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[alway]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9431064/Mitt-Romneys-Olympics-gaffe-overshadows-visit-to-London.html
^that

I think the best description of Romney's international tour is this:  IT KEEPS HAPPENING!!!

[RedKing]

Not that his supporters will care but the fact he's managed to offend Britain, say something stupid about Palestine and have his press secretary make an ass of himself before he's even anywhere near the presidency doesn't speak  wonders of his foreign policy skills.

What did he do to offend Britain? I haven't heard of that one.

Made comments that the state of their Olympic preparations were "disconcerting". Then when the local tabloids got a hold of it and started reaming him, he tried walking it back and saying how it was going to be fantastic. And then they reamed him for flip-flopping. It was a glorious hot mess.

His remark prompted a sharp rejoinder from David Cameron. “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world,” said the Prime Minister. “Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”

BURN

Might also have something to do with this bit out of Romney's memoirs:

England is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people want to buy.

The context being that Romney was holding up Britain as an example of a former superpower and saying "This is why we have to stay preeminent in the world! Otherwise we'll be reduced to exporting oddball humor and funny accents!"

[Owlbread]

Might also have something to do with this bit out of Romney's memoirs:

England is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people want to buy.

The context being that Romney was holding up Britain as an example of a former superpower and saying "This is why we have to stay preeminent in the world! Otherwise we'll be reduced to exporting oddball humor and funny accents!"

And interestingly, he seems to have no idea of what England actually is, considering it isn't an island at all. What an idiot. Of course, I smelled the sickly sweet stench of ignorance when he talked about a shared "Anglo-Saxon" heritage.

[RedKing]

And now he's defending his comments about Israel/Palestine by saying that he "did not speak about Palestinian culture".

So...let's work this out. In his speech the other day, he:
1. Pointed out the disparity in per capita earnings ($21,000 in Israel vs. $10,000 in the Palestinian Authority).
2. Then states "Culture makes all the difference".

"I'm not saying Palestinians are lazy, I'm saying Israelis are hard-working and that's what makes them different from Palestinians!" 

And interestingly, he seems to have no idea of what England actually is, considering it isn't an island at all. What an idiot. Of course, I smelled the sickly sweet stench of ignorance when he talked about a shared "Anglo-Saxon" heritage.

Oh, that got him in a stew over here when one of his advisers trotted out the "Anglo-Saxon" thing and implying that Obama didn't "fully appreciate that shared heritage". Because, you know....he's only HALF Anglo-Saxon. He doesn't have that special "rich, privileged white guy" telepathic mindmeld. Or embrace the secret Rites of Woden. He probably hasn't even read the Doom Book of Alfred of Wessex!

[Leafsnail]

He's also dramatically wrong with both of those numbers.  Israel's is significantly higher at $31,000 per capita while the Palestianian authority's areas are more like $1,500.  But hey, that just proves that Israeli culture is over 20 times better than Palestinian culture!

[Kilroy the Grand]

The thing is, going on about cultural superiority didn't go down well with left wing Israelis, even if he was saying that they are the culturally superior ones.  I guess it doesn't matter though since those aren't the true Israelis.

What do you think of this?

Nobody's Libertarian enough for me I'll just put them all in the upper right corner of my diagram with the Nazis or maybe the upper left with Stalin occasionally

[Kogan Loloklam]

I still support the ZFB party (Zombies for Brains)

Anyway... Reguarding the value of NASA and the intellegance of deep space colonization from a bankrupt nation...

People today insist mankind is immune from extinction, but we sit looking at massive climate change, huge pandemics, and a interconnectivity that makes the distance between any two people in the movie industry connected by less than 7 direct connections. I don't know how it works for people outside the movie industry, but I doubt it's very big given how the furthest I saw of people who knows someone who died in Afghanistan is Friend of a Friend. In this world, we have the ability to follow the evolutionary drive of spreading the species as far as possible, and god's command to spread fourth into his land and be fruitful and multiply. Without spreading into space, we will reach an absolute limit of our ability to do this, assuming we don't all die from super Ebola.

So, NASA isn't just something nessessary for the bankrupt America but the entire human race.

Pointless expenditure? Only if you don't believe in Science or the god of the Jews.

So, that said, I'd like to address the most important campaign issue out there.
Mitt Romney is really a LOLCAT spy!
Just look at his first name parody. Mittens? As in silly kittens you forgot your...
Why can't you dogeple wake up! It's a coup de naze!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Without spreading into space, we will reach an absolute limit of our ability to do this, assuming we don't all die from super Ebola.

Just noting that there can't really be a Super-Ebola. Even regular Ebola is so deadly that whenever outbreaks happen they halt fairly quickly because the disease burns out all of its carriers before they can spread the infection farther. There is a hard limit on the axises of deadliness and infectiveness, hence why Ebola is strictly regional, Influenza effects large areas of the word, and Rhinovirus is global.

So, NASA isn't just something nessessary for the bankrupt America but the entire human race.

Personally, I'm hoping for greater cooperation between NASA and the ESA in the future, since they've been the most successful space organizations. Maybe an alliance akin to NATO, but for space instead of the military. 

[Aqizzar]

So, NASA isn't just something nessessary for the bankrupt America but the entire human race.

There's a story going around that says a lot about how the American government apportions its money and where the "wasteful" spending might be.

Back around 1990, the CIA acquired a couple then top-of-the-line camera satellites for doing CIA stuff, one was launched and the other held as a backup.  The first one worked fine, so the backup was mothballed in the basement of Langley, and promptly forgotten about for twenty years.

Somebody tripped over it a few weeks ago looking for JFK's brain, and they realized they had no use for an out of date spy sat.  Somebody called up NASA about it, and they said the thing would great for taking space pictures if it pointed the other way.  So out of its boundless generosity, the CIA donated the spare satellite to NASA for proprietary use.

Problem is, NASA has to launch it with their own research budget, since it's not anybody else's property now.  They can fit it into the budget schedule until sometime around 2038.

The defense complex has so much fancy expensive crap they lose track of it and nobody bats an eye, while wasteful inefficient needless let-the-market-handle-it NASA can't scrounge up the cash to launch a free satellite within a generation of time.

[alway]

And beyond that, NASA has had an economic ROI measured in hundreds of percents. They solve the hard problems, and in doing so create huge quantities of spin-off technologies and improvements to technologies. It's a massive R&D program whose payoffs have traditionally been huge compared to their funding.

And that's even without getting into things like its unequaled ability to push children into STEM fields; which, btw, America has a growing shortage of, to the point where it will seriously undermine the ability of the economy to grow. And without getting into the planetary defense issues; did you know you are more likely to die from a civilization-killing asteroid than you are from dying due to an act of terrorism? And without getting into the benefits and risk mitigation which come with becoming a space-faring species.

[Sirus]

I just like the thought that NASA could walk into any electronics wholesaler today and pick up a $250 laptop that has far more processing power than anything they had on the Apollo missions. Thank you, NASA!

[Kogan Loloklam]

And once again the bay12 community denies proper time to the important things, like the growing LOLCAT threat!

It's a Crescent Horde conspiricy I tell you!

[mainiac]

There's a story going around that says a lot about how the American government apportions its money and where the "wasteful" spending might be.

Thank you for this entertaining story.

[darkrider2]

So, NASA isn't just something nessessary for the bankrupt America but the entire human race.

The defense complex has so much fancy expensive crap they lose track of it and nobody bats an eye, while wasteful inefficient needless let-the-market-handle-it NASA can't scrounge up the cash to launch a free satellite within a generation of time.

Knowledge is vastly undervalued in this country. I know, I just got out of high school.

[palsch]

A link with some primary sources and perspective.

Let’s assume that the cost to build those telescopes was approximately the same as the Hubble. This means that the cost of the two NRO telescopes combined is about the same as the entire $7 billion budget of the NSF for FY2012.