NASA released a new version of “Blue Marble” and I thought I would pass it on for anybody who missed it. If you get a chance, go to the large size image ( here ) it is staggering in its detail.
Category Archives: Americana
I do think Eisenhower was right
I am not sure what to say about this crazy You Tube video except to say that the armored personal carriers do not seem to be bound for Afghanistan (because of the non-USA military paint job). My cynicism wants to say that they are probably headed to some country that needs more material to keep their citizens in check. What ever the destination, I find this pretty dis-heartening.
Racism and unsprung weight
Just like every car has mass or weight, everybody – to some degree – is a racist . With a car, no matter how much it weighs – but the less weight the better which is why race cars are much lighter than street cars – the trick is to control as much of the weight as possible by putting put it on the control side of the springs or suspension. The weight on the uncontrolled side of the suspension, the unsprung weight, is the weight that causes the most trouble. I think the same is true with our racism, the more we can see it – the more that we can see how the filter of racism colors our perceptions – the better we are able to control the damage done by our racism.
That may be the reason that the people who are the most noticeably racist do not think they are racist and are the most offended by the accusation that they are. They don’t see the filter, they only see the filtered perceptions of their racism. So when Newt Gingrish makes ridiculous, dickish, racist, remarks – like Obama is the food-stamp president because more people are on food-stamps than ever before – I suspect that he doesn’t see them as racist. (He might not even see them as being simplistic to the point of being stupid.)
Zorching
I ran into this line, by Navy spokesman Captain John Kirby, a couple of days ago, I don’t want to leave anybody with the impression that we’re somehow zorching 1two carriers over there because we’re concerned about what happened today in Iran. He was telling reporters that quickly moving two aircraft carriers to the Arabian Sea is not unusual. I like to think that I am more au courant than a Navy captain, the Navy, after all, being the most conservative of all the conservative military services; but I had no idea what zorching means. Oh, well, I guess I do now.
By the way, the U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier groups each with a supercarrier. Nobody else in the world has even one. And now the Republicans are running on saving our military from the ravages of the Democrats. I don’t know if they actually believe what they say, or they get up in the morning, check what the president is doing and then say the opposite. Either way, I do love zorch as a word, it just sounds so right.
1 Zorch is defined by the Urban Dictionary as To travel with velocity approaching lightspeed.
The unreal world of advertising
The whole point of advertising is to dissuade us of the notion that we are OK and the worst offender is advertising for beauty products. I love this put on.
Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.