“The world is flat’ (& only thousands of years old) – ‘& we can’t explore further or we’ll be faced with the end of the world.’

“Humans have Divine missions to civilise and convert everyone else who are evil pagan savages because they don’t follow exactly what our Holy Books or religious decrees state.”

“The king – or hereditary president – is chosen by God, has absolute power next only to God and any who question his rule or rulings are heretics who must be persecuted and exterminated!”

“If you don’t look or think about something it ceases to exist. If the Church says the Earth don’t spin, or go around the Sun, it don’t.”

(Even then they had folks like Galileo to point out it moves all the same! Now, of course, we have the Republicans helped by the string-pulling Big Oil industry saying pretty much this about the Global Warming issue.)

If you can’t see the parallels here with HerediPrez ‘Dubya’ George II the Mad then, frankly, I think you need to learn Braille …

If there one thing I can’t understand about America (and yes, there’s a few) its how so many of you can fail democracy so badly by voting so poorly thus going backwards from Mad King George the Third to an even madder, more despotic George the Second .. Sigh.

Big companies put raking in stacks of profit first above absolutely everything else – above human rights, above the environment, above the future esp. the longer term future.

That’s why they can’t be trusted to develop space exploration or work for the longer term benefit – even if that ‘longer term’ is just decades off rather than fifty or a hundred years.

That axiom is why “corporate ethics” is an oxymoron, why business needs tobe regulatedand cannot be trusted to run public services or act for the good of society.

Space travel, & space-based scientific research deyond the bounds of narrow commercial instances requires government involvement – it takes time, it involves intangible and serendiptious benefits as well as the more obvious $-making ones and it takes an awfully big amount of moolah. Plus it provides longand medium term benefits to everyone – not just thefew consumers or stock-holders of any one large corporation.

That means, by necessity, governments need to be involved and indeed, whole societies do. That’s why NASA is a public, government organisation not an R &D branch of say, MacDonnell-Douglas. Private indutsry, the multinational corporations are by their nature intrinsically unsuited to running broad-based, public-national-&-International good, long-term space programs.

Tragically, the United States has been ideologically blinded to this truism for a long while now; won over by rhetoric about untramelled capitalism that in the long run hurts & is hurting everyone making our planetary & most personal futures far worse than they need be.

This ominous development in the Republican, “Christian” & unbalanced, unchecked capitalist fundamentalist, neo-conservatives war against anything they don’t want to hear -or worse have the public hear is part of that larger picture. Its yet another reason why everyone needs to oppose that mob for all our sakes.

Is there a place for private enterprise in space – of course there is and probably more so later on when costs go down and technology improves for greater accessibility. But do we also – or even more – need NASA and organisations like it – nationally or even internationally run government based space programs looking out for everyone’s interests and everyones future rather than immediate piles of money? Absolutely yes!

Is this latest signal of mad Prez George the Seconds drive to stick everyone’s heads further in the suffocating sands of illogic and thirteenth century thinking unpleasantly ominous. I sure think so.