Creepy JD Vance Stalks Harris Around The Country
What kind of strategy is this?
JD Vance sure isn’t doing much to help quash the overall impression he’s a creep, and a weirdo. What the hell is he doing here? The vice-presidential hopeful, wearing more black eyeliner than Madonna in her Lucky Star era, marched up to Air Force Two on Wednesday while it was parked at the airport in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, just marched right up like he owned the joint.
When reporters were like, uh, “what’re you doing, man?” He was like,
“I just wanted to check out my future plane!” Even though it is not the vice president’s personal plane, it is the taxpayers’ plane, but we don’t expect niceties of “what belongs to me and what belongs to America” to factor into these deeply thefty men’s considerations.
If you heard about JD Vance trying to stalk the vice president on her damn plane and immediately flashed onto Trump looming threateningly over Hillary Clinton on the debate stage in 2016, say hello to everyone who thought the same thing, aka “everybody who has been alive for the past eight years.”
First of all: the gall. Second: the mediocre white man entitlement! The frat boy veiled threat and attempted intimidation of it all! Like they’re going to Brooks Brothers Riot Air Force Fucking Two!
GROSS!
“I also wanted to go say hello to the vice president and ask her why she refuses to answer questions from the media. And I also thought that the press gaggle following her might get a little lonely,” he continued. “I, at least, have enough respect for you all and for the American people you report to, to come and talk to you and answer some questions.”
Vance then accused Harris of running a campaign from her basement with teleprompters, even though Harris at that point had had two maximum-capacity events, in Atlanta and Philadelphia, with about 8,000 and 10,000 attendees, respectively. Vance answered one question, “what would you like to hear from her?” with a bunch of lying nonsense (“every single position she has has changed!”) before scurrying off to his own event, which was at the Wollard International warehouse, and attended by about 50 people. Harris then rallied 12,000 people in Eau Fucking Claire!
Then Vance also followed Harris to Michigan, where she spoke to a crowd of about 15,000, and he spoke to a crowd outside of the Shelby Township police station that had more members of the press in it than voters. (Rebecca, who was at Harris’s amazing event, thinks Harris’s crowd was more like 8,000, but she is not the boss of crowd counting; Donald Trump, for his part, is putting Harris’s crowd at “a thousand,” and Dok drew the short straw on writing that pathetic mess up for the morning; we are very sorry to Dok!)
SAD! AND Vance was supposed to follow her to North Carolina too, though Harris, and then Vance, canceled due to Hurricane Debby. And thank goodness, because WTF?
Why is Trump making Vance go on all of these solo excursions, while Trump sits around his swampy Florida country club in the heat of August doing who-the-hell-knows what? Why is the strategy for Vance to pathetically and stalkerishly follow Harris around, highlighting how deeply unpopular Vance is? Why does Trump only have two appearances this week, Thursday’s surprise gripe session at Mar-a-Lago and a Friday planned stop in deep-red Bozeman, Montana? (He still owes Missoula County $12,922.82 from 2018, wonder if they’ll ever get that money?)
The word “weird” is perhaps overused these days, but damn, it’s weird!
What else is there to say?!
OPEN THREAD!
Dear Lordy Lord. The Boeing Starliner docked at the ISS is now officially without any plan that would allow it to return its astronauts safely to earth.
That doesn't mean it can't safely reach earth, and it doesn't mean that they won't try, but what it does mean is that all the work Boeing put in on the ground to reproduce and analyze the problems (yes, multiple problems) with the capsule's attitude control thrusters (let's call them ACTs even though Boeing probably has a different acronym for the particular type of ACT they use) appears to best outside-observer speculation to be complete and to have not revealed any way to make a return journey safe enough to risk human lives.
The ACTs are tiny things that don't put out a lot of force. They're not intended to propel the capsule, but they rotate the ship to face the correct direction when the main engine fires, and they hold the ship facing the correct direction if the rocket engine's propulsion is, for any reason, slightly off centre (which can happen quite easily with e.g. turbulence in a fuel line leading to slightly unequal fuel distribution in the rocket nozzle). Without the ACTs the main engine will fire just fine, but you might miss your target as the capsule slowly points farther and farther away from where you intend to travel.
But can the capsule really miss earth? No. Of course not. Earth is too large and its gravity is too dominant in LEO space. However the capsule's heat shield is designed to enter the atmosphere from a particular angle. Thus there's a specific "window" that Starliner would have to hit for safest entry.
Hit too shallow and a number of problems can occur, the most frightening being the possibility of "bouncing off" the atmosphere. Should that happen, the capsule's orbit would slowly degrade, with the vehicle eventually reentering at an uncontrolled angle, but it would take weeks for that to happen and any astronauts on board would be dead from lack of food, water, and most importantly oxygen. The more likely of the fatal possibilities is that by entering at a shallow angle the highest heat from reentry is lessened, but the time during which generally high heat is experienced is much longer. Like cooking potatoes at 300 degrees for 6 hours instead of 400 for 50 minutes, the result would be unlikely to be positive. Without knowing details of the thermal management system, we don't know exactly what would happen, but at least some of the important parts of the integrated thermal management systems are ablative -- meaning that the system includes a "heat shield" meant to slowly burn away during descent. Shields like this are designed with a certain thickness to last for a certain amount of time. In theory a shallow descent could still be hot enough to wear away at the shield (though perhaps not quite as quickly) but last so much longer that the net loss of shielding is much greater, perhaps enough to burn all the way through the heat shielding, leaving the rest of the thermal management system unable to compensate. In that ugly scenario, the crew would be cooked alive, assuming the capsule doesn't disintegrate.
If the capsule hits the atmosphere at too steep an angle, the descent is shorter, but the maximum heat is much hotter than the thermal management system can handle. This, too, can burn through the heat shield, but it can also cook the astronauts or damage the structural integrity of some of the capsule's exterior parts (like windows) that can withstand a lot of heat, but not as much as the ablative heat shield on the bottom of the capsule. There is an envelope of heat that surrounds any returning object, and with capsules that is designed to hit hottest and hardest on the bottom where the heat shield is. But a steep reentry not only affects the maximum heat at the point where the shield strikes the atmosphere but raises temperatures in the entire surrounding envelope. Again, the catastrophic scenario is that the exterior of the capsule is damaged by the heat, loses strength, and fractures, with the capsule disintegrating.
Now none of that is particularly likely, but if your ACTs aren't working then you can't rule those scenarios out, either. Only Boeing and NASA know the best estimates of catastrophic failure, but we do know that the space shuttle was originally designed to have a failure rate of less than 1 in 100 missions with the expectation that with more flight experience NASA could reduce that to less than 1 in 500 missions. So we have some idea what NASA believes is a tolerable risk level for human spaceflight and can assume that however they've assessed the risk, it's greater than 1 in 500 and very possibly greater than 1 in 100.
Whatever the numbers, they're enough that while NASA still hopes that someone comes up with a brilliant idea to fix Starliner before it has to leave its docking station, there is no longer an actual plan to bring it home safely with astronauts aboard. The alternatives appear to include allowing Starliner to autonomously fly home to see if it can make it back on its own or to intentionally burn Starliner up in earth's atmosphere. Astronauts would be brought home on another reentry vehicle, almost certainly a SpaceX Crew Dragon.
All this happens against a backdrop of quality control problems with Boeing's aircraft and a failed NASA Inspector General review of certain space vehicle manufacturing facilities in Louisiana (primarily related to a second-stage rocket intended for the Artemis lunar program). The failings centred around a "lack of a trained and qualified workforce." That, as the kids today might tell you, is "plus ungood."
With Boeing also having recently conceded that it is not up to accepting any more fixed-price contracts since it is unable to accurately predict its own costs and timelines, it's not at all certain that Boeing can continue to be the stalwart aerospace company that it has been.
The 1990s merger that led to ousting engineers from leadership positions appears to have led exactly where people feared, even if it has taken more than 25 years to arrive there. The only saving grace for US space science and space-related national security is that SpaceX is still thriving, though given Elon Musk's erratic management of other companies and horrific endorsement of anti-semitism, cissexism, and other BadThings(tm), that isn't nearly as reassuring as it could be.
Wrapping up that creepy intel vote nicely. But dude, not really expanding your voter base.