Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Gray Lady

Continues to diminish the achievement of Apollo 11.

https://twitter.com/SonnyBunch/status/1151874382098128896

[Update a couple minutes later]

Related: Apollo Shrugs.

[Late-afternoon update]

Treacher: Yeah, well, the Soviets sent women and minorities into space first.

[Friday-morning update]

More thoughts from Karol Markowicz (who was born in the Soviet Union):

Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?

“Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,” the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.

It’s not like this is anything new from the paper.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

Mike Collins

It was a weird situation, but it wasn’t lonely.

“You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”

“I didn’t experience that kind of loneliness,” he said. “So I did not have Mission Control yakking at me for a full two-hour orbit — for 40 minutes or so I was over there behind the moon — but I was in my comfortable little home. Columbia was a nice, secure, safe, commodious place. I had hot coffee, I had music if I wanted it, I had nice views out the window.”

“To depict me as in despair or something and so lonely as in, ‘Oh my gosh, I could hardly wait to get back to the human voice coming directly up from Earth,’ yeah, that’s baloney.”

I always thought it was baloney.

The Truth Comes Out

“Washington has laid all the ugly cards out on the table, and at last we have clarity.”

What a scene it presents. On the one hand is a group of people who think America is the source of all evil that should spend the rest of its historical existence atoning for the mischief it has loosed in the world. On the other hand is a group who believe that for all its faults it is the greatest country in the world and that those who want to destroy it should go back to Somalia. Whichever point of view you subscribe to (or neither) it’s hard to deny that these factions have existed for some time and are only now coming to grips in the open.

Yes.

[Update a while later]

Trump is not a racist: He’s just moving the Overton Window back to normal.