I’ll start upfront by admitting that this does not seem to be McLaren’s year.  As one of the commentators helpfully pointed out, Vettel could DNF the next 3 races and still lead the Driver’s Championship.  In the spirit of schadenfreude I’ll point out the same applies to Scuderia Marlboro UPC in spades.

That said there are big changes at Silverstone.  The first is the track itself where they have repositioned the pit and renumbered all the turns.  The new Paddock Building is not as horrendously ugly as it could be I suppose, but the snide sniping at the fact the press pen doesn’t have any windows where you can check your imported Maine Weather Stick (remember- if it’s wet, it’s raining) has already begun.

The FIA Rules committee frowns on the practice of using Pit Lane to shorten your lap even though it’s perfectly possible and difficult to prevent even with the speed limit.

This is not their only folly, the principal one under discussion this weekend will be their jihad against Off Throttle Exhaust Blown Diffusers.  A diffuser is a bit of aerodynamic undercarriage designed to replace the downforce lost when the FIA shrank the rear wing to encourage overtaking because big ones were spoiling the air for following cars (the opposite of Turn Left drafting).  In order to make it more effective they blow the exhaust from the engine across it (usually back to front) to increase the wind speed.

Now the fact is that when you usually need this downforce is just at the moment when you take your foot off the gas which not only reduces the ambient air speed but also the exhaust volume.  Smart engineers have learned how to increase the exhaust volume when you take your foot off the gas.

The FIA has now ruled this ‘movable aerodynamics’ and disallowed it, starting with Engine Mapping (different software setups controlling off throttle engine speed between Qualifying and race day) at the last race in Valencia, and now limiting off throttle exhaust output to 10% of maximum in every instance.

The problem with this is it makes cars fall off the track and find walls and gravel pits when the difference between the downforce produced by the ginormous front wing and the teeney tiny back one unbalance the car in a turn.

Made worse by rain, which always seems to be a factor at Silverstone.  Both practices so far were in the wet and the forecast for Sunday is typically English- a pronounced sense of damp.  Hamilton is openly rooting for the race to take place at the bottom of the Channel, perhaps because he feels things can’t get much worse.

If today’s Qualifying takes place under dry we’ll get for the first time a sense of how badly the FIA has screwed up.  The agreement between the teams and the FIA expired long ago and the current extension is done next year.  Many people are unhappy and Barack Obama Bernie Ecclestone may be facing a revolt by his base.

There are other issues I’ll maybe get to tomorrow when I’m less pressed for time.  Surprising developments below.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Atlantis blasts off on end-of-era spaceflight

By Kerry Sheridan, AFP

37 mins ago

Confidence fairies creating jobs yet?  Or are you going to go into 2012 with 10% Unemployment expecting to win?

Electoral victory my ass.

Job Growth Falters Badly, Clouding Hope for Recovery

By CHRISTINE HAUSER, The New York Times

Published: July 8, 2011

The United States economy added a meager 18,000 jobs in June, up from a gain of a revised 25,000 jobs in May (Herry Monster and John John should teach either Christine or the Labor Department a lesson on Up and Down), the Department of Labor said on Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent in May, the department said.

…

The report said that 14.1 million people were out of work in June, among them 6.3 million who have been jobless for six months or longer. In May, the total number of unemployed people was reported as 13.9 million, with the long-term unemployed at 6.2 million.

The numbers showed the continuing challenges of adding jobs to the economy even at a rate that keeps pace with population growth, two years after the official end of the longest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Friday’s report showed that 39,000 government jobs were cut in June. The previous month, 28,000 local government and 2,000 state jobs were cut, as states and towns dealt with tighter budgets.

…

Economists have ratcheted down their forecasts for the overall growth of the economy, with some estimating an annual rate of about 2 percent or slightly more for the second quarter.

Can you say douple dip?  I knew that you could.

Unfortunately for Barack a Recession is not ice cream.

Le Mans to Châteauroux 136 miles

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Well, it rained a lot, and hard.  Teams were extremely cautious after all the crashes on Wednesday and most of the top riders’ positions are unchanged with the exception of Liepheimer who lost a full minute in, what else, a crash.

We had 2 more withdrawals, Ivan Velasco of Euskaltel who did not start and Vasil Kiryienka of Movistar who was outside the time limit.

There were 62 riders in the top group with the same time as the Stage winner, Edvald Boasson Hagen.  Matthew Harley Goss was second and Thor Hushovd third.  Rojas, Gilbert, Evans, both Schlecks, and Contador also had 0 deltas.

Everyone knows the home of the Grand Prix of Endurance and Efficiency and while tomorrow finishes with a climb into the Massif Central today’s Stage is the flatest in this year’s Tour.  BruceMcF, who understands the points competition for sprinters (Green Jersey) much better than I do, expects two classic bunch sprints– one at the midway checkpoint and again at Châteauroux.

We race through the weekend in medium mountains with a rest day on Monday (no rest for the wicked, I’ll be reviewing Sunday’s results).  After that it’s two flat Stages and then 3 days in the Pyrenees where Contador will be looking to put it away if he can.

This weekend is also Silverstone so you can expect your regular Qualifying and race coverage.  This will be somewhat distracting for me tomorrow as the live Speed coverage of Qualifying conflicts, today all I’ll have to do is drag my ass out of bed at 2 am (did I mention no rest?) to catch up with Valencia on Debrief and the lastest developments with a repeat of today’s P2 session.  The race itself will be on Fox Sunday which means tape delayed until noon.

Vs. coverage of Le Tour starts at 8 am for your half hour of hype before we join the race already in progress.

• Jada Yuan Previews the Hell Out of the Tour de France in the New Yorker, 7/1/11 at 2:00 PM
• Le Tour 2011 official site
• Your The Stars Hollow Gazette Le Tour coverage tags-
• Le Tour
• Le Tour 2010
• Le Tour 2011

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Britain’s scandal-hit News of the World to shut

By Danny Kemp, AFP

4 hrs ago

And Democracy as defined in the United States Constitution itself.

The Breaking Point

By: Jane Hamsher, Firedog Lake

Thursday July 7, 2011 12:46 pm

What we’re watching is the death of the Democratic Party.  Or, at least the Democratic Party as most of us have known it.  The one that has taken its identity in the modern era from FDR and the New Deal, from Keynsianism and the social safety net.  Despite any of its other shortcomings (and they are myriad), the Democratic Party has stood as a symbol for commitment to these principles.   As recently as 2006, Democrats took over the House in a surprise wave election because the public feared that George Bush would destroy Social Security, and they trusted the Democrats over Republicans to secure it.  Just like George Bush, Obama now wants to “save” Social Security….by giving those who want to burn it to the ground the the very thing they’ve wanted for decades.

Any member of any party who participates in this effort does not deserve, and should not get, the support of anyone who values Social Security and cares about its preservation.  The amount of damage that the Democrats under Obama have been able to do has been immeasurable, by virtue of the fact that they are less awful that George Bush.  But where George Bush failed, Obama will probably succeed.

Which means we’re watching another casualty here:  Democracy.  Or at least, the illusion that we live in a democratic society.  The public, regardless of party,  overwhelmingly opposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare. But elected officials of both parties are hell-bent on conspiring to bring the programs to an end.  They seem to have come to grips with a fact that the public has not: their tenure in office depends on carrying out the wishes of oligarchical elites.

There is only one thing you can reasonably conclude as you watch the political theater that is transpiring:  what the voting public thinks really isn’t all that important.  And to the extent that it does matter, it can easily be channeled by those with sufficient money to pay the tab.  Samuel Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels, but in our modern era, that honor goes to tribalism.  The list of horrors that people found intolerable when George Bush was in office, but are now blithely accepted because  “Sarah Palin would be worse,” grows longer every day.

We’ll fight this, because it’s the right thing to do.  We will probably lose. But we will make it as painful as possible for any politician from any party to participate in this wholesale looting of the public sphere, this “shock doctrine” for America.  And maybe along the way we’ll get a vision of what comes next.  Because what we believe in as Americans, and what we stand for, is not something the Democratic party represents any more.

Dinan to Lisieux 141 miles

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Flaming chunks of twisted metal!

So the day started out with flats and evolved into crashes of which Contador had 2.  Withdrawals doubled, Janez Brajkovic of Radio Shack and Christophe Kern of Europcar got added to Jurgen Van de Walle of Omega Pharma (Stage 4).  Brajkovic was involved in Contador’s second crash.

The announcing team was pretty close in their predictions with Cavendish barely edging Gilbert and Rojas.  Cavendish complains that the new rules make it “harder to have a proper bunch sprint.”  What I’ve noticed is that there are fewer break aways.

When there were multiple sprint checkpoints you’d have a leadout group of sprinters form for each one and then swiftly collapse back into the Peloton.  Now we’re getting 4 or 5 riders out there all day long.

In the GC we have Hushovd in yellow again hanging on to his single Second lead with Evans and Schleck (Frank) close behind.  Other likelies Schleck (Andy), Horner, and Liepheimer are in 10th, 13th, and 14th a little less than 18 Seconds back.  Contador is still at 1:42 but has advanced to 39th rank.  I can’t help but feel that margin has to increase a lot before the Pyrenees if he’s going down.

Dinan to Lisieux at 141 miles is the longest individual Stage this year and is not exactly Kansas flat with 2 category 3s and a category 4 climb.  An uphill finish is expected to favor the same contenders as yesterday.

It’s already started and will be about 2 hours in when the coverage on Vs. comes on at 8 am.

• Jada Yuan Previews the Hell Out of the Tour de France in the New Yorker, 7/1/11 at 2:00 PM
• Le Tour 2011 official site
• Your The Stars Hollow Gazette Le Tour coverage tags-
• Le Tour
• Le Tour 2010
• Le Tour 2011

“F-f-f-f-f-f-f-fire!” – Beavis

I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I’ve been mostly impervious to the wonders of the natural world though I believe I have mentioned that it takes only some disappearing clouds and a bench to amuse me for hours.

Fireflies are a phenomena I knew only in the abstract until fairly recently.  I had never seen any.

And it wasn’t some sort of great paradigm shifting universe changing moment either.  I was walking to my car and I looked across the field where I was parked and saw lights moving around and then winking out and after a few moments of brain churning I snapped my fingers and said (audibly and to myself because I’m not at all worried people will think I’m crazy, I know it’s true), “Dang, those are Fireflies.  So that’s what they look like.”

Ok, so maybe I didn’t use the ‘dang’ word.

Now like ear worms they turn up all over and moments ago I had one dangle in six inches in front of my nose until I finally had to shoo them away because I don’t much like bugs.

I’m not sure this story has much of a point except to remind myself that as Yogi (Berra) says- “You can see a lot just by observing.”

And now for some pic-a-nic baskets Boo-Boo.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 British PM backs calls for phone hacking inquiry

By Alice Ritchie, AFP

Wed, Jul 6, 2011

The Conscience of a Liberal–

To those defending Obama on the grounds that he’s saying what he has to politically, I have two answers. First, words matter – as people who rallied around Obama in the first place because of his eloquence should know. Yes, he has to make compromises on policy grounds – but that doesn’t mean he has to adopt the right’s rhetoric and arguments. The effect of his intellectual capitulation is that we now have only one side in the national argument.

Second, since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for actually knowing better? Maybe at some point we have to accept that he believes what he’s saying.

The question then is why. As I’ve tried to show many times, the facts overwhelmingly refute the anti-Keynes talking points. Neither the invisible bond vigilantes nor the confidence fairy have made an appearance. So why is Obama talking up those talking points?

OK, here’s an unprofessional speculation: maybe it’s personal. Maybe the president just doesn’t like the kind of people who tell him counterintuitive things, who say that the government is not like a family, that it’s not right for the government to tighten its belt when Americans are tightening theirs, that unemployment is not caused by lack of the right skills. Certainly just about all the people who might have tried to make that argument have left the administration or are leaving soon.

And what’s left, I’m afraid, are the Very Serious People. It looks as if those are the people the president feels comfortable with. And that, of course, is a tragedy.

Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole; and there is money in it yet, if carefully worked – but not enough, in my judgement, to make any considerable risk advisable. The People that Sit in Darkness are getting to be too scarce ­- too scarce and too shy. And such darkness as is now left is really of but an indifferent quality, and not dark enough for the game. The most of those People that Sit in Darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious.