Cinco de Mayo, Courtesy of the French

(City of Puebla, Mexico. North view, toward the Malinche Volcano)

East of Mexico City lies the landlocked state of Puebla, now formally named Heróica Puebla de Zaragoza. On May 5, 1862, La Puebla de los Angeles, Town of the Angels, hosted the scene of an arrogant Napoléon III and the Imperial French Army's comeuppance by a poorly supplied yet tenacious Mexican Army. At the time, America was a two nation country dragging the southern part back into reunification one bloody battlefield at a time with no real interest in Mexico's internal strife. Besides, America considered France a friend. The people of Pueblo harbored no such illusions. The whole American friendship thing exited with the idea that an emperor or monarchal rule went against what the young war torn nation had fought against before the French republicans lopped off Marie Antoinette's head. Mexican men & women fought off a better supplied Second Empire army that had a disticnt advantage of twice as much manpower to thwart the colonization of central Mexico. It took six years before France threw in the towel when they went in expecting an early crushing of dissent victory after installing Emperor Napoleon's puppet as a Mexican Emperor, the soon to be executed Archduke Ferdinand Maximillian of Austria by Benito Juarez's order.

Photo of escaramuza - women in the Mexican Revolution - courtesy Nelvin C. Cepeda/Union Tribune

In a turnabout induced by time and immigration, Cinco de Mayo is now very popular in the United States but remains a regional phenomenon in Mexico. Pueblo's battle did not decide the outcome, but what a morale booster that Emperor Napoléon III and the 8,000 French soldiers could be beaten by the few people under the command of General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín. The Execution of Maximillian I (and only) of Mexico was captured by the renowned Spanish painter, Édouard Manet in a painting of the ame name. In the 21st century, Cinco de Mayo captures the American imagination while giving those of Mexican descent a means to celebrate a part of its rich heritage.

French interventionism, the first time, went under the anglicized rubric of the Pastry War (1838 -1839) goes by the name, Primera Intervención Francesa en México, in Spanish. The word croissant does not imediately conjur up images of Mexico, but entire battles and many nations including the Republic of Texas became charbroiled over a French baker demanding payment for a ruined shop in Mexico. A French blockade ensued with Americans eventually aiding the Europeans resulting in eventually bringing the venerable Santa Anna out of retirement.

Cinco de Mayo is now also a cause to celebrate Mexican cuisine and drinks. In a spirit of patriotism the Chiles en nogada uses the three colors of the Mexican flag. Food influences allow people to go forward presenting each with treasures from their own culture. The margarita enjoys a variety of flavors, yet for a few of the orange flavored liqueurs a mexico product with a French label Patrón Citrónge, or the imported Cointreau , blue curaçao produces the stunning blue margarita. Yum. Add a little mariachi music and the celebration is ON!




It was setting my teeth on edge that the most prominent authors on Cinco de Mayo were Anglo. So after looking here is a great history for the younder set, Cinco de Mayo:Yesterday and Today, from Maria Christina Urrutia and Rebecca Orozco.

China's Two Face Policy

China, China, China. With over 5 millenniums years worth of experience in the political arts, yet the lesson seems lost again about saying one thing and doing another. The Peoples Republic of China's political wunderkinds are having a collective communist mind melt over being exposed in a Pentagon report to Congress detailing their military aims and growing capabilities. China wants a more flowery emphasis placed on their economic prosperity and growing private sector. In light of their boom and owning the loan papers on a multitude of US debt, China is making a loud case to increase their role in the International monetary Fund (IMF). Popcorn & MRE's all around, this is going to take armies of diplomats to hash out between two nuclear superpowers with space satellites. (Reuters)

After 5 Chinese ships hemmed in a US warship, USNS Impeccable in the South China Sea, plowed through A Tibet-belongs-to China annex anniversary without the number killed last year by the military and rolled over the Dalai Lama's freedom rhetoric, more joint military exercises with Russia, obligatory perennial warnings to Taiwan & an interfering USA that they will backup a One China policy at the point of really big guns and missiles, now with the cyber warfare the Canadians caught from deep inside the land of one time zone happening to 1295 computers in over 100 countries, pulling the camouflage over a hypersensitive world's eyes is tough to brazen out. Canada's report from The Information Warfare Monitor, "Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network" does not attribute the malware directly to the Chinese state. The US military already had suspicous hacker activity attributed to the Chinese at the Pentagon almost eighteen months ago. Those magisterial moments during the 2008 Olympics are over. It leaves China unencumbered by world community threats to showcase its military might on center stage. Only the US military preemptively released their annual assessment on the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the Dalai Lama's office raised suspicions about being hacked.

Computers -- including machines at NATO, governments and embassies -- are infected with software that lets attackers gain complete control of them, according to the reports. One was issued by the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies in conjunction with the Ottawa, Canada-based think tank The SecDev Group; the second came from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

Researchers have dubbed the network GhostNet. The network can not only search a computer but see and hear the people using it, according to the Canadian report.

"GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras," the report says. (Internet map - portion)

Tuesday, President Obama leaves Washington DC for the G-20 Summit hosted in a protest-ready and poorer London after already having words with China's Ambassador to the US over US Naval ships in international waters. The Chinese ambassador made sure the press knew there were concerns about the US currency amidst a global crisis. Warfare, cyber and otherwise, is definitely practiced economically. China is spreading the wealth around and making more inroads and cyber tracks in the Western Hemisphere. France & China have a frosty relationship after President Sarkozy took a meeting with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Meanwhile, Thailand is pretty pissed about their computers while Austrailia is defending its ties at home with China. This summit will be like a giant Hollywood party where people were married to each other, divorced and married former friends while everybody is ensuring all is truly cordial because the cameras are on.

President Hu Jintao will warmly greet President Obama. The pictures will be pretty and the words carefully chosen to convey maximum strength on both sides as they speak as if at a tennis match. China will hear about the lack of government safety control in their manufacturing and food production environments, the US will get slammed over the health of the Dollar, return serve on the artificial price pegging of the Yuan with a volley back on the stupidity of Iraq, followed by the human rights issues in Burma and Darfur with pointed questions about China's designs on Latin America, followed by talks about climate change with the US saying new rules. And that's just Secretary Hillary Clinton's part in the meeting. President Obama will hear much mutterings on the scale and scope of the US military industrial complex's sales of armaments and delivery systems. China claims they are nowhere near able to keep up on that military scale. Um, yeah... just the end user better hope they have some quality control in the stuff they get from a booming China.



Mixing modernity with the mastery of the ancient eastern tradition makes for compelling reading about China's geopolitical growth spurts. Ralph D. Sawyer chronicles the inside political gamesmanships Chinese generals do on each other and other nonconventional means of projecting military might. China is not adverse to using every tool at their command and this China expert shows us how many means and methods they have already used in The Tao of Deception: Unorthodox Warfare in Historic and Modern China.

A Day for Kings, Presidents & People

Usually MLK Day has the media short changing the day into soundbitsy clips of the I Have A Dream speech to fit between commercials to do their duty and pay a quick homage. But now all is different. Twelve hours after the strike of midnight on the National Day of Service, a reparation or down payment on his Dream and last expressed wish about the Promised Land when Barack Obama puts his hand on Lincoln's smallish gilt edged Bible and swears an oath to serve as president. What makes the American heart beat remains filled with vast hopes and vital concerns to the rest of the world who will watch and hear a call to serve. Slavery's stains muted America's large bouncing check to reaching that More Perfect Union part of the program, until the morrow and the world will take note.

Odd that the Letter from a Birmingham Jail was a public oped crafted in a cell as a rebuttal against shortsighted black preachers meaning to lower the lofty aims of MLK and by extension the Civil Rights movement. Coverage of MLK Day with grainy images of the mall filled with 250,000 bus riding and marching folks from all over the nation will compare to the almost 1,000,000 who showed up for the We Are One event for the first bi-racial president. An eloquent letter of legacy, published in June of 1963, before the Dream speech that speaks across the decades to another movement filled with youthful vigor on matters of Life & death issues that shall not wait patiently. The glue that binds is based on character and courage. Maya Angelou often states without Courage none of the other Virtues can be practiced.

Martin Luther King Jr responded to a need to serve a seamstress thrown in jail for staying seated on a bus in 1955. Rosa Parks spent her spare time volunteering and serving as secretary for the Montgomery Alabama NAACP. The 21st century is in a deficit in the serving with a dearth of business leaders lapsing into lawless looting from the public funds and private market square. Now people must bridge the yawning gap, with not very many survival skills, to reach the other side except character built by service. Now another person of color with slaveholders in his past stood before Lincoln on the steps urging a call to action to serve with Courage and Characters.

Reverend King served from jail many times in the pursuit of Justice as promisedby the Founding documents and the Amendments arising out of the Emancipation Proclamation. Nonviolent with Civil Right's moral compass set on true north. The struggle for equality in the land of the free and home of the brave came via words accompanied by synchronized actions of service to the attention of those who bestow the honor of a Nobel peace prize.

In Oslo, Norway King's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech (won through the blood and tears of a 35 year old) acts as another beacon on the scope of international heft focused on USA stated policies and oblivious practices. In the thousand year old Westminster Abbey, atop the Great West Door resides a robed figure carved in King's likeness from marble enshrined in a pantheon of ten Christians dedicated to Martyr's of the world from the 20th century.



In Occupied Europe, a group of flying guardian Angels, literally, had the crappiest planes they fixed themselves, yet the most distinguished of flying records by winging it on faith and serving with courage to honor the sacrifices in the 1940's. They are known as the Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Regiment

Seated near the back of Mount Zion's airy sanctuary, 85-year-old William Booker of Kirkland, a surviving Tuskegee Airman, leaned on his cane and marveled. His grandchildren, Marcus and Brandon, were singing in the children's choir. A few weeks earlier, the president-elect had sent a letter inviting him to the inauguration.

It was a far cry from the years of humiliation Booker and his unit had suffered during and after World War II, demeaned by their own country as inept and too intellectually inferior to be fighter pilots.

The airmen's success in combat in fact contributed to desegregating the military, bolstering a fledgling civil rights movement and broadened acceptance of blacks as leaders.

Last month, Obama wrote to Booker that he had reserved space near the front of the inaugural crowd for the retired Boeing Co. engineer because "he said he was standing on the shoulders of the Tuskegee Airmen," said Booker, whispering hoarsely.

MLK was a young man who was fired up and ready to go. The establishment was doing incremental ism and decided to upbraid the upstart, not for the last time, on what really mattered - patience. King responded with a book on Why We Can't Wait. barack Obama picked up King's message on the fierce urgency of now and the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.

Stevie Wonder put forth his patriot's soul, treasure and time and determination towards finally getting a King holiday in 1986 eighteen years after King's assassination. It is fitting that the bridge is music from Stevie that thrilled a campaign at a Jefferson Jackson dinner in Iowa six weeks before a fateful caucus at the end of an astounding speech from Barack Obama. Signed, Sealed, Delivered, he's Ours now as a president in less than 36 hours and all he is seeking to have all serve equally.


Double Pulitzer Prize winner for biographical portrayals of Martin Luther King Jr., Taylor Branch has written the trilogy for eternal reverence and reference.

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963 - 1965 At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968

Blair House Hosts The Obamas

Emily Post would have been hard pressed to render a Solomon-worthy answer to the Head of State etiquette issue that surrounded presidential sleep overs at Blair House.  Throw in a ghost, 5,000 more square feet than the 65,000 square foot white Georgian manor caddy corner across the street, a detested ex-Australian Prime Minister getting an honor from a detestable president, two little girls that will have moved 5 times in four weeks (Chicago to Hawaii back to Chicago to the Hay-Adams to Blair House to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) to and a request to park the family at Blair House early.  One American head of state rules who stays at Blair House and the future US head of state wanted to use the presidential suite early. Hmmm.  The hopeful future head of state lost that battle and moved in to 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue on Martin Luther King's actual birthday January 15th. 

It's no secret that President-elect Obama and his family requested to move into Blair president, but were bumped by the former prime minister of Australia, John Howard. Double-booking! Incoming presidents and their families traditionally move into Blair House on January 15, five days before inauguration. The Obama family asked to move in several days earlier than the due date—before their daughters started school—but they were denied access by the Bush administration. They ended up moving into the historic Hay-Adams instead. Howard, by the way, was booked for only one night: January 12.

Lyndon Baines Johnson's administration started Blair House's acquisition of official provenance by adding it to National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Blair House is a honest to goodness National Historic Landmark (NHL) complete with signatures and ceremonies commemorating it as such during the Nixon presidency.  As Barack Obama echoes elements of Abraham Lincoln's ascendancy to the presidency, its a pertinent fact that Blair House was the residence for a Lincoln staffer.  None of Barack's staffers will be holed up in there as the State Department has control of the building.  Interestingly, competitor presidential aspirant Seward from the Empire State became Lincoln's Secretary of State as in modern times, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Secretary of State designate from New York for a President-elect Obama.  (Photo courtesy BH website)

First, it was the home of a newspaper publisher, then a family compound as hebought the house next door to house his daughter and brand spanking new son-in-law who was related to Robert E. Lee.  A century later the US government turned it into a US owned asset in 1942.  Harry S Truman camped there for almost four years after gutting the inside of the White House to restore it to the level of powerful beauty George Washington and James Hoban envisioned more than two hundred years ago.  Blair House also saw the genesis of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine.  There was No Blair House or official guest house in 1792, DC was swamp land with tobacco farms plantations sprinkled about with slave labor.  President Truman put Blair House into the public consciousness in the fifties for another reason.  Puerto Rican nationalists killed a Secret Service agent outside Blair House as they tried to rush the premises to assassinate the president.  Now Blair House is part of the security cordon covered by the White House's Secret Service protection.  

Bill Clinton practiced his speech, revised his speech in the suite's library, then stood next to his limo and bellowed for Hillary and Chelsea to hurry up the morning of his first inaugural.  Blair House has seen it all.  Sasha and Malia had a homework corner set up for them.  Blair House is a giant interconnected set of townhouses with a suite in the light colored one with the formal entrance with the green awning over the porch.  First, President -elect Obama and Michelle Obama will formally sign the guest book filled with the likes of Charles de Gaulle, jawaharal Nehru, Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II.  The Obamas will reside on the second floor with access to a living room, library and sitting room and a bathroom recently upgraded to a marbleized five star plus venue.  CSPAN, my favorite channel, will broadcast a special showing many of these specialized rooms inside Blair House.  This is red-letter Special because cameras and film crews are allowed in that august space about as often as a lunar eclipse combines with a meteor shower.  (Photo courtesy State Department)

Someday Malia and Sasha's memoirs will include the short stay in the sumptuous Blair House post 1980's Regan Renovations.  This story from Laura Blair Marvel chronicals the adopted daughters sojourn in Blair House before 1942 in the book, A Child in Blair House: Memoir.

Click here for more items on the Transition

New Presidential Cars & Seats

High priority is being flexed as to where the new presidential butt cheeks reside on the way to work or while in the Oval. A fully armored 2009 hermetically sealable Cadillac with CD player and access to The Google is ready for its debut on Inauguration Day. On the 20th of January, the presidential stretch limo might be the only thing GM makes that gets a two-mile solo worldwide debut this year. Professional gearheads are giving the hulked-up design an Ebert-like thumbs down. The Secret Service is giving the security accoutrements a raise the roof high five as they practice situational tactics in the non-lacquered primer version, affectionately dubbed, The Beast.

Already, spy photos of the limo -- with patches of gray primer -- have leaked out. And already, the reviews: "Ugly as sin," says one car enthusiast on an auto Web site.

"Can't we make a hotter ride for our pres?""Sheesh," says another, "why don't they just transport the president around in an Abrams tank."

One news agency, noting its 8-inch-thick doors, says the limo can withstand a "direct hit from an asteroid." But GM spokeswoman Joanne K. Krell laughed off the comments. (CNN Photo)

Considering that President Obama will have the keys to the nuclear arsenal at noon on that Tuesday, it is fitting the "car" should be able to take a Hell Fire licking and keep on trucking with the President safely tucked in his seat. The First Families' maximus glutinouses will ride upon hand sewn leather, inhaling that fresh new car smell on the first day on the job, with secure satellite phones in a moving cone of silence unless the window is down. Fat chance on that. The Secret Service is so protective of the car that upon delivery it is stripped down, checked for bugs and other creepy crawlies, then rebuilt from the tires up. Good on gas or mileage in something this fossil fuel ravenous will put a black hole in Obama's plan to green the White House. A total deficit on reducing the carbon footprint before he's even returned with the family back to 1600 and more bullet proof glass at the parade hut outside the executive mansion.

Meanwhile, as Barack gets back to the White House his chair should already be behind the desk he has chosen. And it is just not any old ergonomic chair for the Oval Office. It is named Washington. It is bulletproof and from another long time presidential vendor, Gunlocke. JFK ordered the first one to help out a bad back and 9 more presidents ordered their own to add to the unveiling of their Oval Offices. To the side of the desk are rosewood chairs, rather businesslike and straight backed for lesser mortals, that have been part of the Oval decor since 1933 and the time of FDR. Like Noah's Ark, two couches and two Parson chairs sitting as sentinels in front of the fireplace complete most of the seating for the Oval Office. The Chair closest to the Rose Garden Door is always the presidents and it is within reach of his "call" button that summons everything from a glass of water to his Chief of Staff.

Then there is the lush recliners and seating aboard the famous Air Force One. But I'll save that for another day. For more on the transition series.

For those who want to know more, there is a greatly detailed book, Air Force One: A History of Presidents and Their Planes, is chock full of their stories. Kenneth Walsh covers their history and dome of the latest gadgets inside the planes knows as AF1 only when the Commander in Chief is aboard. After January 20th, Renegade, is in charge.

Emancipation Day After Watch Night

For most, today heralds a 2009 bright with promise while still carrying the backpack of burdens from the last year. Seven score and 6 years ago, in a square "Oval Office" in the 1812 torched White House, now known as the Lincoln Bedroom, President Abraham Lincoln retired after a really well attended huddled masses meet and greet to sit down and sign one of this nation's most important documents. His hand swollen from having shaken so many others, he had to pause before putting quill to paper. The witnesses Secretary of State Seward and the office clerk, father and son, were aghast that maybe he had changed his mind like many were urging him to do to not inflame the Unionists or the Confederates. It was a temporary moment designed to let the swelling in his hand subside so his signature would be recorded as strong and firm for posterity on the Emancipation Proclamation. He also used his full first name to mark the formality and solemness the occassion required, the First Watch Night. (Watch Night, the painting is part of the White House Art Collection)

The Emancipation Proclamation
January 1, 1863

By the President of the United States of America:

A Proclamation.

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

Famous paintings depict the moment the Words of Freedom being carried forth into slave hovels

nation on Watch Night. It was literally symbolic on all levels. Everybody knew the hour was upon them on New Years Day as President Lincoln made his intent known to friend and foe alike. Lincoln told his Cabinet officers in July of 1862 once he settled on the idea many urged him to wait until the Union won a big victory to increase the power of a document that was in reality quite limited in its scope. It literally looks at slaves as the spoils of war with the victor setting the terms and conditions. (Painting by Henry Louis Stephens 1863)

All of the things that led to the war - the first Constitution and the 3/5ths accounting, the failed Missouri Compromise (1820), the La Amistad Mutiny (1839) one of the worst Supreme Court idiot decisions ever - Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), and the rebellion of abolitionist John Brown (1859). Through it all the Underground Railroad (National Geographic does a tour and puts you as slave making the intense decisions to stay or go on) carried people to safety out of slavery using clever gospel songs, quilts and the homes of complete strangers who Believed in the righteous cause.

Today around the nation, there are services marking the historic event that set in motion the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution that nullified some portions of the racist lawmaking. This year, the advent of impending historic presidential change imbues the ceremonies at midnight with a lot more meaning and four hundred years of reflection. It is not without a full measure of devotion to historical symmetry that Lincoln freed the slaves and it is his bicentennial year of which a biracial president from the land of Lincoln will lead the commemoration.

The Emancipation Proclamation also will be read during Watch Night at the historic Brick Baptist Church on St. Helena Island. Its ceremony will begin around 10:30 p.m. Brick Baptist is the oldest church on St. Helena Island. The church was built by slaves in 1855 for plantation owners, and former slaves assumed control of the building in 1861 after the Battle of Port Royal.

"Watch Night is a way of thanking God and just being thankful because we're alive to see the dawn of another year," said the church's the Rev. Abraham Murray. "I think this year will be a little bit more significant. We're grateful that we have an African-American who will be installed as president, but our hope is in the Lord, so we just thank the Lord for what the Lord has brought us." (President Abraham Lincoln's March 4, 1861 Oath of Office)

The movie Amistad is just over a decade old now and has lost none of its power to provoke shock and thought at what America was into today's new dynamic. A must see DVD. Perfectly priced for a glorious viewing at under $10 for this and the next Watch Night Party.

Happy Emancipation Day!

NASA Finds Carbonate, But Not Funds

NASA found water on Mars with the MIA carbonate minerals giving way to being able to land somebody there for the rest of their lives to colonize the planet in the future. NASA has some skin in the game as a President Obama is going to decide the mission and the money to go into the programs that shape the space race. Right now the president-elect is heavily focused on earthbound scientists who are bit more aghast at Global Warming and the damage incurred by the Neanderthals that were in charge that denied it all. Meanwhile, the head of NASA and his seven degrees got into a snotty spat with the ex-NASA scientist, current head geek of the Obama transition team about the Constellation project and its funding because its way over budget with an end schedule like the number π. Endeavour went up, came down, knowing in about a year nobody from the US is going into space without thumbing a wild ride on Mr. Putin's Russian rockets.

Now its the 3,600,000,000 year old acidic belief system on trial. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter by virtue of the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) beamed back evidence that some spots like the crater Isidis are less acidic and life gain a green toehold. The images are under review as the carbonates would have dissolved or dissapated long ago and not shown up for their Orbiter DeMille-like closeups. What it really means is a tiny step closer to rationalizing a fantastically expensive but scientifically prolific trip to Mars. Manned or unmanned just makes the stakes that much higher because they need a really powerful rocket... Out of the endless loop, comes proof that the mineral is there giving hope that missions even past Mars are possible.

"Carbonate, like the baking soda in your refrigerator, dissolves quickly when exposed to acid," said study leader and Brown University professor Bethany Ehlmann yesterday at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"So the fact that … carbonate is still present means that the waters flowing through [Nili Fossae] must not have been acid" and could therefore have been conducive to life.

Bacteria and microbes on a meteorite that plopped down to Earth help the hypothesis that life could exist on the red planet. Right now its just a theory that is gaining a foothold as more discoveries are made. The Phoenix Lander and the Energizer twin Mars Rovers have paid for themselves a hundred times over with their discoveries. With each new discovery and scoops full of analyzed dirt more questions arise out of the oxidized red dust. But NASA's next rover that could settle the life (bacteria/microbe) on Mars question, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, is experiencing a two year delay from 2009 to 2011 due to design challenges. That's a big money fix in the works. Spirit and opportunity have taken full effect of the solar panels to beam back photographic evidence. (Photo Opportunity on Mars 2004 NASA)

Now where ever will the financing come from in a totally broke USA to fund the next Rover, Lander, Pathfinder steps? I am sure President Obama will get a group of science money people to find money on Earth to support life on Mars. An international coalition, oh yeah, the International Space -Hotel- Station needs some new bunk beds too. Russia, we'd like to book room for a party of six... Obama is going to find a spare billion somewhere in the name of science and carbonates on Mars.

Passion for Mars: Intrepid Explorers of the Red Planet enlists the imaginations of famous planet watchers to envision what it would be like or take to live there. NASA has finite resources and Mars aficionados are planning to keep the red planet at the top of the list someway, somehow. My guess, some sort of gravitational knowledge pull with a black hole that sucks in the naysayers. Andrew Chaikin writes a biography of the current and future of the red planet that will fire the imagination rockets into our own Habitable Zone in space.