Sunday night, i watched The Discovery Channel’s new mini-series, “When We Left Earth” about the history of NASA and our experience of exploring outer-space. It was captivating, moving and absolutely terrific in HD. I couldn’t be more excited to watch the rest of the series.
After the show was over, i got into a conversation with my roommate, who is a computer engineer for a major aeronautical company — he basically works on guidance systems for missiles all day — and we talked about how amazing it was that the engineers, scientists and astronauts for NASA had no precedents to work from, zero research about space travel (because it hadn’t been done before…at all) and did the majority of their calculations and design work with pen and paper. They just had to sit in a room together and try and figure out the best way, and then test it. A perfect example of this would be during the Mercury missions, the precursor to Apollo, when they were trying to simulate zero gravity with astronauts attached to ropes and pulleys…and Buzz Aldrin — an avid scuba diver — said, “Hey guys, why don’t we do this in a pool?” And some of the brightest minds of that generation said, “Duh.” The whole thing was an amazing example of American intelligence, cooperation and ingenuity.
Of course, the whole project was initiated out of a military need to stay ahead of the Soviet Union in our technology and weapons capabilities. Anyone who thinks we just wanted to explore the next frontier is stupid…the reason for our space program had nothing to do with science and everything to do with being able to stop missile launches from Russsia, return fire with our own missiles and spy on them. That’s it.
Beyond that, JFK said — and i’m paraphrasing –, “Start studying math and science so we can put a man on the moon in this decade.” We sent Alan Shepard into orbit on May 5th, 1961 and landed Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the moon on July 20th, 1969…just 8 years later. With no historical precedent, no concrete knowledge of whether space would suck the eyeballs out of your skull, no idea if zero gravity would cause your blood to boil and not a single clue as to whether the devil himself lived on the moon. Seriously, i’m not exaggerating. We didn’t know. How could we? We just had to try and see what happened. And we succeeded. (Contrast this with Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration” which in 2004 stated that we would be back on the moon by 2018… Really George? It’s going to take 14 years to do something that it only took us 8 years to do in the first place? With 3,000 times the experience and technology they had? Moron.)
Fast forward 40 years (40!!!), we’re currently involved in a war in one of the major oil-producing countries and regions in the entire world. If we had learned anything, ANYTHING! from our past lessons, we’d realize the power these countries have over us and we’d react, not by attacking them, but by pushing our own technology and education systems to put our country in a position in which that region of the world would no longer have power over us. We’d create a community that would try things that had never been tried before, we’d throw billions of dollars at it and we’d put our most courageous, intelligent and scientific minds together and work together until we came up with something that gave us the upper hand in the world again. I’m not talking about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, i’m talking about completely eliminating it. I’m talking about once again leading the world in technology (and scaring the shit out of everyone else in the process.).
We put a man on the moon in 8 years back in the 1960s! And you’re telling me that we can’t make a decent electric car? We’re still burning coal for power? We’re getting worse gas mileage than we were 20 years ago? Our best solution is to drill in the oceans and Alaska, in the very places that we need pristine in order for the human species to survive? Are you kidding?
What in the sweet fuck has happened to us?
(and this isn’t the first time i’ve made this point…i just found this post from Oct. 12th, 2006)
Filed under: Bush, CIA, Iraq, alqaeda, apocalypse, katrina, more fucking stupidity, war
Wow…a stripper from Texas stole money to buy a Nascar team? Who would have ever thought?
The only thing less surprising than this would have been if a stripper stole money to build an octagon in her backyard and scheduled UFC fights…
Also, i decided not to post on this earlier this week but i will now.
Is it bad that before i was even done reading this headline that i was saying in my mind, “You liar. You’re so completely full of shit.” Shouldn’t one have at least a tiny iota of belief in the words of the President of the United States of America??? I mean, just a little? There’s not a thing this guy could say to me from now until eternity that i would say, “You know what? He’s definitely telling the truth, being completely sincere, and i for one, think he has a point…” Not a single damn thing.
This also pisses me off. Bush uses a fucking HURRICANE metaphor to describe the war?!? Is he serious? And, just like the Britney Spears thing (see below), it’s not like Bush is writing his own speeches, but i can’t help but blame him. At some point, he’s gotta say, “Hey listen guys…i know you’re trying to be dramatic and all but i was asleep in my bed when America’s shores were destroyed by a friggin hurricane and we kinda looked bad… Ix-Nay on the urricane-Hay OKEY DOKE??”
But he doesn’t, so it’s his fault. I mean, i guess the metaphor is apt, he’s fucked up both things simultaneously, so we can compare them together now…
And while we’re at it, is this the only thing the CIA has gotten right in the last decade? Methinks yes.
They’re really going to let this happen?
Secondly, i actually posted on my sports blog after last night’s terrific Suns-Spurs game. Check it out here.
Also, Neil passed this along to me today and everyone should check it out. I honestly don’t think that ending the war completely is the right course because it’s going to make us look like even bigger assholes than we already are, but we do need to hold the people that made the decisions responsible by voting them out of office in the next election. Check it out:
The Iraq war should never have been started, and it’s long past time to end it.
We were one signature away from ending this war, but President Bush defied the majority of Americans and vetoed the legislation. He has shown, again and again, since the invasion began, that he will not listen.
But the will of the American people must be followed. If PresidentBush won’t end the war, it’s up to Congress — the representatives of the people — to end it instead. We need 16 Republican Senators to override a veto — any 16 of the 49 Republicans can choose the people over their party and decide to end this war.
In 20 states, an incumbent Republican Senator faces re-election in 2008. They will have to make clear very soon whether they will continue to defy the will of the American people.
Now is the time to hold them accountable for their choices on the war.
Barack Obama is doing just that, and you can, too. Make sure they hear your voice too.
Learn how here: http://www.barackobama.com/16votes
The UN reports that 34,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war. Many organizations would say that this number is higher. If you remember way back when to the reasons we started this war, you would hear that Iraq harbored al-Qaeda hijackers (despite a specific lack of evidence to back this up) responsible for 9-11 in which 2,997 people died. And so we went over there to hunt terrorists. We’ve done the exact opposite over the last few years, actually making the problem worse by unifying the terrorists and creating new ones in the process.
So today we can celebrate that for every one person killed in the 9-11 attacks, we’ve killed 11 Iraqis. This doesn’t count the original fighting in Afghanistan, the recent bombing in Somalia or any of the countless people we’ve tortured or executed in those “top secret” operations that we’re so good at. (This number also doesn’t take into account the 3,026 human sacrifices we’ve made in the form of troop deaths…which i feel now were pretty much entirely unnecessary. I think i would add them on the side with the 34,000 number to be honest.)
I’ve heard of an eye for an eye, but this is getting a little ridiculous.
Filed under: Pure concentrated evil, more fucking stupidity, totally fucking ridiculous, war
Or really unsafe for Muslims…
Didn’t we bomb Somalia just the other day because the Islamic govt. set up 2 years ago was starting to take hold and become relatively peaceful?
And now this. So much for those freedoms we all know and (allegedly) respect. (Check this link too for more nausea inducing fun.)
The last time we were there we caused a Josh Hartnett movie. Do we really need that again, really?
(by the way, it may be propaganda but it least it’s propaganda i can get behind. Check out infowars.com, because there’s a war on for your mind. It has a lot of thought- and blog-provoking topics.)
Back in 2004, i wrote this column for the ASU State Press:
I’m not exactly sure how to say this without tempting the Campus Republicans to lynch me publicly from an umbrella in front of Einstein’s Bagels but I think that the War on Terrorism is making things worse. There, I said it and now that it is out in the open I can process it a little better. All around the world (even in Montana) our terrorist enemies are talking to God on their two-way radios and teaching their children how America is the enemy and how they will be rewarded for killing infidels, which I’m sorry to say, is all of us. These children will grow up and most likely take up arms against us because they hate us for our freedom and our prosperity and our Gucci backpacks and Burberry headbands. Something obviously needs to be done about these people and it is being done with varying degrees of success. However I can’t help but feel that all of our aggression is forming a new breed of terrorist that will grow up hating us because one of our bombs missed and hit his house while he was eating dinner and killed his mom and his little sister. Or his dad lost his job as a truck driver once Halliburton came in to help rebuild the country and he was killed at the Iraqi police station while applying for a job. This new breed of terrorist isn’t motivated by virgins or martyrdom, he’s motivated by vengeance. He’s motivated by something that we as Americans will rarely be motivated by. Unlike us, he gets to see the faces of the dead, he lives in the war and his biggest concern on the way to school is not finding parking but dodging bullets. While our government won’t even allow us the reality of viewing pictures of the coffins of dead U.S. soldiers, these people are given the privilege of digging through the rubble of their home in hopes to find enough of their family members to bury. The website www.iraqbodycount.net estimates that over 12,000 civilians have been killed in military intervention in Iraq. That is 12,000 moms, dads, brothers and sisters who have left survivors behind who now have a new reason to hate America. If someone murdered your family (even by accident) you would want justice. I supposed that is what got us here in the first place but would you feel justified in killing three of them for every one of us. That is exactly what has happened. If you don’t see their faces, if you don’t see them as people who get up in the morning and go to work and have the same basic concerns and desires as all other human beings then you don‘t have as much of a problem hearing about their deaths in enormous numbers. The people who hate this country are multiplying exponentially every time they look for a culprit and see an American flag. I’m not saying that we should leave the terrorists to their own devices and turn a blind eye but we are hurting our own cause by not doing the job the right way. Why add fuel to an already raging oil well fire?
And now the New York Times has released this report by the National Intelligence Council that confirms what i’ve been saying for quite some time now.
Damn, i hate being right.
