I had a most startling dream. You were trying to to tell me something.

I was gonna write some deeply insightful plea for continued exploration of space on the anniversary of Apollo, but instead let me just lament that I didn't make it to Trek in the Park this weekend and don't look to have the time next weekend as we're off to the coast to go camping.

I've read mostly good reviews for Atomic Theater's live reenactment of the Star Trek episode "Amok Time" with only one dissenting jerk bitching that Portland "tries to hard too be weird." It's not that Portland is trying too hard, it's that the rest of y'alls cities aren't trying hard enough. Put your backs into it guys!

For the record: I'm pro-space. To be more precise I'm pro-manned exploration of space. They're all sorts of reasons for this but mostly it stems from my humanism. I believe that man needs challenges (science/ exploration) or he makes up challenges of his own to occupy his time (war.)

One of the most deeply moving things I've ever read was a piece Carl Sagan wrote in Parade magazine during the height of the cold war. He passionately laid out the case for a joint mission to mars with the then USSR. I would like to see the same industry we apply to fighting wars to feeding the people on this planet, curing all of the horrible diseases that plague us, saving the environment and exploring the unknown instead. That's the dream that makes me smile.

Here are some wonderful stories of where people were on the date we landed on the moon written by famous science fiction writers. What humans imagine they can eventually do. Let's do a little more imagining of a world that looks like Star Trek and a little less blowing shit up.

Dean

Also- RIP Walter Cronkite.

Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can't make a move without a form.

It hit me last night that the problem with our political leaders is that they haven't spent enough time watching and reading works of science fiction.

With regards to literature they should be reading the imagined worlds of Aldous Huxley, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, H.G. Wells ("When the Sleeper Wakes",) Alan Moore and George Orwell. *

Then they should turn their attention to the depiction of future dystopian societies in film by watching Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, Michael Anderson's Logan's Run, John Carpenter's Escape from New York, Jose Whedon's Serenity and even Mike Judge's Idiocracy just to get themselves started.

At that point our political leaders should have enough information to consider all these horrible imagined futures where the individual is supplicant to the corporation or the government, and then figure out a way to keep these dystopias from fucking happening.

I'm talking to you, you bunch of FISA bill supporting monkeys.

(*This list could be much, much longer but I'm specifically excluding author Ayn Rand from the list of authors because I believe her ultimate fear wasn't so much an oppressive state but a state employed in the service of equity under the control of common men. She wasn't as much concerned in the suppression of the individual as she was the suppression of "superior" individuals, herself included.)