Re: Deep Impact Kicks Off Fourth of July with Deep Space Fireworks



Eric Chomko wrote:
> spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>
> : Eric Chomko wrote:
> : > spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> [...]
> : > : > : The impact was of larger scale and I find it hard to believe that a
> : > : > : noninvasive method could not get equal data.
> : > : >
> : > : > Okay, how?
> : >
> : > : Come on. Astronomy has long known about such methods including infrared
> : > : spectroscopy.
> : >
> : > Then why do geologists still smash open rocks to see what's inside to this
> : > day?
>
> : Of course, they do so, almost always without harming anything, to get
> : information, and of course, there's nothing wrong with this, because we
> : KNOW the effects. We stopped killing large animals for sport when the
> : denuding of the American West proved to be an aesthetic and physical
> : disaster for people. Whereas smashing rocks is for the most part known
> : not to cause harm.
>
> : But no responsible geologist, any more, will smash apart even a small
> : mountain. Mt. Rushmore would not be carved today, and this is a Good
> : Thing.
>
> : Sure, Michelangelo was improving upon a block of Carrera marble, ripped
> : out of the earth by stonemasons. But you can't ethically "scale up" to
> : give a new Michelango license to destroy or damage a unique object
> : which has been unchanged since the dawn of the solar system for purely
> : artistic or scientific reasons, for the same reason you would not allow
> : him to carve a statue from an entire mountain.
>
> What is so wrong with carving a mountain like Mt. Rushmore? I can
> understand why we leave things in the national parks alone (i.e. no I
> don't think someone should carve something in Half Dome in Yosemite or
> Zoraster Temple in the Grand Canyon, but a scuplture on some foothills,
> what's wrong with that?

It disfigures the view. Christo's installations are temporary and thus
to me the only just form of environmental art.

Furthermore, wtf is Teddy Roosevelt doing on Mt. Rushmore? Guy
authorized butchery in the Phillipines and Nicaragua.

It's like that old ceremony in the west, "let da fire fall", where to
enhance the view, some clueless cowboys would dump burning garbage in a
canyon.

Altering or removing mountains changes DRAINAGE patterns in a large
area all downstream from the mountain with unpredictable effects. To do
so as the Chinese do, to survive, is just: but art should be in
galleries, or a temporary installation.

And the fact that my CONCLUSIONS track fashionable opinion at some
***-tail party in Manhattan with a lot of cute girls, who would
appreciate Christo but laugh at Mt. Rushmore or "let da fire fall", who
would allow the Chinese to strip mountains for fuel but not American
coal companies, means simply that quite a lot of liberalism, quite a
ton of bien-pensance, and a whacking great lot of Political Correctness
is not some fashionable shopping list.

It can be argued for rationally. Plus I gets to impress cute girls, of
course.


>
> : > : > I think you're overreacting here. The probablity that we caused Tempel 1
> : > : > to become a potential threat to the earth is about the same as that we
> : > : > caused it to veer away, thus avoiding a potential threat.
> : >
> : > : Even if the probability is vanishingly small, we set a precedent of
> : > : damaging an object that has been unchanged since the formation of the
> : > : Solar system.
> : >
> : > Unchanged?! No way! Every single orbit erodes some of the surface area.
> : > What we did was break off a few pieces to see under the surface in a
> : > manner that nature could not do for us. Sorry, but to make an omlette you
> : > must break some eggs.
>
> : Interesting; a Leninist justification for slaughtering the Whites and
> : the Kulaks. End justifies the means thinking ok for capitalists, not
> : for Reds? I don't think so.
>
> What the hell does politics have to do with this? We are talking science
> here!! Lenin thought he'd buy a rope from us as well. Never happened!

That's the problem. The apolitical engineers don't realize that NASA
executives ARE playing politics. They are thus blind-sided and lulled
into doing less engineering than politics.
>
> : Every single orbit erodes, but our intervention was different, more
> : akin to a meteor strike and thus at the system scale which is known to
> : have unpredictable, and for earth dangerous.
>
> The risk was less than miniscule.

Perhaps. But the lack of RESPECT for complex and unknown systems with
the demonstrated capability to destroy earth wasn't.
>
> : What I am saying here is that as a Senator or NASA administrator, I
> : would balance the ethical books. The books are to me out of balance
> : because the stunt was so clearly PR and not, in the main, science,
> : scheduled for the University of Maryland not for scientific reasons but
> : under a justification which for Big Science, and Big Scientists, has
> : become a "norm", in Diane Vaughan's sense, I believe, a "normalized
> : deviance".
>
> I think you protest too much, but I defend you right to do so!

Yeah, I bet. You may be the type of "libertarian" who claims this but
is curiously silent when his coworkers are escorted out the building by
Security.
>
> : This is behavior which mere language, mere words, sanctifies as OK even
> : when as in the case of Challenger and Columbia people DIE, and in
> : response, NASA refuses to meet the third requirement of the
> : investigating committee...because it can get away with that refusal. In
> : 1963, they wouldn't have.
>
> You should be more concerned about JFK's assassination in that year rather
> than NASA politics.

I have a lot of concerns. One of them being the unhealed
epistemological wound dealt by the assassination. Whatever we know,
whatever we do not know, we do know that the elite didn't want us to
know.
>
> : Today, NASA's flatasses would let the Apollo 13 drift away in space
> : while its astronauts strangled in their own *** and vomit.
>
> : Just as in the case of the Manhattan Project, which Einstein helped to
> : initiate because of the evil of Hitler, but which was taken out of his
> : ethical guidance after V-E day, the system, NASA or Manhattan, takes
> : upon an amoral life of its own which in these cases seems to be one of
> : decline: for one step, which fudges the ethics, makes a subsequent and
> : more serious step a normal deviance, and thus OK.
>
> You're fighting with the nature of man now! Maybe you should stop eating
> as you're killing plants and animals just so you can live. Think of their
> loss, man...
>
The Buddhists and many others do. Buddha unlearned absolute thinking,
absolute asceticism, in the meditation of the Deer Park. This
reconciled him to having a MINIMAL impact on the occasional squashed
bug. But it did NOT reconcile Buddha to DDT.

You're thinking like a typical Westerner, who in a second-order sense
approaches any goal as if it's the bottom of the ninth with the bases
loaded, and he needs not to bunt or get walked (I trust the base-ball
analogies are apposite) but to hit one out of the park.

If he decides to be a killer ape, he isn't content with bronze swords
as at Thermopylae, he has to build a fusion bomb and set it off.

But if he decides to become a "Buddhist", he thinks this means that
tomorrow he will wake up and be "perfect", killing no bugs.

But in most of life we are the pitcher who is at bat only because there
is no convenient substitute and the manager is looking not for a power
hit but for us to get on base with a walk.

> : Endangering all of New Mexico in an unpredictable runaway chain
> : reaction at Alamogordo ethically PREPARED Leslie Groves, Robert
> : Oppenheimer, and Truman to decide not to make a demonstration for the
> : Japanese and instead to kill and maim.
>
> : This in turn prepared the team to create the fusion bomb, a bomb with
> : deeply minus zero military sense, which caused the Russians through
> : Fuchs to steal the secrets of same. With the result that today (as
> : former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has pointed out) that our
> : stocks and that of the other nuclear powers are still an ongoing danger
> : to life on earth, and that at any time, the North Korean situation can
> : go nuclear.
>
> : Step by step, down we go. Get it?
>
> Sorry, I won't take your Chicken Little approach of things. Does it break
> your heart to see a house built in some animals' habitat? It should!
> Unless it's your house that is...

I can't afford a mortgage, so I dunno whachoo talking about here. Of
course, any number of rich homeowners will indeed perform at some cost
an environmental assessment of their projects.

In fact, private property can IMPROVE environmental conditions. In
America, in fact, brutalization by laissez-faire means that public
lands accessible to thugs are under far more stress than private tracts
owned by environmentally sensitive guys like Bruce Willis.

The point being you don't stop thinking if your house endangers some
prairie dawg. You don't not build the house or build it, and then sit
out on the patio shooting the surviving critters. Instead, if the
little varmints have a key role in your environment, you figure out how
you guys can live together.

>
> I take you don't have much.

No, I don't. But this makes me unwise only in the eyes of drunken white
suburbanites who are in fact ignorant of science and culture to the
extent that they have to be galvanized by stupid displays.

Only in Amerikkka is property ownership an argument. Sure, Alexander
Hamilton thought it argued for good judgement. But while he followed
Plato in this, he was writing in contradiction to Buddha and to Christ,
both of whom saw that the propertied man can be wise about some things
and stupid about others, where his anxieties rule his thought. Eye of
the needle, and all that.

>
> : > : During the 19th century, entire species were wiped out by people who
> : > : reasoned that their small acts made no difference. As it happened, they
> : > : did, and from that we can derive, PRIOR to "cranking the numbers", a
> : > : deep ecology for space, which we now know is not a dead, clockwork,
> : > : Newtonian system but vastly more complex.
> : >
> : > You make it sounds like today Deep Impact, tommorrow the Death Star from
> : > Star Wars fame.
>
> : In an incremental fashion, this is what happens to societies. And idiot
> : movies reconcile people to false propositions, such as George Lucas'
> : FALSE proposition that as long as you are cute, fuzzy, multiculturally
> : accepting of Chewbacca, and above all "like an American", you can never
> : be in fact the Death Star.
>
> I don't think George Orwell, with 1984, included or excluded any country
> WRT who could sponsor Big Brother.
>
> : > : Needless to say, given that NASA cannot even figure out how to repair
> : > : launch damage in space, given that NASA cannot take other than grainy,
> : > : black and white photos of launches, given that NASA has authorized
> : > : Shuttle launches that will endanger lives, I won't hang by my thumbs,
> : > : waiting for it to morally and spiritually evolve to a deep ecology of
> : > : outer space.
> : >
> : > Your choice. When you go to the Air and Space Museum don't throw any money
> : > into the donation box.
>
> : No, a social choice which is normalizing deviance. And your "choice" in
> : fact, taken quite literally, forces me to "go" to this PR museum after
> : all, doesn't it. In fact, while being told I am free, I am in fact
> : marshaled by language and symbols into the idiot teeming manipulated
> : mass, whose opinions are like their arseholes.
>
> So language and symbols are not forms and methods of communication, they
> are shackles on your freedom? A wise man once said that the difference
> between a successful human being and one that isn't is based upon choices
> as well as their ability to interpret reality. I find your interpetation
> of reality quite telling.
>
Gee, I wonder who that wise man wuz. Zig Ziglar? And what is this
"success"?

Ayn Rand confused the Chrysler Building with "reality". Coming from a
collapsed society, a failed state, she THOUGHT that the big buildings
of New York to be the physical embodiment of a New Capitalist Man, who
would build Reality...not what became unrentable commercial real estate
for ten years, during the Depression.

She was as deluded as her Pinko contemporaries because her "philsophy",
to which you seem to adhere, looks outside itself for a
"reality"...when Kant showed that our ability to apprehend reality
needs no such idolatrous ground.

> : > : OUTER SPACE IS WHERE YOU DISCOVER WONDER AND WHERE YOU FIGHT AND NEVER
> : > : HURT EARTH IF YOU STOP BELIEVING THIS YOUR MOOD TURNS UGLY
> : >
> : > You act as if the comet was the habitat for some extraterrestial life of
> : > some sort. It's a friggen rock fer crise sake!
>
> : Just as we did not know, only fifty years ago, about the effects of
> : tobacco on the human body, we don't KNOW what effect these "historical"
> : stunts will have. At the same time, the tobacco smoker circa 1910 could
> : reflect that his pleasure was the pleasure of self-damage.
>
> I just wish I'd had all the baseball cards from that era from those
> tobacco packs!
>
George Washington Hill's Camels unfortunately put an end to cigarette
cards, as well as the lives of thousands of smokers. After the
introduction of Camels, cigarette makers stopped using coupons and
instead used "high quality" tobaccos which lulled the smoker into
thinking that cigarettes were good for him.

George Washington Hill was a type of WWI era publicist who discovered
that, *pace* Abe Lincoln, you could full all, or a statistical
majority, of the people all of the time, and his spiritual shitbag
descendants are in control in NASA.


> : He could in fact reason that his body, to him and his physician not
> : completely known (and not completely known even today) was an important
> : and complex SYSTEM and based on this could seek pleasures which did not
> : "relax" him by making him slightly sick.
>
> : Spinoza saw that the drunkard was seeking something which needed no
> : "scientific" proof to be something harmful, something that damaged a
> : complex SYSTEM.
>
> : Primitive man, unlike millions of men today, survived for aeons because
> : he had the horse sense to know when something constituted a system. He
> : could see his interdependence on the buffalo thus in various ways he
> : evolved what we think to be religious "piety", but which was probably a
> : set of rules, proven useful by their own survival in the
> : "anthropocentric" fashion, where the existence of the man-made rule as
> : preserved by the "primitive" tribe argues strongly for its
> : truth...because at least until the buggers had the misfortune to meet
> : the whiteman, they've been around.
>
> Native Americans weren't the only primative men.
>
> : > Personally, I'm happy we're using explosives in space for science rather
> : > than on each other hear on earth. Oops, that's happneing too. You should
> : > be so critical of the bombs in London yesterday.
>
> : There are in fact in cool light of analysis three possibilities.
>
> : The most likely is that there are terrorists who wage war on
> : governments, which is the Official Story. But even in this scenario,
> : governments have failed to explain how they can "fight" nonstate
> : actors.
>
> Paying off informers that rat out their friends for money and other
> wealth. Someone will rat out the London bombers based upon that same
> scenario, though after-the-fact. The goverments must always have more
> money than the terrorists and must be willing to spend it.
>
> : The second most likely is that our governments have information about
> : these groups, although they are independent, and this is credible,
> : because bin Laden (for example) was our pal when he fought the Reds in
> : Afghanistan. In this second-most-likely scenario, our governments,
> : especially the US, reason, in a criminal fashion, that it is easier to
> : let Sep 11 or the recent London bombings go forward because the outrage
> : serves the ends of governments which are to control people.
>
> Yes and no. They must always try and stp something from happening. On the
> same token, once happened they must justify their existence mt cathcing
> the crooks. You're half right in that governments must take every
> potential danger and actual disaster and turn it into a favorable light to
> justify their existence.
>
> : The second most likely possibility is reinforced by the findings of
> : Thomas Kean and the independent commission of enquiry into Sep 11, a
> : commission that Bush resisted. In the words of the report of this
> : commission, "the system was blinking red" while Condi Rice apparently
> : read only the titles of urgent reports, and Bush played around on his
> : ranch like a ***.
>
> I am quick to remind the Bush-can-do-no-wrong types that 9/11
> happened on Bush's watch (to use a phrase Reagan liked to bandy about).
>
> : The third likely possibility, which is a possible reality, is that
> : hegemony is in fact complete and al Quaeda is performing CIA style
> : black ops on the part of the G-8, at their bidding popping up to cause
> : people to stop worrying about global warming and Africa, and to return
> : to being conveniently patriotic John Bulls or Joe Americans, admiring
> : destructive space stunts and swilling beer to blot out thought.
>
> The problem with that is that even plausible deniability is 100%
> foolproof.
>
> : Of course, in the third scenario, Madrid backfired, because the
> : Spaniards promptly hit the chicken switch as the Brits might: the Brits
> : might refuse to play the Churchillian damn-your-eyes role. Which means,
> : hopefully, that IF the third possibiity obtains, there is Hope.
>
> Hope is a ship and a town in Arkansas.
>
> : I do not know which possibility is TRUE because underneath the numbers
> : lies the ability to THINK, and under the paving stones lie the beach.
> : I've "cranked the numbers" as my trade, and I do so better because I
> : know that before you do the numbers you balance the ethical books.
>
> You presume to think for me??
>
> Here, try this one. I know about the Power Elite, their connection to oil
> and intel and to what means they are willing to go. And rather than simply
> call them despicable or turn a blind eye and wrap myself up in the
> patriotic flag of denial; I'm starting to see the method of their madness.
>
> Eric

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