Posts by Beej
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Gave away nearly all his earnings to charity, died in a VW Beetle
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Didn't sell a LOT of posters
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All the rulings I saw were 'temporary restraining orders', which are NOT any sort of legal reasoning. They just pause them for a short bit
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LOLOLOL! Elon changed his twitter name just to fuck with them
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Loved that song since the first time I heard it at 13 or so, does something to me
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You see that prison they made ? Very impressive.... That country is actually safe now - like destination, vacation potential. All it took was one big modern, concrete & stainless steel gulag.
Dems forever saying "We CAN'T lock them ALL up, there's a better way!"
Well, until that comes along...
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In late 2023, our credit rating was lowered from AAA to AA+, owing to our increasing debt to GDP ratio, and general poor outlook (same thing happened in 2011, odd that I can't find where it reTURNED to AAA later on)
If Trump can get our credit rating BACK to AAA, the cost of financing the ever-growing debt will drop
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Rebs had ONE good general in the west, but he died early on
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QuoteThe name Fort Bragg is coming back, but with a twist. It will not be named after the former Confederate general.
Instead, the new name pays tribute to Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge.
Have fun screeching and protesting against that, woke leftists.
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A good read, explains the difference between NASA's shitty space program and Elon's ascendant one
Boeing Vice President David Dutcher warned workers on the company's Space Launch System (SLS) to prepare for layoffs on Friday if NASA finally cancels the rocket providing lift for the Artemis lunar program. The political fallout could make heads explode.
Eric Burger has the details on Dutcher's emergency all-hands meeting, but they aren't all that interesting. What is interesting is what happens when and if a team led by SpaceX founder Elon Musk tries to cancel a multibillion-dollar project led by Boeing.
Artemis is the U.S.-led international effort to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon, but to borrow a New England expression, we "can't get there from here" on the rocket built for the job —which is where DOGE's budget-cutting chops come in.
SLS isn't just a boring and stupid name for an impressively sized rocket; it's underpowered and too expensive for its intended mission. SLS can't put enough mass into lunar orbit to account for the Orion space capsule it carries and its four-person crew and their supplies. It doesn't even carry the landing vehicle.
To make up for SLS's shortcomings, we're going to build Lunar Gateway — an international space station in orbit around the moon. The plan is that Orion and its crew will dock at the Gateway and transfer to a SpaceX Human Landing System (HLS, and another boring name) for transit to the lunar surface, where they'll conduct their mission, and then back to the Gateway for transfer back to Orion for the voyage back to Earth. HLS gets to Lunar Gateway courtesy of a SpaceX Starship.
Did you get all that? There will be a quiz later.
The complexity is only necessary because SLS can't produce enough lift. Starship, once completed, can produce enough lift, making the Lunar Gateway and all that going back and forth unnecessary.
The Lunar Gateway is expected to cost $5.3 billion just for initial construction (and we both know what happens to those initial estimates; they go nowhere but up) and another billion dollars each year to operate and maintain.
Maybe there's a case to be made for Artemis to include an orbital substation, but it isn't Lunar Gateway.
A modified Starship could — not just in theory — do the same job the Lunar Gateway is supposed to do. Starship Gateway, or whatever you want to call it, could reach lunar orbit with a single launch and go to work immediately, no painstaking and dangerous orbital assembly required. Starship Gateway would have up to ten times (!!!) more habitable space than Lunar Gateway, and at a price measured in tens of millions instead of billions. (I assume operating and maintenance costs would be roughly the same, however.)
I'm not the first to propose using modified Starships for specialty missions, and, given the ship's size, affordability, and potential versatility, I won't be the last.
There is almost zero case for SLS and Lunar Gateway, and both ought to be canceled.
But these are merely practical considerations, and Washington is nothing if not ruinously impractical — so what about the political considerations? Before I get to those — and they are vital — you have to understand what's at stake with the Space Launch System, the massive rocket powering the stupid, impractical, and ultimately unnecessary part of the Artemis program.
SLS is a Frankenrocket, cobbled together out of parts new and old. Its most innovative feature is taking fully reusable Space Shuttle engines — cutting-edge technology from the 1970s — and throwing them into the ocean after each launch. It's a beast designed by Congress (not by engineers) to please contractors spread out in dozens of conveniently located congressional districts.
Each SLS launch costs a little over $4 billion, not including roughly $25 billion in development costs. SpaceX's goal is to get the cost of a Starship launch down to $2 million, but even if they're off by an order of magnitude, each Starship launch will do much more than any SLS launch at a tiny fraction of the cost.
And the SLS part of Artemis can't work without Starship, anyway. It's madness. But it's madness with five million tons of thrust political support.
The primary SLS contractors are Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, United Launch Alliance, and (via the Orion space capsule) Lockheed-Martin. Compared to SpaceX's launch cadence, those companies are major lobbying firms that dabble in putting things into space.
Their lobbyists are going to scream bloody murder when and if Elon Musk, their chief rival, recommends taking away their multibillion-dollar iron rice bowls. They will not go quietly into that good night, and the Legacy Mainstream Media — no strangers to ripping off taxpayers, we've learned — will play along.
I'd be happy to be wrong about the political fallout because that would mean that America is again serious about expanding humanity's reach to Luna, Mars, and beyond.
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Nice summation:
And it has all happened in the blink of an eye. Trump’s extraordinarily active first three weeks have left more than just Taylor Swift blinking their eyes in disbelief and muttering, “What’s going on?” Not too very long ago, the left’s lunatic ideas, including the insistence that some makeup, a wig, and some hormone shots could transform a man into a woman, were ruthlessly enforced. The social media giants relentless and unapologetically deplatformed and silenced dissidents from the left’s agenda, including Donald Trump himself.
Many people who knew better played along with a sense of quiet resignation, duly referring to Rachel Levine as a woman and Elliot Page as a man, and pretending that the rogue’s gallery of freaks and psychopaths that the Biden regime brought in to staff the White House were competent professionals. Two plus two was five, and if it meant total ostracism to say otherwise, then two plus two was five indeed, and patriots glumly searched out small corners of the Internet where they could affirm the truth, while trying to find ways that they could still have a voice in the larger culture while attempting to appease the left’s unappeasable gods.
But the left’s cultural hegemony has crested now and begun to recede. It started even before Trump’s second administration began, but has picked up significant speed since then. Even Taylor Swift herself could have asked her plaintive question long before the boos came cascading in at the Super Bowl. Back in Sept. 2024, NBC News reported that “about 47% of Republicans say they view Swift negatively in a poll conducted days after her presidential endorsement, a sharp uptick from the 26% who reported viewing her negatively in NBC’s Nov. 2023 poll, the last time she was included in the survey. Just 12% of Republicans report positive attitudes toward the singer, down from 28% last year.”
They were just Republicans, which probably meant that they mattered little to Swift, but even that increase in negative views of the singer wasn’t supposed to happen. Back in Oct. 2020, NBC News said that “Swift has previously stayed out of politics, in fear of isolating her audience.” Yet given the left’s cultural ascendancy, endorsing Biden in 2020 was the safest thing she could have done. Patriotic Swifties were used to that sort of thing and would have borne it patiently, and so she wouldn’t have lost any of her audience at all.
By 2024, however, her endorsement of Harris had little impact, and then there she was on Sunday, getting booed at the Super Bowl. “What’s going on?” The left is losing its edge, that’s what’s going on. And it’s a glorious thing to see.
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Looks like a foreign thing for them
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I think I'd be satisfied with leftists going to prison for life, like on a prison island where they can fend for themselves. (Probably end up killing each other.)
I think it would be better to stamp out leftism completely and irrevocably as an example to others and so there can be no recidivism.
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My annoying eagles fan buddy provided some new info: Swift grew up in Reading PA, USED to be seen wearing eagles garb. Thus, apostate
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Those people really are assholes. You show up to their stadium with a jersey from the opposing team and there's a better than fair chance you'll get the shit beat out of you
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NOTHING would have helped