Dollars for NASA
One hates to see NASA have the difficulties that they are currently experiencing. They have enough trouble with aging equipment and an embarrassing lack of budgetary support. Even the most fervent anti-NASA flat-earther would have to admit that we get a lot more out of the space program than we get out the wars that we are currently spending billions and billion of wasted dollars on. I mean, heck, the wars have no return at all, unless you are President or his corporate friends.
So we have people up there in a vacuum struggling with equipment that was made by the lowest bidder, after the specifications had already been diluted for budgetary restraints. It would be pretty easy for a person to get killed up there for want of funding. Of course, we are already unnecessarily killing young soldiers in a place where we don’t belong, as some Dark Ages fans like to say that we don’t belong in space. And look at the expense involved in that.
Fear Factor
It is once again the Halloween season, and scary images are beginning to appear everywhere. Ghouls and ghosts and vampires abound in print, on the tube, and in movies. I have no idea why anyone would think that Americans need a good scare. We already have the most frightening entities in the long and scary history of our country. We have George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Why do we need to conjure up monsters when we have to look every day at the men who have eviscerated our Constitution? There is no need to invoke the Spanish Inquisition when we already have the men who have done their best to carry us back to fifteenth century by bringing back torture, illegal confinement without charges, and by single-handedly repealing the Geneva Convention.
Underpinnings of the New Media
Just like the hardware has to improve in order to bring us the types of service we expect of the Internet in the New Media age, the software upon which it runs will need to evolve. Linux has been one of the better evolutionary steps so far, in the critical area of Web servers, just as open-source and freely distributed Web browsers such as Firefox have spurred innovation. In truth, the entire open-source software revolution did not happen a moment too soon.
I am not always totally happy with open-source offerings, just as I am not always happy with the offerings of commercial software companies. Nonetheless, it is difficult to be less than impressed with the spirit in which open-source projects are carried out. An analogy with college and professional football is not without merit, although in the case of software, where the “college player” is usually several years past amateur status, calls into serious question who will win the game when the teams go head-to-head.
The Reality of New Media
Writing on consecutive days about getting information from the new media and the Ron Paul campaign, a curmudgeon cannot help but reflect on how those things go together. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the (I think) questionable polling techniques of the Paul campaign, you have to admit that their grip on the Web as an instrument of politics is very firm. As more and more people embrace the technology, the Ron Paul model will become increasingly important in politics.
But it is not only politics. It is everything about how we get our information. Take Wikipedia as another example. There are people that say an encyclopedia that anybody can edit cannot be correct; another group maintains that an encyclopedia like that is more likely to be correct. Give the current sad state of textbook production, which is done by committee and mainly for political reasons, how can people possibly say that Wikipedia is worse than what we have now?
Who Is Ron Paul Trying To Fool?
You have to wonder about Ron Paul’s ethics.
He is apparently perfectly all right with letting his acolytes run rigged poll after rigged poll to make him look good, and that is not exactly pristinely honest. It is transparently obvious that his supporters are putting up polls on Websites, then emailing the Ron Paul Fan Club so they can all come vote, at least once, for their hero. It is pretty easy to tell what is going on, since he gets 80% or so in these rigged polls and closer to 1% in actual scientific polls.
On The Transition of News Sources
I have been having an email conversation with a friend that owns a small string of rural Kansas newspapers. As a part of that conversation, I have come to realize even more fully that the news sources of the masses are currently in the phase that economists call “transitional.” That just means that the economists do not yet understand what is going on. They may never understand what is going on. ;o) They are, after all, economists.
Even economists must have noticed, however, that the way people get their news is changing. The fastest growing news sources are not CNN or Fox. The fastest growing are Slate, and the Onion, and blogs of all kinds. Newspapers are probably not here to stay in their current form. The real problem, however, will be transitioning the ethics of the brick and mortar newspaper business into the virtual media. It is not as bad as we think it is, even now, but it has a ways to go.
Sucking Up To A Search Engine
While Stumbling new pages during the last couple of days, I have run across several sites bemoaning the recent Google page-rank downgrading of a number of previously highly-rated sites . I even read one in which a blogger had decided to give up on Google entirely. There is much wringing of hands, rending of clothing, and self-loathing, with confusion and self-pity waiting in the wings. If I may, I would like to render a proverb for these people:
If you live by sucking up to a search engine, so shall ye perish.
It is the job of the Google-place to search the Web for you and return relevant pages. They once did a better job of that that they do now, since they apparently decided in one of their all-night strategy sessions that it was better to return a lot of pages than just returning the right ones. So once you get past page two or three of a search for “adenoidal teenagers” you are looking at what appear to be random returns about horse thievery or first aid.
Hints from Ancient Man
Archeology is a tantalizing science, with anthropology close behind. It seems that every new find of human remains pushes the origins of relatively civilized human being farther back in time. Within the last few days, the remains of a seafood dinner and small stone tools in a cave on the coast of South Africa give evidence of a fairly complex society as long ago as 165,000 years, more than 40,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The same is true of the so-called Clovis culture of the prehistoric Americas. This culture appears to have been wiped out about 13,000 years ago, perhaps by a meteor strike. Some archeological finds suggest that the Clovis culture may have existed in the Americas as many as 50,000 years ago, twenty-odd thousands of years before previous estimates. In fact, the difference is great enough to call the long-held land bridge migration theory into question.
The Treatment of Refugees in America
I am waiting, and watching, with almost unbounded curiosity, to see if the rich white people of Southern California are treated as badly as the poor black people of New Orleans in their time of crisis. We can even have the battle of the football stadiums, since the field where the San Diego Chargers play football has been opened up for people evacuated from their homes, as was the Superdome in New Orleans.
I read today that little George was sending the “chiefs” of FEMA to the fire zones. That undoubtedly struck terror into the hearts of the people of Southern California. The military, such as is left after little George has sent all the people and equipment to Iraq, have been mobilized to help out. Heck, there may be a dozen, and maybe a few more, National Guardsmen still in the Western United States between tours of duty in the Middle East.
Double Jeopardy
You have to wonder about the practical nature of human beings. We keep building our homes and town in places where nature has proven to be a superior adversary. I don’t know how many times I have heard flood or storm victims vow to rebuild their homes in the same places, right in the place where storm surges or raging waters have been destroying structures for generations, and sometimes centuries.
It is happening again today in Southern California, where the fires are burning their way through areas that have been burned or threatened before, in many cases several times. Southern California was a desert, of course, before people decided it would be prime living territory and began to infuse it with imported water. Trees and brush grew, pretty much out of control. But the natural rains were still sparse, and the dry wind still blew. So, every year, some part of it burns.
