The Supreme Court has re-assumed their rightful place as elitist reactionaries. From Dred Scott to Plessy v. Ferguson to the New Deal, the main role of the Supreme Court has been to stand on the side of money and power against decency and equality. It is a fundamentally undemocratic institution that has assumed powers never granted to it by any law, and was allowed to do so because it is the last backstop for wealth and power against democratic popular will.
Good essay. I don’t know if you remember after Obama won in 2008 a bunch of democratic party apparatchiks came up with this idea of “the coalition of the ascendant” and that they pretty much had the government locked in for a generation, due to support that would never waver for them amongst immigrants, yuppies, tech bros, etc. They didn’t need the working class anymore and the Republicans would be the minority party for many years.
Two years later the democrats were wiped out in the midterms.
Libs in 2016: I love Bernie, it’s just too bad about his age
Libs in 2020: Biden has a stutter. Don’t be ageist.
Libs in 2024: We had no idea!
Clearly they should have pumped him full of unicorn blood and stem cells.
The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.
My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.
NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.
Honestly this seems like a way to back-door inject another $800 million into the failing starship program.
When the character that’s “driving” keeps moving the wheel back and forth just a tiny bit at a time.
He’s trying to keep the “hands on the wheel” warning from going off.
As a friend once said “benzene is what anti-nuclear people think nuclear waste is.”
Hey nothing’s more German than genocide amirite?
And then spent the next several cycles systematically forcing anyone who supported him out of the party.