Category: Uncategorized

“Project Hyperion works on a preliminary study that defines integrated concepts for a crewed interstellar starship or generation ship. The study aims to provide an assessment of the feasibility of crewed interstellar flight using current and near-future technologies. It also aims to guide future research and technology development plans as well as to inform the public about crewed interstellar travel,” says the “About” page at Project Hyperion, sponsored by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies.

Concept art, ProjectHyperion.org

Hyperion is offering a $10,000 prize to the team that comes up with the best design for “the habitat of the generation ship, including its architecture and society,” that can survive a mission of “250 years from launch to arrival at the target star system,” with requirements for the habitat such as that it “provides Earth gravity via artificial gravity via rotation but parts of the habitat can have reduced gravity,” “provides atmospheric conditions similar to Earth,” and large enough to accommodate and provide “and decent living conditions for 1000 +/- 500 people over the entire trip duration.”

Convicted felon President-Elect Trump plans to hand over 20 percent of Ukraine to Russia and block the country from joining NATO for 20 years, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“At approximately 1pm on Wednesday November 6, 2024, the Yemassee Police Department received an alert from Alpha Genesis regarding the escape of numerous Rhesus Macaque primates from their enclosures at the Yemassee facility located at 95 Castle Hall Rd, Yemassee SC. The number has since been confirmed to be 43. The primates are described as very young females weighing approximately 6-7lbs, the animals have never been used for testing due to their young age and size.”

“A spokesperson from Alpha Genesis can confirm these animals are too young to carry disease. The Yemassee Police Department, in collaboration with Alpha Genesis, have initiated search teams to help locate the escaped primates. Alpha Genesis currently have eyes on the primates and are working to entice them with food. The public is advised to avoid the area as these animals are described at skittish and any additional noise or movement could hinder their safe capture.”

“Residents are urged to keep their doors and windows securely closed and to report any sightings immediately by dialing 911. Please do not attempt to approach these animals under any circumstances,” says the Yemassee, South Carolina Police Department in a press release.

It was unexpected, but it was vital.  Thirty-six hours after learning that a man who pledged to undermine the Constitution of the United States when he takes office would be back in the Oval Office, the gloom was heavy in our household.   But we cannot stay down forever.  A notecard left by a neighbor on our front step Thursday morning was the first thing that brought a slight smile to my face since an empty void filled me on Election Night.  It was an anonymous hug of sorts, an acknowledgment that we who oppose the Trump regime will continue to support one another.  

It signaled that our jobs are not over; they just got tougher.  We need to take time to recoup, reflect, and reevaluate.  But after that time to recover and mourn, we have two years where we must become an overwhelming force to stand up to the shitstorm that we know is coming.

Voter turnout in Texas this year was essentially flat, possibly even below 2020’s in raw numbers, as so far the Texas Tribune reports 11.2 million voted, and in the end it may or may not edge out the 11,315,056 ballots cast from four years ago. What isn’t a close call however is the decrease in turnout as percentage of the registered voters, down 9.6 percent this year from 2020.

In 2020 there were 17 million registered voters in the state, increasing to 18.6 million this year, which works out to 57.1 percent turnout in 2024. Turnout was at 66.1 percent in 2020.

Mortgage rates increased to a 7.13 percent average on Wednesday, Axios reports, which is weird because we were to understand that certain extrinsic factors would make home buying cheaper.

Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, Michigan Senator-Elect Elissa Slotkin, and North Carolina Governor-Elect Josh Stein

The glass half empty side of the 2024 election: Yeah, pretty much everything. It’s going to fucking suck for a while. All the possibilities foreclosed upon, a demented old tyrant completely unfit for office returning to power with a blank check to do whatever he wants, and the fact that it could have been prevented if the ticket-splitters who backed Dems Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, Michigan Congresswoman now Senator-Elect Elissa Slotkin, and North Carolina Attorney General now-Governor-Elect Josh Stein had also cast their votes for Vice President Kamala Harris when you assume the likely, though not totally certain yet, event that Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen and Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego will prevail in their respective races out west.

The glass half full side of the 2024 election: If there’s one through-line from the 2022 Midterms to 2024 it’s that acting like Trump while not being Trump doesn’t work. Many versions of the following have been written and said here and there: that voters don’t believe Trump is racist (which is fucking stupid, but here we are), but they believe the GOP is. They don’t believe that Trump is anti-abortion (same) but they believe the GOP is. They believe Trump is great for the working class, but they believe the GOP is for the rich. And so on and so forth. He’s a unique figure (goddamned media euphemisms) whose appeal to the lowest common denominator greatly exceeds that of his party and most of its candidates. If that were wrong then Mark Robinson, Mike Rogers, Eric Hovde, plus (likely) Kari Lake and Sam Brown wouldn’t be looking for new jobs. It’s too early to start talking about 2026 but Trump’s proooooobably not going to get any better at endorsing candidates before what will proooooobably be a rough time for Republicans after two years of a second MAGA Reich.

Maybe that’s more like a tenth full. Still more practical than the fucking “long arc” bromides.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday ordered a new trial for Randy Halprin, one of the “Texas 7” who escaped from a Lone Star State prison in December 2000, committed a string of robberies, and killed a cop on Christmas Eve during their 40-odd days on the lam, after the panel ruled that the now retired Judge Vickers Cunningham in Dallas used racial slurs and antisemitic language to refer to Halprin and some of his co-defendants during the trial, the AP reports.

The court found evidence that throughout his life, Cunningham propagated antisemitic bullshit and, after rising to the bench, continued to use derogatory language about Jewish people outside the courtroom “with ‘great hatred, (and) disgust’ and increasing intensity as the years passed,” the court ruled. Cunningham allegedly referred to Halprin himself as a “k*ke” and a “fucking Jew” and said Jews “needed to be shut down because they controlled all the money,” during the trial.

“Today, the Court of Criminal Appeals took a step towards broader trust in the criminal law by throwing out a hopelessly tainted death judgment handed down by a bigoted and biased judge,” one of Halprin’s attorneys, Tivon Schardl, said in a statement. “It also reminded Texans that religious bigotry has no place in our courts.” Yeah, Schardl apparently said that with a straight face.

Halprin, 47, is the second-to-last survivor of the Texas Seven, as one shot himself as police approached in January 2001 and four of the others have been executed since their conviction. Another one, Patrick Murphy, awaits execution, stayed now for five years to the day over whether Murphy would be allowed to have a Buddhist chaplain with him in the lethal injection chamber.

An Oregon man is suing a fire department after an October 2022 accident in which an ambulance from the company struck him during a bike ride, breaking his nose and leaving other injuries, and then sticking him with a $1,862 bill for a ride to the hospital, The Oregonian reports.

Attorney Travis Mayor tells the Oregonian the ambulance provider, Columbia River Fire and Rescue, sent his client, 71-year-old William Hoesch, a $1,862 bill for the ambulance ride after making an abrupt right turn into his path. That’s among about $47,000 in medical expenses that Hoesch has racked up so far and another $50,000 of medical costs he expects soon, the complaint states.

You know what we really need right now? Someone with the guts and know-how to put the current situation in historical context by comparing President Joe Biden to German President Paul von Hindenburg. The writer should start pitching it to The Atlantic or the New Yorker right away.

“What two feckless and overly proud octogenarians that let economic discontent fuel the rise of a charismatic fascist have in common,” can be the sub-hed before like 12,000 words about how the US in 2021 to 2025 echoed the 1920s Weimar Republic and the interwar period in Germany. “No, Americans weren’t wheelbarrowing billions of reichsmarks to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread, but they sure felt like it every time they had to fill up their 2023 Ford Super Duty to drive to a national park to go fishing and rafting once or twice a month. That counts,” the writer can crank out.

The letters of some obscure Jewish academic based in Munich observing that about how the “podcast bros” of his day were getting rowdier and rowdier while his cohorts establishment class were too preoccupied with “enlightenment” and the petty day-to-day of their fields to notice. Of course that academic will have to have met a grim fate after the second half of the 1930s, so it’s better for this 21st century academic to pre-select their nervous German Jew as one who did not eventually escape to the United States or Mandatory Palestine. Then work backwards to find their contemporaneous writings and – Presto! – you have your “foreshadowing” element.

“Future historians may look back and summarize this way: The first reign of Kaiser Trump bookended a tumultuous period in which the rage of the masses fueled his rise as Fuhrer Trump,” the essayist could write, though maybe that’s a little too on the nose. A good PhD and/or MFA could do better.

Justice Department: “A 40-year-old Nigerian national was arrested upon his arrival at an airport in Texas on an indictment returned in the Western District of Washington. Franklin Ikechukwu Nwadialo was indicted in December 2023 for 14 counts of wire fraud connected to his romance fraud scheme. Nwadialo was traveling from Nigeria when he was arrested. Nwadialo will be transported to the Western District of Washington for arraignment. According to the indictment and criminal complaint filed in the case, Nwadialo allegedly defrauded victims of more than $3.3 million.”

“According to the indictment, Nwadialo used various versions of the name ‘Giovanni’ when he met his victims online on websites such as Match, Zoosk, and Christian Café. Nwadialo used false images for his profile and typically told the victims that he was in the military and deployed overseas so he could not meet the victims in person. Using these personas, Nwadialo invented many reasons he needed the victims to send him money. In one such case in 2020, he indicated he had been fined by the military for revealing his location to the victim. He asked the victim to help him pay the $150,000 fine. In all, that victim was defrauded of at least $2.4 million. Finally, in August 2020, Nwadialo defrauded another victim who he met on an online dating site and caused this victim to transfer at least $310,000 by claiming he needed financial assistance, including help paying for his father’s funeral or his son’s tuition. The fourteen counts of wire fraud relate to the communications with Nwadialo and the wiring of funds from victims to the defendant and his co-schemers.”

As final votes are tallied around the country, particularly in Democratic-heavy California, the Democrats’ disappointing performance in the presidential race–and the overestimation of Democratic voter enthusiasm–comes clear in one startling statistic:  Somewhere between seven and ten million people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 did not show up for Democrats in the 2024 election.

About 156 million Americans cast votes in the election.  Trump’s vote total is likely to finish up in the range of 79 million votes, around a nine percent increase from what he received in 2020. Harris’s total, however, will likely fall in the 71- to 73 million range, lower than the 81 million people who voted for Biden in 2020.

There’s a lot of data in the exit polling, but one item stands out:  52% of white women voted for Donald Trump.  In an election where women’s bodily autonomy was on the ballot in a number of states, those female voters chose to split the ticket, voting to preserve their rights to abortion, but voting for the ticket that did the most to remove those rights.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday called convicted felon President-Elect Trump to congratulate him, CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane reports on the end of the 2024 campaign.

Feeling kind of depressed now that convicted felon former President Trump is now convicted felon President-Elect Trump? Did you get owned last night? Want the pain to go away? There might be an option: You could just decide to like Trump and be excited that he’s returning to power.

Look, it could work out for you. Just start watching Fox News like four or five hours a day for the rest of the week and let the celebration of victory seep in to your psyche. You might think “Hey, maybe women’s health and basic rights are less important than that it feels like gas was cheaper in November 2020. Maybe immigrants aren’t really human and Vladimir Putin is a decent leader who was just protecting his country from globalist expansionism,” and other such propaganda.

Now we’re not recommending it so much as saying that the option’s there for you should you want to turn that frown upside-down and enjoy politics again. You can just give up. It’ll be easier than you think. A week or two of consuming right wing media would probably do it. Uncritical thinking is available to you. We understand if you want to do it. Just give it a shot if you want to be happy.

A raccoon suddenly fell through a ceiling panel above the Spirit Airlines gate at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport on Monday, with the little fucker caught and released outdoors by Port Authority cops later that morning after a frenzied chase through the terminal, the New York Post reports.

The incursion has prompted an investigation and a new effort to prevent future breaches by raccoons and other similarly-sized wild animals. “To ensure safety, airport staff is working closely with a professional wildlife control company to monitor the area, identify potential entry points, and implement necessary precautions,” the Port Authority said. “Ongoing inspections and follow-up efforts are in place to prevent future incidents.” It’s not clear if the animal came from outside or arrived on a flight. The second possibility should not be ruled out given that it’s Spirit Airlines.

“Rafael continues to intensify as it approaches western Cuba. Deep convection within the hurricane’s Central Dense Overcast (CDO) is very intense, with cloud tops colder than -80 deg C.”

“There are also strong convective banding features surrounding the CDO. Observations from an Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft indicate a closed eyewall at times, with the central pressure falling at a rate of around 2 mb per hour. Based on the highest flight-level winds reported from the aircraft so far, the current intensity is set at 80 kt for this advisory. Rafael’s inner core is relatively small in size, with hurricane-force winds extending about 25 n mi from its 10-15 n mi wide eye.”

“The hurricane continues its northwestward trek, and the initial motion is a slightly faster 315/12 kt. For the next day or two, Rafael should continue to move along the southwestern side of a mid-level high pressure system and move over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico through Thursday night. After 48 hours the track guidance becomes very divergent, with a number of model solutions taking the system toward the southwest Gulf in 3-4 days. It appears that, during the latter part of the forecast period, a mid-level ridge could build to the north of the tropical cyclone. This could force Rafael to turn to the west or south of west in 4 to 5 days. In order to maintain continuity from the previous NHC predictions, the official track forecast is shifted to the left of the previous one, but not as far as dictated by the latest model consensus. If future model runs continue to show this trend, however, additional leftward adjustment to the NHC track may be required,” says an NOAA bulletin.

Enjoy these while they last. Might not be getting such accurate information next year.

Fuck it. Might as well just call it and if by some miracle we have to walk it back we’ll be thrilled to do it. Trump wins, Harris loses, everything in America’s going to be shit for a while. Or forever.

The vice president ran a hell of a campaign, the loss isn’t on her. There’s only so much her team could do in a fucked up information environment. We can’t put it on the people who voted for what they believed to be their economic interest either because blaming voters is for the weak. That said, many will end up regretting it. And when that time comes they can blame themselves.

Feel free to disconnect from politics for a few months. It’s the only way to preserve your mental health and fortitude for the coming tribulations. Believe it, they are coming. We’re now about to find out what happens when a vengeful tyrant tries to deport 15 or 20 million people en masse and dramatically raise prices on all virtually every product consumers buy. That’s when all the “I was better off under Trump” voters are going to start feeling some buyer’s remorse.

American democracy has been dealt a massive, perhaps fatal blow. But the resistance to his misrule in 2017 through 2021 was an extremely fierce and formidable rage from those who would and could not abide the cruelty and incompetence. Trump is going to be worse. A lot worse. He’s going to go too far and it’s going to ignite a fire that could finally for once and for all consume him.

So stay tuned for National Zero on that. In the meantime we’re probably going to have to run more articles about animals, UFOs, and fast food products just to stay sane after this gut punch.

This is it ladies and gents. Tonight decides what tomorrow knows… Well actually it’s all but already been decided. The revelation of that decision is when we know whether January 21, 2025 dawns on a democracy or a dysfunctional police state that would make Idi Amin facepalm.