Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
Planetary Protection rules can be seen as very sensible, *if* you think there might be life extant on another planetary body. The risk is that any extant signs of life might get masked, or even destroyed, by careless or stupid acts. And that would be a tragedy for science. Then there is the lesser risk of contamination back to Earth.
This is slightly offset by the suspicion that NASA have been studiously ignoring the search for life on Mars as being too politically difficult. They play lip service to it, but are actually doing the least possible science on the topic.
Muskites are against PP because it gets in the way of his dream. Perhaps the rules need loosening, or perhaps not, but the last person who should be setting the rules is Musk. PP *does* make sense; the question is how much it should get in the way. But it should never be totally ignored.
The “rules” at the moment ignore all the contamination that occurs with each landing, due to not everything being auto-claved.
There was a hilarious moment in a online video call, when a NASA engineer pointed out that the projected renters scheme for Starship on Mars - multi-pass* , high velocity would sterilise the outside of the craft to a degree never achieved before. Bathing the whole thing for multiple minutes in plasma…
*the early passes will be extreme - flying *downwards*. That is with Starship upside down, to create a lift vector downwards, to keep it in the upper Martian atmosphere, at entry speeds beyond escape velocity…
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
Thanks for this comment. I don't agree entirely but it did make me go and look up reentry heat on Mars. Something I relaised I had no idea about and had always assumed was very low due to the thin atmosphere. I was surprised to find it is just a smigeon under 2,500 degrees C. That is hotter than you need to melt rocks and 20 times the temperature of a normal autoclave.
I suppose the point is that much of the spaceship is not subject to that temperature or anything near it due to the heat shield. So I can see why the reentry heat argument has some holes in it.
Labour in 2024 neutralised culture and ran on the Tories having failed on the economy.
Sunak tried culture and failed as people simply said “I can’t afford to eat, why is this stuff relevant”.
Labour would be wise to avoid culture going forward. And so far they don’t seem to my eye at least, to have done much in the way of identity politics.
Add the SNP to that list. Their 2024 manifesto tried to weaponise Scottish identity. The SNP are “for Scotland” they said. People on the doorstep told me they felt marginalised by this. They wanted to know why their services were so poor, and the governing party were telling to suck it up or not be patriotic.
Sunak started off with that damn' fool idea about National Service. Most of those who did it are dead now, and their younger brothers have very mixed memories own the tales they were told. 'Waste of two years' was one of them.
May I mention the help the Guardian gave to Trump? Or is that out of bounds? The persistent hostility of that newspaper to any American leader to the right of Bernie Sanders -- regardless of the success or failure of their policies -- influenced American journalists, who became less and less trusted as a result. (Take a look at the Pew studies to see just how deep that distrust is,)
Labour in 2024 neutralised culture and ran on the Tories having failed on the economy.
Sunak tried culture and failed as people simply said “I can’t afford to eat, why is this stuff relevant”.
Labour would be wise to avoid culture going forward. And so far they don’t seem to my eye at least, to have done much in the way of identity politics.
Add the SNP to that list. Their 2024 manifesto tried to weaponise Scottish identity. The SNP are “for Scotland” they said. People on the doorstep told me they felt marginalised by this. They wanted to know why their services were so poor, and the governing party were telling to suck it up or not be patriotic.
Sunak started off with that damn' fool idea about National Service. Most of those who did it are dead now, and their younger brothers have very mixed memories own the tales they were told. 'Waste of two years' was one of them.
And yet it has worked well in other European countries. Most Scandinavian and Baltic states as well as France have National Service in some form.
Labour in 2024 neutralised culture and ran on the Tories having failed on the economy.
Sunak tried culture and failed as people simply said “I can’t afford to eat, why is this stuff relevant”.
Labour would be wise to avoid culture going forward. And so far they don’t seem to my eye at least, to have done much in the way of identity politics.
Add the SNP to that list. Their 2024 manifesto tried to weaponise Scottish identity. The SNP are “for Scotland” they said. People on the doorstep told me they felt marginalised by this. They wanted to know why their services were so poor, and the governing party were telling to suck it up or not be patriotic.
Sunak started off with that damn' fool idea about National Service. Most of those who did it are dead now, and their younger brothers have very mixed memories own the tales they were told. 'Waste of two years' was one of them.
The Tories look at our low productivity and kids these days and conclude that a short sharp shock would sort them out. No. The issue is that too many jobs are crappy and that work doesn’t pay the bills. Fix the jobs. We need to invest in stuff again.
Thanks everyone for the kind comments about the piece btw, I realise it's a bit of a hot take given the closeness to the result but I wanted to write this as a comparison to how Labour won here. As a few have pointed out a centre left party won a landslide here and did it by adopting the centre right position on woke/identity politics and campaigning on the economy and competence.
I hope that the Dems are able to find the right candidate, male, female, black, Latino whatever who won't fall into the identity trap. The candidate needs to win with ideas and what they can do for average Americans and not on the basis of how well the average American identifies with the candidate. There are voters out there who voted for Obama, a black man, in 2008 and 2012 who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. Until the Dems work out that these voters aren't racist or misogynists or whatever the buzzword is in 2028 they won't be able to win and we're stuck with MAGA and all of the awful downsides it has for the world.
Despite winning fairly emphatically, Trump had quite short coat-tails.
The Republicans will gain four, just possibly five, in the Senate. But, they'll only gain one in the House, and only a relative handful of seats in State legislatures.
The bigger issue of interest is the collapse in the Democratic vote.
Where did they all go? And why didn't they show up?
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
Thanks for this comment. I don't agree entirely but it did make me go and look up reentry heat on Mars. Something I relaised I had no idea about and had always assumed was very low due to the thin atmosphere. I was surprised to find it is just a smigeon under 2,500 degrees C. That is hotter than you need to melt rocks and 20 times the temperature of a normal autoclave.
I suppose the point is that much of the spaceship is not subject to that temperature or anything near it due to the heat shield. So I can see why the reentry heat argument has some holes in it.
It’s a function of velocity - anything going to Mars will be coming in at more than Mars escape velocity. Got to get rid of the speed somehow…
Due to entry heating, anything not specifically cooled will get cooked thoroughly. That because if you use a hot structure system, the structure gets hot…
The other point is that the autoclaving that is done, isn’t done to that high a heat. Since that would destroy lots of stuff.
Multiple metric tons of unsterilised stuff, which was protected by heat shields during entry, has already been dumped on Mars. Apparently this doesn’t count according to the paperwork. But how do they verify if microbes have read all the documents?
Trying to do Planetary Protection by sterilising spacecraft is a joke. There are better ways.
Despite winning fairly emphatically, Trump had quite short coat-tails.
The Republicans will gain four, just possibly five, in the Senate. But, they'll only gain one in the House, and only a relative handful of seats in State legislatures.
The bigger issue of interest is the collapse in the Democratic vote.
Where did they all go? And why didn't they show up?
The Democratic vote reverted to what it was before Biden
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
Planetary Protection rules can be seen as very sensible, *if* you think there might be life extant on another planetary body. The risk is that any extant signs of life might get masked, or even destroyed, by careless or stupid acts. And that would be a tragedy for science. Then there is the lesser risk of contamination back to Earth.
This is slightly offset by the suspicion that NASA have been studiously ignoring the search for life on Mars as being too politically difficult. They play lip service to it, but are actually doing the least possible science on the topic.
Muskites are against PP because it gets in the way of his dream. Perhaps the rules need loosening, or perhaps not, but the last person who should be setting the rules is Musk. PP *does* make sense; the question is how much it should get in the way. But it should never be totally ignored.
The “rules” at the moment ignore all the contamination that occurs with each landing, due to not everything being auto-claved.
There was a hilarious moment in a online video call, when a NASA engineer pointed out that the projected renters scheme for Starship on Mars - multi-pass* , high velocity would sterilise the outside of the craft to a degree never achieved before. Bathing the whole thing for multiple minutes in plasma…
*the early passes will be extreme - flying *downwards*. That is with Starship upside down, to create a lift vector downwards, to keep it in the upper Martian atmosphere, at entry speeds beyond escape velocity…
The rules are not 'ignored'. Risks are evaluated and judged. Autoclaving is rather difficult, and there are other techniques that can be, and are, used. PP is even factored into the choice of landing spot.
There was some controversy because the drill bits sent with Curiosity rover to Mars were not correctly cleaned; they were still clean, but not as clean as they should have been.
If we are going to abandon PP, then fair enough. But it should be done on good scientific principles, on a worldwide basis, and not because some rich man-child and his acolytes say it doesn't matter.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Michael Jackson is obviously a problematic figure. But he was also a very important figure politically in music. MTV had an aversion to showing black performers, and the success of “Thriller” and other Jackson videos from that time played an important role in changing that.
MaxPB can extend his argument by noting that many "identity" policies directly violate our civil rights laws. The Supreme Court is beginning to crack down on those violations, which have done so much to poison our politics.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
Have you?
I found therapy really beneficial for my mental health a few years back. I recommend everyone goes.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
It's too simplistic, but very handy, to throw out any explanation for failure that could also work to explain the other side's success. It is one of my favourite heuristics in everyday life before beating myself up too hard about something.
The other point I'll throw in before retiring from this argument, is that correlation (which the header rather leans on) is not causation.
You might equally validly observe that the two times the Democrats picked women, they lost.
The economy argument is far more parsimonious, and accounts for the economic based prediction I posted yesterday, which exactly forecast the state outcome - 100 days out from the election, almost before any campaign at all. (I'll be watching out for that, next time round.)
Note that forecast also used approval numbers, as well as economic indicators.
Labour in 2024 neutralised culture and ran on the Tories having failed on the economy.
Sunak tried culture and failed as people simply said “I can’t afford to eat, why is this stuff relevant”.
Labour would be wise to avoid culture going forward. And so far they don’t seem to my eye at least, to have done much in the way of identity politics.
Add the SNP to that list. Their 2024 manifesto tried to weaponise Scottish identity. The SNP are “for Scotland” they said. People on the doorstep told me they felt marginalised by this. They wanted to know why their services were so poor, and the governing party were telling to suck it up or not be patriotic.
Sunak started off with that damn' fool idea about National Service. Most of those who did it are dead now, and their younger brothers have very mixed memories own the tales they were told. 'Waste of two years' was one of them.
And yet it has worked well in other European countries. Most Scandinavian and Baltic states as well as France have National Service in some form.
Germany has just lined up legislation to reintroduce it.
May I mention the help the Guardian gave to Trump? Or is that out of bounds? The persistent hostility of that newspaper to any American leader to the right of Bernie Sanders -- regardless of the success or failure of their policies -- influenced American journalists, who became less and less trusted as a result. (Take a look at the Pew studies to see just how deep that distrust is,)
Did that have an impact,?
Would the U.K. politicians and staffers, of all parties, going over to campaign for Harris also be counterproductive. I know how dim a view I’d take of it if someone from an overseas political party turned up on my doorstep to tell me how to,vote.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
Have you?
I found therapy really beneficial for my mental health a few years back. I recommend everyone goes.
I've quit my job and spoken to my wife, friends and family a lot. Calmer than I've been for years.
How do you think Scott is with his 8 years of extreme anger management on Brexit?
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
Planetary Protection rules can be seen as very sensible, *if* you think there might be life extant on another planetary body. The risk is that any extant signs of life might get masked, or even destroyed, by careless or stupid acts. And that would be a tragedy for science. Then there is the lesser risk of contamination back to Earth.
This is slightly offset by the suspicion that NASA have been studiously ignoring the search for life on Mars as being too politically difficult. They play lip service to it, but are actually doing the least possible science on the topic.
Muskites are against PP because it gets in the way of his dream. Perhaps the rules need loosening, or perhaps not, but the last person who should be setting the rules is Musk. PP *does* make sense; the question is how much it should get in the way. But it should never be totally ignored.
The “rules” at the moment ignore all the contamination that occurs with each landing, due to not everything being auto-claved.
There was a hilarious moment in a online video call, when a NASA engineer pointed out that the projected renters scheme for Starship on Mars - multi-pass* , high velocity would sterilise the outside of the craft to a degree never achieved before. Bathing the whole thing for multiple minutes in plasma…
*the early passes will be extreme - flying *downwards*. That is with Starship upside down, to create a lift vector downwards, to keep it in the upper Martian atmosphere, at entry speeds beyond escape velocity…
The rules are not 'ignored'. Risks are evaluated and judged. Autoclaving is rather difficult, and there are other techniques that can be, and are, used. PP is even factored into the choice of landing spot.
There was some controversy because the drill bits sent with Curiosity rover to Mars were not correctly cleaned; they were still clean, but not as clean as they should have been.
If we are going to abandon PP, then fair enough. But it should be done on good scientific principles, on a worldwide basis, and not because some rich man-child and his acolytes say it doesn't matter.
The point was that they are already massively breached with each and every mission. But waivers are AOK.
The reaction to attempts to send a comprehensive life search to Mars are interesting.
You have people demanding robotic Mars Sample Return - from places where the probability of life is lowest!
You have the same people saying it is impossible to automate a microscope to include in a mission…
You get the strong impression that they want to *not* look for life in a definitive manner, forever.
Malmesbury probably knows the answer to this: If I recall correctly, early in the US space program, we worried about contaminating the earth; now we worry about contaminating other places. Or am I wrong about that?
Thanks everyone for the kind comments about the piece btw, I realise it's a bit of a hot take given the closeness to the result but I wanted to write this as a comparison to how Labour won here. As a few have pointed out a centre left party won a landslide here and did it by adopting the centre right position on woke/identity politics and campaigning on the economy and competence.
I hope that the Dems are able to find the right candidate, male, female, black, Latino whatever who won't fall into the identity trap. The candidate needs to win with ideas and what they can do for average Americans and not on the basis of how well the average American identifies with the candidate. There are voters out there who voted for Obama, a black man, in 2008 and 2012 who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. Until the Dems work out that these voters aren't racist or misogynists or whatever the buzzword is in 2028 they won't be able to win and we're stuck with MAGA and all of the awful downsides it has for the world.
It’s a good piece. The problem with anyone espousing identity politics from any angle is that to succeed they have to know someone’s identity better than they know it themselves.
Malmesbury probably knows the answer to this: If I recall correctly, early in the US space program, we worried about contaminating the earth; now we worry about contaminating other places. Or am I wrong about that?
(Neither seems like a serious problem to me.)
When they came back from the moon they were quarantined for several days iirc.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Michael Jackson is obviously a problematic figure. But he was also a very important figure politically in music. MTV had an aversion to showing black performers, and the success of “Thriller” and other Jackson videos from that time played an important role in changing that.
I find Jackson a very fascinating and problematic character. I have little doubt he did some bad things, and zero doubt he was weird, but he had an exceptionally weird and difficult childhood and life. I cannot see anyone being raised the way he was and ending up in any way 'normal'.
'Stars' like Gary Glitter were predators. From what I've heard, Jackson doesn't deserve that level of opprobrium.
And on the other side of the ledger, his influence in music, civil rights and general culture was immense. That doesn't wipe away what he did, but neither does what he did wipe away the positive influences. And above all of it sits his totally screwed-up life.
@MaxPB Thank you, a good header. Policies are what matters; policies and whether a candidate is up to the job, whatever their innate characteristics. First of class/type is no use if you aren't the best candidate for the job.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
It is not as straightforward as that. The Yougov America numbers TSE used a few days ago had 60% of men aged 18-29 being happy or thrilled that Trump has won. Only 37% of women in the same age group though. I don't think it possible for anyone to talk about 'the young' as a coherent grouping anymore.
Malmesbury probably knows the answer to this: If I recall correctly, early in the US space program, we worried about contaminating the earth; now we worry about contaminating other places. Or am I wrong about that?
(Neither seems like a serious problem to me.)
Both were and are, concerns. There’s a lot of argument, among serious scientists, about whether it is an issue, and if so, how much.
Tons of Martian origin rocks have landed on Earth, for example. Believe it or not, in the middle of such rocks, the environment never gets to sterilisation levels.
The *assumption*, incidentally is that the moon is dead. However, since the discovery of water ice there, it might just be… but there is an Official Ruling, there.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
It is not as straightforward as that. The Yougov America numbers TSE used a few days ago had 60% of men aged 18-29 being happy or thrilled that Trump has won. Only 37% of women in the same age group though. I don't think it possible for anyone to talk about 'the young' as a coherent grouping anymore.
What was the same or similar stat for 2016? I expect a lot lower for both young men and women
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
You're so far down the rabbit hole you've forgotten what daylight even looks like.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
It is not as straightforward as that. The Yougov America numbers TSE used a few days ago had 60% of men aged 18-29 being happy or thrilled that Trump has won. Only 37% of women in the same age group though. I don't think it possible for anyone to talk about 'the young' as a coherent grouping anymore.
What was the same or similar stat for 2016? I expect a lot lower for both young men and women
No idea. I just remembered how striking the young male number was when TSE posted it.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
I think this is a wish not a reality. Britain is seen by virtually every measure to be worse off since 2016, and there is still no positive vision for what kind of better future we can now have. Until that vision is articulated, the UK will continue its backward looking decline. Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
MaxPB can extend his argument by noting that many "identity" policies directly violate our civil rights laws. The Supreme Court is beginning to crack down on those violations, which have done so much to poison our politics.
Is that last remark a reference to the Supreme Court or to identity policies?
It's my impression it has had a small impact. Example: The response to the Katrina hurricane is widely seen as a failure by George W. Bush. After it, the voters of Louisiana chose a former official of the Bush administration, Bobby Jindal, as their governor. If anyone at the Guardian noticed that, it has not come to my attention.
MaxPB can extend his argument by noting that many "identity" policies directly violate our civil rights laws. The Supreme Court is beginning to crack down on those violations, which have done so much to poison our politics.
Is that last remark a reference to the Supreme Court or to identity policies?
Haven't the courts ruled against affirmative action in college admissions? That's a pretty big slap in the face for identity politics.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
Only 54% of the younger vote was poor - especially so when the candidate was black, female and there was the abortion issue in play.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
I think this is a wish not a reality. Britain is seen by virtually every measure to be worse off since 2016, and there is still no positive vision for what kind of better future we can now have. Until that vision is articulated, the UK will continue its backward looking decline. Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
Lucky escape for Europe then. With Germany deep in the toilet and France with its lame duck president the UK would be the only major nation capable of leading the place.
MaxPB can extend his argument by noting that many "identity" policies directly violate our civil rights laws. The Supreme Court is beginning to crack down on those violations, which have done so much to poison our politics.
Is that last remark a reference to the Supreme Court or to identity policies?
Haven't the courts ruled against affirmative action in college admissions? That's a pretty big slap in the face for identity politics.
They also ruled Trump was eligible for election and had pretty much absolute immunity from prosecution.
That was a severe slap in the face for American politics.
It's not that voters don't care about identity. They don't. But they do care when politicians seem to focus on some batshirt form of identity which either does nothing for them or harms them or distracts politicians from what voters care about.
The Democrats - like the Tories - like all losing parties, in particular and those currently in power - need to listen to voters. Rather than lecture them.
Malmesbury probably knows the answer to this: If I recall correctly, early in the US space program, we worried about contaminating the earth; now we worry about contaminating other places. Or am I wrong about that?
(Neither seems like a serious problem to me.)
We've already contaminated the moon, other planets, asteroids, even the vastness of space beyond our solar system. The arrogance of humankind knows no bounds.
MaxPB can extend his argument by noting that many "identity" policies directly violate our civil rights laws. The Supreme Court is beginning to crack down on those violations, which have done so much to poison our politics.
Is that last remark a reference to the Supreme Court or to identity policies?
Haven't the courts ruled against affirmative action in college admissions? That's a pretty big slap in the face for identity politics.
They also ruled Trump was eligible for election and had pretty much absolute immunity from prosecution.
That was a severe slap in the face for American politics.
Sure? You asked for rulings against identity politics, I gave you a pretty substantial one. I'm not sure what other rulings have to do with it.
Malmesbury probably knows the answer to this: If I recall correctly, early in the US space program, we worried about contaminating the earth; now we worry about contaminating other places. Or am I wrong about that?
(Neither seems like a serious problem to me.)
When they came back from the moon they were quarantined for several days iirc.
That was mostly performative - the quarantine was barely enforced. It certainly wasn’t even air tight.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
I think this is a wish not a reality. Britain is seen by virtually every measure to be worse off since 2016, and there is still no positive vision for what kind of better future we can now have. Until that vision is articulated, the UK will continue its backward looking decline. Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
Lucky escape for Europe then. With Germany deep in the toilet and France with its lame duck president the UK would be the only major nation capable of leading the place.
You say that as if it would have been a bad thing. Surely the ability to dominate and reshape the EU in our own image would have assuaged many of the issues that led to us leaving? And been quite beneficial for the EU too.
MaxPB can extend his argument by noting that many "identity" policies directly violate our civil rights laws. The Supreme Court is beginning to crack down on those violations, which have done so much to poison our politics.
I think what poisoned US politics was the Supreme Court and the rest of the system failing to do anything about violations of civil rights after the Compromise of 1877 and the subsequent nearly a century of Jim Crow laws.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
I think this is a wish not a reality. Britain is seen by virtually every measure to be worse off since 2016, and there is still no positive vision for what kind of better future we can now have. Until that vision is articulated, the UK will continue its backward looking decline. Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
If you phrase it as choosing between Europe and the Anglosphere then it becomes clear that it is a false choice. We are part of both by definition and we don't need to in the EU or the 51st state.
MaxPB can extend his argument by noting that many "identity" policies directly violate our civil rights laws. The Supreme Court is beginning to crack down on those violations, which have done so much to poison our politics.
Is that last remark a reference to the Supreme Court or to identity policies?
Haven't the courts ruled against affirmative action in college admissions? That's a pretty big slap in the face for identity politics.
They also ruled Trump was eligible for election and had pretty much absolute immunity from prosecution.
That was a severe slap in the face for American politics.
Sure? You asked for rulings against identity politics, I gave you a pretty substantial one. I'm not sure what other rulings have to do with it.
My question was, based on that last sentence, 'is it the Supreme Court or identity politics that you (Jim) regard as having poisoned American politics?'
Labour in 2024 neutralised culture and ran on the Tories having failed on the economy.
Sunak tried culture and failed as people simply said “I can’t afford to eat, why is this stuff relevant”.
Labour would be wise to avoid culture going forward. And so far they don’t seem to my eye at least, to have done much in the way of identity politics.
Add the SNP to that list. Their 2024 manifesto tried to weaponise Scottish identity. The SNP are “for Scotland” they said. People on the doorstep told me they felt marginalised by this. They wanted to know why their services were so poor, and the governing party were telling to suck it up or not be patriotic.
Once you get Alex Cole-Hamala on the doorsteps I’m sure that’ll clarify things for voters.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
What was the split in 2020, for comparison?
I think Trump did relatively better with the young this time. He still does badly with the young. Don’t get too excited about the first derivative when the raw numbers are still strongly one way.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
Planetary Protection rules can be seen as very sensible, *if* you think there might be life extant on another planetary body. The risk is that any extant signs of life might get masked, or even destroyed, by careless or stupid acts. And that would be a tragedy for science. Then there is the lesser risk of contamination back to Earth.
This is slightly offset by the suspicion that NASA have been studiously ignoring the search for life on Mars as being too politically difficult. They play lip service to it, but are actually doing the least possible science on the topic.
Muskites are against PP because it gets in the way of his dream. Perhaps the rules need loosening, or perhaps not, but the last person who should be setting the rules is Musk. PP *does* make sense; the question is how much it should get in the way. But it should never be totally ignored.
The “rules” at the moment ignore all the contamination that occurs with each landing, due to not everything being auto-claved.
There was a hilarious moment in a online video call, when a NASA engineer pointed out that the projected renters scheme for Starship on Mars - multi-pass* , high velocity would sterilise the outside of the craft to a degree never achieved before. Bathing the whole thing for multiple minutes in plasma…
*the early passes will be extreme - flying *downwards*. That is with Starship upside down, to create a lift vector downwards, to keep it in the upper Martian atmosphere, at entry speeds beyond escape velocity…
The rules are not 'ignored'. Risks are evaluated and judged. Autoclaving is rather difficult, and there are other techniques that can be, and are, used. PP is even factored into the choice of landing spot.
There was some controversy because the drill bits sent with Curiosity rover to Mars were not correctly cleaned; they were still clean, but not as clean as they should have been.
If we are going to abandon PP, then fair enough. But it should be done on good scientific principles, on a worldwide basis, and not because some rich man-child and his acolytes say it doesn't matter.
The point was that they are already massively breached with each and every mission. But waivers are AOK.
The reaction to attempts to send a comprehensive life search to Mars are interesting.
You have people demanding robotic Mars Sample Return - from places where the probability of life is lowest!
You have the same people saying it is impossible to automate a microscope to include in a mission…
You get the strong impression that they want to *not* look for life in a definitive manner, forever.
PP was not 'massively breached' with each and every mission. Seriously. That's just wrong. It's a case of analysing risks and coming to agreements about what can be done to minimise them, and still have a meaningful mission. Musk wants to abandon it totally.
As for 'automate a microscope'; that's ridiculous. The issue was described very well by (I think Bridenstine) on a podcast a few years back. They are getting brilliant at miniaturising and making 100% reliable instruments for spacecraft. But these are always a generation or two behind the very best similar instruments available in labs back on Earth, for obvious reasons. They will always be able to do more varied and reliable science on samples returned to Earth than they can do with instruments sent to Mars.
Despite winning fairly emphatically, Trump had quite short coat-tails.
The Republicans will gain four, just possibly five, in the Senate. But, they'll only gain one in the House, and only a relative handful of seats in State legislatures.
The bigger issue of interest is the collapse in the Democratic vote.
Where did they all go? And why didn't they show up?
Blue collar voters in Pittsburg not enthused by a West Coast liberal.
Malmesbury probably knows the answer to this: If I recall correctly, early in the US space program, we worried about contaminating the earth; now we worry about contaminating other places. Or am I wrong about that?
(Neither seems like a serious problem to me.)
Some of us were very scarred by watching “The Andromeda Strain”.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
I think this is a wish not a reality. Britain is seen by virtually every measure to be worse off since 2016, and there is still no positive vision for what kind of better future we can now have. Until that vision is articulated, the UK will continue its backward looking decline. Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
If you phrase it as choosing between Europe and the Anglosphere then it becomes clear that it is a false choice. We are part of both by definition and we don't need to in the EU or the 51st state.
Yes, there's an insecurity on both sides of this, they feel as though we need to suck up to the biggest bully in the room of their preference. The answer is that we don't need to do either, we go our own way and choose our own path. Sometimes that might be siding with the EU and others it's siding with the US depending on what our interests are.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
I think this is a wish not a reality. Britain is seen by virtually every measure to be worse off since 2016, and there is still no positive vision for what kind of better future we can now have. Until that vision is articulated, the UK will continue its backward looking decline. Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
Lucky escape for Europe then. With Germany deep in the toilet and France with its lame duck president the UK would be the only major nation capable of leading the place.
You say that as if it would have been a bad thing. Surely the ability to dominate and reshape the EU in our own image would have assuaged many of the issues that led to us leaving? And been quite beneficial for the EU too.
I could quite happily have contemplated staying in the EU if the place had been a confederation. But the place was a gunshot wedding between states and run for the benefit of France and Germany. Ironically post Brexit the EU now appears a more joinable place but it took Brexit imo to bring the place to its senses and have a rethink about how it works.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
I think this is a wish not a reality. Britain is seen by virtually every measure to be worse off since 2016, and there is still no positive vision for what kind of better future we can now have. Until that vision is articulated, the UK will continue its backward looking decline. Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
If you phrase it as choosing between Europe and the Anglosphere then it becomes clear that it is a false choice. We are part of both by definition and we don't need to in the EU or the 51st state.
Well said. We need to deal with our own shit. The idea that either the US or the EU can rescue us from being a basket-case economy is ridiculous. Net Zero, a bloated state gorging itself on GDP, a network of quasi-independent bodies with no accountability making massive decisions on our behalf - these are just some the things we need to deal with. Joining the EU, or becoming the 51st state deals with precisely none of them. It is no more an answer now than joining the EEC was in the 60s and 70s.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
As JJ noted, it's more about settling the question of whether there was life on Mars ... before we introduce life on Mars.
@MaxPB Thank you, a good header. Policies are what matters; policies and whether a candidate is up to the job, whatever their innate characteristics. First of class/type is no use if you aren't the best candidate for the job.
Good afternoon, everyone.
The 2024 US election does not seem to support that. Trump’s policies are unclear and what one can make out are terrible. Trump is clearly not up to the job. Yet he won.
I suggest Trump won because the incumbents were unpopular (inflation mainly) and because people identified with him. He might not have talked in quite the same “identity politics” terms, but he was appealing to and advertising in terms of identity.
Thanks everyone for the kind comments about the piece btw, I realise it's a bit of a hot take given the closeness to the result but I wanted to write this as a comparison to how Labour won here. As a few have pointed out a centre left party won a landslide here and did it by adopting the centre right position on woke/identity politics and campaigning on the economy and competence.
I hope that the Dems are able to find the right candidate, male, female, black, Latino whatever who won't fall into the identity trap. The candidate needs to win with ideas and what they can do for average Americans and not on the basis of how well the average American identifies with the candidate. There are voters out there who voted for Obama, a black man, in 2008 and 2012 who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. Until the Dems work out that these voters aren't racist or misogynists or whatever the buzzword is in 2028 they won't be able to win and we're stuck with MAGA and all of the awful downsides it has for the world.
It’s a good piece. The problem with anyone espousing identity politics from any angle is that to succeed they have to know someone’s identity better than they know it themselves.
Which takes us back to the dark genius of Donald J Trump. What you describe is the thing every conman does- read their mark so well that they can know their thoughts better than their victim does. On one level, we all do it; it's how empathy works. But the key question is what you do with that information.
Two other caveats on the Trump win. One is that one set of weird obsessions is just going to be replaced by a different set which are, if anything, weirder. The other is the whole... you know... November 2020 to January 2021 thing. It may be my weird obsession, but that really ought to have ruled him out completely.
Still, we all know the reason that treason never prospers.
@Casino_Royale - I stopped buying the Arsenal programme years ago mainly because I was running out of space and there's only so much they can write about.
At our last home game, I had to buy a few for a friend of a friend who sadly lost his Arsenal supporting son and there was a tribute in the programme. I had a flick through it and every other article was to do with Black History Month.
Now, Arsenal's history re black players is something that the club can be proud of and it's absolutely right to talk about it. But when every other article is framed in that way, it does get a bit much.
Well, quite. I have loads of albums in my collection by black artists - some of them not particularly surprising like Michael Jackson, Gabrielle and Imagination- but it's not about whether you are open to enjoying music by such artists (we already are) it's about whether you're sufficiently supportive of being politically Black, and this is what people detest being foisted on them.
Culture does change; many or most people in the sixties were disgusted by the rise of a youth culture that we would now consider pretty tame or even at times backward looking. Taking the long scale view, we might just be back in that time of rapid cultural change that we sort of sidestepped for a couple of decades.
Except, unfortunately for you and your ilk, this one isn't sticking and is starting to go into reverse - just look at the stats for younger voters.
Because you've overreached with downright weird obsessions and ideology.
OK, I’ll look at the stats for younger voters. This is from Reuters:
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%. * Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%. * Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
It is not as straightforward as that. The Yougov America numbers TSE used a few days ago had 60% of men aged 18-29 being happy or thrilled that Trump has won. Only 37% of women in the same age group though. I don't think it possible for anyone to talk about 'the young' as a coherent grouping anymore.
Do you think we should instead focus down on demographic subgroups…
Personally, I found the anti-incumbency theory more persuasive. Its a tough time to be in government.
Yes. It’s a decent argument from Max (and his prescription for future campaigns is sensible), but I think it’s overdetermined as an explanation for the loss.
That's the point the article makes, though. Maybe not clearly enough?
Harris didn't campaign on the economy and chose the campaign on her identity while Trump campaigned on the economy. He won. In 2020 the roles were reversed and Biden won.
Apparently one Trump ad in the last few weeks was "She's for they/them. I'm for you."
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
I suspect rejoin is the help Scott needs. Some people like Scott and AC Grayling have taken Brexit badly and still do to this day.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
I think this is a wish not a reality. Britain is seen by virtually every measure to be worse off since 2016, and there is still no positive vision for what kind of better future we can now have. Until that vision is articulated, the UK will continue its backward looking decline. Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
In what measures is the UK worse off now in 2016 that comparable countries are also not worse off in ?
Are you referring to the mass unemployment that the UK now has ? Oh wait.
Or the construction depression ? Oh wait, that's happened in France and Germany not the UK:
Malmesbury probably knows the answer to this: If I recall correctly, early in the US space program, we worried about contaminating the earth; now we worry about contaminating other places. Or am I wrong about that?
(Neither seems like a serious problem to me.)
Some of us were very scarred by watching “The Andromeda Strain”.
Did it feature scientists claiming it came from a wet market?
The cNN coverage on election night drove me to bed with its banality, repetition and tedium but there was one thing that was genuinely interesting.
They pointed out that the biggest and most consistent division in the US is education. States which have more than 50% educated to college standard are blue states. Those under 50% are red states. And the 7 swing states are exactly on it. That’s what they have in common despite their geography.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
As JJ noted, it's more about settling the question of whether there was life on Mars ... before we introduce life on Mars.
Which many of the more…. cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. Finding if there is life or not, that is.
Vocal opposition to experiments capable of finding life is telling.
The most farcical bit is the bizarre attitude to Mars Sample Return. Which won’t be fully sterilised, under current plans. But it has a waiver or 2, so that’s OK…
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
It's too simplistic, but very handy, to throw out any explanation for failure that could also work to explain the other side's success. It is one of my favourite heuristics in everyday life before beating myself up too hard about something.
The other point I'll throw in before retiring from this argument, is that correlation (which the header rather leans on) is not causation.
You might equally validly observe that the two times the Democrats picked women, they lost.
The economy argument is far more parsimonious, and accounts for the economic based prediction I posted yesterday, which exactly forecast the state outcome - 100 days out from the election, almost before any campaign at all. (I'll be watching out for that, next time round.)
Note that forecast also used approval numbers, as well as economic indicators.
Well, yes. But the point that it predated any kind of campaign, whatever you think of the latter, stands.
"Frightened homeowners in millionaires' row in Highgate hit by wave of terrifying home invasions as balaclava gangs use crow bars to wedge open doors to mansions"
"Frightened homeowners in millionaires' row in Highgate hit by wave of terrifying home invasions as balaclava gangs use crow bars to wedge open doors to mansions"
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
As JJ noted, it's more about settling the question of whether there was life on Mars ... before we introduce life on Mars.
Yes, and Malms is wrong about autoclaving. That is just one approach to protection via sterilisation; there are many others, including chemical.
If there is microbial life on Mars, and I would say that's possible and not improbable, then we need to be very careful that we do not destroy or mask it. (Masking it is interesting; if there is life on Mars that came from Earth via meteorites, then we may not be able to detect it as being different from life that came via spacecraft.)
The cNN coverage on election night drove me to bed with its banality, repetition and tedium but there was one thing that was genuinely interesting.
They pointed out that the biggest and most consistent division in the US is education. States which have more than 50% educated to college standard are blue states. Those under 50% are red states. And the 7 swing states are exactly on it. That’s what they have in common despite their geography.
It made me wonder what the equivalent is here.
From the YouGov post election survey;
Education remains a strong indicator of how someone voted, with Labour doing a lot better than the Conservatives amongst those who have a university degree (42% to 18%). By contrast, the Tories performed marginally better than Labour amongst those whose highest level of education attained is GCSEs or lower (31% to 28%).
The cNN coverage on election night drove me to bed with its banality, repetition and tedium but there was one thing that was genuinely interesting.
They pointed out that the biggest and most consistent division in the US is education. States which have more than 50% educated to college standard are blue states. Those under 50% are red states. And the 7 swing states are exactly on it. That’s what they have in common despite their geography.
One final point, credit should be given to @Dura_Ace , who proclaimed four years ago, and stuck to the opinion, that Trump would be nominated and win again.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
Planetary Protection rules can be seen as very sensible, *if* you think there might be life extant on another planetary body. The risk is that any extant signs of life might get masked, or even destroyed, by careless or stupid acts. And that would be a tragedy for science. Then there is the lesser risk of contamination back to Earth.
This is slightly offset by the suspicion that NASA have been studiously ignoring the search for life on Mars as being too politically difficult. They play lip service to it, but are actually doing the least possible science on the topic.
Muskites are against PP because it gets in the way of his dream. Perhaps the rules need loosening, or perhaps not, but the last person who should be setting the rules is Musk. PP *does* make sense; the question is how much it should get in the way. But it should never be totally ignored.
The “rules” at the moment ignore all the contamination that occurs with each landing, due to not everything being auto-claved.
There was a hilarious moment in a online video call, when a NASA engineer pointed out that the projected renters scheme for Starship on Mars - multi-pass* , high velocity would sterilise the outside of the craft to a degree never achieved before. Bathing the whole thing for multiple minutes in plasma…
*the early passes will be extreme - flying *downwards*. That is with Starship upside down, to create a lift vector downwards, to keep it in the upper Martian atmosphere, at entry speeds beyond escape velocity…
The rules are not 'ignored'. Risks are evaluated and judged. Autoclaving is rather difficult, and there are other techniques that can be, and are, used. PP is even factored into the choice of landing spot.
There was some controversy because the drill bits sent with Curiosity rover to Mars were not correctly cleaned; they were still clean, but not as clean as they should have been.
If we are going to abandon PP, then fair enough. But it should be done on good scientific principles, on a worldwide basis, and not because some rich man-child and his acolytes say it doesn't matter.
The point was that they are already massively breached with each and every mission. But waivers are AOK.
The reaction to attempts to send a comprehensive life search to Mars are interesting.
You have people demanding robotic Mars Sample Return - from places where the probability of life is lowest!
You have the same people saying it is impossible to automate a microscope to include in a mission…
You get the strong impression that they want to *not* look for life in a definitive manner, forever.
PP was not 'massively breached' with each and every mission. Seriously. That's just wrong. It's a case of analysing risks and coming to agreements about what can be done to minimise them, and still have a meaningful mission. Musk wants to abandon it totally.
As for 'automate a microscope'; that's ridiculous. The issue was described very well by (I think Bridenstine) on a podcast a few years back. They are getting brilliant at miniaturising and making 100% reliable instruments for spacecraft. But these are always a generation or two behind the very best similar instruments available in labs back on Earth, for obvious reasons. They will always be able to do more varied and reliable science on samples returned to Earth than they can do with instruments sent to Mars.
Yet a microscope is not sent. When asked, the answer is cleaning and preparation. And yet… for example, one engineer designed and built a demonstration of compressing Mars air. Complete with dust filters etc. Working prototype, not far off flight weight.
Which completely answered a whole raft of the “can’t clean lenses on Mars” issues - compressed air to blow on stuff etc.
Project was binned, rather politically, inside JPL.
Mars Sample Return is collapsing under a staggering cost escalation. And mad levels of mis-management. It’s making the Webb look good.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
As JJ noted, it's more about settling the question of whether there was life on Mars ... before we introduce life on Mars.
Which many of the more…. cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. Finding if there is life or not, that is.
Vocal opposition to experiments capable of finding life is telling.
The most farcical bit is the bizarre attitude to Mars Sample Return. Which won’t be fully sterilised, under current plans. But it has a waiver or 2, so that’s OK…
"cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. "
LOL. No. Simply, no.
I want missions to go ahead. But if there is life on Mars (or elsewhere...) I want to be able to find it, and tell it is distinct. Having people who can advise missions on how best to prevent contamination is a great idea. Missions can still go ahead, but risks are reduced. Not removed, as the only way of doing this is doing nothing; but reduced. And some relatively simple processes can reduce risks by orders of magnitude.
I could easily say the anti-PP people are simply uninterested in astrobiology and science.
Thomas Frank, who has spent the last twenty years warning this would happen, writes in NY Times.
"This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for Donald Trump."
"I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals."
Thanks everyone for the kind comments about the piece btw, I realise it's a bit of a hot take given the closeness to the result but I wanted to write this as a comparison to how Labour won here. As a few have pointed out a centre left party won a landslide here and did it by adopting the centre right position on woke/identity politics and campaigning on the economy and competence.
I hope that the Dems are able to find the right candidate, male, female, black, Latino whatever who won't fall into the identity trap. The candidate needs to win with ideas and what they can do for average Americans and not on the basis of how well the average American identifies with the candidate. There are voters out there who voted for Obama, a black man, in 2008 and 2012 who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. Until the Dems work out that these voters aren't racist or misogynists or whatever the buzzword is in 2028 they won't be able to win and we're stuck with MAGA and all of the awful downsides it has for the world.
It was perhaps inevitable that Harris would turn out to be an 'identity' rather than 'ideas' based candidate.
Harris was, after all, chosen to be VP candidate based on her identity.
For 2024 if the Dems want a 'ideas' based candidate then they do have options in Beshear, Shapiro and Whitmer.
The Supreme Court began ruling in favor of the NAACP soon after the organization was founded in 1909. There was an especially important decision in 1944, Smith v. Allwright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Allwright
(You can find some numbers about the difference that made in V. O. Key's classic book.)
"Frightened homeowners in millionaires' row in Highgate hit by wave of terrifying home invasions as balaclava gangs use crow bars to wedge open doors to mansions"
Check if they have suspiciously shiny boots. (It was a real thing during the Algerian civil war. Villages would get done over by "terrorists" in suspiciously shiny boots.)
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
As JJ noted, it's more about settling the question of whether there was life on Mars ... before we introduce life on Mars.
Which many of the more…. cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. Finding if there is life or not, that is.
Vocal opposition to experiments capable of finding life is telling.
The most farcical bit is the bizarre attitude to Mars Sample Return. Which won’t be fully sterilised, under current plans. But it has a waiver or 2, so that’s OK…
"cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. "
LOL. No. Simply, no.
I want missions to go ahead. But if there is life on Mars (or elsewhere...) I want to be able to find it, and tell it is distinct. Having people who can advise missions on how best to prevent contamination is a great idea. Missions can still go ahead, but risks are reduced. Not removed, as the only way of doing this is doing nothing; but reduced. And some relatively simple processes can reduce risks by orders of magnitude.
I could easily say the anti-PP people are simply uninterested in astrobiology and science.
Have you actually met some of these people? I have.
Quite a few say that they will never accept a crewed landing on Mars. Full stop. By anyone.
When you ask them about the sterilisation level of the helicopter, they get all upset. It’s a naughty question, apparently.
"Frightened homeowners in millionaires' row in Highgate hit by wave of terrifying home invasions as balaclava gangs use crow bars to wedge open doors to mansions"
Incidentally, the The Rest is History podcast is looking at US politics in 1968. The episode on George Wallace is very interesting - the thesis is that he was the precursor, both in terms of style and substance, of Trump, the shift in the south to the Republicans from the Democrats and the way that the centre of US politics is now in the Southern states - not just the old Confederate states but California, Texas, and some of the border states as well.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
Planetary Protection rules can be seen as very sensible, *if* you think there might be life extant on another planetary body. The risk is that any extant signs of life might get masked, or even destroyed, by careless or stupid acts. And that would be a tragedy for science. Then there is the lesser risk of contamination back to Earth.
This is slightly offset by the suspicion that NASA have been studiously ignoring the search for life on Mars as being too politically difficult. They play lip service to it, but are actually doing the least possible science on the topic.
Muskites are against PP because it gets in the way of his dream. Perhaps the rules need loosening, or perhaps not, but the last person who should be setting the rules is Musk. PP *does* make sense; the question is how much it should get in the way. But it should never be totally ignored.
The “rules” at the moment ignore all the contamination that occurs with each landing, due to not everything being auto-claved.
There was a hilarious moment in a online video call, when a NASA engineer pointed out that the projected renters scheme for Starship on Mars - multi-pass* , high velocity would sterilise the outside of the craft to a degree never achieved before. Bathing the whole thing for multiple minutes in plasma…
*the early passes will be extreme - flying *downwards*. That is with Starship upside down, to create a lift vector downwards, to keep it in the upper Martian atmosphere, at entry speeds beyond escape velocity…
The rules are not 'ignored'. Risks are evaluated and judged. Autoclaving is rather difficult, and there are other techniques that can be, and are, used. PP is even factored into the choice of landing spot.
There was some controversy because the drill bits sent with Curiosity rover to Mars were not correctly cleaned; they were still clean, but not as clean as they should have been.
If we are going to abandon PP, then fair enough. But it should be done on good scientific principles, on a worldwide basis, and not because some rich man-child and his acolytes say it doesn't matter.
The point was that they are already massively breached with each and every mission. But waivers are AOK.
The reaction to attempts to send a comprehensive life search to Mars are interesting.
You have people demanding robotic Mars Sample Return - from places where the probability of life is lowest!
You have the same people saying it is impossible to automate a microscope to include in a mission…
You get the strong impression that they want to *not* look for life in a definitive manner, forever.
PP was not 'massively breached' with each and every mission. Seriously. That's just wrong. It's a case of analysing risks and coming to agreements about what can be done to minimise them, and still have a meaningful mission. Musk wants to abandon it totally.
As for 'automate a microscope'; that's ridiculous. The issue was described very well by (I think Bridenstine) on a podcast a few years back. They are getting brilliant at miniaturising and making 100% reliable instruments for spacecraft. But these are always a generation or two behind the very best similar instruments available in labs back on Earth, for obvious reasons. They will always be able to do more varied and reliable science on samples returned to Earth than they can do with instruments sent to Mars.
Yet a microscope is not sent. When asked, the answer is cleaning and preparation. And yet… for example, one engineer designed and built a demonstration of compressing Mars air. Complete with dust filters etc. Working prototype, not far off flight weight.
Which completely answered a whole raft of the “can’t clean lenses on Mars” issues - compressed air to blow on stuff etc.
Project was binned, rather politically, inside JPL.
Mars Sample Return is collapsing under a staggering cost escalation. And mad levels of mis-management. It’s making the Webb look good.
The Mars Rovers are absolutely stuffed with instruments, with different payloads on both rovers. If you placed a microscope on one of them, which instrument would you have removed? Supercam? (*). There is limited space and power, and they could not take everything.
If they'd taken a microscope and left supercam behind, people would just be complaining about that.
(*) Lasers that blasts away at rocks, with spectrometers that analyse the dust that comes off the target. This allowed them to tell the chemical composition of rocks, including potential biosignatures.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
As JJ noted, it's more about settling the question of whether there was life on Mars ... before we introduce life on Mars.
Which many of the more…. cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. Finding if there is life or not, that is.
Vocal opposition to experiments capable of finding life is telling.
The most farcical bit is the bizarre attitude to Mars Sample Return. Which won’t be fully sterilised, under current plans. But it has a waiver or 2, so that’s OK…
"cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. "
LOL. No. Simply, no.
I want missions to go ahead. But if there is life on Mars (or elsewhere...) I want to be able to find it, and tell it is distinct. Having people who can advise missions on how best to prevent contamination is a great idea. Missions can still go ahead, but risks are reduced. Not removed, as the only way of doing this is doing nothing; but reduced. And some relatively simple processes can reduce risks by orders of magnitude.
I could easily say the anti-PP people are simply uninterested in astrobiology and science.
Have you actually met some of these people? I have.
Quite a few say that they will never accept a crewed landing on Mars. Full stop. By anyone.
When you ask them about the sterilisation level of the helicopter, they get all upset. It’s a naughty question, apparently.
And their concerns will be listened to, and possibly ignored. But their concerns may also inform, and lead to a better mission. But don't pretend that all PP people are like that, by a long shot.
You seem to hold PP in utter contempt; which is really anti-science.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
As JJ noted, it's more about settling the question of whether there was life on Mars ... before we introduce life on Mars.
Yes, and Malms is wrong about autoclaving. That is just one approach to protection via sterilisation; there are many others, including chemical.
If there is microbial life on Mars, and I would say that's possible and not improbable, then we need to be very careful that we do not destroy or mask it. (Masking it is interesting; if there is life on Mars that came from Earth via meteorites, then we may not be able to detect it as being different from life that came via spacecraft.)
I’m not talking about getting rid of Planetary Protection. I’m talking about non-effective use of the rules (which are not effective, either, since they need updating with modern understanding of microbiology) to further various silly agendas.
Location of landing sites is probably far more effective.
In essence, the left argument is that people are better collectively if they act (and vote) collectively. Womens' right are human rights. Minority rights are human rights. Everybody is better off with these things.
So how do the right persuade people to vote against their own interests?
By claiming that their problems are caused by other people.
It's the fucking Brexit campaign all over again.
You can quibble about the details, but you can't argue with the results.
"I am voting for this guy because he hates all the same people I do, and he told me THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL MY PROBLEMS"
It's bullshit, but it works.
Have you thought about, you know, getting some help?
Have you?
I found therapy really beneficial for my mental health a few years back. I recommend everyone goes.
I've quit my job and spoken to my wife, friends and family a lot. Calmer than I've been for years.
How do you think Scott is with his 8 years of extreme anger management on Brexit?
I didn't suggest Scott shouldn't go, that was rather implied by the "everyone goes".
I'm glad you have found some comfort in speaking to your friends and family but it's no substitute for a professional in my own view. thought I was coping well in much the same way but after going I realised I wasn’t.
Thanks everyone for the kind comments about the piece btw, I realise it's a bit of a hot take given the closeness to the result but I wanted to write this as a comparison to how Labour won here. As a few have pointed out a centre left party won a landslide here and did it by adopting the centre right position on woke/identity politics and campaigning on the economy and competence.
I hope that the Dems are able to find the right candidate, male, female, black, Latino whatever who won't fall into the identity trap. The candidate needs to win with ideas and what they can do for average Americans and not on the basis of how well the average American identifies with the candidate. There are voters out there who voted for Obama, a black man, in 2008 and 2012 who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. Until the Dems work out that these voters aren't racist or misogynists or whatever the buzzword is in 2028 they won't be able to win and we're stuck with MAGA and all of the awful downsides it has for the world.
It’s a good piece. The problem with anyone espousing identity politics from any angle is that to succeed they have to know someone’s identity better than they know it themselves.
Which takes us back to the dark genius of Donald J Trump. What you describe is the thing every conman does- read their mark so well that they can know their thoughts better than their victim does. On one level, we all do it; it's how empathy works. But the key question is what you do with that information.
Two other caveats on the Trump win. One is that one set of weird obsessions is just going to be replaced by a different set which are, if anything, weirder. The other is the whole... you know... November 2020 to January 2021 thing. It may be my weird obsession, but that really ought to have ruled him out completely.
Still, we all know the reason that treason never prospers.
Nobody cares. He’s a fraud. A crook. An abuser. An insurrectionist. A proto-fascist. And nobody cares.
I think the issue is this: Trump naysayers (hi) have been looking in the wrong place. Now of that matters if the guy can diagnose your issues and offer you a solution. Ok so he’s all that. He’s also All That.
Having 99% of Hollywood millionaire celebs preaching at you to vote Dem must grate a little, if you're not doing too well financially. A small easy win for the Dems might be to knock celebrity endorsements on the head.
The billionaire Donald Trump was endorsed by Elon Musk, who hopes one day to be the richest man on Mars.
So he wants to be an illegal alien - again?
One thing that will come up in Trumps presidency is this.
Using the rules on Planetary Protection, there is a strong group who want to try and ban any landing on Mars that isn’t “decontaminated” to a very exacting standard.
The standard is largely bullshit, but that’s another conversation.
It involves autoclaving the entire vehicle (why using renetry heat doesn’t count for this is a question that is refused to be answered). And you can’t autoclave Starship - too big.
Interestingly, the Mars Sample return is hitting similar problem.
So a decision that will be made is whether the Planetary Protection types get their vision of nothing much on Mars - forever. Or whether the first Starship landings occur before the end of the decade
As JJ noted, it's more about settling the question of whether there was life on Mars ... before we introduce life on Mars.
Which many of the more…. cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. Finding if there is life or not, that is.
Vocal opposition to experiments capable of finding life is telling.
The most farcical bit is the bizarre attitude to Mars Sample Return. Which won’t be fully sterilised, under current plans. But it has a waiver or 2, so that’s OK…
"cultist Planetery Protection types seem to want to put off forever. "
LOL. No. Simply, no.
I want missions to go ahead. But if there is life on Mars (or elsewhere...) I want to be able to find it, and tell it is distinct. Having people who can advise missions on how best to prevent contamination is a great idea. Missions can still go ahead, but risks are reduced. Not removed, as the only way of doing this is doing nothing; but reduced. And some relatively simple processes can reduce risks by orders of magnitude.
I could easily say the anti-PP people are simply uninterested in astrobiology and science.
Have you actually met some of these people? I have.
Quite a few say that they will never accept a crewed landing on Mars. Full stop. By anyone.
When you ask them about the sterilisation level of the helicopter, they get all upset. It’s a naughty question, apparently.
And their concerns will be listened to, and possibly ignored. But their concerns may also inform, and lead to a better mission. But don't pretend that all PP people are like that, by a long shot.
You seem to hold PP in utter contempt; which is really anti-science.
Ask some European scientists about their conversations with NASA over planetary protection. WTAF is a common response. Also “this makes no sense - this will contaminate like crazy”.
It’s rather like the personal behaviours that stalled US space suit development for decades. I mean, when you have people claiming that the results from scientific trials should discarded, because the astronauts taking part in the trials must have been lying in their official, written reporting…. That’s definitely zany.
From the discussions on third term possibilities the other day, one thing occurred to me that I'd quite like put to bed. Whilst the intent of the 22nd Amendment is obvious, could a compliant Supreme Court bypass it by looking at the exact wording?
What I'm thinking about is the immediately obvious "swap President and VP on the ticket." That is, a Vance/Trump ticket, with Vance resigning the day after inauguration (and could then be appointed VP by a succeeding Trump). Because the 22nd states that "no-one can be elected to the office of President more than twice."
Nothing about succeeding outwith election, like Ford, LBJ, Truman, Coolidge, Teddy Roosevelt, Arthur, Johnson, Fillmore, Tyler - albeit some later won election as President, but all initially succeeded without being elected to the office of President. And, of course, what if it went further? Is an ex-President actually prohibited from any office in the line of succession? There seems to be no written legal rule saying "Oh, we'll skip over the Attorney General if it gets that far and a term-limited ex-President is doing the job." Maybe there is and I don't know about it?
"Ah, but you can't run as VP if you're term-limited out as President."
Can't you? The 12th Amendment states that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States." A term-limited President is still constitutionally eligible to be President, as long as he or she gets there without having to be elected. Via a tragedy taking out everyone to the Secretary of Education, for example, and that person being an ex-President. Or anywhere else in the line of succession, for that matter.
And being elected VP does not count as election to be President - otherwise every VP who has been elected on a ticket twice would be ineligible to even run once as President (including Biden, Gore, Bush senior, and Nixon before their first (or only) runs). The implication of the wording that you can serve up to 2 years of someone else's term before your first election as President underlines that.
So - while it looks overwhelmingly obvious that the 22nd Amendment intends for no-one to be President for more than eight (or ten) years, and the implication that serving more than two years of someone else's term invalidates one of those two allowed elections underlines it - it isn't explicit on it. So a compliant SCOTUS could say "technically, the law allows that."
I mean the entire ruling on Presidential Immunity looks similarly bad, so it wouldn't even be the most strained the Roberts Court has been, in my view. So - I'd like someone to tell me that there IS an explicit prohibition that stops that interpretation, because all I've done is wikipedia'd it. (In any case, I reckon it's far more likely that Trump gets 25th'd by Vance long before this even becomes a prospect)
Labour in 2024 neutralised culture and ran on the Tories having failed on the economy.
Sunak tried culture and failed as people simply said “I can’t afford to eat, why is this stuff relevant”.
Labour would be wise to avoid culture going forward. And so far they don’t seem to my eye at least, to have done much in the way of identity politics.
Add the SNP to that list. Their 2024 manifesto tried to weaponise Scottish identity. The SNP are “for Scotland” they said. People on the doorstep told me they felt marginalised by this. They wanted to know why their services were so poor, and the governing party were telling to suck it up or not be patriotic.
Sunak started off with that damn' fool idea about National Service. Most of those who did it are dead now, and their younger brothers have very mixed memories own the tales they were told. 'Waste of two years' was one of them.
And yet it has worked well in other European countries. Most Scandinavian and Baltic states as well as France have National Service in some form.
I grew up in Denmark. I never met anyone who had strong views on National Service - it was simply something one had to get through, like the compulsory and ill-regarded philosophy course that was mandatory in year 1 at university. I don''t think that proposing to introducr National Service would be popular, and the military side of my family were dismissive of the idea (two uncles were generals), arguing that it takes the whole period to become useful.
Nobody cares. He’s a fraud. A crook. An abuser. An insurrectionist. A proto-fascist. And nobody cares.
I think the issue is this: Trump naysayers (hi) have been looking in the wrong place. Now of that matters if the guy can diagnose your issues and offer you a solution. Ok so he’s all that. He’s also All That.
That's kinda the point
Proto-fascists have always prospered by diagnosing issues and offering a solution
The solution is always 'get rid of the others', insert your 'other' of choice
Jews, Muslims, immigrants, minorities, women, men pretending to be women, elites of any flavour
Comments
There was a hilarious moment in a online video call, when a NASA engineer pointed out that the projected renters scheme for Starship on Mars - multi-pass* , high velocity would sterilise the outside of the craft to a degree never achieved before. Bathing the whole thing for multiple minutes in plasma…
*the early passes will be extreme - flying *downwards*. That is with Starship upside down, to create a lift vector downwards, to keep it in the upper Martian atmosphere, at entry speeds beyond escape velocity…
I suppose the point is that much of the spaceship is not subject to that temperature or anything near it due to the heat shield. So I can see why the reentry heat argument has some holes in it.
'Waste of two years' was one of them.
I hope that the Dems are able to find the right candidate, male, female, black, Latino whatever who won't fall into the identity trap. The candidate needs to win with ideas and what they can do for average Americans and not on the basis of how well the average American identifies with the candidate. There are voters out there who voted for Obama, a black man, in 2008 and 2012 who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. Until the Dems work out that these voters aren't racist or misogynists or whatever the buzzword is in 2028 they won't be able to win and we're stuck with MAGA and all of the awful downsides it has for the world.
Where did they all go? And why didn't they show up?
Due to entry heating, anything not specifically cooled will get cooked thoroughly. That because if you use a hot structure system, the structure gets hot…
The other point is that the autoclaving that is done, isn’t done to that high a heat. Since that would destroy lots of stuff.
Multiple metric tons of unsterilised stuff, which was protected by heat shields during entry, has already been dumped on Mars. Apparently this doesn’t count according to the paperwork. But how do they verify if microbes have read all the documents?
Trying to do Planetary Protection by sterilising spacecraft is a joke. There are better ways.
There was some controversy because the drill bits sent with Curiosity rover to Mars were not correctly cleaned; they were still clean, but not as clean as they should have been.
If we are going to abandon PP, then fair enough. But it should be done on good scientific principles, on a worldwide basis, and not because some rich man-child and his acolytes say it doesn't matter.
2024,77.0,82.5
2020,81.3,74.2
2016,65.9,62.9
2012,65.9,60.9
2008,69.5,59.9
2004,59.0,62.0
I found therapy really beneficial for my mental health a few years back. I recommend everyone goes.
Then fucking off some more?
Would the U.K. politicians and staffers, of all parties, going over to campaign for Harris also be counterproductive. I know how dim a view I’d take of it if someone from an overseas political party turned up on my doorstep to tell me how to,vote.
How do you think Scott is with his 8 years of extreme anger management on Brexit?
* Trump wins 43% of voters age 18 to 29 nationwide; Harris wins 54%.
* Harris wins 49% of voters age 65+ nationwide; Trump wins 49%.
* Trump wins 52% of voters age 45+ nationwide; Harris wins 46%.
So, younger voters were the most pro-Harris, with the middle-aged being the most pro-Trump.
They lost. It’s over. Most of us have moved on.
The reaction to attempts to send a comprehensive life search to Mars are interesting.
You have people demanding robotic Mars Sample Return - from places where the probability of life is lowest!
You have the same people saying it is impossible to automate a microscope to include in a mission…
You get the strong impression that they want to *not* look for life in a definitive manner, forever.
(Neither seems like a serious problem to me.)
'Stars' like Gary Glitter were predators. From what I've heard, Jackson doesn't deserve that level of opprobrium.
And on the other side of the ledger, his influence in music, civil rights and general culture was immense. That doesn't wipe away what he did, but neither does what he did wipe away the positive influences. And above all of it sits his totally screwed-up life.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Tons of Martian origin rocks have landed on Earth, for example. Believe it or not, in the middle of such rocks, the environment never gets to sterilisation levels.
The *assumption*, incidentally is that the moon is dead. However, since the discovery of water ice there, it might just be… but there is an Official Ruling, there.
Any such vision has to include what choice we wish to make between the US and the EU.
It's my impression it has had a small impact. Example: The response to the Katrina hurricane is widely seen as a failure by George W. Bush. After it, the voters of Louisiana chose a former official of the Bush administration, Bobby Jindal, as their governor. If anyone at the Guardian noticed that, it has not come to my attention.
That was a severe slap in the face for American politics.
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/
It's not that voters don't care about identity. They don't. But they do care when politicians seem to focus on some batshirt form of identity which either does nothing for them or harms them or distracts politicians from what voters care about.
The Democrats - like the Tories - like all losing parties, in particular and those currently in power - need to listen to voters. Rather than lecture them.
As for 'automate a microscope'; that's ridiculous. The issue was described very well by (I think Bridenstine) on a podcast a few years back. They are getting brilliant at miniaturising and making 100% reliable instruments for spacecraft. But these are always a generation or two behind the very best similar instruments available in labs back on Earth, for obvious reasons. They will always be able to do more varied and reliable science on samples returned to Earth than they can do with instruments sent to Mars.
Who could have anticipated that?
I suggest Trump won because the incumbents were unpopular (inflation mainly) and because people identified with him. He might not have talked in quite the same “identity politics” terms, but he was appealing to and advertising in terms of identity.
Two other caveats on the Trump win. One is that one set of weird obsessions is just going to be replaced by a different set which are, if anything, weirder. The other is the whole... you know... November 2020 to January 2021 thing. It may be my weird obsession, but that really ought to have ruled him out completely.
Still, we all know the reason that treason never prospers.
What was her counter to that?
Thanks for the header @MaxPB.
Are you referring to the mass unemployment that the UK now has ? Oh wait.
Or the construction depression ? Oh wait, that's happened in France and Germany not the UK:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/construction-pmi
https://tradingeconomics.com/france/manufacturing-pmi
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/construction-pmi
They pointed out that the biggest and most consistent division in the US is education. States which have more than 50% educated to college standard are blue states. Those under 50% are red states. And the 7 swing states are exactly on it. That’s what they have in common despite their geography.
It made me wonder what the equivalent is here.
Vocal opposition to experiments capable of finding life is telling.
The most farcical bit is the bizarre attitude to Mars Sample Return. Which won’t be fully sterilised, under current plans. But it has a waiver or 2, so that’s OK…
But the point that it predated any kind of campaign, whatever you think of the latter, stands.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14055371/Frightened-homeowners-millionaires-row-Highgate-hit-wave-terrifying-home-invasions-balaclava-gangs-use-crow-bars-wedge-open-doors-mansions.html
If there is microbial life on Mars, and I would say that's possible and not improbable, then we need to be very careful that we do not destroy or mask it. (Masking it is interesting; if there is life on Mars that came from Earth via meteorites, then we may not be able to detect it as being different from life that came via spacecraft.)
Education remains a strong indicator of how someone voted, with Labour doing a lot better than the Conservatives amongst those who have a university degree (42% to 18%). By contrast, the Tories performed marginally better than Labour amongst those whose highest level of education attained is GCSEs or lower (31% to 28%).
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49978-how-britain-voted-in-the-2024-general-election
In part, that's about age, but I suspect not entirely.
Draw what lessons from that, as you will.
I posted one word and triggered 3 different people.
Max could have looked at the link and seen how it aligned with the arguments in his header, but no, he saw the word and had an aneurysm
"moved on"
chuckle...
Which completely answered a whole raft of the “can’t clean lenses on Mars” issues - compressed air to blow on stuff etc.
Project was binned, rather politically, inside JPL.
Mars Sample Return is collapsing under a staggering cost escalation. And mad levels of mis-management. It’s making the Webb look good.
LOL. No. Simply, no.
I want missions to go ahead. But if there is life on Mars (or elsewhere...) I want to be able to find it, and tell it is distinct. Having people who can advise missions on how best to prevent contamination is a great idea. Missions can still go ahead, but risks are reduced. Not removed, as the only way of doing this is doing nothing; but reduced. And some relatively simple processes can reduce risks by orders of magnitude.
I could easily say the anti-PP people are simply uninterested in astrobiology and science.
Thomas Frank, who has spent the last twenty years warning this would happen, writes in NY Times.
"This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for Donald Trump."
"I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals."
The Elites Had It Coming
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion/democrats-trump-elites-centrism.html
Harris was, after all, chosen to be VP candidate based on her identity.
For 2024 if the Dems want a 'ideas' based candidate then they do have options in Beshear, Shapiro and Whitmer.
Or if they want a DC based politician how about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro_Khanna
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Allwright
(You can find some numbers about the difference that made in V. O. Key's classic book.)
Check if they have suspiciously shiny boots. (It was a real thing during the Algerian civil war. Villages would get done over by "terrorists" in suspiciously shiny boots.)
Quite a few say that they will never accept a crewed landing on Mars. Full stop. By anyone.
When you ask them about the sterilisation level of the helicopter, they get all upset. It’s a naughty question, apparently.
Well worth listening to and all the episodes.
If they'd taken a microscope and left supercam behind, people would just be complaining about that.
(*) Lasers that blasts away at rocks, with spectrometers that analyse the dust that comes off the target. This allowed them to tell the chemical composition of rocks, including potential biosignatures.
You seem to hold PP in utter contempt; which is really anti-science.
Location of landing sites is probably far more effective.
I'm glad you have found some comfort in speaking to your friends and family but it's no substitute for a professional in my own view. thought I was coping well in much the same way but after going I realised I wasn’t.
Anyway, I am glad you feel at ease.
I think the issue is this: Trump naysayers (hi) have been looking in the wrong place. Now of that matters if the guy can diagnose your issues and offer you a solution. Ok so he’s all that. He’s also All That.
It’s rather like the personal behaviours that stalled US space suit development for decades. I mean, when you have people claiming that the results from scientific trials should discarded, because the astronauts taking part in the trials must have been lying in their official, written reporting…. That’s definitely zany.
What I'm thinking about is the immediately obvious "swap President and VP on the ticket." That is, a Vance/Trump ticket, with Vance resigning the day after inauguration (and could then be appointed VP by a succeeding Trump). Because the 22nd states that "no-one can be elected to the office of President more than twice."
Nothing about succeeding outwith election, like Ford, LBJ, Truman, Coolidge, Teddy Roosevelt, Arthur, Johnson, Fillmore, Tyler - albeit some later won election as President, but all initially succeeded without being elected to the office of President. And, of course, what if it went further? Is an ex-President actually prohibited from any office in the line of succession? There seems to be no written legal rule saying "Oh, we'll skip over the Attorney General if it gets that far and a term-limited ex-President is doing the job." Maybe there is and I don't know about it?
"Ah, but you can't run as VP if you're term-limited out as President."
Can't you? The 12th Amendment states that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States." A term-limited President is still constitutionally eligible to be President, as long as he or she gets there without having to be elected. Via a tragedy taking out everyone to the Secretary of Education, for example, and that person being an ex-President. Or anywhere else in the line of succession, for that matter.
And being elected VP does not count as election to be President - otherwise every VP who has been elected on a ticket twice would be ineligible to even run once as President (including Biden, Gore, Bush senior, and Nixon before their first (or only) runs). The implication of the wording that you can serve up to 2 years of someone else's term before your first election as President underlines that.
So - while it looks overwhelmingly obvious that the 22nd Amendment intends for no-one to be President for more than eight (or ten) years, and the implication that serving more than two years of someone else's term invalidates one of those two allowed elections underlines it - it isn't explicit on it. So a compliant SCOTUS could say "technically, the law allows that."
I mean the entire ruling on Presidential Immunity looks similarly bad, so it wouldn't even be the most strained the Roberts Court has been, in my view. So - I'd like someone to tell me that there IS an explicit prohibition that stops that interpretation, because all I've done is wikipedia'd it.
(In any case, I reckon it's far more likely that Trump gets 25th'd by Vance long before this even becomes a prospect)
Proto-fascists have always prospered by diagnosing issues and offering a solution
The solution is always 'get rid of the others', insert your 'other' of choice
Jews, Muslims, immigrants, minorities, women, men pretending to be women, elites of any flavour