Dhimmitude: The Final Frontier

If this bullshit is on the level, why doesn't Red Barry just abolish NASA and be done with it?:

In a far-reaching restatement of goals for the nation’s space agency, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says President Obama has ordered him to pursue three new objectives: to “re-inspire children” to study science and math, to “expand our international relationships,” and to “reach out to the Muslim world.”  Of those three goals, Bolden said in a recent interview with al-Jazeera, the mission to reach out to Muslims is “perhaps foremost,” because it will help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

In the same interview, Bolden also said the United States, which first sent men to the moon in 1969, is no longer capable of reaching beyond low earth orbit without help from other nations.

Bolden made the statements during a recent trip to the Middle East.  He told al-Jazeera that in the wake of the president’s speech in Cairo last year, the American space agency is now pursuing “a new beginning of the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world.”  Then:

When I became the NASA Administrator — before I became the NASA Administrator — [Obama] charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but screw "dominantly Muslim nations" (which will describe most of Europe in a couple more generations) and "their self-esteem".  Perhaps if they hadn't rejected the Western culture that made modern technological and scientific advances possible in favor of regressing to the seventh bleeping century in a psychopathic fit of theocratic insanity, they'd still be making "historic contributions" to "science, math, and engineering," and be interested in those topics for other reasons besides developing weapons of mass destruction.

Nor is the "S" in NASA supposed to stand for "State," as in "State Department," whose bailiwick "expanding international relationships" is supposed to include.  I guess in practice this means boasting that the nation that reached Luna forty one years ago has to hitch low orbit rides from other countries that still recognize the strategic value of space.

Ensign Ed notices the blinding, day-glo omission in this reinvention of NASA's mission statement: None of it has ANYTHING to do with space.  B.O. has canceled the space shuttle.  He's canceled the return-to-Luna program President Bush started.  He spends a lot of bloviating time in his favorite place - the distant future - mentioning some sort of Mars mission, in which presumeably astronauts will ride there on space unicorns galloping along rainbow highways paved with Skittles.  But you can't get to Mars without first returning to Luna, and you can't return to Luna without a continuing shuttle or successor program to maintain access to Earth orbit.  Without ANY of the above, you lose the infrastructure and expertise by attrition (if we're lucky), and once it's gone, it'll take a lot more time, effort, and the one thing this administration lacks in abundance - money - to get it back.

Which appears to be the point.  Space would be too much of a "wasteful distraction" from his domestic communization program and accompanying mandatory re-education of the lumpenproletariat to worship the "some kind of a god" from whom da peepul have "strayed" so ungratefully.  It might just inspire fascination with and loyalty to something and/or someone other than The One, and that just cannot be tolerated.

Pity, because going back to Luna and beyond would presumeably be a lot more effective at "re-inspiring" children to study math and science than being Lucifer's towel boys and palm frond wavers and incense burners.  Why study such challenging and otherwise dull subjects if you won't have anything to DO with that knowledge besides MSU as a Marxist climate change fraudster or "green energy" huxter?  Whereas I seem to remember a whole lotta people from my generation (45 and older) who were all kinds of inspired by actually watching something as cool as men actually walking on the surface of another world on live global television.

Makes me think about how the Norse discovered North America five centuries before Christopher Columbus, but never followed up those expeditions, letting colonies on Iceland and Greenland and New Foundland wither and die out.  When we were going to Luna and later Skylab and the Shuttle, and five TV incarnations and ten movie editions of Star Trek and its imitators kept the dream alive into the twenty-first century, it didn't seem possible that we would turn away from the stars and begin a forced march back to the slime from which uniformitarians believe we came.  Yet here we are, with a de-spaced "space" agency charged with "inspiring" children with a "vision" of patronizing enemies that only want to see us all dead.

Robert Heinlein must be going zombie as we speak.