Monday, July 20, 2009

1969 Thoughts

A pair of generations ago... on July 18, 1969 Ted Kennedy left a party with a young woman, crashed his car into a river, went home with woman and car still submerged, and didn't call the cops until the next day. The woman drowned. Ted, though ill, is still a U.S. Senator and never saw the inside of a jail except on Lockup. It pays to be rich.

There was no room in yesterday's Cronkite post, but to give you some idea of Vietnam's savagery: starting at the Tet Offensive in January 1968 and continuing until October 1969, the United States lost at least 500 men killed a week. The South Vietnamese, who were often rightly disparaged as weak, corrupt and ineffective, always lost more. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong topped even that.

Last year's moon post summoned it up well.

3 comments:

takineko said...

My dad went on and on about how the moon landing was fake yesterday. I no longer care if we ever landed on the moon, but I'm thinking of placing a great sum of money into research on silencing mouthy dads.

[Yesterday he wouldn't stop arguing that mater was in fact, destructible. Maybe I should get him a science book for his birthday.]

JP Mac said...

May not be much you can do on that score.

Just don't mention 'moon.'

Keeper said...

...unless there are three wolves involved?

Moon-landing deniers baffle me. There isn't a single argument of theirs that isn't ridiculously easy to explain, be it a simple question of optics or physics.

OMG the flag is "waving". Uh yeah, that's 'cause there's virtually nothing to stop it from doing so when they fiddle with it! No air pushing on the sides, and very little gravity pulling it down. Duh, of COURSE it's going to oscillate!

The simple fact that you cannot speed up the film of the astronauts walking on the moon to any speed and make it look natural is all that really needs to be said. You can't jump that high off the ground on Earth without a much more "cushioned" landing (and dramatic "floomp" of arms and suit due to inertia), not to mention more spent effort to arrive at that height.

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