Happy Birthday, NASA

Fifty years ago today, in response to the Sputnik crisis, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

For a kid like me, growing up in Florida in the final days of the Cold War, NASA stood as a mixed symbol. On one hand, what a heritage! Stern men in white lab coats, beeping displays, cold readiness, and firey, brain-rattling launches: NASA was a secular monastery devoted wholly to the god Science. Its doings were at once utterly trustworthy, and tinged with deep unease.

And on the other hand—what a tidal shift. In the decade between 1985 and 1995, the bipolar political alignment of the planet, in place for forty years, unraveled. We lost a shuttle and launched a telescope. The first pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, in all their blurry wonder, were beamed back to a world fresh out from under the heavy blanket of history. The universe expanded in scope and magnificence, while the planet itself seemed so much smaller and more available than it had ever been.

Is it any wonder our concept of “enemy” weakened? Indeed, we went from threatening Russians with “Star Wars” strategic missile defense, to docking at their space station, Mir.

Children my age, born in the seventies, were never around for the run-up of the Cold War that resulted in NASA’s existence. We were hardly around for the fear, and barely understood it. We knew only Brezhnev, only Gorbachev—a disintegrating threat. Science was an institutional authority to be questioned: Why the militarization? Why did anyone ever think Mutually Assured Destruction was a good idea? We’d missed the opening moves of the Cold War, and so felt compelled to hasten the endgame.

We would use science to clean up the messes that had been made with it. We would join with out former enemies, and save the environment of the only habitable planet science had ever found. And maybe that’s a good thing: as the decades roll on, and government money gets tighter, it’s harder and harder to imagine that space colonization is close.

But part of me is sad, especially to think that Shuttle launches may end in two years. We may become better stewards of this planet, but will we ever be able to leave it? Was the end of the “Us and Them” political attitude also the end of our deep motivation to master space?

My one consolation is the knowledge that those secular monasteries are still there, in Florida, in Texas, in California. They’re still filled with beeping dials, and lab-coated men and women who want to reach the stars far more than most of us will ever know.

Thank you, NASA.

Let’s see: terrorism bomb Taliban 9-11 Osama Islam NSA…Am I missing one?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—to hell with this wiretap-immunity bill, to hell with this climate of fear, and to hell with anyone so spineless and nutless as to defend it.

From BBC:
“US President George W Bush has approved a bill to shield telephone companies who helped in the White House’s controversial wiretaps programme.”

At this point, you’re either against almost anything Bush does, or you’ve had a traumatic head injury somewhere in the past eight years. I’m done even being nice about it, or pretending that both sides have worthwhile points. This administration has fucked up everything it’s ever touched, and used the destruction it’s wrought as an excuse to grab and abuse more power.

I’m not against the surveillance. I’m against the immunity. If our government has shown us anything in the past decade, it’s that it can’t handle the responsibility of power. And we all know how just and fair the telecom industry is—raise your hand if you’ve never had a problem with one of them.

Well, one just granted legal immunity to the other, in exchange for “assistance”.

I can understand Bush’s actions, and those of the opportunists in the telecommunications industry. The rich and powerful usually lose whatever shred of conscience they ever had, in their drive for more riches and power. Sociopaths do what sociopaths do—it’s how nature made them. It’s the supporters of the bill that make me sick.

The lawmakers.

Thanks, you amoral, broken, craven cocksuckers. Thanks, Washington zombie, so disconnected from your own humanity that your family have become mere statistic points. Thanks, shaky-legged, hand-licking Democrats, so grateful for a place at Lord Bush’s table that you’re willing to eat chocolate-covered pieces of your children’s future.

Thanks most of all, chest-thumping xenophobic warmongers. Because of you, we face ridicule abroad and oppression at home. You sold your birthright—your freedom—for ego inflation and a license to hate. Well fucking done.

Oh, and Barack—

“‘I wouldn’t have drafted the legislation like this,’ said Mr Obama, in a statement on his website. However, he added, ‘in a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people’.”

No shit. But it’s our government that is the biggest danger to us right now, and protecting the American people isn’t even on its list of priorities. We know it, and we know that you know it.

Try not to sell out your entire platform.

Because it’s never too late to write in Stephen Colbert.

***

Jennifer Caukin, of skype.com : “We have not received any subpoenas or court orders asking us to perform a live interception or wiretap of Skype-to-Skype communications. In any event, because of Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request.”

What’s In My Bag?

photo uploaded to Flickr by the catalyst…

200 Days Left

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

“That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.”

Happy Fourth of July, lovelies. May all your days be as independent as this one.