Month: March 2008

We spend close to $100,000 every minute in Iraq, but we can’t afford to keep NASA’s budget at its current size and ensure more incredible discoveries about our solar system (and ourselves since we are all created from stardust) from the Mars rover Spirit?

Spirit, the Mars Rover, Left to Die Before Its Time [Mars Rover]: “But now it looks like Spirit has rolled on its six wheels and done science experiments for the very last time. The U.S. government has forced NASA, this country’s national space agency, to cut its budget by 4 million dollars. And that means only one rover, Opportunity, will survive. To say that this is a tragedy is an understatement.”

Amazing. Human short-sightedness never ceases to disappoint me.

Yet another reason to vote for change in ’08.

Update: Spirt Has Been Saved!

Stickers?

I’ll put them on my laptop and make you famous at all the marketing conferences where I speak every year (not to mention the ones I attend).

Email me@samharrelson.com for my address. I’ll even send an SASE if you’re that cheap.

I’ll even blog about you if you don’t make me send an SASE!

http://btre.blogtalkradio.com/74_94716.mp3

Download – Cinch from (803) 413 – 6834 on Monday, March 24, 2008 11:09 AM

Salon.com does a fantastic job of presenting the situation at the Baghdad Museum after the US invasion of Iraq five years ago and where things stand now.

There’s a text transcript as well as a mp3 podcast available of a very valuable roundtable discussion…

The looting of Iraq | Salon News: “Among the many unintended and unforeseen consequences of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that began five years ago this week was the wholesale looting of Iraq’s museums and archaeological sites. Iraq has been called the cradle of civilization. Starting with the Sumerian civilization, which more than 5,000 years ago produced what may be the world’s first examples of writing and math, the area centered on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and known as Mesopotamia has been home to a succession of cultures — Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. Many believe southern Iraq was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. But within weeks of the first American airstrike, the cradle of civilization had been robbed. Baghdad’s National Museum of Iraq, among the globe’s premier repositories of antiquities, was ransacked over the course of a week in April 2003. Statues were dragged down the steps, artifacts six millennia old were carried off in plastic bags. American soldiers were not dispatched to protect the museum until the thieves were long gone. “

You can download the podcast here.

is it kosher to say “happy easter”? i should know with a divinity degree, i guess. makes me feel sorta uneasy saying “happy easter” since what we’re observing here was a rather revolutionary event.

maybe we should say “take easter seriously this year, dammit” instead of “happy easter”?