July 2006 Archives

Here's another example of BushCo's never ending drive to manipulate reality by their typically Orwellian means.

From today's New York Times

NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: July 22, 2006

From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency's mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

…

The “understand and protect” phrase was cited repeatedly by James E. Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA who said publicly last winter that he was being threatened by political appointees for speaking out about the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions.

…

Dr. Hansen said the change might reflect White House eagerness to shift the spotlight away from global warming.

“They’re making it clear that they have the authority to make this change, that the president sets the objectives for NASA, and that they prefer that NASA work on something that’s not causing them a problem,” he said.

This happened in the ancient past, oh, say two or three weeks ago, and I am late posting on it, but I am just catching up on some things that I have put aside to blog on. I accept your forgiveness :-)

I have to admit it ... I am somewhat of a sports fan. Part of my cultural upbringing, I guess. I was a baseball fanatic when I was a kid. I regularly memorized every statistic there was to know. Sandy Koufax was and still is "my hero". One of my fondest memories is going to a Dodgers game with my father one summer night to see them play the SF Giants. Juan Marachal was pitching for the Giants and Sandy for the Dodgers. What excitement. Those were the days.

While my interest in baseball has greatly waned, I still watch the playoffs and the World Series. Basketball is now the only sport that I pay any close attention too. But I like to watch other major sports events on TV, particularly when championship series are being played. Therefore over the last month I watched a bunch of the World Cup matches. I enjoyed watching the matches, the spectacle, the skill of the players, and the overall strangeness (to me) of the sport, which I hardly ever see. I was in Paris on business in 1998 during the time of World Cup was played there and recall a general mood of excitement and the great interest of the locals.

I know that they are just games, and that they are all too human, but when an athlete, particularly one whose skill I admire does something that is so seemingly out of character and appalling as what Zidane did with his vicious head-butt to the Italian player, I am disappointed and saddened. Likewise when Kobe Bryant was revealed having acted as such a louse, to put it mildly, I was genuinely depressed at having been exposed to a truth that reveals the illusion of people who are among the best at what they do acting in such horrible ways.

There are so many ways that life can disappoint us.

From the modern miracle that is YouTube, I just had to share this!

I remember seeing William Shatner performing Mr. Tambourine Man on the Mike Douglas Show back in my early teens and even then I was agog and aghast at the sheer recklessness, if that is the word (so many come to mind) of that performance. Alas that video has not (yet, we can hope) shown up on YouTube.

In lieu of that gaping lacunae in our cultural archives, this all time classic is offered for your viewing pleasure … if you can take it!. (Sorry to my dial-up friends if there is a problem viewing it.)

Brilliant! Click the link for more.

Amnesty International in Switzerland broke a new outdoor campaign May 29th that was created by Walker Werbeagentur Zuerich. The campaign uses the tagline "It's not happening here but it's happening now", in various languages, from French to German. Using the transparent billboards, the campaign aims to show people what is going on in the world, even if it's not happening in front of them at the bus stop. The ads portray issues in countries like Iraq, China, and Sudan.

From Rising Hegemon quoting former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan:

Science isn't science unless it agrees with me and my beliefs. Which do not come from any knowledge of science.

"During the past week's heat wave--it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday--I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warning is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

"You would think the world's greatest scientists could do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth. And yet they can't. Because science too, like other great institutions, is poisoned by politics. Scientists have ideologies. They are politicized."

I think I am going to rename this blog "Continually Counting To 10 So I Don't Blow A Gasket" !!!