During the last two weeks, a series of dizzying, stomach-churning events have sent shock waves around the world.
The American financial system has come thisclose to a complete meltdown, threatening to take the planet’s economy down with it. A venerable investment firm has collapsed, another was forced into a shotgun merger, and U.S. government now owns 80 percent of the world’s largest insurance company. President George W. Bush - about to bequeath a half-trillion dollar annual budget deficit on his successor - has proposed spending an additional $700 billion to buy out bad real estate investments. And that might be conservative. The national debt will be raised to a staggering $11.3 trillion.
You might think this would cause people to rethink some of our national priorities - such as building expensive housing for a handful of astronauts on the Moon, for example. But, you’ll be happy to know that NASA Administrator Mike Griffin is having none of it.
Continue reading ‘No Bucks, No Tom Wolfe Analogies’
If you do a search for “miserable failure” on certain web search engines, the top result will be a link to George W. Bush’s official White House biography. This is a result of multiple webmasters using the phrases “failure” and “miserable failure” to describe and link to the White House website.
They should probably be using that same technique to link to Bush’s space program, or more specifically, NASA. At least according to one Congressman. The Houston Chronicle reports:
“Two days after telling an online town hall meeting that NASA had ‘failed us miserably’ and ‘wastes a vast amount of money,’ Houston Rep. John Culberson said Thursday he was weighing legislation to overhaul the structure of the space agency responsible for about 20,000 Houston-area jobs.
“Culberson, a blunt-spoken conservative from a heavily Republican westside district, said his proposal would slash NASA headquarter’s bureaucracy and enable scientists and engineers to rekindle visionary space exploration.
“‘We need revolutionary change, a complete restructuring,’ Culberson told the Houston Chronicle. ‘NASA needs complete freedom to hire and fire based on performance, it needs to be driven by the scientists and the engineers, and it needs to be free of politics as much as possible.’”
