The ultimate strong arm
Earlier this year, several reports started circulating once again about the end of the world as we know it. This time via an asteroid that has an incredibly remote chance of hitting Earth somewhere around 2036. This was fairly immediately after Congress told NASA in 2005 it needed to spend more time finding what is going to hit Earth and do something about it.
Today, NASA gave their response to Congress’s directive. It was a simple answer. Something to the effect of, “we won’t do it until you pay for it”. Now, this is where it gets fun to me.
- IF Congress balks, and an asteroid does end the world as we know it, Congress will look pretty bad. Granted, that would be for a farely short period of time since people probably wouldn’t be haggling too much over the politics of what happened AFTER the world ended as we know it.
- IF Congress does fund it, and nothing happens in 29 years, Congress will get blamed for blowing a billion dollars on pork-barrel pie-in-the-sky projects that benefit only one Congressman and two Senators.
What to do? If I were in Congress, I’d nix the funding since facing the consequences of Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and CAGW would be a lot shorter. We don’t want to waste any more money than we have to. Right?
Of course, we could ask other countries to chip in and help with this.
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