Time to Think

Fly Me To The Moon                        #382 By Hank Silverberg  My heart skipped a beat as I watched the Artemis II spacecraft lift off from Cape Canaveral this past week. I was immediately taken back to that 13 and 14 year-old kid who watched the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions of the 1960's and early 1970's. There was hope that by this time in the 21st century we would see the final frontier not as an expensive mission to beat the Russians to the Moon and keep the Cold War--cold, but rather as a mission to expand man's knowledge of the universe and take us where no human has gone before.  This past week I kept thinking about Apollo 18, 19, and 20, which were cancelled by the Nixon Administration. There were a number of reasons, but mostly it was the price tag that lead to the decision to scrub the missions, some of which were headed to the dark side of the Moon.  When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July...

The United States of America                   #381 By Hank Silverberg  Commentary As many as nine million people took to the streets this past weekend in the latest round of "No Kings" protests. The movement has not taken very long to attract large crowds across the country, making it one of the largest protests in U.S. history.   The White House reaction? Before the huge protests in dozens of cities and towns across the country, there was a claim from the White House that the protestors "hate America".  As the protests were happening, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Newsweek,  "the only people who care about this Trump Derangement Therapy Session are the reporters who are paid to cover them."  She couldn't be more wrong. So let's take a closer look. What is America?  America, from its very beginning, was a place where diversity was common.  White Europeans take all the credit, but Co...

Why Mourn for  CBS Radio News?               #380 By Hank Silverberg   Was   it really a financial decision or was it a political one? That is what many people are asking about the impending death of CBS Radio News.    (This image was posted on Facebook by Former  CBS employee, Larry Magid)    CBS   News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and President Tom Cibrowski, w ho are  now in charge of the legendary news division at CBS, announced a 6% cutback this past week that included closing the 100-year-old radio network news division in May. It hit me emotionally because of my past association with CBS Radio.  I never worked for CBS News proper, but over the 16 years I worked at CBS affiliate WTOP in Washington, I earned thousands of dollars stringing for the network. In case you don't know, a stringer is a local reporter who will file a story of national interest for the network and will be compensated a se...

Hard To Write                                                                                           #379           By Hank Silverberg      Commentary It is becoming extremely difficult to write an opinion blog on anything right now. The world situation is slowly getting worse, the polarization in the American population is growing, and if you express your opinion on just about anything, you are probably going to get attacked verbally or even physically by someone who is offended.  A friend of mine advised me to stop writing about Israel or Iran, or the war, or even antisemitism  because it might make someone mad enough to do harm to me.   So I could try something less polarizing, like baseball...

                                                                                                                                 #378 The Truth  By Hank Silverberg              One of the more difficult things for many people to understand is how an event that happened just five years ago, that most of us saw on TV as it was happening, can get so distorted with myth and conspiracy theories that a state legislature has to pass a bill requiring that the truth about the event be taught in schools.   But that is what has happened here in Virginia where many federal workers live. Governor Abigail Spanberger signed the bill ...