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“Are these the shadows of things that must be, or are they the shadows of things that might be?”

Joy of Tech warns me to repent before it’s too late.

Too late for me… save yourselves!

Joy of Tech has useful and informative warning labels for bloggers. Some should be printed out and stuck on the blogger’s own monitor, but a few should be prominently displayed on the blog page itself.

Via Pink Tentacle, the recent solar eclipse, as seen by a Japanese weather satellite:

There’s more than one Michael Collins.

There’s even more than one famous Michael Collins.

So, when I saw a song titled “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me” on Jethro Tull’s Benefit album, I never seriously imagined the song was about the astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the Moon in the Apollo 11 command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) down to the surface and walked on the Sea of Tranquility.

I played the record a number of times without ever paying much attention to that song. But I had it playing softly one night as I fell asleep, and in a lucid moment between sleep and waking, I heard this:

I’m with you, LEM,
Though it’s a shame
That it had to be you.

The mother ship
Is just a blip
On your trip made for two.

I’m with you, boys,
So please employ
Just a little extra care.

It’s on my mind,
I’m left behind
When I should have been there
Walking with you.

That was how I felt about the entire Apollo program: I wanted to be there. I wanted to experience zero gravity in orbit, and on the way to the moon. I wanted to glide in lunar one-sixth gravity over the rocks and craters of an alien world. I wanted to see the far side of the moon with my own eyes, and see the earth — the entire earth — as a blue marble floating in black space.

I think I missed the point. I think almost everyone misses the point.

One-sixth gravity is fun. Lunar rocks answered persistent questions about the origin of the earth and the entire solar system. The miniature on-board computers were technological breaththroughs. The earth, seen whole from a quarter million miles away, is poetry.

But I think the most important thing about Apollo was not the fun, the science, the technology, or even the mind-altering change of perspective it made possible. All those things are by-products.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade,” said John F. Kennedy, and to confront other difficult challenges, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Should we return to the Moon now? Should we set a goal of landing a man on Mars? I don’t know. How hard are they?

Is it possible to find a challenge here on earth that will demand the best we have to give? Can we find a challenge that we are willing to accept, unwilling to postpone, and which we truly intend to win? Can we do anything with the realization that this planet, our home, is a small jewel in a vast emptiness?

Happy Moon Day.

Barack Obama has been president now for exactly six months — January 20 to July 20 — and the country still has problems.

Golly, should I have voted for John McCain after all?

Rachel Maddow looks into The Family, a fundamentalist religious group that counts a number of important politicians among its members. She talks with reporter Jeff Sharlet, who spent time inside the organization, and wrote The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. (Video runs about 9 minutes.)

It’s the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington. It goes back 70 years, when the founder believed that God gave him a new revelation, saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years, and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek, and the down and out, he believes God came to him one night in April 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful, and that these powerful men who were chosen by God, can then, if they want to, dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism.

Rachel asks whether this sense of being God’s chosen explains why members like Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford, caught in scandals, have refused to resign. Sharlet notes that Sanford cited King David to help explain that he wasn’t going to resign.

That just struck a bell with me, because the King David story is a core teaching of The Family … One of the leaders of The Family was explaining why King David was important, and he said, “It’s not because he was a good man; it’s because he was a bad man. You know, he seduced another man’s wife; he actually had the husband murdered.”

And he wanted to explain why this was a model, and he says to one of the men in the group, “Suppose I heard you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?”

And this guy, being a human being, says, “You would think I was a monster.”

Well, the leader of The Family says, “No, not at all, because you’re chosen. You’re chosen by God for leadership, and so the normal rules don’t apply.”

Sounds like the Manson family.

More from NPR, including an excerpt from Sharlet’s book.

I just got back from a park near here. I stood out in the middle of a dark softball field and watched the International Space Station (ISS) fly over.

It looked like a bright star, but it was moving. If I hadn’t known what it was, I might have assumed it was a high-flying jet. But it was too high, and too bright, to be a jet. The sun had set more than an hour before. The ISS, orbiting 220 miles above the earth, could still catch sunlight.

I knew where and when to watch thanks to NASA’s ISS tracker site, and this Space Fellowship article, which I found thanks to Slashdot.

The marathon of space station flybys won’t stop until mid-to-late July (depending on your location). That gives space shuttle Endeavour, currently scheduled to launch on July 11th, time to reach the space station and join the show. As the shuttle approaches station for docking, many observers will witness a memorable double flyby — Endeavour and the ISS sailing side by side across the starry night sky.

So, watch the skies, and remember to wave.

I enjoyed the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, so long as I could suppress the gag reflex — it’s funny, but gross.

But Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd makes an excellent point:

More harm has been done by people panicked over societal decline than societal decline ever did.

By George, he’s got something there. You can click the image to see the complete comic.

Those who aren’t already familiar with xkcd might be startled by the crude stick-figure drawings, or by the crude language sometimes present in the comics. I think those things are simply evidence of society’s decline and inevitable collapse, but I could be wrong.

Austan Goolsbee, of the Council of Economic Advisors, appeared Monday on The Colbert Report. Asked about critics like Rush Limbaugh who say they want Obama’s economic policies to fail, Goolsbee said:

Your house is on fire. Guy goes, “Ahhh! My child!” Guy runs in, takes your kid out, saves their life. Now is not the time to accuse them of kidnapping. This is the situation that we face.

The right-wingers have called Obama a Socialist, a Communist, a Fascist, a terrorist, and worse. I expect them to call him a kidnapper within 72 hours.

He who says of others, “They only understand one thing,” only understands one thing.

Via BoingBoing, a different kind of dance recital:

Today would have been John F. Kennedy’s 92nd birthday.

His administration was too short for us to know what kind of president he might have become, but I think he had one quality that’s rare among American politicians: he could recognize when he was playing a game that couldn’t be won, and stop playing it.

We tend to reward politicians who mouth the expected national pieties, and penalize those who “think outside the box.” But when he saw that the old game wasn’t working — couldn’t work — Kennedy tried to change the game. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of a nuclear exchange that might have meant the extinction of the human race. Having gazed into that particular abyss, Kennedy knew that we had to find a different way forward.

On June 10, 1963, at a commencement address at American University, Kennedy spoke about peace in the era of the atom bomb.

I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

…

Some say that it is useless to speak of peace … until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitudes, as individuals and as a Nation, for our attitude is as essential as theirs…

First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again…

There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process — a way of solving problems.

With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors. So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable…

[Extreme Soviet statements about American intentions offer] a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.

Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.

…

So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.

It’s a Cold War speech. We face different challenges now. But it remains true that we must find a way to live together on this small planet, and we are all mortal.

Video, audio, and the published text of the speech (not an accurate transcript) are available here. A more accurate transcript is here.

From HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher:

Raw, unencumbered capitalism is a wonderful engine, but how we mistook it for a social framework — for how to build a just society — and interpreted it as that, is just incredible. —David Simon

So it’s not just in science fiction that we turn control of our society over to the machines?

Via Cartoon Brew: If you’re a fan of Warner Bros. cartoons from the 40s, this musical number may sound familiar to you. It’s called Powerhouse, and it was written by Raymond Scott, and often borrowed by cartoon composer Carl Stalling.

If you’re as old as I am, you may even remember harmonica bands. Unless your memory is going.

Saturday Night Live gets inside the thought processes of congressional Republicans: