Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
The New Era of Space Travel
Following-up, "Jeff Bezos Blasts Into Space Aboard Blue Origin (VIDEO)."
At the Los Angeles Times, "Jeff Bezos launches new era of space travel with Blue Origin ride":
VAN HORN, Texas — The New Shepard rocket rumbled to life early Tuesday, catapulting Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and three others to the edge of space and allowing the world’s richest person to achieve a childhood dream. Back on Earth, spaceflight enthusiasts saw the brief voyage as the realization of decades of promise — the beginning of a new era for space tourism. “Space tourism is finally here,” said Alan Ladwig, author of the book “See You in Orbit? Our Dream of Spaceflight.” “It’s still going to be expensive, it’s still not going to be something everybody can do right away, but it’s a first step.” Bezos’ suborbital flight — his company Blue Origin’s first crewed launch — came a little over a week after British billionaire Richard Branson along with five others boarded a space plane built by his Virgin Galactic firm and flew to the edge of space and back, making it there ahead of Bezos, who had announced his plans earlier. Virgin Galactic plans to complete two more test flights before it begins flying paying customers to space next year. Although Blue Origin flew its first paying customer on Tuesday’s flight — 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the son of a Dutch private equity executive and now the youngest person to go to space — it has yet to announce seat prices or additional details about its commercial operations. During a livestream of Tuesday’s launch, Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s director of astronaut sales, repeatedly encouraged interested customers to email the company. Already the company is approaching $100 million in private sales, Bezos told an assembled audience of guests, employees and reporters after the launch. An auction for a seat on Tuesday’s flight ended with a winning bid of $28 million, but the ticket holder, whose identity has not been disclosed, postponed the trip, citing scheduling conflicts, according to Blue Origin. They will fly on a future mission. (Proceeds from the auction for a spot on Tuesday’s launch went to the Club for the Future foundation, which was founded by Blue Origin and is aimed at promoting science, technology, engineering and math careers. From those proceeds, 19 nonprofit organizations were selected to receive $1-million grants.) But suborbital flights aren’t the company’s only goal; Blue Origin plans to build a family of larger rockets that could hoist cargo, satellites and people to orbit and beyond, eventually creating an ecosystem to allow millions of people to live and work in space. Bezos has previously suggested building cylindrical habitats with artificial gravity known as O’Neill colonies, after the physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who pioneered the idea. “Big things start small,” Bezos said Tuesday. “We’re going to build a road to space so that our kids and their kids can build the future.” The seeming arrival of the era of suborbital space tourism after years of hype has fueled public debate around the increasing commercialization of space and the role that billionaires play in the industry. After his flight, Bezos thanked Amazon employees and customers, saying, “You guys paid for all this.” He has previously said he has sold about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin...
Well, you can't say the man ain't got the money. *Shrug.*
Still more.
Kate Upton Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2013
Don't see much of this woman anymore, but hot damn she's got some of the finest honkers around.
Satellite Images of Western Wildfires (VIDEO)
The "Bootleg fire" in Oregon's at the video, but hundreds of fires are blazing across the American west.
At the New York Times, "How Bad Is the Bootleg Fire? It’s Generating Its Own Weather":
A towering cloud of hot air, smoke and moisture that reached airliner heights and spawned lightning. Wind-driven fronts of flame that have stampeded across the landscape, often leapfrogging firebreaks. Even, possibly, a rare fire tornado. The Bootleg Fire in Southern Oregon, spurred by months of drought and last month’s blistering heat wave, is the largest wildfire so far this year in the United States, having already burned more than 340,000 acres, or 530 square miles, of forest and grasslands. And at a time when climate change is causing wildfires to be larger and more intense, it’s also one of the most extreme, so big and hot that it’s affecting winds and otherwise disrupting the atmosphere. The Bootleg Fire has been burning for two weeks, and for most of that time it’s exhibited one or more forms of extreme fire behavior, leading to rapid changes in winds and other conditions that have caused flames to spread rapidly in the forest canopy, ignited whole stands of trees at once, and blown embers long distances, rapidly igniting spot fires elsewhere. “It’s kind of an extreme, dangerous situation,” said Chuck Redman, a forecaster with the National Weather Service who has been at the fire command headquarters providing forecasts. Fires so extreme that they generate their own weather confound firefighting efforts. The intensity and extreme heat can force wind to go around them, create clouds and sometimes even generate so-called fire tornadoes — swirling vortexes of heat, smoke and high wind. The catastrophic Carr Fire near Redding, Calif., in July 2018 was one of those fires, burning through 230,000 acres, destroying more than 1,600 structures and leading to the deaths of at least eight people, some of which were attributed to a fire tornado with winds as high as 140 miles per hour that was captured on video...
Also, cool map here: "Tracking Western Wildfires."
Armed Citizen Defends Himself in Los Angeles Robbery Attempt
Regular folks are packing heat --- and this is in far-left Los Angeles, dang.
At Fox News, "Would-be robbers shot by armed shoppers in Los Angeles: Victim in Los Angeles was standing in a parking lot when the would-be robbers rolled in."
New Covid Cases Surging in California
And cases in Los Angeles shot up 240% month over month.
I was up in Burbank shopping on Sunday, and I forgot L.A. County reimposed the mask mandate. I stepped into the Barnes and Noble up there and the woman at the counter wouldn't help me without a mask. I'm darn lucky I had a couple in the car, but damn I had to huff it back out the the parking garage to retrieve one. The O.C., so far, ain't going with a new mandate, and thank the Lord for that, sheesh.
At the Los Angeles Times, "California coronavirus hospitalizations hit highest point in months as Delta spreads":
A spate of new coronavirus infections is striking California’s healthcare system, pushing COVID-19 hospitalizations to levels not seen since early spring — lending new urgency to efforts to tamp down transmission as a growing number of counties urge residents to wear masks indoors. Statewide, the number of coronavirus patients in the hospital more than doubled in the last month, and the numbers have accelerated further in the last two weeks. Even with the recent increase, though, the state’s healthcare system is nowhere near as swamped as it was during the fall-and-winter surge. And many health experts are confident that California will never see numbers on that scale again, given how many residents are vaccinated. But with the continued spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, which officials fear could mushroom in communities with lower inoculation rates, the next few weeks are key in determining how potent the pandemic’s latest punch may be. The recent increases confirm that nearly everyone falling seriously ill from COVID-19 at this point is unvaccinated. “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And so, if you care about getting back to normalcy once and for all, please get vaccinated,” Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters Tuesday. Still, L.A. County Health Services Director Dr. Christina Ghaly said Tuesday that “the individual consequences of a choice not to get vaccinated can be dire for that person and his or her family and friends.” Ghaly said seeing a continued stream of COVID-19 patients, the vast majority of whom are unvaccinated, triggers a range of emotions in healthcare workers who have long been on the front lines of the pandemic: frustration, sadness and “some level of disbelief that, after all of the pain and suffering that we’ve all seen … there’s still people who either don’t believe it or don’t believe that it can affect them.” The highest-risk Californians — notably the elderly — have been vaccinated at high rates. But the numbers drop off for younger segments of the population, and children under the age of 12 still aren’t eligible to be vaccinated. “I think sometimes the mentality is that people think, ‘Well, I’m not going to get that sick. I’m going to be OK. I’m not going to die from COVID; I’m young; I’m healthy,’ ” Ghaly said. “And I can tell you, hopefully that’s the case, but that’s not necessarily the case.” From June 22 to July 6, the daily number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in California increased from 978 to 1,228, a nearly 26% bump, state data show...
Still more.
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
Haiti's New Day?
A new prime minister was sworn in today.
At the New York Times, "A New Day in Haiti? Many Haitians Have Their Doubts":
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Gerard Lovius falls asleep at night on the floor of an empty classroom to the sound of gunfire. He and his shellshocked neighbors started living there a month ago, after gang members invaded his home, sending his terrified wife and three children running to the streets and leaving him with nothing: no money, no possessions, not even a cellphone. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Lovius was back at his job as a street cleaner, tidying up before the day’s stately memorial for Haiti’s assassinated leader in the Champs de Mars, the capital’s main square. President Jovenel Moïse would soon be laid to rest, and the sparring members of his government had just reached a truce, vowing to lead the country anew. But there was little peace in Mr. Lovius’s life. “We have hope only in God,” he said, hauling a wheelbarrow of trash up the street. Haiti’s leaders have called the political truce a new chapter, a historic turning of the page that, in the words of the interim prime minister, shows “that we can actually work together, even if we are different, even if we have different world outlooks.” But for many in country, it does not seem like a change. The list of cabinet ministers published in the government’s official gazette featured several familiar names from Mr. Moïse’s governing party, including the new prime minister and the new foreign minister, both of whom had been angling to take over since the president was killed. “This is a provocation,” Pierre Espérance, the executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, said of the party’s control of the new government. “It means the crisis will continue, insecurity will continue, and the gangs will continue.” He argued that Mr. Moïse was a victim of his own rule, a leader who “died because of the insecurity his party created.” Two years ago, violence and furious demonstrators condemning corruption and demanding the president’s ouster locked the country in place — keeping the sick from hospitals, children from school, workers from rare jobs and people in the dark in areas where electricity stopped flowing. Gangs have become more brazen since then, controlling large parts of the capital, attacking at will, kidnapping children on their way to school and pastors in the middle of delivering their services. “The country is going to remain in the same condition, unless they get their heads together,” Rosemane Jean Louis, said shortly before the memorial began and the new government took office. “We have no security. We are hungry. We are in misery.” Ms. Jean Louis recounted how she had casually said goodbye to her son, 24, one day last year, not knowing it would be the last time. With a smile, he had grabbed a piece of candy from the pile of treats she sold outside their home, then continued on his way to meet a friend. He made it a block, she said, before being shot dead by gang members in front of a church. “I didn’t even find his body,” said Ms. Jean Louis, 61, tears falling. “They took it with them.” Crime, kidnappings, gangs, security: the words streamed from Haitians across the capital as dignitaries paid their respects to the assassinated president on Tuesday and his successors took the helm. Even as rival politicians made claims and counterclaims to replace Mr. Moïse, residents were still in the streets protesting — often because they felt certain that their new leaders, whoever might prevail, would not care about them.
The place is in bad shape.
Keep reading.
Tomi Lahren on Outnumbered
She makes a good point on Cuba, and how folks are "finally waking up" to Marxism.
She's up first.
Watch (she speaks from the beginning):
Kaia Gerber on the Cover of Vogue
This isn't the first time, apparently.
And dang! I'm gobsmacked, sheesh.
She's only 19! They say she's the most successful model in the world. Pfft. Of course, she's Cindy Crawford's daughter. How's that for white privilege!
See, "Girl Interrupted: The Education of Kaia Gerber":
“For a long time, I thought my face and my body had more to say than I did, because that’s what people thought of me,” Kaia Gerber says. At only 19, Gerber is one of the most successful models in the world and so, to many, a highly controlled, highly burnished product sold to millions on Instagram and beyond. On the gorgeous early-spring day when she and I meet at the reservoir at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, which we are set to loop around, accompanied by Gerber’s enthusiastic rescue mix Milo, her manner is preternaturally poised, that of a remarkably tall and beautiful child who has learned early in life how to talk to adults. Who is Kaia Gerber, really? With a smile or a glance, a well-placed word or a keen observation, she will signal that she is thinking hard about that very question—and beginning to come up with some answers. “I always wanted to be good and easy, not to make trouble,” she says, “but when you do that, you sometimes end up losing your voice.”
Gerber is aware that she has been lucky during a merciless year. She’s had her parents’ house in Malibu, for one thing. “We have a sort of compound with a garden, and a big lawn, and the beach that we could go to every day,” she says. “I’m not blind to the fact that we’ve been incredibly blessed.” Gerber and her brother, Presley, who is two years her senior, have grown up in the seemingly picture-perfect circumstances of Southern California royalty. Their parents are the entrepreneur Rande Gerber, who counts among his endeavors the Casamigos tequila brand, founded with good family friend George Clooney, and Cindy Crawford, one of the most iconic American supermodels of the past half century, whose likeness to her daughter has been a popular subject for clickbait listicles ever since Gerber began modeling. Still, emotionally speaking, Gerber’s last months have been ones of change and transition. “I was always so concentrated on work, and suddenly that was gone. And so for the first time, I could no longer focus on everything outside,” she says. “I was forced to go internal. Work was always a really easy excuse not to do that.” She was only 13 when she began modeling—shooting for Italian Vogue with Steven Meisel and posing alongside Presley for a CR Fashion Book portfolio by Bruce Weber. As her career kicked into high gear a couple of years later, Gerber transitioned to an online course load at Malibu High, the local public school she and her brother both attended, walking distance from Zuma Beach, where kids would tote surfboards to class, as if in a real-life version wof a Beach Boys song. She became an instant runway sensation. “When Kaia started to model, she jumped right into it, loved it, and immediately wanted to do everything,” Crawford tells me by phone from Malibu. “I was very protective at first, and I traveled with her to fashion month. But Kaia has her head on straight.”...
No doubt it's pretty easy to "keep your head on straight when your parents are SoCal "royalty." Damn. *Eye-roll.*
Today's Shopping
At Amazon, Today's Deals. New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.
And especially, Practical Power: Luminoodle LED Light Rope - USB Powered Outdoor LED String + Camping Lantern - Waterproof Lights for Tents, Hiking, Safety, Emergencies.
Also, LEGACY HEATING Rectangular Fire Pit Table, Mocha powder coated finish.
And, Millennium Assorted Energy Bars (6 Count) - Long Shelf Life Fruit flavored Bar Bundle - Survival Pack for Calamity, Disaster, Hiking and Meal replacement - with Emergency Guide.
More, Mountain House Just In Case...Breakfast Bucket.
Plus, Koffee Kult - Medium Roast Coffee Beans (2 lb Whole Bean) Highest Quality Delicious Coffee - Fresh Gourmet Aromatic Artisan Blend - Packaging May Vary.
BONUS: Tim Bouverie, Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
