Cousin. Did I typo that?

Good plan.

Step 1: Ban all US social media. Step 2: Ban all US citizens. Step 3: Ban all US businesses of any kind.

There. MEGA.

Yes. At work, for example, I make a cup in the morning about 10AM and then keep refilling and drinking until about an hour before quitting time.

(P.S. Even at 50,000,000 dollars that’s less than 1/8 of the Apartheid Manchild’s net worth.)

Saturn V was that expensive because the sheer volume of calculations that had to be done were done BY HUMAN BEINGS. Electronic computers weren’t up to the task. Salaries were a huge expense item because computers (in the original sense of the word) liked to be paid.

SpaceX has the advantage of having computers literally four orders of magnitude more powerful in every one of their engineer’s pockets. Plus computers far more powerful than those available at a very low price. Calculations that took thousands of person-days (daily!), with the commensurate salaries of the people doing them, are now done in seconds.

There is simply no excuse—beyond the toxic “move fast and break things” ethos of modern “tech”—for constantly having rockets blow up in this day and age. The simulations and static test analyses and such that were once such an expensive chore are orders (note the plural) of magnitude cheaper today than they were in the 1960s.

It’s just incompetence and arrogance.

Also I note with interest that from inception (1962) to first full stack flight (which was also the first flight of any component) was only five years.

Starship was officially announced in 2012 and its first flight (of sorts, if you call "spinning out of control until it disassembled itself a “flight”) was in 2023.

ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS and SpaceX still hadn’t made a surviving launch. For reference, eleven years after the Saturn V was started, the Saturn V had made 13 flights, all successful, doing its final flight that year boosting Skylab into LEO. (You know, that place that SpaceX hasn’t even yet put an empty Starship into.)

I get it straight from a collective representing the farmers in Liubao. There are some Internet vendors who sell it, though, so you don’t have to move to China. I can’t vouch for any of them though since, well, I don’t use their services.

You don’t. You finish your cup, you put the leaves back in, you pour hot water over top.

I cycle among these four randomly:

I don’t know. This one looks a bit sticky!

Did he delete it? It keeps erroring out for me.

The Apollo project launched the roughly comparable Saturn V rockets 13 times. None of the launched rockets exploded. None of the launched¹ missions led to any loss of life.

The Saturn V was made at a time when all the computing power on the planet put together was less than a middling-power smart phone of five years ago. The rockets and modules were controlled by computers that had less computing horsepower than an average USB charger. And it was more of an experimental rocket system than anything the Apartheid Manchild’s company has put out thus far.

Space Karen’s company has launched their pretentiously-named “Starship” system seven times. Four of them ended up exploding, and one of them broke up the launch pad so badly that it endangered life and limb and did damnable violence to a fragile ecosystem with endangered species.

And yet the fanbois trumpet the “success” of a mission that has not yet actually made it to LEO, has not done any of the things it was supposed to have had done in 2022 for NASA’s Artemis mission and going back to the moon.

And this turd wants to send people to MARS!?

¹ Important word here. Re-read it before you “well akshuallee” me.

Park Alpine Dry Gin

Converting $20 to local currency, I’d probably go with this:

This is so-called “Liubao Tea”, a kissing cousin to pu’er tea. I did a review of my first batch(es) and it has rapidly (literally with one round of brews) reached the top of my circulation in teas.

The depicted tea is one aged from 1991 (the one I reviewed was tea stems from 2003) and is of one of the higher grades. A 100g package will set you back about $15 or so at today’s exchange rate. 100g is about 15-20 servings, and each serving can be brewed multiple times (even my tea stems can be brewed four times without loss of flavour), so it’s quite the bargain.

Save it for a time when you really need something warm, rich, and comforting. It will last forever as long as you store it in a cool, dry, dark space. And personally I think it’s a bargain at 15 bucks.

Now imagine this:

I lived in Inuvik for three years (Dad was stationed there). For three consecutive winters I lived 30 days of night. You think you get SAD “down south”? You ain’t seen nothin’ 'til you’ve faced a whole month of nothing but twilight conditions or darker.

Which brings us to my first Sunrise Festival.

This is the most memorable sun-related event in my life, displacing even the total solar eclipse I experienced in Wuhan a few years back. For 30 days there was no sun. Further, for 15 days the “twilight” portions of the day got darker and darker until it was basically nothing but night. Then, for 15 days, in the depths of SAD you’ve never felt the like of, it got brighter and brighter at the high parts of the day.

Until the day of the Sunrise Festival.

This is the day that basically all work stops as close to noon we gathered out in the streets and playgrounds (in my case) and such to watch the sky. Watch the twilight get brighter and brighter and brighter. Until suddenly the sun peeks for a few minutes above the horizon, blood red, staining the sky, only to dip quickly back down.

Sure we’ve got another month of really, incredibly short days before we face something similar to normalcy, but it’s all good. It only gets lighter from here.

The sun is back in town.

Yeah, welcome to my world.

And it’s not just with the loud fundamentalists who hold these attitudes. I completely cut off a friend of almost 20 years who seemed to be one of those “sane” and “quiet” Christians when, in a period of mild intoxication, he let spill everything he actually believed.

He believed women should stay at home keeping house and raising children. Women should not have careers or aspirations beyond that. He believed that all of his friends were going to Hell to be tortured for eternity. (He was fine with this. Absolutely copacetic.) He believed that victims of natural disaster and of crime deserved it because obviously God was doing this to them for a reason.

And that’s when I realized that even the “quiet” and “non-extreme” Christians can have horrors concealed beneath their placid exteriors. So now I give very large side-eye when people think their Christianity is so important to their life that they have to bring it up at all in circles where it’s not relevant.

but that would be problematic because it would show favoritism

And we all know that Trump has never, ever, at any point in his history, played favourites, right?

Just bolt his hands to the exterior directly. Why waste the metal on a handle?

The Apartheid Manchild claims to be autistic. He claims to be diagnosed autistic.

The people who know him and/or researched his life (like his biographer) say that he is entirely self-diagnosed.

Make of this what you will.

Oh, no muttering here. I go full-on announcer voiceover mode when I’m alone. And sometimes people show up while I’m doing it and I don’t notice so they get it full blast.