When The Hail Mary Pass Falls Incomplete

Ever have a friend who’s pinned their hopes on something that, to the outside observer, seemed unlikely if not impossible? A “big investment opportunity”, the “house flip that’s gonna set ’em up on easy street”, the “girl way out of his league saying yes”, the “can’t miss deal”, or any one of life’s hail mary plays?

You’re not an animal – so you may have some sympathy, or at least empathy, for them – but that’s tempered with the realization that the dumbass pinned all his hopes in life on a long shot.

I’m reminded of that watching my Democrat friends responses to the collapse of the expectations of the Mueller Report.

I saved a dozen file-gallon jerry cans of tears to water my “Hahahaha” plants this spring from the opening day alone:

I know, I know – too much Hannity. Work with me, here.

The impact on their psyches, as manifested on social media at any rate, seemed to be…

disproportionate?

Democrats seem both angry and frightened, and their kneejerk and perhaps even somewhat panicked response right now is to try to destroy Barr.
You can feel the frisson of fear they emanate. They waited two years for the blow of the Mueller report to fall on Trump, and now other investigative blows may fall on them. The Mueller report combined with Barr’s appointment could end up being a sort of ironic boomerang (whether or not boomerangs can be ironic I leave to you to decide).
How could this have happened? they must be thinking. How could the worm have turned? But they are spinning in the usual manner, hoping that—as so often has happened in the past—their confederates in the press will work their magic to make all of it go away and boomerang back to Republicans instead.
But whatever comes of it all, if anything, Democrats cannot believe that at least right now their dreams have turned to dust and they taste, instead of the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

I try to stay sympathetic, on one level – but on another, it’s hard to cut too much of a break for people who put that much of their emotional well-being in long shots, especially the ones that seems so transparently stretchy, over and over and over.

17 thoughts on “When The Hail Mary Pass Falls Incomplete

  1. It was an effing attempted coup. It fortunately failed. I don’t know what there is to be sympathetic about.

  2. Im more amazed that you still have any Democratic friends. I have a couple but after 2016 where I was solidly against the Queens coronation (2016 I was much, much moore anti-Hillary than pro-Trump) I was considered unclean and a hater and they bailed on me. And in a way I almost want to thank them for it, if you arent going to be my friend anymore because of who I do or dont support in a presidential election I dont need, or frankly want, you in my life.

  3. They keep sorting through the horsesh*t, hoping there’s a pony in there.

    I find the timing of busting Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy interesting, though. Supposedly brokered by Trump/Pence, so maybe some of those Hillary files the FBI lost will turn up. Since the deal was lubricated by a $4 billion IMF loan to Ecuador, though, my hopes aren’t high.

  4. NW,

    That… is a damn good point. Assange could deal a fatal blow to the Democratic-socialist part. Id say Barr would be included on that deal, give them some of their aid back in exchange for a treasure trove of info. I need to go on Reddit or 4Chan and see what they are saying. They are more accurate than the MSM these days.

  5. I’m starting to believe that some of these people (mediots, the guest “experts” they have on their shows, never-trumpers) are actually ill, in need of some kind of medical help. Just let it go for G*d’s sake.

  6. It was never rational, was it?
    There was never any basis for Mueller’s investigation. There was no crime to be investigated. We still do not know Mueller’s mandate, but we do know that it was broad, a “fishing expedition” that brought back no fish.
    Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to ask on what basis it was begun, this is not supposed to happen.

  7. Kinlaw – my theory is those “experts” can’t let it go. Its their meal ticket. For the last few years, they’ve been getting lots of calls and airtime. What happens when the music’s over? You can’t expect them to go back to obscurity, working a desk job, and no party invitations.
    Who cares what is good for the nation – I’ve got to get mine!

  8. Shaking makes a great point. What ratings the lame stream media does have left, will drop through the floor after Trump leaves office in 2025.

    There is no doubt about it. The Democrats and I dare say a few Republicans that are part of the deep state, are running scared.

  9. I’ve seen references to dropping ratings at CNN (especially) for a while now. I always wondered how can they keep losing money, but according to Nolte, it doesn’t matter.

    This means 90 million people pay money to CNN every month even though fewer than one million on average actually watch CNN. […] is called a carriage fee, and every month you subsidize this hate network to the tune of about $1.00 a month […] about $90 million a month […] the welfare queens at CNN are bringing in over a billion — that’s “billion” with a “B” — dollars a year

    That’s why ratings don’t matter as much as you might think.

  10. Off topic.
    MP, did any of the telescopes on Mauna Kea play a part in the Event Horizon project?

  11. Nope, that was a radio telescope thing. More remarkable for the tech used than the science produced, though I could be convinced otherwise. I understand that the EHT has resulted in 6 peer reviewed papers, to date.
    But in general I don’t like these big wind ups & poor deliveries. The “image of the black hole” is manufactured using real data, but it’s still manufactured. You could never actually see what it portrays.

  12. I’m not a physicist, but . . . you can combine the signals from radio telescopes after the fact. I understand it involves massive amounts of data with time stamps. Petabytes of data. You cannot do this with optical telescopes, I presume because the wavelength is too short.
    When they combine light between optical telescopes, it is done in real time. You take two light collecting mirrors & reflect the lightbeams so they meet each other. Then you adjust the length of the lightpaths so the exact wavefronts are interfering with each other — you can’t be off by a single wavefront, and the wavefronts are maybe 500 nanometers apart. You need the lightwave that leaves the target star at time t0 to reflect off of both mirrors, and combine at t NOW.. There are a lot of servos involved since everything in the world moves and vibrates, and locking the wavefronts for any period of time has to deal with movement of the telescopes and the object you’re looking at, and the rotation and revolution of the earth itself, and the flexure & thermal expansion of the optical elements of an interferometer are much larger, on small time scales, than 500 nm.
    So you get the two beams really close to exactly overlapping, and slowly move one mirror back and forth until the light interferes and you see an interference pattern. Often the scientist or optical engineer will give a ‘woot!’ and say “We’ve got fringes!” (meaning the light beams are interfering with each other). Then you have two small optical telescope separated by, say, 80 meters, acting like a single telescope with a single mirror 80 meters across.
    You lose so much light in the optical train that your star has to be very bright to make it work, and mechanical constraints on the physical size of the light train restricts where in the sky your science target can be.
    Back when we were doing stellar interferometry, we could only “lock fringes” for maybe a quarter hour before some element of the optical train would hit a mechanical limit. Then we’d send all the optics back to their nominal position, reacquire the target with the telescopes and try to lock the fringes again.
    It’s less tricky — but still very impressive — to record the signals received by the radio telescopes of EHT and then combine those signals days or weeks later.

  13. Anyway, light is very odd stuff. maybe all that is real is made of light, in one form or another, and when you work with light as discreet wavicles or photons you are reminded that universe only exists now, and that one nanosecond ago exists no more than 100 million years ago exists.

  14. “. . . only exists now . . .”

    Perhaps it only seems that way because we’re like a surfer riding the wave front, we can only touch the water we’re riding.

    What we need is a Jet Ski to travel ahead of the wave to see where the future is going, and behind the wave to see where history has been.

  15. “The “image of the black hole” is manufactured using real data, but it’s still manufactured.”

    Aren’t all images manufactured? Back in the day, an image was the result of the chemical reaction of light and silver salts.

    Later, other chemistry was used, then the assignment of light and color according to the digital instructions of a computer.
    Strictly speaking, photographs have always been subject to the interpretation of the computer we call a brain.

    If the data is true, haven’t we really seen a black hole as well as ever we will? At least as well as we can and live to Tell the tale, I think.

    But aren’t there radio telescope arrays on the slopes of MK? I’ve got pics that I’ve identified as such. Too small to be of use?

    But you did clear something up for me. I didnt understand how telescopes on opposite sides of the planet could observe a body at the same time…They cant.

  16. All images (including the ones we see with our eyes) are composites of billions or trillions of point-source interference patterns. At least that is one way to express it. The spatial dimensions of a point source interference pattern depend on the wavelength of the light you are observing and the diameter of the pupil (aka telescope mirror diameter). If you have perfect optics and a perfect medium of transfer (i.e. no atmosphere), what you see if you magnify the image of a star in a telescope is not a star’s surface, but an interference pattern that looks a bit like the pattern that emerges when you drop a stone into a pool of water, concentric circles whose magnitude varies in inverse proportion of the length of the radial distance to the point where the stone impacted the water (the pattern is called an “Airy Disk” in astronomy). An image is made up of innumerable, overlapping point interference patterns like this.
    You can’t image the surface of even a nearby star because, for a perfect 8 meter telescope, the theoretical size of the “Airy Disk,” at 550 nm, is 0.012 arcseconds, and the spatial size of a star, seen from earth, is an order of magnitude, at least, smaller than 0.012 arcsecs. So you can see the light, but not the star 🙂

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