I pick up most of my written news online at Excite.com, cause it gives me feeds to the CBS written material, & CBS is in a co-publishing argeement with The Nation, National Review, American Prospect and couple of other magazines I can't remember. It's nice wide variety or material - good for reminding me that exclusively reading stuff from one point of view isn't necessarily good for my opinions.
But I can't help but think this one's way over the top: End Of The Astro-Nots? is by John Derbyshire, a National Review writer.
More in Extended Entry -
(before I get rolling, can someone point me to the How-To on nice little boxes that people throw around quotes?)
"Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant -- 14 deaths in 113 flights -- is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt, sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs when the vehicle survives. If a shuttle blows up -- which, depending on whether or not you think that 35 human lives (five original launchworthy Shuttles at seven astronauts each) would be too high a price to pay for ridding the nation of an embarrassing and expensive monstrosity, is either too often or not often enough** -- then the cost, what with lost inventory, insurance payouts, and the endless subsequent investigations, is seven or eight times that. "
And that, ladies and germs, was just the first paragraph. That's some first class hyperbole that just beats the crap out of Will, Rush, and everyother blowhard on the conservative right.
"Anyone who finds it "easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket" just hasn't been following the shuttle program very attentively. One astronaut death per eight flights! "
Would someone teach this man some statistics? Even I know that the numbers are being perverted here, and I have an Art Degree!
"Did they really know that? My experience of pointless make-work, which is much more extensive than I would have wished when starting out in life, is that people engaged in it know they are engaged in it. Whether they mind or not depends on the rewards. For a thousand bucks an hour, I'd do make-work all day long -- aye, and all night too! Astronaut salaries don't rise to anything like that level, of course; but there are rewards other than the merely financial. I hope no one will take it amiss -- I am very sorry for the astronauts who have died in the shuttle program, and for their loved ones -- if I quietly speculate on whether, being engaged in such a supremely thrilling and glamorous style of make-work, one might not easily be able to convince oneself to, as Astronaut Bowersox says, "believe in the program.""
Too late - I think he's managed to just about insult even the astronaut's second and third cousins with such an obviously insulting comment. To paraphrase, "I don't disrespect you, but you're the joy-riding equivalent of a welfare-queen whore who drives a cadillac and has 16 children by different fathers."
We progressives, or liberals if you prefer, have issues with NASA and space program too - issues of cost vs. budgeting of social programs, insane amounts of waste by contractors and sub-contractors, and . . I'll let the commentors make those arguments because I really don't have the passion for them. But I will say is that for all it's faults, I think the Space Program has been a good investment in the past. Properly harnessed and oversought, I think it may actually get us off the planet for constructive meaningful uses. It's been a motivator for science, reasearch and design, and for national motivation. And hopefully, if we face an extinction-level clamity, we'll be able to survive.
But this piece of vile diatribe passing as conservative thought is just absolutely disgusting.