Unbelievable.

A friend on Facebook posted this link to a composite of images from Curiousity.  You can scroll around 360° and look at the Martian landscape, down at parts of the rover, and up at the sky.  I thought, "wow, this is pretty cool," until I reached this point...

...and then I just stopped, totally awestruck by the sun.  This has to be the first photograph that I've ever seen of the sun from the surface of another object in our solar system.  If I've seen one before now, then I either don't remember it, or I didn't really understand what I was seeing at the time.

Fuck politics, fuck the Republican Party, fuck the Democrats.  Fuck the Olympics, fuck Chick-fil-A, fuck the wars on terror and drugs, fuck everything in the world that distracts us from the fact that for a fraction of a fraction of our ridiculously wasteful national budget, we shot a rocket off into space on a specific trajectory, precise enough to meet up with another planet tens of millions of kilometers away, parachuted a robot filled with delicate scientific equipment onto the surface of that planet, and then started taking pictures and samples.  That's fucking amazing.  We did all of that, and compared to a lot of other developed countries, we have really really really shitty education in the kinds of sciences that enable us to do things like that, and we are barely willing to fund these types of scientific endeavors.

I'm in Indianapolis right now, and the downtown area is absolutely beautiful, but there are more homeless people per city block than I can remember seeing in any other city I've been to.  We can spend billions and billions of dollars blowing up poor people on the other side of the planet, and then spend billions and billions of dollars on political campaigns making different flavors of centrist bullshit taste palatable, but it's a huge fucking struggle to get that robot onto mars, and we've got homeless people living on the streets of an otherwise very prosperous looking downtown commercial district of a major city.

Where are our priorities?  They're certainly not on the types of things that are going to make our country and our world a better place to live a few generations down the road.