Time was a sculptor looked at a big slab of stone and saw the figure within he would liberate with hammer and chisel; time was, people gathered to see a monolith pass because it was a gift from Egypt, and stood for the power of another culture your culture had managed to subdue. Plus, it was cool; it was exotic. Time was, you valued something for what we could make of it, not the fact that you could just drag it somewhere else and say “now walk under it, and think things about big rocks.” Feh.
I have to confess, I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was, either, but if I had gone to watch, it would have been to see the vehicle, not the rock.
…Steven Chu is a great scientist. But there’s nothing in his experience or education that would equip him for running a federal department, or to be a competent venture capitalist with other peoples’ money, and with billions of losses to the taxpayer and energy prices going through the roof, it shows. The notion that he deserves anything short of an F is laughable.
The Journaltakes on the Jerry Sandusky of climate science:
…for all his caviling about “smear campaigns,” “conspiracy theorists” and “character assassination,” Mr. Mann is happy to employ similar tactics against his opponents. Patrick Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a past program chair of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Applied Climatology, is introduced as “a prominent climate change contrarian at the University of Virginia primarily known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.” (Nowhere does Mr. Mann explain why a scientist might be more easily corrupted by a check from, say, a coal company than by one from a politically controlled institution.)
Instead of molesting children, though, he molests the data and his critics. But unlike Sandusky, Penn State continues to whitewash it.
…and we want them to keep talking. Seriously, WTF difference does it make if a majority of people want Rush Limbaugh fired? It’s not their decision to make. As long as he has listeners and sponsors, he’ll stay on the air.
One of the many notable things it did was to introduce America to space, in collaboration with von Braun, before the Disney shorts. Maybe they’ll consider an update as part of their relaunch.