Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Not all heroes wear capes.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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

The lights are all blinking red.

Is trump is trying to break black America over his knee? signs point to ‘yes’.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

So very ready.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Be a wild strawberry.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

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Open Thread: Riding With Artemis

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LAUNCH! ARTEMIS II LAUNCHES WITH A CREW OF 4 TOWARDS THE MOON

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— NASASpaceflight.com (@nasaspaceflight.com) April 1, 2026 at 6:39 PM

Clothing design is always fascinating…
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/s…

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— Anne Laurie (@annelaurie.bsky.social) April 2, 2026 at 3:26 AM

Gift link:

… Though much of the spacesuit-related attention thus far has been levied on the white spacewalk suits being created by Prada and Axiom Space, it is the orange suits that may be the more eye-catching — by design…

The suits, which function as mini life-support systems (astronauts can live in them for 144 hours, if necessary), were custom-made to each astronaut’s physique by NASA engineers. They also feature reflective, sky-blue accent stripes that form a heroic V at the torso and circle the thighs and the upper arms, where they emphasize the armadillo-like articulation of the shoulders.

Not that the blue is merely decorative. The V indicates external straps for rescue crews to grab onto, and blue pouches that look like external batteries contain life preservers and backup oxygen bottles. And the hue is a vivid contrast to the orange, adding a further flex to the suit’s primary shade…

Officially known as AMS Standard 595 color #FS 12197, according to a U.S. federal government standard created for paint, International Orange is described by Merriam-Webster as “a vivid reddish orange,” deeper than safety cone orange or fluorescent orange and specifically meant to stand out against ocean and sky blues…

The Air Force embraced the color in the 1970s, using it for high-altitude pressure suits — the orange facilitated water rescues — and it finally made its way to NASA when the Challenger disaster in 1986 prompted the agency to explore new safety measures. Previous launch and re-entry suits had been white, but the efficacy of orange in search and rescue was impossible to ignore. (The NASA EVA suits, which are worn by astronauts for spacewalks on the International Space Station, remain white because the color repels heat more effectively.) By 1988, the International Orange suits had appeared, complete with a new nickname: “pumpkin suits.”…

This is very cool! I hear getting a patch is a big deal in nasa/space culture so WOOT to Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond for sending them off in a good way. (quoted article gives good context for the designs)

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— Joanne Hammond (@joannehammond.bsky.social) April 1, 2026 at 8:21 PM

Per Space.com, “‘The sasquatch is honesty’: Inside Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s Artemis 2 mission patch”:

… Jeremy Hansen, who is with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), will fly as a mission specialist on the Artemis 2 mission alongside three NASA astronauts: Reid Wiseman (the Artemis 2 commander), pilot Victor Glover (who will become the first Black person to leave low Earth orbit, or LEO) and mission specialist Christina Koch (the first woman to do so). Hansen will become the first non-American to leave LEO.

There are many mission patches flying with the astronaut quartet, with all four sporting the Artemis 2 main mission patch as well as a “Freedom 250” commemorative patch marking the year 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And Hansen’s flight suit patches include a special one symbolizing the meaning of the Artemis 2 mission for himself and his country, including Indigenous communities with whom he has spent time as a CSA astronaut…

The patch, CSA explains, has “elements of Anishinaabe culture.” These are not meant to represent all aspects of First Nations, Inuit and Métis culture, but they do show “the importance of traditional knowledge and Indigenous Peoples in Canada.” The patch was created by Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond of Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba. Dave Courchene III (Sabe), the leader of the Turtle Lodge in Sagkeeng First Nation, also contributed to the patch.

Hansen said the patch incorporates one element of Anishinaabe perspectives — the culture’s seven sacred laws, as represented by the heptagonal shape of the patch, as well as seven animals.

“Just quickly: The buffalo represents respect. The eagle, love. The bear is courage. The sasquatch is honesty. The beaver is wisdom. The wolf is humility, and the turtle is truth. None of us are perfect. We’re not always able to walk in that integrity, but if we strive to, they will bring a rich life for each of us.” (More information about the animals’ meaning is available on the CSA webpage.)…

(I’m a little sad the mountain lion / bobcat didn’t make the cut, but everyone gets to choose their own spirit animals… )

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Something Nice Open Thread: Artemis Has Launched Successfully

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"Humanity's next great voyage begins" #Artemis

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— Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) April 1, 2026 at 6:39 PM

I was saving this for a pick-me-up after my previous SCOTUS post, so of course y’all decided to talk about the Artemis launch in *that* thread, and no doubt as soon as I hit publish on this one Cole will stomp me. Don’t care, says the sf nerd girl, this is still *FANTASTIC CONTENT*!

The Artemis II space mission has officially launched 🚀
• They will go one swing around the Moon and back (no landing)
• Mission will last ~10 days
• Next step is to land on the Moon — then eventually establish a Moon base

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— Culture Crave 🍿 (@culturecrave.co) April 1, 2026 at 6:45 PM

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— paulpro (@mariopro.bsky.social) April 1, 2026 at 6:40 PM

This is the photo, the moment, the unspoken comment on where we actually fit in this universe.
It's been waaaaaaaaay way way too long since we've done this.

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— Nolan Hicks (@ndhapple.bsky.social) April 1, 2026 at 6:43 PM

🚀 Artemis II is safely in orbit! 🚀 A daring 10-day voyage will take four astronauts on a loop around the moon and set the stage for future forays

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Respite: Antimatter To Go Edition

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I’ve got a ton of rage-inducing stuff in the pipeline which I hope to start putting up here and there soon. But I promised some respite, and I’m a content-generator of my (often deadline-missing) word, so here’s a bit of fun for your Wednesday afternoon.

Humankind has just witnessed its latest never-before achievement. Yesterday a truck hit the road within the CERN campus near Geneva. It was transporting very, VERY carefully a cargo created within that laboratory, Europe’s particle physics research center.

That cargo was antimatter. To be precise, that truck transported a grand total of 92 antiprotons, produced in a facility at CERN known informally as the antimatter factory.

Antimatter is just like the ordinary matter you and I are made of, but for one crucial difference: each of its particles has the opposite charge of its ordinary matter counterpart. An antiproton has a negative charge instead of the positive charge of the protons in the nuclei in every atom in our bodies/the universe, for example. (There are a handful of other reversed properties, but that’s the gist.)

One other thing: matter and its anti- counterpart really, REALLY don’t like each other. If an anti-proton comes into contact with a scrap of ordinary matter, it goes BOOM!—the two particles annihilate.

Respite: Antimatter To Go Edition

So antimatter is hard to make in a world full of the other stuff, and once created (which CERN does by ramming protons into metal targets and then capturing a small fraction of the anti-protons created in the flash of collision energy), is even harder to preserve.

To simplify a lot, the way to hang on to antimatter in this vale of tears is to trap it in such a way that it never comes into contact with its surroundings. Doing so requires extreme cold—four degrees K above absolute zero; as near a complete vacuum as technically achievable; and superconducting magnets to hold the antiprotons in a tight enough grasp to ensure they never strike the sides of the containment vessel.

This is not an easy task in a lab. Now imagine what it would take if an antiproton developed an urge for going.* The need to figure out how to transport antimatter arose because the CERN is an electromagnetically busy place, and some of the experiments researchers hoped to perform with antimatter couldn’t be done except in a much more pristine setting—which is being built in Dusseldorf, Germany, 700 kilometers from Geneva.

So the laboratory’s antimatter folks found themselves in the trucking business. Getting antiprotons to become rolling cargo involved designing a traveling version of the containment technology used in the lab. Today marked the first test of the system. A box truck set off on what accumulated into a half-hour, eight kilometer drive—a careful journey, topping out at forty-two kilometers per hour.

Antimatter is implicated in a range of fundamental questions, among them, why there is so much matter and so little antimatter in our universe (which is a good thing from a wholly selfish point of view; if the Big Bang had generated equal amounts of both forms of matter, as some calculations suggest it could have, then there’d be nothing in our neighborhood but the residue of the vast mutual annihilation of the two species of particles). So there’s a lot riding on the ability first to create a storable stock of antiparticles and then to get it into the right environment for ultra-precise measurement.

A five mile jaunt on a secured right of way is only the beginning. It will be a while yet before you can DoorDash an order of anti-hydrogen with some frites on the side. But it is amazing for all of that. Human beings have managed to reach into the realm previously reserved for action on a cosmological scale—and now the antimatter show has hit the road.

To put this another way: we just witnessed the Winter Olympics. We saw extraordinarily accomplished people do exceptional things. While almost every last person watching will never attempt, much less land, a quad axel or a 1620 rotation on a freestyle jump, it is thrilling to witness, to know it can be done.

Same here, learning of those 92 antiprotons made it out and back safely using machinery that is at the very limit of what humankind knows how to build.

More detail at the source for this post.

*Inevitable soundtrack. Inevitable alternate soundtrack.

Image: Joseph Stevens, Enemies, 1854

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Little Things That Make Us Happy

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No matter how bad things get, there is one thing always brings me happiness, however fleeting.

Do we all have things like that?  Mine is related to my little Henry.

When Henry tore his ACL in 2017, the vet told me that something like 25 or 50% of pets will tear the ACL in their other leg.  Yes, I am aware that there’s a huge difference between 25 and 50 :-) but all I remember is that it was some horrendously big round number.

Anyway, that was the end of Henry getting to hop on and off my (high) bed a hundred times a day like a little bunny.

So he started having to sleep in a crate in my bedroom at night.  Sad for both of us!  Fast forward… Henry has started waking me up at 5 or 5:30 to go to the bathroom.  I turn my heat really low when I go to bed at night, so the house is very cold when we get up around 5.  When we come back in, I turn the heat up and we go back to bed.

The kitties sleep with me at night, but they bail once we’ve been out to the bathroom.  So I close the bedroom door and go back to bed, leaving Henry’s crate open.  Sometimes we sleep for hours, sometimes not that long, but at some point Henry comes out of his crate to see if I’m awake.  I often play possum if I’m not ready to get up.

Anyway, the sound that never fails to make me happy comes when little Henry steps out of the crate and I hear the patter of his little feet as he runs over to the bed.  I can hear the happiness in his little footsteps.  “Are we getting up now?  Is it time to get up?”

He’s such a happy little boy, it never fails to make me smile.  And if I’m not ready to get up yet, he runs right back to his crate with the comfy blankie and tries again a little while later.  Every time, always hopeful.  He is such a blessing in these terrible times.

Do you guys all have little things like that?

A particular bird call?  The sound of your partner snoring?  The sound of the kitties who inevitably start to play like crazy after the lights are out?  The sound of your child or grandchild laughing?  Something that never fails to trigger a happy memory?

If you do, I hope you’ll consider sharing it with us.

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A Bit of Inspiration

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In honor of International Women’s Day, last night’s Medium Cool was about women and culture.

Many of the comments were moving and inspirational, but there’s one in particular that I want to share here.  It was a late arrival and I hope everyone takes a couple of minutes to read it.

We all need inspiration!

Percysowner

My inspirations will never be found on any Wiki, or anywhere other than Ancestry and then only if you pay money, they are my mother, my grandmother and my great grandmother. GGM AKA Little Grandma (she was 4″ 10″ at most) was from Slovakia. She had Granny in 1894,when she was 20 and unmarried. Neither she nor Granny talked about it. She did eventually marry Grandpa Lou, Was he Granny’s father? Who knows. Slovakia was in the middle of a war zone. My cousin thinks that Grandpa Lou was sent to fight before he knew she was pregnant. My father, not from her side, said that an army marched in and when they left she was pregnant. The implications there are darker. In any case, when my Granny was 6 Little Grandma brought her to America. Presumably Grandpa Lou sent for her, but no real info is available.

Little Grandma took what work she could find, cooking, cleaning houses. Granny dropped out of school when she was 16 and started working, cleaning houses, cooking, and I don’t know what. She married Grandpa Joe who was also an immigrant and who ran and owned a dairy.Both Grandpa Lou and Grandpa Joe died before I was born. Little Grandma died when I was 4.

My mom went to college. She got a Master’s Degree in Library Science and worked as a librarian until I was born. Then, even though it was the 1950s, she went back to work part time because she wanted to. She developed MS, was fired because the place she worked thought it was “too depressing” to see her “struggling” to work, even though she completed all of her tasks, which hurt her a LOT. God Bless the ADA!

So my inspirations are not only my maternal ancestors, but all the women who crossed oceans, or deserts or countries to make a better life for themselves and their children. Who worked “menial” jobs and were looked down upon because they were “just immigrants” and not as good as those who were here longer, THEY are the ones who made America and who will continue to make America. Now all we have to do is accept that women coming here makes us strong and will keep strong and safe.

Every poster here, unless they have Native American heritage, has someone in their ancestry that left home and hearth. That left a bad situation for their children and added to this country or who simply wanted a better live than they had at “home”. I am inspired by them all, the Somalis who live down the road from me in Ohio, the Hispanics who left South America and Central America, the Ukrainian immigrants, the Asian immigrants, the women from the Middle East and every woman who came to this county looking for a better life for her and her children,

I’m pretty sure this is a dying thread. I’m going to bed, but I wanted to put my vote in for the unsung women who made the country was today, and FUCK those who say they aren’t good enough!​

I too got a library degree and ran a county law library. My daughter runs a smalll city department in a STEM area.

Immigration helped this world.

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Taking a Break from the News

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Let’s use this as a mostly open thread (even politics is fine, as long as it’s good news).

Taking a Break from the News 23

These are the sidebar pics from February.
The days are going by so fast.

On The Road - Beckya57 - Baja Blast 3
Photo by Beckya57 (2/18/26)

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