"SOUTHERN BAPTISTS for SPACE SETTLEMENTS ? --- no such thing !

    I say this ,not in a spirit of harsh criticism, but in a kindly, supporting way to my many friends among the greater Southern Baptist community: you simply can't advocate flying off to terra-form Mars AND  be a good Baptist.
   It simply isn't possible --- and you would know that, if you spent as much time reading the Bible as you do secretly reading POPULAR MECHANICS.... and other such soft techno-porn.
   If God had really wanted us humans to live on Mars, don't you think HE would have planted us there, instead of Earth ?

SVE is a proud member of the "99% NEWS MEDIA NETWORK"

     It is well known that The One Percent (the 1%) control our biggest media (through private ownership or by controlling public corporations) and those media, in the crunch, only give you the One Percent's spin on the news of the day.
    Or, more often, those big media don't publish (or greatly downplay) the news that the One Percent don't want you to hear.
     The One Percent are those people whose combined family income is about $400,000 a year or more.

ALISON REDFORD alive , CAYDEN WOURMS dead, as DUTCH DISEASE claims new victims

      A Roman Catholic priest, Father Richard Doll, has told The Regina Leader-Post that Darren Wourms's family members had urged him not to return to his job in Fort McMurray, where his job had been taking a toll on him.
    But Darren was determined to get his engineering certificate and did return to "The Fort".
   Police had been called to his home in Airdrie, Alberta in April where his behavior had concerned his family and he was sent to hospital for a psychiatric examination and later returned home.
    This weekend, Darren 26, his wife Hayley 23, and his son Cayden 2, returned to St Walburg Saskatchewan to help plan the wedding of Darren's brother.
   Hours after attending mass, the bodies of the family of three was found in a nearby ditch, a .22 rifle near by.

The coal-dark SILVER DART flight of 1909: VOLCANIC modernity ...

   Abstract: It is an irony much unnoted, that is was only thanks to the efforts of dirt-faced coal miners, labouring deep in the dark beneath the sea bed, was it possible for one of humanity's first flights into the bright ,clear, pristine skies high above the earth to occur.

Libertarians (aka DENIERS) the world over celebrate humanity's first flights in heavier-than-air craft, above all for flight's ability to slip Earth's surly bonds : no more kids, wives, bosses, mortgages, no taking out the garbage, no more picking up socks.
    "Thelma and Louise" : but for guys.

VICTORIA's CHILDREN : skygods versus earthlings

      Queen Victoria's long reign is frequently divided into two periods.
       The Early Victorian Age was from 1837 when she became Queen until 1870 and the end of her 10 years of mourning over the death of her husband Albert.
       1870 is generally regarded as both  the low point - and turning point - of her popularity.

Like BOOMERS, High Modernity kids divided into early and late stages

     From 1873 to 1893 to 1913, people in North America went through first the 20 years of the long depression and then the 20 years of the long boom (in Canada much better known as the Wheat or Rail Boom).
   Children born early in the Era of High Modernity , say between 1870 and 1885, were old enough to fully enjoy the fruits of that long Edwardian summer of optimism and exuberance between 1893-1913.
   And then were often too old to enjoy the mud (and death) of the Great War.
   Those born after 1885 and on until 1900 felt cheated - they had missed the boom Edwardian Years but got to enjoy all of the mud and all of the death of WWI.

Recession malaise and technological growth co-exist quite nicely ...

    As the Euro-woes and the American toxic mortgage scandals stall the global economy ( stall its growth rate a little - its not as if the whole world has stopped breathing or something), some sectors of the economy are still going gangbusters.
   As their cousins did during the long 1870s-1890s recession-depression and during the Great Depression 1929-1942.
    Currently it is mobile electronics that is absorbing all the free cash going, and asking for even more, as it throws up cellular towers and fibre optic links everywhere.
   New technological wonders alway find ready money in depressions as the 'smart money' tries desperately to get on board the next 'new thing' , whatever it might be, in an effort to survive and even flourish during hard times for the rest of business.

HIGH MODERNITY's technology versus its science...

    By 1900, as Vaclav Smil reminds us ,most of the technology (machines, 'things' in David Edgerton's sense of that word) around us today had been invented and was in active use: as well as being further commercially developed and technically improved.
   They are still in use, still under constant commercial development and steady technological improvement.
   They are the fruits of the generation of The Children of High Modernity.

"The Children of HIGH MODERNITY" (1870 -1970)

     The generation of The Children of  High Modernity was born after 1870 and before the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
     'Their War' was the Great War, WWI.
   They had children, usually when they were between 20 and 40.
    For their kids, 'their war' was WWII and they were flattered by being called "The Greatest Generation" by younger authors who wanted to sell lots of books to them.
    Their grandchildren were usually born between 1940 and 1960, the (Atomic) Boom Generation : 'their war' was Vietnam.
    For example, my grandfathers were born in the 1890s and served in WWI. Their kids were born in the 1920s and served in WWII.
     I, like virtually all their grandkids was born in the 1950s.
    While, as a Canadian, I wasn't expected to serve in Vietnam, some kids at my two high schools did volunteer to go do so.

Libertarian DENIERS to get physical over buses and bikes?

     HALIFAX - There has been quite an outcry among the libertarian majority in the Halifax public.
   (These libertarians are DENIERS of any limits to their freedom to do what they want).
    Their current whine is over the extension of bus and bike lanes in Halifax, because it reduces their absolute rights to see that their big SUVs (usually with just as single person in them) have ample curb space, whenever wherever.
    Agricola Street seems the current flashpoint but there has been other signs of ill-temper from car owners.
     In Ottawa ,a city famous around the world for being seen as health-conscious and bike-friendly, a similar big backlash has emerged against bike lanes from among the opponents to good health (again the unhealthy Medicare-addicted SUV-driving libertarian denier types).
     Laurier Street is the site of the latest Ottawa protest against bikes.
    Ultimately, SVE believes it is really a battle over TAX DOLLARS : between the healthy and frugal who saves them and the unhealthy libertarian deniers who wastes them.

David Edgerton's 'mule spinners' and my grannie's lifelong optimistic disposition

    My father's mother, May ,was born in 1900 and was 15 in 1915.
    I must say I never saw any sign that the horrors of the Great War, 1914-1918, had ever effected her much.
   I think this was because she grew into her formative teenage years under circumstances never seen before or since in Manchester England.
  Her father Eddie made his living installing mule spinners into Northern England's cotton mills and I never appreciated just how good his business was, during May's early years ,until I re-read David Edgerton's SHOCK OF THE OLD.

SVE 'MUST READ' book : David Edgerton's "SHOCK OF THE OLD"

     Re-reading British historian of technology David's Edgerton's "SHOCK OF THE OLD" recently, I found it a fount of zillions of ideas, stimulating my mind into overdrive, and forcing me to look at our world anew.
   Perhaps in light of my recent studies on the continuing impact of (mutated) Romanticism upon everything, I can better appreciate the force of Edgerton's main argument that histories of technology and science focus far, far, far too exclusively on 'priority' and 'original originality' ----- entrepreneurs,inventors and scientists all being obsessed with being original ,creative and 'the first'.

SVE supports unmanned probes of Mars & Venus: makes our rare EARTH more precious still

     It won't be wise - would it ? - to use the EARTH as a laboratory to prove up the concept of what a runaway greenhouse effect can do to a planet.
   We don't have to - not that the libertarians/deniers/SF fans among us aren't doing their darnedest to try anyway.
    Instead we can just consider the latest science on Venus, a planet somewhat close to us in features, where a classic case of runaway greenhouse gases destroyed any hopes of Life on a planet somewhat similar to ours.

"Houston we have LIFE - a million years away"

    When Mariner 4 snapped its pics of Mars in July 1965, the delusion of humans living on other planets should finally have died - but it didn't.
    Bad ideas need perpetually teenage boys with bad arithmetic skills - an item never in short supply.