Slashdot Mirror
India Moves To Put Its First Man In Space By 2016
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from the International Business Times: "India plans to launch its first manned space mission in 2016, moving to become the fourth nation to put a man in space. Space scientists and senior officials of the state-run ISRO are preparing a pre-project report to build the infrastructure and facilities for the mission, estimated to cost a $2.76 billion. 'We are planning a human space flight in 2016, with two astronauts who will spend seven days in the Earth's lower orbit,' Radhakrishnan told reporters at ISRO headquarters in Bangalore. In September, India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite discovered water on the moon, boosting India's credibility among established space-faring nations"
While in geo-synchronise orbit over every major continent, call center employees will be available to answer your computer questions both day and night.
Ha ha. Let's make fun of the Indians and run through the usual 'call center' jokes because nobody has ever though of that before, huh?
This announcement comes on the same day that it has emerged that the US administration has no intention of going to the moon, in a time when the US national debt clock has needed an extra digit added to it, when the US is still recovering from the diplomatic and geo-political catastrophe what was the Bush years, and all you can do is crack jokes about Indians because they have started turning a hugely populated and impoverished country around using the latest opportunities afforded to them by technology. Hmmm.
Enjoy your inflated sense of superiority while it lasts, because it isn't gonna as long as people like you sit back on the Apollo moon landing's laurels and fiddle while Rome burns. The developing world is emerging onto the world stage. The EU is already the world's biggest economy. China and India have poverty on the run and are making in-roads into LEO. What's the USA doing? Still putting out fires in Mesopotamia, trying to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world in figuring out how to treat people when they're sick, and figuring out how to stop consuming a quarter of the world's resources.
Yup, you go right on cracking your jokes. Ha fucking ha. You won't be laughing so loud when you see the red flag of China over the Sea of Tranquility.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
To safeguard our identity and culture, and to maintain the very existence of our nation, we will immediately put an indefinite moratorium on all immigration......To restore, with civility, the identity and culture of our homeland, we will provide incentives for recent, legal immigrants to return to their respective lands.
Emphasis mine. So, while I may agree with the A3P position regarding space and fiscal responsibility, it appears that this party wants to take an isolationist attitude regarding the American culture. Never mind the fact that some of the greatest minds in America were immigrants. Nevermind the fact that Werner Von Braun was a German born rocket scientist, turned American immigrant, turned leader of the Saturn V program that got our boys to the moon. Never mind the fact that jazz, one of our greatest cultural movements in America, was started by immigrants. Nevermind the fact that Einstein, one of the best known scientists in the world, that contributed significantly to our nuclear supremacy was also a foreign born immigrant. Nevermind all those pesky historical facts that show, time and again, that legal immigration both enriches and strengthens America as a nation. Nah, forget all that, A3P is going to put a ban on ALL immigration. What's more? They are going to start paying legal immigrants to return to their own country. Goodbye knowledgeable Indian, Japanese, and Chinese scientists, programmers, engineers, and technicians. Goodbye Mexican immigrants that provide California with one of its most delicious and plentiful types of food. In fact, goodbye all non-native American people as you, in fact, have descended from immigrants yourself. We real Americans don't need you here.....
Oh wait...
So no, sorry, I am not going to give any credence to a political party that proudly declares white nationalism as one of its creeds and mission goals. The hypocrisy evident in the quote above with regards to immigration and the historical contribution immigrants have made to American technical progress is as thick as it is nauseating. Take your political astroturfing somewhere. I, for one, would rather spend my vote writing in a candidate with absolutely no chance at election (and thus adding one more vote to the count that reduces a possible majority of ANY party) than support that kind of bullshit that A3P is peddling.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
This might be taken as being anti-American, but it's not. Really, it's not.
I live in Scotland. My country is a lot older than America, to the extent that my house has trees in the garden that predate the USA. Somewhere round about the time that the Declaration of Independence was being signed, my house was having an extension built on an existing extension on the original house. We're the old guys. And from where I'm sitting, I can see the young guys.
America now looks like a possibly slightly backwards late teenager/early twenties guy, still pedalling around town on his outgrown BMX bike and making "Your Mom" jokes, while all the little kids that were too little for America to play with like India, Pakistan, Iran and China have now grown up a bit and got jobs and cars and girlfriends. And America really desperately wants to play, and throws his not inconsiderable weight around, but really until America grows up and starts acting like a responsible grown-up no-one wants to know.
America has slowly - over the past 20 years or so - made itself utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world.