MIAMI — Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? The amazing, long-anticipated answer has come.

Nobody. Not when it mattered most.

Putting a bold exclamation point on what was already a storybook season, the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-17 Sunday night in Super Bowl XLIV.

Quarterback Drew Brees passed for 288 yards and two touchdowns, and Port Allen native Tracy Porter returned an interception 74 yards for the clinching score to make New Orleans’ first Super Bowl trip in its 43-year history a success.

“It was all meant to be,” said Brees, named the game’s Most Valuable Player, speaking of his decision to come to the team and of the team’s ultimate moment. “It was all destiny.”

As the final seconds ticked off the Sun Life Stadium clock, the Saints gave head coach Sean Payton the obligatory Gatorade shower, lifted him to their shoulders and began a celebration amid confetti and fireworks, as thousands of Who Dat supporters stood at their seats and partied like it was New Year’s Eve and Fat Tuesday combined.

And who could blame them?

A franchise that contemplated leaving New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina trashed the city and its stadium in 2005 now brings the Vince Lombardi Trophy to a region that has seldom had reason to even dream such a thing could happen.

The win came almost 30 years to the day after one of sports’ greatest upsets, the Miracle on Ice. It matters little that, facing the 5‰-point favorite Colts, New Orleans wasn’t as big an underdog as the U.S. Olympic ice hockey team that beat the Soviet Union juggernaut in the 1980 Winter Olympics.

That year the Saints won only one game. But if Sunday’s game didn’t erase the memory of New Orleans fans wearing bags on their heads, it showed that these are not the latter-day Aints.

Facing a likely future Hall of Fame quarterback for the third consecutive game — and this time it was one who grew up in the Superdome’s shadow and as the son of one of the bad old days’ few stars — New Orleans was superior on both offense and, more surprisingly, defense.

Peyton Manning was trying to lead the Colts to their second Super Bowl title in four years and have a Manning hold the Lombardi Trophy for the third time in that span. (Younger brother Eli won it with the New York Giants in 2008.) Such heights are far loftier than their father, Archie, experienced while never enjoying a winning Saints season from 1971-82.

New Orleans frustrated Manning as it had Kurt Warner and Brett Favre in the playoffs. Though he completed 31 of 45 passes for 333 yards, only one was for a touchdown, as the Saints didn’t allow him to create the big plays that have been his hallmark.

When New Orleans took a 24-17 lead with 5:42 left, Manning had plenty of time to tie the game. But that is where Porter made the biggest play of his athletic life. On third-and-5 at the New Orleans 31, the cornerback stepped in front of a throw to Reggie Wayne and, after a couple of cuts, took it past a delirious Saints bench for a touchdown and a 31-17 lead with 3:12 left.

“When I saw my blockers in front of me and only Peyton (Manning) and the offensive linemen left, I cut back and ran it in,” Porter said.

Manning marched the Colts as far as the New Orleans 3, but his last-gasp pass bounced off Wayne’s hands with 44 seconds left to play, and the stadium began to rock.

After falling behind 10-0, the Saints climbed back with a combination of execution and a gambler’s nerve. The bold play didn’t always work. Instead of asking Garrett Hartley to kick a chip-shot field goal in the second quarter, Payton tried to run it in from the 1, and linebackers Gary Brackett and Clint Session stopped Pierre Thomas cold.

So, Payton doubled down.

Trailing 10-6 at the half, he surprised everyone with an onside kick that reserve safety Chris Reis recovered at the Saints 42. It ignited a drive that led to New Orleans’ first touchdown, a 16-yard screen pass to Thomas, and its first lead, 13-10. Though Manning would answer with a drive punctuated by former LSU star Joseph Addai’s 4-yard touchdown run, Brees responded in moving the Saints to one of Hartley’s three field goals and a 2-yard touchdown pass to tight end Jeremy Shockey. A two-point conversion pass to Lance Moore gave the Saints a 24-17 edge.

“Ever since you start playing football, you’re dreaming about playing in this game,” Shockey said. “I dreamed and prayed all day and night about being in the situation I’m in right now.”

More than an hour after the game, the chants of hundreds of other black-and-gold-clad fellow dreamers were chanting their team’s famous question.

It was, of course, rhetorical. At long last, they had the answer they wanted.

Check out the article at The Advocate.

WHO DAT??? What an excellent football game!!! Check out this cool article…

Who Dat Nation: Saints become America's Team

MIAMI (AP) — Marshall Faulk ran as far as he could from the dead-end Desire Projects. He bolted the New Orleans streets to play college ball in San Diego, then blossomed into an NFL star with the Indianapolis Colts.

Forced to take sides in this Super Bowl, it was easy. Faulk rooted for his roots.

From President Barack Obama to a Queen, from Mr. Big to Miss America, the retired All-Pro had lots of company. For one game, the Saints were America's Team — champions, too, after a 31-17 win over the Colts on Sunday night.

"We played for so much more than ourselves," quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees said.

That's for sure, Faulk said.

"This is very important to the city," he said a few days ago. "For the last five, maybe 10 years, whether it's Katrina, or the crime rate, the city's always in a bad light. Now ... you're getting to see some of the great things that we have to offer."

French Quarter hotels and restaurants filled up as Sunday's game between the Colts and Saints approached, with fans streaming into Louisiana hoping to begin celebrating a week ahead of Mardi Gras.

Almost 4½ years after flooding from Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and nearly chased the Saints out of town for good, the club's first Super Bowl win may well represent the city's rebirth.

"You can't put it into words," receiver Marques Colston said after the win. "This city and region have been through so much."

Even the Colts grasped the soulful connection between the Saints and their town.

"There's a reason America is pulling for New Orleans, and why wouldn't they? They've been through a lot," Indianapolis safety Antoine Bethea said recently. "Sports tends to pull people together, so it's commendable for New Orleans to be, as I guess you'd say, America's Team right now."

Who Dat! That's the shortened version of the team's rally cry: "Who dat, who dat, who dat say gonna beat dem Saints?"

Egged on by New Orleans players, Saints fans started that loud, familiar chant inside Sun Life Stadium an hour before kickoff. Adorned in black-and-gold beads, toting parasols in team colors and stirred by a brass band, they paraded outside. Clearly, they needed no prompting to start the party.

Long after the final whistle, Saints fans lingered inside, chanting and cheering. It was a win many of them thought they may never see. The franchise began playing in 1967, one year after the first Super Bowl, and had never reached the big game.

Perhaps the Saints' biggest fan — literally — is the NBA's Shaquille O'Neal, the 7-foot-plus Cleveland Cavaliers center who got his start at LSU.

"It's good for the city, the economy and the organization. When I went to school, they had, like, a 99-year curse and hopefully that curse is over," O'Neal said. "They haven't won it at all. They haven't always had bad seasons but they've always had, like, one play — a missed field goal or a fumble or somebody getting hurt — and now this is their chance."

The Saints have managed only nine winning seasons in their 43-year history, with blooper tapes often replacing highlight reels. Try as they might, their fleur-de-lis logo often stood for losing.

But the emblem took on a different meaning this week in South Florida. It came to symbolize the Saints' spiritual connection to New Orleans — and hope for a city that once had little.

The Superdome, which hosts the 2013 Super Bowl, was an even more tangible example of the town's renaissance.

In the days after Katrina, the stadium became a place of last resort, with perhaps 30,000 helpless, homeless people trapped inside without plumbing or power. When the Saints beat Brett Favre and Minnesota in overtime for the NFC championship, the dome was packed again — this time with jubilant fans toasting their heroes.

Obama found himself drifting in their direction, even though the Colts were still five-point favorites.

"I do have a soft spot in my heart for New Orleans, mainly because of what the city's gone through over these last several years and I just know how much that team means to them," he said during a pregame interview broadcast by CBS.

Made sense to Queen Latifah, who sang "America the Beautiful" before the game. She's worked and lived in New Orleans.

"It would be kind of fun, it'd be almost a Cinderella story to see the Saints come through against someone who's as strong and dominant and skillful as Peyton Manning and the Colts," she said.

Ah, Manning. He's a four-time Most Valuable Player and was MVP of the Colts' Super Bowl win three years ago. He's also from New Orleans, where Brees is now the star quarterback.

"It's a special place to me. My family lives there," Manning said. "What Drew, and really the entire Saints team have meant to that community has been extremely impressive. Being a fellow New Orleanian, I certainly appreciate it."

The Manning vs. Brees matchup attracted a lot of pregame attention. Comedian Chris Rock liked the Saints because of their QB.

"Just for a practical reason, not a sentimental one," Rock said. "Drew Brees has been as good as Peyton Manning the last two years."

New Orleans linebacker Scott Fujita left the Cowboys after the 2005 season and signed with the Saints seven months after Katrina.

"The Saints are America's adopted team. There's no question about it," he said. "When I chose to leave Dallas, everybody said, 'Why would you leave Dallas? They're America's team.'

"Well, they were self-proclaimed America's Team a couple decades ago, and they have really, really good, loyal fans, but the rest of the country hates them. I mean, let's be honest," he said. "So New Orleans, yeah, you've got people all over the country who are pulling for us for so many reasons and really, really valid reasons."

Echoed NFL commissioner Roger Goodell: "It's a great success story for us, and while I can't root for a team, I'm really proud of what happened there and I'm thrilled for the people of the Gulf Coast."

"I don't think that can be stated enough," Saints safety Darren Sharper said. "It's just a close tie between the city and the team. Everyone says, 'Are you guys playing for the community? Are you guys playing for New Orleans?' We think that we are."

Check out the article at The Advocate.

Of course (to those who don't know), the title of this post is an old joke that we 'Aints fans USED TO say. But, no more!!! Geaux!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images, Sports

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Mardi Gras falls on a Sunday this year.

The city of the Saints is filling up with ex-New Orleanians and others ahead of the Super Bowl, many looking to cast off a legacy of football futility and natural disaster - others just looking to party down in one of the world's greatest party towns.

"We're gearing up for Sunday just like Mardi Gras day," said Earl Bernhardt, a bar owner in the French Quarter. "We're staffing just like we do for Mardi Gras, and if the Saints win, we won't close at all. We'll stay open as long as people are standing." After 43 years in existence, the Saints will make their Super Bowl debut in Miami on Sunday, facing the favored Indianapolis Colts.

Fans from most cities would be headed to South Florida about now. But for ex-pat New Orleanians, the game is triggering a pilgrimage home. And for everybody back in town, the party's already started.

A few are taking the week off in the countdown to game day. Others are punching the clock, but not getting much done. Saints jerseys, "Who Dat?" T-shirts and black and gold beads are the uniform everywhere you go.

The French Quarter's narrow streets also are awash in the team colors. As revelers cruise down its streets, strangers give each other high-fives.

"It's been all Saints all the time," said Steve Sabrier, an oil field worker who marched from the Superdome to the French Quarter after the NFC championship. "I pity anybody who needs something done in New Orleans these days. We can't concentrate on anything but the game."

Sister Mary Rose, a Dominican nun who attends every Saints game and teaches at a Catholic school in the Quarter, said the feeling of sheer excitement in the city is almost tangible. "I think 'exuberant joy' is the word," the nun said. "And it has brought such a unity to us, such a bond between all the people here it's just amazing."

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, New Orleans transplant Belinda Hernandez vowed to be in Miami if the Saints made the big game.

"But seeing the fever pitch in New Orleans and knowing how we party, I changed my mind," Hernandez said.

"Who wants to be on Miami Beach when they can be in the French Quarter with the Who Dats for the game?"

So Hernandez turned down some friends in South Florida, who offered to get her tickets.

Besides being Super Bowl weekend, this is the start of carnival season that ends Feb. 16 on the real Mardi Gras. There are four parades scheduled in New Orleans on Saturday and two on Sunday - but they're rolling early to avoid conflicting with the game.

All eyes on the game, starting Sunday at 5:25 p.m. local time.

Mary Beth Romig of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau says there's no question the Saints have created something special - this time for the city's tourist trade.

"This is turning into a very big weekend for the hotels in downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter," said Romig. "We did a survey and hotels are running about 90 percent full late in the week, and that jumps to 95 percent on Sunday. People are definitely coming to New Orleans for Super Bowl."

Sorry, Colts fans, but it's a different story up north.

Kimberly Harms, a spokeswoman for the Indianapolis Convention & Visitors Association, said there was no noticeable jump in hotel occupancy there for the weekend. She noted, however that one hotel had set aside 44 rooms at the special rate of $144 in honor of the 44th Super Bowl. If Indianapolis wins, she said, the rooms will be free for those staying in them.

At New Orleans' Roosevelt Hotel, an upscale hotel where suites start at $259 a night and go up, marketing director Mark Wilson said they are seeing a "huge surge" of people who want to celebrate the Super Bowl in New Orleans.

"Let's face it, not everybody can get a ticket to the game," Wilson said. "And a lot of people seem to think being in New Orleans is a good alternative."

The Roosevelt is about 80 percent booked, which is 10 percent to 15 percent more than normal for a weekend with no convention in town, Wilson said. The big seller is the hotel suites, with much of the business coming from Texas, Mississippi and Alabama.

"People are booking the entertainment suites, which are great for parties of 25, 35 people," he said.

"Some are probably just people looking for a party. But a lot are former residents, I think. People in New Orleans have looked for this day a long time and now they want to be here for it."

Police will increase their coverage in the French Quarter this weekend, adding approximately 600 officers, police spokesman Bob Young said. That's about the number the city would deploy if New Orleans were hosting the game.

Rick Watson, and his wife, Katherine, are among the natives coming back.

Now residents of North Carolina, 35-year-old Watson said it took them a long time to believe the Saints had really made the big game, but not much time to decide where to watch it.

"When something big happens, you go home, and this is big," Watson said. "Besides, where would you rather be if the Saints win, the French Quarter or Miami? Even if they lose you want to be in New Orleans."

Check out the article at The Advocate.

Who Dat? Geaux Saints!!!

Check out the Saints Photo Gallery

A Letter to Miami…

Dear Miami,

The Saints are coming. And so are we, their loyal, long-suffering and slightly discombobulated Super Bowl-bound fans.

While there's still time to prepare -- although a few hard-core Who Dats will begin trickling in Monday, most of us won't arrive until Thursday or Friday -- we thought we'd give you a heads-up about what you should expect.

First things first: You need more beer. Yeah, we know. You ordered extra. You think you have more than any group of humans could possibly consume in one week. Trust us. You don't. New Orleans was a drinking town long before the Saints drove us to drink. But it turns out beer tastes better when you're winning. (Who knew?) So let's just say we're thirsty for more than a championship; adjust your stockpiles accordingly.

And look. When we ask you for a go-cup, be nice to us. We don't even know what "open container law" means. Is that anything like "last call"?

It's Carnival season in New Orleans (that's Mardi Gras to you), and we'll be taking the celebration on the road. So don't be startled if you walk past us and we throw stuff at you; that's just our way of saying hello.

Oh, and sorry in advance about those beads we leave dangling from your palm trees. We just can't help ourselves.

February is also crawfish season, and you can be sure that more than one enterprising tailgater will figure out a way to transport a couple sacks of live mudbugs and a boiling pot to Miami.

When the dude in the 'Who Dat' T-shirt asks if you want to suck da head and pinch da tail, resist the urge to punch him. He's not propositioning you. He's inviting you to dinner.

And if you see a big Cajun guy who looks exactly like an old Saints quarterback walking around town in a dress ...don't ask. It's a long story. We know that crowd control is a major concern for any Super Bowl host city. Our advice? Put away the riot gear.

Reason No. 1: Indianapolis is going to lose, and their fans are way too dull to start a riot.

Reason No. 2: New Orleans showed the world on Sunday that we know how to throw a victory party. We don't burn cars. We dance on them.

Reason No. 3: Even if we did lose, which we won't, leaving the stadium would be like leaving a funeral, and our typical response to that is to have a parade.

Speaking of which: If you happen to see a brass band roll by, followed by a line of folks waving their handkerchiefs, you're not supposed to just stand there and watch. As our own Irma Thomas would say, get your backfield in motion.

And hey, Mister DJ! Yes, we know you've already played that stupid Ying Yang Twins song 10 times tonight, but indulge us just one more time.

To us, "Halftime (Stand Up and Get Crunk)" isn't just a song; it's 576 points of good memories. It's the sound of a Drew Brees touchdown pass to Devery Henderson, a Pierre Thomas dive for first down on 4th-and-1, a Garrett Hartley field goal sailing through the uprights in overtime.

It's what a championship sounds like. You may get sick of hearing it. We won't. Encore, dammit.

Inside Sun Life Stadium, you may find your ears ringing more than usual. We're louder than other fans. Seven thousand of ours sound like 70,000 of theirs. Don't believe us? Ask the 12th man in the Vikings huddle.

Some people think it's just the Dome that heightens our volume. But you're about to discover a little secret: We can scream loud enough to make your head explode, indoors or out.

It's not the roof. It's the heart. Well, OK, and the beer.

Don't be surprised if there are more Saints fans outside the stadium than inside. A lot of us are coming just to say we were part of history, even if we can't witness it up close. The Saints are family to us, and you know how it is with family: We want to be there for them, whether they really need us or not. Because we know our presence will mean something to them, whether they can see us or not.

Come to think of it, seeing as how you're taking us in for the week, we pretty much regard you as family, too. So we're warning you now: If you're within hugging distance, you're fair game.

Hugging strangers is a proud Who Dat tradition, right up there with crying when we win.

Most sports fans cry when their teams lose. Not us. We've been losing gracefully and with good humor for 43 years. Tragedy and disappointment don't faze us. It's success that makes us go to pieces.

Hurricane Katrina? We got that under control. The Saints in the Super Bowl? SOMEBODY CALL A PARAMEDIC!!!

So anyway, don't let the tears of joy freak you out. We're just ... disoriented.

OK. Let's review:

Order more beer. Throw me something, mister. Suck da heads. Wear da dress. Stand up. Get crunk. Hug it out. Protect your eardrums. Pass the Kleenex. Hoist the trophy.

See you at the victory party.

Faithfully yours,
The Who Dat Nation

Labels: Entertainment, History, Sports

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NEW ORLEANS —  They sure ain't the Aints anymore.

The New Orleans Saints are heading to their first Super Bowl after battering Brett Favre and beating the Minnesota Vikings 31-28 in overtime Sunday on unheralded Garrett Hartley's 40-yard field goal.

Favre threw away Minnesota's best chance to win, tossing an interception deep in New Orleans territory in the closing seconds of regulation. Then the Saints won the coin toss and soon it was over.

The team that had no home five years ago after Hurricane Katrina ravaged its city and the Superdome overcame a slew of mistakes in the biggest game the Big Easy has ever seen.

"This is for everybody in this city," said coach Sean Payton, the architect of the Saints' turnaround. "This stadium used to have holes in it and used to be wet. It's not wet anymore. This is for the city of New Orleans."

Forget the paper bag masks and that long history of losing that started in 1967. Moments after Hartley's kick, they were toasting their hometown winners on Bourbon Street.

And in the Superdome, once a squalid refuge after Katrina, they boogied in the aisles as confetti covered the field.

"It's a moment I've been waiting for for a long time and obviously we're not done yet," said Drew Brees, Payton's hand-picked quarterback for the Saints' renaissance.

The Saints (15-3) will meet Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts (16-2) in the Super Bowl in two weeks in Miami. The Colts opened as four-point favorites.

It's the first time the top seeds in each conference made the big game since the 1993 season.

"Brett prepared us, but now we've got another challenge in Peyton," safety Darren Sharper said.

There were nine fumbles and two interceptions, and the biggest mistake belonged to Favre. Flushed from the pocket in the final minute, he seemed to have room to run to set up a field goal. But hampered by a left leg injured in the third quarter, the 40-year-old quarterback threw cross-field and was intercepted by Tracy Porter at the 22.

That finished off Minnesota's chance for its first Super Bowl trip in 33 years — and opportunity to win it for the first time after four defeats.

New Orleans won the coin toss, Brees guided it to the Minnesota 22 after converting a fourth-and-1 on Pierre Thomas' leap over the line, and Hartley — suspended at the start of the season for using a banned stimulant — split the uprights 4:45 into OT.

"Just helping my team get to Miami," Hartley said. "Just doing my part."

It was anything but easy for the Saints, in only their second conference championship game; they lost at Chicago three years ago.

They had to withstand yet one more comeback by Favre, who returned to the NFL with the Vikings (13-5) after another brief retirement. He was alternately spectacular and pedestrian Sunday, finally betrayed by his gambling style and, perhaps, an aging body.

Minnesota, meanwhile, lost its fifth straight NFC championship game.

Porter's pick sent it into overtime, the third time an NFC title game has needed extra time and the second in three seasons. Two years ago, Favre's interception in OT set up a field goal that sent the Giants past the Packers and into the Super Bowl.

The Saints can only hope they have the same happy ending as New York did back then.

"Yeah," said Reggie Bush, who scored a touchdown and also muffed a punt that set up a Vikings score. "One more step."

The seesaw game saw All-Pro Adrian Peterson score three touchdowns for Minnesota and Saints running back Pierre Thomas get two. The Vikings handily won the possession and yardage battles — Peterson rushed for 122 yards and Minnesota gained 475 overall. But the Vikings were undone by five turnovers, including three fumbles.

"We really gave those guys the game," said Peterson, who peeked at the rousing celebrations on the Superdome floor. "Too many turnovers. It's eating me up inside."

Check out the article at Fox News.

Somebody pinch me… I must be dreaming! Hope Pat saved an extra coat, cuz the devil might need it soon!!!

Geaux Saints!!!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Sports

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Here's another New Year's resolution to add to your list: scrub 15 "overused" and "useless" words from your vocabulary.

Lake Superior State University has issued a list of the top 15 words that it thinks deserve to be banished in 2010.

LSSU explains,

Former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and friends created "word banishment" in 1975 at a New Year's Eve party and released the first list on New Year's Day. Since then, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations for the list, which includes words and phrases from marketing, media, education, technology and more.

Word-watchers may check the alphabetical "complete list" on the website before making their submissions.

Here's the university's 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness:

• Shovel-ready
• Transparent/Transparency
• Czar
• Tweet
• App
• Sexting
• Friend as a verb
• Teachable moment
• In these economic times...
• Stimulus
• Toxic assets
• Too big to fail
• Bromance
• Chillaxin'
• Obama-prefix or roots

Check out the article at Huffington Post.

Happy New Year!

Labels: History, Images

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Christmas has had a long and varied history. It was been celebrated for centuries by different people, at different times, in different places, and in many different ways. Here you will find links to information about the different ways that the holiday we know as Christmas has been celebrated, or not celebrated, over the years.

Check out The Real Story of Christmas at History.com.

Regardless of the very interesting origins and history behind it, Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. While we're enjoying all of our gifts and traditions, let us not forget the real reason for the season!

Merry Christmas!

Check out the Holiday Google art:

Labels: History, Images

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St. Andrew's Day is the feast day of Saint Andrew. It is celebrated on 30 November.

Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, and St. Andrew's Day is Scotland's official national day. In 2006, the Scottish Parliament designated St. Andrew's Day as an official bank holiday.

Although most commonly associated with Scotland, Saint Andrew is also the patron saint of Greece, Romania, Russia and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

In Germany, the feast day is celebrated as Andreasnacht ("St. Andrew's Night"), in Austria with the custom of Andreasgebet ("St. Andrew's Prayer"), and in Poland as Andrzejki ("Andrews").

Check out the article at Wikiedia.

It would really be nice to be able to make the trip over there to celebrate one of these years!

Labels: History, Images

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Thanksgiving Day in America is a time to offer thanks, of family gatherings and holiday meals. A time of turkeys, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. A time for Indian corn, holiday parades and giant balloons.

So here for your entertainment are some fun Holiday things for you and your family. We've got stories of the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, turkeys to take home, holiday pictures for the kids to print and color, tasty holiday recipes and e-greeting cards to send your friends and family. We hope you find something you like!

Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 4th Thursday of November, which this year (2009) is November 26th.

Check out the Thanksgiving page at Holidays.net.

Between all of the good food, good times, football games and afternoon naps... be sure to take a moment to give thanks!

Labels: History

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For 90 years, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month has been a remembrance of those who served America in time of war.

But the Nov. 11 Veterans Day commemoration began as a day to celebrate peace — the silencing of the guns of World War I, "The Great War," which claimed the lives of more than 15 million soldiers and civilians.

On that day in 1918, at the 11th hour, Germany signed an armistice with the Allied Powers — including the U.S., France, Britain, Japan and Italy — ending major hostilities in a war that nearly wiped out a generation of men.

A full peace was concluded the next year in France at the Palace of Versailles, and the first Armistice Day was proclaimed and celebrated by President Woodrow Wilson on the anniversary of the ceasefire: Nov. 11, 1919.

It was fully established by Congress as a legal holiday in 1938.

But Armistice Day honored veterans of only World War I, essentially ignoring millions of soldiers who served in peacetime or fought in World War II, Korea and other engagements.

So in 1954 Congress extended the holiday to honor all vets, giving it the name Veterans Day, which it has kept for 55 years.

Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are some 23.2 million veterans in the United States. That includes 2.6 million who served during World War II, 2.8 million who served in the Korean War, 7.8 million in the Vietnam War, 5.2 million in the Gulf War and about 1.7 million who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nearly 120,000 are still stationed in Iraq, and about 68,000 will be deployed in Afghanistan by the end of the year, according to the Census.

Just one American veteran who served in World War I is still alive: 108-year-old Frank Buckles, who drove ambulances in England and France after enlisting at the age of 16. Buckles also fought in World War II and was taken prisoner by the Japanese.

Check out the article at Fox News.

Always honor our veterans... they have fought for our freedom and deserve our respect at all times!

For some more very interesting history and personal accounts of WWII, I highly recommend Band of Brothers, Pegasus Bridge, D-Day June 6, 1944, and Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose

Be sure to check out the Patriotic Fact Sheet at the Department of Veteran Affairs website.

Labels: History, Images, Military

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NEW YORK  —  The new Navy assault ship USS New York, built with World Trade Center steel, arrived in its namesake city Monday with a 21-gun salute near the site of the 2001 terrorist attack.

First responders, families of Sept. 11 victims and the public gathered Monday at a waterfront viewing area, where they could see the crew standing at attention along the deck of the battleship gray vessel.

The big ship paused. Then the shots were fired, with a cracking sound, in three bursts.

The bow of the $1 billion ship, built in Louisiana, contains about 7.5 tons of steel from the fallen towers.

"It's a transformation ... from something really twisted and ugly," said Rosaleen Tallon, who lost her firefighter brother, Sean, on 9/11. "I'm proud that our military is using that steel."

Tallon said her brother, who was also was a Marine, also would have been proud.

JoAnn Atlas, of Howells, N.Y., who lost her husband, fire Lt. Gregg Atlas, draped a flag-themed banner along the fence. The names of emergency workers who died were written on the red stripes.

"We have to remember. It's a way to honor them," she said.

Of the 361 sailors serving aboard the ship, around 13 percent are from New York state, which is higher than would normally be the case, Murphy said. There were many requests from Navy personnel to serve on the ship, which will carry some 250 Marines.

After the ground zero stop, the ship — ecorted by about two dozen tugboats and other vessels — headed up the Hudson River toward the George Washington Bridge. After a U-turn there, it was to head south to Pier 88. An official commissioning ceremony is scheduled for Saturday.

The New York will remain in the city through Veteran's Day and then head to Norfolk, Va., for about a year of crew training and exercises, Murphy said.

The ship is 684 feet long and can carry as many as 800 Marines. Its flight deck that can handle helicopters and the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

It was scheduled to be built before the terrorist attacks. About a year later, the announcement came that the ship would bear the name New York to honor the city, state, and those who died.

It's the latest in a line of Navy ships to bear that name. The others included a Spanish-American War-era cruiser, a battleship that served in World Wars I and II and a nuclear submarine retired from the fleet in 1997.

The ship is technically known as a San Antonio-class amphibious dock vessel. Four vessels in that class are in service, the USS San Antonio, USS New Orleans, USS Mesa Verde and USS Green Bay. Four others are being built. Of those, two also have been named in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The USS Arlington was named to honor the attack on the Pentagon. The USS Somerset was named after the county in Pennsylvania where United Airlines flight 93 crashed.

Check out the article at Fox News.

What an awesome ship... and an awesome tribute to those who perished in the terrorist attack. That steel will be put to good use fighting terror around the globe!

Check out these USS New York Links:

• USS New York website
• USS New York wiki
• USS New York photo gallery

Labels: History, Images, Military, Technology

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Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in).

The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.

During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.

Check out the article at History.com.

Halloween is the best holiday of the year!!!

Geaux Tigers

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images

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Billy Cannon’s Halloween Run. Just the mention of those four words is enough to bring a sense of pride and joy to any LSU football fan.

Saturday's game against Tulane marks the 50th anniversary of the legendary game on October 31, 1959 in which LSU running back Billy Cannon returned a punt 89 yards for a touchdown.

The return turned out to be the only touchdown of the game as the top-ranked Tigers defeated the No. 3 Ole Miss Rebels 7-3.

Cannon, now 72, admits that while he may be getting older, his memory of the run that Halloween night is still fresh in his mind.

“My mind is getting fuzzy but the run isn’t,” Cannon said. “The games that you win or lose big drift away. But the ones where the outcome of the game depends on every play, those are the games that you remember vividly.”

Both the Tigers and the Rebels were undefeated heading into the game, which only added to the hype surrounding the already heated rivalry.

“The week of the game it was just crazy,” Cannon recalled. “Everyone just wanted to talk football.”

The game also marked the first time that the stadium sold out since new bleachers were installed in the south end zone. Over 67,500 people crammed into Tiger Stadium to watch the much anticipated matchup.

“To be playing before that many people with them sitting in the aisles and everywhere else, it was quite a stir,” said Cannon.

LSU trailed 3-0 through three hard-fought quarters.  As Cannon stood at his own 11-yard line with just under 10 minutes remaining, he knew that in order for the Tigers to have a chance to win the game he was going to have to make something happen.

“It doesn’t take a genius to look at the scoreboard and figure out you are down and that you are running out of time,” Cannon said.  “Before the punt I said to myself that if I have a chance I’m going to take this one back up the field because if we are going to do something we are going to have to do it pretty quick.”

And Cannon did just that.

Ole Miss’ Jake Gibbs tried to punt the ball out of bounds, but instead the ball took a bounce at the 11-yard line right into Cannon’s hands.

“I got the perfect bounce,” Cannon said.  “If I had caught it on the fly I don’t think it would have worked out the same. I think the bounce made them relax a little bit and they were just surprised when the ball bounced straight to me. I was just as surprised as they were.”

After fielding the ball, the 6-foot-1, 225-pound Cannon fought his way through seven would-be tacklers before finally breaking free around the 50-yard line. He then galloped his way into the end zone and into LSU history as the Tiger Stadium crowd erupted.

“There was a guy in the stands that was in the box seats that jumped out onto the field,” Cannon said. “He jumped on my back and he was beating me to death. One of my teammates, Donnie Daye, came over and pulled him off of me. He was so happy and going crazy. He was just going crazy and the whole stands were going crazy.”

Every year during the week of the LSU-Ole Miss game the black-and-white replay is shown numerous times on TV. These replays provide not only nostalgia for the fans of LSU football, but also for Cannon and his teammates.

“Over the years it has become a contest of who can point out what,” Cannon joked. “We have a lot of fun with it.”

“When I’m with Lynn LeBlanc, Lynn always says ‘Watch this block! Watch this block right here!’ because it was him making the block that took three guys down,” Cannon said, laughing. “But I tell him ‘Lynn I was by that guy before you even blocked anybody!’”

“Red (Brodnax) makes a block late in the play and Lynn accuses him of clipping and putting the whole team in jeopardy with the clip, but of course Red denies it,” Cannon added.

Fifty years have now passed since that Halloween night and Cannon’s punt return is still a prominent part of LSU history. But Cannon said he doesn’t want it to be remembered as an individual effort because it was a team effort.

“Not one of us on that entire team would have ever told you we were going to do something that would be so remembered 50 years later. We were there for the day, the moment, the game, and that period of time. That is all we cared about.”

Check out the article at LSU Sports.

Classic!

Check out these articles on the famous punt return:

• The Halloween Run: 50 Years Later
• Run to Glory

Geaux Tigers!!!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Sports

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —  At 11:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, the Ares 1-X experimental rocket — the next-generation of America's space flight program — blasted off flawlessly through clear skies at Cape Canaveral.

This launch shows how challenging rocket science really is: Blue skies over the launch pad in Florida hid a variety of challenges, including static-filled clouds and high-altitude winds.

Launching a rocket through these conditions isn't like a plane taking off from a landing strip: It's more like shooting a rubberband through a keyhole from across a parking lot.

At 11:26, NASA resumed the 4-minute launch countdown that had been on pause since 8 a.m Tuesday morning. The ignition system armed, the water and electrical systems activated, and at 11:30 a.m., the Ares 1-X experimental rocket blasted off through clear skies from NASA's launch pad in Florida.

The ship passed Mach 2, achieving speeds of over 1,540 mph. Then, at 22.2 nautical miles up in the air, "burnout" occurred, a stage at which the two segments of the rocket separate and the capsule falls back to Earth.

The test rocket includes a real solid-rocket first stage, with a mock second stage and dummy Orion crew capsule on top to simulate the intended weight and size of Ares I. Ares I-X is the tallest booster in service or about to fly and stands about 327 feet high — 14 stories taller than NASA's space shuttles.

This rocket could eventually take man into space, back to the moon. In an actual moon launch, the second stage of the rocket will contain the liquid propellant that carries the capsule further into space, and ultimately into orbit.

Clouds, snagged tethers and even a misdirected cargo ship within the danger area in the Atlantic Ocean contributed to an eventual postponement in Monday's scheduled launch of the Ares 1-X.

Check out the article at Fox News.

It's nice to see NASA's Constellation Program moving right along ahead of schedule. It would be really nice to see American astronauts avoid having to hitch a ride on Russian rockets!

Check out these interesting links:

• NASA Ares Launch Vehicles
• NASA Constellation Program
• NASA Constellation Program Wiki

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry.

This effort to reshape the American psyche has nothing to do with healing the nation and everything to do with easing the nation along in the ongoing radical transformation of America that President Obama promised during last year's election campaign. The president signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service, but it's not likely many lawmakers thought this meant that day was going to be turned into a celebration of ethanol, carbon emission controls, and radical community organizing.

The administration's plans were outlined in an Aug. 11 White House-sponsored teleconference call run by Obama ally Lennox Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus, and Liv Havstad, the group's senior vice president of strategic partnerships and programs.

Yearwood, who uses the honorific "Reverend" before his name, has been in the news in recent years, usually for getting arrested. After Democrats took back Congress, the rowdy activist was handcuffed outside a congressional hearing in September 2007 when Gen. David Petraeus was to testify. Yearwood told the "Democracy Now" radio program that he wanted to attend the hearing to hear Petraeus give his report. "I knew that when officers lie, soldiers die," he said.

On the Aug. 11 call, Yearwood and other leaders kept saying repeatedly that they wanted 9/11 to be used for something "positive," "forward-leaning," and "productive," said a source with knowledge of the teleconference.

The plan is to turn a "day of fear" that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left. In other words, nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.

"They think it needs to be taken back from the right," said the source. "They're taking that day and they're breaking it because it gives Republicans an advantage. To them, that day is a fearful day."

A coalition including the unsavory left-wing pressure group Color of Change and about 60 far-left, environmentalist, labor, and corporate shakedown groups participated in the call. Groups on the call included: ACORN, AFL-CIO, Apollo Alliance, Community Action Partnership, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, 80 Million Strong for Young American Jobs, Friends of the Earth, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Mobilize.org, National Black Police Association, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, National Council of Negro Women, National Wildlife Federation, RainbowPUSH Coalition, Urban League, and Young Democrats of America.

Color of Change is the extremist racial grievance group that isn't happy that TV's Glenn Beck did several news packages on Van Jones, the self-described "communist" and "rowdy black nationalist" who became the president's green jobs czar after jumping on the environmentalist bandwagon. The White House may be behind a push to destroy Beck by convincing advertisers to stop buying time on his show. Jones was also on the board of the Apollo Alliance, a hard-left environmentalist group that is now running large chunks of the Obama administration. The group has acknowledged that it dictated parts of the February stimulus bill to Congress.

With the help of the Obama administration, the coalition is launching a public relations campaign under the radar of the mainstream media -- which remains almost uniformly terrified of criticizing the nation's first black president -- to try to change 9/11 from a day of reflection and remembrance to a day of activism, food banks, and community gardens.

"The organizing term is to 'go dark.' You don't tell the press, don't tell people you think will tell the press," said the source.

Of course, the annual commemoration of the 2001 terrorist attacks belongs to the entire nation, but President Obama and the activist left don't see it that way. They view the nationwide remembrance of the murder of 3,000 Americans by Islamic totalitarians as an obstacle to winning over the hearts and minds of the American people.

"When you criticize them, they are prepared to say, 'Did you want 9/11 to be another day of selling mattresses, like Presidents Day?" the source said. "They are truly trying to change the American mindset."

They view Sept. 11 as a "Republican" day because it focuses the public on supposedly "Republican" issues like patriotism, national security, and terrorism. According to liberals, 9/11 was long ago hijacked by Republicans and their enablers and unfairly used to bludgeon helpless Democrats at election time.

MSNBC's foremost left-wing bloviator, Keith Olbermann, summed up this ugly perspective the week after the Republican Party convention last year:

"But 9/11 has become a brand name. A Republican campaign slogan. Propaganda of the lowest form. 9/11 has become 9/11 with a trademark logo. "9/11 TM" has sustained a president who long ago should have been dismissed, or impeached. It has kept him and his gang of financial and constitutional crooks in office without -- literally -- any visible means of support. "9/11 TM" has made possible the greatest sleight-of-hand in our nation's history."

On Aug. 4, the White House offered a glimpse into its plans to desecrate 9/11 for political advantage. Jones appeared in a largely ignored 33-minute video posted on the official blog of the White House to discuss the administration's plan to flush 9/11 down the memory hole just as it has tried to do by rechristening the Global War on Terror the "Overseas Contingency Operations."

Of this National Day of Service, Jones says little except that it will be a great opportunity "for people to connect, to find other people in your peer group who are also passionate about repowering America but also greening up America and cleaning up America."

On the same day, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, and Department of Energy Under Secretary Kristina Johnson and activists held a low-key press conference. At it, Yearwood said the National Day of Service will be "the first milestone" of a larger effort called Green the Block that is attempting to convince Americans that the utopian fantasy of a so-called green economy is possible without turning the U.S. into a Third World country.

"From policy creation to community implementation, the Green the Block campaign wants to see access and opportunity created for all Americans, to build prosperity and a healthier planet for future generations," Yearwood said.

At no time does anyone explain why this National Day of Service has to be held -- of all the 365 days in a year -- on Sept. 11.

Check out the article at The American Spectator.

NEVER FORGET 9-11!!!

For some incredible images, check out:

• Freedom Tower Rendering
• National 911 Memorial
• Tribute in Light photos

NOTE: I would also like to point out that the advertisement agency DDB Brasil and the Manhattan non-profit group The One Club are anti-American and that they totally SUCK for their endorsement of this tasteless ad exploiting 9/11.

The ad appeared online bearing the WWF's famous panda logo and showed dozens of planes diving at lower Manhattan with the tag line: "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it."

The ad surfaced - days before the eighth anniversary of the attack - when it won a merit award from The One Club, a nonprofit that promotes "excellence" in advertising. Just one problem - the WWF says the image was created on specifications by a Brazilian ad agency, DDB Brasil, that were never approved.

Check out the ad and judge for yourself:

Check out the NY Daily News article.

Labels: History, Images, Politics

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Have special plans this 09/09/09?

Everyone from brides and grooms to movie studio execs are celebrating the upcoming calendrical anomaly in their own way.

In Florida, at least one county clerk's office is offering a one-day wedding special for $99.99. The rarity of this Sept. 9 hasn't been lost on the creators of the iPod, who have moved their traditional Tuesday release day to Wednesday to take advantage of the special date. Focus Features is releasing their new film "9," an animated tale about the apocalypse, on the 9th.

Not only does the date look good in marketing promotions, but it also represents the last set of repeating, single-digit dates that we'll see for almost a century (until January 1, 2101), or a millennium (mark your calendars for January 1, 3001), depending on how you want to count it.

Though technically there's nothing special about the symmetrical date, some concerned with the history and meaning of numbers ascribe powerful significance to 09/09/09.

For cultures in which the number nine is lucky, Sept. 9 is anticipated – while others might see the date as an ominous warning.

Math Magic

Modern numerologists — who operate outside the realm of real science — believe that mystical significance or vibrations can be assigned to each numeral one through nine, and different combinations of the digits produce tangible results in life depending on their application.

As the final numeral, the number nine holds special rank. It is associated with forgiveness, compassion and success on the positive side as well as arrogance and self-righteousness on the negative, according to numerologists.

Though usually discredited as bogus, numerologists do have a famous predecessor to look to. Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and father of the famous theorem, is also credited with popularizing numerology in ancient times.

"Pythagoras most of all seems to have honored and advanced the study concerned with numbers, having taken it away from the use of merchants and likening all things to numbers," wrote Aristoxenus, an ancient Greek historian, in the 4th century B.C.

As part of his obsession with numbers both mathematically and divine, and like many mathematicians before and since, Pythagoras noted that nine in particular had many unique properties.

Any grade-schooler could tell you, for example, that the sum of the two-digits resulting from nine multiplied by any other single-digit number will equal nine. So 9x3=27, and 2+7=9.

Multiply nine by any two, three or four-digit number and the sums of those will also break down to nine. For example: 9x62 = 558; 5+5+8=18; 1+8=9.

Sept. 9 also happens to be the 252nd day of the year (2 + 5 +2)...

Loving 9

Both China and Japan have strong feelings about the number nine. Those feelings just happen to be on opposite ends of the spectrum.

The Chinese pulled out all the stops to celebrate their lucky number eight during last year's Summer Olympics, ringing the games in at 8 p.m. on 08/08/08. What many might not realize is that nine comes in second on their list of auspicious digits and is associated with long life, due to how similar its pronunciation is to the local word for long-lasting (eight sounds like wealth).

Historically, ancient Chinese emperors associated themselves closely with the number nine, which appeared prominently in architecture and royal dress, often in the form of nine fearsome dragons. The imperial dynasties were so convinced of the power of the number nine that the palace complex at Beijing's Forbidden City is rumored to have been built with 9,999 rooms.

Japanese emperors would have never worn a robe with nine dragons, however.

In Japanese, the word for nine is a homophone for the word for suffering, so the number is considered highly unlucky – second only to four, which sounds like death.

Many Japanese will go so far as to avoid room numbers including nine at hotels or hospitals, if the building planners haven't already eliminated them altogether.

Check out the article at Live Science.

Interesting stuff, but I think sometimes people can read too much into things. To me, this is just a normal day.

Labels: Entertainment, History

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Neil Armstrong moved slowly down the ladder. Getting to the moon had been a long time coming. He was an Ohio pilot who came from the same soil as Orville and Wilbur, who ejected from a crippled jet fighter over Korea just after turning 21, who flew seven test flights in the X-15 rocket, who saved himself and a crewmate in Gemini 8, who ejected from a lunar landing trainer a split second before it crashed.

In the 1950s and '60s, he flew about every propeller, jet, rocket and helicopter built by his country. To say that this Midwestern farmboy was the best test pilot in an emergency ever was an easy argument. That’s why chief astronaut Deke Slayton chose Neil Armstrong to take the first step on a small world that had never been touched by life. A landscape where no leaf had ever drifted, no insect had ever scurried, where no blade of green ever waved, where in the silence of vacuum even the fury of a thermonuclear blast would sound no louder than a falling snowflake.

More than 200,000 miles away, billions of eyes stared at the black-and-white TV picture. They watched Neil’s ghostly figure move like a spacesuited phantom, closer and closer, planting his boots in moondust at 10:56 p.m. ET, July 20, 1969.

All motion stopped. "That's one small step for a man," Neil said slowly, "one giant leap for mankind."

Neil gathered several ounces of rock and soil from the lunar surface and stuffed the invaluable material in a suit pocket. The plan was, after Buzz Aldrin joined him, they would remain outside for two hours, planting experiments and collecting primarily rocks, but if something should go wrong, at least they would have a tiny bit of the moon.

With the contingency sample safely tucked away, he took the time to look around. “The moon has a very stark beauty all its own,” he said, almost whispering. “It’s like much of the high desert areas of the United States. It’s different, but it’s pretty out here.”

What we on Earth did not know at the time was exactly why history’s first moonwalk began when it did. NASA had scheduled a four-hour sleep and rest period for Armstrong and Aldrin in the lunar module, or LM, and we were told to wait.

It turned out that we were hoodwinked.

The truth came out last November. NBC News President Steve Capus was giving me a dinner to celebrate my 50 years at the network. Former astronauts Neil Armstrong, John Glenn and Edgar Mitchell flew in, along with other survivors of the old days. Following dinner and a short ride to one of our favorite watering holes, Neil spilled the beans.

“Of course we wanted to get outside as soon as possible, before an emergency. But we thought we would need several hours to get the LM’s fluids and systems settled,” he explained.

"For several hours you reporters would have been speculating, guessing about possible problems, and we didn’t want one of you inventing stories,” Neil grinned. “That’s why we put in a four-hour sleep and rest period we hoped we would never use.”

We laughed, and Neil laughed, and he added, “Everything went much faster than we expected.”

Most of us were having dinner when the call came that the moonwalk would begin early. We rushed back to our microphones and reported the history-making event of our lives.

Buzz takes his turn

While Neil took his one small step, Buzz Aldrin stayed aboard the lunar module, which they named Eagle, to monitor its systems. That was his duty as lunar module pilot, and that was one reason why he was the second man to walk on the moon. When he and Mission Control were convinced that the Eagle was safe and purring, he joined Neil on the surface.

“Beautiful, beautiful! Magnificent desolation,” Buzz said as he stared at a sky that was the darkest of blacks above a landscape that was many shades of gray, a touch of brown, and utter black where the rocks cast their shadows. No real color, not even the places lit by the unfiltered sun.

Then there was the weak gravity. They weighed only one-sixth of their Earth poundage, and Neil reported, “The surface is fine and powdery. It adheres in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the soles and sides of my boots. I only go in a fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”

Was the moonwalk faked? No!

It would be these highly defined footprints that would set some armchair physicists crying the moonwalk was a fake. In the years to come there would be those who would claim Apollo astronauts never went to the moon. They said all of it was done on a movie set in an Arizona.

It occurred to me that if NASA had been so deviously smart to persuade 400,000 Apollo workers to lie, to persuade the Russians to lie, to persuade the people tracking the lunar flights with giant radio antennas around the world to lie ... well, if NASA got away with it once, would the agency be so stupid as to try to get away with this world-class hoax nine times?

The claim is too dumb not to be laughable. It is sad. We as a people would rather think the worst of ourselves than the best.

Nevertheless, scientific investigators investigated.

Myth-believers claimed that Neil and Buzz could have only left such firm, defined bootprints in soil with moisture — and everyone knows there is no water on the moon, right?

Wrong. There’s now evidence there could be water ice at the poles, but that hasn’t a thing to do with the first footprints on the moon.

Close examination of the lunar soil back on earth showed it to be virgin. The grains still had their sharp edges. They had not been rounded off by wind and erosion in an atmosphere. In their vacuum the sharp edges of lunar soil cling together, leaving a smooth surface much as moist sand does on a beach.

"Where were the stars," the myth-believers ask. "Where’s the crater carved out by Eagle's descent rockets during landing?"

The cameras that NASA sent to the moon had to use short-exposure times to take pictures of the bright lunar surface and the moonwalkers' white spacesuits. Stars’ images were too faint and underexposed to be seen, as they are in photographs taken from Earth orbit. And why didn’t the descent rockets carve out a crater? Their thrust was simply too weak to make a huge dent in the lunar surface.

So much to see, so little time

For Neil and Buzz there was so much to see and do and so little time. They moved their television camera 60 feet from Eagle. This would help Earth’s viewers see some of the things they were seeing and let them watch them going about the business of setting up Apollo 11’s experiments.

The two had problems jamming the pole that held the American flag into the lunar surface. Though a metal rod held the flag extended, the subsurface soil was so hard that they had to bang and push on the pole to get it to barely remain erect. Their forcible actions left the flag’s staff rocking back and forth for an unusual length of time.

Ah, said the myth-believers. That’s wind blowing the flag, and everyone knows there’s no wind on the moon. Right?

Right, there’s no wind on the moon. No atmosphere, just vacuum. And everyone knows an object that is forced into repeating motions in vacuum repeats many more times than it does in atmosphere. Atmospheric drag dampens movement. Vacuum is nothing. No resistance.

The flag’s motion was later duplicated in a vacuum chamber at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

No fraud, no conspiracy.

With Old Glory standing, Neil moved off to take more pictures while Buzz set up a seismometer to gather information on quakes and meteorites hitting the moon. An instrument to measure the flow of radiation particles inside the solar wind and a multi-mirror target for returning laser beams fired from Earth were deployed — laser reflectors that have been used by American universities and Russian institutes and other global investigators to determine the distance between Earth and the moon to the inch.

Those laser reflectors could not have been used if Neil and Buzz had not put them there.

Just days ago, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched last month from Cape Canaveral, returned its first images of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show five of the six Apollo descent stages, including Apollo 11's, resting on the moon's surface. The Apollo 14 landing area shows a faint trail of Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell's two-mile round-trip march to Cone Crater with their "rickshaw."

Guess we really did go to the moon, huh? So much for the myth-believers and the conspiracy theorists.

In the lunar dust, the two Americans placed mementos for the five astronauts and cosmonauts who had lost their lives, and Neil read the words on a plaque mounted on Eagle's descent stage: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Neil and Buzz gathered about 46 pounds of lunar materials, and once everything was loaded for flight back to Earth, they shut down the first moonwalk.

Was Buzz Aldrin a publicity hog? No!

Because of the primitive state of television at the time, most of us couldn’t wait for Apollo 11 to get back with all the great pictures the crew had shot. That in itself was the beginning of yet another controversy.

When all the film had been developed, there was only one image out of the 121 Hasselblad still-camera photographs that showed Neil on the moon, plus the film from a 16mm movie camera that was set up to peer out one of Eagle's windows. Neil had taken great shots of Buzz moving about, Aldrin took only one rear shot of Neil stowing samples for return to Earth.

Why?

Was Buzz angry?

No.

“I was the one with the camera,” Neil told me. “His job was to set up the experiments. He had much to do. Nothing more than that.”

Two months ago I had the same conversation with Buzz, and got a similar response. “NASA should have trained us in public relations,” he said with passion. “We were just doing our job.”

Simply put, MIT-educated Buzz Aldrin was one of the smartest guys in the astronaut corps.

During Project Gemini, spacewalker after spacewalker had failed. They tired quickly, and Buzz studied their problems. By the time he stepped into space, he had invented the tools and methods needed to walk in a vacuum. For example, he fashioned a pair of golden slippers that could be placed where needed to hold his booted feet. A spacewalker needs that — something to hold his or her feet in place — to keep stable attachment with the spaceship. Otherwise you will thrash about wildly. During Gemini 12, Buzz Aldrin whistled and sang through his spacewalk assignments.

And when he returned from the moon, when one of those moon-conspiracy theorists shoved a Bible in Aldrin’s face and ordered him to swear on it that he walked on the moon, Buzz decked him. Fellow astronaut Wally Schirra, one of the original Mercury 7, renamed him Rocky. That’s my kind of man.

After 51 years on the job, after covering every spaceflight flown by Americans, I can report that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — and Michael Collins, who kept stoking the home fires on board the Apollo 11’s command ship Columbia — were the best Earth had to offer.

History, this time we got it right.

Check out the article at MSNBC.

For more info, check out the following links:

• Apollo 11 Wiki
• Apollo 11 Photo Gallery
• NEW Apollo 11 Landing Site Images
• Top 10 Moon Mysteries

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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With the mercury hovering around 95 degrees, several hundred people gathered on the Mississippi River levee to watch three World War II-era airplanes stage a mock attack on the USS Kidd during the day’s “Star-Spangled Celebration” of Independence Day.

People eagerly scanning the sky for the start of the show saw two F-15 Eagle jets approaching from across the river before roaring above the Navy’s retired destroyer moored on the downtown Baton Rouge waterfront.

Several minutes later, three T-6 trainers, their engines a dull hum compared to the jets, approached the Kidd, which began firing back angrily, causing many of the kids in the audience to clutch at their ears.

“They’re blanks! They’re blanks!” shouted Anthony Antoine, 47, a warning to people in the crowd not to worry. “Smell that gunpowder!”

Cheryl Cummins, of Prairieville, peered up at the unfolding battle, eagerly snapping photos with her digital camera.

This was the first Fourth of July celebration in Baton Rouge for Cummins, 60, and her husband Phil, 61, who moved to the area last month from Midland, Mich.

The couple, originally from Philadelphia, said they decided to stay in the Sheraton downtown, eager to avoid the traffic following Saturday night’s fireworks display.

“We figure we had to do it once and do it right,” Cheryl Cummins said.

Maury Drummond, executive director of the USS Kidd Veterans Memorial & Museum, said the display was made possible by the Louisiana National Guard and Dan Fordyce, of Vicksburg, Miss.

“They’ve been so good to us every year,” Drummond said.

The T-6s were flown down from Mississippi earlier in the day and then waited at Baton Rouge Ryan Airport before taking off to perform in the mock battle, Drummond said.

Quite a few people could be seen milling around inside the museum Saturday, perhaps taking respite in the air conditioning from the day’s intense heat.

“It’s never been this hot,” Drummond said of the weather. “I’ve been producing a Fourth of July event for 24 years and it is absolutely brutal today.”

Drummond said he was grateful for everyone who came out despite the heat.

Earlier in the day, brothers Sean, 7, and Aaron, 10, Jameson munched on snowballs outside of the River Center. The boys and their parents crouched alongside an outside wall of the arena as they sought shelter from the noon sun.

They were among the first people down by the Mississippi river for Baton Rouge’s Star-Spangled Celebration.

As Sean ate his icy treat, a few drops of the blue snowball spilled onto his white T-shirt. Aaron showed off his green-tinged tongue as he laughed at his younger brother.

“The ice is melting before I eat it!” Sean pouted with his blue-stained lips.

The Jameson family, of Shreveport, were in Baton Rouge Saturday visiting relatives.

“We tried to get here early to beat the heat, but that didn’t happen,” said mother Laura Jameson, 39.

The all-day celebration started at 8 a.m. with Freedom Mile, a series of 1-mile races along River Road. The race was followed by tours of the USS Kidd.

As the day went on, more people showed up dressed in red, white and blue. Many of them found shady spots under trees or next to a building. Others laid out lawn chairs in the grassy area next to the USS Kidd and waited for the first live band to take the stage.

Young children found respite from the heat by splashing around in one of the area’s many fountains.

For Jeanie and Mitch Talbot, the celebration has become a Fourth of July tradition.

“We’ve been coming every year for about five years,” Mitch Talbot said. “We stay all day and wait for the fireworks.”

Check out the article at The Advocate.

Hope everyone is out enjoying their independence today! It's great to be free!!!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images, Military

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OMAHA, Nebraska — Nine years ago, most of the players on LSU’s current roster were still just young boys whose baseball futures were only beginning to take shape on baseball diamonds all over Louisiana as well as in corners as far away as New Jersey, Michigan, California and Florida.

For many of them, watching the mighty Tigers carve out their place as college baseball’s dynasty of the ’90s was central to what they wanted to do someday.

At the heart of their baseball dreams.

Sometimes, dreams come true.

Sometime arrived in style Wednesday night, when LSU surged past Texas 11-4 at Rosenblatt Stadium to win the College World Series.

The championship is the Tigers’ sixth, their first since 2000. A nine-year drought that gave some new aspirations a chance to percolate.

“It’s an unbelievable feeling to be put in a position where in Baton Rouge you’re remembered forever,” LSU right fielder Jared Mitchell said. He and Chad Jones already possess national championship rings in football from the Tigers’ 2007 BCS national championship in football.

“We put LSU baseball back on top where it belongs and for years to come, and to be a part of that is something special.”

To get back to the top, LSU (56-17) got contributions up and down the lineup to knock off Texas (50-16-1) as the Tigers won the best-of-three championship series.

Mitchell, named the CWS Most Outstanding Player, got his college swan song started in rousing fashion with a three-run, two-out, first-inning home run.

Tough-as-nails pitcher Anthony Ranaudo gutted out 51/3 innings on short rest and battled as long as he possibly could to keep LSU in front.

When the Longhorns threatened to snatch momentum away, freshman center fielder Mikie Mahtook came through in the clutch again and then Sean Ochinko stuck a dagger in Texas’ heart with a two-out, two-run single.

And in the most fitting of endings, senior Louis Coleman — LSU’s unquestionable heart-and-soul — struck out the side in the bottom of the ninth inning to ignite a wild celebration in the middle of a Rosenblatt diamond that has been so kind to the Tigers through the years.

Coleman launched his glove in the air and braced for a bear hug from catcher Micah Gibbs as the LSU players converged on the mound. Paul Mainieri shared the moment in a long hug in front of the dugout with sons Nick and Tommy. Then, he found his 80-year-old father and mentor, Demie “Doc” Mainieri, as quickly as he could.

“I’ve dreamt my whole life of having this moment after the game to be able to talk about a national championship, and now it’s here. It’s almost surreal,” said Mainieri, who guided the Tigers to the national crown in his third season.

“I’m filled with so many different emotions right now. But all I could think about during the ninth inning was my father. I’m just so happy he could be here to share it with us. But I’ll tell you, I’m so proud to be the coach at LSU and represent that great state and all the great people in that state and a wonderful university.

“And all I could think about that was these wonderful kids I’ve had a chance to coach. … I’m so happy for these kids — they’ve done everything you ask them to do, and they’re great kids, and they deserve it.”

There was the customary victory lap and the sought-after national championship hardware was distributed, but the celebration was only getting started.

Because after nine years of waiting, the Tigers are back on top — the champions of college baseball again. And a new corps of little boys has a new set of heroes and a new set of dreams to hatch.

“If there’s a better way, you write the story for me,” Mitchell said when asked if the ending to the season was as good as he could’ve expected. “I can’t explain it. It’s been so much fun with these guys who I really care about to really come together the way we did.”

No. 1-ranked LSU danced with destiny all season long and did so with nearly perfect rhythm.

The Tigers began the season ranked No. 1 in two major polls, stayed in the top 10 of every ranking throughout the season, battled through the grinding Southeastern Conference to tie for the regular-season championship and then stormed back to win the league tournament.

LSU then blazed through NCAA regional and super regional play unbeaten and won three games in Omaha to get to the CWS finals without a hiccup.

Texas had the Tigers beat in the championship series opener, but DJ LeMahieu gave LSU life with a two-out, two-run ninth inning double and Mahtook drove in the game-winner two innings later.

The ’Horns finally wobbled the Tigers with a 5-1 victory Tuesday to force the decisive third meeting, but that wasn’t enough to separate LSU from what it wanted to accomplish.

Not even close.

Wednesday’s victory fulfilled destiny’s call by pulling together all the strands of success the Tigers have relied on all season long.

Ranaudo’s grit was at the heart of the triumph. He labored through his stint, at times showing flashes of brilliance that helped him win 12 games, at others reaching down deep to find whatever he could muster.

“I knew he was going to give us a chance,” Ochinko said. “I put my head on my pillow last night knowing that Anthony Ranaudo was going to get it done for us.”

Jones, known more as a football safety, amplified the element he has added since his late-season emergence as a left-handed reliever out of the bullpen with 1 2/3 innings of scoreless relief that bridged the gap to Coleman.

Together, those two capped a magical final series by the bullpen: only three runs allowed in 15 2/3 innings.

Ochinko swung the bat like he did early in the season when he helped carry the offense. He went 4-for-5 Wednesday with a monstrous exclamation-point home run in the ninth inning after he singled three times, none bigger than a two-out, two-run single in the sixth inning.

After the feisty ’Horns drew even at 4-4 in the bottom of the fifth, the Tigers clawed back in front in the top of the sixth by erupting for five runs.

Mitchell continued a memorable championship day by beginning the inning by working Texas reliever Brandon Workman for a full-count walk. That snapped Workman’s streak of nine hitters in a row mowed down and seemed to rattle him.

UT catcher Cameron Rupp got handcuffed on a pitch that got away from him for a passed ball that allowed Mitchell to scamper to second with nobody out. Mahtook delivered his second big hit against Workman in the finals when he rifled a double to right-center to plate Mitchell with the go-ahead run.

As he reached second base, Mahtook pumped both fists.

“I didn’t have great at-bats my first three,” Mahtook said. “He threw me a fastball and I got it in the gap. Like they say, I play with a football mentality, and I just showed my emotions on second base.”

Gibbs laid down a perfect bunt to move Mahtook to third and UT reliever Austin Dicharry’s throw to first base was off the mark, allowing Gibbs to reach safely. Derek Helenihi cranked a deep fly ball to left field to score Mahtook for a 6-4 advantage, but LSU wasn’t finished.

Dicharry got Austin Nola on a groundout but walked LeMahieu on four pitches. Austin Wood took over and couldn’t get the door shut. He hit Ryan Schimpf and Blake Dean with pitches back-to-back to force in a run.

Then, on his first pitch to Ochinko, the first baseman rammed a single to left field to score LeMahieu and Schimpf for a 9-4 LSU lead.

“Got to two outs and we were in pretty good shape and then the wheels fell off the car,” legendary Texas coach Augie Garrido said. “We walked people, hit people and they kept the rally going by capitalizing on our mistakes. And then they added to it.

“Once they smelled the blood in the water, I think they did what they should do and really put us away.”

Things started with a dramatic shot in the arm for LSU when Mitchell wrapped a three-run home run around the right-field foul pole with two outs to give the Tigers an immediate lead and their earliest of the CWS finals.

Though buoyed by the quick advantage, Ranaudo wasn’t sharp like he has been most of the season, and the Longhorns got to him to cut the deficit in half in the third inning.

Travis Tucker laced a leadoff double into the left-field corner and Ranaudo walked Brandon Belt. Those two worked a double steal with one out and Tucker came home on a groundout.

With two outs Ranaudo walked three straight hitters, with Preston Clark forcing in a run when he won a 10-pitch battle with Ranaudo for an RBI walk.

The Longhorns erased LSU’s lead in the fifth inning on Kevin Keyes’ prodigious two-run blast into a section of left-center field bleachers populated by burnt orange-clad Longhorns fans.

That knotted the score 4-4 and allowed Texas to hit the reset button and turn the game into a four-inning battle for the championship.

LSU won that abbreviated showdown by scoring the final seven runs.

“They did the thing they needed to do to beat us twice,” Garrido said. “They are the best team we faced this season. By far.”

Best is what these Tigers will always be known as in 2009. Which means it’s time for new dreams.

Check out the article at The Advocate.

Sweet!!! What an awesome College World Series this has been... and with such a fitting end!

Be sure to check out Return of the Tigers! at LSUSports.net.

Congratulations Tigers!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images, Sports

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LA CAMBE, France — American and German World War II veterans paid respects to their fallen comrades at a cemetery near a D-Day landing site Friday before an international commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy.

During the ceremony, military bands played anthems of the United States, Germany, Britain and France and German visitors piled wreaths of flowers at the foot of a mound at the center of the cemetery at La Cambe. Some 22,000 German soldiers are buried beneath clusters of rounded brown crosses in a grassy meadow not far from Omaha Beach.

After the ceremony, most visitors headed out, but a few dozen stayed on in a corner of the cemetery, where a German priest and a few soldiers buried the remains of a German soldier discovered last year. A Frenchman conducting construction work near the German battery at Grand Camp Maisy, a dozen miles away, came across first a gun and then the remains, which have yet to be identified.

"It's a great feeling ... to come here," said Austin Cox of Crisfield, Maryland, a sergeant with the 29th Division of the U.S. 115th infantry regiment who landed on Omaha Beach at 9 a.m. on the epic day that turned the tide of World War II.

"My comrades though are buried over at Omaha," said Cox, 90.

Flags from nations on both sides of World War II flew in the spring breeze.

A low, granite entrance leads into the cemetery containing the graves of the German soldiers, each marked with a small, flat stone. The main American cemetery at nearby Colleville-Sur-Mer has about 9,300 graves. Most U.S. war dead were repatriated.

Earlier Friday, British paratroopers swooped down on Ranville as part of the commemorations. Later in the day, a fireworks display was planned up and down the shore where Allied troops launched the Battle of Normandy that helped turn the tide of the war.

The big event is Saturday, when President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the Canadian and British prime ministers and Prince Charles gather for a ceremony amid the rows of white crosses and Stars of David at the American cemetery, which is U.S. territory.

Check out the article at Fox News.

A brief history...

D-Day - June 6, 1944

The Battle of Normandy was fought in 1944 between Nazi Germany in Western Europe and the invading Allied forces as part of the larger conflict of World War II. Operation Overlord was the codename for the Allied invasion of northwest Europe, which began on June 6, 1944, and ended on August 19, 1944, when the Allies crossed the River Seine. Over sixty years later, the Normandy Invasion still remains the largest seaborne invasion in history, involving almost three million troops crossing the English Channel from England to Normandy. Operation Neptune was the codename given to the initial assault phase of Operation Overlord; its mission, to gain a foothold on the continent, started on June 6, 1944 (most commonly known by the name D-Day) and ended on June 30, 1944.

The primary Allied formations that saw combat in Normandy came from the United States of America, United Kingdom and Canada. Substantial Free French and Polish forces also participated in the battle after the assault phase, and there were also contingents from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, and Norway.

The Normandy invasion began with overnight parachute and glider landings, massive air attacks, naval bombardments, and an early morning amphibious phase began on June 6, 1944. The “D-Day” forces deployed from bases along the south coast of England, the most important of these being Portsmouth. The battle for Normandy continued for more than two months, with campaigns to establish, expand, and eventually break out of the Allied beachheads, and concluded with the liberation of Paris and the fall of the Falaise pocket in late August 1944.

The Battle of Normandy was described thus by Adolf Hitler: “In the East, the vastness of space will... permit a loss of territory... without suffering a mortal blow to Germany’s chance for survival. Not so in the West! If the enemy here succeeds… consequences of staggering proportions will follow within a short time.”

Check out the article at Wikipedia.

Be sure to visit the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana for some exciting events going on today!

If you are interested in accurate D-Day and WWII history, I highly recommend the following books by Stephen Ambrose. He has written other WWII books, but those four are by far the most notable and my favorites:

• Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest


• D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II


• Citizen Soldiers: The U. S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany


• Pegasus Bridge

The HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, inspired by Stephen Ambrose's book by the same title, is a must-see for any WWII history buff. I have found the series to be one of the most historically accurate movies made on the topic... I highly recommend checking it out!

There are MANY movies made in the WWII setting, check out World War II on Film at www.worldwar-2.net and the Wikipedia List of WWII Films.

Labels: History, Images, Military

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BEIJING — Chinese police aggressively deterred dissent on Thursday's 20th anniversary of the crackdown on democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, ignoring calls from Hillary Rodham Clinton and even Taiwan's China-friendly president for Beijing to face up to the 1989 violence.

Foreign journalists were barred from the vast square as uniformed and plainclothes police stood guard across the area which was the epicenter of the student-led movement that was crushed by the military on the night of June 3-4, 1989.

Security officials checking passports also blocked foreign TV camera operators and photographers from entering the square to cover the raising of China's national flag, which happens at dawn every day. Plain clothes officers aggressively confronted journalists on the streets surrounding the square, cursing and threatening violence against them.

The extraordinary security moves come after government censors shut down social networking and image-sharing Web sites such as Twitter and Flickr, and blacked out CNN and other foreign news channels each time they aired stories about Tiananmen.

Dissidents and families of crackdown victims were confined to their homes or forced to leave Beijing, part of sweeping efforts to prevent online debate or organized commemorations of the anniversary.

"We've been under 24-hour surveillance for a week and aren't able to leave home to mourn. It's totally inhuman," said Xu Jue, whose son was 22 when he was shot in the chest by soldiers and bled to death on June 4, 1989.

Officers and police cars were also stationed outside the home of Wang Yannan, the daughter of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader deposed for sympathizing with the pro-democracy protesters, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. Wang heads an auction firm and has never been politically active.

In a further sign of the government's intransigence, the second most-wanted student leader from 1989 was forced to return to Taiwan on Thursday after flying to the Chinese territory of Macau the day before in an attempt to return home.

Wu'er Kaixi, in exile since fleeing China after the crackdown, told The Associated Press by phone he was held overnight at the Macau airport's detention center and that being denied entry on the Tiananmen anniversary was a "tragedy."

The student leader who topped the most-wanted list, Wang Dan, was jailed for seven years before being expelled to the United States in 1998.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Clinton said in a statement Wednesday that China, as an emerging global power, "should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal."

Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou urged China to lift the taboo on discussing the crackdown.

"This painful chapter in history must be faced. Pretending it never happened is not an option," Ma said in a statement issued Thursday.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman attacked Clinton's comments as a "gross interference in China's internal affairs."

"We urge the U.S. to put aside its political prejudice and correct its wrongdoing and refrain from disrupting or undermining bilateral relations," Qin said in response to a question at a regularly scheduled news briefing.

Qin refused to comment on the security measures — or even acknowledge they were in place.

"Today is like any other day, stable," he said.

Beijing has never allowed an independent investigation into the military's crushing of the protests, in which possibly thousands of students, activists and ordinary citizens were killed. Young Chinese know little about the events, having grown up in a generation that has largely eschewed politics in favor of raw nationalism, wealth acquisition, and individual pursuits.

Authorities have been tightening surveillance of China's dissident community ahead of the anniversary, with some leading writers under close watch or house arrest for months.

Ding Zilin, a retired professor and advocate for Tiananmen victims, said by telephone that a dozen officers have been blocking her and her husband from leaving their Beijing apartment.

In contrast to the repression on the mainland, tens of thousands of people were expected to attend an annual candlelight vigil in the former British colony of Hong Kong, which has maintained its own legal system and open society since reverting to Chinese rule in 1997.

Check out article at Fox News.

What happened in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago should serve as a grande example why government control is not the answer to a people's problems. As was graphically illustrated: "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong!"

For more info on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, check out the Wiki!

Labels: History, Images, Military, Politics

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NEW YORK — With its scratches and sticky brown beer stains, the "Tetris" arcade machine near the back of a Brooklyn bar called Barcade has seen better days. Which makes sense, given that the machine was made in the 1980s.

Even today, though, it's not hard to find 20- and 30-somethings plucking away at its ancient controls, flipping shapes made up of four connected squares and fitting them into orderly patterns as they descend, faster and faster as the game goes on.

"You could just play infinitely," said Michael Pierce, 28, who was playing against Dan Rothfarb, also 28. Both have been fans since they — and the game — were young. "Tetris" has its 25th birthday this week.

Completed by a Soviet programmer in 1984, "Tetris" has come a long way from its square roots. It's played by millions, not just on computers and gaming consoles but now on Facebook and the iPhone as well.

"Tetris" stands out as one of the rare cultural products to come West from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And the addictive rhythm of its task-by-task race against time was an early sign of our inbox-clearing, Twitter-updating, BlackBerry-thumbing world to come.

In her book "Hamlet on the Holodeck," Georgia Tech professor Janet Murray called "Tetris" the "perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans."

The game, she wrote, shows the "constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught."

Many people who grew up with "Tetris" haven't stopped playing.

"Tetris" is easy to pick up. Rotate the falling shapes so that you form full lines at the bottom of the screen. Fit the shapes so there are as few open spaces left as possible. Aim for a Tetris: four lines completed in one swoop. Repeat. Watch your score zoom.

But Tetris is hard to master. Because the shapes — technically known as tetrominoes — come in a random order, it is hard to predict the best way to organize them so that they can form neat rows.

In fact, in 2002, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers determined that the potential combinations are so numerous that it would be impossible even for a computer to calculate the best place to put each falling shape.

Erik Demaine, an associate professor of computer science, praised the game's "mathematical elegance," which perhaps stems from the background of its developer.

Alexey Pajitnov was 29 and working for the Moscow Academy of Sciences when he completed "Tetris" on June 6, 1984, for a Soviet computer system called the Elektronika.

A computer programmer by day who researched artificial intelligence and automatic speech recognition, Pajitnov worked on the game in his spare time.

"All my life I liked puzzles, mathematical riddles and diversion," Pajitnov said in a recent interview from Moscow. "Tetris," he said, was just one of the games he made back then. The others are mostly long forgotten.

Pajitnov's creation spread in Moscow through the small community of people who had access to computers. Word filtered through computer circles to the West, where the game drew the interest of entrepreneurs.

A company called Spectrum HoloByte managed to obtain PC rights, but another, Mirrorsoft, also released a version.

Years of legal wrangling followed, with several companies claiming pieces of the "Tetris" pie — for handheld systems, computers and arcades.

Complicating matters, the Soviet Union did not allow privately held businesses. The Soviet state held the "Tetris" licensing rights and Pajitnov had no claim to the profits. He didn't fight it.

"Basically, at the moment I realized I wanted this game to be published, I understood that Soviet power will either help me or never let it happen," he said.

It wasn't until 1996 that Pajitnov got licensing rights. Asked whether he made enough money off the game to live comfortably, he says yes, but offers no more details.

Today, he is part owner of Tetris Co., which manages the game's licenses worldwide.

Nintendo Co. was an early and big beneficiary of the game, which stood out from its mid-'80s peers because it had no characters and no shooting.

When Nintendo was preparing to release its Game Boy device in 1989, the company planned to include with it one of the games that are also classics today: "Super Mario," "Donkey Kong" and "Zelda."

But Nintendo wanted something everyone would play — a "perfect killer game" that would sell the Game Boy, said Minoru Arakawa, the president of Nintendo of America from 1980 to 2002.

The solution was "Tetris" — though Nintendo needed help from Henk Rogers, a U.S. entrepreneur.

Rogers had spotted "Tetris" at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and bought the rights to a PC version of the game in Japan from Spectrum HoloByte.

In February 1989, he went to Moscow on a tourist visa to try to get the rights for Nintendo. He spent his first day in a taxi with a driver who didn't speak English, communicating by gestures and trying in vain to find the ministry of software and hardware export.

The next morning, he hired an interpreter and things went more smoothly, and "Tetris" got bundled into the first Game Boy.

Since then, "Tetris" has expanded to all kinds of devices and inspired a generation of knockoffs. Tetris Co. says 125 million copies have been sold in various incarnations.

Pajitnov says "Tetris" could stick around another quarter-century.

"I hope so, why not?" he said. "Technology changes a lot, but I can't say people change a lot."

Check out article at Fox News.

From playing against my brother via wire on long car trips... to hooking up my grandpa's Super-Gameboy on his TV so he could play Tetris without having to squint at the little screen... to competing against many family members for bragging rights on highest score... to downloading Tetris Party for the Wii and introducing it to my kids... I have many fond memories of this classic game! Congrats on 25 great years!!!

For more info, check out the Tetris Wiki!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images, Technology

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RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Abts, Richard. Adamski, Walter. Ahlman, Enoch.

The names are whisked away by the hot, gusting wind as soon as they are spoken, forgotten in the stream of the next name and the next name and the next name.

Fuller, Addison. Fuller, Mary. Furlong, John.

The story of America could be told through these names, tales of bravery and hesitation, of dreams achieved or deferred and of battles won and lost.

Taken alone, they are just words, identities stripped of place and time, stripped of rank and deeds and meaning.

But they are not taken alone. They are taken together — 148,000 names, representing the entire veteran population of Riverside National Cemetery, a roll call of the dead read aloud over 10 days by more than 300 volunteers.

They read in pairs, rotating through 15-minute shifts in the beating sun, in the chilly desert night and in the pre-dawn hours thick with mosquitoes.

Some time on Memorial Day, they will read the last name on the 2,465th page.

Some read for their country.

Others read for a father lost in battle or a beloved son cut down in his prime.

And one man reads for no one in particular — except, maybe, for himself.

---

Richard Blackaby was just 18 and fresh out of high school in 1966 when he was drafted for Vietnam. His father had served as a Seabee in the U.S. Navy during World War II and Blackaby was desperate to follow in his path.

But the Army said no: Blackaby had epilepsy and asthma and was unfit for service.

Twelve years later, Blackaby — now married with three children — reapplied to the Army and was accepted to the 4th Infantry Division as a forward observer.

But Vietnam was over and the eager recruit spent the next six years waiting for a war that never came. When he was honorably discharged in 1984, he was a sergeant but had never experienced combat, had never called in a real air strike or fired at a real target.

Nearly 25 years later, Blackaby's missed opportunity weighs on him as he patrols his self-selected battleground: Riverside, the nation's busiest national cemetery. While others gave their lives, Blackaby gives his time — and a lot of it, nearly 30 hours a week.

Over the years, Blackaby has made his specialty here not among the remembered and the honored, but among the lost, the abandoned and the forgotten. The work seems to fit his story of missed chances and dashed dreams, his yearning to belong to something greater than himself.

Every day, the 60-year-old grandfather with the crinkly, blue-gray eyes slips on the black leather vest that's his personal uniform and stands at attention as the cemetery honors the cremated remains of dozens of abandoned or forgotten veterans.

Every day, he salutes as the National Guard reads the names off the simple wooden boxes filled with ashes.

Every day, he accepts the folded flag for soldiers he will never know — and then gives it back for the next day's dead.

Dog tags engraved with the names of 145 forgotten veterans dangle from a thick key chain that never leaves his side, a different color for each branch of service. He knows the story behind almost every name.

"If I didn't do it, who would do it?" he says. "I mean, they have friends, they HAVE to have friends. They don't go through a whole lifetime and not have somebody that cares about them."

And, true to form, Blackaby reads names — hundreds of them — for the roll call project.

He reads for hours on overnight shifts in the cemetery's eerie gloom, the podium illuminated only by a floodlight. He reads during the weekend afternoons and late into a Saturday night to cover gaps in the schedule.

"Every one that we read off, I feel like I am probably doing their family a favor because they can't be here," he said.

"I'm reading off a whole litany of history. It kind of makes you wonder what's behind each name, what their life was like, what they did."

---

Lamborn, Richard. Lamphear, Everett. Landaker, Jared.

A gust of wind springs up and snatches the last name away.

No one notices it and later, even the volunteer readers won't recall the name of the young Marine or which one of them read it.

All they know is he was a 1st lieutenant, fifth from the bottom on page seven of 2,465.

---

Joe Landaker was the first person to touch his son, Jared, as he slipped into the world on his parents' bed on May 3, 1981, after 36 hours of labor.

From the beginning, Jared was special — but not in the way most parents would want. His skull was compressed during birth and doctors warned that he might be mentally challenged.

During childhood, he kept falling off the growth chart. He barely topped out at 5-foot-8.

But Jared, who went by the nickname J-Rod, surprised everyone.

He took calculus in high school, knuckled down in college and got a degree in physics. He signed up for the Marines his sophomore year and graduated from officer training school in Quantico, Va., among the top five in his platoon of 80 men.

By fall of 2003, he was in flight school and on Aug. 18, 2006, Jared shipped out for Iraq as a Marine helicopter pilot flying a CH-46 Sea Knight with the famed HMM-364 Purple Foxes.

"He overcame so many adversities in his life, time after time," said his father, Joe.

On Feb. 7, 2007, a week before Jared was expected home in Big Bear City, his father was watching CNN at 5:30 a.m., getting ready to go to work, when he saw that a CH-46 chopper had been shot down near while on a medical mission.

Two months before, when two Marines died in a CH-46 crash, Jared had e-mailed his parents within two hours to let him know he was OK.

But this time, hours passed with no word.

"They said there were seven people on board, so I waited. I didn't go to work, waited and waited all day long, waited again for his e-mail or a phone call that he was all right," said Landaker, choking back tears. "It never did come."

At 4:15 p.m., a Marine captain, a chaplain and a 1st sergeant came to tell Landaker his son had died on his last mission before coming home.

Since that day, Landaker has been consumed with keeping his son's memory alive. He shares his story with anyone who will listen. He has memorized every detail of his son's life and death. He now knows that the boy who called him "Pops" took 58 seconds to lower his stricken chopper from 1,500 feet to 200 feet; seven seconds faster, and he might be alive today.

"The last thing I want to do is forget about Jared. He comes to my mind all the time, songs, things that you see," said Landaker. "When he was a baby, I'd give him a shower and I'd hold him up and those kind of memories come to mind all the time."

"He's so special to me," he said. "Those Iraqis have no idea who they killed."

The rows of grave markers are cool and smooth in the heat, their numbers obscured by tufts of grass that have crept around the edges of the stone.

Landaker walks, head bowed, along the rows of plots in Section 49B.

"3438. It should be right around here," he says, bending low.

Then Landaker falls to his knees, weeping.

The stories, the details don't matter now: There is no way to unbury the dead, to bring the CH-46 from 200 feet back to 1,500 feet, to reset the clock with seven extra seconds.

"Well, all right son," he says. "Take care, son."

And so he volunteers to help call the roll at Riverside. He will not have an opportunity to read his own son's name, but at least he can ensure that the sons of others are not forgotten.

---

The heat beats down on the volunteers. A dozen spectators press themselves into any sliver of shade — a tree, the thin shadow of the flagpole, an awning.

In the shade near the sign-in booth, Richard Blackaby and Joe Landaker stand ready to take the podium, two strangers awkwardly chatting before their shared 15 minutes of service.

Landaker wears a white T-shirt printed with Jared's photo; Blackaby, for once, has shed his black leather vest for a dark suit adorned with military ribbons and an American flag pin.

They discover a bittersweet bond: Blackaby escorted Jared's coffin to his military funeral at the cemetery two years before. The two men embrace, then step to the podium.

The names pass between them like fragile treasures.

White, Clark. White, Mary. Whito, Russell.

Their 15 minutes pass, and they step down. Landaker, eyes red with tears, has another piece of his puzzle, another connection — another story to cling to.

But Blackaby is not finished. He steps forward again, ready to read for those who will never have the love of a father like Jared's. He will be there until 2:30 a.m. on this muggy Sunday and back again the next day and the next day and the next.

He is patrolling the boundaries of the past, filling gaps in this American story and in his own life — one name at a time.

Check out article at Fox News.

It is very sad to think of the countless families who are effected by the loss of their family member in the service of our country. It is important that we all remember their sacrifices and the freedom we enjoy because of them.

Be sure to check out the Memorial Day Wiki

Labels: History, Images, Military

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INDIANAPOLIS — Indianapolis Motor Speedway has made the reputation of racing greats: A.J. Foyt, Rick Mears, the Unser family.

It's been a testing ground for safety features such as rearview mirrors and seat belts, well before they became commonplace in Americans' everyday lives. It's been a movie set, and the place where Janet Guthrie struck a blow for female athletes by becoming the first woman racer at the Indy 500 in 1977.

And, as of this year, Indy has been part of American driving and racing for a century.

"Not only is this the same joint, the (first) surface is still there ... the crushed rock and tar is still there," speedway historian Donald Davidson said.

The common perception that bricks were used first as the first track surface is as untrue as the speedway's reputation for being a race car-only facility - that was never the intent.

When Carl Fisher and three other partners bought four large plots of farmland for $72,000 in 1908, they wanted to make the speedway a showcase for what was then a major automobile-producing city.

Early cars reached maximum speeds of about 10 mph on the city's dirt roads, so Fisher surmised automakers needed a place to demonstrate whose stripped-down cars were the best.

By 1911, with Indy automakers going out of business, track owners switched gears and started the Indianapolis 500 International Sweepstakes, which gave the speedway and generations of drivers their signature event.

It worked.

Seventy-five thousand out-of-towners from as far away as New York came to Indy and saw Ray Harroun drive a locally built Marmon Wasp to victory in the first Indy 500. The influx of fans never stopped. Tuesday's rookie orientation kicks off practice for the 93rd Indianapolis 500, a race that likely will draw 300,000 people on May 24. The race was shut down during the two world wars.

"The early testing was 'Can we drive this thing from Indianapolis to Greenfield (Indiana) and back,' and then it was 'How can we push these things to the max?'" Davidson said. "The thinking was 'We need a track so we can push them to the limits at all times.' How did you find the weak link? You just stood on it till it broke and then you took it back to the factory to find out how it broke."

Fisher had bigger plans, though, and over the decades the speedway has often transcended auto racing alone.

The first event at the speedway, in fact, was a helium balloon competition. In June 1910, Orville Wright was flying planes over the facility at the United States' first aviation meet. During World War I, the track served as an Army aviation depot to repair planes, and then-owner Eddie Rickenbacker, a World War I flying ace, offered it up for the same purpose during World War II.

By the end of that war, the track nearly ended up on history's scrap heap..

It was nearly destroyed by overgrown foliage and rotting wood, prompting some to contend it should be torn down and converted into a subdivision to help ease the nation's housing crisis - a move that would have forced all those familiar names to attain fame somewhere other than Indianapolis.

Then, in 1945, Terre Huate businessman Tony Hulman Jr. saved it. He bought the track from Rickenbacker and started a major renovation project.

"The infield was just a jungle, and everybody thought the thing was pretty much done for," Davidson said. "The locals said it was falling apart and the wood was rotting and falling down."

Not for long. Throughout the '50s and '60s, the track played an integral role in the city's image. The ABA (and now NBA) franchise that first took the floor in 1967 called itself the Pacers partly because of the Indianapolis' racing reputation. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward filmed the movie "Winning" at Indy. Afterward, Newman got involved in the sport himself.

Despite the complaints of some, the races have gone beyond traditional Indy cars: NASCAR, Formula One and even motorcyles have or do compete here. To kick off this month's centennial celebration, the speedway held hot-air balloon races.

But to those who grew up around the track, the history and future of the track gets back to the 500.

"The 500 is something that will endure a long time after I'm gone," said Tony George, grandson of Hulman, whose family still owns the track. "You know when I was young, I enjoyed coming out and going to the cafeteria under the old terrace tower and having a Coke or a chocolate malt. That's why I wanted to come to the track."

What will the next century bring?

George, who turns 50 later this year, isn't sure. After spending millions of dollars to build the road course for F1, a road course Fisher lobbied for as part of his grand plan, he wants F1 to return to America. The track also has been involved in a redevelopment plan for the city of the speedway.

Yet George insists his family will fulfill the track's purpose - putting on good races and being a community partner with the city and its businesses.

"I learned about the commitment to be a steward of the institution," George said. "That's how my grandparents did it, and the generations that followed have tried to do the same thing."

Check out article at Fox News.

Very interesting info on how the Brickyard came to be!

For more info, check out the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Wiki.

Be sure to check out the Official Indianapolis Motor Speedway Website.

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images

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Morse code is a type of character encoding that transmits telegraphic information using rhythm. Morse code uses a standardized sequence of short and long elements to represent the letters, numerals, punctuation and special characters of a given message. The short and long elements can be formed by sounds, marks, or pulses, in on off keying and are commonly known as "dots" and "dashes" or "dits" and "dahs". The speed of Morse code is measured in words per minute (WPM) or characters per minute, while fixed-length data forms of telecommunication transmission are usually measured in baud or bps.

Originally created for Samuel F. B. Morse's electric telegraph in the early 1840s, Morse code was also extensively used for early radio communication beginning in the 1890s. For the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of high-speed international communication was conducted in Morse code, using telegraph lines, undersea cables, and radio circuits. However, the variable length of the Morse characters made it hard to adapt to automated circuits, so for most electronic communication it has been replaced by machine readable formats, such as Baudot code and ASCII.

The most popular current use of Morse code is by amateur radio operators, although it is no longer a requirement for amateur licensing in many countries. In the professional field, pilots and air traffic controllers are usually familiar with Morse code and require a basic understanding. Navigational aids in the field of aviation, such as VORs and NDBs, constantly transmit their identity in Morse code. Morse code is designed to be read by humans without a decoding device, making it useful for sending automated digital data in voice channels. For emergency signaling, Morse code can be sent by way of improvised sources that can be easily "keyed" on and off, making Morse code one of the most versatile methods of telecommunication in existence.

Check out article at Wikipedia.

I checked out the Development and History section of the Morse Code article and I must say that I learned something new! Having not known much about the history of Morse Code, I had always assumed that it was originally invented for the same reasons that it has been used for the last 150+ years. Surprisingly enough, the technology evolved through some interesting methods... history never ceases to amaze!

On another note, if the world and all of it's technology were to be turned upside down one day, one could depend on basic technologies such as Morse Code for communication. Those possessing this knowledge would be indispensable! Unfortunately, like many old-school technologies and skills, they are falling by the wayside as digital technologies take over. But one day, it will all blink off and we'll need to know how to do things old-school again... one can only hope the library has some good info in print. But, I digress...

Labels: History, Military, Technology

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From not-so-humble beginnings in 1970, when 20 million participated across the U.S., Earth Day has grown into a global tradition, with a billion expected to take part in 2009. Find out when it is, how it started, how it's evolved, and what you can do.

When Is Earth Day?

Every day, the saying goes, is Earth Day. But it's popularly celebrated on April 22. Why?

One persistent rumor holds that April 22 was chosen because it's the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union.

"Lenin's goal was to destroy private property and this goal is obviously shared by environmentalists," the Capitalism Magazine Web site noted in a 2004 article perpetuating the theory.

Kathleen Rogers, president of Washington, D.C.-based Earth Day Network, which was founded by the original organizers of Earth Day, scoffs at the rumored communist connection.

She said April 22, 1970, was chosen for the first Earth Day in part because it fell on a Wednesday, the best part of the week to encourage a large turnout for the environmental rallies held across the country.

"It worked out perfectly, because everybody was at work and they all left," she said.

In fact, more than 20 million people across the U.S. are estimated to have participated in that first Earth Day.

Earth Day is now celebrated every year by more than a billion people in 180 nations around the world, according to Rogers.

Mad People and a Frustrated Politician

Earth Day's history is rooted in 1960s activism. The environment was in visible ruins and people were mad, according to Rogers.

"It wasn't uncommon in some cities during rush hour to be standing on a street corner and not be able to see across the street" because of pollution, she said.

Despite the anger, green issues were absent from the U.S. political agenda, which frustrated U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, whose campaigns for the environment through much of the 1960s had fallen flat.

First Earth Day "Took off Like Gangbusters"

In 1969 Nelson hit on the idea of an environmental protest modeled after anti-Vietnam War demonstrations called teach-ins.

"It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country," Nelson recounted in an essay shortly before he died in July 2005 at 89.

"The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air—and they did so with spectacular exuberance."

Nelson recruited activist Denis Hayes to organize the April 22, 1970, teach-in, which today is sometimes credited for launching the modern environmental movement.

By the end of 1970, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had been born, and efforts to improve air and water quality were gaining political traction.

"It was truly amazing what happened," Rogers said. "Blocks just tumbled."

Earth Day Evolves

Amy Cassara is a senior associate at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., who analyzes global environmental trends.

She noted that, since Earth Day started, environmentalism has moved from a fringe issue to a mainstream concern. "As many as 80 percent of Americans describe themselves as environmentalists," Cassara said.

Environmental issues today, however, are less immediate than dirty air, toxic water, and a hole in the ozone layer, she added.

For example, the impacts of global climate change are largely abstract and difficult to explain "without coming off as a doomsday prognosticator," Cassara said.

"As we become more industrialized and our supply chains become less transparent, it can be more difficult to understand the environmental consequences of our actions," she noted.

Earth Day Network is pushing the Earth Day movement from single-day actions—such as park cleanups and tree-planting parties—to long-term commitments.

"Planting a tree, morally and poetically, requires taking care of it for a really long time, not just sticking it in the ground," Earth Day Network's Rogers said.

To help make the transition, the organization is aligned with a hundred thousand schools around the world, integrating projects with an environmental component into the year-round curriculum.

"They announce the results on Earth Day, so Earth Day becomes a moment in time," Rogers said.

Cassara, of the World Resources Institute, said her organization uses Earth Day to convene with leaders in the movement and assess progress in their campaigns.

"[Earth Day] doesn't raise awareness among the general public in the same way that it used to. But it still provides a benchmark for reflection among those of us in the environmental community," she said.

What to Do on Earth Day?

For those whose inner environmentalist speaks loudest on April 22, Earth Day Network's Rogers encourages them to make a public commitment to take an environmental action.

"We are headed for a billion commitments to do something green," Rogers said. "And that doesn't mean think about it—it means do something."

Commitment ideas promoted by the Earth Day Network include pledging to educate friends and family on global warming or buy green products such as energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).

The commitments are part of a yearlong initiative called the Green Generation, which leads up to the 40th anniversary of Earth Day in 2010.

According to Rogers, everyone is part of this generation, which marks the transition from the industrial revolution to the green revolution.

"It is also about the green generation of energy and the generation of green jobs. ... The name [Green Generation], whenever I say it to people, they have their own idea of what it means, which is exactly what we want."

Check out article at National Geographic News.

In case you're wondering how you can do your part to preserve our beautiful planet, visit the Leave No Trace website.

Be sure to check out the Earth Day Network website.

Labels: History, Images

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In 1970, Marshall Kaplan, then an aerospace engineering professor at Penn State, had a peculiar dream — he wanted to retrieve Sputnik, the world's first orbiting satellite, from space.

Sputnik had been launched by the Russians in 1957, and by 1970 it was no longer operational. Kaplan wanted to go get it.

NASA had never considered space retrieval before, but it thought it was a good idea. Kaplan got the job, but it didn't work out — because the time frame was too short. Sputnik, nearing the end of its life cycle, was already about to deorbit — the technical term for what happens when an object circling the Earth gets close enough to be caught in gravity and burned to cinders in the atmosphere.

But that didn't mean Kaplan needed a new line of work. In fact, his work was just beginning.

For the next 40 years, Kaplan, now a senior researcher in the space department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., has been figuring out how to bring down objects from space.

That makes him one of a few dozen scientists feverishly trying to prevent what he calls a "coming catastrophic disaster" — a collision between a manned spacecraft and orbital debris, or space junk, thousands of pieces of which are zooming at thousands of miles per hour 300 to 800 miles above the Earth, ready to take out anything in their paths.

Space junk is anything that's lost or discarded in orbit — everything from the spare glove astronaut Ed White lost on the first American spacewalk in 1965, to the garbage bags jettisoned by cosmonauts stationed on the Mir space station in the '80s and '90s, to the dangerous remnants of a old weather satellite blasted into smithereens by a Chinese missile in 2007.

The probability of a disastrous orbital collision has been on front pages lately. On Feb. 12, a Russian-made satellite smashed into a commercial U.S. telecommunications satellite, creating the second worst mess (after the deliberate Chinese incident) ever in space.

Fortunately, the telecom satellite was quickly replaced, and the Russian "bird" had long been out of commission.

But a month later, on March 13, the two astronauts and one cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station had to scramble into an escape capsule after they got less than 20 minutes' warning that a piece of speeding junk was heading straight for them.

There wasn't time to reposition the ISS, which could have suffered a fatal loss of pressure had the five-inch piece of an old rocket punctured the walls of a living area. Fortunately, the debris missed.

"This is just a taste of what's to come. Experts are saying we could expect a crash every couple of years, but this is an educated guess," says Michael Krepon, co-founder of The Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank that focuses on security concerns.

"We really don't know the scale of the problem — we just know that we've already done serious damage to a zone of space that's essential to our security."

Our fast-paced, hyperlinked world could not exist without orbital relays; everything from phone calls to GPS devices to banking transfers needs satellites to work.

Even more damaging to satellites, and the enormous potential of the commercial development of space overall, could be a ground-based threat — crippling lawsuits over orbital-debris collisions.

"Liability claims killed the private aviation industry," says Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, which sponsors contests and awards for private space ventures and innovation. "In space, we're going to be dealing with 'Your satellite killed my satellite' claims. It's going to be a mess."

No ... it's a mess already.

"We're currently tracking 18,000 objects floating through space," says Kaplan. "But that's only objects larger than 4 inches. At 10,000 mph, even a nut or a bolt could do serious damage."

In the microscopic range, there are literally billions of micro-particles around — too small to puncture a spacecraft's exterior, but enough to have already pitted windows on a space shuttle and destroyed a lens on an orbiting telescope.

It's Kaplan's job to figure out how to get all of this down, and it's a big job.

"This clean-up will cost tens of billions of dollars," he says. "It's going to require a whole new space program to pull off. But we don't have a choice. This is just a cost-benefit analysis. If we don't clean this mess up in the next 20 years, we're going to lose our access to space."

Nations are beginning to act. On Feb. 13, the United Nations endorsed seven "Space Debris Guidelines to Curtail Space Debris in the Future."

The guidelines include adding more shielding to spacecraft and giving satellites extra fuel so they can either deorbit themselves quickly (it normally takes decades) or put themselves into higher, less crowded orbits at the ends of their life cycles.

The Colorado-based Secure World Foundation, a space think tank, is calling for a Civil Space Situational Awareness System — essentially a global air-traffic controller that would track everything in orbit so collisions could be avoided.

That sounds like a no-brainer, but it's something of a problem for the Air Force, to use only one example of a governmental authority that naturally has serious concerns about telling anyone where its surveillance satellites are at any given time.

A Stanford study released in late March suggests that future space junk can be minimized by simply forcing nations to "take out their own garbage" by deorbiting anything after it's done its job.

Most experts feel the U.N. recommendations will be ratified by international treaty, or a similar mechanism for good-conduct rules will be enacted soon.

But while all of these ideas are good planning, they don't get rid of the junk that's already up there.

That's what Kaplan spends most of his time working on.

Recently, he conducted a global survey of orbital waste-management ideas. He got over 100 — some pipe dreams, some crack-pipe dreams, but 30 or 40 of them with merit.

One concept that's gotten attention is the "space broom," a ground-based laser that will use quick pulses to singe orbital debris, changing each piece's trajectory so that it deorbits faster. The idea has considerable merit, and considerable problems — how to hit each piece, for one.

"We don't really know where this junk is with any real sense of accuracy," says Kaplan. "We can get within a few meters, perhaps, but that's not enough for a laser."

You could get a lot closer by putting the lasers on a spacescraft, but that would be a space-based weapon, and those are banned by several international treaties.

"Collection by collision" is another possibility Kaplan is earnestly examining.

The idea is simple — coat a spaceship in something sticky and put it into orbit. Think of it as a giant lint roller — debris will naturally collide with the craft, but instead of bouncing off or tearing through it, the junk will simply adhere. The added mass will lower the ship until it deorbits on its own.

And then there are a bevy of independent thinkers eager to jump into the mix.

Retired aerospace engineer Jim Hollopeter was profiled in a recent Wall Street Journal article, which reported that he wants to load aging rockets with water and bring down debris with what would essentially be the world's largest fire hose.

Meanwhile, the folks at Tether Unlimited, a Washington-based aerospace company funded by the Air Force, have created the "terminator tape," basically a pizza-sized box that can be clamped on to to a defunct satellite.

Once attached, the box opens, several hundred meters of electro-dynamic wire unspool and atmospheric drag does the rest to bring the bird down.

There are also nets, and magnets, and a science-fiction treasure trove of tantalization. The bad news is that none of them, even something as low-tech as the terminator tether, comes cheap.

The good news is that many could be "bootstrap"-financing technologies. There's a fortune to be made in space-mining operations, for example in harvesting nickel from the moon.

Diamandis himself believes this future industry will produce the world's first trillionaire, and if the fortunes of the 19th-century "robber barons" are anything to go by, he may not be wrong.

The point is that cleaning debris out of space means learning how to tow objects around space — a fundamental component of any mining operation.

"You don't even have to go that far out," says Diamandis. "Whatever 'waste management' organization gets the contract for space is looking at heaps of valuable material already floating around above us. You have to remember — one man's waste is another's treasure."

Check out article at Fox News.

It seems that wherever we go, humans somehow manage to pollute and litter the environment. When will we ever learn... LEAVE NO TRACE!!!

Be sure to check out NASA Orbital Debris Program Office

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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The first day of spring is no guarantee of spring-like weather, but officially the season's start comes around at the same time each year nonetheless.

Well, sort of.

The first day of spring arrives on varying dates (from March 19-21) in different years for two reasons: Our year is not exactly an even number of days; and Earth's slightly noncircular orbit, plus the gravitational tug of the other planets, constantly changes our planet's orientation to the sun from year to year.

And weather-wise, Earth's seasons have shifted in the past 150 years or so, according to a study that came out last month.

The hottest and coldest days of the years now are occurring almost two days earlier.

This year, spring starts Friday, March 20, because that is when the so-called vernal equinox occurs. Equinoxes (which mark the onset of spring and autumn) and solstices (which mark when summer and winter begin) are points in time and space that mark a transition in our planet's annual trip around the sun.

At each equinox, the sun crosses the Earth's equator, making night and day of approximately equal length on most of the planet. At the equator, the sun is directly overhead at noon on either equinox.

How it works

Earth's multiple motions — spinning on its axis and orbiting the sun — are behind everything from day and night to the changing seasons.

The sun comes up each day because Earth rotates once on its axis every 24 hours or so. Seasons are a result of Earth being tilted 23.5 degrees on its spin axis coupled with the planet's 365-day orbit around the sun.

(At the North Pole, the sun rises only once a year — at the start of spring. It gets higher in the sky each day until the summer solstice, then sinks but does not truly set until late September, at the autumn equinox.)

Imagine Earth as an apple sitting on one side of a table, with the stem being the North Pole. Tilt the apple 23.5 degrees so the stem points toward a candle (the sun) at the center of the table. That's summer for the top half of the apple.

Keep the stem pointing in the same direction but move the apple to the other side of the table: Now the stem points away from the candle, and it's winter on the top half of the fruit.

The very top of the apple, representing the north polar region, is in total darkness 24 hours a day, during that season.

At winter solstice, the sun arcs low across the Northern Hemisphere sky for those of us below the Arctic Circle, and the stretch of daylight is at its shortest. By the time of the spring equinox, days have grown noticeably longer.

At the summer solstice, the sun gets as high in our sky as it can go, yielding the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

As long ago as the fourth century B.C., ancient peoples in the Americas understood enough of this that they could create giant calendars to interact with the cycle of sunlight. They built observatories of stone to mark the solstices and other times important for planting or harvesting crops. Shrines and even tombs were also designed with the sun in mind.

More seasonal facts

As we orbit the sun, the part of the night sky that's in our view changes. A given star sets about 4 minutes earlier each night. Over a month, this amounts to two hours.

In winter, this means that we're looking at stars that during the summer were in our daytime sky, overwhelmed of course by the glare of the sun. Since we complete a circle around the sun every year, the stars of summer, such as those in the Big Dipper, are always the stars of summer.

During summer on the top half of Earth, our planet is actually farther from the sun than during winter, a fact owing to our non-circular orbit around the sun. The difference is about 3 million miles (5 million kilometers), and it makes a difference in radiant heat received by the entire Earth of nearly 7 percent.

But the difference is more than made up for by the longer days in the Northern Hemisphere summer with the sun higher in the sky.

Which brings up a common question: If the summer solstice is the longest day of the year, why are the dog days of August typically hotter?

Because it takes a while for the oceans to warm up, and a lot of weather on land is driven by the heat of the oceans.

Check out article at Fox News.

Interesting facts about the equinox... I'm just ready for the nice weather!!!

For more info, check out the Equinox Wikipedia Entry

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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On St. Patrick's Day—Tuesday, March 17—millions of people will don green and celebrate the Irish in, and around, them with parades, good cheer, and perhaps a pint of beer.

But few St. Patrick's Day revelers have a clue about St. Patrick, the man, according to the author of St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography.

"The modern celebration of St. Patrick's Day really has almost nothing to do with the real man," said classics professor Philip Freeman of Luther College in Iowa.

Who Was the Man Behind St. Patrick's Day?

The real St. Patrick wasn't even Irish.

He was born in Britain around the A.D. 390 to an aristocratic Christian family with a townhouse, a country villa, and plenty of slaves.

What's more, Patrick professed no interest in Christianity as a young boy, Freeman noted.

At 16, Patrick's world turned.

He was kidnapped and sent overseas to tend sheep as a slave in the chilly, mountainous countryside of Ireland for seven years.

"It was just horrible for him," Freeman said. "But he got a religious conversion while he was there and became a very deeply believing Christian."

Hearing Voices

According to folklore, a voice came to Patrick in his dreams, telling him to escape. He found passage on a pirate ship back to Britain, where he was reunited with his family.

The voice then told him to go back to Ireland.

"He gets ordained as a priest from a bishop and goes back and spends the rest of his life trying to convert the Irish to Christianity," Freeman said.

Patrick's work in Ireland was tough—he was constantly beaten by thugs, harassed by the Irish royalty, and admonished by his British superiors.

After he died on March 17, 461, Patrick was largely forgotten.

But slowly, mythology grew up around Patrick. Centuries later he was honored as the patron saint of Ireland, Freeman noted.

No Snakes in Ireland

The St. Patrick mythology includes the claim that he banished snakes from Ireland.

It's true no snakes exist on the island today, Freeman said. But they never did.

Ireland, after all, is surrounded by icy ocean waters—much too cold to allow snakes to migrate from Britain or anywhere else.

But since snakes often represent evil in literature, "when Patrick drives the snakes out of Ireland, it is symbolically saying he drove the old, evil, pagan ways out of Ireland [and] brought in a new age," Freeman said.

The snakes myth and others—such as Patrick using three-leafed shamrocks to explain the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost)—were likely spread by well-meaning monks centuries after St. Patrick's death, Freeman said.

St. Patrick's Day: Made in America?

Until the 1970s, St. Patrick's Day in Ireland was a minor religious holiday. A priest would acknowledge the feast day, and families would celebrate with a big meal, but that was about it.

"St. Patrick's Day was basically invented in America by Irish-Americans," Freeman said.

Timothy Meagher is an expert on Irish-American history at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

He said Irish charitable organizations originally celebrated St. Patrick's Day with banquets in places such as Boston, Massachusetts; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina.

Eighteenth-century Irish soldiers fighting with the British in the U.S. Revolutionary War held the first St. Patrick's Day parades. Some soldiers, for example, marched through New York City in 1762 to reconnect with their Irish roots.

Others parades followed in the years and decades after, including well-known celebrations in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, primarily for flourishing Irish immigrant communities.

"It becomes a way to honor the saint but also to confirm ethnic identity and to create bonds of solidarity," Meagher said.

Wearing Green Clothes, Dyeing River Green

Sometime in the 19th century, as St. Patrick's Day parades were flourishing, wearing the color green became a show of commitment to Ireland, Meagher said.

In 1962 the show of solidarity took a spectacular turn in Chicago when the city decided to dye a portion of the Chicago River green.

The tradition started when parade organizer Steve Bailey, head of a plumbers' union, noticed how a dye used to detect river pollution had stained a colleague's overalls a brilliant green, according to greenchicagoriver.com.

Why not, Bailey thought, turn the river green on St. Patrick's Day? So began the tradition.

The environmental impact of the dye is minimal compared with sources of pollution such as bacteria from sewage-treatment plants, said Margaret Frisbie, the executive director of the advocacy group Friends of the Chicago River.

Her group focuses instead on turning the Chicago River into a well-known habitat full of fish, herons, turtles, and beavers.

If the river becomes a wildlife haven, the thinking goes, Chicagoans won't want to dye their river green.

"Our hope is that, as the river continues to improve, ultimately people can get excited about celebrating St. Patrick's Day different ways," she said.

Pint of Guinness

On any given day 5.5 million pints of Guinness, the famous Irish stout, are consumed around the world.

On St. Patrick's Day, that number more than doubles to 13 million pints, said Beth Davies Ryan, global corporate relations director of Guinness.

"Historically speaking, a lot of Irish immigrants came to the United States and brought with them lots of customs and traditions, one of them being Guinness," she said.

Today, the U.S. tradition of St. Patrick's Day parades, packed pubs, and green silliness has invaded Ireland with full force, noted Freeman, the classics professor.

The country, he noted, figured out the popularity of St. Patrick's Day was a good way to boost spring tourism.

"Like anybody else," he said, "they can take advantage of a good opportunity."

Check out article at National Geographic News.

Interesting history on St. Patrick's Day! You learn something new each day! Are you wearing green today? The green in my camo counts, right?

Labels: History, Images

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PENSACOLA, Fla. — Debbie Harris knew the military dog tag and small metal emblem of a Navy fighter squadron she recently found in the sand near her home on an Alabama beach belonged to a Blue Angels pilot who was killed when his jet crashed there a half-century ago.

But she wanted to find out more about Cmdr. Robert Nicholls Glasgow and what happened , so she turned to her aunt and uncle, who live in Pensacola, home of the National Museum of Naval Aviation. Their search led them to the museum's director, Bob Rasmussen, a retired Navy captain and once a member of the famed flight demonstration team.

"I said to myself, 'Isn't that a coincidence,' " Rasmussen mused. "Of all the people that they might have brought this to, it happened to be the person who was flying with him the morning he was killed in that crash."

That's not the only coincidence, Harris said Friday, when she went to the museum to show Rasmussen what she had found.

Harris, 56, of Fort Morgan, Ala., said she came upon the fire-scorched emblem from Fighter Squadron 191, one of Glasgow's previous units, in mid-October. It was nearly 50 years to the day after the Oct. 14, 1958 crash.

The emblem probably had been on a Zippo cigarette lighter, Rasmussen said. She also found a small piece of metal shaped like a W, but Rasmussen couldn't identify it.

Harris then found the dog tag, bent but with the pilot's name clearly visible, on Feb. 17 — Glasgow's birthday. He was born on that date in 1922.

"It's like he's — I don't know," Harris said. "It's spooky."

Harris thinks hurricanes that swept through the area in recent years may have uncovered the items.

She wants to give them to Glasgow's family, but she's been unable to find any relatives through her research on the Internet. An Oct. 15, 1958, article on the crash in the Pensacola News Journal indicated Glasgow had a wife and four children and that his parents lived in El Monte, Calif.

Rasmussen said he'll try to help her search, although he hardly knew Glasgow. Glasgow had reported for duty at Pensacola Naval Air Station as the Blue Angels new leader just a few days before his first flight in one of the team's F-11 Tigers ended in tragedy.

The outgoing Blue Angels commander, Ed Holley, had asked Rasmussen, one of the team's most experienced air show pilots, to take Glasgow on an orientation flight. They took off in separate jets on a clear, cloudless day and headed for the Blue Angels' practice area over the Gulf of Mexico just off the Alabama coast.

Rasmussen's No. 4 jet had just had its radio identification device replaced and he needed to fly to a higher altitude over Mobile, Ala., to test it, something Glasgow had been briefed on before they took off. Holley also told Rasmussen they could try some maneuvers at high altitude but nothing low.

"I dropped him off at the site and said, 'Just orbit here until I get back. I'll be back in three or four minutes,'" Rasmussen recalled.

It was their last communication.

"I went up there, checked out the equipment, came back on the radio, called him and he was already gone," Rasmussen said.

Rasmussen didn't see Glasgow's jet crash into a vacant house at Fort Morgan and then explode — only the aftermath.

"I could see the smoke and a big black mark on the beach," Rasmussen said. "Flying lower I could see some blue pieces of metal and it was pretty obvious what had happened."

Witnesses on the ground said the jet crashed while attempting a loop.

"I'm always looking for things there," said Harris, a retired aircraft company employee who works the night shift at a Wal-Mart. "I grew up knowing about the crash."

She said she found the squadron emblem no more than 200 feet from the crash site, now covered with sand and sea oats. She then did some research and found out the pilot's name before seeing it on the dog tag she spotted along a path between her house and the water.

"I was walking along there and looked down and I saw this and went, 'Um, oh my gosh,' " Harris said, her voice dropping to a whisper.

"It was like one of those magical moments," she said. "I stood there and the sun was setting and I held this in my hand and I said, 'No one has touched this since it was around his neck, and I'm touching it.' It was real emotional."

Check out the article at Fox News.

What an interesting piece of history! To think that on the same beach I've walked numerous times would be found artifacts such as these boggles the mind! Good find, Debbie!

Be sure the check out the Official Blue Angels website and the Blue Angels Wiki.

Labels: History, Images, Military

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HODGENVILLE, Kentucky — The first of four new pennies chronicling Abraham Lincoln's rise from a small Kentucky cabin are being put into circulation to honor the 16th U.S. president's 200th birthday.

The coin's front is unchanged but the reverse depicts a tiny log cabin, representing the one-room dwelling where Lincoln was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky.

The one-cent piece is being unveiled by the U.S. Mint as part of Lincoln's bicentennial celebration Thursday near his birthplace.

The remaining coins will be released later this year and show other phases of Lincoln's life: a young man reading while sitting on a log during his formative years in Indiana; Lincoln the state legislator speaking at the Illinois capitol; and the unfinished dome of the U.S. Capitol.

Check out the article at Fox News.

The new penny designs are really cool! However, I'm not sure where they will be much use other than as a collectors item (pennies ARE the most collected US coin). I mean, let's be realistic - in this economic climate, even $1 bills aren't very useful. I dunno, it just seems like a big waste of money to me.

Labels: History, Images, Politics

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” (Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have strongly disputed the recidivism figures, asserting that the Pentagon data have inconsistencies and omissions.) Cheney called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates' native countries.

But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.

The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

The dire portrait Cheney painted of the country’s security situation was made even grimmer by his comments agreeing with analysts who believe this recession may be a once-in-a-century disaster.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Cheney said. “The combination of the financial crisis that started last year, coupled now with, obviously, a major recession, I think we’re a long way from having solved these problems.”

The interview, less than two weeks after the Bush administration ceded power to Obama, found the man who is arguably the most controversial — and almost surely the most influential — vice president in U.S. history in a self-vindicating mood.

He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.

Not content to wait for a historical verdict, Cheney said he is set to plunge into his own memoirs, feeling liberated to describe behind-the-scenes roles over several decades in government now that the “statute of limitations has expired” on many of the most sensitive episodes.

His comments made unmistakable that Cheney — likely more than former President Bush, who has not yet given post-White House interviews — is willing and even eager to spar with the new administration and its supporters over the issues he cares most about.

His standing in this public debate is beset by contradictions. Cheney for years has had intimate access to the sort of highly classified national security intelligence that Obama and his teams are only recently seeing.

But many of the top Democratic legal and national security players have long viewed Cheney as a man who became unhinged by his fears, responsible for major misjudgments in Iraq and Afghanistan, willing to bend or break legal precedents and constitutional principles to advance his aims. Polls show he is one of the most unpopular people in national life.

In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”

Check out the article at Fox News.

I sure hope that Cheney's prediction doesn't come to fruition... and that Obama has the presence of mind to take the necessary actions to prevent it!

Labels: History, Military, Politics

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The True Miracle of the Day:
The Peaceful Transfer of Power

Inauguration Day 2009 is as important as everyone says it is. There’s no escaping it. It is, as most of those covering it have already observed, an historic day, full of meaning for people all across the world. That a mere half-century after a time when blacks in parts of America were routinely prevented from voting we inaugurate an African-American president of the United States is a time of celebration for us all. It is a tangible symbol of how far the nation has come on race, one of the thorniest issues we as a nation have ever had to confront. We must not, however, lose sight of the fact that this is a subtext of the real story.

The true symbolism of the Inauguration Day, something we can hope the rest of the world sees and takes to heart is that the transfer of power, in which one political party is being completely supplanted by its opposition, comes as the result of something that for us, is as routine and simple as an election. It is the power of the people, exercised in their votes — not violence or mass arrest or social chaos — that is agent that has brought about the change.

How unlike the rest of the world America is. It is all too easy to forget that we live in a world where national leaders are deposed through military coups, where democratically-elected leaders subvert the very process that brought them to power in the name of keeping it, where dictatorships pass from father to son. And it is also easy to forget that this nation has, for more than 200 years, managed to keep its democratic heritage intact and expand upon it, extending the franchise beyond its original conception.

The preservation of this democracy has come at great cost. The sons and daughters of this nation have been called to its defense more than once, perhaps no more nobly than for a war, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “testing whether that nation — or any nation so conceived and so dedicated — can long endure.”

It has endured. And it has prospered. Freedom, the democratic ideal first appearing in ancient Greece, first entering the law through the Magna Carta, enshrined in our republican form of government by the Founding Fathers, has been this nation’s most significant export.

Today we accept our lot as commonplace, ordinary. We forget how truly radical the men who designed our system of government were, trusting the people to wield the ultimate power in their hands. And how, for many years, that system existed inside a fragile effort to compromise on that which there ultimately could be no compromise. Yet we have managed to sustain it. This is the true miracle of the day, one about which we should be no less emotional. It is the hope of the world.

Check out article at Fox News.

It's a great historical feat to finally have the first black President - and I am extremely proud of the progress that this nation has made in equality.

That being said, some members of the black community need to learn to act a little more mature about it and stop with all of the "Barack's in the house" BS. Barack Obama got where he is by being intelligent, sophisticated and civilized... not by acting like a thug and showing off his "blackness." Obama said the "lines of tribe shall soon dissolve..." so maybe they should listen to him.

I have a lot of respect for the words that President Obama spoke today and hope that he truly is sincere and successful.

Be sure to go check out the transcript of his Inaugural Address.

Labels: History, Images, Politics

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NORFOLK, Va. — It's the perfect gift for an old Navy flier: 1,092 feet of flattop.

"What do you give a guy who has been blessed and has just about everything he has ever needed?" asked President George W. Bush from aboard the Navy's newest ship. "Well, an aircraft carrier."

The USS George H.W. Bush, a steel-gray vessel longer than three football fields and built at a cost of $6.2 billion, was commissioned Saturday with its namesake, the 41st president, and other members of the Bush family on hand for the ceremonies at Naval Station Norfolk.

Adorned for the day with red, white and blue bunting, the USS George H.W. Bush is one of the Nimitz class of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the largest warships in the world.

"The ship that bears our dad's name is more than 95,000 tons of aluminum and steel," Bush said from a podium tucked under the flight deck. "She will carry nearly 6,000 of the finest sailors and Marines in the world. She represents the craftsmanship of many skilled builders, and thousands of hours of preparation."

Bush, who took his last scheduled flight aboard Air Force One to get to Norfolk, added: "Laura and I are thrilled to be here to help commission an awesome ship and to honor an awesome man."

It was the ultimate honor for former President George H.W. Bush, a decorated World War II pilot.

The former president recalled the day 65 years ago in Philadelphia when he attended the commissioning of the USS San Jacinto, a light carrier on which he served during the war. It was during that trip, he said, that he gave his fiancee, Barbara, an engagement ring.

"I thought that the San Jac was by far the biggest ship, or anything else, I'd ever seen," said the elder Bush, comparing it to the massive aircraft carrier, spit and polished for its unveiling. He marveled at its 4.5-acre landing field, a tower that reaches 20 stories above the waterline and its 1,400 telephones.

Speaking to the sailors preparing to serve on the new ship, his voice quavering at times with emotion, the former president said: "I wish I was sitting right out there with you, ready to start the adventures of my naval aviation career all over."

Bush, 84, joined the Navy on June 12, 1942, his 18th birthday and six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war he flew torpedo bombers off the USS San Jacinto. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals for his service.

On a mission over the Pacific in September 1944, Bush's plane crashed into the ocean after being hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire. The future president parachuted into the sea and was rescued by a Navy submarine. He returned to combat and served until the end of the war.

The Nimitz class of nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was first launched in 1972. The USS George H.W. Bush is the 10th and final vessel of its type.

A bronze statue on its hangar bay deck depicts the former president as a youthful, smiling pilot in his flight suit. On an upper deck, a "tribute room" presents Bush's life from his days in the Navy to his four years in the White House.

No other former president has visited a carrier named after him. Ronald Reagan was the first living ex-president to have a carrier named in his honor, but he was unable to visit the vessel before he died.

Doro Bush Koch, the president's sister and ship's sponsor, had the honor of bringing the carrier to service, calling out: "Man our ship. Bring her to life." With that, hundreds of sailors charged up gangplanks as a band played "Anchors Aweigh," the song of the Navy.

Four F-18s flew overhead, followed by a solo World War II torpedo bomber similar to the one the elder Bush flew during the war.

The president's daughters, Jenna Hager and Barbara Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, were among the throng of attendees. Also on hand were Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.

Check out article at Fox News.

You have to admit... the Nimitz Class Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier is one awesome and intimidating piece of naval technology. We can be thankful that no other nation in the world can match the power that one of these holds... not to mention all ten of ours!

Congratulations to President H W Bush on this honor!

Labels: History, Images, Military, Politics, Technology

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Each year, millions of eyes from all over the world are focused on the sparkling Waterford Crystal Times Square New Year's Eve Ball. At 11:59 p.m., the Ball begins its descent as millions of voices unite to count down the final seconds of the year, and celebrate the beginning of a new year full of hopes, challenges, changes and dreams.

On November 11th, 2008, The co-organizers of New Year’s Eve in Times Square (Times Square Alliance, Countdown Entertainment) unveiled a new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball at a press conference at Hudson Scenic Studio in Yonkers, New York.

The new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball is a 12 foot geodesic sphere, double the size of previous Balls, and weighs 11,875 pounds. Covered in 2,668 Waterford Crystals and powered by 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDS, the new Ball is capable of creating a palette of more than 16 million vibrant colors and billions of patterns producing a spectacular kaleidoscope effect atop One Times Square.

The organizers also announced that the new Ball will become a year-round attraction above Times Square in full public view January through December.

“For one hundred years, the Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball has attracted millions of revelers to Times Square on December 31st to celebrate the beginning of the New Year” said Jeff Straus, president of Countdown Entertainment and co-organizer of Times Square New Year’s Eve. “The new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball will be a bright sparkling jewel atop One Times Square entertaining New Yorkers and tourists from around the world not only on December 31, but throughout the year.”

“The New Year’s Eve ball is bigger, better and brighter than ever, just like Times Square itself,” said Times Square Alliance President Tim Tompkins. “And like Times Square, it’s not afraid to show off. That’s why we’re proudly putting it on display year-round so visitors to the neighborhood can enjoy a true Crossroads of the World icon.”

Check out article at Time Square Alliance.

I wish everyone a safe, happy and prosperous 2009!

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AT THE GREENWICH PRIME MERIDIAN, England (AP) -- Just a second, 2009. It's going to take a little longer to say goodbye to the worst economic year since the Great Depression, but all for good cause. The custodians of time will ring in the New Year by tacking a "leap second" onto the clock Wednesday to account for the minute slowing of the Earth's rotation. The leap second has been used sporadically at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich since 1972, an adjustment that has kept Greenwich Mean Time the internationally agreed time standard.

Some scientists now say GMT should be replaced by International Atomic Time - computed outside Paris - because new technologies have allowed atomic time to tick away with down-to-the-nanosecond accuracy.

But opponents say atomic time's very precision poses a problem.

A strict measurement, they say, would change our very notion of time forever, as atomic clocks would one day outpace the familiar cycle of sunrise and sunset.

The time warp wouldn't be noticeable for generations, but within a millennium, noon - the hour associated with the sun's highest point in the sky - would occur around 1 o'clock. In tens of thousands of years, the sun would be days behind the human calendar.

That bothers people like Steve Allen, an analyst at the University of California at Santa Cruz's Lick Observatory.

"I think (our descendants) will curse us less if we choose to keep the clock reading near 12:00 when the sun is highest in the sky," Allen said.

Atomic time advocates argue that leap seconds are onerous because they're unpredictable.

Since the exact speed of the Earth's rotation can't be plotted out in advance, they're added as needed. Sometimes, like this year, they're added on Dec. 31, sometimes they're inserted at the end of June 30.

Those willy-nilly fixes can trip up time-sensitive software, particularly in Asia, where the extra second is added in the middle of the day.

Critics say everything from satellite navigation to power transmission and cellular communication is vulnerable to problems stemming from programs ignoring the extra second or adding it at different times.

Although the time will pass in the blink of an eye, Judah Levine, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., predicts the change will make him a very busy man starting about 5 p.m. Mountain Time. As part of the institute's Time and Frequency Division, he'll be helping to work out the bugs that follow.

"There's always somebody who doesn't get it right," Levine said. "It never fails."

Britons seemed less concerned about the remote prospect of having tea at 3 a.m. than the notion of leaving a France-based body in control of the world's time.

"I think there's some kind of historical pride we might feel in Britain about Greenwich being the point around which time is measured," 50-year-old telecoms executive Stephen Mallinson said as he waited to board a Eurostar train for Paris at London's St. Pancras Station.

"But in practice, does it make a difference? No."

At the Royal Observatory, 53-year-old homemaker Susie Holt was adjusting her wristwatch to match the digital display above the meridian. She said it would be a pity if GMT were made obsolete. Her daughter, 15-year-old Kirsty, was more forthright.

"We don't want the French to control time," she said. "They might get it wrong or something."

Meanwhile, Elisa Felicitas Arias, a scientist at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which computes atomic time at a facility outside Paris, has been busy lobbying to scrap the leap seconds that have given the 17th century Royal Observatory pride of place.

"GMT is out of date," she sniffed.

She said she has been garnering considerable support, with the International Telecommunications Union - the arbiter of international time standards - considering a vote on a switch as early as next year, with a 2018 target to implement it.

The U.S., France, Germany, Italy, and Japan were all on board, she said.

But David Rooney, the Royal Observatory's curator of time, defended leap seconds, saying they give everyone "the best of both worlds."

The arrangement, he said, allows satellites, physicists, and high-frequency traders to benefit from the accuracy of atomic time while keeping our clocks consistent with the position of the sun in the sky - and with GMT.

The American Astronomical Society is officially neutral on the proposal to switch to atomic time, which is calculated based on readings from more than 200 atomic clocks maintained across the world.

Perhaps predictably, Britain's Royal Astronomical Society has come out in favor of conserving leap seconds. While spokesman Robert Massey said star-watchers could cope no matter what happened, he urged caution on such an important change.

"It's not just a matter for the telecommunications industry to tell everybody to get rid of the leap second," Massey said. "It would be a big cultural change at the very least. Abandoning the connection between time and solar time is really a big shift."

Check out article at The Advocate.

I'm on the fence on this one... scientific accuracy is important, but I kinda like that time matches solar time. Guess we'll have to see how this argument plays out over the next few years.

Anyway... Please everyone remember to be safe and responsible tonight... and enjoy the celebrations!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images, Technology

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Christmas has had a long and varied history. It was been celebrated for centuries by different people, at different times, in different places, and in many different ways. Here you will find links to information about the different ways that the holiday we know as Christmas has been celebrated, or not celebrated, over the years.

Check out The Real Story of Christmas at History.com.

Regardless of the very interesting origins and history behind it, Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. While we're enjoying all of our gifts and traditions, let us not forget the real reason for the season!

Merry Christmas!

Labels: History, Images

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Need that perfect gift for the space buff in your life?
Got 129 million cu ft of spare hangar space?
Then has NASA got a deal for you: Once the space shuttle fleet retires,
probably by 2010, the shuttles will be ready for purchase.
But even for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum,
the shuttles come at a hefty price—about $42 million each!

Earlier this week the space agency issued a Request for Information (RFI) to educational institutions, museums, and "other organizations" in an attempt to sell off the remaining space shuttles in 2010. The estimated total for tax, tags and freight is $42 million. According to NASA, the RFI will "gauge the level and scope of interest of U.S. organizations in acquiring … orbiters and other major flight hardware."

The agency hopes to find homes for two of the three orbiters; Discovery is already earmarked for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. By law, the institution has something akin to a rights-of-first-refusal agreement with NASA that allows it first crack at space memorabilia once the government is done with it.

Discovery's long, active history makes it a logical choice for the Smithsonian. The third of NASA's winged spaceships and the oldest working orbiter, Discovery was deployed for the Hubble Space Telescope on mission STS-31 in April 1990, carried the 77-year-old John Glenn back into space in 1998, and was twice NASA's return-to-flight spacecraft—after the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Columbia explosion five years ago. While Enterprise, the shuttle built for test flights, anchors the Smithsonian's space collection at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles airport in Virginia, the museum has long wanted to replace it with an operational orbiter. "To have any flown orbiter would be wonderful," says Valerie Neal, the Smithsonian's curator of the human spaceflight collection. "The Smithsonian tries to acquire the oldest or first-flown aircraft—so up until 2003, we'd hoped it would be Columbia. Now, of course, Discovery would be a perfect fit."

But that history comes with a hefty price tag—even for the internationally renowned Smithsonian. "We were in a different era then, where we had no eBay and people who were looking to make money off of artifacts," NASA spokesman Michael Curie told CollectSpace, a Web site devoted to space memorabilia. "So it was to everyone's advantage to try to provide them to those who might display them." NASA makes an important distinction: The $42 million isn't to buy an orbiter, but to prepare it for public presentation—nearly $30 million goes to "safeing" the craft (removing the fuel systems and other environmental hazards), approximately $8 million goes to display preparation and the final $6 million or so is spent on transportation and installation. Technically, the agency says, the cost is compensation for shipping and handling.

Industry observers also suggest that the cash-strapped space agency is grabbing every dollar it can find for the over-budget Constellation Program. In August, budget constraints forced NASA to scrap plans to have the shuttle's replacement, Orion, ready by 2013. The orbiters should be available Sept. 30, 2011, according to the RFI, and they should be ferried to their final destinations by May 31, 2012—where they will likely remain for a long time, since the agency is also decommissioning the 747 that is used to haul the spacecraft. "In the past, sometimes we have paid for this sort of 'shipping and handling,'" Neal says, "but this is unprecedented in terms of the cost involved. We're thrilled to have an orbiter designated for us, but we'll have to resolve the cost matter. Luckily, it's not like we have to come up with the money in 90 days."

Check out the article at Popular Mechanics.

Sweet... I want one!!! =)

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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With schools and many businesses closed this morning, area residents took to the snow-covered streets to enjoy the rare weather.

Even as snow turned to sleet, sledders and even a snowboarder slid down the rolling white hills of City Park.

On the LSU campus, seniors Kirk Melancon and Cade Worsham ran around the snow-covered campus fairgrounds with a few-dozen other students.

The two roommates started with photos and snowballs, which eventually led to full-on snow wrestling.

“I have one more exam today at 5:30,” Melancon said. “But I had to come out here today. This is a one in 15-year snow.”

Meteorologist Danielle Manning with the National Weather Service in Slidell estimated that 3 inches of snow fell in East Baton Rouge Parish, 2 inches in West Baton Rouge Parish and 5 in Livingston Parish.

The average snowfall in greater Baton Rouge is 2 to 3 inches, she said.

When Chicago native Chris Horton looked out of his Baton Rouge window this morning, the winter scene reminded him of home.

“Straight up Chicago,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything but being in the Windy City.”

Horton’s sister, Crystal Burk, called him before sunrise to tell him about the weather. A few hours of shoveling and sculpting later, the twins had a life-size snowman in front of her Old South Baton Rouge house.

Burk’s grandchildren, who helped briefly with the project, had gone inside.

“It got too cold for them,” said Horton, who had a wide smile as he shoveled the snow.

Check out the article at The Advocate.

Yeah, Snow Day!!! Now, before y'all from up nawth start laughing at us, you gotta realize that we haven't seen this much snow since 1988!!!

Check out the online photo galleries at LSU Sports and The Advocate!

Labels: History, Images

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The heavens smiled down on Earth Monday in a rare celestial trifecta of Venus, Jupiter, and the moon.

The planets aligned—an event known as a conjunction—Sunday night, and were joined by a thin sliver of moon on Monday.

The rare planetary meeting was visible from all parts of the world, even from light-polluted cities such as Hong Kong and New York.

People in Asia witnessed a smiley face (above, photographed from Manila, Philippines), while skywatchers in the United States saw a frown.

The three brightest objects in the sky were so tightly gathered that one could eclipse them with a thumb, according to NASA's Web site.

The next visible Venus-Jupiter conjunction will be on the evening of March 14, 2012, but the two planets will appear farther apart in the sky.

Check out the article at National Geographic News.

Wish I could've seen the smiley face in the sky, but it was still an awesome viewing despite the frown! =)

Labels: History, Images, Space

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LSU’s 1958 national champion football team will be honored at halftime of the LSU vs. Ole Miss game on Saturday. Also, 1959 Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon will be recognized for his election into the College Football Hall of Fame.

BATON ROUGE -- Nostalgia will be dripping from Tiger Stadium on Saturday when the 1958 LSU Tigers, the first consensus national championship team in school history and the only undefeated title holder in school annals, will be presented at halftime of the game as part of a weekend-long reunion celebration for the squad.

Also, LSU legend Billy Cannon will be honored during the break between the first and second quarters for his election to the College Football Hall of Fame. Cannon was elected earlier this year and will be inducted in ceremonies to be held at New York’s historic Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on December 9.

The 1958 team will start its reunion activities with a gathering at the Cox Communications Academic Center for Student-Athletes on Friday evening followed by a tour of the LSU Football Operations Center. On Saturday morning the team will tour the Andonie Museum and will be presented at the Tiger Athletic Foundation Pre-Game Party in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.

At halftime of the LSU-Ole Miss game, the team will be introduced at mid-field.

Cannon becomes only the sixth player in the history of LSU football to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. Cannon will be presented with a plaque by the National Football Foundation on Saturday to commemorate his election to the Hall.

Other former LSU players who have been elected to the College Football Hall of Fame are G.E. “Doc” Fenton (1904-09), Abe Mickal (1933-35), Gaynell “Gus” Tinsley (1934-36), Ken Kavanaugh (1937-39) and Tommy Casanova (1969-71).

Five former LSU coaches are in the College Football Hall of Fame. They are Mike Donahue who also coached at Auburn; Lawrence “Biff” Jones who also coached at Army, Oklahoma and Nebraska; Dana X. Bible who also coached at Mississippi College, Texas A&M, Nebraska and Texas; Bernie Moore who also coached at Mercer, and LSU’s all-time winningest coach, Charles McClendon, who coached only at LSU from 1962-79.

Check out the article at LSU Sports.

Congrats to Billy Cannon and the rest of the 1958 Championship Team, who had one helluva season back in the day and have been honored for their accomplishments ever since.

Labels: History, Images, Sports

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The next two decades will see a world living with the daily threat of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe and the decline of America as the dominant global power, according to a frighteningly bleak assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.

"The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons," said the report by the National Intelligence Council.

The analysts said that the report had been prepared in time for Barack Obama's entry into the Oval office on January 20, where he will be faced with some of the greatest challenges of any newly-elected president.

"The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a widening range of options for limited strikes," the 121-page assessment said.

The analysts draw attention to an already escalating nuclear arms race in the Middle East and anticipate that a growing number of rogue states will be prepared to share their destructive technology with terror groups.

"Over the next 15-20 years reactions to the decisions Iran makes about its nuclear program could cause a number of regional states to intensify these efforts and consider actively pursuing nuclear weapons," the report Global Trends 2025 said. "This will add a new and more dangerous dimension to what is likely to be increasing competition for influence within the region," it said.

The spread of nuclear capabilities will raise questions about the ability of weak states to safeguard them, it added. "If the number of nuclear-capable states increases, so will the number of countries potentially willing to provide nuclear assistance to other countries or to terrorists."

The report, a year in the making, said that global warming will aggravate the scarcity of water, food and energy resources. Citing a British study, it said that climate change could force up to 200 million people to migrate to more temperate zones. "Widening gaps in birth rates and wealth-to-poverty ratios, and the impact of climate change, could further exacerbate tensions," it said.

The report says the warming earth will extend Russia and Canada's growing season and ease their access to northern oil fields, strengthening their economies. But Russia's potential emergence as a world power may be clouded by lagging investment in its energy sector, persistent crime and government corruption, the report says.

"The international system will be almost unrecognizable by 2025, owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing economy, a transfer of wealth from West to East, and the growing influence of non-state actors. Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, the United States' relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and US leverage will become more strained."

Global power will be multipolar with the rise of India and China, and the Korean peninsula will be unified in some form. Turning to the current financial situation, the analysts say that the financial crisis on Wall Street is the beginning of a global economic rebalancing.

The U.S. dollar's role as the major world currency will weaken to the point where it becomes a "first among equals."

"Strategic rivalries are most likely to revolve around trade, investments and technological innovation, but we cannot rule out a 19th-century-like scenario of arms races, territorial expansion and military rivalries." The report, based on a global survey of experts and trends, was more pessimistic about America's global status than previous outlooks prepared every four years. It said that outcomes will depend in part on the actions of political leaders. "The next 20 years of transition to a new system are fraught with risks," it said.

The analysts also give warning that the kind of organized crime plaguing Russia could eventually take over the government of an Eastern or Central European country, and that countries in Africa and South Asia may find themselves ungoverned, as states wither away under pressure from security threats and diminishing resources.

The intelligence community expects that terrorism would survive until 2025, but in slightly different form, suggesting that Al Qaeda's "terrorist wave" might be breaking up. "Al Qaeda's inability to attract broad-based support might cause it to decay sooner than people think," it said.

On a positive note it added that an alternative to oil might be in place by 2025.

Check out the article at Fox News.

This is not the best of news. So much for "Change We Need..."

Check out Another Version of the Truth and use your mouse to wipe away the lies.

Labels: History, Images, Military, Politics

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WASHINGTON -- A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may -- may not, I hope not -- but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

Obama's comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado about building a new civil service corps. Among other things, he called for expanding the nation's foreign service and doubling the size of the Peace Corps "to renew our diplomacy."

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set," Obama said in July. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

Broun said he also believes Obama likely will move to ban gun ownership if he does build a national police force.

Obama has said he respects the Second Amendment right to bear arms and favors "common sense" gun laws. Gun rights advocates interpret that as meaning he'll at least enact curbs on ownership of assault weapons and concealed weapons. As an Illinois state lawmaker, Obama supported a ban on semiautomatic weapons and tighter restrictions on firearms generally.

"We can't be lulled into complacency," Broun said. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential."

Obama's transition office did not respond immediately to Broun's remarks.

Check out the article at Fox News.

What a scary thought! One can only hope that our system wouldn't allow such a thing to happen... I don't think it will.

Labels: History, Military, Politics

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OPELOUSAS -- There’s more than superficial concern expressed by 90-year-old Paul Kimball Sr. when he contemplates the type of combat facing U.S. soldiers now fighting in Iraq.

“That’s urban warfare, it’s the worse kind,” says Kimball, while sitting in a quiet room of his secluded farmhouse several miles south of Opelousas.

If anyone knows the ferocity of house-to-house fighting, it’s Kimball, who served as a World War II ammunition and supply sergeant with the 75th Infantry Division in Europe from 1944 until May 1945.

Recently, just days before Veterans Day, Kimball took time to recall how just weeks after he arrived in France, he was rushed to Belgium near Bastogne, to help repulse the mid-December German counteroffensive launched through the Ardennes Forest.

Later he and members of his division moved into Holland, and then the Alsace-Lorraine area of France, fought along the Maginot Line, crossed the Rhine River and then finished the war in Germany, where they helped liberate a slave labor camp.

According to an official report compiled by the Army Office of the Theater Historian for the European Theater of Operations, the 75th Infantry Division was in combat for 94 days beginning Dec. 25, 1944.

During that time, the division suffered 3,954 combat casualties — killed, wounded and missing — and another 4,062 noncombat casualties.

Most of the fighting Kimball and his men experienced was in rural villages or in open countryside, where soldiers lived for days in foxholes. They faced machine gun fire, strafing from fighter planes and shelling from German artillery.

“The one thing the war did for me was make me a Christian. I say the rosary twice a day now and go to Mass every day. The old saying about no atheists in a foxhole is true,” he said.

Kimball said he never intended to serve in the Army. However, because it was difficult to find employment during the Great Depression in St. Landry Parish, Kimball said he and his brother, Pete, joined the Marine Corps in 1937.

Kimball served four years in the Corps but decided not to re-enlist. He also got a warning from a Marine officer which proved prophetic.

“He told me if I didn’t join up again, I’d be drafted into the Army,” Kimball said. Three months after being discharged from the Marines, Kimball was an Army staff sergeant in charge of an ammunition and pioneer platoon at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

The 75th Infantry Division arrived at Le Harve, France, in November 1944 and moved on to nearby Rouen, in Normandy province, where Kimball once traded Army rations for a butchered cow.

By early December, Kimball went to Vise, Belgium, and then the nearby town of Liege, where he took cover in a barn during a concentrated rocket attack.

“The rockets were coming in so low, we shot at them with our rifles, but it didn’t stop them,” he said.

Three days later Kimball moved to Charleroi and then onto Ny, about 6 miles from Bastogne, where the Germans eventually surrounded the American infantry.

Kimble said he and his soldiers accidentally dug into the Belgian forest 5 miles behind German lines, where they supplied rifle companies with ammunition.

“We fought all Christmas day and the day afterward. We took a lot of casualties, killed or wounded,” he said.

Kimball remembered that Christmas night as being clear and extremely cold, with a vivid full moon.

Kimball said one of his saddest memories of that engagement was knowing that a good friend, a lieutenant, died a few days after the man received a letter saying said his wife had delivered a baby boy.

Another scene Kimball can’t forget is watching an American P-38 Lightning fighter plane get shot down during a dogfight with a German Messerschmitt over Belgium.

“When the P-38 crashed, we all cried,” he said.

On New Year’s Day, 1945, Kimball was summoned to the front line, a hill held by the Americans.

For close to an hour, Kimball was in an earthen dugout where German artillery fire toppled trees over his protection.

Kimball said his knowledge of French allowed him to ride at the head of troop convoys.

In Alsace, France, he said the 75th joined the First French Army and the Third U.S. Army to flush the Germans out of a mountainous region.

Kimball recalled dining on cheese and champagne before a German artillery round exploded and cut off the leg of a cook sitting near him.

“Nobody ate anything after that,” he said.

A few days later at Weckleshiem, Kimball said he “almost vomited my guts out” when he was assigned to organize the burial of 30 German bodies, which had been stored in a barn for several days.

Several days afterward, he took a Luger pistol off a dead German officer lying face down at the Maginot Line.

“This officer was dressed to kill and he got killed, too. He must have been important, because the holster had the German Order of the Iron Cross on it,” Kimball said.

While in Germany, Kimball and his men were under siege in Dortmund before heading to Wesel and then Hemer.

It was near Hemer where Kimball said the Germans had established a slave labor camp which included Russian prisoners.

“Most of them looked like skeletons when we got there. They were dying at a rate of 250 per day,” he said.

Kimball said he helped organize a 50-man civilian detail to help bury the camp’s dead until “the graves looked like a big levee.”

During the past 63 years Kimball said he contemplated revisiting Europe.

Over time that changed.

“I thought about it, but then I decided not to. The memories are not that good,” he said.

Check out the article at The Advocate.

What an impressive story! I have nothing but the utmost respect for what that man and all members of the greatest generation went through.

Always honor our veterans... they have fought for our freedom and deserve our respect at all times!

For some more very interesting history and personal accounts of WWII, I highly recommend Band of Brothers, Pegasus Bridge, D-Day June 6, 1944, and Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose

Be sure to check out the Patriotic Fact Sheet and 2008 Presidential Proclamation by George W. Bush at the Department of Veteran Affairs website.

Labels: History, Images, Military

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Barack Obama owes his election in part to President Bush's vast unpopularity, but that favor comes at a cost: the president-elect will be assuming responsibility for a credit crisis, a banking collapse, an unstable stock market and what is likely to be a lasting recession.

Now that he has won the White House following a two-year campaign that relied on soaring rhetoric about America's future, reality is setting in -- how can Obama deliver on his lengthy list of promises?

"He's made comments on the campaign trail that will have to be reconciled with his policies," said Republican political analyst Dylan Glenn.

Obama has offered tax cuts for working families, affordable and expanded health care and a speedy withdrawal from Iraq intended to save billions of dollars each month.

"His notion about what he will do in Iraq, his notion about what he will do in terms of fiscal policy for this country will have to be translated into real live policy, and that will be a challenge," Glenn said.

Obama will inherit a budget deficit that many analysts say could hit $1 trillion for the first time in history, potentially crimping any promises of tax cuts or spending on new programs.

He faces a diving economy that has traumatized Americans trying to buy a home, pay for college or plan for retirement. And he'll confront the complexities of trying to extricate U.S. forces from Iraq while facing a resurgent conflict in Afghanistan.

"He's taking office during a recession, in all likelihood, which is about what happened to George Bush," said Kevin Hassett, a senior fellow and director of economic policies at the American Enterprise Institute. "The odds are that we'll have a recession that's pretty lengthy, maybe stretching into the spring."

Just last month, Obama said he would delay rescinding Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if there is a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy.

"I think we've got to take a look and see where the economy is," he told ABC News. "I mean, the economy is weak right now."

He added that he still plans to push for his promised tax cuts for the middle class. But during the last weeks of the campaign, confusion swirled over how Obama defines the middle class. Joe Biden pegged the middle class as people making under $150,000 a year, and Bill Richardson cited those making under $120,000. Both figures are lower than the $250,000 Obama had set as the threshold for a tax increase.

Robert Litan, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, said he believes economic realities will force Obama to adjust only the timing of his promises.

"I think he's been very clear about what he wants to do," Litan said, citing Obama's pledge to fix healthcare, reduce dependence on foreign oil and lift middle-class families.

"I don't think his priorities are going to change. It's just the pace is going to be slower," he said.

Litan said he's not sure if Obama can do everything he wants in one term. But as far as what is Obama's top priority, Litan said it will be clear only if Obama tackle these issues sequentially.

Political analyst and FOX News contributor Juan Williams said Obama's biggest critics will come from the party's left wing, because he won't be able to fulfill all of his promises.

"Barack Obama realizes if he does anything precipitous with regard to American military forces in a place like Iraq and puts anybody in danger or in some way allows terrorists to make some gains, he will suffer a tremendous backlash that could be political damaging to him to the point that he never recovers," Williams said.

Glenn agreed, noting that will be "working with a liberal Congress that has been strengthened in numbers both on the Senate and House side."

Regarding what not to do as president, Obama need look no further than to Bush himself.

The outgoing president mainly embraced deregulation during his two terms in office, but some economists fault him for lacking a clear economic vision, leaving the next administration to pick up the pieces in his wake.

"In the end he was a president who failed to have any coherent economic policy," Hassett told FOXNews.com. "He pursued an enormous number of policies that were designed to attract Democratic support, and they all failed miserably to do that."

Obama's economic influence may well begin before he takes office, as he appoints a transition team to shape his administration's economic policies.

But the decisions that define his first few months in office could already be established in deals hammered out by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who announced Wednesday that she wants to revisit a stimulus package that includes additional benefits for the unemployed.

"I think that most of the policies, especially if there's [an additional] stimulus package... might well be baked into the cake by the time he takes office," Hassett said.

Check out the article at Fox News.

I'm not sure he'll be able to deliver on all of the rhetoric he relied upon to get into office... thank God!

In his speech, Obama invoked the words of Abraham Lincoln and echoed John F. Kennedy. "So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder," he said. If he truly believes these words, then what need would there be to spread the wealth in the first place? I mean, if everyone is working hard, they don't need any hand-outs... right???

I guess we'll just have to see how it all works out. I wish him the best and hope the next four years goes better than I think they will. I am a patriot and will back him and pray he is smarter than I think he is. Congratulations, President Obama!

I would also like to congratulate Senator John McCain on a hard-fought campaign and to thank him for a lifetime of service to this great country. The Democrats can bash him all they want, but none of them have half the balls that this man has. You are a great American, Senator McCain!!!

God Bless America!

Labels: History, Politics

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Obama a Uniter? Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Is Barack Obama a uniter? Since the beginning of the Democratic primaries, unity has been one of his major themes. It proved a strong lure compared to the polarizing Hillary Clinton. That theme has also helped Obama blunt the undeniably bipartisan record of John McCain.

But being a uniter takes some effort. It isn’t just about words. Republicans have pointed to Obama’s lack of bipartisan accomplishments in either state or federal government. And even Obama’s presidential campaign indicates that he has a tin ear when it comes to dealing with those he disagrees with. One of the surest ways to anger others is not giving them a chance to air their views.

Obama’s list of heavy-handed actions is growing:

• Last week the Obama campaign kicked reporters from the Dallas Morning News, the New York Post and the Washington Times off the campaign plane — making it difficult for their papers to cover Obama’s final campaign appearances. The reporters were replaced with writers from magazines such as Glamour. The editorial pages of all three papers had endorsed McCain.

The Obama campaign explained the decision as simply occurring from an excess demand for seats. But Washington Times Executive Editor John Solomon told radio show host Mark Levin on Friday evening that they had been covering the Obama campaign from the beginning of his run for the presidency, and that those endorsements were “the only one common thread among [the three newspapers].”

Kirsten Powers notes how times have changed — not even Richard Nixon kicked disagreeable reporters off campaign planes, not even his archenemies at the Washington Post.

• Democrats seemed determined to cut back on the few conservative voices in the mainstream media. Obama supports media-ownership caps, which will primarily affect News Corp, the company that owns Fox News and conservative newspapers such as the New York Post. His proposals to increase minority ownership of broadcasting are also designed to change content, no longer leaving it up to customers to decide what it is they want to listen to.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promise more direct regulations on content. They want to re-impose the “Fairness Doctrine,” mandating that private radio stations provide what the government determines to be “balanced” coverage and guaranteeing that conservative talk radio will be over. There is a reason why talk radio only really began after the “Fairness Doctrine” ended in the 1980s.

Congressman Mike Pence couldn’t get even one single Democratic member of Congress to oppose these regulations last year, and Obama hasn’t yet said whether he would veto a bill regulating radio show content.

• There has been what can only be described as thuggish activity. In late August, Milt Rosenberg — a Chicago institution, broadcasting on WGN radio since 1973 — interviewed Stanley Kurtz about the extremely extensive relationship between Obama and William Ayers. Milt, a mild mannered, middle-of-the-road person, tried to have both sides represented and had invited a representative of the Obama campaign. No one from the campaign agreed to appear. Instead, the campaign organized an immediate, massive call-in campaign to force WGN to cancel Kurtz’s appearance. When that failed, the campaign organized supporters to call in to the station and simply tie up the telephone lines so that other listeners couldn’t ask questions. Others threatened Federal Communication Commission action to revoke WGN’s license.

Rosenberg said that he had never seen anything similar to silence discussion during his years on radio.

• Obama has also gone to the extreme of threatening opponents and television stations with legal action for running ads. For example, when ads were run discussing Obama’s relationship to Ayers, Obama’s campaign demanded that the Department of Justice criminally investigate the group behind the ads. (What criminal charges that were justified by running an ad were never explained.) It is bad enough that a senator demands criminal charges against a political opponent, but Justice Department officials might take this seriously if the president of the United States asks them to press charges.

When the National Rifle Association started running ads warning that Obama had previously supported bans on handguns and massive taxes on bullets, the Obama campaign likewise used intimidation and sent cease-and-desist letters to television stations threatening legal action.

The list is long, but the media isn’t the only place that Obama promises to eliminate dissent. Campaign finance laws will surely be rewritten in ways that make it particularly difficult for Republicans to win races. Limits on total expenditures and public financing entrench incumbents, which in this case would be Democrats. For example, when an incumbent president doesn't face a serious challenge during the primaries, he can sit on the public funds obtained during the primaries until the nominee from the other party has been determined, and then use those primary funds to attack his general election opponent. The non-incumbent party's nominee must usually battle for the nomination and typically has reached the spending limit imposed by the taxpayer funding system by March. These challengers are then severely limited in their ability to campaign until their nominating conventions in August. Challengers Walter Mondale in 1984 and Bob Dole in 1996 were pummeled for months with little financial means to respond.

Or take unions, where secret ballots will be eliminated for union certification elections. What is next? Eliminating secret ballots for other elections? Presumably not, but if we care about preventing voter intimidation generally, why don’t we also care about that for workers? Don’t Democrats trust workers enough to make judgments on their own?

Stronger unions do mean one thing: more money for Democrats’ campaigns in future elections.

It is hard to put up with those who disagree. But will Democrats put up with criticism when they have the presidency and Congress and enough votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster? This will be more power than any party has had for a long time, because even when the Democrats had over 60 votes in the Senate, many of those were conservative Southern Democrats, who no longer exist.

Some Republicans think that this election doesn’t matter. That in two years they will come back stronger than ever. Indeed, Republicans might be quite angry and inspired to take things back. But 2012 won’t be like 1980. The Democrats plan to tilt the playing field in their favor to ensure a long-term domination in politics.

Check out the article at Fox News.

Well, it's finally out of the media's hands and left for us to decide. About freakin' time!!! Everyone be sure to go vote!

Be sure that you take the issues into account and educate yourself before you pull a lever. I'm so tired of un-educated people voting for someone just because of how they look or because of their performance on-stage during a debate or speech.

I'm also tired of the liberal media propaganda and think that it's time for them to get back to honest journalism!

Be sure to check out The History of US Presidential Elections

Labels: History, Images, Politics

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Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in).

The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.

During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.

Check out the article at History.com.

I love Halloween!!! Then again, who doesn't? Check out today's Google art:

Happy Halloween!

Labels: Entertainment, History

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Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Sen. Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" (http://snipurl.com/457to): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Fred Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards' own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women (NOW) threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe -- and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

Check out the editorial by Orson Scott Card.

This is one extremely well-written and spot-on editorial by Orson Scott Card... who is also the author of Ender's Game, which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

On to the subject at hand... Regardless of your political leanings, I have respect for your beliefs... as you should have respect for mine. I don't believe for a moment that the media should be feeding the masses lies, propaganda, or biased coverage for any candidate for public office. It is the media's responsibility to call these people down and hold them to account for their past actions and associations and their plans for the future. No individual seeking the highest power in the world should be excused from this most important of litmus tests. Unfortunately, Barack Obama has been given a free pass. If you don't watch Fox News, then you are a victim of the left's media propaganda machine... which Senator Obama has purchased with his vast campaign funds. It is a crying shame when an election can be bought so publicly right under our noses - WAKE UP AMERICA!!!

	Check out NObama.com to learn the truth about Barack Obama's agenda!
	Be sure to check out John McCain.com to learn the truth about what he stands for and what he will do for this great nation.

Labels: History, Military, Politics

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CAMBRIDGE, England — Most clocks just tell time. Not the newly unveiled clock at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, which aims to disorient and dazzle, to remind people of their own mortality and to pay tribute to one of the most famous watchmakers of all time.

No wonder it cost more than 1 million pounds (US$1.8 million) to build and drew the attention of famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who formally unveiled the masterwork Friday.

This clock blasts away all preconceptions about timepieces. For one thing, it has no hands. And it is specially designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up from time to time.

The "Corpus clock" is the brainchild of inventor John Taylor, who used his own money to build it, in part to pay homage to the genius of John Harrison, the Englishman who in 1725 invented the "grasshopper" escapement — a mechanical device that helps regulate a clock's movement.

Making a visual pun on the grasshopper image, Taylor has designed a fantasy version of a grasshopper at the top of the clock face, and uses this beast — with its long needle teeth and barbed tail — as an integral part of the clockworks.

Its jaws begin to open halfway through a minute, then snap shut at 59 seconds. The creature's eyes, usually a dull green, occasionally flash bright yellow.

The oversize grasshopper is called a chronophage, or "time eater."

"Time is gone, he's eaten it," Taylor said. "My object was simply to turn a clock inside out so that the grasshopper became a reality."

At the unveiling, Hawking predicted the creature atop the clock would become "a much-loved, and possibly feared, addition to Cambridge's cityscape."

The chronophage stands atop the clock face, which is four feet in diameter. It displays time with light — a light races around the outer ring once every second, pausing briefly at the actual second. The next ring inside indicates the minute, and the inner ring shows the hour.

The lights are light-emitting diodes, or LEDS, which are constantly on. The apparent motion is regulated mechanically through slots in moving discs.

Weirdly, the pendulum slows down or speeds up. Sometimes it stops, the chronophage shakes a foot, and the pendulum moves again. Because of that, the time display may be as much as a minute off, although it swings back to the correct time every five minutes.

"There are so many expressions in everyday life about time going fast, time going slow and time standing still. Your life is not regular, it's relative to what's going on," Taylor said.

"This is the first clock in the world that does not set out to show accurate time," Taylor said.

He noted Albert Einstein's observation: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

On Taylor's clock, the hour is tolled not by a bell or a cuckoo, but by the clanking of a chain that falls into a coffin, which then loudly bangs closed.

"I'm in my early 70s," Taylor told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "When you're a young person you think there is plenty of time. The sound was to remind me of my mortality."

The clock is the showpiece of Corpus Christi's new library, also a gift from Taylor. His wealth comes from inventing controls for electric tea kettles, inventions which he estimates are used 1 billion times a day around the globe.

Taylor is intrigued by making the ordinary interesting.

"Clocks are boring. They just tell the time, and people treat them as boring objects," he added. "This clock actually interacts with you."

Check out the article at Fox News.

Awesome concept! That is one cool clock!

For more info, check out the Corpus Clock Wiki Entry

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images, Technology

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JEAN LAFITTE, La. — After four big hurricanes in three years, residents of the Cajun towns along the fast-eroding coast of Louisiana are wondering just how much more they can take.

Hurricane Ike's floodwaters slowly gave way Thursday to muddy cleanup, and although the state's share of Ike's damage has been overshadowed by the devastation next door in Texas, the flooding across southern Louisiana was considerable _ tens of thousands of homes and businesses damaged or destroyed.

And that was only the latest stroke. Many of the same areas were inundated by Hurricane Gustav less than two weeks earlier, and rebuilt after Katrina and Rita did widespread damage to the Gulf Coast in 2005.

The home of the traditionally French-speaking Cajuns is a land under siege.

"This community is beaten," said Albert Creppel, the town constable in Jean Lafitte, about 25 miles south of New Orleans. His house, which he had finally repaired nearly three years after Rita, now had two feet of standing water.

"It's too much," he said, shaking his head. "My wife says she doesn't want to come back."

Of course, the cultural and environmental threats to the region are not new.

The cycle of storms and erosion has for decades stripped away the barrier wetlands that protect the inland settlements, while an increasingly homogenized America has been chiseling away at the Cajuns' unique linguistic and cultural traditions for almost as long.

With each storm, the threats grow.

"If it keeps on like this you're losing a whole culture, a whole way of life," said Tracy Kuhns, who lives in the bayou-side town of Barataria and is director of the conservation group Louisiana Bayoukeeper. "It's just going to wash away."

Nearly a week after the storm, state officials were still tallying the damage to the mainly rural coastal parishes, or counties, that lie just above sea level where the Mississippi and other rivers drain through alligator-filled bayous to the Gulf of Mexico.

Some residents were being allowed to visit their homes by boat to inspect the damage. Water had receded in some places, while others remained flooded, particularly in southwest Louisiana, near the Texas border.

"We've got places flooding that never flooded before," said Kuhns. "They need to do something about restoring our wetlands."

Tens of thousands remained without power, but the numbers had dwindled sharply in recent days.

More than 700 people who didn't heed warnings to get out had been rescued from floodwaters since Ike struck on Saturday. Authorities appeared to be winning a battle against collapsing coastal levees that still threatened some areas. At least six deaths in Louisiana were blamed on Ike.

Ike also uprooted the dead. An estimated 200 coffins were unearthed and swirled away by Ike's storm surge in two southwest parishes, forcing coroners to hunt for bodies.

"It's been a nightmare," said Annette Claverie, inside a flooded food store called Herb's in Jean Lafitte.

The town, named for the pirate and hero of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, is a resilient mix of oil field roughnecks, fishermen and those who like to live by water.

Ike flooded Claverie's store with more than two feet of water, destroying almost everything inside. By midweek, a cooling north wind was blowing water back into Bayou Barataria, but the damage had been done.

"We're just too low," said a tearful Claverie, who also lost her inventory during Gustav for a combined hit of $400,000. "Without our wetlands, which used to be our barrier, we do not have the protection we had in the past."

Over the past century, nearly 2,000 square miles of Louisiana wetlands have disappeared. Hurricanes, unstable soil and canals cut for shipping and oil exploration all have been blamed.

Environmental groups say that by 2050, another one-third of the 250-mile coast is expected to be lost.

"My family's story is the story of coastal Louisiana," said Windell Curole, 57, a biologist and levee board member in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes. "But the land where we settled is all gone now. We have had to keep moving up, moving away."

Curole, a Cajun who says he was the first family member in seven generations to learn English before French, said wetlands loss is making even minor hurricanes dangerous.

"I first saw it in 1985, when Juan hit," Curole said. "It was a relatively weak hurricane, but it caused extensive flooding 40 to 50 miles in."

The long-term task of fixing the shattered coast is daunting. Wetlands restoration and extension of levee systems appear years distant, and will cost billions of dollars.

Whether the bayou communities can hold on until then is anyone's guess.

The fishing industry has taken the biggest hit, especially since Katrina and Rita. Federal officials this week declared a fisheries disaster, making commercial fishermen in Texas and Louisiana eligible for federal aid and opening the tap for loans for small fishing businesses.

But Claverie worries that Ike will still drive many of them out of business and out of town.

"Each storm knocks a hole in our community," she said. "They buy their groceries from us, and without them, it's a hole in our business."

But Ramona Guidry sounded defiant as she checked the damage to her childood home and began restocking the house for her 77-year-old mother. Standing on the porch as water sloshed across her lawn, Guidry said she will never part with her family home no matter how many hurricanes come.

"This is where I went to school. This is where I grew up," she said. "This is where we want to be."

Check out the article at Fox News.

It's very sad what is happening to our beautiful coastline. If we don't do something to stop the erosion, I'll have a view of the Gulf of Mexico from my own backyard!

On another sad note, Hurricane Gustav destroyed the famous Thomas Boyd Oak, which has stood for over 250 years!

Be sure to check out Remembering Hurricane Katrina.

Labels: History, Images

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The country honored the nearly 3,000 victims of the worst terrorist attack on American soil Thursday with ceremonies in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania to mark seven years since Sept. 11, 2001.

At the White House, President Bush led a moment of silence on the South Lawn at 8:46 a.m., the time that terrorists flew the first commercial jetliner into one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. The second plane crashed into the other tower at 9:03 a.m.

In New York, victims' families and dignitaries paused for four moments of silence Thursday morning to commemorate the precise times that two hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, along with the times that each tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. and 10:29 a.m.

"Today marks the seventh anniversary of the day our world was broken," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. "It lives forever in our hearts and our history, a tragedy that unites us in a common memory and a common story ... the day that began like any other and ended as none ever has."

Family members and students representing more than 90 countries that lost citizens on Sept. 11, 2001, gathered in Lower Manhattan for remarks and a recitation of the names of the more than 2,700 people killed in New York.

Shortly before 9 a.m., families of Sept. 11 victims went down seven stories into the cavern where the towers stood — called Ground Zero ever since this day in 2001 — using the construction ramp on the south side of the 16-acre site to touch the place where their loved ones died before returning to street level.

Bush said Thursday that history will look back at America's response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks and conclude that "we did not tire, we did not falter and we did not fail."

After the White House remembrance, Bush headed to the Pentagon in Washington to dedicate a memorial to each life lost when American Airlines Flight 77 hit that building — a symbol of American military prowess — in the third strike that morning.

The Pentagon monument consists of 184 benches, one for each victim, that overlook small reflecting pools. The Defense Department's headquarters were struck about an hour after the attacks in New York.

A fourth plane that was apparently headed for the White House or the Capitol building in Washington crashed prematurely in a field in Shanksville, Pa. A ceremony was also held there.

Barack Obama and John McCain, the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, will appear together at Ground Zero in New York on Thursday afternoon once the ceremony is over to honor those who died.

The campaigns agreed to halt television advertising critical of each other for the day.

McCain also attended the service in Shanksville for the 40 people killed there aboard United Airlines Flight 93.

Obama called on Americans Thursday to renew "that spirit of service and that sense of common purpose" that followed the attacks. McCain asked every person "to be as good an American" as the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93 after they rose up against the hijackers.

In Pennsylvania, at least 200 people gathered Thursday morning at an observance in a reclaimed minefield in Shanksville where Flight 93 came down after passengers reportedly stormed the cockpit to thwart terrorists' plans to use that plane as a weapon like the others. Bells tolled and victims' names were read as part of the service.

Some mourners in New York wondered if the remembrance would, or should, continue as it has indefinitely. About 3,500 people attended last year's ceremony, a roughly 25 percent decrease from 2006.

Other victims' relatives worry that Sept. 11 will revert to being just another date on the calendar.

The New York ceremony included the reading of 2,751 victims' names, one more than last year. The city restored Sneha Philip, a woman who vanished on Sept. 10, to its official death toll this year after a court ruled that she was likely killed at the trade center.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke at the commemoration, as he has every year, along with officials including Bloomberg and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Joining the president at the White House and the Pentagon were first lady Laura Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne, members of Congress, Cabinet members, military officials and about 3,000 White House employees and guests.

The Pentagon ceremony included a wreath laying, music and a reading of the names of those who died on the plane and inside the building. Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke.

"This memorial tells the story to future generations," Gates said. "They won't directly feel the heat, smell the smoke or know the horror of that day, but they will know, as the inscription says, that we claim this ground."

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mourned those who "one morning kissed their loved ones goodbye, went off to work and never came home" and the airline passengers "who in the last moments made phone calls to loved ones and prayed to the Almighty before their journey ended not far from where it began."

The Pentagon Memorial was built at a cost of $22 million on a 1.9-acre parcel of land adjacent to the Defense Department building and within view of the crash site.

Memorials are years away from being built in Pennsylvania and New York. As in past years, two bright blue beams of light will shine at night on the New York City skyline, in memory of the fallen towers.

Check out the article at Fox News.

Never Forget 911!!!

For some excellent images, check out:

• Freedom Tower Rendering
• National 911 Memorial
• Tribute in Light photos

Be sure to check out a very interesting article: Foiled Terror Plots since 9-11

Labels: History, Images, Military, Politics

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Large Hadron Collider Successfully Completes First Test








The sky is falling! Quick, get under a blanket!

The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 17-mile tunnel Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

The startup was eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made.

The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, fired the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages, several miles at a time.

Now that the beam has been successfully tested in clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise. Eventually the two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of smashing together protons to see how they are made.

"The beam is the size of a human hair," Paola Catapano, a spokeswoman for the host European Organization for Nuclear Research said after the protons were fired into the accelerator below the Swiss-French border at 9:32 a.m. (3:32 a.m. EDT).

It'll be months before any usable data comes out from the experiments, but the so-called "Big Bang machine" already has physicists salivating at the prospect of unlocking the mysteries of the universe — and many other people worried it'll create a black hole or strange self-replicating particle that will gobble up the Earth.

Professor Stephen Hawking, easily the world's most renowned living physicist, came down squarely in the "it's a good thing" camp Tuesday in a interview with BBC Radio: "Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe."

The researchers' top aim is to find the Higgs boson, a sub-subatomic particle that's essential to the so-called Standard Model of nuclear physics, but which has never been seen.

Previously unknown particles are also expected to pop up, if only for a millionth of a second, from the high-energy collisions of protons and antiprotons.

A pair of Russian scientists even think the LHC would be the world's first time machine, and that we should expect visitors from the future to arrive soon after it goes into operation.

For that, $10 billion dollars has been spent to build the machine, the largest supercollider on Earth ever since the project to build an even larger ring in Texas was canceled in 1993.

But the very fact that it would create unknown particles, as well as incredibly dense microscopic black holes that would almost instantly evaporate, has raised many fears.

"It's nonsense," CERN chief spokesman James Gillies told the Associated Press.

A columnist on Wired magazine's Web site said that "the likelihood of these black holes becoming the more well-known kind of black hole is nearly nonexistent."

Brian Cox, a glamorous particle physicist who literally was once a rock star, told London's Daily Telegraph that he and his colleagues had been receiving death threats.

He then bluntly characterized anyone who feared the LHC would destroy the world with an unprintable term for a female body part.

That hasn't stopped several people, including a former nuclear engineer from Hawaii and a German biochemist, from speaking out against the project.

"Someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it, retired Professor Otto Roessler told London's Mail on Sunday. "Very soon the whole planet will be eaten in a magnificent scenario — if you could watch it from the moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it says in the Bible."

"The compression of the two atoms colliding together at nearly light speed will cause an irreversible implosion, forming a miniature version of a giant black hole," reads a lawsuit filed in March in U.S. District Court in Honolulu by Walter L. Wagner and a Spanish colleague, Luis Sancho.

The case, in which Wagner and Sancho demand that the LHC stop operations until an independent safety review is conducted, is still pending.

Wagner first became famous a decade ago when he filed suit against the opening of the smaller Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island, claiming it too would destroy the world when it started up in 2000.

Public reaction, true to form, has been mixed.

"This reminds me of the Millennium Bug! I love hysteria — it makes me laugh and I need a good laugh," said "Johan of Brisbane" in the comments to an Australian News Corp story.

Best of all was the posting on the same page by "KnowerOfAll": "Chuck Norris doesn't look for God Particles — he creates them."

Gillies told The Associated Press that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam of protons at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the collider itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.

Full power is probably a year away.

"On Wednesday, we start small," Gillies said. "What we're putting in to start with is one single low-intensity bunch at low energy and we thread that around. We get experience with low-energy things and then we ramp up as we get to know the machine better."

Huge amounts of data will pour in — so big that the lab's computers can't sift through it all. So scientists, who will monitor the experiment at above-ground control centers, have devised a way to share the load among dozens of leading computing centers worldwide.

The result is the "LHC Grid," a network of 60,000 computers to analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other. That computing power is needed if scientists are to find what they are looking for among the mountains of data.

"You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second," said CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the grid project.

Sophisticated filters discard all but the most interesting data, still leaving some 15 petabytes to be analyzed. That's enough to fill 2 million DVDs.

The data will be sent to 11 top research institutions in Europe, North America and Asia, and from there to a wider network of 150 research facilities around the world for scrutiny by thousands of researchers.

Collaborating on such a large project has proved invaluable, said Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid at Fermilab in Chicago. The U.S.-government funded project is among the major contributors to the grid.

"We are doing things that are at the boundaries of science," Pordes said. "But the technologies, the methods and the results will be picked up by industry."

Even if the LHC experiment doesn't yield answers to the cosmic questions, historians may one day see it as a key step in developing networked computing.

It wouldn't be the first time that has happened at CERN. In 1990, young British researcher Tim Berners-Lee created a computer-based system for sharing information with colleagues around the world.

He called it the World Wide Web.

Check out the article at Fox News.

Now, that's some exciting science! So exciting that it has captured the imaginations of people around the world!

Even Google got in on the act!

Coincidentally, this was the subject matter at the center of the plot in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, which will be made into a 2009 movie of the same title! The story is the prequel to The Da Vinci Code, and is very well written... Check it out!

Labels: History, Images, Technology

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URUMQI, China — Once-reclusive China commandeered the world stage Friday, celebrating its first-time role as Olympic host with a stunning display of pageantry and pyrotechnics to open a Summer Games unrivaled for its mix of problems and promise.

At the end of the ceremony, retired Chinese gymnast Li Ning lit the Beijing Olympic flame, which will remain lit throughout the Olympic games.

Now ascendent as a global power, China welcomed scores of world leaders to an opening ceremony watched by 91,000 people at the eye-catching National Stadium and a potential audience of 4 billion worldwide. It was depicted as the largest, costliest extravaganza in Olympic history, bookended by barrages of some 30,000 fireworks.

To the beat of sparkling explosions, the crowd counted down the final seconds before the show began. A sea of drummers — 2,008 in all — pounded out rhythms with their hands, then acrobats on wires gently wafted down into the stadium as rockets shot up into the night sky from its rim.

President Bush and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were among the glittering roster of notables who watched China make this bold declaration that it had arrived. Bush, rebuked by China after he raised human-rights concerns this week, is the first U.S. president to attend an Olympics on foreign soil.

Already an economic juggernaut, China is given a good chance of overtaking the U.S. atop the gold-medal standings with its legions of athletes trained intensely since childhood. One dramatic showdown will be in women's gymnastics, where the U.S. and Chinese teams are co-favorites; in the pool, Chinese divers and U.S. swimmers are expected to dominate.

The run-up to the games had epic story lines — China investing $40 billion to build the needed infrastructure, reeling from a catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan province in May, struggling right up to Friday to diminish Beijing's stubborn smog. China's detentions of political activists, its crackdown on uprisings in Tibet and its economic ties to Sudan — home of the war-torn Darfur region — fueled relentless criticisms from human rights groups and calls for an Olympic boycott.

Second-guessed for awarding the games to Beijing, the International Olympic Committee stood firmly by its decision. It was time, the committee said, to bring the games to the homeland of 1.3 billion people, a fifth of humanity.

The games, said IOC President Jacques Rogge, "are a chance for the rest of the world to discover what China really is."

The story presented in Friday's ceremony sought to distill 5,000 years of Chinese history — featuring everything from the Great Wall to opera puppets to astronauts, and highlighting achievements in art, music and science. Roughly 15,000 people were in the cast, all under the direction of Zhang Yimou, whose early films often often ran afoul of government censors for their blunt portrayals of China's problems.

The show's script steered clear of modern politics — there were no references to Chairman Mao and the class struggle, nor to the more recent conflicts and controversies. The ceremony was taped for broadcast 12 hours later in the United States.

A record 204 delegations were set to parade their athletes through the stadium — superstars such as basketball idols Kobe Bryant and Yao Ming, as well as plucky underdogs from Iraq, Afghanistan and other embattled lands. The nations were marching not in the traditional alphabetical order but in a sequence based on the number of strokes it takes to write their names in Chinese. The exceptions were Greece, birthplace of the Olympics, which was given its traditional place at the start, and the 639-member Chinese team, which lined up last.

The American flag-bearer was 1500-meter runner Lopez Lomong, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who spent a decade of his youth in a refugee camp in Kenya. He's a member of the Team Darfur coalition, representing athletes opposed to China's support for Sudan. On Friday he avoided any criticism and said the Chinese "have been great putting all these things together."

Abroad, human rights activists were less generous.

"The Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee have wasted a historic opportunity to use the Beijing Games to make real progress on human rights in China," said Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.

For Chinese dissidents who have dared to challenge the Communist Party's monopoly on power, the start of the Olympics meant tighter surveillance and restrictions.

"It's not my Olympic Games," said Jiang Tianyong, a human rights lawyer. "It's not the games for the ordinary people."

By all indications, however, most Chinese have embraced the games, buying up tickets at a record pace, volunteering by the thousands for Olympic duties, nursing expectations of triumphs by their home team.

To their eyes, the omens were good. The ceremony began at 8 p.m. on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008 — auspicious in a country where eight is the luckiest number.

"It not easy to meet with such a date," said Wang Wei, secretary general of Beijing Organizing Committee. "Hopefully this lucky day will bring luck."

Check out the article at Fox News.

I'm excited about the Olympics and will definitely be checking out the games, but I'm not too excited about red China hosting them. I feel that the International Olympic Committee could have done more to persuade China to earn the right to host the games in the future, instead of just handing it to them now and allowing their inhuman policies to go unpunished.

Oh well, not much I can do at this point, but to hope that the Chinese lose every single event! Not likely, since their athletes are raised from birth specifically to compete!

GO USA!!!

Be sure to check out 08-08-08: You're Lucky Day???

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images, Politics, Sports

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The Space Race

After the Soviet space program's launch of the world's first human-made satellite (Sputnik 1) on 4 October 1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. The U.S. Congress, alarmed by the perceived threat to U.S. security and technological leadership (known as the "Sputnik crisis"), urged immediate and swift action; President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisors counseled more deliberate measures. Several months of debate produced an agreement that a new federal agency was needed to conduct all non-military activity in space.

Explorer 1, officially Satellite 1958 Alpha, was the first Earth artificial satellite of the United States, having been launched at 10:48pm EST on 31 January 1958.

On 29 July 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). When it began operations on 1 October 1958, NASA consisted mainly of the four laboratories and some 80 employees of the government's 46-year-old research agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). A significant contributor to NASA's entry into the Space race was the technology from the German rocket program, led by Wernher von Braun, who became a naturalized citizen of the United States after World War II. He is today regarded as the father of the United States space program. Elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (of which von Braun's team was a part) and the Naval Research Laboratory were incorporated into NASA.

NASA's earliest programs involved research into human spaceflight and were conducted under the pressure of the competition between the U.S. and the USSR (the Space Race) that existed during the Cold War. Project Mercury, initiated in 1958, started NASA down the path of human space exploration with missions designed to discover simply if man could survive in space.

On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard—one of the seven Project Mercury astronauts selected as pilot for this mission—became the first American in space when he piloted Freedom 7 on a 15-minute suborbital flight. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on 20 February 1962 during the 5 and a quarter-hour flight of Friendship 7.

Once the Mercury project proved that human spaceflight was possible, Project Gemini was launched to conduct experiments and work out issues relating to a moon mission. The first Gemini flight with astronauts on board, Gemini 3, was flown by Gus Grissom and John Young on 23 March 1965. Nine other missions followed, showing that long-duration human space flight was possible, proving that rendezvous and docking with another vehicle in space was possible, and gathering medical data on the effects of weightlessness on human beings.

Apollo program

The Apollo program was designed to land humans on the Moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Apollo 1 ended tragically when all the astronauts inside died due to fire in command module during an experimental simulation. Because of this incident, there were a few unmanned tests before men boarded the spacecraft. Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 tested various components while orbiting the Moon, and returned photography. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11, landed the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. Apollo 13 did not land on the Moon due to a malfunction, but did return photographs. The six missions that landed on the Moon returned a wealth of scientific data and almost 400 kilograms of lunar samples. Experiments included soil mechanics, meteoroids, seismic, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields, and solar wind experiments.

Skylab

Skylab was the first space station the United States launched into orbit. The 75 tonne station was in Earth orbit from 1973 to 1979, and was visited by crews three times, in 1973 and 1974. Skylab was originally intended to study gravitational anomalies in other solar systems, but the assignment was curtailed due to lack of funding and interest. It included a laboratory for studying the effects of microgravity, and a solar observatory. A Space Shuttle was planned to dock with and elevate Skylab to a higher safe altitude, but Skylab reentered the atmosphere and was destroyed in 1979, before the first shuttle could be launched, landing over parts of Western Australia and the Indian Ocean, with some fragments being recovered.

Apollo-Soyuz

The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (or ASTP) was the first joint flight of the U.S. and Soviet space programs. The mission took place in July 1975. For the United States of America, it was the last Apollo flight, as well as the last manned space launch until the flight of the first Space Shuttle in April 1981.

Shuttle era

The Space Shuttle became the major focus of NASA in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Planned to be a frequently launchable and mostly reusable vehicle, four space shuttles were built by 1985. The first to launch, Columbia, did so on April 12, 1981.

The shuttle was not all good news for NASA — flights were much more expensive than initially projected, and the public again lost interest as missions appeared to become mundane until the 1986 Challenger disaster again highlighted the risks of space flight. Work began on Space Station Freedom as a focus for the manned space program, but within NASA there was argument that these projects came at the expense of more inspiring unmanned missions such as the Voyager probes.

Nonetheless, the shuttle launched milestone projects like the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The HST is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), and its success has paved the way for greater collaboration between the agencies. The HST was created with a relatively small budget of $2 billion but has continued operation since 1990, delighting both scientists and the public. Some of its images, such as the groundbreaking Hubble Deep Field, have become famous.

In 1995 Russian-American interaction resumed with the Shuttle-Mir missions. Once more an American vehicle docked with a Russian craft, this time a full-fledged space station. This cooperation continues to today, with Russia and America the two biggest partners in the largest space station ever built – the International Space Station (ISS). The strength of their cooperation on this project was even more evident when NASA began relying on Russian launch vehicles to service the ISS during the two year grounding of the shuttle fleet following the 2003 Columbia disaster.

Costing over one hundred billion dollars, it has been difficult at times for NASA to justify the ISS. The population at large has historically been hard to impress with details of scientific experiments in space, preferring news of grand projects to exotic locations. Even now, the ISS cannot accommodate as many scientists as planned.

During much of the 1990s, NASA was faced with shrinking annual budgets due to Congressional belt-tightening in Washington, D.C. In response, NASA's ninth administrator, Daniel Goldin, pioneered the "faster, better, cheaper" approach that enabled NASA to cut costs while still delivering a wide variety of aerospace programs (Discovery Program). That method was criticized and re-evaluated following the twin losses of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in 1999. Yet, NASA's shuttle program had made 116 successful launches as of December 2006.

The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, which killed the crew of six Americans and one Israeli, caused a 29-month hiatus in space shuttle flights and triggered a serious re-examination of NASA's priorities. The U.S. government, various scientists, and the public all reconsidered the future of the space program.

NASA's future

NASA's ongoing investigations include in-depth surveys of Mars and Saturn and studies of the Earth and the Sun. Other NASA spacecraft are presently en route to Mercury and Pluto. With missions to Jupiter in planning stages, NASA's itinerary covers over half the solar system.

Managed by the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, the Phoenix mission was launched on August 4, 2007. It will search for possible underground water courses in the northern Martian pole. This lander revives much of its experiments and instrumentation from the failed 1999 Mars Polar Lander, hence its name. An improved and larger rover, Mars Science Laboratory, is under construction and slated to launch in 2009. On the horizon of NASA's plans are two possibilities under consideration for the Mars Scout 2013 mission.

The New Horizons mission to Pluto was launched in 2006 and will fly by Pluto in 2015. The probe received a gravity assist from Jupiter in February 2007, examining some of Jupiter's inner moons and testing on-board instruments during the fly-by.

Vision for space exploration

On January 14, 2004, ten days after the landing of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, US President George W. Bush announced a new plan for NASA's future, dubbed the Vision for Space Exploration. According to this plan, mankind will return to the Moon by 2018, and set up outposts as a testbed and potential resource for future missions. The Space Shuttle will be retired in 2010 and Orion will replace it by 2014, capable of both docking with the ISS and leaving the Earth's orbit. The future of the ISS is somewhat uncertain — construction will be completed, but beyond that is less clear. Although the plan initially met with skepticism from Congress, in late 2004 Congress agreed to provide start-up funds for the first year's worth of the new space vision.

Hoping to spur innovation from the private sector, NASA established a series of Centennial Challenges, technology prizes for non-government teams, in 2004. The Challenges include tasks that will be useful for implementing the Vision for Space Exploration, such as building more efficient astronaut gloves.

Moon base

On December 4, 2006, NASA announced it was planning to build a permanent moon base. NASA Associate Administrator Scott Horowitz said the goal was to start building the moonbase by 2020, and by 2024, have a fully functional base, that would allow for crew rotations like the International Space Station. Additionally, NASA plans to collaborate and partner with other nations for this project.

Man on Mars

On September 28, 2007, NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin stated that NASA aims to put a man on Mars by 2037, and in 2057, "We should be celebrating 20 years of man on Mars."

Check out the article at Wikipedia.

When you look at how much NASA has brought us in the past 50 years, one cannot even begin to imagine what the next 50 will bring! Exciting stuff!!!

Be sure to check out the image gallery at the NASA 50th Anniversary website!

For more information, check out the following interesting links:

• Space Shuttle
• Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicle
• International Space Station
• Colonization of the Moon
• Colonization of Mars

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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ARLINGTON, Va. — President Bush paid tribute Monday to America's fighting men and women who died in battle, saying national leaders must have "the courage and character to follow their lead" in preserving peace and freedom.

"On this Memorial Day, I stand before you as the commander in chief and try to tell you how proud I am," Bush told an audience of military figures, veterans and their families at Arlington National Cemetery. Of the men and women buried in the hallowed cemetery, he said, "They're an awesome bunch of people and the United States is blessed to have such citizens."

"From faraway lands, they were returned to cemeteries like this one where broken hearts received their broken bodies," Bush said. "They found peace beneath the white headstones in the land they fought to defend. It is a solemn reminder of the cost of freedom that the number of headstones in a place such as this grows with every new Memorial Day."

He eulogized all U.S. troops who have died in service to the nation, but particularly those who lost their lives this past year.

"I am humbled by those who have made the ultimate sacrifice that allow a free civilization to endure and flourish," Bush said. "It only remains for us, the heirs of their legacy, to have the courage and the character to follow their lead and to preserve America as the greatest nation on Earth and the last, best hope for mankind."

Check out article at Fox News.

Hope everyone enjoys their Memorial Day and remembers the reason behind the holiday... the Rolling Thunder definitely didn't forget!

Labels: History, Military

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BATON ROUGE -- Before the largest paid attendance in Alex Box Stadium history, No. 22 LSU beat Mississippi State, 9-6, Sunday and swept the weekend series in the final regular season contest at the historic ballpark.

After the victory, over 100 former LSU players spanning seven decades of baseball in Alex Box Stadium joined current players, coaches, fans and LSU Athletics Director and legendary Tiger baseball coach Skip Bertman to commemorate 70 years in “The Box."

The Tigers (35-16-1, 15-11-1 SEC), winners of 12 consecutive games, swept their third straight SEC series for the first time since the 1991 national championship season. Mississippi State dropped to 20-32 and 7-20 in the SEC.

LSU is in first place in the SEC Western Division, 1.5 games ahead of Alabama and Ole Miss. The Tigers’ 12-game win streak is the longest by an LSU squad since the 2000 club won 13 in a row at the end of its national championship season.

Fans couldn’t take their seats with them Sunday after the last regular season game at LSU’s Alex Box Stadium, but they could take their memories and, if they wanted, a souvenir T-shirt or program.

Like nearly everyone else at the ballpark, Bobby Box left with more than a few of each those things.

Box, 55, a Baton Rouge resident who is the nephew of the stadium’s namesake, recounted growing up a few blocks from the stadium named years before in honor of an uncle he never met.

As a youth, he would ride his bike over to the stadium with his friends and shag foul balls for the baseball team, Box said Sunday during the regular season finale against Mississippi State. In return for foul balls, he said, the players gave the children their cracked wooden bats, which Box and his friends taped up and used in their own games.

Box knew all about his family’s legacy attached to the stadium — his father, Neal, had told him at an early age about Alex Box, an LSU baseball and football player and U.S. Army first lieutenant killed in North Africa during World War II.

But for Bobby Box — and about 6,555 other fans who crowded into the stadium for one more game — the memories weren’t about the name that adorned the stadium, the seats or the field.

It was always about the game.

With a No. 22 ranking, a lead in the SEC Western Division and 12 consecutive wins, some say LSU has put itself in a prime position to host an NCAA regional at Alex Box Stadium one last time.

Can you say Omaha?

But regional sites won’t be announced until the final day of the Southeastern Conference Tournament on May 25, so many fans left the ballpark Sunday afternoon wondering if that was the last game they would see within the stadium’s walls.

That’s the reason why there was no question LSU had to have a ceremony after the game commemorating the park’s history, said Bertman, the outgoing LSU athletic director and architect of the national championship winning program.

Bertman, who said he “fulfilled a lot of dreams" at the old stadium, acknowledged it will be difficult to leave behind the stadium but added that players and fans will make new memories at the new ballpark.

“It would be just another ball yard except for these fans," Bertman said after the post-game ceremony. “The fans made The Box, and they’ll make the new stadium."

The new $31 million Alex Box Stadium is being built at Nicholson Drive and Gourrier Lane, about 1,000 feet south of the present Alex Box Stadium. It will seat more than 8,700 fans — about 1,000 more than the present stadium — and is scheduled to open at the beginning of the 2009 season.

For some fans, however, leaving behind the old stadium on Sunday was still difficult.

Check out the article at The Advocate.

I’ll miss Alex Box, but have to say that I’m very exited about the New Alex Box that’s being built! For more info, check out New Alex Box or LSU Sports.

Labels: Entertainment, History, Sports

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Each year, the April 22 Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Among other things, 1970 in the United States brought with it the Kent State shootings, the advent of fiber optics, "Bridge over Troubled Water," Apollo 13, the Beatles' last album, the death of Jimi Hendrix, and the meltdown of fuel rods in the Savannah River nuclear plant near Aiken, South Carolina -- an incident not acknowledged for 18 years. At the time, most Americans were consuming leaded gas in massive V8 sedans. Heavy industry released smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity[citation needed]. Environment was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news. The 1970 Earth Day helped to change many peoples' minds.

On April 22, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. Denis Hayes, the national coordinator, and his youthful staff organized massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting the status of environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day on April 22 in 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

As the millennium approached, Hayes agreed to spearhead another campaign, this time focused on global warming and a push for clean energy. The April 22 Earth Day in 2000 combined the big-picture feistiness of the first Earth Day with the international grassroots activism of Earth Day 1990. For 2000, Earth Day had the Internet to help link activists around the world. By the time April 22 rolled around, 5,000 environmental groups around the world were on board, reaching out to hundreds of millions of people in a record 184 countries. Events varied: A talking drum chain traveled from village to village in Gabon, Africa, for example, while hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., USA.

Earth Day 2000 sent the message loud and clear that citizens the world 'round wanted quick and decisive action on clean energy. Earth Day 2007 was one of the largest Earth Days to date, with an estimated billion people participating in the activities in thousands of places like Kiev, Ukraine; Caracas, Venezuela; Tuvalu; Manila, Philippines; Togo; Madrid, Spain; London; and New York.

Founded by the organizers of the first April 22 Earth Day in 1970, Earth Day Network promotes environmental citizenship and year round progressive action worldwide. Earth Day Network is a driving force steering environmental awareness around the world. Through Earth Day Network, activists connect change in local, national, and global policies. Earth Day Network’s international network reaches over 17,000 organizations in 174 countries, while the domestic program engages 5,000 groups and over 25,000 educators coordinating millions of community development and environmental protection activities throughout the year. Earth Day is the only event celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all backgrounds, faiths and nationalities. More than a half billion people participate in Earth Day Network campaigns every year.

Check out the article at Wikipedia.

Happy Earth Day - a day late! Our Blue Marble holds so many breathtaking views! Photos don't do them justice... you have to see for yourself! If every day were Earth Day we could all breathe a bit easier!

Labels: History, Images, Politics

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On first look, the uniform worn by Pope Benedict XVI’s bodyguards — the colorful yellow and blue stripey uniforms, the red ostrich feather-plumed helmets, the tights and bloomers — might lead you to think your grandmother could take them on.

You would be gravely mistaken.

The Swiss Guards are renowned in the security community; they are the world’s smallest army, but have an excellent reputation, outstanding capabilities and a noble history. Although tiny in number, they are a force to be reckoned with — an elite, company-sized military force that has defended pontiffs for more than 500 years, a duty that has sometimes demanded bloodshed.

Trained and equipped to fight an armed enemy (should the need arise), they are like the American Marines at the White House and the Beefeaters guarding Buckingham Palace. The Swiss Guards stand watch throughout the Apostolic Palace from the Vatican’s exterior gates to the entrance to the Pope’s private apartments.

As in other elite military units, competition to join the Swiss Guard is fierce. Selection standards are extremely high — all recruits must be unmarried Roman Catholic males between the ages of 19 and 30 who are able to endure grueling 24-hour shifts.

To be selected, a candidate must also be at least 5-foot-8 and have completed military training in the Swiss armed forces.

Carrying on tradition, the selected recruits train to handle swords and the Guard's trademark weapon: a combination spear and battle-axe known as the halberd.

Armed only with Renaissance weaponry, this minuscule army successfully kept Nazi soldiers out of Vatican City during World War II as Germany occupied Rome.

While they still wear armor and carry antique weapons, it’s not all medieval warfare for the Swiss Guards. They must maintain a high degree of physical fitness and master modern weaponry, such as the H&K submachine gun and the SIG Sauer 9 mm pistol. To best protect the Pope, they also train at close-quarters fighting and tactical movement, as well as security and counter-terrorism techniques.

And battle-axe might not be the best tool to ward off religious fanatics determined to pass a message to the Pope or to threaten him, so the guards have also added tear gas and pepper spray to their arsenal.

Across the pond, during the first papal visit to the U.S. since Usama bin Laden accused the pope of leading a “new Crusade” against Muslims, the Swiss Guard will be joined by the very best from the United States as well.

The U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting foreign dignitaries alongside local Washington and New York law enforcement, will be providing Benedict XVI and President Bush the utmost protection.

Supervisory Special Agent Ed Donovan gave us the inside scoop that one lucky Secret Service Agent has the very important job of driving the Popemobile. The Secret Service has a long history of working with the Swiss Guard on previous Papal visits as well as presidential visits to the Vatican.

As the pope makes his way to New York this weekend, security measures will be rigorous, from airspace restrictions and blockaded waterways to streets being entirely shut down. Police helicopters will patrol the skies, and the waters will be protected by harbor units and scuba divers stationed in the East River.

While measures will be similar to Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1995, we will see on the streets a very visible uniformed police presence and bomb-sniffing dogs.

The security services have stressed that they are not aware of any specific threats to the pope during this visit, but they recognize that bin Laden was critical of the pontiff in his latest videotape.

While you may not see the Swiss Guard in their eye-catching garb or carrying their trademark halberds on this trip, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. In fact, it was a plainclothes undercover Swiss Guard who shielded Pope John Paul II and saved his life during a 1981 assassination attempt. The Swiss Guards, undercover and incognito, are on duty to protect the pope at all times.

Check out the article at Fox News.

The Swiss Guard is rich with history and tradition! You gotta have respect for these guys... they adhere to a very strict set of standards and are not to be trifled with! For more info, check out this article at Wikipedia.

For more information regarding Pope Benedict XVI and his Apostolic Journey, check out the Official US Papal Visit website.

Labels: History, Images, Military

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The fiercest reptile ever to terrorize the oceans has been identified from a fossil on a frozen Arctic island.

The huge pliosaur, dubbed "The Monster" by its discoverers, dated from 150 million years ago and boasted 60 dagger-like teeth the size of cucumbers, which it used to rip chunks out of prey.

The 50-foot animal was one of the biggest marine predators to have ever swum and would have been able to take on "anything that moved" in the water.

It was built for speed and power, and with its armory of fangs would have been rivaled in ferocity only by an extinct shark, the megalodon, which lived about 16 million years ago.

Fossilized remains of the pliosaur, which had 10-foot-long jaws, were located on the island of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, inside the Arctic Circle.

It was one of 40 fossil creatures found close together on a mountain on Spitsbergen by a team of mainly Norwegian researchers from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum.

Jørn Hurum, who led the expedition, compared the animal to a "medium-sized blue whale with a three-meter-long crocodile skull."

It was twice as big as a killer whale.

The pliosaur, a type of short-necked plesiosaur, was the leading marine predator during the Jurassic Period and is thought to represent an unknown species.

Its body was designed to minimize drag while its enormous flippers propelled it forward in a motion like flying through the water.

A front flipper from "The Monster" was measured at almost 10 feet long.

Fossil bones from the specimen excavated last summer showed that it was almost 50 per cent bigger than the largest confirmed pliosaur, Kronosaurus, from Australia.

An ichthyosaur, another marine predator, from 210 million years ago has previously been identified as being 75 feet long. but its teeth were much smaller than the pliosaur's and it would have chased much smaller prey.

"The pliosaur was much, much fiercer," said Hurum. "The ichthyosaur would have been an oversized fat dolphin by comparison. This animal would have taken chunks out of anything that moved. It was the fiercest marine reptile and the biggest of its era. Its teeth and jaws could crush almost anything."

Dr. Patrick Druckenmiller, a plesiosaur specialist at the University of Alaska Museum, was involved in the discovery.

"Not only is this specimen significant in that it is one of the largest and relatively complete plesiosaurs ever found," said Druckenmiller, "it also demonstrates that these gigantic animals inhabited the northern seas of our planet during the age of dinosaurs."

In 2002 a fossil pliosaur from Mexico was nicknamed the Monster of Aramberri, amid claims that it was up to 65 feet long. However, the measurements have yet to be confirmed.

Angela Milner, associate keeper of paleontology at the Natural History Museum in London, said the find illustrated how different the world was when the animal ruled the seas.

"Svalbard was not so near the North Pole 150 million years ago — there was no ice cap and the climate was much warmer than it is today."

She added: "There are a few isolated bones of huge pliosaurs already known, but this is the first find of a significant portion of a whole skeleton of such a giant."

It has been suggested that the Loch Ness Monster could be a long-necked plesiosaur.

Skeptics, however, have pointed out that the loch is 10,000 years old, whereas plesiosaurs are thought to have died out 65 million years ago.

Check out the article at Fox News.

Sweet! That would be one kick-ass show at Sea World!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images

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The original Earth-rise - taken by William Anders
during the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon on December 24, 1968.

A Japanese moon probe has replicated the famous Apollo-era "Earth-rise" photograph with modern high-definition imaging.

The Kaguya spacecraft, also called Selene, has been orbiting 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon since Oct. 18.

The new Earth-rise image shows our blue world floating in the blackness of space. It is a still shot taken from video made by the craft's high-definition television (HDTV) for space.

A second image, taken from a different location in the lunar orbit, has been dubbed Earth-set. A related series of still images shows our planet setting beyond the lunar horizon.

In the Earth-set image, Earth appears upside-down; visible are Australia and Asia. A region near the moon's south pole is seen in the foreground.

The footage was taken Nov. 7 using equipment provided by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK).

The orbiter mission is run by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Its first high-definition videos of Earth were sent back last month. The mission objectives are to obtain scientific data on the origin and evolution of the moon and to develop the technology for future lunar exploration.

Check out the article at Space.com.

Awesome images... I want to get my hands on that video! Congrats to JAXA on a successful mission, and thanks for sharing!

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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World War I – known at the time as “The Great War” - officially ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Palace of Versailles outside the town of Versailles, France. However, fighting ceased seven months earlier when an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, between the Allied nations and Germany went into effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. For that reason, November 11, 1918, is generally regarded as the end of “the war to end all wars.”

In November 1919, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day with the following words: "To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…"

Check out the article at Department of Veteran Affairs website.

Never forget our veterans... past, present or future!

Check out the Veterans Day Wiki page.

Labels: History, Images, Military

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Halloween had its beginnings in an ancient, pre-Christian Celtic festival of the dead. The Celtic peoples, who were once found all over Europe, divided the year by four major holidays. According to their calendar, the year began on a day corresponding to November 1st on our present calendar. The date marked the beginning of winter. Since they were pastoral people, it was a time when cattle and sheep had to be moved to closer pastures and all livestock had to be secured for the winter months. Crops were harvested and stored. The date marked both an ending and a beginning in an eternal cycle.

The festival observed at this time was called Samhain (pronounced Sah-ween). It was the biggest and most significant holiday of the Celtic year. The Celts believed that at the time of Samhain, more so than any other time of the year, the ghosts of the dead were able to mingle with the living, because at Samhain the souls of those who had died during the year traveled into the otherworld. People gathered to sacrifice animals, fruits, and vegetables. They also lit bonfires in honor of the dead, to aid them on their journey, and to keep them away from the living. On that day all manner of beings were abroad: ghosts, fairies, and demons--all part of the dark and dread.

Samhain became the Halloween we are familiar with when Christian missionaries attempted to change the religious practices of the Celtic people. In the early centuries of the first millennium A.D., before missionaries such as St. Patrick and St. Columcille converted them to Christianity, the Celts practiced an elaborate religion through their priestly caste, the Druids, who were priests, poets, scientists and scholars all at once. As religious leaders, ritual specialists, and bearers of learning, the Druids were not unlike the very missionaries and monks who were to Christianize their people and brand them evil devil worshippers.

As a result of their efforts to wipe out "pagan" holidays, such as Samhain, the Christians succeeded in effecting major transformations in it. In 601 A.D. Pope Gregory the First issued a now famous edict to his missionaries concerning the native beliefs and customs of the peoples he hoped to convert. Rather than try to obliterate native peoples' customs and beliefs, the pope instructed his missionaries to use them: if a group of people worshipped a tree, rather than cut it down, he advised them to consecrate it to Christ and allow its continued worship.

In terms of spreading Christianity, this was a brilliant concept and it became a basic approach used in Catholic missionary work. Church holy days were purposely set to coincide with native holy days. Christmas, for instance, was assigned the arbitrary date of December 25th because it corresponded with the mid-winter celebration of many peoples. Likewise, St. John's Day was set on the summer solstice.

Samhain, with its emphasis on the supernatural, was decidedly pagan. While missionaries identified their holy days with those observed by the Celts, they branded the earlier religion's supernatural deities as evil, and associated them with the devil. As representatives of the rival religion, Druids were considered evil worshippers of devilish or demonic gods and spirits. The Celtic underworld inevitably became identified with the Christian Hell.

The effects of this policy were to diminish but not totally eradicate the beliefs in the traditional gods. Celtic belief in supernatural creatures persisted, while the church made deliberate attempts to define them as being not merely dangerous, but malicious. Followers of the old religion went into hiding and were branded as witches.

The Christian feast of All Saints was assigned to November 1st. The day honored every Christian saint, especially those that did not otherwise have a special day devoted to them. This feast day was meant to substitute for Samhain, to draw the devotion of the Celtic peoples, and, finally, to replace it forever. That did not happen, but the traditional Celtic deities diminished in status, becoming fairies or leprechauns of more recent traditions.

The old beliefs associated with Samhain never died out entirely. The powerful symbolism of the traveling dead was too strong, and perhaps too basic to the human psyche, to be satisfied with the new, more abstract Catholic feast honoring saints. Recognizing that something that would subsume the original energy of Samhain was necessary, the church tried again to supplant it with a Christian feast day in the 9th century. This time it established November 2nd as All Souls Day--a day when the living prayed for the souls of all the dead. But, once again, the practice of retaining traditional customs while attempting to redefine them had a sustaining effect: the traditional beliefs and customs lived on, in new guises.

All Saints Day, otherwise known as All Hallows (hallowed means sanctified or holy), continued the ancient Celtic traditions. The evening prior to the day was the time of the most intense activity, both human and supernatural. People continued to celebrate All Hallows Eve as a time of the wandering dead, but the supernatural beings were now thought to be evil. The folk continued to propitiate those spirits (and their masked impersonators) by setting out gifts of food and drink. Subsequently, All Hallows Eve became Hallow Evening, which became Hallowe'en--an ancient Celtic, pre-Christian New Year's Day in contemporary dress.

Virtually all present Halloween traditions can be traced to the ancient Celtic day of the dead. Halloween is a holiday of many mysterious customs, but each one has a history, or at least a story behind it. The wearing of costumes, for instance, and roaming from door to door demanding treats can be traced to the Celtic period and the first few centuries of the Christian era, when it was thought that the souls of the dead were out and around, along with fairies, witches, and demons. Offerings of food and drink were left out to placate them. As the centuries wore on, people began dressing like these dreadful creatures, performing antics in exchange for food and drink. This practice is called mumming, from which the practice of trick-or-treating evolved. To this day, witches, ghosts, and skeleton figures of the dead are among the favorite disguises. Halloween also retains some features that harken back to the original harvest holiday of Samhain, such as the customs of bobbing for apples and carving vegetables, as well as the