It's a Good Thing It's Star Wars Day

Cause otherwise, I got nothing. 

An oldie but a goodie - so old the couple of uses I can find have no attribution to where it came from.  As is the case with the second irresistible meme. Because if the bad guy in last sequence of films is Kylo Ren (played by Adam Driver), that implies the universe must create a need for a Kylo Stimpy to maintain symmetry. 

Image source: Imgflip

Last year I did a bit of a summary of my Star Wars life. I was going to say that I hadn't seen any Star Wars content since the last trilogy, episodes 7, 8 and 9 with Daisy Ridley (Rey Skywalker),  Adam Driver (of course), John Boyega (Finn) and many more.  That's what I originally thought, but it's not complete at all.  I watched Rogue One - "the prequel" movie, the original Andor series on Disney+/Hulu streaming, the Obi Wan Kenobi series, the first two Mandalorian series and probably more that I can't remember now.  I mentioned being aware of the Mandalorian and Grogu which is a full length feature film that IMDB says is coming May 22 - (they didn't have a date last year). That's just three weeks from last Friday (May 1). Yeah, I think I've been following SciFi, reading and watching, since I was about 12. 

Sometimes things just don't go as planned

As if that's news, but as they say, "the best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray." Friday didn't go as planned and at 9:00 PM I'm not finding any stories that look like big Space news. I'm ordinarily well into the next day's post by this time. 

So since we're short of space news anyway, I'm going to shift gears and get into something I thought I'd write about over the weekend. A visit to a movie theater. Our first in more years than I can think of.

On Wednesday, we took a break from the endless spring of "what needs expensive work done on it now?" to go see what comes across as a surprisingly popular movie, Project Hail Mary. It's long movie based on a complicated story by Andy Weir, who wrote the book The Martian was based on. The movie is primarily Ryan Gosling on screen, although that's an over simplification. It seems to be that rare combination of a sci-fi movie that tries to get the science right for a story that's long and involved.  

Gosling plays biologist Ryland Grace who was essentially kicked out of his science career when he published something that was poorly accepted by big names in his field, and he's working as an elementary school teacher. It was the only kind of job he could get. But you don't know that fact when the movie starts. The movie opens up with Grace coming out of an induced coma, on a space ship in deep space; lost and not remembering where he is or why he's there. Everyone else on the ship is dead. The movie bounces back in time to set up the answers to that and it starts with him being told someone had discovered an unexplained stream of something going from the sun to Venus. Researchers then discovered this mysterious thing was actually slowly destroying the sun and calculated that within a short time (20 years, I think) the sun will stop working and the entire population of Earth will die off. Every one and every thing will die.

They go farther to point out that every star in our part of the galaxy is showing the same effects except one, so why is that star unaffected? The name of the movie comes from realizing their only hope is to stop this thing which is pretty quickly determined to be some exotic microbe they call astrophage (star eater). Astrophage needs to be exterminated and they've found no way to kill it. It comes down to this mission named after the desperation hail Mary pass from football. Humanity can build a one-of-a-kind ship that can go nearly lightspeed and get a crew to that star to find out why it's different, but it's a one way flight and the crew is expected to die off because they don't have enough fuel to get back home. 

If they go, the world may have a chance. If they don't go there is no chance. Either way, the crew is expected to die. 

I found it a very well done movie and enjoyed it a lot. Gosling is the only person in the cast I recognized and know I've seen in movies before. If you go watch trailers and other videos on YouTube, you'll see that featured side to the story is that he meets a sentient, rock-creature (alien) from another planet. After they learn to communicate coarsely, Grace calls the rock alien "Rocky" and Rocky calls him Grace. The story goes back and forth between the past and present situations to explain why some parts are setup the way they are; I found those transitions fairly easy to get used to. 

A large crowd scene from one of the memories before the launch of their "Hail Mary" mission. Next to Ryan Gosling (Grace) is actress Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, one of the project leaders, and seemed to be the one that tracked down Grace for the mission.

This may be my oddest post ever

But it's still better than last year's.

Last year's post was an awkward one about having forgotten it was this blog's 15th blogiversary, but it was almost a full month late. I posted it on March 15. This one isn't that late, only a little. My 16th anniversary was Saturday the 21st. 

My first post was February 21, 2010, which was a Sunday. Since dates move around, instead of celebrating on February 21, I've just used the last Sunday in February. That would have been yesterday, so I even missed the make believe anniversary. 

So let's do the obligatory thing;

Copyright Adobe Stock, as you can see...

As always, I thank you for stopping by. It's hard to know how many people stop by to read by Blogger's stats, part of that is real differences in people stopping by but my gut feel is that most of the "funny business" isn't real. Check out this plot of traffic for the last 90 days. 

Which is more realistic, the peaks up above 20,000 views per day or the ends mostly under 5000? I'll bet those days with over 10,000 views are some sort of either cyber attacks or something nefarious. At random times, I'll get comments that are obviously spam - not related to the post at all, links to other sites, usually outside the US. Stuff like that. I generally delete those but leave the "deleted" message in hopes that the ones doing it will realize the comment will only be there a few hours. 

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So let me pass on something that I think many people will find interesting, especially hams and broader radio hobbyists. We have just gone through at least 1-1/2 days without one visible sunspot. I first saw this yesterday afternoon, and we don't know when or where the next spot will show up. This is the first time without a visible spot in four years. There's a hole in the sun's atmosphere and we've had minor (G1) geomagnetic storms off and on since yesterday, caused by the solar wind getting here both faster and stronger. 

Both of these things are evidence that cycle 25 is decreasing toward solar minimum. That's not to say we're virtually there, that's likely to be four years away (plus or minus something) just to say that it's almost certain that the "good days" of the cycle are going to be less frequent going forward 

Well, this is a new one...

I started trying to summarize, shorten and link to a good space-related story tonight and I couldn't do it. The source is so long and so involved that I didn't have enough time to summarize it.  I'll try to work at that tomorrow. 

Day got away from me

It has been oddly busy this week and especially late yesterday through today. The busy managed to conflict with my regular times to go find something to write about. 

All could think of was to repost one of my all-time favorite goofy posts, about breeding Spider Chickens. It was from the period of peak crazy over Covid, June of 2021. 

 (Somebody's wonderful conceptual art of spider-chicken, from the previous link)  ("Spider chicken, spider chicken.  Does whatever a spider chicken does." (Source))

Yet Another Slow to Zero News Day

So some old memes! 

Um... dude?  You might want to check your six.

So little going on...

There's so little going on that the only thing that I think is worth mentioning is a report that Blue Origin's initial examinations of the recovered booster from New Glenn 2 show it appears to be in better shape than they expected. A video that's five minutes long from where this is set to start has lots of impressive pictures. A little too much emphasis on how clean it is for my taste, but it's their video.

So a couple of little attempts at humor.

 

Finally... are you a plugger? 

The Headline of the Week

I'd be the first person to tell you I have a somewhat strange way of looking at things and a "few sigma" sense of humor - where I use that to mean "far from normal." Telling you that means I think you're going to need to keep it in mind. 

On Thursday, Legal Insurrection blog (one that's not regular or everyday reading but that I visit maybe a couple of times a week) ran a headline story that simply caught my eye, at first, but blossomed into my favorite headline of the week. 

Let me start out the normal way. In reality, this is a sad story. The greenies, in their perpetual dream that they can save the planet from any real or imagined doom, got legislation passed to drug the cows with a medication called Bovaer that somehow reduced the methane the cows produce during digestion. This was a new drug, apparently never widely used before. From the first few words of the article's title you might have figured out the problem.  The drug (or some combination involving the drug) is killing the cattle.

There are now reports that from Denmark of cows collapsing and suffering illness after eating Bovaer, which is now legally required for many farms in Denmark as part of its national climate policy. Some farmers claim their cattle experienced severe symptoms after eating the additive-infused feed, including collapse, lethargy, reduced feed intake, fever, diarrhea, miscarriages, and significant drops in milk production. 

The article isn't very long, and it's another shining example of how when legislatures pass laws to address a problem they apparently never think, "...and then what happens?" The author points out, "Consumers are also alarmed by the introduction of a supplement to animals, with no consideration given to the long-term effects of humans consuming meat and dairy products from animals that eat the additives."

The reason it became my favorite story of the year ties back to that 3-sigma sense of humor. See, it fires off pretty regularly with no thought on my part. This time, my brain grabbed the music and lyrics of a song I grew up listening to 60 years ago, "Big Girls Don't Cry" by a group called The Four Seasons. (Here if you want to listen to it). Instantly, the repeating lyrics went from "Big Girls Don't Cry" to "Dead Cows Can't Fart." Then it became impossible to go more than a couple of hours without thinking of - or even singing it in as close to Frankie Valli's falsetto as I can get. 

From: Big girls doh-on't cry-yi-yi
To: Dead cows cah-an't fa-ar-art

Now that I've passed on the mental virus to you, my work here is done. To quote The Big Guy: thank you for your attention to this matter.

Night Off

Sorry everybody.  Did some stuff today that left me sore and hurting, so I need to sit still.  "What?," you say.  "I thought you sit at a keyboard and it's hard to sit more motionless than that." 

Very true.  It's just that typing hurts a few fingers.  

So a few things I've seen lately that stuck with me.  

Yes, the train broke the sound barrier, but not the one that 99% of people who read that will think it meant.  It broke that fence that blocked some of the sound from trains going by.
 

Then there's Queen as you never saw them.

From the "needs no explanation" file.

And finally 

Because it honestly choked me up and it's simply too beautiful for words.  Yeah, we're cat "staff" and not dog people, but how can you not appreciate this?

Now for something I haven't done in a long time

This evening over dinner Mrs. Graybeard and I did something we haven't done in quite a while.  We used our streaming subscription to Disney+ to watch a movie we didn't catch in the theater, the new Marvel Cinematic Universe movie based on characters that have been cast since the Infinity War, and End Game movies about Thanos killing half of humanity.  It's called Thunderbolts: The New Avengers.   

If you've been a reader for a while, you know I like movies that aren't serious human drama.  I had enough Shakespeare in school and enough real life drama years ago.  No typical, Hallmark-channel, romantic comedies, and not much in the way of dramas that don't involve sci fi, whether that means a super hero movie or some programmed super soldier like a Jason Bourne.  As a general rule, I've liked comic book movies, although I've liked the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) more than the DC movies.  

I've said many times that Thor: Ragnarok has been my favorite of the Marvel movies and just tons of lighthearted fun - for a topic as serious as the end of the world for Thor's planet, Asgard.  There really hasn't been one that I think unseats Ragnarok, but that's not to say none of the newer MCU movies have been enjoyable or fun.   

With a couple of exceptions, all of the characters in Thunderbolts are familiar from other theatrical movies or streaming series in the last few years and of those exceptions only one major character is completely new addition to the MCU.  The main characters are Yelena Belova played by Florence Pugh a role she first played in Black Widow, Bucky Barnes by Sebastian Stan, Alexei Shostakov who is Yelena Belova's father played by David Harbour, John Walker by Wyatt Russell, and Ava Starr by Hannah John-Kamen.  All of these actors/characters have been in at least a few movies except I think Hannah John-Kamen was only in one movie, Ant Man and the Wasp (AKA Ant Man 2) as someone who could slip between universes.  The one completely new major character is Robert Reynolds (pretty much just called "Bob") played by Lewis Pullman. 

Without getting into too much detail the movie is about them coming together to form a new team.  All of them have problems they need to work with (or around).  All of them talk about depression and the hard, lonely lives they find themselves in.  They have a big problem to solve, caused by another actor and character in previous movies, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus a Washington DC insider who's trying to get more power for herself by using other people.  

The main "New Avengers" from a publicity shot.  Left to right: Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan)

Image credit: Marvel Cinematic Universe

While the movie had its opening in theaters in the June time frame, and played in theaters for a while, I don't know if it was considered a success.  ScreenRant considered it one of the 10 best movies of '25, with most of the year past.  Like I said, we watched this on Disney+ which is part of our streaming service, Hulu, so it was no money out of pocket to watch.  We're paying for these things no matter what.  To my mind it was a respectably good movie and like the writer at ScreenRant, I think it's evidence Marvel movies have recovered.  I'll grade it a B.  

We're just past the halfway point

Halfway through 2025, that is.  

A year has 365 days, and half of that is 182.5.  July 2nd is day number 183 of the year, so the midpoint of 182.5 was technically the afternoon of July 1, Tuesday.  Here in the Silicon Swamp, we're in the last days of the latest sunset of the year; the Sunrise/Sunset app I have on my phone (probably obsolete) shows our local sunset at 8:23 PM until Friday, July 4th, when it crosses the minute mark to 8:22 and sunsets get earlier until the winter solstice.  The changes in sunrise and sunset times are slow this time of year.  Sunrises started getting later back before the start of summer (solstice).  

There's another thing that's going to change soon, possibly after this Friday's Independence Day.  You'll start hearing talk about next year being the 250th anniversary of our founding - if you haven't heard it already.  Many of you will remember the 1976 Bicentennial hoopla which was pretty much constant and everywhere (a few other weirdos and I referred to it as the Bison Testicle).  The 250th anniversary is referred to as the Semiquincentennial, the Bisesquicentennial, or the Sestercentennial.  Wikipedia also offers America250 or the Quarter Millennium.

Closer to today than next July, National Hurricane Center predictions have had an area spread across peninsular Florida from the Gulf to the Atlantic off North Carolina for several days.  It was originally given a 20% chance of developing that bumped up to 40% yesterday.  In both cases, that was said to happen in the next seven days not in the next 48 hours.  Late today or tonight, that was changed to look like this, with none of the orange area (40% chance of development) over Florida or in the Gulf:

It's still rated at 40% chance of development, and the fact the Gulf of America has had the orange blob removed doesn't mean it can't reappear there in the next several days.

Our local forecast has shown this to be a rainy weekend since it first appeared on the 10 day forecast.  It sure doesn't look like a good weekend for barbecue or fireworks shows.  And the next SpaceX launch isn't until Monday night/Tuesday morning, July 8.

Sorry, I Got Nothing

A day of feeling rather crappy in new and different ways,  a day that has me trying to think of how to sleep until my post-surgery check in on Wednesday.   If I could just find a way to build a time machine and move up to that day...

Meanwhile... a quote I got from someone somewhere without saving that important info.

30% of my mistakes are due to incompetence, 80% to impatience, 10% to poor or wrong equipment and at least 20% are someone else's fault. The remaining 70% is caused by my poor math performance and insufficient thinking ahead. 

Sorry... I Got Nothing

Busy day that started earlier than usual, then dragged on for hours of hurry up and wait.  In a hospital for a medical test.  

I don't see any quick and obvious news headlines to dive into.  I'll get back to it tomorrow.

So a little amusement...

Headline of the Day

At least in the world of Space Science as reported by Space.com.

Not-so-clean rooms: Scientists discover 26 new microbe species in NASA spacecraft facility

It doesn't quite convey the entire message written that way.  So let me try it a little more directly:

Scientists discover 26 new microbe species in NASA Clean Room

The clean room is used to ensure spacecraft don't bring Earth microbes to other planets.  And they find 26 new species that can survive the conditions intended to kill them off before flight?

Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, along with researchers in India and Saudi Arabia, have discovered 26 previously unknown bacterial species in the clean rooms that were used to prep NASA's Phoenix Mars lander for its August 2007 launch. 

Clean rooms are intensely controlled environments designed to prevent Earth's microbes from hitching a ride to other planets and contaminating them with our life.  The constant battle, though, is with some microorganisms, known as extremophiles, that show impressive resilience in inhospitable environments, whether that's the vacuum of space, hydrothermal vents on the slopes of undersea volcanoes, or even NASA clean rooms. (BTW, you have got to click on that extremophiles link so you can see "Conan the Bacterium")

"Our study aimed to understand the risk of extremophiles being transferred in space missions and to identify which microorganisms might survive the harsh conditions of space," study team member Alexandre Rosado, a researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, said in a statement.

"This effort is pivotal for monitoring the risk of microbial contamination and safeguarding against unintentional colonization of exploring planets," Rosado added.

When the concept of extremophiles comes up, it's natural to want to understand how they survive things that kill other life forms, much like you'd want to know why a bug spray you're using for creepy crawly insects doesn't work, or stops working as some insect extremophiles are selected for. 

These hardy microbes may also offer insights that could benefit life on Earth. The scientists performed genetic research on samples gathered from the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, one of the last stops for Phoenix before its launch from neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (then known as Cape Canaveral Air Force Station).

They found 53 strains that they determined belonged to 26 novel species. And they dug into the genomes of these newfound extremophiles, looking for clues that could help explain their extraordinary survivability. The keys might be in genes linked to DNA repair, detoxification of harmful substances and boosted metabolism, according to the team.

NASA's Phoenix Mars lander undergoes a test before its August 2007 launch. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA/Lockheed Martin)

While it seems these newly discovered species could help improve applications in medicine, food preservation and more, most importantly it seems they could help NASA improve their basic mission of not spreading Earth's microbes around the solar system.

A Rare Meme Dump

Most of the times when I do an "I got nothing" post, it's because the day got away from me.  Today it's because I've been trying to find something to write about for hours and there's just NOTHING - just like the days of coverage of the big nothing-burger (but slightly historically interesting) story of the Cosmos 482 satellite reentry.   

Yeah, I guess some of that time was spent doing some research on various personal problems and concerns.  Like "we had spectacular Sporadic E Tuesday and Wednesday, why did it just stop?"  In the space of an hour I worked two stations thousands of miles away and in opposite directions,  Angola in southern Africa and the Austral Islands in the south Pacific.  While it's not exactly the same, the 50 MHz (6 meter) ham band is just at the bottom of where the old VHF TV Channel 2 was, so it's like watching TV on channel 2 from sub-Equatorial Africa or the South Pacific.  

Said to be from Mechanix Illustrated in the late 1950s,  predicting everyone having a flying saucer within 10 years.

Michael Ramirez 

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics.  I sent this to my son for his 43rd birthday with a note that this was us 35 years ago.  He agreed.

Since the live action Snow White bombed so badly, the idea of recasting it with the biggest-name black movie star is being floated.  Let's just say Ms. Zegler is not pleased.  There are YouTube videos featuring (I assume) AI generated Samuel L Jackson figures that seem to only be there to hear him say the MF word while celebrating success as Snow White.

It's Star Wars Day

My brain fart of the day was thinking it was the fourth on Saturday and not the third.  I caught on fairly late in the day when I had to actually think about the date. 

It just got to be time to say, "May the fourth be with you," and all.  

I was going to say that I haven't seen any Star Wars content since the last trilogy, episodes 7, 8 and 9 - excuse me, episodes VII, VIII and IX - with Daisy Ridley (Rey Skywalker),  Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), John Boyega (Finn) and many more.  That's what I originally thought, but it's not really all.  I watched the Rogue One "prequel" movie, the original Andor series on Disney+/Hulu streaming, the Obi Wan Kenobi series, the first two Mandalorian series and probably more that I can't remember now.  I see the second Andor season is playing, although I haven't caught a minute of it, and something called the Mandalorian and Grogu looks like a full feature film that's coming in 2026.

But Kylo Ren is the only Star Wars character that has an internet meme about him.  The existence of Kylo Ren implies the existence of a Kylo Stimpy. 

Image source: Imgflip

Well, This is Kinda Embarassing

I noticed something rather surprising this week, and honestly didn't know quite what to do about it.

You see, last month was this blog's 15th anniversary.

I've never missed a blogiversary before.  My actual first posting was Sunday, February 21, 2010.  Since dates move around, instead of celebrating on February 21, I've just used the last Sunday in February.  This year that fell on February 23rd and there was a bunch of little stuff going that just made me forget that all.  Since I'm three weeks late, I could get all Anal-Retentive and say it's my 15-3/52nd or 15.096 blogiversary but then I'd be guaranteed to not find an image to use here.  

So here 'tis

Image by Vecteezy, as it says.  They appear to accept that their images will get used by blogs with no revenue like this one and offer various levels of membership that aren't required.

BTW, these anniversary symbols serve a purpose when I'm looking for old images to reuse. If I can find the first time I used it, the anniversary posts are markers in the calendar to look around. Those of you who use Blogger probably already know this. 

As always, I thank you for stopping by. It's hard to know how many people stop by to read by Blogger's stats. Over the last month, views per day stayed in the 2000-2500 range, going up around my real (February) anniversary to a peak at 14,537 on 2/20.  The stats blogger gives for the last 30 days look like this:

I suspect the peaks are some sort of hacking, perhaps even attacks that Blogger handled.  The annual stats are even weirder, with peaks over 25,000 views per day around the end of May and early June of '24.  This is why I say it's hard to know how many valid visitors a blog gets.  

This will be post 5,208 and at my typical one post/day, I'll hit 5,500 in about 292 days, which is the end of the year.  

If you've read down this far, what are you doing? Just kidding. Double thanks.

It's One of Those Days

It's one of those days that happen on occasion, where I start pulling on the strings of an idea to put together a post, only to have it fall apart as I miss details along the way - and then notice my mistakes.  

I suppose it's better to not post crap I shouldn't, but it's still less than fun.  

So a couple of diversionary, geeky memes.

All the talk about there being so many chemicals in our foods makes me think of things like this.  Water - Dihydrogen Monoxide, H₂O, is a chemical!  Everything is a chemical!!

Dear Daughter-in-Law is a chemist, and she sent me this in the last couple of weeks.  This is the way it's s'posed to be! 

And just because...

No Falling Iguanas Around Here

One of those "peak Florida" stories that goes around every winter is to beware of Frozen Iguanas falling out of trees when temperatures drop below 50.  With morning lows from 38 to 43 almost all of last week here in central Florida, various news sources in the state have been posting stories about this and advising everyone to avoid the iguanas and leave them alone.  That link, if you haven't clicked it, is to a Channel 13 TV broadcaster in the Tampa area - Fox 13.

An unstated but obvious requirement is for there to be a population of iguanas in the area before you see them falling from trees or whatever.  There is no self-sustaining population of iguanas in Tampa or really much of anywhere north of the southernmost part of the state. Which isn't to say that there can't be any iguanas here in the central part of the state, just that they're likely to not be a real population, just some lizards that ended up here after exploring and getting lost, or some that were taken as pets and then thrown out. 

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) puts it this way:

Green iguana populations now stretch along the Atlantic Coast in Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach Counties and along the Gulf Coast in Collier and Lee Counties. There have also been reports as far north as Alachua, Highlands, Hillsborough, Indian River and St. Lucie Counties. However, individuals observed in more northern counties are likely escaped or released captive animals and are unlikely to establish populations, as iguanas are not cold hardy. In cleared habitats such as canal banks and vacant lots, green iguanas reside in burrows, culverts, drainage pipes and rock or debris piles. South Florida’s extensive man-made canals serve as ideal dispersal corridors to further allow iguanas to colonize new areas.

The first group of counties they mention are the southern tip of the state.  The next group includes a handful of counties in the central part of the state: Highlands, Hillsborough, Indian River and St. Lucie counties as well as a genuinely northern county, Alachua.  Indian River county is the county south of the one I live in (Brevard).  I've never heard of an iguana population around here. I've seen them in Palm Beach County, some in my brother's yard, but haven't been there when it was cool enough for falling iguanas.

A graphic from Fox13's article. Image credit: FOX Weather

While I said I've never heard of an iguana population here, there have been iguanas spotted from time to time in this county.  I'm just not seeing mention of a regular population here. 

Very Little Space News Today

You'd think it was some sort of holiday observed in most of the world or something. 

The only thing I saw reported that was pretty much new was the SpaceNews (dot com!) article on the record year that the US Space Force had at Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.  

Florida’s Space Coast capped off a record-breaking year with 93 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, up from 74 launches in 2023.

Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of the Eastern Range and Space Delta 45, credited the accelerated pace to innovations by both Space Launch Delta 45 and the private sector. “We’ve been able to reach these crazy numbers by leveraging automation, modernizing infrastructure, and streamlining processes,” Panzenhagen told SpaceNews.

The interesting thing General Panzenhagen pointed out was of those 93 launches, 88 were SpaceX.  The other five were United Launch Alliance.  

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All that out of the way, two memes that have been on my mind. The first one is just a simple observation.

The second one is an observation that seems obvious to me.

I think Candace Owens is absolutely right: those people being against Tulsi is as good an endorsement as  you'll see.  I guess I'm assuming this is either exactly the same group that covered up Hunter's laptop and called it Russian disinformation or there's a lot of overlap.  A favorite observation I came across years ago is that the biggest benefit of true Freedom of Speech is that it makes it easier to know who the assholes are.  If everyone is censored, it's harder.  In this case, by giving their names publicly, they've made it easier to identify who the corrupt operators are so they can be gotten rid of faster.