How has itpreserved your freedoms? By takingaway the freedoms of people living inIraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and much of Latin America?

By torturing and brutalising so many around the world?

Preventing WW III? Nonsense. On the contrary it is *because* of US military that there is the danger of WW III.

Oh & the US courts have done far more to preserve your freedoms than the military.

Blind faith & undeserved and exxaggerated fawning over the military is a step towards dictatorship, war and suffering.

The US populace in general is overly fond of the simplistic, brutal, counter-productive use of violence and murderous force – both at home & worse abroad. It is long overdue that they grew up and realised that far from improving matters military involvemnt esp. outside their own boarders almost always makes things far, far worse.

IMHO.

I’m very glad Gration is NOT going to run NASA. I wouldn’t put him in charge of *any* civilian organisation.

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The Amalekites were one of many peoples utterly exterminated by the Jewish tribes such groups also including the Canaanites, Midianites, Philistines (who btw .weren’t what they’ve been slandered as), Jebusites, Amorites, Moabites and many others incl. the Palestineans today. One wonders where the Holocaust memorials and days and moves are for all of them??? King Saul supposedly lost Yahweh’s favour, his kingship and ultimatley his life for showing mercy to and sparing the life of an Amalekite king. Jews today use “Amalekite”as a perjorative term for non-jews percieved as their enemies esp. Palestineans & also atheists. The Jewish sacred texts explicitly call for the extermination and commands the genocide of all the Amalekites.

@David D, not at all. It is my opinion that military members probably deserve more money for what is a fairly thankless task too. As an outsider looking in the overt displays of gratitude seem almost of that “USA all the way thank you Jesus” public displays that make a few of us uncomfortable. Some of it also appears as cynical political opportunism. Exploiting the guys and gals in uniform with these overt public displays. I’m not talking about welcome home parades or thank you ceremonies either where you’d expect a show of gratitude.

We in Oz come from a culture where we have a history of cutting down tall poppies. We do have some short-lived hero worship that stops after a while because we don’t want these people getting too big for their boots do we. This attitude is probably what would make the average Aussie cringe with what appears to be an overt public display. We’re pretty restrained when it comes to that sort of thing. We’re a culture that has trouble getting our bums off a seat for a standing ovation for example.

As I said I find it interesting and no offence was intended. Thanks for responding.

A lot of scientists really don’t like the idea of working with a chief from the military. The military tend to be extremely secretive while most good scientists like to share what they know (although often not before publishing). I’ve got buddies in the USAF and the US Naval Air Force and although I love them all, I wouldn’t want any of them running a scientific research institution. If it’s going to be someone from the military you’d think they could at least choose someone who works a lot with scientists – like people from the US Naval Observatory. A lot of the top brass like to come in, bark orders, and totally screw things over; a lifetime in the military service seems to condition them to believing this is how things get done (and that may be so in the military).

NASA has a lot of challenges; personally I think the space vehicle projects should be funded pretty much entirely with extra money from the government otherwise many other projects will simply have to be shut down to fund the vehicle development and testing. I don’t know how much of a push there will be to fulfil Dubbyah’s delusions of putting a monkey on Mars; looking at all the hassles of the International Space Station, I wouldn’t hold my breath. It would be nice to have an administrator who has at least worked extensively with scientists and can understand them rather than a stand-over guy. I see nothing posted about this guy that would make me think he has any business whatsoever being chief of NASA. Such lousy appointments seem to be the norm these days though; the chief of Australia’s civilian research organization, the CSIRO, is nothing more than the former head of “occupational health and safety” at a commercial enterprise – some qualification that is. The choice of the chief of NASA is an important issue because not any monkey can do a decent job. Bad decisions made over years will simply continue to cripple the organization.

Of course I’ll be waiting for breaking news that will make me eat my hat, but I’m pretty smug that my hat is safe.

There’s no doubt NASA has military roots, nor can it be ignored. However, NASA today is a civilian space agency and the overlap of military and civilian space agencies is a big deal around the world. If you look at some foreign coverage, you’ll see there is a lot of consternation even on the military use of the Galileo global positioning system in Europe. This is not something that can be ignored.

Oh, and if people want to look at a launch in action, a Delta IV is launching an NRO satellite tonight. This is the third launch for the heavy launch variant and it has already been delayed on several occasions. Most recently, the launch was delayed Tuesday and Wednesday due to minor technical problems with the rocket.

To give the United Launch Alliance credit, they have never had a catastrophic failure yet, although between the Delta and Atlas there have only been ~20 launches.

Do you perhaps think that they do not deserve our gratitude? In what way is expressing thanks for their service “overly respectful?”