"RichA" wrote in message
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On Thursday, September 4, 2014 2:54:21 PM UTC-4, Lord Androcles wrote:
"Chris.B" wrote in message

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On Friday, 29 August 2014 09:24:16 UTC+2, RichA wrote:

The ISS has cost FOUR TIMES what the entire Apollo program cost.



A mote in our universe compared with what it will cost humanity to
eradicate

the IS scourge. Everything has to be paid for. One way or another. Our

lackey dictators have their terrifying costs to humanity long after they

strut before their last, military parade.



Our causing resentment at a lack of basic human rights, while we steal
their

country's natural resources for a pittance, is not trade. It is criminal

behaviour on a global scale. What we do today and yesterday resonates down

the unbreakable strings of time. Nothing is ever free. Payment is merely

delayed until a later generation must pick up our tab. With crippling,

compound interest to boot.



Slavery is not cheap labour. It is theft of limited lifetimes for greater

personal profit. And then what, when the slaves finally revolt?
Unemployment

is a sociopathic tool to keep several billions controlled by the dark

satanic mills of quarterly bills. True freedom is as rare as free-range,

organic dodos and value for money.



Subsistence survival does not free the hungry and exhausted to add to the

sum of human knowledge. Nor does sexism, class and racism and the vertical

hierarchy of obscene wealth and abject, grinding poverty. Along with

deliberately limited supply of education, health and welfare for quite

literally billions of real human beings. These absences will all have to
be

paid for eventually. Whether by filling prisons, paying the wages of sin
of

the police state. Or by summary, mass executions, starvation or allowing

preventable disease.



Fair taxes for all is a share of the burden of keeping humanity sane, well

and maximizing each individual's unique potential. Instead of fighting
over

diminishing resources like clean water. We can only exist as a race for
the

benefit of all. For all time. Or we fall like every other lost empire.
Each

of which has left their warning sirens screaming hoarsely down the

millennia, for those who have ears. None ever failed due to an excess of

equality or freedom.



Monopoly is a crippling disease far worse than any polio pandemic.
Diversity

of source and resource and belief provide the strength to carry on despite

the crises. Provided everything on offer is a truly free choice for all.

And, despite the inevitably corrupt waving their magic beads, their AK47s

and openly chanting their raving insanity. As they demand their child

victims and their protection money against failure to comply with their

paper-thin drivel.



If we were truly free and equal, the NSA, NASA and religion would never
have

existed and we would probably have reached the stars by now. We compare

ourselves to older civilisations in the universe as if we, as a race, had

been free to achieve our true potential throughout time. While we continue

to exploit the vast majority of humanity. Just as has been done since we

first picked up a stone to take what was not rightfully ours. Or to
suppress

basic rights and freedoms for the profit of a vanishingly small minority.



Our lives are still ruled by the very worst, sociopathic megalomaniacs.

Inhuman, self-elected destroyers of even the most humble of dreams. So
that

they alone may prosper at the expense of humanity and its still-childish,

unformed dreams. We have bowed our heads for so long in the service of

others that we have never had time to organise humanity properly. Or even
to

vocalize our rights to free speech for all. We treat conscripts as cannon

fodder while the Assads, Putins and Kims strut inviolate to our precision

weapons. Millions must be allowed to die before these criminals against

humanity finally stand in the dock.

================================================== ======

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

In real terms the ISS cost 4/6.5= 0.615 TIMES what the entire Apollo

program cost.



Fair enough. If you ignore the spin-offs from Apollo that made billions for
the commercial and consumer industry. But Apollo (even though it was not
the best choice for space travel) ushered in serious space travel and put
people on the Moon. What did ISS do? Let people keep experimental rats in
cages, try (and fail) to improve upon normal manufacturing processes because
some witch doctor thought zero grav was some kind of miracle that would
revolutionize production of various things?
================================================== ============
Spin-off is NASA hyperbole just as inventing the internet is CERN hype,
teflon coated frying pans were bound to happen anyway. You have geriatric
nostalgia, you remember the good ol' days of the past and forget the bad. We
don't yet know what spin-off the ISS may produce, but if someone uses it to
shoot the retro-reflectors on the Moon with a laser (put there by the Apollo
missions) and time the light's round trip from a moving source (i.e. the
ISS) perhaps we can put witch doctor Einstein's nonsense -- light is always
propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of
the state of motion of the emitting body -- to its coffin once and for all.
That one experiment alone will make Apollo and the ISS combined worthwhile.

-- The Reverend Lord Androcles.
REWARD £1000
I'm not the government,
if I were it would £20,000,000,
but I am offering £1000 for the
head of the murderer(s) of
James Foley or Steven Sotloff,
on a spike, mounted on London
Bridge as we would have done
in medieval times. Add your own
contribution and spread the word.
It's eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,
head for a head, barbarism for
barbarism.