad: poor little Rover. Literally worked itself to death.
As to leaving trash on Mars: I acknowledge the point, but in turn must point out we don’t have much in the way of trash pickup services for Mars. Or the Moon.
I mean, hell, there’s tons of trash on Mt. Everest that will never be picked up.
lowtechcyclist
@JoyceH:
Yeah, it’ll be fifty years in December.
I never would have thought nobody would be back in the next half-century. If we didn’t decide to return, I figured some other up-and-coming power (e.g. Japan 30 years ago, or China now) would do a lunar mission as a peaceful way to show it belonged in the big time.
I don’t know how much the relevant technology as a whole has improved since 1972, but there’s more memory and computational power in your phone than in the Apollo 17 onboard computer. Hell, probably more of both in your phone than in the NASA computers in Houston or Huntsville or wherever in 1972.
Wapiti
… the romance of manned space travel …
Is very closely connected to the idea that the airline pilot is in total control of the aircraft, so we can’t have the flight crew locked in the cockpit for the duration of the flight. Not even if the Israelis proved, pre-9/11, that that step could practically eliminate hijackings.
Villago Delenda Est
I want some Earth vs. Flying Saucers action, except instead of attacking DC, they go for Merde-A-Loser.
JoyceH
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah, looking back it seems like we barged into space before we really had the technological development to back it up. (But that’s probably always the way – think of those airplanes in WWI!) But back then we had the competition angle, the Space Race! Don’t you wish we could get that level of sense of urgency for the shift to renewables? Maybe Ukraine etc will give us the urgency – get out from under the thumb of murderous dictators. And yeah, Bone Saw, we mean you too!
Just One More Canuck
@Yutsano: (970) Very Angry Indeed – YouTube
Ten Bears
Consider this: if we somehow make it out of this mess and off this the only ball of rock we know of we can live on and the enveloping thin layer of no longer potentially toxic gasses we live in … if we survive, we will have been turned out of the garden.
wetzel
We have been insane about COVID, not even going by the mailbox, because of high risk in our family.
My son withdrew from senior year in the Fall. The plan is he will finish next year at a private school. The protections in his public school were a joke.
Anyway, let him go to prom last week. There is a sense it’s over, everywhere you look, though I know there are approximatley 50,000 cases/day with BA2. He had a wonderful time with his friends, after the year away from them. Now he has COVID.
We’re all boosted. It’s nothing millions of others have already gone through. I thought we were going to get through this without one of us getting it over here. Oh well. Could really do without this.
Feeling crappy myself!!! Oh well. I think I’ll go jump in that cement mixer up the street and let them pour me into the foundation of the house they’re building up there.
NotMax
@Villago Delenda Est
Believe it or not (and Mars topical), Trump vs. the Illuminati.
:)
Ken
That was before we discovered that the real prestige is in cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens. Now rather than going into space, everyone sits at home generating bit-strings.
(Hmm, is that a new solution to the Fermi Paradox?)
Dangerman
@Just One More Canuck: Someone should photoshop in Marvin to the picture.
Roger Moore
@TonyG:
There are reasons to want to send humans some of these places. While the robots are great, they are inherently limited. They travel incredibly slowly, so they can only explore a short distance from where they started. For example, the Opportunity rover averaged about 2 miles traveled per year. Some of that was that it needed to look in detail at everything it passed, but a huge part was that it had to be extremely cautious in everything it did. If you could get an actual geologist to the same area, they could cover that distance in a few days, collecting samples the whole way and taking them back to a lab where they could be studied in far greater detail. It would obviously be a far bigger deal, but the rewards would be real.
eclare
@Dangerman: Agree!
Yutsano
@Dangerman: I’m surprised that hasn’t happened already. TO THE INTERWEBS!!!
Fair Economist
Best clickbait ever.
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: So, Mark Watney remains the most intelligent person on Mars.
NotMax
If only the balloons which inflated on that bouncy rover landing had been green….
;)
TriassicSands
@Ben Cisco:
The people who wrote the script for the Ivey ad, inadvertently captured the essence of the Republican voter:
Ignorant gun-nut #1: “What does that mean, anyway?”
Ignorant gun-nut #2: “I don’t know, but I like it.”
Philbert
I thought it was a T72 turret for a sec!
Villago Delenda Est
Ukrainians blow those things sky high…and beyond!
lowtechcyclist
@JoyceH:
If only! Unfortunately, Republicans have ceased to regard foreign policy as anything besides being one more weapon to use against their adversaries here at home. (They’d rather be Russian than be a Democrat, and all that.)
They hate us and our renewables far more than they hate Putin, MBS, or even Iran. So it ain’t happening. They’ll let the world burn before they’ll admit we’re right about global warming.
Ben Cisco
@lowtechcyclist: HA!
Poe Larity
How about the romance of blasting Elon Musk off on a one-way to Mars?
Get with the program, people.
Dangerman
@Yutsano: With Marvin the Martian mooning us.
Ben Cisco
@TriassicSands: It is isolating politically – no doubt about it.
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
“Call XXX-YYYY to learn about opportunities for investing in oceanfront property in beautiful Indiana!”
//
Major Major Major Major
@Fair Economist: heh, thanks, I’m pretty pleased with it myself.
Dangerman
@lowtechcyclist:
Maybe they get a choice. Give up the gas guzzler or give up guns. We can send a clean up crew for the exploding heads.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: There’s a case to be made that from a scientific perspective, sending humans is a dumb way to explore space. Even when it gets you a lot of advantages, the costs and risks are just so high compared to sending machines only. As technology advances, it just makes the calculation tilt further against sending people.
(While the Apollo astronauts did a lot of good science, that clearly wasn’t the motivation for sending them.)
NotMax
@Dangerman
“You’ll have to pry my Dodge Ram from my cold dead ass.”
//
PJ
@Wapiti: My recollection (I could very well be wrong) is that US airlines just didn’t want to pay for the added expense of the locking door system.
Brachiator
@dmsilev:
Yeah. An amazing feat. The team had to account for lesser Martian gravity and thinner atmosphere. It blows my mind how well they have succeeded.
Agree with others that robot probes are probably more effective exploration tools.
But I am watching the video of Space X docking with the International Space Station and this is also very cool.
Martin
@NotMax: My son and I are theory crafting a story where we have to recover the moon poop as the only pristine source of pre-zombie pandemic bacteria.
NotMax
@Brachiator
“Obviously faked. Can’t hear a note of The Blue Danube.”
//
Another Scott
ICYMI, a good thread about educational debt these days, with real-life numbers.
He’s right that the system is broken and hurting far, far too many people for far, far too long.
(via LOLGOP)
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@Martin
Holy sh*t, to coin a rejoinder.
;)
Feathers
Um. It actually is an alien spacecraft.
trollhattan
A day after meeting with the UN secretary general (at either end of the white fleet carrier table) Putin sends missiles to Kyiv, while it is being visited by the UN secretary general.
lowtechcyclist
@Dangerman:
They’d just go, “good luck in making us have to choose” and fart in our general direction.
Even if you explained to them that if all us libs get electric cars, and that the resulting huge reduction in demand for gasoline would mean cheaper gas for them, they’d still rather pay more for gas (and complain about it) than to let us build the infrastructure to support electric cars.
They’re all about pissing on everyone and everything they don’t like. That’s their Prime Directive.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Consider how far we have come from craft which could only orbit Mars to land rover to craft like Ingenuity, which can fly over the landscape. We are just getting started in thinking about and designing more versatile devices. And other probes can investigate worlds where human beings simply cannot go.
Human exploration is cool, but the vast proportion of money spent for this must be devoted to keeping humans safe and getting them out there and back again safely.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
I am always amazed by how much the interior of the Space X pilot command area reminds me of the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Especially the various display screens.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: Some of that is probably deliberate. The company definitely has a sense of theatrics.
MattF
Since science-y stuff is being noted here I’ll note that that the Webb Telescope alignment has been declared successful and is now done. This means all the sub-mirrors in the array are properly lined up and producing an image at maximum resolution for all four IR instruments over the whole field of view. Including the mid-IR instrument that had to be actively cooled to 7 degrees above absolute zero. Major achievement.
eclare
@Another Scott: Thanks, that was eye opening.
mrmoshpotato
Well played! ?
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott: Thanks for sharing that. Gotta love Ingraham’s tweet and his response at the end of that thread.
Exactly! If my mom had had to waitress until she was 73 to help to pay for my college, I’d have been arguing that nobody else should have to go through that sort of hell. But this just adds to the pile of evidence that Ingraham is a horrible excuse for a human being.
Luckily, I’m a quarter-century older than Weinstein, and even at my non-Ivy but still fairly prestigious New England college, people of limited means could get through on work-study programs back in the early to mid 1970s.
College was that much cheaper then: the state schools, even the really good ones, cost very little, and that limited how much the private colleges could jack up the tuition and fees. I think I graduated with something like $5000 in student loan debt.
trollhattan
What’s round on the ends, insane in the middle. Ohio.
eclare
@lowtechcyclist: I graduated in 1990 with around $10k in debt. I spent my first two years at a small, private college, then the next two at a large public state university. The career advice I received at the state university was so much better than what I received at the private school.
And of course it was much cheaper.
Old School
@eclare: But tipped minimum wage hasn’t gone up since 1991. Laura’s mom would have to work double-shifts these days.
oatler
@NotMax:
I can’t believe that neither Prine nor Zevon wrote a song about poop on the moon. Or did they?
WereBear
Getting your first two years at a community college is another great move and works well for a wide range of students. I CLEP-tested away my freshman year on top of that.
In NY graduation includes acceptance at any SUNY campus.
Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff)
Ugh…tumors are bullshit.
Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff)
@oatler: Maybe it was in an early draft of Space Monkey?
Poe Larity
How is showing there is more intelligence on Mars than Fox News supposed to make me feel better.
Roger Moore
@JoyceH:
Unfortunately, “The Space Race” was always a BS excuse for weapons development. The rockets were very lightly modified ICBMs, and putting men in space was a polite way of showing off the technology. Once ICBM technology was well established, we became a lot less interested in the Space Race.
Math Guy
How can the same species that built Perseverance and the Webb Space Telescope also produce Qanon, Trump and Co.?
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
Does Ingraham oppose filing bankruptcy? Not with the crowd she hangs around with, I hope.
So she only opposes discharging this specific category of debt. Why just this one?
Roger Moore
@lowtechcyclist:
This is the real difference between liberals and conservatives, and a great example of why suffering won’t magically make us better people. If you put a liberal and a conservative through the same miserable experience, the liberal will say, “That was awful! Nobody should have to suffer through that,” and want to fix things. The conservative will say, “I survived that. There’s no reason other people shouldn’t deal with it, too,” and want to leave things the same.
eclare
Deleted
Steve in the ATL
@eclare: and don’t make that mistake again!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You know all all the conspiracy theorist will be going about how those UFOS on Mars are made by tall hairless apes from earth. Hello people, oxygen is toxic and if oxygen based life eats up all the carbon like the conspiracy theory claims why isn’t Earth frozen over?
Kay
@Another Scott:
Most debt is about making a bad decision, really other than medical debt or expenses incurred when you’re sick or unable to find a job. We forgive all kinds of debt in bankruptcy or thru non payment when t gets written off. Billions and billions. And that’s just personal debt- we discharge a lot more than that when companies file bankrutpcy.
His poor decision was going to a fancy private college for undergrad. He was 18 when he made this poor decision. The punishment for that is a life sentence?
I don’t know why it’s treated differently than all other debt. It doesn’t make any sense. Did anyone in this country make a credit card payment today? Are they seething with anger that a lot of people don’t pay their unsecured debt like credit cards and instead discharge it in bankruptcy? Of course not. They don’t even think about it.
Captain C
@Geminid: I hope they were paying him decently.
Kay
@Another Scott:
A bad decision. One. At 18 years old. Sorry, Bud. You’ll pay for that until you’re dead.
Kay
There’s now an entire group of political pundits who rush to prove that everything Elon Musk tweets is correct.
Hysterical. They love him. Wuv him.
Another Scott
@Kay: I would sort it differently. He made a good decision – he probably wouldn’t be making $110k a year without going to college (given the system we have now) – it’s just that the system is such now that rather than his employer, or his state of residence, or society as a whole paying most of the costs of his good decision, he’s paying far more than his parents or grandparents did.
Debt makes modern society possible. Only a tiny fraction of adults would own their own home, or car, or anything that costs more than about $1000, if it weren’t for debt. The modern transportation system wouldn’t exist without financing.
That doesn’t mean that it’s fair for college financing now to be based on student loans that are run like a PayDay/Title Loan outfit that charges huge amounts that people can’t pay back in a reasonable amount of time (less than 10 years).
People like him need debt relief too, but the whole system needs to be fixed. A one-time federal debt forgiveness system isn’t going to do much for the 4-5 million new students entering college every year.
I had about $9k in student loans when I finished in 1983, going to an expensive private school. Even that was scary to me…
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
I’m in favor of a lot of college debt reduction, but I’d argue that at least some of it should be paid for with the multi-billion dollar endowments that some universities have racked up. They can do that voluntarily or we can do some asset forfeiture, set a reasonable floor – say, anything above $500,000 per student. If you’re below that, the feds will erase debt, and above that the university needs to work out a deal with the feds to do it. ($500K per student is the threshold in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 above which they are taxed 1.4%. Average endowment was up 35% last year, so they can pay off the student debt and still have turned a gain last year)
Benw
@dmsilev: let a bunch of engineers and physicists loose and we’ll overdesign everything!
Martin
@Another Scott: The best plan for college financing that I’ve seen is to make college free and to levy a supplemental federal income tax on whoever went to college. It doesn’t need to be a lot – 2% would probably suffice. The pool of revenue is split with 2/3 of it being distributed evenly per student to the alma mater, and the other 1/3 being returned directly to the alma mater from the alums. (Essentially, 2/3 the money gets spread evenly per student, and the other 1/3 is a ‘reward’ for universities to help their students land good careers). This would then cause universities to provide decent basically life-long career placement services.
So ability to pay is removed as an issue. Universities are incentivized in a host of different ways to grow student populations, focus on better paying careers, retain their students (since they only get paid for the ones that graduate), etc.
UC has explored this idea but its impossible to do at the state level. It has to be a federal program. And for foreign students you would retain normal tuition but the income tax supplement wouldn’t apply if they stayed in the US.
Martin
@dmsilev: As a general rule, JPL is extremely good at what they do. Other parts of NASA are so-so. SLS/Artemis is a train wreck. James Webb out of Goddard, despite being wildly late has some impossibly good engineering in it as well.
Kay
@Another Scott:
Agreed. I only based my “poor decision” on what he thinks was the poor decision, which was not “going to college” but going to such an expensive college. But I bet he WAS told to go to the best school he got into. That was common advice. Not so much anymore. My youngest got a whole “best value” talk at the guidance counselors that I never got.
It just doesn’t make any sense to keep people stuck like that. Cut em loose. He’s 44. He paid long enough. He’s paid the principal twice over with interest payments. Enough.
Kay
@Another Scott:
The hard part is people have complicated lives and the debt stories are all different. It’s never a clear line- HER FAULT or NOT HER FAULT. That’s why I like bankrutpcy for bad cases like his. We already know how to do that, there’s a specialized, expert court and clear rules that apply to everyone. There’s no morality analysis, so no one has to get into “well, you should have been a nurse” which is how these discussions always go. I don’t know what he should have been. I know he has 140k in debt he will never pay off and he can’t return what he purchased with it. It needs to go away so he can get on with his life.
We have to give them a way to fix it.
Another Scott
@Martin: I’m a big fan of Atrios’s mantra to just make everything universal and just tax the wealthy more to pay for it. Means-testing is expensive, inefficient, rage-inducing, and generally counter-productive.
This college idea you present makes a huge amount of sense, too. I’m a little leery of making it all a federal system, though. It makes sense that states that have a history of doing very well in education (California, Massachusetts, maybe Iowa?) be able to continue to do things that work well and maybe exceed what could get through a federal system. But having a national floor (for Mississippi and too much of the rest of the country) would be a very good thing and promote value and not just gold-plated credentials and giant alumni/alumnae networks.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
Yep. To pick another example of the same general phenomenon, it’s the way we understand that any kind of immigration amnesty needs to be tied to broader immigration reform. If we fix problems for people who are here without some broader based reform, we’ll just have a new batch of undocumented immigrants and dreamers in another generation. Or rent relief. If we institute rent control without doing something about housing supply, we’ll just create more winners and losers. We need long-term fixes to make the system work better and short term fixes to help the people who are being screwed today.
J R in WV
@lowtechcyclist:
$5,000 in debt?
I was surprised that Wife had $500 in debt at graduation — cosigned by one of her teachers! We paid that off really soon after she graduated and we married. Those were the days!
It was a local bank loan…
Another Scott
@Kay: Isn’t bankruptcy a very blunt tool? Would he have been able to buy his house (and thereby refinance some of his other debts and get some breathing room, as well as cutting his housing costs) if he had declared bankruptcy to get out from under the education debts?
If one is going to change the rules to allow student loan bankruptcy, I’d prefer that they change more of the system so that the debt can be discharged without trashing the rest of his financial health.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: worth noting that universal welfare states generally get a good chunk of their funding from hefty sales taxes.
Geminid
@Ben Cisco: Are you in Representative Terry Sewell’s Congressional district? She looks like a very solid Democrat.
Ben Cisco
@Geminid: I was until a recent move. Gary Palmer is my rep now, the best thing about him is that he is not the odious, seditious Mo Brooks.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Made me look. Let’s see – Denmark has a total tax burden of roughly half their GDP. They have a 25% VAT.
But they seem to be doing Ok, and there are ways to make a VAT a wash or much less regressive if there’s interest in doing so.
Still, your point is a good one. Life is more complicated than slogans (even good slogans like “make benefits universal and tax the rich more to pay for it!”) and one needs to think about the whole system to achieve sensible goals.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
The worst thing about means testing is that by leaving some people out it creates a built in political constituency for ending the program. The more it focuses on helping the most deserving, the more everyone else hates it. I think that’s the real reason Republicans like it so much. It looks like something fiscally prudent, but it’s actually a load of crap.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
The key thing is that the government can affect income distribution at both ends: taxation and services. Europe does better than the US mostly because they are more progressive in providing services, not because their tax system is more progressive.
Philbert
@Roger Moore: Well said, to extend, liberals want to break the cycle of (whatever bad thing), conservatives want to conserve it.
Geminid
@Ben Cisco: I am sorry for your loss. I would like to have Ms. Sewell for my Rep.
Right now I’m stuck with Bob “No Good” Good as my 5th VA CD Congressman. He’s as bad as Brooks or Boebert, just more more bland.
But redistricting will give me Abigail Spanberger as my new 7th CD Representitive! That is, as long as I and the rest of the Democrats in the new 7th CD work hard enough between now and November.