Posted on 07/05/2010 12:52:08 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
NASA Chief: Next Frontier Better Relations With Muslim World
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his "foremost" mission as the head of America's space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world. fox news
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his "foremost" mission as the head of America's space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.
Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA's orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Amen, AMEN, AMEN!
Reminds me of something I saw with my own eyes when I was in Peru a few years ago. We made the obligatory turista trip to Macchu Picchu since my wife had never seen it before. While we were there, I noticed a guide pointing to a big puddle of water on a landing above a long flight of steps. He was explaining to a couple of gullible-looking yuppies that this was a sacred reflecting pool incorporated by the magically talented architects. The yuppies were lapping it up (the description, not the puddle). The yuppies left, we stayed around for a while and soon saw a maintenance guy come along and mop up the “sacred pool.”
Peru is one of my favorite countries in the world but the place is absolutely infested with new age flakes from Europe and the US who come there to encounter magnetic nodes and harmonic convergences and the like. The locals laugh at them behind their backs.
i’ve been to peru
it’s astonishingly beautiful but as much a tourist trap as, say, the Outer Banks here in NC. what we call “beachie” culture was invented in the eighties by carpetbagging hippies from New Jersey and California who decided to settle on our beaches, like, dude.
the genuine culture of our barrier islands is that of pirates and smugglers. hm. maybe the hippies do fit in.
Yep, probably the first of many programs that obungler will decide are not longer needed for their original mission - and in many cases he would be right - so why let an already funded program like NASA go to waste when it can be used to make muzzies feel like they are relevant.
Hmmm. . . it seems to me that NASA could play a role in improving relations with the Muslim world. . . by orbiting satellites carrying tungsten rods with mechanisms to drop them on all the major mosques in the world, including the “Two Holy Mosques” in Mecca and Medina and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
Somehow, I doubt that’s the program that’s envisioned.
@#$%ing.
Fail.
Me.
It must be hard for comedians to do satire on this administration. Anything they can dream up has already been done by these yoyos.
He obviously does not know the priorities of his job.
Fire up your flying carpet and get on Clyde and ride.
You are mistaken. The Arab contributions to mathematics and science took place during the Muslim era, though the contributors were a mix of Muslims, Christians and Jews (there used to be Arab Jews, but I digress), and were in an indirect way, in part, due to Islam. In particular Islam’s militancy led to the conquest of parts of the Roman Empire (by your leave, there was never such a thing as “the Byzantine Empire”, the notion was invented by Western Europeans who wanted to dispossess the Christian East of its Roman heritage) and of India. Access to both Greco-Roman and Hindu science and mathematics led to some advances largely by combining the two and making inferences which were not that big of leaps. Algebra was Diophantus plus the Hindu notion of zero, but the beginnings of trigonometry were genuinely of Arab/Persian origin (a real advance unlike algebra, but based on mixing old Greek problems with Hindu numeration).
In medicine, the Arabs took off were the Greeks left off and made some advances during the Muslim era (again, not just Muslims, but Christians and Jews contributing, too).
But all of Muslim science came to a grinding halt, due to the rejection of the Aristotelianism of Averroes and Avicenna in favor of Al Ghazali’s occasionalism: the idea everything happens by the direct will of Allah, which except as revealed in the Qu’ran is unknowable. Once Sunni Islam went down that path, it became the intellectual, cultural and commercial backwater it remains to this day.
Shi’ite Islam remained fairly vibrant culturally until its embrace of Khomeniism in the 1980’s.
Perversely, Islam represented a step forward from Arab paganism, even as it represented several steps backward from Arab Christianity and even Arab Judaism. (Yes, things were that bad among Arab pagans in the 6th and 7th centuries after Christ.)
Kojackoff is a jerk.
Doesn’t surprise me. Time for folks to take an inventory of all essentials, get what you may need and then buy a little bit more. The real crap is about to hit the fan. Get ready while you can.
That would be an interesting question if Muslims faced East when praying. Traditional Christians (Orthodox, Copts, Armenians, Assyrians, Latins, traditionalist Anglicans) face east when praying, Muslims face Mecca, and Jews face Jerusalem.
Isn’t nice to know that NASA has figured out that muslims are alien to this planet?
Obama offers millions in Muslim technology fund
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2369763/posts
<>
Obama administration is an epic fail.
“Bolden is married to the former Alexis (Jackie) Walker of Columbia, S.C. The couple has two children: Anthony Che, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps”
Che ??
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.