Comments on: An Apollo astronaut on political quagmires

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 09:52:00 +0000

Bummer.

Or…

Psilocybin Mushrooms: great way to check out of reality when things don’t meet expectations and pretend to touch some divine truth others just don’t understand because they choose to live differently than the Anointed Ones.

Moon Shot: decades of space age technologies – including tools we can use to build a better world when humans stop hiding under rocks – that more than pay for themsleves and diverted 100 billion dollars in today’s money from truly fruitless military spending.

By: Earth

Earth — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Psychedelic Remix

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an
intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to
do something about it. From out there on the [psilocybin mushrooms], international
politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of
the neck and [feed him some psilocybin mushrooms] and say, ‘Look at that, you son of [an atomized, Cartesian, reductionist, scientifically materialist and perverted Darwinian nightmare society who has lost all sense of the Sacred].”

— Edgar Mitchell [speaking upon his return from inner space]

Psilocybin Mushrooms: found free for millennia growing on suitable substrate in a replenishable and sustainable fashion. Environmentally friendly. Life Transforming for everyone who wants it.

Moon Shot: over 100 billion dollars in today’s money. Not at all replenishable or sustainable. Toxic as hell. Life changing for a few white guys.

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 05:58:00 +0000

That was hi-larious. Thanks.

By: Lee Meade

Lee Meade — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 02:57:00 +0000

Politicians are like lawyers (ok, many are), we all hate them, but wouldn’t dream of going into court without one of them on (at) our side’.
The same for the political arena.

By: social_maladroit

social_maladroit — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 02:41:00 +0000

Actually, I was thinking of something out of Stan Freberg’s The United States of America:

Christopher Columbus: “I claim this land in the name of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain.”
Native American: “How.”
Columbus: “Well, first I stick the flag in the sand, and then I…”

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:57:00 +0000

FYI, Edgar Mitchell never really got back from the moon. His extraterrestrial claims would’ve been much more credible had his position not also been peppered with a smorgasboard of woo, including such tasties as remote healing and “energy” studies.

He founded The Institute of Noetic Sciences, and his name and prior status as an astronaut are used to lend credibility to a new kind of “science”.

Nevertheless, great quote.

By: rastronomicals

rastronomicals — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:09:00 +0000

Yeah, political infighting is stupid.

Let’s just go along with what the Christian right and the Tea Party want, and then we can all look up at the moon together.

And you can see our president agrees!

By: Daemonworks

Daemonworks — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:01:00 +0000

Don’t most people want to this to politicians most of the time?

By: t3kna2007

t3kna2007 — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:50:00 +0000

Bloviation is a style of empty, pompous, political speech which originated in Ohio and was used by US President Warren G. Harding, who described it as “the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing”. The verb to bloviate is the act of creating bloviation.

Apparently we’re receiving posts from people writing in from another planet. A planet with better politicians than we have around here.

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:42:00 +0000

If you dragged a politician to the surface of the moon and said, “Look at that, you son of a bitch!” he’d be more likely to make animated gesticulations while his eyes turned red and his skin puffed up, followed by about two to three minutes of silent retching, then decrescendoing low-gee spasms for another minute or two.

No one explicitly mentioned a spacesuit, so naturally I just assumed…

Only joking. Even politicians deserve air…barely.

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:31:00 +0000

It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just life. We have power and we can either use it constructively or we can squander it on emotional immaturity.

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:29:00 +0000

Maybe he’d just like us, politicians and all, to make a little more effort to live up to our potential as a species. The amount of resources we expend fighting each other for the sake of fighting each other (and I’m not just talking about war) is staggering. Someday perhaps more of us will realize that our sense of accomplishment is inversely proportional to how much we unnecessarily make each others lives more difficult. Competition is great. Petty embittered strife with the neighbors is not. The governance of the polis is fine, but in the grand scheme of things, politicians and nations stand upon the sands of time. If we want our lives to have meaning, it’s incumbent upon us to give them meaning, because we really are a small dust mote in a majestically indifferent cosmos.

By: Ambiguity

Ambiguity — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:28:00 +0000

Anyone can get involved and have impact far beyond their single vote.

You say that as if it’s a good thing.

By: ROSSINDETROIT

ROSSINDETROIT — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:08:00 +0000

Everything looks simple from far away. You can’t see the details. Unfortunately we all live in the messy earthbound details. While I appreciate Mitchell’s point of view on this I hope he realized that without politicians and a national government willing to support a space program he wouldn’t ever have had the privilege of that point of view.

By: Uncle Geo

Uncle Geo — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:06:00 +0000

Mark Kirk nails it. Blaming politicians is a huge cop out as term limits are. If you pay attention (and so many don’t or fall for propaganda) you know who to throw out and who you want in there for the long term.

Blaming parties is a cop out too -most are made up of no more than a few hundred people out of every million and the leadership posts are the hardest to fill. Anyone can get involved and have impact far beyond their single vote. But then that would mean they’d actually have to do something besides bloviating.

By: Richard Paterson

Richard Paterson — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:57:00 +0000

Nice idea, until he found out someone had to take the photos. From space. After they crippled NASA some more.

By: t3kna2007

t3kna2007 — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:40:00 +0000

Wouldn’t it be a shame if a politician were suddenly unable to speak after exposure to hard vacuum?

In space, no one can hear you bloviate.

By: kmoser

kmoser — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:42:00 +0000

Of course UFOs are real. Virtually every person on this planet has seen things in the air they can’t identify. Unless they were hallucinating, those things are called “UFOs” and are real things (albeit unidentified). Or do you think every UFO sighting is a hallucination?

By: penguinsix

penguinsix — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 07:19:00 +0000

Actually many other astronauts have had remarkably similar realizations when looking at the Earth from the same point of view.

http://www.spacequotations.com/earth.html

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 06:31:00 +0000

Yet both were invented by humans.

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 06:28:00 +0000

Not if he wasn’t a American politician.

By: Lexicat

Lexicat — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 06:01:00 +0000

flags hate god.

By: BrotherPower

BrotherPower — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:40:00 +0000

God hates flags.

By: Jim Schmidt

Jim Schmidt — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:21:00 +0000

Dish Network does that. One of the first things I did after we got our DVR set up was to record 18 hours of that channel and fast forward through it to watch the weather patterns move across the ocean :)

By: lutherblissett

lutherblissett — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:15:00 +0000

I think you may be thinking of this -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory

By: hazz

hazz — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:03:00 +0000

Yep. Everyone hates all politicians. Except the one they voted for.

By: SomeGuyNamedMark

SomeGuyNamedMark — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:41:00 +0000

My problem with statements like this is the assumption that we are all helpless victims at the hands of politicians. There is little mention of the fact (especially in democracies) that we get the leaders we desire. For every politician that tries to, say, protect workers in the workplace there is a crowd of people convinced that “You can’t do that, it’ll cost jobs! XYZ News said so!” So feel free to twist the arms of those polticians but you had better be ready to give a kick in the butt to the masses too.

By: Jim Saul

Jim Saul — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:37:00 +0000

That sounds familiar, but everything I can find seems to be simulated.

Leaving a long-term broadcasting camera on the surface of the moon would make a nice bonus to the X-Prize:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize

By: J B

J B — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:32:00 +0000

Snort. Go read the Federalist Papers. Much better than cliched, simple-minded tripe.

By: social_maladroit

social_maladroit — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:10:00 +0000

If you dragged a politician to the surface of the moon and said, “Look at that, you son of a bitch!” he’d be more likely to respond, “So this is what the moon looks like! Hey, can we claim the moon as the sovereign territory of the United States?”