November 4, 2007 archive

If you have 18 minutes, check out this video link below (sorry, no permalink).  It is Carolyn Porco, lead scientist on the Cassini Saturn mission, talking about one of the greatest human achievements in exploration that has barely raised eyebrows in our terminally dull population.  She is the awesome, and she knows how to talk about science to stupid people like me. 

The Turtles

Happy Together

Back in 2004, Thomas J. DiLorenzo wrote a piece titled “Bush’s Lincolnian Assault on Civil Liberties (Or, Al Gore is Right!)” Here is some background information:

Under Abraham Lincoln, Habeas corpus was unilaterally (and illegally) suspended … and the military, with the help of a secret police bureaucracy operated by William Seward, imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political opponents. They were thrown into gulags such as Fort Lafayette in New York harbor where they were never charged, had no idea how long they would be held, and their families often had no idea of their whereabouts. (See James Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln; and Dean Sprague, Freedom Under Lincoln). The Virginia patriot George Washington would have undoubtedly drawn his sword and fought another revolution over such an outrage.

When I first found blogs in 2003, they were a place I felt at home and not so alone as our country beat the war drums and went on to “re-elect” (??) this criminal administration. I needed a sense of community to shore up my sanity and found it in some of the larger Democratic and progressive blogs.

Then came flame wars and I found myself detached from any particular community. But I still felt like there was something here in this land of blogtopia that I wasn’t ready to give up. So I started to venture out to some of the smaller blogs – especially those written by people who looked and lived differently from me – and found a whole new world. I sometimes feel like the globe is at my fingertips and all I have to do is sit on my couch with this screen in front of me to explore it all. That works for me – given that I’ve always leaned more towards the couch-potato kind of challenge.

So in this weekly series I’m planning to do, I’ll take you along with me and try to just scatch the surface of the wealth of information, experience, and beauty that is the blogosphere.