You may have seen today's NYT article titled "Gore Wants U.S. to Abandon Fossil Fuels by 2018." Obama has already hailed Gore's speech, which was delivered at a D.C. energy conference; no doubt the cable news shows are already asqueak with the outraged cries of Lilliputians and the dismissive laughter of pundits who make Homer Simpson look like a geophysicist. That's why I don't watch cable news.
Gore's prescription is typically powerful and bears his characteristic mix of gravity and optimism. But what really struck me was a quote in which Gore pithily connects our ecological, economic and security problems in one tidy formula. See below the fold.
Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of electric power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.
"The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. "The future of human civilization is at stake."
Mr. Gore called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon 39 years ago this month, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy famously embraced that goal.
Being a science writer, I can't help but gravitate toward scientific metaphors. So imagine for a second if two famous primate experts were interviewed for a nature program while an 800 pound gorilla tore the studio apart in the background. And in the midst of that chaos, the scientists avoided any mention of gorillas, while Calmly and Seriously discussing the theoretical danger posed by bunny rabbits.
Something like that happened last weekend: NBC News "chief" Tim Russert interviewed two leading 'conservative intellectuals,' Andrew Sullivan author of The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, and Christopher Hitchens who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Both guests have been incessantly congratulated for, as the title of their books indicate, their admirable courage in transcending previously defined conservative boundaries and confronting the pernicious influence fringe ideologues and religious fundamentalists exert on the conservative movement.
Amazingly, during an hour long show, I can't recall either ‘critic’ or host raising a single question or making one comment concerning the stranglehold the religious right has on the modern Republican Party. Just for example, there was not one word spoken about conservative foreign cult figure Sun-myung Moon, his ownership of the Washington Times, its sister publication Insight which published the false story that Obama attended a hard-line militant Madrassa as a child, or any of the dozens of other scandalous connections joining ultra right wing religious icons -- some of whom who routinely concoct wild and ugly religious fabrications -- irrevocably to the Republican Party. The fact that McCain political adviser Charlie Black organized a coronation where Moon was literally crowned the Messiah in a US Senate building, and duped two US lawmakers into not just attending, but physically placing a crown on Mister and Mrs. Messiah's head did not rise to the attention of Russert or his guests. Not like there's any shortage of material.
Instead, two or three full segments of the program were exclusively dedicated to Pastor Jeremiah Wright's comments on the electoral prospects for democratic front runner Barack Obama. (To be fair, Sullivan, an outspoken Obama supporter, took time to at least try and put the issue in context.)
The traditional media gets a lot of knocks in the blogosphere these days. But they bring much of it on themselves with their endless complicity in serving a far right-wing agenda. Glenn Greenwald has a new book coming out soon which takes this on directly:
Glenn Greenwald -- The central paradox of our political life is that the right-wing faction that continues to dominate our political institutions and win elections embraces fringe beliefs which have little popular support. That's why their overarching objective is to remove substantive considerations from our political debates ... An aggressive campaign to demonstrate how absurd and destructive are these right-wing leaders, how deceitful is the media's personality-based glorification of them, is absolutely necessary.
What better place to start exposing the right-wing media infestation than the Washington Times? This newspaper was founded in 1982 by cult leader Sun Myung Moon and his second in command Bo Hi Pak. It has lost about $3 billion to date and according to the Wikipedia, is only still in business because of a subsidy from News World Communications, Inc., described by the Columbia Journalism Review as "the media arm of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church." As business ventures go, a three billion dollar loss doesn't appear terribly attractive (So much for that 'free market' conservative magic, huh?). But as a propaganda appendage of the Moonie/GOP empire, it's worth every penny. Here's just a few of their greatest hits courtesy of John Gorenfeld and his new book chronicling Moon's antics, Bad Moon Rising:
In 1988 the Washington Times started a rumor that Michael Dukakis was mentally ill, inspiring Reagan to joke, "I'm not going to pick on an invalid." Wash. Times, "Dukakis kin hints at sessions," August 4, 1988.
In 1992, it pushed the story that Clinton might have been an agent of influence for the KGB while traveling as a Rhodes scholar. Wash. Times, "Clinton Can't Recall Much of Soviet Trip; Unable to Give Details," Oct. 6, 1992.
In 2007, its sister publication Insight was the first publication to print that Barack had attended an Islamic Madrassa. "Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa...?" Lead from a January 17, 2007 article on Insight Magazine that was cited by CNN. - John Gorenfeld
Based on past performance, it's a fair bet that the Washington Moonie Times will publish more negative nonsense this election cycle and that those hypothetical fabrications will then be magnified by wingnut hate radio and neocon bloggers. What is unknown is why otherwise legitimate media venues continue to enable the media appendage of an ultra conservative cult leader with a national, credible platform, without so much as a ticker to viewers that it's coming from a paper controlled by whacked-out extremist right-wing religious maniac, who has proclaimed himself the Messiah and claims to channel dead American Presidents. If and when the next political hit piece does appear in the Moonie Times, how will the traditional media react? Will they once again fall into that comfortable, familiar trap? Or will they finally, this time, not play the helpful fool, and instead turn and do a story on the Washington Times' agenda in pushing Moonie bullshit? We'll know soon enough, if the times really are a'changin.
Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built an American Kingdom. Author John Gorenfeld (Order here)
Imagine someone with a net worth approaching Warren Buffet's, the international reach of a rock superstar, who enjoys the same access to the conservative elite as the most successful K-Street lobbyist, and worst of all, sharing the fringe messianic delusions of someone like David Koresh all rolled into one power-mad cult leader. Now imagine that that individual successfully buys their way into the heart of the GOP, with the oft stated goal of destroying both Christianity and representative government. Well, stop imagining: that's a decent synopsis of Sun-myung Moon, protected darling of the religious right.
Even though he does have this stunning sort of international reach and influence, people just tune it out, maybe because it does sound so ludicrous. It is a shock to realize the conservative movement has gone this far off the rails. Perhaps a simpler aspect of the scandal to write about would be the moral emptiness of Washington conservatives helping to keep kids in an emotionally abusive cult that is literally obsessed with ending Christianity and democracy. -- John Gorenfeld (Blog)
It's old news that dominionist zealots have taken over a big chunk of the Republican Party. But what's amazing is the media -- along with so-called moderate conservative commentators -- have in large part let a guy as twisted as Moon do it in the wide open for over two decades. It's under that self-imposed, multi-decadal media embargo that "Father" Moon and his "True Family" (Moon's term for his nuclear family) along with the "36 Families" (Moon's name for the 36 families he has 'perfected' and which function as the core of his empire) have infiltrated a surprising number of key nooks and crannies in the GOP.
...the [Unification] church has established a network of affiliated organizations and connections in almost every conservative organization in Washington, including the Heritage Foundation, the largest of the conservative think tanks and an important source of government personnel during the Reagan administration... "Most people are afraid to address the issue because they don't want to publicize the extent of the church's involvement," says Amy Moritz of the Conservative National Center for Public Policy Research. (Source -- U.S. News & World Report, 3/27/89)
Well ... we're not afraid to publicize it. Until then, for those with any embarrassing cozy links to this profoundly un-American cult figure, fair warning: now would be the time to sever them.
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon's right-wing rag, the Washington Times, originally reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice knew about the State Department's illegal spying on Obama's passport files YESTERDAY. Now, without even admitting it has changed its story, the same web article has quietly changed the word "yesterday" to "today."
Google it quick before the evidence goes away, but I saw it with my own eyes. The original report said "yesterday."
Now it says 'today'.
Taking funds from NASA programs to support schools is
something I support and I would back Mr Obama's plans
to do that, but the question rapidly becomes which
programs should be cut and which are worthy of being
kept? The Manned Moon program is the one program I
feel is a necessity for America to persue.
It's no secret that I have long derided the Manned
Mars Mission as a one-off, bloated, dangerous,
spacebizcentric monstrosity designed to give the
maximum financial return to NASA and techonology
builders while having a minimum knowledge return to
the public. NASA has tuned its internal program
advancment to the ability of the funding that any
one program can produce, and not to the long term
benefit that a program will have for the American
public. In that respect I have no qualms in seeing
many of NASA's programs .....
It would have been inconceivable to a reasonably intelligent adult in 1968 that the U.S. wouldn't AT LEAST have a permanent base on the moon in 2007. The technology was in place, the value of the resources to be gained (e.g. Helium 3) were obvious. Something has held our country back from what seemed like a slam dunk only a few decades ago.
Absolutely not to be missed! If you're old enough, you'll remember when Americans were respected and, yes, even liked. If you're too young to remember, then this is a must see!
News of the new Google Lunar X Prize organized by Peter Diamandis is getting a fair amount of attention, and appropriately so. It's good to see Diamandis pursuing his dream, as I wrote about in this post about the Heinlein Centennial Gala:
I'm going to be out for the next day or so visiting a cousin in her new home, so I don't feel bad about burning a diary on a non-political topic. I have some purty pictures for you of the lunar eclipse earlier this week. I'm asserting copyright over the photos -- meaning that your fair use is OK -- but if you're someone whose name I recognize from here and you want to use them for something else, just ask; you'll probably find that I'm a soft touch.
(And no, I realize that I didn't actually promise to post these photos; don't analyze the title too much.)
Full moon at the end of August, summer's almost done.
I'm kinda loopy from cold medicine, a summer cold, how classic. Reading all the news of the day, seems a never ending litany of badness, and oh me oh my, there's a moon out tonight.
So in the spirit of the full moon, the irrational, I shall share some fleeting and irrelevant thoughts and notions with my fellow Kosmonauts.
Last night as I watched the rising, full moon and thought about things and people and how we are all connected by our ability to look at that same moon, the inspiration for this was born:
NEW DELHI: The longest total lunar eclipse in the last seven years will occur on Tuesday and people in parts of northeast India would manage to get a glimpse only towards the end as it would take place during the day.
"The people in India will miss the event as the eclipse will take place when it is day here," Chander Devgun, President of an NGO, Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE), said.
The ending of the partial phase of the eclipse will be visible from the extreme northeastern parts of the countryincluding Agartala, Aizawl, Dibrugarh, Shillong, Silchar,Tezpur and Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
A total eclipse of the Moon occurs during the early morning of Tuesday, August 28, 2007. The event is widely visible from the United States and Canada as well as South America, the Pacific Ocean, western Asia and Australia. During a total lunar eclipse, the Moon's disk can take on a dramatically colorful appearance from bright orange to blood red to dark brown and (rarely) very dark gray.
Pretty much everyone has had the experience of having your computer crash and take out data you hadn't backed-up properly. Whether it is some kind of hardware failure, or a virus, or a lighting strike, or even a malicious employee/spouse/whomever, at some point we have all lost stuff on a computer we thought was secure. If you're really lucky, you don't lose much, and you learn the painful lesson about keeping important information properly backed-up on recoverable media. If you're not really lucky, you learn the hard way that you can lose years of hard work in just an instant, with no recovery possible.
And that's the basic idea behind building a secure storage facility for the bulk of human knowledge, and perhaps even humanity itself, off-planet. The people behind the newly formed Alliance to Rescue Civilization want to do just that:
On Friday, China announced its intention to map "every inch" of the Moon's surface, in preparation for future robotic rovers & rumored ultimately to culminate with their own manned missions to the Moon around 2020. Although, I have to wonder if this might have been a translation error with "inch". Don't the Chinese use the metric system?
The Chinese will be sending a lunar orbiter, Chang’e 1, on a Long March rocket to survey & analyze later this year.
"We would like to survey every inch of the moon's surface," Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of the China's moon exploration project, was quoted as saying on the website of Chinese News Service.
Ouyang, speaking at a conference in southwestern China this week, said China's lunar exploration programme was divided into three phases: orbiting the moon, landing on the lunar surface and coming back to Earth with samples.
"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war." (John F. Kennedy)
Something like that happened last weekend: NBC News "chief" Tim Russert interviewed two leading 'conservative intellectuals,' Andrew Sullivan author of The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, and Christopher Hitchens who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Both guests have been incessantly congratulated for, as the title of their books indicate, their admirable courage in transcending previously defined conservative boundaries and confronting the pernicious influence fringe ideologues and religious fundamentalists exert on the conservative movement.
Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built an American Kingdom. Author John Gorenfeld (
A total eclipse of the Moon occurs during the early morning of Tuesday, August 28, 2007. The event is widely visible from the United States and Canada as well as South America, the Pacific Ocean, western Asia and Australia. During a total lunar eclipse, the Moon's disk can take on a dramatically colorful appearance from bright orange to blood red to dark brown and (rarely) very dark gray.
On Friday, China announced its intention to map "
