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Aberdeen American News:The South Dakota State Historical Society recently received a diary kept by a ranch hand who lived in western South Dakota at the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Henry P. Smith's diary was donated to the society...

I blogged on the Patriot Act a couple days ago. Now the only radio talk show host I can stand, the very intelligent Dennis Prager, takes up the fight. Although the column in its entirety is a bit weak, I...

The post I made regarding the South Daktoa Democrats billboard has the South Daktoa Democrats stumped. Here is all Chad Schuldt can say:Trent spanks Sibby for his typical nuttiness yesterday about the Grassroot Democrats billboards in Sibby?s hometown.Looks like Schuldt...

Last week NRO reported the number of hurricanes hitting each state in the past 104 years: Direct Hits, 1900-2004 Florida 64 Texas 38 North Carolina 29 Louisiana 27 South Carolina 16 Alabama 12 Mississippi 9 New York 9 Connecticut 8...

Foreign Policy is providing this interesting table of countries that have donated money and supplies to the United States for relief efforts for Katrina.America?s friends abroad, and even some of its foes, have responded to the horrific destruction to the...

NASA administrator says space shuttle was a mistake

Any good "hard" science fiction fan was capable of making this analysis. Among others, rocketeer Homer Hickham, author and main character of October Sky retired from NASA and wrote a novel titled Back to the Moon in which NASA is given a pretty good black eye for having become moribund with bureaucracy and political correctness.

Latest in this feeling that NASA had lost its direction comes from no less than the NASA chief administrator himself:

The space shuttle and International Space Station ? nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades ? were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth. ?It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,? Griffin said. ?We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.?

Reading between the lines, it appears to the Chief that NASA needed more von Braun and less Rube Goldberg in its design philosophy:

Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, ?My opinion is that it was. ? It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible.? Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, ?Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.?

Sounds like we finally have a NASA chief worthy of the name after too many bureaucrats, program managers and barely-disguised political hatchetmen, and not nearly enough engineers in the lead. Hopefully now the Congresscritters will give Griffen the support needed to get us back on the road towards the stars. It's absolutely essential if our civilization is to continue to exist and improve itself.

Let's start with the worst. Abe rounds up some educational "zero tolerance" that ran amok in Omaha when a six year old showed up at school with a butter knife in his backpack. As Abe points out, this is always...

This is something you dog lovers will get a kick out of: LauraW posts the details of washing her dog after he rolled in shee-it, but in Bible speak....

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