Not sure that I would want to stand this close to 200 odd tonnes of steel and propellant that's still in bellyflop position this close to the ground....

Sure, telephoto lens probably makes it look closer than it is.  But I was surprised how late it does the landing burn...

Anyway, the other thing I thought odd was how close some infrastructure is to the catch tower.  A crash at the last minute would seemingly be an expensive exercise.

No one can deny this landing system is a technological marvel.  But I still say that it is just obvious (and inadequately noted in commentary!) that no one knows how cost effective this whole system will be until they start working out how much refurbishment is needed between flights.  

Life without Outlook

My office (along with countless others) has been without email via Outlook all day, and given that the file management software which I (and the majority of other offices in my line of business in Australia) use is integrated with Outlook, I am curious as to what the knock on consequences of this might be.   

Maybe everyone is dusting off the fax machines?  (I haven't used the one integrated in my printer for a few years, probably.)

I'm pretty sure that while some legal contracts provide an "out" for something not being able to happen because the internet itself is down, I don't think they have addressed legal positions if something can't happen because email is down.   (Which, in a sense, it isn't:  yahoo is still working!  Maybe there has been surge of new online email accounts being created under business names today?)

Interesting times... 

The return of "the greatest (MAGA) hits"

What a joke.  

Talk about your fake Christians

He's also so charitable to the [perfectly normal looking] happy Texan Democrats?:

 

People in comments just don't get it (with good reason - I don't understand his point either!):

 

I can well image the screams of Stephen Miller while he watched this...

And, indeed:

Trump proving that he has zero principles and in only interested in power.  Thus, anti- immigrant bigotry and fearmongering got him a long way, but when it stopped working, he wants to be Mr Reasonable and throw all of the ICE defenders under the bus.  

It's ridiculous. And kind of hilarious, if it weren't for people's lives being ruined, or ended. 

 

UPDATE:   Oh, I just learnt this morning that the interview was made just before he appointed Miller as the new Chief of Staff.

 

I also saw a clip on Youtube of Trump in 2018 saying to a group including the late Senator Feinstein that he could perhaps do a deal about amnesty for some immigrants.  Nothing ever happened, of course.

 

The thing is, this is just empty words, again.  Like his great health care deal.   

The return of the blue-faced honeyeaters

I was thinking recently that I haven't seen these pretty birds for quite a while, but this morning they made a springtime return, and the lighting made the camera catch the blue nicely.

The split in the American Right worth watching...

This is interesting, and who know where it will end up.

 JD Vance is that apparent head of "it's the Iran War, stupid" camp (as an explanation for the Republican wipeout at the midterms) within Trump's circle, and is apparently urging a rapid negotiated end to the conflict.     Surprisingly, he has the support of Don Jnr!  (God knows why he has decided to get involved.)

But as Mark Steyn notes (hey, he's still writing?  No one pays much attention to him anymore, do they?), there is a camp of Trump loving commentators who are urging him to finish the conflict militarily - in other words, engage in a massive attack to remove the regime.   To his (ever-so-slight) credit, Steyn thinks that's crazy advice.

Is Miller influential on Trump's war decisions?   Because it's hard to imagine him being a moderating influence in that regard.  I half expect he would be suggesting nuclear strikes.   

So, it all continues to be a worry.  Hopefully, a Democrat controlled congress may well be prepared to impeach a US President who goes "full war" without its approval? 

 

Reactions to Stephen Miller getting a Trump promotion

In the Washington Post:

  

But Australian conservative weirdo Gray Connolly thinks he can read the American room better:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, yes, with Miller, it's impossible not to see the Nazi comparisons:

Update:  Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic:

 

He is fanatically post-liberal. Miller has repeatedly described the opposition as illegitimate. “The Democrat Party is not a political party,” he said last year. “It is a domestic extremist organization.” He has obsessively, and effectively, employed executive actions to circumvent Congress as a lawmaking body. Trump had little use for the legislature even when his allies controlled it. If Miller remains true to form, he will extend his reliance on executive action, and commit the administration to total defiance of any oversight. 

Does he mention that it starts at the top?

Erick Erickson writes in the New York Times:

I’m a Republican. We Have Let Too Many Weirdos Into Our Party.

Well, hear hear.  

Interestingly, as I don't really know much about Erickson's views, he seems not to be a fan of Vance:

During the 2016 campaign, Ross Douthat warned, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” A decade later, we have met it. It has borrowed the grievance politics, the identity obsessions and the contempt for dissent of the woke left, and it has dressed all of that in a rather Christless Christian nationalism. It intends to be the future of the Republican Party.

Consider how some of its leading lights spent the month before the election. For four consecutive Mondays, Peter Thiel, a billionaire, lectured on the Antichrist at a Masonic lodge in Nashville. The sessions drew William Wolfe, Andrew Isker and Joshua Haymes, prominent Christian nationalists. Mr. Wolfe’s Center for Baptist Leadership rallies online mobs against Southern Baptist pastors who resist his project and offer a gentle word about the culture.

Some of the funding behind this movement comes from Charles Haywood, who made his fortune selling a shampoo company. Mr. Haywood has written that his preferred government “will not be democratic,” that women “will not be permitted to choose career over family” and that men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family” without “significant penalties.” He has written glowingly of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. His foundation has reportedly given the Claremont Institute nearly $400,000 since 2022, and it has funded American Reformer, a publication devoted to recapturing Christian institutions, and American Moment, a government staffing pipeline founded with JD Vance’s support.....

Here's the main bit:

 This group is invested in the future of Vice President JD Vance as the agent of the change they want. At a National Conservatism conference in Jerusalem, which happened to be held on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Mr. Wolfe said that “JD Vance is our guy.” According to Rod Dreher, he also suggested that conservative American Jews should know their place. Mr. Vance, for his part, has cultivated the weirdo right rather than confront it. He appears to be going along for the ride. Even after Tucker Carlson turned on President Trump and kept mainstreaming antisemitic conspiracy theories, Mr. Vance has not put any real distance between himself and the weirdo right.

  UPDATE:  good point!

Thank heavens for the non White vote...

From the New York Times today:

 One would think that, despite the obvious significance of the Iran War, with the massive move in the Hispanic and Asian vote (and the vote in Texas), Republicans should not be underestimating the importance of the terrible implementation of their anti-immigration policies in the form of ICE, and more generally with the routine demonisation of all (non white) immigration...

Time for some considered analysis from Australia's mini-MAGA-me online people

Billionaire blows nearly half a billion dollars and tries to joke about it

 Note the number of comments.  I can tell you, it is hard to find any that are supportive.

Quite a few are along the lines "what a waste:  think of the good you could have done in the world by spending it on something worthwhile".    Which is a very good point, and all the more reason to dislike him.... 

A simple idea that works

Seems that a simple idea that helps in working out whether mothers really do need urgent treatment to stop postpartum bleeding is making a real difference, especially in poorer countries.   Have a read about it from the New York Times.

 It's very cool when you read about cheap, effective medical interventions.   

Things we like to see...

Korean does AC/DC

The YouTube algorithm, seeing how much Asian sourced pop I have been investigating lately, suggested this Korean guy who seems pretty popular, but I hadn't heard of him before.  This recent song immediately made me think that it's a copy, even vocally, of early AC/DC with Bon Scott.   I find this amusingly incongruous, but the video is actually pretty fun to watch: 

 

I have scrolled through some of the comments following the video, and although most are in Korean, I thought I might spot "AC/DC" in one of them. No luck, so far, though...