Flying over Pluto…
And the best view we’re going to get of the moon Nix:
As an aside… I noticed when I went to add this image to the blog post that it was dated August, 2012. Almost certainly just a flub. But prepare for the conspiracy theories…
It looks like Syfy is taking some *major* liberties with the plot of Clarke’s classic novel. Some of that sort of thing is to be expected… but I dunno. Starting to get an uncomfortable feeling about this. Who want to bet that the basic nature (and probably appearance) of the Overlords will be fundamentally altered?
Here’s an interesting little article, originally published in the September 1934 issue of Soviet Russia Today by Roger Nash Baldwin, founding member and first director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Keep it in mind if you encounter anyone who suggests that it’d be a good idea to elect as president someone who espouses Socialism.
When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies at home and abroad.
I saw in the Soviet Union many opponents of the regime. I visited a dozen prisons — the political sections among them. I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion.
It seems in later years Baldwin came to understand that that Soviet system sucked. But for a while, while he was in a position of historic importance, he held the view that dictatorship and suppression of the opinions, property and lives of countless individuals was perfectly acceptable so long as these individuals were being oppressed by socialists.
From this piece in the Daily Fail (which seems to be bemoaning the fact that the brother and sister of some woman who married some dude who’s somewhere in the line of succession to the Englandlanderish crown seem to be inserting themselves into the public doings of their extended family) comes this nugget of spectacular cognitive dissonance:
For their invitations seemed to owe nothing to their personal achievements and everything to their position as brother and sister-in-law to the future king — which is a very different thing from being a genuine royal.
Ummm. A “genuine royal?”
Snerk.
The closest-pass images are starting to come in.
The tiny moon Hydra:
Charon:
And Pluto in closeup:
And this:
After all the talk of “Boston Strong,” it seems that if someone dressed in bog-standard punk attire shows up, it’s time to freak out.
Some guy was wearing a belt that looked like a belt of rifle cartridges (appears from the photo to actually be a belt of ammo), some idiots panicked and called the cops, the cops showed up, examined the belt, recognized it for what it was…and arrested him anyway. He was charged with “unlawful possession of ammunition, unlawfully carrying a dangerous weapon and disorderly conduct,” but the charges were later dropped.
Unless the “punk” in question was acting like a jackass (certainly possible, but no indication of that is given in the article), all the blame for this falls on the side of the panicked idjits and the cops who arrested a guy for his fashion choice. Even if the belt of ammo was a belt of live ammo, you know what’s missing from this story? A *gun.* Where’s the M-60 machine gun that would be required to actually make the ammo go “bang?” According to THIS, “the passengers were in a panic, fearing that the suspect was about to pull out a weapon.” Where, exactly, did these brave Bostonian geniuses think he was going to pull out a 30-pound, four-foot-long machine gun *from?*
And how the hell can it be unlawful for a 26-year-old to possess ammunition?
I have a number of ideas for different tales to go into Pax Orionis, including standard third person narratives, bits of memoirs, articles, interviews, technical descriptions, etc. Some of them I’ve started poking away at. Because why not, below are the opening paragraphs of four such yarns. Some I have little more than what’s here, others are good long chunks. None are done. The titles are just placeholders for the moment,
Telemetry is coming in from New Horizons. Everything is nominal; seems Cthulhu didn’t eat it at closest approach.
After 25 years, Berkeley Breathed is back to producing Bloom County strips. On Facebook rather than in newspapers. Yay, my childhood!
