Instead of a Mission to Mars, Mission to Muslims
Posted on 07 July 2010
I hope this is an April Fool’s Day joke. This cannot be serious. But let us look on the Web of Lies to see the truth of things. Perhaps I should check Snopes first. GO GO GADGET INTERWEB!
President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be “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 . . . and math and engineering.” (http://article.nationalreview.com/437675/nasa-does-muslim-outreach/mona-charen)
Charles Bolden, a retired United States Marines Corps major-general and former astronaut, said in an interview with al-Jazeera that Nasa was not only a space exploration agency but also an “Earth improvement agency”.
Mr Bolden said: “When I became the Nasa administrator, he [Mr Obama] charged me with three things.
“One, he wanted me to help reinspire 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.”
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world. Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA’s orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.
(http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/05/nasa-chief-frontier-better-relations-muslims/)
The original video is here: (http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/talktojazeera/2010/07/201071122234471970.html)
My comment: I am old enough to remember the Space Age. There was a time when we sent men to the moon. I am old enough (just barely) to remember the time when it was held to be a serious and sober opinion that men could never reach the moon, that it was not technically feasible, and would not happen in our lifetimes.
President Kennedy and the rocket scientists at NASA proved those naysayers wrong.
In the vanguard, partly as cheerleaders and partly as revival-tent preachers, were science fiction writers: they consistently said it was possible. The visionary stories of men like Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke and the essays of men like John W. Campbell, Jr., not only showed that the possibility was within our grasp, but they opened our minds to the wonder and adventure of it, such wonder as has not been felt in the world since the great Age of Discovery, when bold adventurers were finding new continents, reaching the poles or the peak of Everest. For their efforts at upholding their starry dream, these writers were mocked and dismissed.
Then something happened. We landed on the Moon. There was nothing in history like it. No previous peoples had ever climbed into the heavens and walked in the mansions of the zodiac.
But at the same time, almost the same year, something else happened. We suddenly became ashamed of our explorations, our conquests: the spread of civilization across the world was something Western intellectuals began to deplore. Exploration and innovation came under a cloud is disapproval. It was arrogant, ecologically unsound, perhaps even racist.
The new intellectual philosophy says that it is proper to crowd in our muddy-floored cave, never looking up at the stars, having only two children, or, better yet, one or none, and to applaud when the proud Saracen conqueror comes to trample our honor and dictate our laws, first to the Jews in Israel, then to the cowards in England and France, and then to us. We must give to Saladin not only our material goods, with both hands, but also (and more importantly) our spiritual goods, and tell them that they are to claim credit for the unique and unparalleled achievements of Christendom, Europe, and the West.
We are to make them “feel good” about their pathetic and insignificant contributions to Western science and technology rather than, for example, using Western science and technology and flying a manned mission to Mars or the Moons of Jupiter and putting up a flag, or uttering stirring words: THAT IS ONE SMALL STEP FOR A MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.
Weigh those two carefully in the balance pans of your idea of justice. Which would you prefer? To have the West once again make history, and astound the world both now in the memory of grateful generations to come forever, or to spend the same time and effort instead cajoling oil-rich sheiks and dirt-poor herdsmen living in palaces or caves who stone their wives and kill their daughters, and telling them how much we admire Muhammad ibn Masa al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra, for stealing his ideas from India? Which would you rather have, a Moonbase, or a smile on the empty-eyed face of Osama bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as he visits the Mosque constructed atop of the rubble of the Twin Towers, while schoolboys (no girls) sing his praises, and laud the efforts of Islamic science to build better bombs to kill more Jews?
Me? I’d rather have the frelling Moonbase. NASA has different ideas.
It is after 1985! Where is my Moonbase?
It is after 1999! Where is my Moonbase?
Why, it is even After 2001! So where is my Moonbase, already?!
No, the sad thing is that NASA is a government agency, and, like all government agencies, it follows political policy. The policy of our current masters, both Democrat and Republican, seems to be submission and dhimmi. Even warhawk Bush’s first act after 9-11 was to go to a Mosque and ritually submit, bow, slave, toad-eat, bootlick, scrape and fawn over the true masters and rulers of this nation: call it Oil Addiction, or the New World Order, or Political Correctness or Pure Stupidity or the Dark Eldil — your theory is as good as mine, or better — all I know is that the true masters and rulers of this nation is no longer the American people and no longer the American Dream.
The policy of making an enemy, who has stood in opposition to the West since the Eighth Century A.D., and successfully destroyed the Christendom that once ruled in North Africa and the Near East, and that has only ever successfully be driven back thrice, in Spain, in the Balkans, and in Israel, “feel good” about itself is the policy of a sick and dying civilization, but one that refuses to die with dignity, preferring instead to fritter away its remaining years in an opiate haze of Utopian daydreams, devotion to trivialities, and glorification of anything absurd, perverse or grotesque that ultimately will accelerate the downfall.
So who are the people again, exactly, whose self esteem it is NASA’s task to uphold?
It’s starting to come back to me…
Oh, wait. I think I remember which guys we are talking about now.
The people who danced in the streets on 9-11.
The people who tortured and killed the parents of this little boy in Bombay, who was still crying, and begging to see mommy, when this photo was taken. He was too young to grasp that she was dead. We are talking about the people who think this little boy’s precious mother was a filthy Jew, the daughter of pigs and apes, and she had to die, even though she had never done anyone any wrong in her life, merely for being a Jew.
I remember who we are talking about now! Those guys. NASA’s mission is to bolster their sense of self-worth.
(To head off any stupid objection that moderate Muslims ought not be offended by comments rightly directed at Extremist Muslims, allow me to say, moderate Muslims have the exact same status in morality and history and policy as moderate Nazis and Moderate Communists. They mean nothing. Their friendship cannot be won, and, if won, is not worth having. They will make not a particle of difference. If your model of the universe says that insincere tokenism used to vaunt the contributions of Muslim Rocket Scientists to the March of Western Progress will turns the heart of a moderate and lethargic supporter of Islamic Fascism so that he will love the West, your model needs fixing.)
So, no, NASA has no more future. Put not your faith in Caesar: government cannot open the final frontier for us; they are too busy making plans about how to censor the Internet (see the recent FCC ruling).
I myself cherish very little hope that private enterprise will take up the dropped baton and see us to the end of the race, but the X Prize being won by Spaceship One is indeed a gleam of hope. I think the American Spirit is dead, and has been replaced by a combination of high self-esteem and zero accomplishment. If it is not dead, we the next generation of science fiction writers and readers must keep that dream alive, and with the same persistence those who came before us displayed.
Spaceship One. May there soon be Two, Three, Many more to come...
Why, oh why, are people still trying appeasement in this age?
Because they weren’t alive to see it fail all those other times?
@John: I just realized that mean have not been to the moon in my lifetime… sigh.
men*
A better question: why are self-professed Christians turning Devil’s Most Loyal Disciples and lusting for war?
Hint: It’s the collectivism.
Question: what is an alleged advocate of individualism and reason reduced to cheap ad hominem instead of rational arguments?
Hint: because his philosophy is a type religious faith, and ‘collectivism’ is what the faithful calls the Devil, that is, anyone (like me) who bases his conclusions on fact and logic, rather than on trumpery. Sorry, faithful and true believer, I do not look at the war and see merely a Jewish conspiracy for oil. The elaborate mental gymnastics you have to contort yourself into to make the 9-11 attacks somehow our fault have no interest for me.
John — as always, this is brilliant. Sometimes the truth is far more bizarre than fiction.
It’s exasperating to watch it happen but some of the things you say are a textbook example of what Garet Garrett called the “emotional complex of fear and vaunting” that plagues and ennervates the peoples of all empires, before those empires collapse:
This doesn’t look like confidence, to me. It looks like you have no faith, in your religion, your philosophy, your moral code. As Rand pointed out, your ideal is not practical and your practical sacrifices the ideal in the name of expedience and necessity, the latter, a word that William Pitt condemned as: “the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
Shut down the war. Dismantle the paranoid opportunistic security state industry the government is fostering. Stop advocating worse-than-useless, counter-productive laws which mangle and devour the lives, fortunes, and sacred honor of Americans and “The Saracen” loses all power to threaten. It is not capitulation; it is reclaiming sanity. It is an end to the practice of sapping the strength of the individual with ridiculous dependence, either upon the warfare complex or the welfare complex. I don’t like what NASA is doing either, but you seem to be presenting a false dichotomy: “appeasement” or war to the death.
These ridiculous wars have become a lucrative racket for a well-connected minority. They have become a source of National Identity for much larger population of fearful collectivists who seek to immerse themselves and lose their unwanted individuality in the grand, unifying drama of a Clash of Civilizations. This is hollowing out the empire and will be its downfall. The people supposedly representing the United States government are implementing the playbook of the former Soviet Union and it will end no better for our empire than it did for theirs.
In this vein, from a Catholic point of view, it’s also worth remembering it wasn’t military superiority that won the Battle of Lepanto.
“This doesn’t look like confidence, to me. It looks like you have no faith, in your religion, your philosophy, your moral code.”
At this point, all I will do is stand aside and watch the debate you will concoct between yourself and the fictional version of John Wright you have invented in your strange little imagination. Have at it! I am sure that strawman will not put up much of a fight!
Perhaps that version of John Wright is not confident, and perhaps he said something about necessity. Perhaps in that same universe, we are being strangled by the PATRIOT ACT, but I am an attorney, and I actually took the trouble to read through the act, line by line, and all it does is unify existing law and make it easier to get warrants for wiretaps for cellular telephones, which otherwise require the magistrate in every jurisdiction the telephone passes through to sign. And so on.
You comments are merely disconnected to reality. The war is not something we started, or we made up, or we promoted or proposed.
We were attacked without a declaration of war by men not in uniform who killed innocent civilians. The motive of the attack is perfectly clear: they have announced it again and again. They wish for Hegemony in the Middle East, the destruction of Israel, the weakening of Europe, the imposition of Shari’a law wherever possible. The disrespect paid to Muslim mathematicians in Andalusia is not among their complaints.
They are merely this generation’s harbingers of a civilizational war that has been going on since the time of Emperor Heraclius. The battle has been ongoing since the battle of Hieromyax (for those of you who speak PC, this is the battle of Yarmouk in Anatolia.)
They are the enemy. We did not create them. You are hallucinating if you think the enemy will go away if only we all retreated to Galt’s Gulch and swore to be self-centered on his great electric altar.
“Stop advocating worse-than-useless, counter-productive laws which mangle and devour the lives, fortunes, and sacred honor of Americans and “The Saracen” loses all power to threaten”
Excrementum tauri est. Do you honestly think they ‘just want to be alone’?
In sum, it is good to see you acknowledge that the government has become the problem, that it is engaged in “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, to reduce [us] under absolute despotism.” It’s metastasized. Old Yeller has gone rabid and slipped its leash. The process can no more be reversed than Second Law of Thermodynamics be repealled. It needs to go.
The thing is, you really ought to quit howling for blood and war, which is what you seem to be doing. It’s not only unnecessary but counter-productive and downright immoral.
Dear internet,
Today I learned that the only alternative to appeasement is war and blood, and a sure sign that one’s ideology is failing is when people who don’t practice it don’t get practical results! Life sure is funny, isn’t it?
In other news, the State Department has announced that its number one priority is asteroid defense and the DOD is redoubling its efforts to ensure that municipal sewage engineers are fully informed on the pros and cons of union membership.
The frustrating thing is that, aside from placing manuscripts about the hindu numbering system (which we erroneously call hindu-arabic numbers), every contribution to science made by islam can be attributed to not not persecuting a group of nestorian monks living within the Caliphate during the Ummayid dynasty. Once a more devout dynasty took over the Caliphate, islamic science went into torpor, if it did not die outright. You would think that there was no place for science in the muslim world view.
There are progressives that opine that Islam needs to have its Martin Luther, when what it really needs is its Thomas Aquinas.
There are progressives that opine that Islam needs to have its Martin Luther, when what it really needs is its Thomas Aquinas.
The one serious attempt to excise reason from Christianity I have ever seen, looked mysteriously like Islam. That was one of the things that caused me to question any such attempts. I am inclined to agree with you.
What about al-Kindi? Okay, so, well, he was flogged in public to cheering crowds and his library confiscated; but he contributed to science.
And ibn Rushd, known in Europe as “The Commentator.” Okay, so he was deprived of all offices and had to flee al-Andalus, and more copies of his work circulated to greater praise in Europe than ever did in the House of Submission. But like he was kool, right?
And what about all the madrassas that taught science? Well, okay, the one (in Persia) that taught science. Why, it lasted nearly 70 years! Hah! Match that, University of Paris! Hmm. Well. OK. Umm.
OK. What about all the scientific literature that was, umm, copied by the muslims from, umm, Greek originals, by um, Syriac Nestorians. Why, they even called it, well, um, “Greek Studies” or “foreign studies.”
So… I know. Al-Ghazali! Remember when he said that fire does not burn cloth? It was God that caused the fire and God that caused the cloth to blacken and disintegrate. But the fire itself did not have the power to do so. It was only the “habit of God” that made the two events come one after the other. Not -that- was surely a great leap in science!
Say, wait a minute. How will reminding modern muslims about the accomplishments of a bunch of heretics long ago help their self-esteem? Or is this a subtle effort to undermine the ash’ari aqida with insidious mu’tazilitism?
There were some really good Arab mathematicians (sorry, can’t spell without spellchecker) and it is a shame that their contribution is not more widely heralded…
…but why are we reaching out to the Muslims and not…well, everyone else. There’s a lot of other people who had excellent but forgotten contributions, too.
obama’s dealth panels will be the end of our health care