Givin' It Up

35 years ago, a billion Chinese were riding bikes. Now there are almost as many cars in China as there are people in USAmerica Inc.

The age of the ‘car is king’ is over. The sooner we accept that, the better

John Vidal

Accidents and pollution are making road vehicles untenable. With public transport and ride-sharing, their demise can’t come soon enough

In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.

“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”

He was nearly right. China’s breakneck development has been led by mass car ownership. It now has 300m cars – and what was once the kingdom of bikes is now the land of 20-lane motorways, more than 100,000 petrol stations and scrap metal yards. Beijing, Shanghai and most other cities are choked with traffic, their air is some of the worst in the world, and their hospitals are full of children with asthma and respiratory diseases. China, like every other country, is having to rethink the car.

The worldwide love affair with the car, which promised consumers convenience, status and freedom, is over. The reality from Hotan to Hull and Lagos to Lahore is that the car is now a social and environmental curse, disconnecting people, eroding public space, fracturing local economies, and generating sprawl and urban decay. With UK temperatures hitting highs of 40C this summer, this reality has become impossible to ignore. Instead of the prospect of speed and cheap mobility, consumers now get soaring costs, climate breakdown and air pollution, the devastation of nature, mounting debt, personal danger and ill health, and the most serious energy crisis in 30 years.

Now the World Health Organization is worried. Car accidents are the eighth highest cause of death for people of all ages, and the leading cause among young people aged 5-29 worldwide. At least 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year, with a further 20 to 50 million people sustaining injuries, often at phenomenal personal and financial cost.

Here in the UK, 24,530 people were killed or seriously injured on roads in 2020/21, which costs the country around £36bn a year, or around 20% of the current NHS budget, according to the legal firm Hugh James. In the US it is even worse: government figures show that traffic accidents and their knock-on impacts cost nearly $1tn (£800bn) a year, and that more than 624,000 people died in fatal crashes between 2000 and 2017. That compares with the 535,000 American military personnel estimated to have died in both world wars. In China, 250,000 people a year die in accidents.

But we may be reaching “peak car”, the point at which the world is so saturated with vehicles – and cities and individuals are so fed up or financially stretched by them – that they are banned or voluntarily given up. As UK petrol hits £2 a litre and it costs £100 to fill up a tank – on top of the thousands of pounds paid out in loans and taxes to own a car in the first place – it is unsurprising that young people especially are eschewing them and taking to other forms of transport.

The auto-magic that has entranced societies for a century has gone. When the cost of living crisis started to bite, Ireland, Italy and others (although not the UK) cut public transport fares by as much as 90% (in Germany). Spain has gone a step further, announcing that train travel on many routes will be free from September to the end of the year. Global car sales, already stuttering before the pandemic, are now declining in China, Russia and Germany. UK new car sales have fallen for five months in a row and the level of UK car ownership has now fallen for two consecutive years – the first successive drops in ownership in more than a century.

From here on, it looks like death by 1,000 breakdowns for the private car. Just as the coach and horse were pushed out by automobiles 120 years ago, so the car is being steadily evicted from world cities by the authorities or by public revulsion. As thousands of jubilee street parties showed, car-free streets are popular, and the surest and best way to save money, improve health and make cities quieter and more livable. A recent report from the Centre for London shows how low-traffic neighbourhoods, introduced widely during the pandemic to encourage walking and cycling, reduce car use and make roads safer. Wales has slashed the default speed limit on residential roads from 30mph to 20mph.

Countries may have little choice but to reduce car use. There is wide agreement that car mileage must be cut by at least 20% by 2030 just to meet climate targets. Milan, Paris, Hamburg, Copenhagen and most European cities are now either banning cars from their centres on a large scale or making it prohibitively expensive to drive in them. They are pushing at an open door. London car ownership is reducing – and recently, 50,000 Berliners asked the city to impose the world’s largest car ban, covering 34 sq miles.

In this urban century, where nearly 70% of people are expected to live in built-up areas within 30 years and the global population is expected to grow by another 3 billion by 2100, the private car makes little economic or social sense. Ride sharing apps, car sharing, e-bikes and scooters are all hastening the car’s demise. City leaders, as well as health, transport and environment groups, are now calling for it to be made easy and affordable for people to leave the car at home or get rid of it – and for cities to be reimagined so that people can access key things like food and health centres on foot or by bike.

It is time for cities to take advantage of lessons learned during the pandemic and the unfolding energy, environment and cost of living crises, and start to design themselves not around the car, but around the bicycle and the pedestrian. But it is also time for those who deify the car, and continue to aggressively assert its place in our social and economic hierarchy – and its untrammelled right to road space – to understand that a page has been turned. The sooner they accept that, the easier the future and their part in it will be.

The car as we know it is fast becoming extinct; it is a relic of a former age. Sitting in a traffic jam in a ton of metal that belches pollution and costs a fortune will surely be seen by future generations as not just stupid, but criminal.

They Don't Stop

Maybe they're just throwing the usual bullshit bone to "the base", in their usual bullshit attempt to get the rubes fired up for the midterms.

Or maybe they think they've got a legit chance to get back into power, and holy fuck, you won't believe what these assholes are gonna do - this is prob'ly just for starters.

House conservatives prep plans to impeach Biden

Republicans hoping to seize control of the House in November are already setting their sights on what is, for many of them, a top priority next year: impeaching President Biden.

A number of rank-and-file conservatives have already introduced impeachment articles in the current Congress against the president. They accuse Biden of committing “high crimes” in his approach to a range of issues touching on border enforcement, the coronavirus pandemic and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Those resolutions never had a chance of seeing the light of day, with Democrats holding a narrow control of the lower chamber. But with Republicans widely expected to win the House majority in the midterms, many of those same conservatives want to tap their new potential powers to oust a president they deem unfit. Some would like to make it a first order of business.

“I have consistently said President Biden should be impeached for intentionally opening our border and making Americans less safe,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.). “Congress has a duty to hold the President accountable for this and any other failures of his Constitutional responsibilities, so a new Republican majority must be prepared to aggressively conduct oversight on day one.”

The conservative impeachment drive is reminiscent of that orchestrated by liberals four years ago, as Democrats took control of the House in 2019 under then-President Trump. At the time, a small handful of vocal progressives wanted to impeach Trump, largely over accusations that he’d obstructed a Justice Department probe into Russian ties to his 2016 campaign. The idea was repeatedly rejected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), not least out of fear that it would alienate voters in tough battleground districts.

The tide turned when a whistleblower accused Trump of pressuring a foreign power to find dirt on his political opponent — a charge that brought centrist Democrats onto the impeachment train. With moderates on board, Pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry in September of 2019, eight months after taking the Speaker’s gavel. Three months later, the House impeached Trump on two counts related to abusing power.

The difference between then and now is that liberals, in early 2019, were fighting a lonely battle with scant support. This year, heading into the midterms, dozens of conservatives have either endorsed Biden’s impeachment formally, or have suggested they’re ready to support it.

At least eight resolutions to impeach Biden have been offered since he took office: Three related to his handling of the migrant surge at the southern border; three targeting his management of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year; one denouncing the eviction moratorium designed to help renters during the pandemic; and still another connected to the overseas business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.

Those proposals will expire with the end of this Congress. But some of the sponsors are already vowing to revisit them quickly next year. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the lead sponsor of four of the impeachment resolutions, is among them.

“She believes Joe Biden should have been impeached as soon as he was sworn in, so of course she wants it to happen as soon as possible,” Nick Dyer, a Greene spokesman, said Monday in an email.

A noisy impeachment push from the GOP’s right flank could create headaches for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), the Republican leader in line to be Speaker, and other party brass just as the 2024 presidential cycle heats up.

On the one hand, impeaching Biden could alienate moderate voters and hurt the GOP at the polls, as was the case in 1998 following the impeachment of President Clinton. Already, GOP leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are throwing cold water on the impeachment talk, suggesting it could damage Republicans politically in the midterms.

On the other hand, ignoring the conservatives’ impeachment entreaties might spark a revolt from a Republican base keen to avenge the Democrats’ two impeachments of Trump, who remains the most popular national figure in the GOP. McCarthy knows well the perils of angering the far right: The Freedom Caucus had nudged Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) into an early retirement in 2015, deeming him insufficiently conservative, then prevented McCarthy from replacing him.

McCarthy’s office did not respond Monday to a request for comment.

The challenge facing Republican leaders in a GOP-controlled House will be to demonstrate an aggressive posture toward the administration, to appease conservatives, without alienating moderate voters in the process.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) appears to be walking that line. Last summer, she called Biden “unfit to serve as president,” but stopped short of endorsing his impeachment.

Stefanik’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Another strategy GOP leaders may adopt is to impeach a high-ranking member of the administration, but not the president himself. Several resolutions have been introduced to do just that, separately targeting Vice President Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

McCarthy, during a visit to the southern border earlier in the year, had floated the idea of impeaching Mayorkas if he is found to be “derelict” in his job of securing the border. And the concept has plenty of support among conservatives.

“Mayorkas and Garland have purposefully made our country less safe, politicized their departments, and violated the rule of law. In some instances, they have instructed their subordinates to disobey our laws. That is unacceptable,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who has endorsed a number of impeachment resolutions this year, said in an email.

“Next January I expect the House to pursue my impeachment articles against Mayorkas as well as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment articles that I co-sponsored against Attorney General Merrick Garland,” Biggs added.

Still, conservatives like Biggs, the former head of the Freedom Caucus, also want to go straight to the top by impeaching Biden. And it remains unclear if anything less than that will appease the GOP’s restive right flank — one that’s expected to grow next year with the arrival of a number of pro-Trump conservatives vowing to take on anyone they consider to be part of Washington’s political establishment.

Some Republicans said the decision whether to endorse impeachment next year will simply hinge on events. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), for instance, has endorsed two impeachment resolutions this cycle related to the Afghanistan withdrawal, but “has made no decisions yet on supporting impeachment articles next year with Republicans in the majority,” according to spokesman Austin Livingston.

“He will wait to see what those efforts look like, specifically how they align with Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution,” Livingston said, referring to the section outlining Congress’s impeachment powers.

The Memo: Five reasons Democrats’ midterm chances are rising

But others are eager to use a GOP majority to hold Biden’s feet to the fire. And that energy doesn’t appear to be fleeting, particularly when it comes to the border crisis, which could very well remain a hot topic six months from now.

Rep. Mary Miller (R), a strong Trump supporter who recently won an Illinois primary over the more moderate Rep. Rodney Davis (R), said Biden should be removed “for purposely ignoring our immigration laws.”

“Biden and Harris have failed their most basic duty,” Miller said, “which is ensuring the safety of the American people through the security of our borders.”

Ukraine

Some items from NYT.

(pay wall)

Ukraine Steps Up Strikes Against Russia in the South

The Ukrainian military continued to pound targets across southern Ukraine on Tuesday as it sought to disrupt Russian supply lines, degrade Russia’s combat capabilities and isolate Russian forces, part of what analysts said could be the beginnings of a broad and coordinated counteroffensive.

The military said that its forces had broken through Russia’s first line of defense in multiple points along the front in the occupied Kherson region, but officials offered little detail and their claims could not be independently verified.

Western military analysts emphasized that Russian forces have had months to reinforce multiple lines of defense across the south, making any Ukrainian advance likely to be tough and bloody.

It remained unclear whether the strikes marked the start of a long-anticipated counteroffensive or were simply an intensification of weeks of Ukrainian counterattacks. The British military intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Ukrainian brigades had “increased the weight of artillery fires in frontline sectors across southern Ukraine” but noted that it was “not yet possible to confirm the extent of Ukrainian advances.”

snip

President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking in his nightly address, said that while details of military operations must remain secret, Ukraine’s objective was clear.

“The occupiers should know: We will oust them to the border. To our border, the line of which has not changed,” he said. “If they want to survive, it is time for the Russian military to flee.”

Kyiv is seeking to disrupt Russian supply lines and isolate its forces, part of what analysts said could be the beginnings of a broad counteroffensive.

Soldiers find a way to get what they need. Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.

A Frontline Shadow Economy: Ukrainian Units Trade Tanks and Artillery

Most of the bartering involves items captured from Russian troops, which are exchanged for urgently needed supplies. “Let’s just call it a simplification of bureaucracy,” one soldier said.

DONETSK REGION, Ukraine — The Ukrainian sergeant slid the captured Russian rocket launcher into the center of a small room. He was pleased. The weapon was practically brand-new. It had been built in 2020, and its thermobaric warhead was deadly against troops and armored vehicles.

But the sergeant, nicknamed Zmei, had no plans to fire it at advancing Russian soldiers or at a tank trying to burst through his unit’s front line in eastern Ukraine.

Instead, he was going to use it as a bargaining chip.

Within the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, Zmei was not just a lowly sergeant. He was the brigade’s point man for a wartime bartering system among Ukrainian forces. Prevalent along the front line, the exchange operates like a kind of shadow economy, soldiers say, in which units acquire weapons or equipment and trade them for supplies they need urgently.

Most of the bartering involves items captured from Russian troops. Ukrainian soldiers refer to them as “trophies.”

“Usually, the trades are done really fast,” Zmei said last week during an interview in Ukraine’s mineral-rich Donbas region, where the 93rd is now stationed. “Let’s just call it a simplification of bureaucracy.”

Despite the influx of Western weapons and equipment in recent months, the Ukrainian military still relies heavily on arms and vehicles captured from their better-equipped Russian foe for the matériel needed to wage war; much of Ukraine’s aging Soviet-era arsenal is either destroyed, worn down or lacks ammunition.

That has left Ukrainian soldiers scrounging the battlefield for essentials as their own supply lines are strained. And the relatively small numbers of big-ticket foreign weapons, such as the American-made M777 howitzer, are thinly spread on the sprawling 1,500-mile front.

“We have hopes for Kyiv,” said Fedir, one of the brigade’s supply sergeants and an understudy of Zmei, referring to military commanders in the capital. “But we rely on ourselves. We aren’t trying to just sit and wait like idiots until Kyiv sends us something.”

To protect against reprisals, Zmei, Fedir and others interviewed for this article requested that only their given names or nicknames be used.

The Ukrainian military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the equipment exchanges.

Capturing Russian items has become increasingly difficult as the war moves into a more static phase, with Russia’s grinding artillery war forcing Ukrainians to slowly retreat in the east, while trying to regain territory in the south. That has created even higher demand for items traded in the soldiers’ underground exchange.

Such was the case in early May, when the 93rd — a renowned unit that had fought in almost every major battle of the war — was operating around the Russian-occupied city of Izium. Zmei, who before the war owned a small publishing house that specialized in dark fantasy novels, received an innocuous text message from a nearby Ukrainian commander.

“Hi,” the message read. “Listen, here’s the thing, we have a needless tank, a T-72 a bit damaged.”

“And we’d exchange it for something nice,” the commander added.

The series of text messages, sent over the messaging application Telegram and reviewed by The New York Times, is just one example of the type of equipment that is unofficially swapping hands.

The commander’s requests were modest: a transport truck and a couple of sniper rifles in return for the Russian trophy tank. But Zmei told his customer, “This is too few things for a tank, write down what else you need.” The commander responded that he had plenty of tanks and wanted only the items requested.

When the commander mentioned all the tanks in his unit’s possession, Zmei sensed an opportunity to expand the trade. He wanted more tanks, and noted that the 93rd had foreign-supplied anti-tank missiles and U.S. portable surface-to-air missile systems available for a swap.

“Can get the launchers for a Stinger, NLAWs, various large stuff for a trade — and a lot of that,” Zmei said, referring to some of the Western weapons, which cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece.

Of the more than half-dozen soldiers interviewed for this article, most said that this underground economy was driven by the need to survive. Sometimes, they said, that meant circumventing a clumsy bureaucracy.

Although soldiers said that they were supposed to send captured equipment up the supply chain back to Kyiv, they noted that there was little effort to investigate the underground exchanges, let alone punish anyone for doing it.

Western governments, having provided billions of dollars of military equipment, have pressed Ukraine to safeguard against possible corruption in the distribution process, but so far there have been no documented cases of weapons ending up in the hands of anyone apart from other Ukrainian units.

But even keeping the transfer of weapons unofficial can cause problems.

Matt Schroeder, an analyst at the Small Arms Survey, a research organization, said that informal transfers of matériel between units “could undermine stockpile management procedures,” but that “such transfers are not, in themselves, indicative of trafficking or leakage.”

Sitting near the turret of a captured Russian T-80 tank, a Ukrainian soldier named Alex explained that sending captured equipment back to Kyiv for official accounting was problematic.

“There is no guarantee that we’re going to get it back anytime soon,” he said. “We try to do it mostly ourselves.”

Inside a truck mounted with a captured Russian antiaircraft gun. Most Ukrainian soldiers said that the underground economy was driven by the need to survive.

A former software engineer from Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, Alex is a celebrity in the 93rd. His captured tank, nicknamed Bunny, with him in command, destroyed several Russian armored vehicles around Izium and the northeastern city of Sumy earlier in the war, Ukrainian commanders said.

But now the tank is far from the front and awaiting a turret repair. An important part for that work was recently acquired by trading a 120-millimeter mortar and a heavy machine gun with another unit, Alex said.

Just as he was speaking, a captured Russian armored personnel carrier rolled into the repair bay. It parked behind a barely running Ukrainian armored vehicle that one soldier joked had probably participated in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Alex is waiting for his own kind of repairs. He was shot in the right leg during a patrol in May. The bullet shattered his femur.

He and several other Ukrainian soldiers had been on a reconnaissance patrol in the gray zone — the area between Russian and Ukrainian front lines — when he was hit. The mission had carried two objectives, he said: to find Russian positions and to find abandoned equipment.

“We are losing tanks,” Alex said. “If this war goes the distance, sooner or later we’ll be out of Soviet equipment and other Soviet tanks, so we will have to switch to something else.”

Near his subterranean headquarters not far from the front line, Alex’s battalion commander, Bogdan, described the severity of his unit’s situation. The sound of incoming and outgoing artillery echoed in the fields beyond.

“We’re fighting with whatever we captured from the enemy,” Bogdan said, noting that 80 percent of his current supplies was captured Russian equipment.

“It’s no better in other battalions,” he added.

Bogdan’s unit of around 700 troops had arrived to replace Ukrainian forces worn down by casualties and equipment loss. Now, after six months of acting like a “firefighter” by rushing from one frontline hot spot to the next, his troops were facing a similar fate.

“We are losing a lot of men,” Bogdan said. “We can’t cope with their artillery. This, and airstrikes, are big problems.”

Alex, a former software engineer, with his captured tank, nicknamed Bunny.

He said that sending equipment back to Kyiv was problematic:

“There is no guarantee that we’re going to get it back anytime soon.”

Asked about sophisticated, Western-supplied weapons that government officials say will be the big difference-maker, he said that in his brigade, “nobody has foreign equipment,” adding, “We have a great many questions as to where it goes.”

Those questions have fallen on a 28-year-old Ukrainian soldier who goes by the name of Michael. He lives in a small rundown single-story house several miles from the front line. An infantry soldier by trade, he is currently Bogdan’s supply officer.

In Michael’s squalid kitchen are printouts tacked to the wall listing the Western equipment his battalion desperately needs: encrypted radios, semiautomatic grenade launchers and Polish 155-millimeter howitzers, known as Krabs.

A Krab unit commander named Andriy said that his howitzers were not available for trade, though he might consider a swap if offered a French self-propelled artillery piece in exchange.

The 93rd currently only possesses old Soviet-era artillery pieces that have worn out barrels and are low on ammunition.

“I have to go and buy everything and trade things, and bring it all here,” Michael said.

“So what’s going on is a personal initiative,” he said. “You’re taking the risk, it’s criminal. Nobody will thank you. It’s a thankless job.”

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🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦

To The Moon - Eventually

(pay wall)

NASA, and Space Fans, Await Decision on Next Chance to Launch Artemis Moon Rocket

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Thousands of people had come from near and far to pack the beaches, roadsides, rooftops and waterways. Some even camped overnight in hopes of seeing NASA’s giant new moon rocket launch for the first time, rising upward with a thunderous boom and jets of fire from its engines.

“We are going,” proclaimed NASA banners hung all around the space center. Even Vice President Kamala Harris was on hand to watch.

But on Monday, the rocket did not go, and NASA officials said it was too early to guess whether it might be able to launch Friday, the next potential opportunity, or later. Mission managers will meet on Tuesday to discuss their next steps.

Although there will be no astronauts on this test flight, this rocket — what NASA calls the Space Launch System — is to usher in a new era of human exploration including sending the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of the moon.

The first mission, without astronauts, is to be a weekslong flight around the moon to test both the rocket and the Orion crew capsule where astronauts will sit on future missions. In particular, NASA wants to make sure that the heat shield on Orion can survive a fiery entry through Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour, the speed of a spacecraft returning from the moon.

Monday’s scrubbed launch added another delay to the moon program, named Artemis, which has already cost more than $40 billion and is years behind schedule. The program, including the giant rocket, has nonetheless received steady support from Congress and NASA officials.

The issue that halted the launch on Monday was a liquid hydrogen line that did not adequately chill one of the rocket’s four core-stage engines, part of the preparations needed before ignition. Otherwise, sudden shrinkage from the temperature shock of supercold propellants crack the metal engine parts.

Troubleshooting efforts proved unsuccessful within the limited time, and at about 8:40 a.m. Eastern, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director, decided that it was time to call it off and try again another day. Even if they had resolved the technical issues, weather conditions would likely have prevented a launch.

“This is a brand-new rocket,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference in the afternoon. “It’s not going to fly until it’s ready.”

If the launch cannot occur during the Labor Day weekend, the rocket will have to be rolled back to the giant Vehicle Assembly Building — essentially a garage for rockets. A trip there would most likely mean a delay of a month or more.

NASA officials said it was important to prudently tackle each problem as it arose and not to rush decisions that might lead to catastrophic failures.

“We are going to give the team time to rest, first of all, and then come back fresh tomorrow and reassess what we learned today and then develop a series of options,” said Mike Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager. “It’s too early to say what the options are.”

Had it lifted off, the flight would have capped a strong summer for NASA, which lit up imaginations all over the world when it released the first views of the cosmos captured by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at the start of July.

Vice President Kamala Harris signed a piece of equipment

during a tour of the Kennedy Space Center.

Credit...Pool photo by Alex G. Perez

Instead, NASA’s engineers, V.I.P. spectators and the public at large were disappointed, but many were sympathetic.

That included Ms. Harris, who had been scheduled to deliver a speech after an Artemis I launch. Instead, she spoke to reporters on Monday after NASA scrubbed the flight.

“Innovation requires this kind of moment where you test out something that’s never been done and then you regroup,” she said. “And you figure out what the next step will be to get to the ultimate goal, which for us is going to the moon and showing how humans can live and work on the moon.”

Camille Calibeo, 25, who studied aerospace engineering in college, woke up at about 2 a.m. to board a boat to get a prime view of the launchpad. She said she was hoping the launch would still happen in the coming days. “There are so many people here and the excitement was crazy and definitely sad,” she said, “and hopefully I get to stick around.”

Kendal Van Dyke, 46, a senior program manager at Microsoft who lives in Orlando, and members of his family were set to watch the launch from the NASA Causeway. While disappointed, he emphasized that scrubbed launches were a standard risk in spaceflight.

“It’s not about wowing people. It’s about getting billions of dollars’ worth of hardware into space safely,” Mr. Van Dyke said. “Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t but that’s OK. We got a good experience and got to spend some time together.”

Six of his seven siblings traveled from around the region to watch the launch together and commemorate their father, who died in November and worked as a contractor on the Apollo program installing A.V. equipment to monitor astronauts on the launchpad. Several of his siblings now also work in the space industry.

“We thought it would be a great way to celebrate his passing and the accomplishments of the family” Mr. Van Dyke said.

It is not uncommon for technical problems to crop up during debut launch attempts. In 1981, the first space shuttle, Columbia, was on the launchpad with two astronauts strapped in for the first launch to orbit, but the countdown was halted by a computer glitch. Columbia successfully launched on the second try two days later.

For the Space Launch System rocket, the countdown started Saturday. Despite several lightning strikes on the launch site on Saturday afternoon, the countdown continued smoothly for the most part through the weekend. Then early Monday morning, the threat of nearby thunderstorms caused a 45-minute delay before liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen could begin flowing into the rocket’s propellant tanks.

Another problem cropped up when a leak was detected in a hydrogen fuel line that attaches to the bottom of the rocket. That was a recurrence of a problem that occurred during a practice countdown in April.

Engineers were able to fix that problem, and the filling of the hydrogen tank resumed.

The engine issue that arose later in the countdown also involved hydrogen but in a different part of the rocket. In the last part of the launch countdown, some liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen is diverted to flow around the four engines to cool them in preparation for ignition.

Three of the four engines were fine but, in the fourth, a hydrogen line did not appear to open properly, and one of the engines was not as cold as the others.

This was the first test of the engine chill-down, which usually occurs 4 minutes 40 seconds before launch. Dress rehearsals of countdown procedures earlier this year were designed to catch such issues but were cut short by technical problems. As a result, the engine chill-down was not tested. But mission managers believed the rocket had passed the critical test objectives, and they moved ahead with preparations for launch.

For Monday’s countdown, a chill-down test was added at an earlier point to allow troubleshooting in case a problem showed up. Mission managers recognized the risk.

“That is something that we’re going to demonstrate, end to end, for the first time on the day of launch,” Mr. Sarafin said last week after the mission team decided to go ahead with the launch attempt. “And if we do not successfully demonstrate that, we are not going to launch that day.”

Mr. Sarafin turned out to be correct.

Don't Sleep On This

Nancy MacLean

The plutocrats are very serious and very busy.

(pay wall)

Opinion
A $1.6 billion donation lays bare a broken campaign finance system

One man has donated $1.6 billion to a nonprofit group controlled by a conservative activist who has crusaded, with startling success, to transform the country’s politics. The only reason the public knows about it? An insider tip-off to the New York Times.

The Times reported this week that electronics mogul Barre Seid last year gave 100 percent of the shares of surge protector and data-center equipment manufacturer Tripp Lite to a group called Marble Freedom Trust. The group is led by Leonard Leo — who has helped bankroll right-wing advocacy on abortion rights, voting and climate change, among other things. His chief focus for a time was reshaping the judiciary as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, including by advising Republican presidents on Supreme Court nominees. The tale of how his group got such a lavish gift underscores the sad state of this country’s campaign finance system.

The Marble Freedom Trust donation, possibly the largest ever to such an advocacy group in U.S. history, manages to encapsulate in a single case the problems with the status quo. The issue isn’t merely the distortion of democracy enabled by 2010′s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision allowed for unlimited political spending by corporations and outside groups — to which, in turn, the ultra-wealthy can funnel unlimited funds of their own. The issue is also that the distortion remains, in most cases, invisible. Nonprofits groups registered as 501(c)(4)s, such as Marble Freedom Trust, don’t have to disclose their donors.

Adding insult to injury, donors can also use these nonprofits to reduce taxes — in this instance, to the tune of somewhere around $400 million. To sell his company on his own, Mr. Seid would have had to pay capital gains taxes, leaving him with less to bequeath to Marble Freedom Trust. But as supposed “social welfare organizations,” 501(c)(4)s are exempt from paying taxes. So instead he handed his shares over to the trust, which then itself sold Tripp Lite: for the $1.6 billion now in Mr. Leo’s coffers. As a result, dutiful everyday taxpayers essentially finance the extravagant expenditures of the privileged few, who use their know-how to avoid their obligations and twist the political landscape.

Congress should close the tax loophole these donors exploit. And the Disclose Act, some version of which has been languishing in Congress for more than a decade, blocked by GOP filibusters, would at least tell voters who’s trying to buy their votes. The Internal Revenue Service can improve things on its own by collecting donors’ information again, after it stopped in 2018. Unfortunately, without a change in Supreme Court precedent or a constitutional amendment, only marginal improvements are possible.

Mr. Leo defended his gambit by saying it is “high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals.” Really, it’s not toe-to-toe but billions-to-billions — and neither side should be proud of that.

Overheard

The folks who call anything they don't like

"woke" or "socialistic" or "communist"

are complaining about being called "fascist"

- because that's divisive.

Today's Wingnut

Mark Robinson, North Carolina's Christian nationalist lieutenant governor, tells Christians to stop reading the news: "When Jesus Christ comes back and is swinging that double-edged sword and riding that white horse, ABC can write all the stories they want to, but their entity is going down in flames."

Jesus left the instructions for YOU.

YOU have to do this.

YOU have to do that.

These guys always invite the inference that they're special - they are one with god - and if you disagree with them, then you're going against god.

Never fails, and the devotees never get wise to the scam.

And what's really scary is that the relaxed-n-groovy-hippie-dude Jesus has morphed into a rage-fueled avenger, who's coming not with love and mercy and forgiveness, but with an iron rod. And it's a very short step from true believer, praying for deliverance, to radicalized terrorist, taking up the sword of a vengeful god against the infidel.

This is exactly what the founders told us to reject.

Yeesh

There's something wrong with this Trump guy - duh.

But there has to be something even more wrong with a GOP that keeps putting up with his shit.

But then again, he keeps recycling his shit over and over, so may this is just a re-re-re-release of his basic classic shit(?)

Trump demands reinstatement as 'rightful' president or 'a new Election, immediately!' as some Republicans seek distance from him

Former President Donald Trump demanded reinstatement as president or "a new Election, immediately" after news that Facebook temporarily limited a controversial story about Hunter Biden's laptop in users' news feeds before the 2020 election.

Trump was responding to Facebook, now Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments on Joe Rogan's podcast that a New York Post story about the laptop "fit the pattern" of polarizing content, including "Russian propaganda," that the FBI had warned the company about. The laptop story had several red flags that raised questions about its authenticity and Facebook limited its reach on the site's news feeds for a few days.

Trump's statement on Truth Social doubles down on false election fraud claims as some Republicans, the Washington Post has reported, are trying to distance themselves from his personal grievances ahead of the midterm elections in November.

In his statement, Trump wrote in all capital letters that the "FBI BURIED THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY BEFORE THE ELECTION knowing that, if they didn't, 'Trump would have easily won the 2020 Presidential Election.' This is massive FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE at a level never seen before in our Country."

Trump continued: "REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!"

Facebook allowed users to share the story but it showed up less in people's news feeds, so it was seen less. During Rogan's program, Zuckerberg said he couldn't recall if the FBI warned him about the New York Post story specifically, but he thought the story "fit the pattern."

But Meta later tweeted that "nothing about the Hunter Biden laptop story is new" and that the "FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference — nothing specific about Hunter Biden."

Trump has been railing against the FBI since agents searched his Mar-a-Lago home earlier this month for classified documents.

Trump won't be reinstated after losing the election, although QAnon conspiracy theorists spread the idea a year ago. The New York Times' Maggie Haberman said last year that Trump was telling allies that he thought he'd be reinstated, as well.

Federal investigators are weighing possible charges related to Hunter Biden's business activities.

The president has not been implicated, CNN reported, but Republicans say they will ramp up their investigations of the Bidens if they win control of the House in the midterm elections.

Today's Dirty Fuels Fuckup

For all their overblown rhetoric about 'decentralization' and 'energy independence', conservatives are ridiculously upside down and backwards on what should happen if they truly believed what they claim those terms should mean.

I've got news for y'all. They've been lying their asses off about that too.

So what happens when one refinery goes down?

How is anyone "energy independent" when we're at the mercy of 5 or 6 ginormous oil companies?

BP Whiting, Indiana, refinery shut; timing of restart unknown -sources

BP Plc’s (BP.L) 435,000 barrel-per-day Whiting, Indiana, refinery is shut and undergoing damage assessment following loss of electrical power and cooling water systems in a Wednesday fire, sources familiar with plant operations said on Friday.

The timing for the refinery’s restart remains unknown as all of the refinery’s units will have to be checked for damage following the sudden loss of electrical power on Wednesday afternoon, the sources said.

BP spokesperson Christina Audisho said on Friday the refinery is "continuing to assess when a restart of the affected units can take place."

Following the assessment, any damage found will have to be repaired.

A few of the refinery’s units have been on cold circulation since, but will require being heated to operating temperatures that can reach 1,000 Fahrenheit (538 Celsius), the sources said.

The Whiting refinery outage sent Chicago CBOB gasoline up 30.5 cents a gallon on Thursday and ultra-low sulfur diesel up 17 cents.

The shutdown of one of the largest refineries in the Midwest comes as farmers are beginning fall harvest across the northern central states.

Whiting is the sixth-biggest by capacity in the United States and the company's largest in the nation, according the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Today's Beau

We know there has to be some number of Dems doing shitty things like this fund-raising scam in Tennessee, but we don't hear very much about them very often.

And I really do think that's not because of a liberal bias in the political media. Cuz fake lord knows the Press Poodles are always willing to jump on a good old-fashioned Both Sides story so they can countervail their reputation for being a buncha leftie stooges.

So anyway, for now, Republicans are the ones who keep showing up as dog-ass crooks, uninterested in anything but lining their pockets with money that they haven't come by honestly.

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Reality has a well known liberal bias.

Liberals have a well known reality bias.

Former Tennessee speaker, top aide arrested in corruption probe

Aug 23, 2022

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee’s former House Speaker Glen Casada and his top aide were arrested Tuesday on federal charges including bribery, kickbacks and conspiracy to commit money laundering involving federal funds.

Their indictments come months after a Republican legislator, Rep. Robin Smith, abruptly resigned while facing federal wire charges that involved Casada. Casada was not directly named in those court documents, but her March indictment kicked off speculation that more charges would come from the corruption investigation.

U.S. attorney says FBI agents searched offices and homes of Tennessee lawmakers

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Casada and former Chief of Staff Cade Cothren face a 20-count indictment. FBI agents arrested both at their homes Tuesday morning.

The charging document alleges Casada and Cothren exploited their positions of power by working with another unnamed lawmaker to funnel money to themselves using a political consulting firm that concealed their involvement.

more at NYT (pay wall)

Ex-Tennessee Speaker and Aide Charged With Bribery and Conspiracy

F.B.I. agents arrested Glen Casada and Cade Cothren at their Tennessee homes on Tuesday.

A former Tennessee speaker of the House and his former chief of staff were arrested on Tuesday at their homes on federal charges in connection to a bribery and kickback scheme, prosecutors said.

Former Speaker Glen Casada, 63, a Republican, and his top aide, Cade Cothren, 35, were charged with conspiracy to commit theft from programs receiving federal funds; bribery and kickbacks concerning programs receiving federal funds; honest services wire fraud; and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The charges were announced by U.S. Attorney Mark H. Wildasin for the Middle District of Tennessee and Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s criminal division in a joint statement on Tuesday.

Mr. Casada and Mr. Cothren appeared in federal court on Tuesday. Mr. Casada entered a plea of not guilty “and will present a vigorous defense at trial,” Ed Yarbrough, a lawyer for Mr. Casada, said on Tuesday. He did not comment further. It was not immediately clear who was representing Mr. Cothren. If convicted, Mr. Casada and Mr. Cothren each face up to 20 years in prison.

The arrests came months after the resignation of Representative Robin Smith, a Tennessee Republican who pleaded guilty to a federal wire fraud charge over involvement in the political consulting scheme with Mr. Casada and Mr. Cothren, according to The Associated Press.

Around October 2019, Mr. Casada, who represented Tennessee House District 63 in Williamson County, and another conspirator, who was also a Tennessee representative but was not named in the prosecutors’ statement or court documents, launched a scheme “to enrich themselves” by using their positions to obtain state approval for a company called Phoenix Solutions as a vendor to provide mail services to members of the state’s General Assembly and political campaigns, according to the statement.

Mr. Casada, Mr. Cothren and the third associate then sought to pull state funds for Phoenix Solutions, a political consulting business that was run by Mr. Cothren, according to court documents, one that Mr. Casada and the third individual profited from.

“Casada and the other conspirator are alleged to have enriched themselves by obtaining bribes and kickbacks from Cothren, in exchange for securing the approval of Phoenix Solutions as a mailer program vendor,” according to the statement.

The associates told members of the state’s General Assembly that the company was run by a man named “Matthew Phoenix” who was described as “an experienced political consultant,” but was actually a fabrication, prosecutors said.

Mr. Casada, Mr. Cothren and the third conspirator concealed their involvement in Phoenix Solutions “by submitting sham invoices to the state of Tennessee in the names of political consulting companies” owned by Mr. Casada and the other conspirator to funnel funds to the company from the state, prosecutors said.

In all, Phoenix Solutions received nearly $52,000 through the mailer program, according to court documents.

Mr. Casada was first elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 2003 and was re-elected as a representative in each subsequent General Assembly, according to court records.

In 2019, Mr. Casada resigned as speaker from the Tennessee House after it was revealed that he and Mr. Cothren had “exchanged sexually explicit text messages” about women, according to The Associated Press.