Metaphysical folks like us are often interested in religion, though we are not always pious accepters of whatever the current fad is among dogmatists. It would pay us well to understand the enormous gap between truth and the current Tea Party dogma about the religious right’s views on the Founding Fathers. They are deliberately introducing lies about religious matters into politics and policy that will affect all of us.

Last year at this time I wrote an article about Sputnik and how it changed the world in October 1957. Here is another, with updates and additions, on the verge of the 51st anniversary of that historical event. I know that some teenagers read this site, even though to them Nixon is prehistory so let’s quickly review for the young folks what happened, or what seemed to happen, when Sputnik, the first ever earth satellite, built in Russia, began to orbit the Earth every 96 minutes on October 4th 1957. It had a skin of polished aluminium and was visible from Earth.