Are Technophobes Necessary?

The New York Pravda editorial page as usual skips past the details and gets right down to the nitty-gritty the Dominionists and the Carlyle War Machine would like the people to think about:

Is the Space Station Necessary?

Now that the space shuttle fleet has been grounded until NASA can solve its foam-shedding problem, it's time to re-examine the future of the International Space Station.

The space station is circling the globe, partly finished, some 240 miles overhead. Its fate and that of the shuttle fleet are intertwined. The shuttle is a finicky and technologically outdated vehicle that should be replaced with a safer and more reliable spacecraft. The rub is that a replacement is at least five years away and the space station cannot be completed without many more shuttle flights.

If the space station did not have to be finished, there would be little reason to keep the shuttle fleet in operation beyond a single flight to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. But how important, really, is the station?...

Juxtaposed to it is this little ditty: Meanwhile, People Starve.

Somehow the Pravda NeoLibs Hawks weren't really concerned about starving innocent people in the lead -up to the Iraqi War where Judith Miller and the Pravda played a front line role in convincing the nation to go for broke.

Why the bother to shoot down the international space station?

Think of all that money that could be going to DARPA contractors. Northrop-Grumman. Raytheon. All the D.o'D. black budget items that aren't as transparent as NASA.

Don't get me wrong. With an ex-CIA money launderer in charge of NASA, I'm quite sure the budget is a little, shall we say, padded. It's also a good bet that despite the fact the man is a Ph.D. physicist from M.I.T., scientific curiosity isn't tops on his agenda.

But let's get real. They don't like the space station because it can't be Darth Rumsfeld's tinker toy. They can't make a Death Star with the Russians on board.

Count on it: they'll see this one fall and burn up like Mir, and float another one- D.o'D. controlled- for their interplanetary pork aspirations.

Meanwhile, as pointed out to me by a friend, global warming has progressed to a point where Mount Kilimanjaro is stripped of its snowcap for the first time in 11,000 years. This photo was intended to be shown at London this summer, but with all the terra'ist chaos, somehow the point just didn't sink in to the main$tream media.

It's a similar tactic: distraction and subversion.

The space program could be designed as a model for international co operation and the development of new technology to spur international economies. But that grates on the Dominionists, who don't like all those new fangled ideas being spread around, nor do they like the evidence for a non-theological cosmology. It grates on the Military-Industrial complex, who like the idea of moving technological toys for quick bucks, not the idea of producing technology directed for a purpose. And finally it grates on the NeoCon jingoists, who view co operation as big obstacle to Empire.