Only a few
of us have the courage for what we really know.
Only a few
of us have the courage for what we really know.
There is no expedition to which a man
will not go
to avoid the real labor of thinking.
Thomas Edison
No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.
Niels Bohr
|
21 July 2011
WE NEED MANNED MISSIONS, FOLKS The purpose of humans is to explore, not just make money and rut and look at pictures from telescopes and robots. This is a pretty planet, but I want to be OUT THERE!!! Alas, that's not in the cards, because we've been wallowing in consumerist self-gratification since Apollo, when a mission to Jupiter by 2001 was quite plausible. Instead, 2001 achieved 9/11 and a decade of fecklessness, culminating in the end of manned space flight as a national endeavor, with hardly a whimper. The difference between what we could have been and what we turned out to be is pretty disgusting. JMR |
Space junk, low earth orbit, 2009
(European Space Agency)
And so, as Americans continue to wallow in media-driven consumerist self-gratification . . .
Others take up the future's mission
28 September 2008
Chinese cosmonauts returning from their first space walk.
Arthur C. Clarke
1917 - 2008
Humanity has failed to live up to his vision.
"Jupiter Mission" 2001 -- seemed doable in 1967.
How pitifully feckless we've become.
3 August 2007
About tipsy astronauts . . .
|
It is important for the human
race to spread out into space for the survival of the species.
Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out
by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a
genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet
thought of.
Stephen Hawking |
Wally Schirra
1923-2007
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo
MARS
Satellite Composite
Himmler-Hamster, Goebbels-Gerbils
Chomsky-Chumpsky
|
"When they take away our right to own
handguns, only criminals will have them."
NRA moment Sheriff: 10-year-old kills mother, self (CNN) A 10-year-old Arcola, North Carolina, boy shot and killed his mother before taking his own life, according to the Warren County Sheriff's Department.
Columbine In Pennsylvania and man with no criminal record forced his way into an Amish schoolhouse, then sexually assulted and shot dead five school children before shooting himself. An Iowa man shot and killed his parents and three sisters. He had no criminal record. A Virginia Tech student committed the worst gun massacre in modern American history. He had no criminal record. |
| A religion is its people, not just a set of precepts; and since people are what they do, Islam is what was happening on 11 September 2001, just as Christianity was what was happening four centuries ago. Though a few bloody-minded militants still infest the Judeo-Christian community, they are regarded as anathema. By contrast, the Islamic community continue to embrace their murderous militants, to lie to the outside world in claiming to have disavowed them; to lie, even about the sinister name of their purported religion, claiming Islam means "peace," when it actually means surrender. Islam, in its manifestations before the civilized world, has shown itself little changed from its barbarous infancy. It remains the religion of despair, of the envious and the savage, of the hashshashin — the assassin. |
2004
JMR
Is morality based on a
categorical imperative,
or is it based on aesthetic?
Can we debate this question honestly?
2009
"Today, many psychologists,
cognitive scientists and even philosophers
embrace...moral thinking [as] more like aesthetics."
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