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Monday’s Forum
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14 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
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Todd Blanche REALLY wants the AG gig:
In a statement accompanying the order, the Justice Department said that “although the Acting Attorney General has repeatedly advised Congress through testimony, including under oath, as well as in written responses, that the Fund is not moving forward, and the Department has repeatedly represented to district courts that the Fund is not moving forward, today’s Order officially rescinds the May 18, 2026 Order.”…..The document released by Blanche on Sunday night also limits the scope of another provision of the settlement that provided broad immunity for Trump and members of his family from tax audits.
The deal clarifies that the tax audit immunity agreement “applies by its terms only retroactively” to claims open at the time of the settlement and does not protect the president from examination of future tax filings.Tillis and Cornyn were smart enough not to trust Blanche, even under oath. But the fact that Blanche still insists there is a legitimate immunity deal flies in the face of the judge’s decision that the lawsuit from which the “deal” emerged was basically a self-dealing fraud upon the court by Donald Trump. The judge said there could be no “settlement” of a bogus lawsuit, so if the slush fund was thus neutered, how can there still be a legitimate (i.e., binding) immunity agreement? Blanche is being too cute by half in focusing on past versus future tax shenanigans by Trump, his sons, and the Trump Org. This one is destined to be litigated AGAIN.
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The Taco so-called administration is crowdsourcing ideas to punish Iran
Easy: make El taco their president, and his cabinet their cabinet. Let them have measles outbreaks, broken trade relations, alienated allies, and explosive donorrhea.
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And just like that, the fixer’s in.
Self debasement is always ugly.
And there’s no doubt in my mind the slush fund and the criminal immunity for actual crimes will go ahead sometime in the near future.
My question for the US is: how long are you going to eat shit before you decide you don’t like it?
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Disappointing, but not at all surprising, that Cornyn and Tillis would fold like cheap beach chairs. If you can’t take a stand against an overtly and unapologeticaly corrupt POS like Blanche, just what does it take to stir the last embers of your dignity? Trump is deeply enmeshed and invested in his delusions; what’s the excuse for his enablers?
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I’ve been bouncing idea off chatbots. It helps me think through both premises and major plot developments. the issue is the bots keep telling me how great, brilliant, insightful, and even poetic all my ideas are*.
I wanted to post a short summary of one plot here, but it comes with a lot of backstory to make it a reasonable blog comment. The gist simple: Nareed Loomin, the teenage heir to the throne of Antirya, stops a coup by the regent, her uncle, and then leads a peaceful revolution to abolish the monarchy.
The backstory explains why there’s a regent, why he attempts a coup, why Nareed wants to abolish the monarchy, where and what is Antirya, etc.
And that’s just parts one and two of the novel.
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A couple of weeks ago France shut down three nuclear power reactors and started running eight others at reduced output due to limits on the cooling water supply. Last week Romania had to shut down one of their nuclear power reactors because there was insufficient cooling water available due to record-low water levels in the Danube River. Over the weekend the Romanian military began using explosives to demolish other river channelization infrastructure in hopes of avoiding shutting down a second reactor. Hungary is on the verge of having to shut down the reactor that provides half of the country’s electricity, also due to low Danube levels.
The US Dept of the Interior has released the first of its proposals for managing the Colorado River drought. Arizona gets hit the hardest. Arizona has already said they will sue the upper basin states to force them to take much larger cuts. I live in Colorado, signatory to nine separate interstate river compacts. I believe Colorado has been involved in some SCOTUS river case or the other continuously for the last 70 years.
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My takeaway from this piece is that XpaceS, the world’s most capital intensive ISP, is having trouble getting its upper stage back intact, or at least in a reusable form.
For once I’m not mocking their efforts. The heat from reentry is intense, and we all know how expensive it was to reuse the shuttle orbiter.
But questions do arise. How cheap would Xtarship be if the upper stage cant be reused? Would it then make sense to redesign it with lighter materials?
Note, too the bit that says “Even after SpaceX(sic) learns to recover both Super Heavy and the upper ship, additional challenges lie ahead, including working out how the vehicle can be refueled while it sits in orbit.” (emphasis added).
I’m not aware of any major instances of in-orbit refueling. This is crucial for the lunar lander version of Xtarship. A dozen or so upper stages carrying extra fuel have been mentioned as necessary.
Moving stuff in space is tricky due to the lack of gravity. Moving volatile liquids is tricky with gravity. Not to mention cryogenic fuels tend to evaporate despite insulation (though at least they’re not using tiny molecules like hydrogen, which might help with leaks). Remember it was a liquid oxygen tank, meant for breathing and not propulsion, that blew up and nearly took down Apollo 13.
The point is, there’s no way anyone, least of all Adolf launch subsidiary, will be landing on the Moon any time soon. Certainly not next year, and possbly not this decade.
I’ve no idea how Lex Besoz is doing with his rocket company, except that it looks he’s following in Adolf’s footsteps and setting up an ISP as well.
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How about that? The FAA has certified the B737 MAX7.
The headline linked to is completely right: it’s great news one for Southwest.
It was supposed to enter service in 2019…
