Tradition says that campaign season starts right after Labor Day, but not any more. You have seen many campaigns running at top speed for months, and we just had President Biden’s well-received explanation of the threat of ultra-MAGA semi-fascists, and his invitation to the not-entirely-batshit crasy to come back to the light. Which is working. Remember that we don’t have to reach the hard core, just a few percent of those who can handle the truth.
We have seen great advances for our side in recent polling and in special elections.
But there is more!
Musical Interlude I
As someday it may happen that an author must be found,
I’ve made a little list, I’ve made a little list,...
The Mikado - Little List Song - Lyric Theatre June 2010 updated lyrics
And we all have our little lists of Wrong-Wing paskudnyaks who never would be missed. But we don’t have to sweat it.
We can simply concentrate on throwing the entire Party of Rascality out. Or to a large extent, allowing them to throw themselves under the electric bus.
Musical Interlude II
I've got a Little List in 2018 from The Mikado, also with updated lyrics
Regular Good News
It turns out that
- We beat back gerrymandering in this cycle, and may have come out ahead in the House.
- As hpg and others constantly remind us, our prospects in the Senate are excellent. (Remember, repetition is good. I repeat, repetition is good.)
- We are beating back voter suppression in the courts and through GOTV.
- The DOJ has started to arrest election terrorists.
- Marc Elias, the ACLU, the NAACP LDF, and others are on top of the states asserting a right to overturn Presidential elections and name their own electors.
- Dems are getting our messages out.
- Rs are no longer in disarray—It’s total chaos and fog of internal civil war now.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
One Year of Biden-Harris
President Biden and Vice President Harris promised to move quickly to deliver results for working families. That’s what they’ve done.
Good News Network
Today: Good News
Feeling Down? The Top 5 Good News Websites to Cheer You Up
Here are the five best positive news websites.
and some others recommended by Gnusie arhpdx.
Musical Interlude III
Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra Tour at Lincoln Center
In solidarity with the victims of the war in Ukraine, the Metropolitan Opera and the Polish National Opera have gathered leading Ukrainian musicians into the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra for a European and American tour, culminating with outdoor concerts at Lincoln Center. Under the leadership of Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, the orchestra will perform a program that includes Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Seventh Symphony and Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with Ukrainian virtuoso Anna Fedorova. Leading Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska will perform the great aria “Abscheulicher!” from Beethoven’s Fidelio, a paean to humanity and peace in the face of violence and cruelty.
The orchestra will include recent refugees, Ukrainian members of European orchestras, and some of the top musicians of Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and elsewhere in Ukraine. The Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine is supporting the project by addressing the organizational issues of allowing male musicians to put down weapons and take up their instruments in a remarkable demonstration of the power of art over adversity.
More Dark Brandon and Co.
I was collecting Dark Brandon images from Twitter yesterday, and uploading them to the DK Image Library. I am nowhere near done, but I have enough for a tip-of-the-tongue taste today. There will be more Diaries with this material as long as the internet keeps generating it.
I was going to put that one into my first Dark Brandon Diary, but I lost it to the DK Story Editor. I am delighted to have it back where I can’t lose it again.
Science! Animals! Plants! Weirdness!
'Ridiculously Detailed' New Image of The Moon Is a Masterpiece of Space Photography
The masterpiece consists of more than 200,000 images, all taken over the course of a single evening and stacked together.
"The whole thing is assembled like a mosaic, and each tile is made up of thousands of photos," McCarthy told NPR, simplifying what must have been a lengthy editing process.
The Biggest Star Ever Found Just Revealed A Surprising New Insight
The star R136a1 was initially measured at around 250 to 320 times the mass of our own Sun. The new estimate places it between 150 and 230 times the mass of the Sun.
Previous research set a firm 150 solar masses as the Eddington limit. Then new data on the R136 stars was acquired, with a whole bunch weighing in at significantly higher masses.
In addition to defying the Eddington limit, these stars – young, very hot, and very large – defied stellar formation models. Later research found that such chonkers can form through stellar mergers, but we still don't have a good answer on the Eddington limit problem.
Eat your heart out, Tchaikovsky!
A Pair of Supermassive Black Holes Could Be Fated to Collide Within 3 Years
Fluctuations in light from the center of the galaxy SDSS J1430+2303 look suspiciously like a pair of supermassive black holes with a combined mass of around 200 million Suns destined for an imminent collision with each other.
We Just Found a 'Super-Earth' That Could Be an Ocean-Covered Water World
An exoplanet just 100 light-years from Earth appears to be the best candidate yet for a sloshy, water-covered ocean world.
It's called TOI-1452b, and measurements of its size and mass suggest a density profile consistent with a global liquid ocean. Scientists believe that worlds like this are possible, but they haven't yet conclusively found one.
We'll need to follow up with observations from the James Webb Space Telescope to study the exoplanet's atmosphere and make a more confident ruling on the nature of TOI-1452b, but the initial results are very intriguing.
Funny or Cry
Look for “cartoon” in the DK image library. Check out DK’s Stories from Comics, too. And various DK authors and commenters provide excellent material all over the place. And be sure to check on Twitter.
This turns out to be a bad week for Wrong-Wing political cartoons, which are saturating Twitter with butthurtedness.
We can, of course, point and laugh at it.