Forty years ago NASA put the first man on the moon. Now, after scrapping the shuttle program, NASA can’t even put a man in space. But don’t worry, that’s not NASA’s concern anymore as NASA administrator Charles Bolden explained in an al-Jazeera interview. Bolden stated that one of the primary goals given to America’s space agency by President Obama was finding a way to “reach out to the Muslim world.”
Islam: The final frontier! To boldly go where no diversity outreach consultant has gone before! What’s “foremost” for NASA is to make Muslims “feel good” about their contribution to science. Why, as recently as the early ninth century Muhammad al-Kwarizmi invented the first universal horary quadrant!
During the Great Depression, the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building, was built in eighteen months because “the head of General Motors wanted to show the head of Chrysler that he could build something that went higher than the Chrysler Building.” Now? There’s a gaping hole and a mere skeleton of a new construction project at Ground Zero ten years and $7 billion after 9/11. Meanwhile other countries have been quite busy:
In the decade after 9/11, China (which America still thinks of as a cheap assembly plant for your local Krappimart) built the Three Gorges Dam, the largest electricity-generating plant in the world. Dubai, a mere sub-jurisdiction of the United Arabs Emirate, put up the world’s tallest building and built a Busby Berkeley geometric kaleidoscope of offshore artificial islands. Brazil, an emerging economic power, began diverting the Sao Francisco River to create some 400 miles of canals to irrigate its parched northeast.