Tag Archives: NASA

You get your weather forecast at the grocery store DUH!

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My Grandpa, 27 year veteran of the Army, was also a staunch Democrat mostly because of Roosevelt and his emergency actions to stop the Depression from destroying America. As bad as it was, it could have gone worse. I know a lot of our (ahem)”conservative” readers, those who drew the assignment of trolling the weblog today, are screaming at their monitors right now just from that. Now, don’t y’all worry none, boys, you’ll get more to holler about presently.
He was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the ones who at public expense did the necessary work to keep the Heartland from turning into a desert, and cleaned up other little “mistakes” visited on the ecosystem by Mechanized American Mercantilism. That’s my nouveau mot du jour.
Grandpa was assigned on a dairy farm. With a bunch of others, one of whom was from some city and had apparently never become acquainted with farm life. And who complained about caring for, cleaning and milking the cows. Since cattle lay belly down to sleep at night, often in their own feces, you can’t just lead Bossy to the barn, slap a bucket under her and starting pulling teats. Hell to the No Sir.
You have to wash those teats first, especially in a setup with a milking machine.
Ol’ boy was understandably not very happy with that. Wished the cows gone in fact. Grandpa asked him “what would you do for milk then?” and he said “Why, I’d just go to the store and buy it.” Enter NOAA and the National Weather Service. Both of them proposed to be cut by the “conservatives”.

No, seriously. It’s been echoed up and down the Right Wing Talking points by now so I’m not sure which one exactly said it first. Bachmann perhaps Who represents a Dairy district by the way.

But they’re searching for things that cumulatively wouldn’t cut a tenth of the deficit, because they’re not going to dare breathe the Subsidies to The Rich in the form of the Police and Military State.

A “Sacred Cow” as it were. Which is a misnomer as is “scapegoat” as used in the vernacular “they made him the scapegoat”.
Let’s roll with those a few moments

For instance, the Wealthy “scapegoat” food stamps and public housing and point to privately subsidized enterprises like Soup Kitchens and the Salvation Army. Cut a check to the mission every other month, so they think, Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am nobody goes hungry.
Ummmm… not so… Aside from the Privatize Everything mentality causing most of the problems in the economy today, the very little spent on soup kitchens and missions doesn’t even go to a red hot two percent of the people who need help just to Not Freakin’ Starve In The Streets.

Then there’s the National Weather Service. The Lunatic Fringe want to cut it because, “people would just get their weather from weather.com or Weatherbug”….

Uhhhh…. not only didn’t your cheeseburger and fries not magically appear at your McFatFood restaurant, there were many middlemen such as, oh, let’s see, the Earth used to grow the potatoes and the grains and other grasses the cattle ate, and so forth…

Weatherbug and weather.com and your Corporate Media weather forecasts all came from THE NATIONAL OCEANIC and ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION and distributed, free of charge actually, by the NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE, The satellites used to monitor the weather, the weather stations across the globe, the people who told you about global warming… (and you stupid bastards really hate that part, don’t you?) all of them including NASA, originally set in place so that your Giant Shipping Industries and the Military who “acquire” your supply contracts from, shall we say “unwilling” business partners like say, every country in the world who are forced into selling the goods and services of their nations at a price YOU dictate… could have accurate weather and other information necessary for your Corporate Dictatorship to function.

Just another way for Wall Street to get their money for free at public expense.

Morons argue to replace National Weather Service with private companies

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Like “accuweather” WHO GET THEIR DATA FROM NWS AND NOAA.
Oh, and using NASA maintained satellites, NOAA maintained field workers at weather stations from north pole to south pole and all points in between, you know… The scientists who work at public expense for the public good.
Who also have collected and analyzed the data about Global Warming. Must kill the messengers, then all that smog, the toxic fumes coming from the carbon-burning motors driving everything from cars to aeroplanes to electric generators will continue to poison us but we’ll not know anything about it because the Big Brother Corporate Government won’t let us. Real swell idea.
Dumbshit TeaBags and RepubliKlan types are going to eat it up with a spoon though.

Space time capsule December 21, 1968

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Earth seen by ApolloWhat does it mean that the stars we see in the sky represent light coming at us from millions of years before? The images we have of Earth, of ourselves from space, reflect a distant past too actually. Although we’re accustomed now to visualizing our planet from above, as a quilt of satellite photos wrapped around a globe, viewable from any distance on Google Earth, the actual vision they mimic is a single thoroughly ubiquitous NASA photo called “The Blue Marble.”

We have only a handful of actual pictures of our planet, taken during the lunar expeditions Apollo 8-17, between 1968 and 1972. Together they allow our minds to conjure our blue globe selves floating against the continuum of space, but they’re also snapshots of the past, of home forty or so years ago.

That’s not just our planet set against the dark universe, that’s you, spinning along. Were you looking up toward the astronauts on their mission as these pictures were taken? You might have watched the launch at Cape Canaveral and hours later thought about the first men to leave Earth’s orbit.

The above photo isn’t the “Blue Marble.” The image above differs from the photo taken by Apollo 17 on Pear Harbor Day, December 7, 1972. That photograph was the first to capture the Earth in full sunlight, but it showed only the Southern Hemisphere. I wanted to chose one where you’re in the picture.

The above image is the first photograph of Earth taken from space, snapped by Apollo 8 as it left for the moon, Saturday, December 21st, 1968. If you were in North America at the time, you’re at the lower right.

If you don’t remember where you were around noon on the winter solstice in 1968, here’s a subsequent photograph they took on their eighth orbit around the moon. It’s the first “Earthrise” seen by man. That was December 24, 1968, a date for which you probably have additional family snapshots.

NASA Apollo 8 orbits the moon