Christmas comes but once a year...

One of the greatest thrills of my youth.... earthrise from a lunar orbit, thanks to the Apollo astronauts. From far away... she sure looks peaceful.


Defeated in two world wars, Germania found comfort in the spiritual.

Let's hope that this pompous, self-described "man of peace" finds a lump of coal in his stocking. Our world needs no political "supermen" to save it.

Upton Sinclair - Al Gore has been studying failed campaigns

This mornings ten minute research project? .... getting to the bottom of an intriguing quote.
At 8:30 a.m. I had my nose buried in a fascinating article, "Open-Source Warfare" [IEEE SPECTRUM online] how terrorist warfare is morphing into the ability of tiny groups to wage war on large nation states. I didn't find the article myself. It is flagged today in SLASHDOT, a news aggregator which is on my my morning check sheet.

The author of the SPECTRUM piece quotes Upton Sinclair, an American Socialist writer who was a personal favorite when I was still a young and impressionable student. I've read his brilliant novel THE JUNGLE (1906) at least twice. I have half a dozen of Sinclair's other works on my shelves, but not "Oil!", which has just been filmed. The buzz is that the movie, There Will Be Blood, is destined to be win Best Picture and Best Actor at the next Academy Awards.

What was the Sinclair quote and how was it used? "It is hard to get a man to understand something if his living depends on him not understanding it.” The author's thesis is that the U.S. military has been too slow to adapt to the agile and techno-savvy Muslim terrorists and worse, that the costly lessons learned will be quickly squandered once the Iraq insurgency is declared over and the U.S. military begins to shed Iraq and move on to new missions.

I wondered where a man with the author's cold background would find the time to read Upton Sinclair so I Googled his quote selection. It turns out the quote is from Al Gore's documentary essay AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (2006). Al may not have persuaded everyone as to his "truth", but it seems clear that he resurrected a dusty old American political quote and endowed it with a hip new currency. I noticed one odd thing though. Current users are tweaking Upton's sentence to suit their taste - "living" "job" "salary" etc.

It turns out that the exact quote is "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The sentence appears in a book which Sinclair wrote about his failed attempt to become the Governor of California. It is entitled I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935). I think it reveals something more interesting about Al Gore and his reading habits (and his stealth campaign for the Presidency) than it says about the adaptability of the U.S. war machine.


"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair, 1935.

University of California Press reprint edition of Sinclair's 1935 book, and the source for quote used in Al Gore's bio-pic AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.

And so I learned that the musings of a rather good man (and occasionally a terrific novelist), but who was also an unhappy, defeated candidate for the Governorship of California, were recycled by a very frustrated modern Democratic Party aspirant for the Presidency. That the quote is now found useful, deemed as some sort of "truism," by a specialist in Electronic Warfare... that is the leap in logic which I must wrestle with.

Mars and Earth - both sweating out a heatwave

The Mars south polar icecap. This recent photo shows the melt runoff channels. Photo-recon proves Mars global warming.

Some may recall that on February 2 I posted an article in Blogspot called "ENVIRONMENTALISM - THE NEW CANADIAN RELIGION". I wasn’t overly aggressive, and found it hard to be brief on such a weighty topic. One of the points I made was that Mars has a geologic and climate history which has many similarities to Earth. I supplied a photo of Mars’ south polar icecap as it was in 1877, pointing out that our neighbor goes through melting cycles even without the man-made influence of automobile exhaust and smokestack industries.

Last week there was a flurry of stories refuting the "man-mad" Global Warming thesis. One report in particular caught my eye because it was in the National Geographic News e-magazine. Not even the crankiest of Doubting Thomas’s, I hope, could slough off the venerable NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC as being an organ of the “vast right wing conspiracy”. That article, entitled “MARS MELT HINTS AT SOLAR, NOT HUMAN, CAUSE FOR WARMING, SCIENTISTS SAY” reported on the analysis of daily satellite reconnaissance imagery coming from Mars orbit. The findings show that solar irradiance has caused dramatic melting of the carbon dioxide and water icecap for three years in a row. The conclusion? “The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars.” The reaction to such contrarian thinking from runagate scientists is predictable. Scientists and Global Warming enthusiasts all over the planet began bombarding the media with press releases mocking the latest heresy.

The N.G.N. story is here.

It's kind of fun to read this a.m. that even the powerful Washington politicians who have been running with this issue, can themselves be stymied by the ... weather. A case in point. This morning a Senate Committee was scheduled to fill American TV sets with live reiterations of reiterations on Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth".

The website schedule says "Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality Hearing on "Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?" at 10:00 a.m., in room 2322 Rayburn House Office Building" The problem is, one inch of snow overnight has created chaos in D.C. The suits have rescheduled.

One last comment on the subject of Mars: I am of course a big fan of Mars colonization, and have been receiving the informative mailings of THE MARS SOCIETY for many years. (our logo above) Yesterday’s post brought news of the Tenth International Mars Society Convention, scheduled for Los Angeles in late August. I had to smile when I read the list of Conference Sessions.

No. 28 reads “Law, Governance, and social systems for Mars”.