How many children actually need neo-natal heart work? Or have severe birth defects?
Because modern parents will sue a doctor, her practice, and any hospital they've ever visited in their lifetime if they sense for a second that every possibly $100,000 test, $1,000,000 imaging device, $10,000/dose experimental drug, $5,000/hour team of critical care people etc aren't fully deployed no matter what the prognosis, every child in that situations consumes more health care than a thousand (or more) generally-healthy babies. My neighbor gave birth to a premature kid. She's great, like her a lot all these years later. But her birth and the year following it cost roughly $3,000,000. And that was just a premature birth because the mother just had to go out dancing.
It isn't about denying healthcare to someone in such a situation. It's about knowing three weeks into a pregnancy that you're guaranteed to have a real problem on your hands that will cost what it would cost to birth a couple thousand other kids. There's nothing morally wrong with thinking that through while all you're dealing with is an embryo less sophisticated than the fish that went into the sushi you had for lunch.
How is it selfish to want others to be better off?
You've got it backwards. He thinks it's selfish to want to use science to make sure your baby is genetically healthy. I say he's an ass hat for saying that other people should just take the chances they get and lump it if they don't have to.
Nice straw man there, and utterly disingenuous attempt to pretend you didn't get the point. You get bonus points for throwing in the ad hominem gay bashing rant, too. Nice work!
No, that's exactly wrong. The point he made, and which I'm trying to reinforce, is that many posts here are marked by a reflexive, sweeping, venomous animosity that drips with loathing for anybody that runs a business (especially one that employs people, to say nothing of one that is actually successful). There is no topic here that doesn't find its way around some means by which to spout vitriol about anyone that makes one penny more a year than the person doing the bitching. If you don't see this, you're deliberately ignoring it.
And if your whistling-past-the-graveyard la-dee-da-chance-is-fine-with-me baby turns out to need $200k worth of otherwise avoidable neo-natal heart work or a lifetime of constant nursing care, you'll be happy to stick other people with the bill, too, right? Because that how that ends of working.
It's one thing to get hit by a bus on your way to work and rack up $1m in neurolgical services. It's another thing to decide to go rock climging without a belay or helmet, and do the same. Likewise, knowing you've got a quarter of a teaspoon of embryo with sure-fire signs of a short, miserable, explensive life of pain and suffering in store for it, and proceeding anyway... yeah, you're a nice guy. Chance is fun! Save it for poker, not the avoidable horror show of a sick and dying kid.
a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the discussion
Other than the part where he's exactly right. This is a prevalent, recurring theme throughout many/. threads, and the tone of such posts is almost always irrational, whiney, or worse. The GP is very observant. Not that you'd have to be to spot that trend.
You are being selfish, not wanting other people to be less likely than you to suffer from mental illness, premature death from failing organs, etc.
The word "selfish" presents all sorts of opportunities for irony, and you just landed some.
No, actually we don't. It depends on what the people want, since this is a democracy
No, it's not. It's a constitutional republic, and the constitution expressly keeps the government (which includes government-run public schools) out of the religous propoganda and indoctrination business. People who want to stunt their kids' futures by making sure they only see things from a medieval perspective should simply take them out of public schools and train them privately. And, of course, watch them fail reasonable standardized tests when they attempt to be certifiied as educated to those government standards.
you need to break the country up into smaller units
You're confusing country with culture. The irony of your confusion on this topic, even as you maintain a condescending smarter-than-thou posture, is no lost on your readers.
the only way to do that is to have an authoritarian government
No, the only way to do it is to require them to amend the constitution if they want government to be in the religious indoctrination line of work. They will never be able to do that. And so all we need to do is challenge their attempts at government religious activity in civil court - where it always fails, on the simplest of 1st Amendment grounds.
I wonder what it costs you to maintain, pay taxes on, and get to and from your non-spoiled, obviously essential "family mountain house."
I own an SUV, and only an SUV. And it's for exactly the reasons the GP mentioned. It's frequently full of people, lots of cargo, and travels over questionable terrain. I work from home almost all the time, and so use - at 18mpg - far less fuel than most people do, regardless of how tiny a vehicle they own, should they commute. When we buy most food, it's a tuckload, every few weeks. This as opposed to the people in tiny cars that flit back and forth to the store every other day for a constant parade of small pickups/deliveries to their pantry. It's not about mpg, it's about lifestyle. I'd like a mountain house, but don't want to pay for energy to keep it safe and functional, or for the taxes to keep it mine.
You mentioned hiring people to large, heavy things. Why not just rent a vacation house for a week on the rare occasions you need one? Just pointing out the similarities.
Wow, Mr. Lefty Political Hack. You're doing a fabulous job of pretending your party's control of the legislature and executive branches didn't matter. Or that your party's leader and his policy of regime change in Iraq and continuing military presence there didn't happen. Or that it was dem-led policies that created the housing bubble that is at the heart of the current recession.
And I really get tired of weird accusations like "the administration doesn't want to talk about" even mean? It's all just rhetorical hocus pocus.
It means talking about things like the fact that even if you taxed the Eeeeevil Rich People at 100%, it wouldn't even cover the deficit for a few months, let alone balance the budget or even begin to pay the interest on trillions in new debt. That's the stuff that Obama's people don't want to talk about. That no amount of taxes will cause prosperity. Only a growing, thriving economy unencombered by trillions in new deficit spending will allow any sort of solid economy to claw its way back. And they are proposing the opposite: to tax the economy back to health - even though they know that the math does not lie, and that it cannot work. Think what you will about Ryan and distracting (meaningless) social wedge issues - he doesn't blink when it comes to the deficit/debt math horror show. And he'll talk about it, and Biden will blather and make his usual ad hominem and gaffe-laden anecdotes instead of actually talking about reality. And it will show.
So what you want is for a small group to take all the risks and to do things like start businesses and employ people, and then to give away what they create. How long do you suppose that people will want to create things when someone with a gun is standing there promising to take it away and give it to people who don't create things? How about we split what I create 50/50 when you also do the same amount of work I do, and create as much as I create. And then... ah! No point swapping out equal amounts of things, is there?
You don't want equitable, you want productive, hard-working tax slaves, paying even more than the vast majority of all the country's taxes they already pay. And here I thought that owning slaves being a bad thing was already settled.
So you think that out of all the people who are qualified to be Vice President, the "correct" choice just happened to be a white, Anglo-Saxon male? Do you understand how absurd that sounds?
So what you're saying is that it's inappropriate for someone who happens to be the same skin color as most of the people who seek and hold lower offices to stick with that career and wind up in higher executive office after seven terms in congress? Your preference is to... what?... have racial quotas for who gets to be a congressional representative - based on skin pigment - so that later, when someone running for president wants to sift through the people that he likes, he'll have a more likely choice among different colors? Are you also going to use quotas to make sure that he's able to choose someone that shares his personal view of government's role in society and the nature of the constituation? How are you going to do that, exactly, based on skin color? Will you use quotas to ship more gay people from New York into Wisconsin so that there are exactly the right number of them running to represent a small Wisconsin district? Please, do go into some details, as I'm sure you've thought it all the way through. Will you be forcing some people to hold certain views so that presidential candidates will have exactly proportional choices from all shades of skin? Do tell! Specifically. Thanks.
It'd be nice if some of that policy work went towards making life better for oppressed
So you should be all for a guy who is laser-focused on reducing the country's aggressive debt death-spiral. Because the poor and down-trodden who've been trained for decades to expect someone else to provide for them are going to have the worst of it when get to the point where several people are living off of the taxes being paid by only one or two people.
We have serious problems in this country
Yes, we do. We have a government that spends wildly more money than it takes through taxes. Taxing millionaires at a rate of 100% of their earnings wouldn't even pay the federal deficit through the first fiscal quarter of the year, let alone touch the debt and the choking interest service we're all passing along to future generations. You cannot tax the economy into prosperity, and you cannot continue to dole out vastly more borrowed money without economic prosperity to back it up.
Putting the 'kill medicare' guy into office is kind of a huge joke.
No, the joke is you perpetuating that nice little lefty lie. But you know it is, so I won't bother pointing out the actual details. The most important one, of course, is that medicare is already dead. Do the math. It's falling off a cliff. The people who actually, really need it - the sort of people you seem to want to claim you care about - are once again going to be the worst-off as that corrupt, nonsensical, and bankrupt program fails and chases doctors away from it as fast as they can back out of the paperwork.
Ryan and his idealogical partners can't kill something that's already dying. Only reducing the rate at which it grossly wastes money can help it, and that's something that Pelosi, Reid, and Obama have not only avoided doing, they crafted a law specifically to get around having to address it. But the math is unavoidable, and Ryan at least as the manners not to sugarcoat the issue and pretend - as you're doing, and as Joe Biden does whenever asked - that it doesn't exist.
Sure it does. That's the wing that thinks that one group of people should permanently, structurally, be taxed in order to provide social spending for the 50% of the country that pay no income taxes at all. The group that is focused on the government as the source of personal comfort, sustenance, housing, medical services, etc., using funds removed from a small group of people who will be the beasts of burden providing all of those things. That group is the left wing. The Nanny Staters, the collectivists, the people who think the government doesn't yet have enough involvement in day to day personal activities and decision making. That's a left wing no matter what country it's in. Our president just reflected on the move he made to take General Motors away from the people who owned it, and while keeping a large share of the company for the government, gave the rest to labor union supporters on the left. And he just said yesterday that he'd like to repeat that process across all industries in the US. You know - classic left-wing claptrap.
No matter how much the left will want to make this about Ryan wanting to kill little old ladies (as in their ad showing him literally throwing one off a cliff), what this will really do is force people like Biden (in debates, with Ryan) to directly address some specific things that the current administration would really, really rather not talk about. Which is good for everyone, no matter how the voting goes.
So your compaint is about small-time retailers who don't understand the value of your time, and thus aren't prepared to cashier your order. You'd have the same complaint if they used a classic wireless credit card terminal, but didn't have it turned on or loaded with paper until after you handed them your credit card.
You've never really used this system, have you? Or does it actually take you two to three minutes to type in your e-mail address on a pad? Really? Two to three minutes? Because it's swipe, sign, optionally-type, done. I've done hundreds of Square transactions, and it takes seconds. You don't know what you're talking about.
A few hundred comments here on/. addressed this topic when he (the agency's director) mentioned this in an interview. He was fresh from meeting with Obama, and that was what he took away and decided to talk about. Just google for it, man. I copied/pasted his words from the CNN web site.
And which mission is the one trying to prevent another entire generation in that region from falling under the control of a bunch of medieval-minded religious thugs who drag school teachers out into the town square and shoot them in the head in front of their students for talking about current events and science? You know, things like landing an SUV on Mars with the help of female scientists who are allowed to drive themselves to work where they can talk to men, read and write, and make a living doing science.
You're right. We can only do one thing at a time. We should focus on more rovers, and tell the Taliban that they're welcome to roll that region back into the Dark Ages again, and do their level best to work their way into more influence in nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Or maybe it is possible to do two things, possibly even three things, at once? In the interests of both practicing fantastic science like this, and endeavoring to show the world that Western Civilization thinks its rude to burn down school houses for daring to talk about it. Nah, that's crazy talk, right?
I think it's safe to say that if Obama doesn't win the election, NASA's director may get some slightly different marching orders than he got from Obama. Director Bolden, on his meeting with Obama on NASA strategy, mission: "...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."
Now if that's not a worthy foremost priority for NASA, I don't know what is. Pumping up the self esteem of the Religion Of Peace seems like it should be lower on the totem pole than a whole lot of other objectives (he said it was more important than expanding NASA's interaction with other country's space programs, and more important than inspiring kids to get into math and the sciences. Neato.
Budget issues aside, I'd like to see the agency's mission drift back towards its real target, in much the way that its scientists just bulls-eyed that landing zone on Mars.
Seriously? You're going to condemn an entire culture? For the perceived crime of condemning your culture?
No, I'm going to say exactly what I said, again. I'm all for pushing back against the violent parts of a culture that lash out at the rest of the world (you know, by killing people) expressly because they are afraid of things like literate women. I don't care if they condemn the notion of a culture with things like women who are allowed to vote and work, but I do care when they do things like blow up nightclubs full of people, destroy embassies, kill trainloads of people in places like Madrid and much worse in an attempt to bolster their street cred while the call to caliphate-ize the entire middle east and the rest of the world. But to the extent that the wider culture under which they operate does nothing more than vaguely chastise them for sending drugged young girls wearing bomb vests into a vegetable market to slaughter women and children for being the wrong flavor of religious and insufficiently supporting of jihaddism... yeah, I'm prepared to offer up some culture-wide condemnation.
Go watch Collateral Murder on youtube, then come back and say this shit.
Why? Armed insurgents in a combat area were killed. Reporters that didn't announce themselves or take any steps to make sure that the counter-insurgency efforts were aware of their presence were caught up in the combat that the people they were hanging out with started. This has what, exactly, to do with the fact that the insurgents were part of a campaign to retain and promote the strength of groups that would, indeed, prefer that NASA's female scientists were put to death for how they've spent their lives? That you're posting as a Coward is in keeping with your urge to skip over that little detail. Spineless moral relativisim must be a painful condition.
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How many children actually need neo-natal heart work? Or have severe birth defects?
Because modern parents will sue a doctor, her practice, and any hospital they've ever visited in their lifetime if they sense for a second that every possibly $100,000 test, $1,000,000 imaging device, $10,000/dose experimental drug, $5,000/hour team of critical care people etc aren't fully deployed no matter what the prognosis, every child in that situations consumes more health care than a thousand (or more) generally-healthy babies. My neighbor gave birth to a premature kid. She's great, like her a lot all these years later. But her birth and the year following it cost roughly $3,000,000. And that was just a premature birth because the mother just had to go out dancing.
It isn't about denying healthcare to someone in such a situation. It's about knowing three weeks into a pregnancy that you're guaranteed to have a real problem on your hands that will cost what it would cost to birth a couple thousand other kids. There's nothing morally wrong with thinking that through while all you're dealing with is an embryo less sophisticated than the fish that went into the sushi you had for lunch.
How is it selfish to want others to be better off?
You've got it backwards. He thinks it's selfish to want to use science to make sure your baby is genetically healthy. I say he's an ass hat for saying that other people should just take the chances they get and lump it if they don't have to.
Nice straw man there, and utterly disingenuous attempt to pretend you didn't get the point. You get bonus points for throwing in the ad hominem gay bashing rant, too. Nice work!
Nobody is faulting anyone for being rich.
No, that's exactly wrong. The point he made, and which I'm trying to reinforce, is that many posts here are marked by a reflexive, sweeping, venomous animosity that drips with loathing for anybody that runs a business (especially one that employs people, to say nothing of one that is actually successful). There is no topic here that doesn't find its way around some means by which to spout vitriol about anyone that makes one penny more a year than the person doing the bitching. If you don't see this, you're deliberately ignoring it.
No thanks, I'll just stick with chance.
And if your whistling-past-the-graveyard la-dee-da-chance-is-fine-with-me baby turns out to need $200k worth of otherwise avoidable neo-natal heart work or a lifetime of constant nursing care, you'll be happy to stick other people with the bill, too, right? Because that how that ends of working.
... yeah, you're a nice guy. Chance is fun! Save it for poker, not the avoidable horror show of a sick and dying kid.
It's one thing to get hit by a bus on your way to work and rack up $1m in neurolgical services. It's another thing to decide to go rock climging without a belay or helmet, and do the same. Likewise, knowing you've got a quarter of a teaspoon of embryo with sure-fire signs of a short, miserable, explensive life of pain and suffering in store for it, and proceeding anyway
a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the discussion
Other than the part where he's exactly right. This is a prevalent, recurring theme throughout many /. threads, and the tone of such posts is almost always irrational, whiney, or worse. The GP is very observant. Not that you'd have to be to spot that trend.
You are being selfish, not wanting other people to be less likely than you to suffer from mental illness, premature death from failing organs, etc. The word "selfish" presents all sorts of opportunities for irony, and you just landed some.
No, actually we don't. It depends on what the people want, since this is a democracy
No, it's not. It's a constitutional republic, and the constitution expressly keeps the government (which includes government-run public schools) out of the religous propoganda and indoctrination business. People who want to stunt their kids' futures by making sure they only see things from a medieval perspective should simply take them out of public schools and train them privately. And, of course, watch them fail reasonable standardized tests when they attempt to be certifiied as educated to those government standards.
you need to break the country up into smaller units
You're confusing country with culture. The irony of your confusion on this topic, even as you maintain a condescending smarter-than-thou posture, is no lost on your readers.
the only way to do that is to have an authoritarian government
No, the only way to do it is to require them to amend the constitution if they want government to be in the religious indoctrination line of work. They will never be able to do that. And so all we need to do is challenge their attempts at government religious activity in civil court - where it always fails, on the simplest of 1st Amendment grounds.
I wonder what it costs you to maintain, pay taxes on, and get to and from your non-spoiled, obviously essential "family mountain house."
I own an SUV, and only an SUV. And it's for exactly the reasons the GP mentioned. It's frequently full of people, lots of cargo, and travels over questionable terrain. I work from home almost all the time, and so use - at 18mpg - far less fuel than most people do, regardless of how tiny a vehicle they own, should they commute. When we buy most food, it's a tuckload, every few weeks. This as opposed to the people in tiny cars that flit back and forth to the store every other day for a constant parade of small pickups/deliveries to their pantry. It's not about mpg, it's about lifestyle. I'd like a mountain house, but don't want to pay for energy to keep it safe and functional, or for the taxes to keep it mine.
You mentioned hiring people to large, heavy things. Why not just rent a vacation house for a week on the rare occasions you need one? Just pointing out the similarities.
And I really get tired of weird accusations like "the administration doesn't want to talk about" even mean? It's all just rhetorical hocus pocus.
It means talking about things like the fact that even if you taxed the Eeeeevil Rich People at 100%, it wouldn't even cover the deficit for a few months, let alone balance the budget or even begin to pay the interest on trillions in new debt. That's the stuff that Obama's people don't want to talk about. That no amount of taxes will cause prosperity. Only a growing, thriving economy unencombered by trillions in new deficit spending will allow any sort of solid economy to claw its way back. And they are proposing the opposite: to tax the economy back to health - even though they know that the math does not lie, and that it cannot work. Think what you will about Ryan and distracting (meaningless) social wedge issues - he doesn't blink when it comes to the deficit/debt math horror show. And he'll talk about it, and Biden will blather and make his usual ad hominem and gaffe-laden anecdotes instead of actually talking about reality. And it will show.
So what you want is for a small group to take all the risks and to do things like start businesses and employ people, and then to give away what they create. How long do you suppose that people will want to create things when someone with a gun is standing there promising to take it away and give it to people who don't create things? How about we split what I create 50/50 when you also do the same amount of work I do, and create as much as I create. And then ... ah! No point swapping out equal amounts of things, is there?
You don't want equitable, you want productive, hard-working tax slaves, paying even more than the vast majority of all the country's taxes they already pay. And here I thought that owning slaves being a bad thing was already settled.
So you think that out of all the people who are qualified to be Vice President, the "correct" choice just happened to be a white, Anglo-Saxon male? Do you understand how absurd that sounds?
So what you're saying is that it's inappropriate for someone who happens to be the same skin color as most of the people who seek and hold lower offices to stick with that career and wind up in higher executive office after seven terms in congress? Your preference is to ... what? ... have racial quotas for who gets to be a congressional representative - based on skin pigment - so that later, when someone running for president wants to sift through the people that he likes, he'll have a more likely choice among different colors? Are you also going to use quotas to make sure that he's able to choose someone that shares his personal view of government's role in society and the nature of the constituation? How are you going to do that, exactly, based on skin color? Will you use quotas to ship more gay people from New York into Wisconsin so that there are exactly the right number of them running to represent a small Wisconsin district? Please, do go into some details, as I'm sure you've thought it all the way through. Will you be forcing some people to hold certain views so that presidential candidates will have exactly proportional choices from all shades of skin? Do tell! Specifically. Thanks.
It'd be nice if some of that policy work went towards making life better for oppressed
So you should be all for a guy who is laser-focused on reducing the country's aggressive debt death-spiral. Because the poor and down-trodden who've been trained for decades to expect someone else to provide for them are going to have the worst of it when get to the point where several people are living off of the taxes being paid by only one or two people.
We have serious problems in this country
Yes, we do. We have a government that spends wildly more money than it takes through taxes. Taxing millionaires at a rate of 100% of their earnings wouldn't even pay the federal deficit through the first fiscal quarter of the year, let alone touch the debt and the choking interest service we're all passing along to future generations. You cannot tax the economy into prosperity, and you cannot continue to dole out vastly more borrowed money without economic prosperity to back it up.
Putting the 'kill medicare' guy into office is kind of a huge joke.
No, the joke is you perpetuating that nice little lefty lie. But you know it is, so I won't bother pointing out the actual details. The most important one, of course, is that medicare is already dead. Do the math. It's falling off a cliff. The people who actually, really need it - the sort of people you seem to want to claim you care about - are once again going to be the worst-off as that corrupt, nonsensical, and bankrupt program fails and chases doctors away from it as fast as they can back out of the paperwork.
Ryan and his idealogical partners can't kill something that's already dying. Only reducing the rate at which it grossly wastes money can help it, and that's something that Pelosi, Reid, and Obama have not only avoided doing, they crafted a law specifically to get around having to address it. But the math is unavoidable, and Ryan at least as the manners not to sugarcoat the issue and pretend - as you're doing, and as Joe Biden does whenever asked - that it doesn't exist.
So you are another person that believes that intelligence varies with skin color? Nice.
Your country doesn't have a left wing
Sure it does. That's the wing that thinks that one group of people should permanently, structurally, be taxed in order to provide social spending for the 50% of the country that pay no income taxes at all. The group that is focused on the government as the source of personal comfort, sustenance, housing, medical services, etc., using funds removed from a small group of people who will be the beasts of burden providing all of those things. That group is the left wing. The Nanny Staters, the collectivists, the people who think the government doesn't yet have enough involvement in day to day personal activities and decision making. That's a left wing no matter what country it's in. Our president just reflected on the move he made to take General Motors away from the people who owned it, and while keeping a large share of the company for the government, gave the rest to labor union supporters on the left. And he just said yesterday that he'd like to repeat that process across all industries in the US. You know - classic left-wing claptrap.
So you think that skin color or gender is what makes a person correct for a given job? Do you understand how absurd that actually sounds? I guess not.
No matter how much the left will want to make this about Ryan wanting to kill little old ladies (as in their ad showing him literally throwing one off a cliff), what this will really do is force people like Biden (in debates, with Ryan) to directly address some specific things that the current administration would really, really rather not talk about. Which is good for everyone, no matter how the voting goes.
So your compaint is about small-time retailers who don't understand the value of your time, and thus aren't prepared to cashier your order. You'd have the same complaint if they used a classic wireless credit card terminal, but didn't have it turned on or loaded with paper until after you handed them your credit card.
You've never really used this system, have you? Or does it actually take you two to three minutes to type in your e-mail address on a pad? Really? Two to three minutes? Because it's swipe, sign, optionally-type, done. I've done hundreds of Square transactions, and it takes seconds. You don't know what you're talking about.
A few hundred comments here on /. addressed this topic when he (the agency's director) mentioned this in an interview. He was fresh from meeting with Obama, and that was what he took away and decided to talk about. Just google for it, man. I copied/pasted his words from the CNN web site.
And which mission is the one trying to prevent another entire generation in that region from falling under the control of a bunch of medieval-minded religious thugs who drag school teachers out into the town square and shoot them in the head in front of their students for talking about current events and science? You know, things like landing an SUV on Mars with the help of female scientists who are allowed to drive themselves to work where they can talk to men, read and write, and make a living doing science.
You're right. We can only do one thing at a time. We should focus on more rovers, and tell the Taliban that they're welcome to roll that region back into the Dark Ages again, and do their level best to work their way into more influence in nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Or maybe it is possible to do two things, possibly even three things, at once? In the interests of both practicing fantastic science like this, and endeavoring to show the world that Western Civilization thinks its rude to burn down school houses for daring to talk about it. Nah, that's crazy talk, right?
no matter who wins the next election
I think it's safe to say that if Obama doesn't win the election, NASA's director may get some slightly different marching orders than he got from Obama. Director Bolden, on his meeting with Obama on NASA strategy, mission: " ...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."
Now if that's not a worthy foremost priority for NASA, I don't know what is. Pumping up the self esteem of the Religion Of Peace seems like it should be lower on the totem pole than a whole lot of other objectives (he said it was more important than expanding NASA's interaction with other country's space programs, and more important than inspiring kids to get into math and the sciences. Neato.
Budget issues aside, I'd like to see the agency's mission drift back towards its real target, in much the way that its scientists just bulls-eyed that landing zone on Mars.
Seriously? You're going to condemn an entire culture? For the perceived crime of condemning your culture?
No, I'm going to say exactly what I said, again. I'm all for pushing back against the violent parts of a culture that lash out at the rest of the world (you know, by killing people) expressly because they are afraid of things like literate women. I don't care if they condemn the notion of a culture with things like women who are allowed to vote and work, but I do care when they do things like blow up nightclubs full of people, destroy embassies, kill trainloads of people in places like Madrid and much worse in an attempt to bolster their street cred while the call to caliphate-ize the entire middle east and the rest of the world. But to the extent that the wider culture under which they operate does nothing more than vaguely chastise them for sending drugged young girls wearing bomb vests into a vegetable market to slaughter women and children for being the wrong flavor of religious and insufficiently supporting of jihaddism ... yeah, I'm prepared to offer up some culture-wide condemnation.
What are you talking about? I replied to someone else who tossed in silly notion that it's NASA vs. Military, funding-wise. Which it's not.
Go watch Collateral Murder on youtube, then come back and say this shit.
Why? Armed insurgents in a combat area were killed. Reporters that didn't announce themselves or take any steps to make sure that the counter-insurgency efforts were aware of their presence were caught up in the combat that the people they were hanging out with started. This has what, exactly, to do with the fact that the insurgents were part of a campaign to retain and promote the strength of groups that would, indeed, prefer that NASA's female scientists were put to death for how they've spent their lives? That you're posting as a Coward is in keeping with your urge to skip over that little detail. Spineless moral relativisim must be a painful condition.