A place for things I found…
These things are serious.
Source: Staples eReader Department
This was my Mom, Delphy Diseker. It’s another Mother’s Day since she passed away, and I felt like making a small tribute to her here.
Continue reading “Mom…”
This mother isn’t going to let a little thing like the Great Japan Earthquake of 2011 do anything to upset her son! She stays rock-steady and calm, so that she can keep her son safe and calm and not panicky. It’s an amazing show of strength, courage, and devotion to her son, that she fought down the natural fear (that you can hear in others’ voices in the video) of something so huge. She deserves Mother of the Year, or even Mother of the Millenium!
(Saturn 5 liftoff courtesy NASA)
I’ve read some excerpts and discussions of Newt Gingrich’s speech about settling the Moon and allowing the colony(s) to become States of the United States. He’s gotten a lot of flack from all sides on that, a disturbing amount coming from the conservative blogosphere. It’s like so many Americans don’t want to think about a future that might involve doing something we haven’t done before, because “it’s too crazy” or “too dangerous” or “too expensive.”
After reading a lot of “conservative” commentary on many blogs, it’s just depressing to hear coming from them the same Leftist phrases I heard in the 70’s dismissing the space program, mainly “it’s too costly in money and lives” to go into space, “we need to solve the problems here on Earth, first.” We used to dream big, and we used to “do big,” often just to spite the naysayers and doom mongers who said something couldn’t be done.
Our ancestors carved a continent-wide Republic out of nothing, laid thousands of miles and kilotons of steel in bridges, railroads, buildings, dams. Twice they fought and destroyed the forces of totalitarians, against whom it was “too dangerous” and “too risky” to try to even fight, much less beat down. They and we even dared to dream of expanding our frontier into that great black Unknown above our heads, and the men and women of that Great Generation that defeated the Axis powers actually pulled it off, actually putting people on another world! For some of us that watched it as children then, it was amazing, thrilling, it made us think that we could dream and do big things like that, too!
But somehow we let the bureaucrats and politicians and naysayers take over the dreams, a host of “Grima Wormtongues” whispering soft words of “take it easy”, “don’t rock the boat”, “play it safe”, weakening us like Theoden in “Lord of the Rings”, making our society old before its time. I hope we can wake up as a culture, start to dream and do big again, but I’m afraid the “sensible” voices are too loud to hear above. SpaceX and Bigelow and the others might be able to prove the “too expensive” and “too crazy” voices wrong and start to build their own infrastructures out there, unless the FAA/NASA/EPA/DHS/NLRB bureaucrats suck the life out of the infant industries in their cradles.
It’s possible that it may be left to countries that are young and energetic and hopeful, like India or Brazil, to take up the flag of frontier building, of facing and facing down the future. They’re likely more motivated than we are, anyway. We have more important things to do, like catch up on “Jersey Shore” and update our Facebook pages.
(expanded from a comment on the Evil Blogger Lady’s website
Our Government is about to take away most of our rights on the Internet, all in the name of preserving the profits of the movie and music industry, two groups that have already made copyright a permanent thing, even though it spits on the memory of the Founders. The idea of making some money off of a creation is okay, but the Founders understood that society and the US in particular would benefit if that time was limited.
But after Disney and other companies became powerful (by using creations that were freely available) they were able to “persuade” (buy off) the Government into making copyright permanent, so that creations never become free to use by the next generation of Disneys. Regular people will lose their rights, all in order to protect another year’s worth of profit, even though the companies have had 80+ years to make their money.
The Internet has been the one channel that the movie and music industries couldn’t control, which means we US citizens were not being controlled, which means we were free to speak, to create, to copy and create new things from the copies (the Founders called this “fair use”).
Now we have one chance to keep our free channel open, but Disney and Sony and Fox and Comcast have a lot of money that they’ve used to buy Congress, and to spread lies and propaganda about the Internet and its users.
Watch what will happen if Sony and Fox and others get their way:
