There is a lot of talk about privatizing space.
Holy Private Enterprise will get out there instead of government programs.
The people who insist on this are the same ones who met at conventions to push the space program with General Whozits as keynoter while the real subcommittee dealing with the real budget were snipping NASA out.
While they are showing how they are both pro-Space and pro-Private Enterprise For All Mankind — Hooray! — they are outnumbered a hundred to one, minimum, by those who are already putting together the regulations that will keep us out of space.
For every bit of promotion at their get-togethers, there are a hundred professionals demanding that we not pollute space. There are groups who would never put it this way, but they are demanding the rights of Native Spacians.
In 1969 the astronauts went up alone. Today they would have to have a thousand of Mommy Professor-trained bureaucrats for every astronaut, minimum.
As always you simply cannot put this into context without Mantra Thinking: We are dealing with an established religion.
When they want money for their own priests rather than for science, one of their continuing lines is, “Man has no right to interfere with the Works of God.”
Except for the substitution of the word “Nature” for “God,” do you actually see the slightest difference between today’s established religion and the Traditional Values.
Professional conservatives make their living by making the same statements in terms of the older established faith. To me, they are MORE offensive than liberals because they use the name of God,
You can’t blaspheme Nature.
The space program died under the ministrations of conservatives. Even Reagan, the former governor of California, regarded space spending as he did any other government expenditures except those cute boys in uniform.
To keep us out of space, you simply regulate any private program out of existence, just as they did atomic power and as they will any technology beyond the windmill.
And if someone can produce a windmill scare, there could be a hundred thousands bureaucrats in it for them
#1 by BGLass on 07/14/2011 - 7:30 am
The other one that gets used on that is “Charity Begins at Home.” Home being many Haitis but never space. One wonders if “space aliens” were less associated in movies, with whiteness if that would change. (Blue eyed people being called “mutants” and so on.) Maybe those seriously interested in space programs should have made more movies about oppressed aliens, but aliens who will take over is usually the theme (or transhuman machine types who show the horrors of science)— and what kind of people have these aliens as their main fear fantasy? –and whose team the aliens will be on. the underlying questions in all the alien scenes show things really on the movie-makers minds. there are takeover aliens, machine aliens, and occasionally an outsider-oppressed alien, an update of rudolf the rednosed reindeer.
#2 by Genseric on 07/14/2011 - 2:32 pm
The writing is on the wall.
Everyone could see the Soviet Union crumbling. The rusting and decrepit submarines in port. The rationing of Vodka to the citizens. The shifty political maneuvers. The adoption of Democratic mechanisms. The dissidents who were executed. The arms race. The Soviet Union chasing America to the moon.
They called it The Power and Might of Mother Russia. We call it the downfall of the Soviet Union.
Now, we maneuver to lead from the rear. Runner up and just ahead of the Mexican Space Agency (for now). Once again, a hallmark of a third World country. A loser. Pioneers and Innovators no more. Ours was a pole position that must be reclaimed once we get the right to state our case without being called naziswhowanttokillsixmillionjews.