Be a hip Nasa nazi and win friends.


McNasa the Feinsteinocrat!

Instead of debating budget allocations for NASA–i.e. do we choose rockets instead of funding medical research for dying and diseased women and children, or upgrading public education, saving national parks, etc.–Max rubber stamps NASA Corp and Mars dreams. Weldon would be proud. As would Nixon/Kissinger, NASA allies.

Speaking of the Mars business, even a WaPo pundit has her doubts:

""None of which is to say that it isn't interesting or important for NASA to send robotic probes to other planets. It's interesting in the way that the exploration of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is interesting, or important in the way that the study of obscure dead languages is important. Like space exploration, these are inspiring human pursuits. Like space exploration, they nevertheless have very few practical applications.

But space exploration isn't treated the way other purely academic pursuits are treated. For one, the scientists doing it have perverse incentives. Their most dangerous missions -- the ones involving human beings -- produce the fewest research results, yet receive the most attention, applause and funding. Their most productive missions -- the ones involving robots -- inspire interest largely because the public illogically believes they will lead to more manned space travel."""""

Das stimmt.



(and those 1-2 people lurking on Goy Worlds may have noted one crypto-rightist Betya misquoting Scripture and what he takes to be the "sophists". After admitting his mistake, he claims he was quoting Nabakov. What a laugh. Nabakov sagt auch: "Du bist Scheiße").



Zubrin, current Mars guru, has approved of substantially increasing the NASA budget, and he defends Bush’s recent Mars hype; a Pilate-like approach would entail debating the NASA budget (ye olde cost-benefit analysis perhaps?), in light of other concerns, social, economic, environmental, etc. INSTEAD of taking Mars exploration as sacred gospel.

The Jeffersonian-Madisonian tradition of American politics would indeed require such rational debates–not that that occurs too much given the hysteria of most Dempublicans. Madison, secularist, himself a bit closer to a Pilate than to a Yeshua (in fact the Founding Fathers were all quite well read in Latin political classics, Plato’s Republic, etc., while perhaps objecting to some of the greek authoritarianism). Let’s ask Gary Hart, who knows his Mad-Jeff, what he thinks of Zubrin.


Max googles "Sophist!" THe spammed in definition doesn’t really apply. It was your pal who alluded to historical figures: Pilate/Yeshua (he misquoted a literary text, but it’s quite obvious “sophist” was being used to refer to the ancient sort of rhetorician or disputant). A debate exists even over the status of the sophists. They opposed the greek authorities of the time (including Plato). Probably sort of a school of lawyers and politicians, maybe cutthroat, but skilled debaters.

The history lesson (and semantic clarification) isn’t the central point. The point concerns the need for rational discussion of NASA, and one might say in Popperian terms, an OPEN society, where NASA, defense, economic reform, democracy as a whole–even blog politics and communication issues– are on the table, instead of always being taken over by “experts” and apparatchiks of left or right.)