Artemis II, Congressional backbone, and a no-drama ump shift

I could do separate posts on separate topics tonight, but I'm not feeling really coherent about any of them so I'm just gonna wing it with a hodgepodge.

• ITEM: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Haven't We Put Anyone on the Moon Since 1972?

  Well, we're on our way to rectifying that with the success of Artemis II, which has been quite impressive and which has been a needed reminder in this age of chaos and idiocy that is the early 21st Century that we as a species and as a culture can achieve great things for the common good if we just choose to. The Artemis II mission went off without a hitch, with the Integrity spacecraft successfully testing and evaluating the launch infrastructure and vessel components as well as navigation to the moon and back. Thus providing key information on what needs to be tweaked and improved for the scheduled Artemis III mission next year—for orbital tests of new lunar landing craft—and Artemis IV in 2028, which will be a crewed lunar landing. Of course, I can't help but be somewhat skeptical of those schedules because the landing craft are to be provided by SpaceX. Any outfit owned and run by Elon Musk can't really be trusted, can it? So for that Artemis III mission I expect problems. We'll see.

  Seth Masket wrote this in his newsletter today and it resonated with me:

  One thing that really stood out is that this is really NASA at its finest. Not that this is the most important mission they ever pulled off, but they did this in a competent way that celebrated the achievements and kept the crew and the science at the forefront of the project. This wasn’t some billionaire throwing celebrities or cars into orbit as a vanity project—this was a collective effort to send experts in to do a job and come home safely. We don’t see that sort of thing much these days. I’m guessing few people would describe many government agencies as inspiring, but this one counts for me.

  Plus, the photos from Integrity are fantastic:

  

  

• ITEM: We Finally Have an Answer!

  Having asked the question for over a year now, we know the answer to "what has to happen before people in Congress call for impeachment?!!" What had to happen, evidently, is for the alleged president of the United States to threaten genocide. Good, yes, this is a war crime and undeniably an impeachable offense, but we all saw some version of this coming the whole way. It's not even his first war crime. But, OK, let's not get hung up on why you were late to the party and just be glad you finally got here. There are now dozens of Congressional Democrats calling for impeachment (or the invocation of the 25th Amendment, but (a) 25A isn't going to happen with this VP and cabinet, and (b) if it did happen it wouldn't work, though the chaos it would instigate would be interesting). I doubt any are under the impression it will go anywhere so long as Mike Johnson remains Speaker, but it's absolutely necessary for Congresspeople and Senators to be calling for the removal of Felon47, loudly and frequently, lest the public fall victim to the wider corporate media's repeated implications that this is all normal and acceptable behavior from any public official let alone a President. Calls for impeachment need to be in the news each and every time Felon47 does or says something criminal, stupid, corrupt, and insanely dangerous, which is basically every day. And the calls should be varied in their presentation—some should be emphasizing the utter stupidity and madness of his war, others the flagrant corruption of the entire regime, still others the abuses of ICE and DHS, still others the rampant racism and misogyny exhibited in all of the various atrocities the regime commits.

  As columnist Will Bunch put it: "We must stop the killing and the crime spree—not 33 months from now, as Trump’s mental health continues to deteriorate before our eyes, but today. The indisputable truth that the president took America into an undeclared and illegal war for no reason, and lost that war in barely a month, should be the wake-up call for everyone still in denial."

  Now, the remaining question is what has to happen before Republicans figure out he needs to be removed?

   

• ITEM: Still No Bingo!

  I had a three-game umpire shift at Capitol Hill last night, which had very little in the way of drama or oddities. Except that it was a championship series, and usually I have prizes to give out to the winning team at the end of such things. Certificates good for credit at a sponsor bar and a discount on future league fees, typically, sometimes along with a token like championship wristbands or T-shirts. Actually, we haven't had T-shirts since pre-COVID. Those might never come back, I don't know. Anyway, last night I had nothing. No prizes to be had. I presume this was an oversight, because some of the other, regular game stuff was also not present in my provided batch of gear, so I merely noted it in my report and assume that the winning teams will be given their prizes at a later date. Meantime, the Bingo card remains un-bingoed:

  

• ITEM: For All Mankind is Back!

  The brilliant alternate-history series For All Mankind is three episodes into its fifth season on Apple TV+ and it is, as usual, awesome. It's changed a lot since its first season, but that's by design—the show begins in 1969, when the Soviet Union is the first nation to land a person on the moon and thus history as we know it begins to diverge and the space race continues on in a much different fashion, with the US feeling the need to one-up the Soviets and vice-versa. (Technically, the point of historical divergence, according to showrunner/creator Ronald D. Moore, was in 1966, when Sergei Korolev survived a routine surgery rather than died from its complications; Korolev was the prime force behind the Soviet moon mission in both "our" reality and in the FAM history, where he was able to continue on.) Each new season begins with a time jump of about nine years, each season premiere showing a brief retrospective on what has happened in the world in the interim, where we not only see things like new technological advances borne of the continued space race, but what became of President Ted Kennedy (who due to the Soviet moon landing fallout canceled his trip to Chappaquiddick in 1969 and defeated Richard Nixon in 1972) and his razor-thin loss to Reagan in 1976; how the astronaut program forges support for the ERA, which is ratified in 1974; how the Camp David Accord meetings end in failure under President Reagan; how John Lennon survived an assassination attempt in 1980 and reunited the Beatles for a concert tour in 1987; that Blockbuster Video opens its first store on the moon in 2007; and so on. All that stuff is just background, though, the show is really about a cast of astronaut/cosmonaut characters and their support people and families, a few of whom appear in all five seasons (spanning forty-some years). Some of my faves aren't in season 5, but maybe they'll make appearances later on even though they'd be pushing 80. As the series goes on, life in space becomes more and more prevalent—by season two there is a permanent moon presence, by season three we have space tourism, season four establishes permanence of a sort on Mars, and here in season 5 we have a proto-Mars colony complete with refugee immigrants. It's more and more sci-fi as we get further and further from 1969, but the show is still, well, grounded in realism and logical politics and is just damn well written with compelling human dramas. It's an awesome show and you should watch it.