Christmas Stranger Things Shirt
I remember a Christmas Stranger Things Shirt memoir — Beasts, Men, and Gods — by Ferdinand Ossendowski, a White Pole who fled the Bolshevik revolution through Siberia. He served in General Kolchak’s All-Russian Government before escaping through the Steppes north of Mongolia, and then participated in the government of that most notorious adventurer, the “Mad Baron” Ungern-Sternberg, who attempted to take over Mongolia to restore an imperial Khaganate as part of an imagined reactionary restoration of the Great Mongol, Chinese, and Russian monarchies in the interests of the “warrior races” of Germans and Mongols (a Baltic German, he considered the old Russian ruling class to represent Germandom over and against Jews and Slavs). Some of the things – the acts of desperation and madness, in which he himself was no disinterested observer – Ossendowski relates are harrowing. But this part struck me as very much making a point about what people think of the Steppe peoples, and of what (German-trained) nationalists like Ungern-Sternberg did (and would do again) to the Mongols. And, other things:

Christmas Stranger Things Shirt
I would dare to say that a Christmas Stranger Things Shirt Mars landing aboard Starship can happen even earlier than 2029, perhaps in the first half of 2027. Why? In the first place, the rapid unscheduled disassembly of SN9 we saw today is nothing more than one of the possible results of testing a prototype to its limits. Sure, we all wanted to see that rocket land in one piece. But to be fair, the act of launching a stainless steel giant silo into the air, bringing it down to earth with a wonderful bellyflop maneuver, and relighting its massive engines just a few hundred meters above the ground is a great achievement in itself. I feel the big media news sites are not being fair with the development of this vehicle, putting too much emphasis on the “booms,” and making people believe that Starship is just a big flying bomb. But those of us who have been following the progress of this rocket for years know that SpaceX is achieving the impossible with Starship.

