I'm off of work soon to drink and be merry whilst we celebrate our nations freedom. I will be doing my damndest to avoid any type of computer screen for the next three days if at all possible, besides of course watching the results from the Deep Impact Mission. You know, the one I haven't shut up about for the last year or so. Yeah. That one. With the impactor that's going to hit the comet on the morning of the fourth of july.
Here is the schedule of events for Deep Impact-
Mission Events (Earth-receive time - in EDT)
July 3, 2:07 a.m: Impactor released into comet's path
July 4, 12:21 a.m.: 1st impactor targeting maneuver
July 4, 1:17 a.m.: 2nd impactor targeting maneuver
July 4, 1:39 a.m.: 3rd impactor targeting maneuver
July 4, 1:52 a.m.: (+ or - 3 min.): Impact with Tempel 1
July 4, 2:05 a.m.: Flyby goes into shield mode
July 4, 2:06 a.m.: Flyby's closest approach to Tempel 1
You will be able to watch live updates and streaming video of the latest news and images at the NASA TELEVISION site here..Goo
I leave you for the weekend with an essay from the always inciteful Victor Davis Hanson entitled American Zen, which gave me things to think about and be thankful for this weekend.....
An excerpt-
While the world debated whether an American guard at Guantanamo really flushed a Koran down a toilet, Robert Mugabe may have bulldozed the homes of 1.5 million Zimbabweans.
Few seem to have cared.
To do so would be a messy, complicated thing — lecturing a black third-world leader to stop tormenting his own poor; pleading with other African states not to allow the genesis of another Rwanda; and, probably, being embarrassed by someone who doesn’t give a hoot what a Western elite liberal says.
Mao, whose minions killed somewhere between 40 and 50 million, is still popular in China. That Communist country is deemed by many Western allies as less of a threat than the United States and its elected president, who routinely appears with a Hitler-moustache in European demonstrations.
The new general rule: Global morality is established by the degree the United States can be blamed. Millions of lives lost, vast corruption, thousands of refugees — all that can’t quite equate with a U.S. soldier showing insensitivity or an American detention center with mere doctors, ethnic food, and religious accommodations.
All this is not mere theater anymore, but serious stuff, since we are at war with thousands of troops in harm’s way counting on our support. America should wake up to this near-religious hatred — unless it is so far gone itself that it really believes the arguments of silly university-press books about our own pathologies and pernicious “empire.”
So how does the United States navigate nimbly between its weariness with the thankless role of a superpower and the dangers of a nostalgic isolationism? We need to find a sort of Zen-like philosophical balance that brings both some maturity to our pampered critics and psychic relief to ourselves, without endangering our own security or abandoning our true allies — while in the middle of a war and a polarized electorate here at home.
And one more thing we shouldn't forget this weekend-
No comments:
Post a Comment