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Why go to the moon?

by guest blogger Raymond E. Feist

Science! Why go to the moon? Again?

In the best tradition of Mark Twain, a lot of people saying, “Why are we spending all that money to go to the moon when we could be [fill in the blank]?”

If you’re under 50, Apollo is history to you. If you’re under 20, any memory you have of the Space Shuttle is a kid’s memory.

Science roughly falls into two areas of research: targeted and pure (or general). Most people understand targeted: we must cure a disease, solve an environmental problem, come up with a better whatever. And of course all the politics that revolves around it.

Pure research is 100% curiosity. “How do things work?” “Why does that happen?” “What makes that work/not work?” People who are by nature curious pretty much don’t get people who are not curious, and vice versa. Most writers are curious, and usually become encyclopedia of trivia, or as my father would say, “A compendium of useless information.” It’s why I have opinions on a whole lot of things I am no expert in, and why I welcome being corrected on facts when I screw up, which frequently is the case.

One thing that may not be obvious in the case of general research is it often provides us with unexpected benefits. Because early astronauts have different issues getting in an out of gear while in space, we all now have velcro. And there are many things we all take for granted that came to us from the need to solve problems getting people to the moon and back. It’s safe to say we would not have a certain type of microchip, cell phones, and smart appliances if not for space research. Just like we wouldn’t have the internet if it hadn’t been for the Cold War, or Viagra if a smooth muscle heart medicine hadn’t shown an unexpected effect on male subjects.

In other words, often we get surprised by pure research .

So we go to the moon because we’re curious and want to know how the universe works, because we’ve learned a lot about solar radiation, climate change, the history of the universe, and a whole lot of other stuff that in the long run benefits us all.

IMHO, one might also ask why are we spending money bombing Iran instead of subsidizing the health care of millions of people?

Many equivalents exist, many of the false.

The best answer I saw was a clip Stephen Colbert showed last night. A youngster with a go-pro on his helmet was outside the Kennedy Space Center watching the launch and a local reporter asked him why he wanted to be there. His answer, “Because we’re going to the fucking moon!”

History.

Raymond E. Feist is the author of more than 36 novels, including the Rifwar Cycle and the Empire trilogy co-authored by Janny Wurts. Feist has been writing for 45 years and has more than 20 million books published world-wide in over a dozen languages.

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The original “No Kings” protest

Clay Bennett

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Republicans pissed that we can gerrymander, too

A friend in Virginia (where I grew up) is mad because there is a ballot question that would allow Virginia — like California before it — to ignore its law banning gerrymandering. If passed, the law would allow the Democrats to draw new districts to give them more representatives.

You know — exactly how Texas and other red states have done year after year.

The Republicans are doing everything they can to defeat this ballot question, even running misleading ads with a picture of Obama, as if he was telling people to vote “no.” (For the record, Obama’s quote was about how bad gerrymandering is but he endorsed a “yes” vote on the question — the exact opposite of what this ad implies.)

The misleading ad, but what did you expect from the party of Trump?

Suddenly Republicans are concerned with fairness now that they are on the receiving end.

Historically, what has happened all over the country is this: Democrats pass laws to stop gerrymandering because it’s unfair. Republicans ignore that and gerrymander their states to death.

Democrats are now saying it does us no good to be playing by the rules and trying to do the right thing only to be defeated by people who have no interest in doing so.

It’s how you deal with bullies — you fight back. You don’t let them win. You give them a taste of their own medicine.

Would I prefer that the entire country have fair, nonpartisan committees to figure out the districts? OF COURSE. That’s what the Democrats have been fighting for over and over again. But until the Republicans join, it makes no sense for us to allow them to run over us.

They’re just now getting a taste of their own medicine, and they are pissed. Well, suck it up. Maybe you Republicans should have done something to prevent us from doing this.

But, as has been pointed out before, Republicans know they’re outnumbered. They know if they play fair, they’ll lose. So they do everything they can to cheat — not just with gerrymandering, but with unnecessary voter suppression laws. In order to save our democracy, we have to fight back. And clutching our pearls and saying “Gracious, they’re so evil” will not do it. We need to fight back.

And this is a necessary step. Do we like it? No, of course not. We don’t like gerrymandering. But until the day we can control the government again and then outlaw gerrymandering, we should use every tool at our disposal to win. Republicans sure would (and do).

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Holy shit

Matt Wuerker
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The Trump-Iran War: Who Benefits?

by guest blogger Ian Randal Strock

Last year, President Donald Trump was railing against wind power, urging the UK to shut down their wind power farms in favor “cheap and reliable” oil. His Big Beautiful Bill (which seems much more like a Frankenbill) cancelled tax breaks for solar and wind power in the US.

Three weeks ago, he launched a hot war against Iran.

The United States, which is nearly self-sufficient in terms of oil, is not threatened by that bottleneck. Prices, however, skyrocketed. And last week, Trump reminded the world “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

In response—a response any first-year political science student could have predicted—Iran threatened the safety of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sending the cost of oil skyrocketing and imperiling the global flow of oil. And now Trump is calling for other countries to pledge military support to secure the Strait, in effect, demanding they clean up after his mistake.

Who benefits?

The “we” in that Trump quote is not the average American; it’s the oil companies in the US. And quite possibly Trump himself and his close advisors. The US oil companies, for whom the cost of producing and distributing oil and gasoline have not changed, now get to sell their product for more money.

Global instability also leads to lower values for national currencies, increasing interest in those media which are not tied to any nation, such as cryptocurrencies. In October 2025, Bitcoin peaked at a value around $126,000 per coin. It then plummeted to about $62,000 in February. Since Trump launched this war, it is back up to $74,000, a 20% increase. Ethereum—one of the cryptocurrencies in the president’s personal portfolio—has followed a similar trajectory.

Saudi Arabia is almost the undisputed power in the Gulf region. Indeed, the only country that can threaten them is Iran, which is lead by people who are unpredictable and dangerous. Reports March 16 say that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman, is speaking regularly with Trump, urging him to continue attacking Iran harshly.

Meanwhile, since the onset of this war, you haven’t thought about the Trump-Epstein Files, have you?

Presidential historian Ian Randal Strock is a publisher and writer whose home on the web is at IanRandalStrock.com. He is the recipient of two AnLab Awards, the American Mensa National Service Award, and the 2025 Skylark Award.

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The Big Dumb War Cycle

Jen Sorensen

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Trump has never had a majority

I get depressed about how many Americans voted for Trump, but at least it’s never been a majority.

He lost the popular vote in the first election, never even reached a 50% approval the entire time he was in office, lost the second election by a larger amount, only won 49% of the vote the next time, and has an even lower approval rating this time.

Still, it’s astounding that people voted for him a second and third time at all. We should all be ashamed as a country about that.

His popularity is currently at the lowest of any President since they began doing these polls. He beat the record of the previous President with the lowest popularity, which was (checks notes) Donald Trump in his first term.

Rob Rogers
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Noble Intentions

Garry Trudeau

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Suddenly, being a pedo is just fine with conservatives

The whole fake QAnon thing was about how there was a cabal of liberals abusing children. They made up stories about secret basements in pizza parlors that don’t have basements and tied every liberal they could think of into it. Look at how terrible this is! Won’t somebody think of the children!

Turns out they were right about the abuse of children, but wrong about who was doing it.

Now they don’t care because, as we have seen time and time again, the current conservative in America stands for nothing.

cartoon by Chris Britt

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The Good, the bad and the ugly

Adam Zyglis