While I am sure that something interesting is happening here, I expect to be inundated by endless social media posts and videos from uninformed aviation geeks.
Mike Relja, a retiree in his late 70s, received an unexpected job offer from NASA about a month ago.
The assignment: Help put a former NASA-operated Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird back in the air after a nearly 27-year hiatus.
Relja, an ex-U.S. Air Force and NASA test engineer for the SR-71A, could not believe his ears. David Ash, a former U.S. Navy and Joby test pilot who was hired in June as a special projects director for NASA, asked Relja to provide his expertise for a secret effort to return a long-retired and neglected Blackbird to flight.
“I told the guy, ‘You know, I’m too old to be doing this,’” Relja recalls to Aviation Week. “‘I wish you well. I’d like to see you make it. It would be interesting. But I just don’t think you can get there from here.’”
It appears NASA is going to try.
At some point early this year—certainly before May 17 and perhaps even before April, according to commercial satellite imagery acquired by Aviation Week—agency employees removed the SR-71A with Tail No. 844 from a display pole near the corners of Lilly and Walker Avenues at the Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards AFB, California.
I appreciate that NASA might have a need for the aircraft, my guess is launching of scramjet test vehicles, why couldn't they have they kept it a secret?
This is despite the fact that Vindman outraised and outspent her by almost 17:1.
In an upset for the Democratic establishment, progressive Angie Nixon won the party’s US Senate primary in Florida, beating former army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman.
Nixon,
a state representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of
America, had significantly less funding going into the primary – with
$975,000 to Vindman’s $16.3m at the end of July, according to Florida Politics.
Vindman
served on the national security council in Donald Trump’s first term
and became a well-known whistleblower and witness in the president’s
first impeachment, centered on Trump pressuring Volodymyr Zelenskyy,
Ukraine’s president, to investigate Joe Biden.
………
Nixon, who was born in
Jacksonville, has aggressively opposed DeSantis’s policies, including
with a sit-in at the governor’s office this spring to protest Republican
redistricting, the Miami Herald reported. That demonstration resulted in her facing misdemeanor charges of trespassing and resisting, which she is fighting in court.
Vindman’s campaign had been focused on Moody, not his primary opponent, and he did not agree to debate Nixon, despite her public calls for him to take the stage with her.
Also in Florida, the state's most reprehensible Democrat, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, succeeded in her effort to Bigfoot her way into a predominantly black district, because competitive elections are for suckers.
But establishment Democrats prevailed in other Florida races this week, in the first election in the state after redistricting. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, an 11-term congresswoman and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, defeated Elijah Manley, a 27-year-old substitute teacher who was endorsed by a progressive group. Wasserman Schultz had faced criticisms for running in a district that has a plurality of Black voters and has long been represented by a Black Democrat.
Wasserman Schultz’s previous district was broken up by Republicans’ gerrymandered congressional maps, and she chose not to run in the district where she lives, but in a newly drawn one that was solidly blue.
Wall Street banks have demanded more collateral from hedge funds in recent
weeks as a rout in AI stocks accelerates and triggers heavy losses across
several popular strategies.
Banks asked funds whose holdings are
heavily concentrated in certain industries to provide additional collateral
to keep their existing levels of leverage, according to four people familiar
with the matter.
The collateral demands highlight the mounting
fears on Wall Street about the scale and speed of the sell-off in
AI stocks over the
past fortnight, which has upended a rally in a sector favoured by many
funds.
………
Banks build in protections when
lending to hedge funds to make
sure they do not incur losses in case the market turns negative.
When people start buying stocks with borrowed money at rates not seen
since the dot-com bubble, someone usually gets hurt. Deutsche Bank is now
waving the yellow flag.
The bank’s credit strategists, led by
Steve Caprio, published a warning on July 24 that US margin debt has
crossed the $1 trillion mark as of June 2025. That’s not just a round
number for headlines. As a share of GDP, margin debt has now surpassed
levels seen during the late-1990s tech mania and is closing in on the 2021
all-time high.
The numbers behind the warning
Here’s what caught
Deutsche Bank’s attention: NYSE margin debt jumped 18.5% from April to
June 2025. That two-month sprint ranks as the fifth-fastest increase since
1998, a period that includes some of the most memorable market blowups in
modern history.
The spreads between high and low quality debt is shrinking, which tends to happen before a crash.
For all the current economic and geopolitical turmoil, the U.S. bond market is remarkably sanguine about the risks of a U.S. economic recession, even after oil’s big price jump.
To appreciate the bond market’s seemingly unconcerned behavior, consider the high-yield bond spread, which represents the additional compensation bond investors demand for incurring the extra risk that high-yield (“junk”) bonds represent relative to U.S. Treasurys.
The junk spread rises along with the risk of recession, when issuers of high-yield bonds become less likely to be able to repay, and it falls when the risk of an economic downturn is lower.
At the end of June, when a barrel of Brent crude was selling for $73, the junk spread stood at 2.75 percentage points. Currently, with Brent crude near $100 per barrel, the spread stands at 2.68 points. While a 7-basis-point decline is not in itself particularly meaningful, it is highly significant in light of the increased likelihood of economic distress to which the higher oil price leads.
In addition, we shouldn’t forget that oil’s recent spike comes on top of a private-credit market that has already been struggling. In its recent report on the state of private markets in 2026, MSCI writes that this market is facing problems even deeper than previously known: “Among loans in private-credit funds, 15.7% have been marked below 80% of principal — a rough threshold for distress — and more than 10% are now marked below 50% — a level typically associated with deep distress or risk of restructuring.”
MSCI’s report reflected the state of private markets at the end of 2025’s third quarter, the latest period for which data were available. Since then, conditions in the private-credit market have deteriorated even more, but the junk spread has narrowed rather than widened — to 2.68 percentage points from 2.80.
Moreover, as you can see from the chart above, the junk spread is now lower than at any time since immediately prior to the 2008 global financial crisis. The only other time since 1997 that the spread was lower than today came near the top of the dot-com bubble. We don’t need to be reminded what happened after that.
Donald Trump has claimed a deal well over a dozen times in the past few months, so the White House's credibility is below that of the Tooth Fairy.
With a draft deal between the United States and Iran now on the table, speculation has been swirling about exactly what is in the agreement.
President Trump insisted on Friday that reports circulating about details of the proposed deal were incorrect. In a post on social media, he said the terms “Iran leaked” to the media “have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing.”
There were conflicting accounts of the deal in Iranian media, with one hard-line news outlet reporting terms more favorable to Iran and the state news agency providing a more measured description. On Friday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said that a deal “has never been closer,” but added that “the media should refrain from entering speculation about its content.”
Much about the emerging deal remains murky, with both sides keen to frame it as a victory. What is known is that a “memorandum of understanding” between the two sides is under discussion.
I do not see any way that a deal that is acceptable to Iran could be cast as a victor for the United States, since the Iranian government, for very good reason, does not believe that the United States can be trusted to keep its end of the bargain.
As such, I think that any deal that would be signed would necessarily include a removal of sanctions, a repatriation of frozen Iranian assets from the US, and a redeployment of US forces out of the region.
I do not believe that (even with the horrible US press corps) that this could be sold as a victory, and Trump is terrified of being seen a loser.
And the United States and Israel are at war with Iran, and allegedly the Ali Khamenei has been assassinated by US air strike.
Trump is claiming that the purpose is regime change.
As near as I can tell, there have been no plans for a large boots on the ground campaign, and the record of air power triggering regime change is extremely thin, so if I were a betting man, I would bet on this conflict ending up a loss for the United States.
Of note, there was a hero there, Ahmed al Ahmed a fruit stand vendor who tackled and wrestled a gun away from one of the gunmen.
It's important to note here that Ahmed is a Muslim and an immigrant from the Middle East to Australia, and he snuck up to the gunman unarmed and tackled him.
There are additional links if you want to go further, see here, here, here, and here.
Note that anything you read online is likely to contain misinformation, so double check everything, particularly AI slop.
So, I was picking up my kid from rehearsal, headed north on i-83, minding my own business, driving the speed limit, when someone in an SUV driving like a bat out of hell sideswiped my car.
Oh yeah minor damage to the car, the driver side front wheel is crashed, but Nat and I are okay, if a bit shaky.
The car is definitely not total, but the driver side front wheel got kind of mangled, So it's not drivable at this moment.
My car has been towed and my wife has picked me up and I'm headed home.
By, "Lost an engine," I mean that the engine fell off.
The aircraft was an MD-11, basically a rebadged DC-10.
If this scenario sounds familiar, it's because a DC-10 crashed at Chicago O'Hare in 1979 after its engine detached from the wing.
That plane is cursed.
An engine on the UPS cargo jet that crashed in Louisville, Ky., this week fell off moments before the plane took flight, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Wednesday.
The jet, with a crew of three, plunged to the ground seconds later and erupted into flames as it careened through industrial buildings at the edge of the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport Tuesday evening.
At least 12 people died, officials said on Wednesday. A coroner was at the crash site on Wednesday, and the condition of some of the bodies could make it difficult to confirm their identities, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said. The identities of the victims have not been released.
At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Todd Inman, a member of the transportation safety board, said that, according to security footage, the plane’s left engine had detached from the wing while the aircraft was rolling to take off.
The person of interest I referenced last night was simply some random right wing long time nut-job who pissed off law enforcement in the aftermath and was briefly detained for, Contempt of Cop."
First, and most prominently, a man driving a truck literally flying the ISIS
(Daesh) flag,
drove into a crowd, killing at least 15 people.
A New Orleans Police Department vehicle was blocking Bourbon Street in
place of barriers that were down for repairs early Wednesday when
a Texas man drove a pickup truck around it
and onto the sidewalk, police said.
The suspect,
42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, then sped down New Orleans' most famous street, killing and injuring
people in an attack the FBI has labeled as terrorism.
"We had
patrol cars out there as a hard target," said New Orleans Police
Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick at an afternoon news conference. "This
particular terrorist drove around onto the sidewalk and got around the hard
target." Kirkpatrick and Mayor LaToya Cantrell acknowledged that security
barriers installed years ago to prevent terrorist attacks along Bourbon
Street were being replaced when Jabbar, flying an ISIS flag from his
tailgate, mowed down dozens of people. Fifteen
were confirmed dead as of Wednesday evening.
At least 30 more were injured, many of them severely, officials said.
Bollards don't cover sidewalks
Bollards don't cover sidewalks
The removable stainless-steel bollards are designed to be securely locked
at each crosswalk along Bourbon Street between Canal and St. Ann streets,
according to Cantrell's administration. They do not cover city sidewalks.
The alleged attack occurred near the intersection of Bourbon and Iberville
streets.
………
Kirkpatrick and Mayor LaToya Cantrell
acknowledged that security barriers installed years ago to prevent terrorist
attacks along Bourbon Street were being replaced when Jabbar,
flying an ISIS flag from his tailgate, mowed down dozens of people. Fifteen
were confirmed dead as of Wednesday evening.
At least 30 more were injured, many of them severely, officials said.
(emphasis mine)
This was not security, it was security theater.
Even if the Bollards had been operational, it would not have stopped him,
because he was driving on the sidewalks.
Officials are looking into the possible connection between the Las Vegas
explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck and an attack that left 15 dead in New
Orleans, President Joe Biden said in a Wednesday evening address to the
nation.
One person was killed and seven suffered minor injuries
when a Tesla Cybertruck exploded Wednesday morning in front of the entrance
to Trump International, Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a news conference.
The
person who died was in the Cybertruck, and McMahill said it was unclear if
it was a man or a woman.
According to Jeremy Schwartz, acting
special agent in charge for the FBI’s Las Vegas office, authorities also are
trying to determine whether the explosion was an act of terrorism but
believe it was an “isolated incident.”
A Virginia man was arrested this month with what federal prosecutors
described in court papers on Monday as the largest cache of “finished
explosive devices” ever found in the F.B.I.’s history.
The man,
Brad Spafford, was taken into custody at a farm outside Norfolk on Dec. 17
on the basis of a single-count criminal complaint accusing him of illegally
possessing an unregistered short-barrel rifle. When investigators searched
his 20-acre property, in Isle of Wight County, they found in a detached
garage more than 150 explosive devices — mostly pipe bombs, some of them
labeled “lethal,” prosecutors said.
They found more pipe bombs in
a bedroom inside Mr. Spafford’s house, loosely stuffed in a backpack that
bore a patch shaped like a hand grenade and a logo reading “#NoLivesMatter,”
prosecutors said.
The slogan had the same name as a nihilistic,
far-right ideology that largely exists on encrypted online messaging apps
like Telegram. There was no other evidence that Mr. Spafford adhered to such
beliefs.
Yeah, that last sentence seems to be whistling in the dark.
………
According to the court papers, which were
reported earlier by the website Court Watch, the investigation into Mr. Spafford began last year, after a neighbor
reached out to the authorities. Mr. Spafford had lost three fingers on his
right hand while working with a homemade explosive device, the neighbor
said, and he was stockpiling weapons and homemade ammunition.
The
neighbor reported that Mr. Spafford had told him that he and his friends
were “preparing for something” that he “would not be able to do alone,” the
court papers said.
The neighbor also told investigators that Mr.
Spafford sometimes used photographs of President Biden for target practice
at a local shooting range and believed that “political assassinations should
be brought back.” After the attempt on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s
life in Pennsylvania in July, the papers said, Mr. Spafford told his
neighbor that he “hoped the shooter doesn’t miss Kamala,” an apparent
reference to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Let me rephrase myself, "Yeah, that last sentence seems to be
irresponsible and reckless whistling in the dark."
Then again, what would one expect from what Atrios calls, "That Fucking
Newspaper."
The New Orleans case, and the Virginia case both seem to be people involved in
right wing terrorism, with the former hearkening back to 8th century Basra,
and the former yearning for the height of the Klan in the 1920s.
As to whatever happened in Vegas,it's not clear yet.
All I can do is to quote Bette Davis in All About Eve, "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
The year is not off to a good start.
(On Update)
Both the New Orleans and Las Vegas vehicles were rented through the Turo app, which allows people to peer-to-peer car sharing, which might be a connection.
I understand the reason, there is significant evidence that a Trump DoJ would engage in a malicious prosecution, as Hunter's defense team noted.
There are plenty of reasons for him to do this, but the fact that he categorically ruled out any pardon this summer makes it, to quote (not) Tallyrand, "Worse than a crime, it is a mistake."
President Joe Biden on Sunday issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, a controversial decision that reverses his long-standing pledge to not use his presidential powers to protect his only surviving son, who was found guilty of gun-related charges in Delaware and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in California.
………
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” he said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
Biden said he came to the decision over the weekend, which coincided with the family being together in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving. Hunter Biden’s attorneys this weekend also mounted a vigorous public defense, releasing a 52-page paper on Saturday titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden.”
………
According to the text of the pardon, it applies to all offenses that Hunter Biden “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”
The problem here is not the pardon, it was the promise not to do so.
Not great for the aforementioned kitten, but great for paleontologists everywhere:
While searching for mammoth tusks in eastern Siberia, scavengers
found a rare ice mummy along the banks of the Badyarikha River. One of
the many treasures to be unearthed in Siberia, the finding turned out to
be a three-week-old saber-toothed kitten preserved in the permafrost.
The study, published on Thursday in Scientific Reports,
describes the frozen kitten’s 35,000-year-old body. The mummy contains
the head and front parts of the animal, including fur and muzzle, making
it possible for scientists to study these for the first time.
………
Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers found that the cub lived
somewhere between 35,500 to 37,000 years ago. It also belonged to the
species Homotherium latidens, and lived in the Late Pleistocene. Judging by its incisors, scientists estimate it was about three weeks old.
Amid all of the crappy news these days, this is good news.
Yes, I know that his name is pronounced "Walls", not "Waltz", but who am I to pass up a cheesy pun.
Of all of the 6 or so usual suspects, Walz is probably the best choice, given his success as governor of Minnesota and his generally good policies on things like abortion rights, anthropogenic climate change, and labor rights.
Also, he's the guy who got the whole, "Drump and Vance are weird," thing going.
It's probably the best I could have expected:
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, wagering that a former red-district congressman with rural roots and a progressive streak can help her win over the working-class voters in battleground states needed to beat Donald Trump in November.
In picking Walz, 60, Harris is elevating a second-term governor from a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican for president in more than 50 years, someone who is relatively unknown nationally vaulting over swing state contenders such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
They Shapiro and Kelly were both a lot worse on policy.
Shapiro is horrible on charter schools and vouchers, has some issues with not addressing issues of sexual harassment from some of his staff, and he has been excoriated for his position on Israel.
Kelly, a figurative blue dog married to a former actual Blue Dog, has been horrible on labor issues, and notwithstanding his time as an astronaut.
I do think that if there is a VP debate, which is not particularly likely, given Trump's and Vance's obvious fear at any debates for either of them, he would wipe the floor with Vance.
As to what this means electorally? Probably not much.
There is only one VP candidate who might have effected the general election in my lifetime, Bob Dole in 1976, so it is unlikely that either Vance of Walz will make much of a difference electorally/
Biden had announced that he is dropping out of the race.
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV
Vance is a serial exaggerator, a hypocrite, a narcissistic manipulator, and corrupt, so why would Trump ……… Oh, now I get it.
It's like he is running with the son he never had, because no one in their right mind would run with the sons that he DOES have:
Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Donald J. Trump’s newly chosen running mate, has made a shift from the Trump critic he was when he first entered politics to the loyalist he is today. It was a shift both in style and substance: Now, on topics as disparate as trade and Ukraine, Mr. Vance is closely aligned with Mr. Trump.
This blog is a place to put my stream of consciousness thoughts about life, politics, technology, and cats.
It's a posting ground for my more-or-less annual personal newsletter, 40 Years in the Desert.(PDF's available at link)
I find that if I wait until year's end I miss stuff from earlier in the year.
40 Years is put out the old fashioned way, it's printed out on ledger sized paper with 4 pages and mailed to people, total circulation of about 100.
I'm just not the holiday card kind of guy.
A warning, if you comment here, I may use it in my paper publication.
You will get credit, and if I can get your postal adress, you will get at least the issue where you are quoted (probably a lot more, I rarely trim my list).
If someone actually wants to pay for an issue...I don't know, I guess a buck, but you can get the PDF's free.
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