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Hawaii Approves Telescope On Volcano Sacred To Indigenous People (reuters.com)
A new $1.4 billion telescope will be built atop a Hawaiian volcano indigenous people consider sacred. The team of scientists fighting for the telescope won approval from Hawaiian officials on Thursday after selecting the site and applying to build there in 2009. Reuters reports: The Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources voted 5-2 to allow construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island, state officials said in a statement. Astronomers consider the summit one of the world's best places to view the cosmos, while Native Hawaiians say the project would disturb holy ground crucial to their connection with ancestors and the heavens. A consortium of scientists initially received construction permits from state officials in 2011. In 2015, the Hawaii Supreme Court voided that decision, saying officials did not follow the proper procedures for a "contested case hearing." That forced the state board to re-evaluate the proposal with more input from opponents. The project calls for building one of the world's largest telescopes atop the dormant volcano.
But at large cost as is often the case.
We will see the usual troublemakers rush back in to try and stir up more protests now.
The same ones who have been missing throughout this actual process, because creating public strife and being the center of attention is what the seek, rather than any actual improvement to peoples lives.
They sent some shaman (or whatever the druggy is called in their religion) to converse with the ancients and they said a gift of a few million bucks could appease them...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Their so-called 'native religion' is nothing but a pathetic hoax
I wholeheartedly agree! A hoax like all religions!
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
Ancient corpses are only used in building the support arms for the secondary mirror; the primary mirror is entirely corpse free.
All we want to do is eat your brains.
I always find it interesting that when the (few) native Hawaiians and their opportunistic supporters go up the mountain, they always seem to do it using the roads that the telescope facilities built and manage/maintain. I guess that part of the desecration is just a nice time saver.
Physical proof, you say? Does your "gaia" speak to you? Does it speak to _anyone_? Or is it just another (rather massive) pagan statue, merely a piece of dumb rock? The number of people that do not believe in the surface they stand on is really rather limited. The number of people believe that the surface they stand on is sentient and god-like is much, much smaller.
I'm totally with you on the naked dancing though. All religions should be doing that, it would improve things a lot.
Presumably less than telescope atop an active volcano...
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Hawaiian natives don't give a shit either. This "You can't build here because it's sacred" is just their long-standing way of demanding a bribe. You would think a "consortium of scientists" would be smart enough to figure out this is how things work in Hawaii.
Did somebody make a Hoffa they can't refuse?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Leftists have a problem with trash like you using religion to get at minorities. Christians are not being told to bugger off 'back to sand ni**er land'. Most left wingers think that all religions are superstition given unwarranted power. Quite apart from which we had the holy wars in the pig ignorant middle ages and the last thing the world needs now is more war.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Their so-called 'native religion' is nothing but a pathetic hoax
I wholeheartedly agree! A hoax like all religions!
The tricky part is that there really isn't a good way to differentiate. A Pastafarian is every bit as legitimate as a traditional Christian or a fundamentalist one, or Muslim or Hindu, or Jain and so on Nowhere is it written that a god cannot have a sense of humor.
In the Name of the Pasta, and of the Sauce, and of the Holy Meatballs, R'Amen.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Which way does liberal outrage swing these days?
I think the latest algorithm works like this:
Yeah yeah, take whatever group you don't like, and strawman the living fuck out of them. It kind of leaves out my family, who were serious liberals, yet were very religious.
And then there was me, the most conservative one of the bunch, who doesn't have any part of that bullshit fairy tale or any fairy tale for that matter.
Regardless, despite what people have been trained to think, there are right wing atheists, and left wing deeply religious. If a religion has a litmus test of politics, it is a political group more than a religion.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Which religion would that be? Let me guess: The only true one! How did you figure that out? Did you compare all the world's religions when you were a kid or did you just pick the one of the people who raised you or that you happened to interact with.
Of course it is the one you are exposed to as a child, that what culture IS, packaged messily as religion so you have a framework to build a personal morality from by taking responsibility for you're own shitty behavior. Here, read this book to discover how ugly and cruel humanity can be and figure out how to not to do that.
I've never got why people compare science and religion when they are two different fields of knowledge, one deals with the nature of the universe, the other the nature of humanity.
All religions are bullshit and no rational person should put up with any of them!
Is this from your study of religion? Isn't it also possible you simply lack the imagination and intellect to read the texts that created your culture? That brought forth the morality that crafted the laws that allow you to roam the streets at night in relative safety? That despite it's thousands of years of messy hypocrisy manifested enough civil behavior to lay the foundations for science so you could sit on your computer and criticize it as irrational, which it is, but what does that say about us?
Is it rational to trash someone else's culture because you can?
Rational, as if our society is rational. No, it is not rational because people are not rational and that's why a planet full of crazy primates evolved religion in several flavors so we have a framework for how to behave like a person that other people want to be around and not kill. Anyone who take religions as literal truth is not rational however anyone who cannot take the lessons from religion as archetypical truths about subjective behavior of human beings has little chance of mastering their own culture because they don't know the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
His Noodliness is about to run you through the Universal Colander for that bit of blasphemy.
Without any Parmesan cheese.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Chile is not a third world shithole. It's actually one of the best places in the world to start a business.
In part that's because it's a country run by and for a relatively small a social and financial elite, which may not be to you taste, but is far from making it a "shithole". It's actually quite clean and comfortable if you're middle class, and an excellent place if you aspire to ascend from the middle class to the ranks of the wealthy. If you're poor, expect to work hard without much chance of advancement, but you're probably not living in a hole in the ground; you're living in a house. It's a very *tiny* house by US standards, and if you live in the Santiago like almost half of Chileans do, it's in a neighborhood with epic air pollution, but it's still a house.
Basically imagine a US run by the Republican Party that could actually get things done. Chile might not be your idea of paradise, but it's not the Democratic Republic of Congo either.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The author of this piece has an agenda, lying by omission. There are several large telescopes on Mauna Kea. The "sacred ground" is already highly developed. The new telescope will be built on the site of one of the existing telescopes, which will be remove.
The original plan was to build on a new site. The compromise is to build on an existing site.
The summit of Mauna Kea isn't sacred like a burial ground. The native Hawaiians never went there. It's sacred like Mount Olympus was sacred to the ancient Greeks (they never went there either).
Win for astronomy, except the Governor made UH promise to close down 25% of their existing sites on the mountain. Because reasons.
And much more importantly, a big win for the rule of law. Public land is public land, and religious considerations can't be allowed to dictate use of public land.
Agreed, but the issue is which religions are PC to criticize, and which are protected from any and all criticism. Right now it's open season on Christianity, but every other religion gets a pass. If it were Christianity objecting to this telescope on "sacred ground" people would be waiting in line for hours to throw their two cents of derision Christianity's way. But if this is "sacred ground" to "indigenous people" (they are not) suddenly we have to respect and revere these ancient traditions and protest against this scientific endeavor. If we were consistent we'd call BS on all religious mumbo jumbo instead of reserving whipping boy status only for Christianity.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The Native Americans spent thousands of years killing each other and taking land from each other before Whitey ever showed up.
Ya, they got to eat a shit sandwich, just like the losers always have everywhere on Earth for all of History. And now we have a country which has enough power and influence to try and change that globally, and all you assmonkeys can do is whine about World Police.
I live in Honolulu, visit Puna on the Big Island pretty often.
Please do not paint native Hawaiians as anti-science, they are not.
The protesters are loud, but they represent a fairly small percentage of the population.
Protests are just part of the process of building new structures here.
Things still get built, believe me. They just take longer.
Ob astronomy reference 1 - the ancient polynesians were master navigators who relied on the stars to cross a huge seas in tiny craft without a compass or a map. They were the geeks of their day.
Ob astronomy reference 2 - Many heavenly bodies discovered in Hawaii have been given Hawaiian / polynesian names. The new scope will doubtless add more.
Nah, Pastafarian isn't a real religion. There's not enough guilt and self loathing for it to count as a religion. Maybe what you really need is some fundamentalists who run out and bomb all the infidels who don't like Italian food.
It's science which they distrust vs. "false" religion they don't like.
If they can be bothered to watch at all, they sit back with a bowl of popcorn.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nobody would give a shit about your religion if you didn't constantly try to push it into education and law. Quite frankly, I couldn't care less about some loonies scooting about on their knees in front of a corpse nailed to an IKEA set if they didn't want to force me to do it, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah yeah, take whatever group you don't like, and strawman the living fuck out of them. It kind of leaves out my family, who were serious liberals, yet were very religious.
And then there was me, the most conservative one of the bunch, who doesn't have any part of that bullshit fairy tale or any fairy tale for that matter.
Funny. That fits my family exactly. I remember being shocked when I got to college and there was an association of religious with conservative. All the conservatives I knew were atheists and all the leftists I knew were United Church of Christ, etc., deeply religious.
That's because the "religious right", which is as much a political group as a religion, have somehow managed to usurp the whole definition, turning it into a nasty tempered cherry picking of the Old Testament's baser parts. I've never seen the Sermon on the Mount mentioned unless they are pressed into it, which you would think would be a "Christian's" guiding principles, being marching orders given by the man himself.
I do understand that the Republican party is issuing a new translation of the New Testament, to be known as the Cruz Edition, in which Supply Side Jesus tells the apostles to distribute the loaves and fish among the people, but only those who have passed a drug test first.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.