Random thoughts 12/26/12

• Quiet day in the news thus far.   Nothing to post about there. 
•  Googled rocket trajectories and read through some posts on sounding rockets.  Did you know that these rockets return a reusable payload?  A sounding rocket has a parabolic trajectory, which means it goes mostly up and down.  It may go as high as several hundred miles up.  I was thinking of this in terms of a reusable first stage.  Of course it can be done.  It just hasn't been tried.
• Jim Morrison of The Doors didn't think much of space travel, I gather.  He wrote a song called Ship of Fools which seems to ridicule the idea.  Nevertheless, I like The Crystal Ship as a song about space travel, even though that is pretty much not what Morrison intended for the song.
• Barnhardt put up a post which featured Charlie Brown's Christmas.  She mentioned something about 1965 being the end of an era, and she is right.  I lived through that time.  Did you know that prior to that year, there were Public Service Announcements on TV which instructed aliens to get registered with the government?  It was up to them, the aliens, to report themselves.  They had to do this every year.  If they failed to do this, they would be in explicit violation of the law and subject to deportation at any moment.  That would include illegal immigrants from Mexico, if they were here.  There was an act of Congress in 1965 that changed all that.  Ted Kennedy wrote it.  It is an example of Progressivism.  It has wrought a great deal of havoc with this country.  There was a blizzard of legislation that year from a super liberal Congress swept into power by LBJ's landslide victory in 1964 over Goldwater.  Elections have consequences.  That gives me shudders to think what two terms of Obama has done to this country.  We won't see it immediately.  Fifty years from now, it will be in its full bloom.  Like a blooming stench of a rotting carcass dead and eaten up by maggots.