"Private Astronaut"

OK, US media – and aerospace-related trade media, I’m especially looking at YOU – it’s time to cut the goddamn crap and quit calling these knobs “private astronauts” and call them what they are: “rich-ass motherfuckers who can afford to have themselves shot into space”, especially this Isaacman clown who could afford to have himself shot into space twice, and on the second flight performed the most useless-ass excuse for an EVA ever. Even Alexei Leonov was out longer, and actually managed to gather significant scientific and engineering data while in the process of getting back into the spacecraft without accidentally killing himself.

But yeah, sure… the standard-issue tech entrepreneur who has near-zero training or experience in aerospace engineering or program management or flying high-performance jet aircraft at all but who made himself a massive pile off a payment processing company he supposedly started as a teenager in his parents’ basement (your standard tech-bro rags-to-riches saga) and so was able to pay to have himself shot into space twice and who is best buds with Elon Musk is, according to the Donster, the ideal choice for NASA Administrator. Yeah, that’s right — the goddamn “private astronaut”.

We’re fucked on Earth, and fucked in space.

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Stop Overreacting!

(Inspiration: thanks @pogglerebecca.bsky.social)

So — exactly how comically bad ARE Liberals, Centrists and other mutant beasts in the Democratic Party Zoo going to get about this shit? Schumer, Pelosi, AOC, “and the rest” are basically selling us out and handing us over to the Fascists, like “m’eh, waddya gonna do…?” right out in front of Jah and everybody, and the Liberal/Centrist crowd tells us to stop “overreacting”.

Well, hell — they aren’t the ones who are being criminalized and terrorized for merely existing, so of course.

Assholes.

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Fashionably Fashy

“Not a single Roman work of art — sculpture, coinage, or painting — displays a salute of the kind that is found in Fascism, Nazism, and related ideologies… It is also unknown to Roman literature and is never mentioned by ancient historians of either republican or imperial Rome. The gesture of the raised right arm or hand in Roman and other ancient cultures that is attested in surviving art and literature had a significantly different function and is never identical with the modern straight-arm salute.”
— Martin Winkler, in “The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology”

…just in case you run into any fashy apologists or Musk symps trying to explain it away by saying it’s a “Roman Salute”.

So just cut the crap already, ‘cos all the wide-open fash are wide-open loving it and — like the original — the Early 21st sequel also features craven-ass collaborators, in the form of the Democratic Party.

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A Successful Launch

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship. Thank you to our customers, Cameron County, and the wider community for the continued support and encouragement. And congratulations to the entire Space team on an exciting first flight test of Starship!”
— SpaceX statement 04.20.2023

“Where’s the KABOOM?
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!”
— Marvin The Martian

So, I was hitting some sativa bud and banging my head on the table the other day trying to shake loose a decent France uprising cartoon, and THIS weirdness fell out. I’d given up on a France cartoon at the moment and was just doing my daily space geekery, reading about the spectacular SpaceX launch failure and the attendant “hah, I MEANT to do that” spin from SpaceX, when I found my train of thought wandering to the Twitter valuation crash and the Paid Blue Check shitshow and was suddenly, like…

…like, yeah; Musk was really laughing off the Twitter valuation and the hot mess about the paid Blue Check accounts that’s been all over the news lately, and then a day or two later another one of his goddamn Starship tests goes sideways on him and the SpaceX PAO flacks are babbling a bunch of balloon juice about how much they learned today, and it was one of those moments of inspiration and serendipity that screamed “quit twisting your panties trying to think of a France cartoon for a moment and jump on THIS shit, man! Here it is!” Like, yeah — crashing and burning, in metaphor and reality.

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Elon Musk's FashFone™ by PhoneX

 

After Elon Musk bought Twitter, declared it a "free speech zone", started letting all the fascists back in and shutting down the Left, there was some understandable online rioting this week, and the predictable calls from America's boutique anarchist media to join an exodus to Mastodon. Oh, how I laughed. 

So, late last week, Apple and Google finally got off their goddamn duffs and declared that Twitter would be shut out of the Google Play and Apple App stores if the enabling of fascist hate speech and harassment was allowed to continue. Musk, at his very Muskmost, announced that he would develop his own brand of smartphone whose App Shoppe would allow Twitter.

...which basically leaves Gab and Parler in a spot, when you think about it. Now, you don't have to go to some seedy, fringey fascist social-media site to spew your shit; you can just go to Twitter.

Sometimes these gags draw themselves.

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For All Pigkind no.2: To Oligarchy, And Beyond!

So, Jeff Bezos thinks he can tug at my old Boomer heartstrings by sending up 90 year-old William Shatner (and his toupee) on Blue Origin's latest suborbital joyride, while continuing to shit on his workers and dodge taxes. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has opened new vistas in whiny excuses for not paying taxes on his obscene wealth by puking up a bunch of balloon juice about Mars and "the light of consciousness". Nice try, guys — but, no. Also a big "no" to these guys at the Space Review trying to spin it as an important insight into the effects of microgravity on old rich and famous people.

My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2021

And elsewhere in the Space Review, one of their regulars can't shut up about the "normalization of space tourism" — for anyone who's so goddamn rich they have the price of a long weekend at the ISS lying around under their sofa cushions.

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God Damn You All To Hell

Saturday Night Live died with John Belushi. That's it. That's the blog post.

 

pic.twitter.com/ziirugIcaf

— Miley Ray Cyrus (@MileyCyrus) April 24, 2021

 

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Tough Decisions at Tesla

So... after a week or two of stomping his little feet and threatening to hold his breath until he turned blue, spoiled rotten rich punk Elon Musk re-opened his Tesla plant in California in defiance of that state's "stay-at-home" order, because he couldn't stand to lose a penny of profit on his overpriced electric hot rods.

Subsequently, this past Tuesday, Sputnik International published this report on the situation headlined Tesla Workers Faced With Tough Decisions as Elon Musk Re-Opens California Factory...

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