It is also (mostly) that he says it… so poorly.
His wished-for bombast… has become nothing more than a frail 98 lbs., 90-something year old geezer weakly breathing as he half whispers…
“Stay off my lawn…”
Pretty pathetic, John.
Out.
Category: Uncategorized
[Twitter Tangent:] Mr. Musk Supposedly Just Let His ~$13 Billion Worth Of Lending Commits Know… That He Will Close “By THIS Friday”.
No official SEC filings have appeared yet (late on Tuesday evening), but if this is accurate, it is plainly material.
The lenders had, collectively… previously suggested some skepticism about whether Musk would go forward, given that he is in the midst of Delaware litigation (with the Twitter board) that seeks to compel him to close on the original price and structure — in short, to enforce the contract he signed (which until a few weeks ago, he was obviously and loudly resisting). [But to be clear, the lending commitments expiring would not be a good reason to abandon the deal, if Musk caused the expiration — by foot-dragging.]
Here’s how Bloomberg puts the state of the play, at midday today:
…Elon Musk pledged Monday to close the acquisition of Twitter Inc. by Friday in a video conference call with bankers helping fund the deal, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The banks, which are providing $13 billion of debt financing, have finished putting together the final credit agreement and are in the process of signing the documentation, one of the last steps before actually sending the cash to Musk, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a private transaction….
The original acquisition agreements recited a deadline for the deal, under which the lenders’ commitments would (by contract) expire, if the deal hadn’t closed — by end of October 2022.
Thus, this may all go right down to the wire, then — maybe even into the late afternoon hours Eastern, on Halloween — the 31st. We shall see.
Mr. Biden Will See His Student Loans Relief Plan Begin, Shortly… Eighth Circuit Will Side With Him.
The Eighth Circuit will shortly dump the appeal of these states. You may bank on it. They lost at the trial court level (without need for any trial, at all), due to their fundamental lack of standing — to even bring a claim like this. The states cannot complain about how the President implements a spending provision, from the Congress, duly enacted.
The government has laid it all bare, in its overnight brief. Here’s a bit of that excellent 37 page brief:
…In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Secretaries from two Administrations invoked that authority to suspend interest accrual and payments on federally held student loans. As those protections wind down, the Secretary reasonably determined it necessary to provide targeted debt relief to federal student-loan borrowers affected by the pandemic. Six States seek to enjoin the Secretary’s action, but the district court correctly held they lack standing.
Plaintiffs cannot establish the need for injunctive relief. Plaintiffs do not have Article III standing, and even if they did, they are unlikely to succeed on their claims given Congress’s authorization for the Secretary’s action and the Secretary’s explicit consideration of the relevant factors….
Now you know — smiling, in the soft cool rains, as I head out, to the steel and glass canyons, once more….
नमस्ते
About 1,000 Times Clearer, Than The Earlier, Stunning Hubble Images — Individual Solar-System-Sized Objects Resolved, Inside Dark Clouds…
Shown here in “representational” colors, so that our human eyes can see through the dark, dusty gray and brownish clouds (all that would be visible to the naked eye, in wavelengths we might resolve), inside the so-called Pillars of Creation — these stunning details emerge from inside the clouds, as imaged by the new space ‘scope.
The images assign reds and yellows to areas of “newly heating” star formation, in the centers of the dark clouds. That way, we can resolve what the 15,000 pixels at-a-throw “heat maps” are showing us. But in these reddish regions, hydrogen fusion has not yet begun. [The current masthead, at lower right, covers a portion of the images at right.] Our understanding of how stars at the earliest stages form, inside these clouds… is making geometric leaps, daily now. And in unprecedented detail, too — the areas are hot, at thousands of degrees — but not yet… a fusion furnace-driven millions of degrees, in white light. What a time to be… alive!
Here’s the story, from Space.com’s excellent and comprehensive backgrounder:
…The protostars that [redacted] sees are not fully there yet, only beginning to glow in the infrared light as they warm above the coldness of the surrounding cloud, which is no warmer than minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 degrees Celsius), said Ward-Thompson.
“These young stars that we see in the image are not yet burning hydrogen,” Ward-Thompson said. “But gradually, as more and more material falls in, the middle becomes denser and denser, and then suddenly, it becomes so dense that the hydrogen burning switches on, and then suddenly their temperature jumps up to about 2 million degrees Celsius [35 million degrees F].”
In some of the larger bright red patches in the image, several stars are bursting out at once. Elsewhere, their heat has not yet broken through the surrounding dust….
Each of those red dots that you can only see when you zoom into the image covers an area larger than our solar system. The whole image, 15,000 pixels wide, captures an area some 8 to 9 light years-across.
“You can resolve things that are about the size of our solar system in the image,” Koekemoer said. “If there were individual planets like Jupiter, you wouldn’t be able to resolve those….”
The reds and oranges and golds… look very much like what is swirling about on my deck this morning (also under dark clouds)… smiling — ever smiling.
नमस्ते
A VERY Worthy Read, Given The Powerline Boys’ Regular Shilling For Candace Owens, And Her Hatred Tours.
I’ll just post it — been re-sampled acapella since at least 2000-1500 BC — for certain.
Out. See ‘ya, Ye — and Candace.
Overnight, Nine New Cases In Kampala — The Capital City, And The Main International Airport… For Uganda…
This is disturbing news. And on the other side of the coin, the Health Ministry had said over the weekend that the lockdowns in the two districts (Kasanda and Mubende) not including the capital city would last only three more weeks. I think that early lifting is unwise — but I do understand that it would be nearly impossible to lock down Kampala.
It would seem that the populace is already skeptical of government public health efforts… and so, I think the authorities are now balancing what (scientifically) should be done… against what can be done, without widespread political unrest. And closing all businesses in a city of 1.5 million or so people is not an option, politically. Here’s the latest, via Reuters:
…Uganda has reported nine more Ebola cases in the capital Kampala, bringing the total number of known infections to 14 in the last two days, the health minister said on Monday….
Seven of the nine who tested positive on Sunday are family members of the man who died and are from the Kampala neighbourhood of Masanafu, Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng said in a tweet.
Another is a health worker who treated the man and his wife in a private clinic, she said.
“Fellow Ugandans, let’s be vigilant. Report yourself if you have had contact or know of a person who has had contact,” Aceng said in her tweet….
Now you know — and keep a good thought that cooler heads prevail inside Kampala, in the coming weeks — this is a very dangerous moment. People need to be smart enough to save their own lives there [and here, as we saw with COVID in 2020-’21].
नमस्ते
Hinderaker Thinks “Quality Public School Education” EXCLUDES… Respecting Differences.
Y A W N.
Tonight John complains that MSM in Minnesota label his 501(c)(4)’s push to “train” local school board candidates as pushing “social issues”.
He wants it reframed as “quality” education.
But his 501(c)(4) teaches prospective board members to oppose recognizing gay people… as fully formed humans, or being accepting of the notion that not everyone wants “Christian” messages pushed in public schools. And that many people DO feel that racial minorities and indigenous peoples’ history is not covered fairly in many older (still in use) teaching materials.
But that is — in my view — exactly why the MSM is spot-on in labeling his efforts “pushing a social agenda.”
Me? I might’ve called it… advocating for a “regressive sociological curricula”.
That too would be… accurate.
Hinderaker is the lady that doth protest too greatly, here.
Out. Sit, John.
A Dense Cosmic Knot in The Early Universe; And A “Halo” Of Dark Matter Around It…
This is the answer to the overnight puzzler in the masthead at right.
This is not one proto-galaxy, but in fact… three of them. They are orbiting each other at extremely high speeds. That in turn would indicate a great deal of mass is present near the centrifugal center of the three. When combined with how closely they are packed into the region around this quasar, the team believes this marks one of the densest known areas of galaxy formation in the early universe.
The team thinks they could be seeing a region where two massive “halos” of dark matter are merging together. This dark matter is an invisible component of the universe that holds galaxies and galaxy clusters together. In this image, dark matter is forming a “halo” that extends beyond the stars, to hold all of them tightly together, revolving speedily around one another.
A “shepherding moon” effect — but on the hundreds of thousands of light years scale, very early in the known universe. Thus this is very, very far away — since this light only recently reached us. Whoosh! Here is the full story, from the Goddard team, at NASA:
…Previous studies by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories called attention to the quasar’s powerful outflows, and astronomers had speculated that its host galaxy could be merging with some unseen partner. But the team was not expecting [redacted’s] NIRSpec data to clearly indicate it was not just one galaxy, but at least three more swirling around it. Thanks to spectra over a broad area, the motions of all this surrounding material could be mapped, resulting in the conclusion that the red quasar was in fact part of a dense knot of galaxy formation.
“There are few galaxy protoclusters known at this early time. It’s hard to find them, and very few have had time to form since the big bang,” said astronomer Dominika Wylezalek of Heidelberg University in Germany, who led the study with [the newest ‘scope]. “This may eventually help us understand how galaxies in dense environments evolve. It’s an exciting result.”
Using the observations from NIRSpec, the team was able to confirm three galactic companions to this quasar and show how they are connected. Archival data from Hubble hint that there may be even more. Images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 had shown extended material surrounding the quasar and its galaxy, prompting its selection for this study into its outflow and the effects on its host galaxy. Now, the team suspects they could have been looking at the core of a whole cluster of galaxies — only now revealed by [redacted’s] crisp imaging….
And this puts us in mind of a winter’s night, six years ago, when we last discussed shepherd moons at length, and the poetry that arrives with them. Here is that bit:
…Waterlilies soon and a Pleiku of dragonflies.
Shipwrecked fleets of naked limbs…
buried at sea — wrapped
in a starmap of the sky….I will forget I am aging. I will be a medicine bag
of healing metaphors and powerful occult charms… I will
lie down upon the earth in the unassuming grass
after I’ve finished painting, fascinated by the…
stranger I’ve become to myself, listening deeply
to the picture music of the life of the mind like a kid
with forty-eight crayons and the whole of the sky to draw on
as I wait for the stars to make themselves apparent
in the sweet, sweet darkness that envelopes me…
in the [copper-colored] flames and [deep-]violet shadows of another
[exquisite] martyr — to the cause of keeping their fires alive within me,
a dragonfly in a chrysalis, a hermit thrush in ecstasy,
a sulphur butterfly with antennae like burnt match sticks
looking for a light from the lanterns of the nightwatch
reigniting the passions of old poems like fireflies
inspiring the ashes in the urns of the stars to enlighten their afterlife…
fracturing koans like diamond insights into
a labyrinthine gallery of mirrors that see me
with the same eyes by which I see signs
of the disastrous happiness of life in them….
With that, I will quite easily drift off to sleep, shepherded once more, by my own moon-lette — somewhere, to the South, out there… smile. G’night….
नमस्ते
Hinderaker: Unable To Grasp That Decent Businesses… Shun Him, On The Merits.
Tonight John complains that gmail and mailchimp, among others, have decided not to let their services be easily deployed by racists, insurrectionists and their close supporters.
Y A W N.
That is, Powerline has seen its outbound e-mail blasts to certain mailing lists… relegated to recipients’ spam folders. “Oh! The humanities!” (As intoned by the immortal radio announcer who was struck dumb, as the Hindenburg exploded in flames above Lakehurst, New Jersey — almost ninety years ago, now.)
Perhaps if the boys did not generate so much spam-mail (via their right wing commercial partners)… they would not feel this pinch. I dunno… crazy idea, that.
But Hinderaker tries to reframe it all as pernicious “viewpoint” discrimination.
Supporting the 01.06 terror attackers, and supporting the domestic terrorists who plotted to kidnap Michigan’s Governor… all while firing off racist tropes… is his reality checked stance. Supporting terror: not a good look.
Grow up, John.
Again, A Bevy Of Former Federal Prosecutors Have Filed A Humdinger Of An Amici Brief, Against Cannon, And Tangerine In The 11th…
Again overnight, the dozens of former US prosecutors (both Ds and Rs) have filed a muscular brief to oppose Tangerine’s efforts to avoid the natural consequences of flauting dozens of criminal (federal felony) statutes, through wholly-supine USDC Judge Aileen Cannon’s unhinged trial court rulings. To re-tool a long out of date phrase (since we’ve already referenced Abbott and Costello this morning!)… it is a… HUMDINGER! Heh.
Do go read all 29 pages — but this is the main theme. It is clearly correct; Tangerine will lose this appeal:
…The district court’s order repeatedly granted the plaintiff in this case, former President Donald J. Trump, procedural rights and protections that are not afforded to other criminal defendants and subjects of criminal investigations. This special treatment of one private citizen by virtue of his former status runs contrary to well-established caselaw. But, even more important, the analysis employed by the district court is antithetical to the central principle in this country that everyone should be treated equally by the law….
[In addition,] well-established caselaw… holds that a threat of future prosecution and potential reputational injury is never sufficient to establish irreparable injury….
In the decades of experience Amici collectively have in state and federal law enforcement, Amici have never observed a court treat the subject of a criminal investigation with such solicitude simply because the subject used to be a public official. In Amici’s experience, it is critical to the rule of law that the subjects of criminal investigations be treated equally, regardless of their former occupation….
Now you know. With the “grown folk’s pumpkin carving competition” tomorrow afternoon, and a pot roast feast, thereafter! I think there will be martinis — too, but I’ll have a fine root beer float. Grinning, here….
नमस्ते
