I know I haven’t been posting much this week, but I do have a reason, honest. It turns out the Blogger template for this blog was corrupted or something and it was failing to publish. Before this week, I just haven’t felt like posting much.

With respect to the Iraq situation, I was amused this morning to hear the shock with which Bush’s inner circle have received the news that the Iraqis are – horror of horrors – fighting back. And to hear the news that they are taking cover amongst civilians, attacking supply lines once they’re behind the front, and so on. News flash, in case they’ve forgotten the lessons they should have learned from Vietnam – it’s nigh on impossible to fight a guerilla army with a regular army. I’m sure the army people know this, it’s just that the politicians as is usual, just don’t know about the real world.

I’d like to add today this image. Check it out. See that tiny blue dot a little over half way down on the right hand side, in whay looks like a ray of light? That’s the Earth. From 42 million kilometers away. And here’s a quote from Carl Sagan to go with it:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 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. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Great words from a great man.