Good heavens.Still here, proudly unverified, but we've been up and down the country (mostly up) and continue to turn up. Check my site Charlie Dore. com and join us for a night of music unfettered by genre,
2-timing with the other man...multi-talented Gareth Huw Davies:Bass,Cello piano
📷 WED 6 MAY, 1st visit to Over Hulton Folk Club, Bolton
📷 THUR 7 MAY, The Globe at Hay on Wye
📷 FRI 8 MAY,back to great favourite,
The Ale House, Colwall
Tkts from venues or https://t.co/CBlZ7UNPEr
Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
In the early 1980s, Sagan and a small team of atmospheric scientists (the TTAPS group) used computer models to warn that even a “limited” nuclear war could loft enough smoke and dust to plunge the planet into years of freezing darkness, famine, and collapse “nuclear winter.”
NASA’s Ames Research Center, where key collaborators worked, was nervous. The director feared Reagan administration backlash and political retaliation against the agency’s funding.
Sagan stepped in, leveraging his public profile from Cosmos to override the objections and green-light the work.
The team published their findings in Science, and Sagan followed with a vivid cover story in Parade magazine that reached millions.
Despite fierce opposition from Edward Teller and others who called it alarmist, Sagan testified before Congress.
The idea shifted global thinking on nuclear arms; years later, Mikhail Gorbachev credited it with helping end the Cold War.
Be a child. Pay attention to small things. Don't be led by prejudice. Take nobody's word for anything. Observe and think. Ask simple questions. Seek simple answers.
✍️Brian Cox