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“One Small Step for a Man…”

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I posted this a couple of years ago. I thought I’d drag it out and update it.

On this day at 02:56 UTC 45 years ago, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to leave one of these on the surface of another astronomical body. Three years and five months later, Eugene Cernan became the last man to do so, so far.

The last Space Shuttle touched down for the last time on this day three years ago.

Elon Musk of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX fame has said that the impetus behind the development of SpaceX came when his son asked him, “is it really true that they used to fly to the moon when you were a boy?”

Now there are two-dozen or more private space ventures around the world. There is a plan to capture and retrieve an asteroid for commercial purposes. At least two companies want to mine the moon. A proposal to colonize not Mars, but Venus has been proposed, and it actually makes better sense.

If we can just hold it together for a couple more decades, humanity might get off this rock, and we might do it in my lifetime.

But it’s still not looking too good.

Read This

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Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist by Danusha V. Goska at American Thinker. Excerpt:

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.

Also:

My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: “Think Globally; Screw up Locally.” In other words, “Love Humanity but Hate People.”

Interesting read.  Pay particular attention to reason #1.

RIP Jim Garner

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I’ve always enjoyed the film and television work of James Garner. He passed away yesterday.

Back in 2012, I posted this:

I watched an interesting interview of actor/producer James Garner from 1999 recently, and I’ve extracted three significant pieces from that interview that I wanted some feedback on.  Please watch the short (2:50) video, and give me your thoughts.  I’m really interested.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MruAzbUve9k?rel=0]

In the comments, TheGeekWithA.45 described it thus:

My initial thought was “cognitive dissonance”. Giving it a little more consideration, I’m going to go with “the triumph of indoctrination over reason”.

Edumacation

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So the New Yorker magazine does an article about the recent Atlanta school system standardized test cheating conspiracy:  Wrong Answer.  This used to be the thing that would inspire hours of research and writing to create an überpost, but I’m going to resist that.  Instead, I’m just going to quote this little excerpt:

“Without even reading the question, I could tell you just by the shape of the graph, ‘Oh, my kids know that,’ ” (Damany Lewis, a math teacher at Parks Middle School, in Atlanta) told me. He put the test in his fireplace once he’d confirmed that he had taught the necessary concepts. But he worried that his students would struggle with questions that were delivered in paragraph form. Some of his seventh-grade students were still reading by sounding out the letters. It seemed unfair that the concepts were “buried in words.”

Seventh grade.  They’re 12-13 years old, assuming none had been previously held back.

And some can barely read.

But the tests are at fault.