Tag: politics

Cave exploration the astronaut way

11:18 am

How not to go cave exploring:

An international crew of six astronauts will start training for a caving adventure designed to prepare them for spaceflight. CAVES, an abbreviation of Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills, prepares astronauts to work safely and effectively and solve problems as a multicultural team while exploring uncharted areas using space procedures.

Or to put it more bluntly, overly complicated, bureaucratically organized, and not very efficient. For example:
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An aide to Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren threatened and pushed a reporter this weekend, knocking his video camera to the ground.

10:37 am

Leftwing civility: An aide to Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren threatened and pushed a reporter this weekend, knocking his video camera to the ground.

I like the aide’s comment at the end of the video: “You’re messing with the wrong people.” Video below the fold.
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Todd Akin, whose stupid comments about rape have practically destroyed his campaign, is receiving death threats to himself, his family, and his staff.

9:41 am

Modern political civility: Todd Akin, whose stupid comments about rape have practically destroyed his Senate campaign in Missouri, is receiving death threats against himself, his family, and his staff.

I don’t know if the threats are coming from either the left or the right. The left kind of wants Akin to stay in the race so that Claire McCaskill has a better shot at winning. Yet, the left has also been quite willing in recent years to express and even commit violence against their opponents. For these kinds of death threats to come from the left would not be unusual or surprising. The right meanwhile is furious at Akin, mostly because of the absolute stupidity and ignorance exhibited by his comments. It is likely that the comments will cost them an easy Senate win, which in turn might cost them control of the Senate. Yet, threats of violence from the right are rare.

Thus, it is hard to say what politics might be instigating these threats.

It really doesn’t matter. The threats are horrible, and are far worse than anything Todd Akin said. I hope the police find and arrest every single person who sent a threat.

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A Connecticut gay man has pleaded guilty to sending hundreds of threatening letters, including death threats, to the director of a conservative organization opposed to same-sex marriage.

11:11 am

Leftwing civility: A Connecticut gay man has pleaded guilty to sending hundreds of threatening letters, including death threats, to the director of a conservative organization opposed to same-sex marriage.

Some quotes from his letters:
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NASA scientists in a battle with astronomers over who gets to name things on Vesta and Mars.

10:01 am

A rose by any other name: NASA scientists are in a battle with astronomers over who gets to name things on Vesta and Mars.

This is not a new problem. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has maintained its power over naming everything in space since the 1960s, even though the IAU has sometimes ignored the wishes of the actual discoverers and explorers and given names to things that no one likes. For example, even though the Apollo 8 astronauts wanted to give certain unnamed features on the Moon specific names, the IAU refused to accept their choices, even though those astronauts were the first human beings to reach another world and see these features up close.

Eventually, the spacefarers of the future are going to tell the IAU where to go. And that will begin to happen when those spacefarers simply refuse to use the names the IAU assigns.

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