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July 19th, 2009
NASA definitely shot itself in the foot with this one.
Apollo Landing Sites Spotted by Lunar Orbiter
http://news.aol.com/article/apollo-land
The article asserts that the picture taken by the lunar orbiter will put paid once and for all to claims that the Apollo lunar landings were all hoaxes. Want to make a bet? Those who believe it was all a hoax will just claim that the lunar orbiter that took those pictures doesn't exist, or is just a prop in the hoax.
Apollo 11 and September 11: The Power of Symbols -- Politics Daily
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/0
We actually went to the Moon. By now we could have planted a base there, then a permanent colony, and gone on to do the same on Mars and, perhaps, planets farther out. Instead, everybody just sort of gave up. Why? Then there are the 9/11 "Truthers," who will read conspiracies that don't exist into that event no matter what evidence they're presented with. Why? Because Western civilization has a death-wish. Because people have ceased to give a damn about the sort of world -- the universe -- their children will inhabit. Because it's easier to lie back on the couch and change channels than to do anything worth a damn.
http://www.dnr.wa.gov/ResearchScience/T
The Cascades actually extend from British Columbia to the north all the way down to Mount Shasta, in California, at their southernmost reach. Parts of them are extremely complex, geologically speaking, and in northern Washington State, there are two ranges of them side-by-side, the Western Slopes and the Eastern Slopes. I love Western Washington for just that reason: I'm really only at home in actively volcanic areas. And when regional politics are considered in the context of those mountains . . . well, crooked politicians are just as mortal as the rest of us, and in the shadow of active volcanoes, they are a little more mortal than that. As are all of us who live here.
Five stars
The headmaster of Avery Academy, a prestigious New England boarding school for grades 9-12, is given a videotape that turns out to be a ticking time bomb. The subject of the video are four Avery students, three boys, two of them seniors and one a post-grad, and one freshman girl, age 14. There is no mention of or sign on the tape of whoever was holding the camera. The four students shown in the film are involved sexually with one another -- and the most experienced of them is the 14-year-old freshman girl.
The tape's catastrophic impact on the school, the town where it is locaed, and the students at the school, their relatives, and the townsfolk is far-ranging, the fallout from it still doing damage years later. The scandal splits the town against itself, ruins its businesses and drives wedges between its people, destroys the career of the headmaster of the school, and denies the four students who had been the subjects of the tape the bright future that all of them seemed poised to inherit.
But as those who were involved speak out on their parts in the affair of the tape, as many questions as answers arise as to exactly what happened, and why. As the novel proceeds, each chapter peels one more layer off the onion that is the story of Avery Academy and the scandal that nearly destroyed it, revealing deeper and deeper layers of the lives of the school, the town and its people. And with each new revelation comes an understanding that rather than being the core of the disaster, the tape was a symptom of a deeper underlying rot -- a rot that claimed the life of one exceptional student, destroyed one marriage and savagely ruined another, totaled several cardeers, and left Avery Academy the target of numerous, potentially ruinous lawsuits. And yet . . . also revealed is the identity of the student who held the camera, the reasons that the students in the film never turned his name over to the school or the police, and the reason that he himself never came forward to tell his part in it all. And that revelation is on the opposite side of the moral ledger from the scandal itself, showing a genuine good-heartedness on the part of the students in the film, in spite of everything.
This ban would be a bad idea, for reasons discussed in this article. I quit using the damned things in 1982, and I'll never take it up again -- but I wasn't in our military then, and if I had been, I wouldn't have been able to quit. Even if I tried to quit, that would have made my performance deteriorate, and could even have interfered with my combat ability -- and my survival. This issue isn't one of Puritans-vs.-Sinners -- it's one of avoiding something that could make morale among our military personnnel plummet, and, in some cases, interfere with their ability to perform in-country in ways that could get them captured or killed.
YouTube - Devil went down to Jamaica
Samuel Ramey, the greatest basso cantante singer and portrayer of evil that has ever graced a stage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Ra
YouTube - Samuel Ramey: The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha
". . . a herd of another kind of animal came lumbering toward the water.
"These were big creatures, as big as the goat-elephants. Nervously they huddled together, querulously jostling. But even as they stumbled toward the water, under the apparent guidance of the mouse-raptors [gigantic creatures the size and build of the T. rex of the Late Cretaceous], they cropped hastily at the grass under their feet.
"Their bodies were coated with sparse fur. Their heads were crested, their skulls shaped to allow anchorage for the tremendous cheek muscles that worked their immense lower jaws: Their heads looked rather like those of robust pithecines, in fact. Their ears, plastered back over their massive skulls, were huge and veined, great radiator fins designed to extract waste heat from their huge bodies. Though their hind legs were massive, enabling them to support their weight, they had the peculiar wrong-way-bending look of the rabbit-gazelles: legs meant for fleeing.
"These animals were ugly, elephantine. But they had not descended from goat or pig. They had forward-looking eyes under heavy browridges, huge dark eyes that peered at the world, baffled and fearful. They walked on all fours, but they supported themselves on the folded knuckles of their hands, a posture that had once been called knuckle-walking.
"Like Remembrance, their ancestors had once been human.
"Remembrance waited until the big dull animals had settled to their drinking, jostling querulously, their ears spreading in the cooling air of the afternoon. Then she crept away."
Those "big dull animals," it seems, are owned and herded by the huge Tyranno-mice, who harvest them for their flesh. The mouse that roared, indeed!
Do we really want to undergo a reversal of the roles of mice and men like that? Have we truly surrendered our spirit, our human curiosity and inquisitiveness and the will to boldly go where no one has ever gone before? If so, we're finished, and we might as well hang it up now. If not . . . well, there is the ultimate frontier, right above our heads. Who will go with me to see what we can find there?