Space: The Final Frontier

NASA, the government's great symbolic vestige of the cold war,is once again under scrutiny. Thanks to the shuttle program's impending conclusion and the psychological consequences of the financial crisis, the future of manned space flight is increasingly uncertain. Mix in the fact that the Obama administration is looking to check books across the federal budget while NASA's leadership is working overtime to ensure hefty cuts and it is hard to have any faith in what was once the premiere example of the American can-do attitude and the power of collective action.

The symbolic weight of NASA has been waning for generations; what was once an agency that inspired pride and held the fascination of an entire nation is today the stand-in for wasteful government spending. Libertarians and progressives alike are quick to pounce on NASA as a emonstration of federal largesse, but when you break down the budget numbers, it seems that NASA garners an undue amount of attention:






Perhaps instead of representing the dream of exploration, NASA has come into its own as the federal agency that is the easiest to understand. Try to level a critique at the treasury department and you soon find that even they aren't sure about the limits of their power or where all the TARP money goes. Point to NASA and you see a gigantic, money-burning rocket.

Despite the grandeur of space, even the most exuberant Trekkie can see how flat the dream of exploring space can seem in the modern day:

The plan, based on President Bush's 2004 "Vision for Space Exploration" and authorized by Congress, has been vigorously promoted by Griffin. The key elements include the completion of the international space station, the retirement of the shuttle, and the construction of a spaceflight system featuring two new rockets and a new crew vehicle that would be capable of journeys to the space station, the moon and beyond. -WaPo

The "Vision" read more like defeat with vague promises of future exploration as the only silver lining. Hot on the heels of the Iraq war, few saw Bush's proposal as anything more than a rhetorical swing for the fences. Commonly enough, Obama eloquently defined the underlying sentiment throughout the United States:

“NASA has lost focus and is no longer associated with inspiration,” he said. “I don’t think our kids are watching the space shuttle launches. It used to be a remarkable thing. It doesn’t even pass for news anymore.”

All this from a man who ran his campaign on the words "Hope, "Change," and "Yes We Can." As the new president, his solution seems to be delaying the Constellation program (an uninspiring shuttle replacement aimed at taking us into earth orbit on the cheap) -undoubtedly a savvy financial move in the short-run, but where is the inspiration candidate on turning the program around?

All this bad news has neatly coincided with the final demise of the plucky but still inspiring Phoenix Lander (40k+ twitter followers), a firm demonstration of NASA's ability to run a successful research mission and PR campaign at the same time.

If there truly is a new mission to focus on public works, create hi-tech jobs and reinstill trust in the power of the federal government, what could be an easier demonstration than building up NASA? People love space, people love competition and nothing could be more exciting than crushing Chinese plans to go to the moon with an infinitely more ostenatious launch to Mars. Few things scream power like a bigger rocket.

At least consider doing it as a Mad Men tie-in!:




Listen to those drums beating for progress!:

Girl Talk Soils Apple

Girl Talk's "No Pause" reworked featuring Yael Naim:

BANANA

Behold the wild banana:
The wild banana belongs on Axis Monday for a very simple reason: it is wondrous!

Rather, the wild banana tastes and looks really gross. But it is wondrous that man has wrought the spirit of nature into a form so much more suitable for him. Without icky seeds.

A Children's Guide to Credit Default Swaps and the Current Economic Situation

Billy wants to buy a pack of baseball cards. However, baseball cards are a dollar and Billy doesn't have a dollar. So Billy goes to his best friend Jamie and says, can I borrow a dollar? Jamie says, sure, but only if you pay me a dollar and a nickel back. Billy says okay, because he plans to sell the cards for two dollars. Jamie writes an IOU because he only has a quarter. Jamie isn't sure that Billy can pay him back, so he decides to sell a credit default swap. Jamie goes to Sally and says, I owe Billy a dollar and Billy owes me a dollar and a nickel back. Can I give you a penny a day in exchange for you signing your name on the IOU I gave Billy? Sally doesn't know Billy, so to her this proposal looks like a bargain. Besides, Sally just got ten dollars for her birthday so even if Billy can't pay back she can easily cover Billy's debt.

Repeat this process 70 trillion times.

Billy and the 69,999,999,999,999 other kids open their card packs. Most of them are worthless, and not all the children manage to sell their cards for two dollars as planned. These children now are not only unable to pay the Jamies of the world a dollar and a nickel, they can't even cover the interest on Jamie's loan. The cardshop owners of the world go to the Sallies of the world and ask for their money. The Sallies of the world had enough money to cover ten credit swaps, but because they used that as a rationale to take on several hundred, they are now totally broke. The Jamies of the world profusely apologize and swear they had no idea that this could have happened.

So, to summarize: Billy has no money, Jamie has no money, the cardshop owner has no money, and Sally has no money. They all do the logical thing, which is to ask their parents for money and promise to be good with it this time.


If that was confusing, fear not, it is all handily explained in the following cartoon:

Simple Flags

Consider the Swiss flag.

It is unusual in two respects. First of all, its simplicity; few flags except the maddeningly confusing and uninteresting tricolors are so unadorned. Second, it is square. Only two sovereign nations have square flags; the other is the Holy See.

You would think that the square, as a more perfect geometrical shape than the rectangle, would be predominant. Nations naturally wish to portray themselves as enduring (sometimes as immutable). The rectangle is not the shape that best portrays that. Note the perfect symmetry of the Swiss flag; rectangular flags lack such perfection.

I have found only one plausible answer to why nations do not use square flags, and even that is just a guess: square flags do not blow as well in the wind. Is this important for purely aesthetic reasons--the majesty of a waving flag--or for symbolic ones as well?

A barren flagpole in itself means nothing; however, a flagpole with a flag waving at the top of it becomes a localized Axis Mundi. Thus, a nation's waving flag asserts its control over the heavens. It lays official claim to the realm of the symbolic (and no nation shall long endure without vesting itself in symbolism, which builds loyalty).

I won't go into the symbolism of the Swiss flag (it should be obvious), but consider that the earliest known precursor to the current flag featured Jesus himself suffering on the cross. It is also worthy of note that although the dimensions of the current cross relative to itself are established by statute, the exact red hue is not so prescribed, so different flags vary.

It is extremely curious that the Swiss allow any variance in this matter. Flags are probably the single most visible symbol of a nation, both at home and abroad, and their symbolism or historical significance usually is very strong. The Swiss flag embodies not only its Christian roots but its origins as a federation of cantons; the flag is the nation's history. But you can fool around with the color a bit. A strange levity to grant; I will discuss it in more detail with regard to the American flag in a future post.

One group fooled around with the color a bit more than usual. The globally known and aptly named Red Cross:

The Red Cross has officially stated (when they refused to recognize the lengthily named Red Star of David as an official Emblem of Red Stuff International) that the flag is not deliberately Christian, but a direct inversion of the Swiss flag.

This seems somewhat controversial. Wouldn't the inversion of a flag's colors imply the inversion of the symbols that flag stands for? And Switzerland stands for peace. Of course, the Red Cross does not concern itself with peace but with war (or rather of helping people who suffer because of it). Likewise, Switzerland is a nation of peace with one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world. Perhaps then the Red Cross (based in Switzerland) is onto something: the nation sponsors peace with militarization; the organization inverts it by accepting the reality of war and bringing peace into it.

Of course, even though the Red Cross denies that it has Christian roots, it still bears a cross on its flag, adopted from a country which itself bears a cross which in its earliest forms featured a dying Christ emblazoned. Symbolism, even buried and denied, never perishes. If it did, we would not have a Red Crescent (which could be argued to basically invert the flag of the Ottomans). Why not make a Red Star of David as a similar near-inversion of the flag of Israel (which does officially recognize the symbol)?

The Red Cross states that doing so would dilute the internationalism of their symbols, and that is certainly true. Perhaps the protests by certain nations, including Syria, against the Red Star had something to do with it. Why did they protest? Because nations know that symbols have power, and a symbol's meanings, whatever an organization may claim, never lose their original meaning. The Red Cross and the Red Crescent are both implicitly religious symbols and always will be. For that reason alone, the logical third member of the trio cannot join them, despite the very practical and beneficial nature of the organization in question. The sacred trumps the profane as nations fight wars solely over symbolism.

Never think those wars are not important.

Songs of the Space Age

You, Me and the Cellphone

Advertisers, P.R. reps and marketers are probably the first people to grab the latest book by Naomi Klein or leave the kids with their vegan cook/babysitter as they head off to see "Flow" or "The Corporation."

It is hard to imagine a group of people more inclined to pick up the latest hip, typographically-nuanced and limited-release polemic against the bourgeoisie. Certainly the rest of us aren't getting the daily press releases.

On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine the perverse thrills they must get from slipping self-aware gems like these into national ad campaigns:



Lyrics:

Oh, my baby don't be so distressed
We're done with politesse
It's time to be so brutally honest about
The way we know we long for something fine
When we pine for higher ceilings
And bourgeois happy feelings

And here we are in the center of the first world
It's laid out before us, who are we to break down?

[Chorus]Everyday we wake up, we choose love, we choose light
And we try, it's too easy just to fall apart

While the instrumental has been playing across the country for months, the ad producers clearly felt as if the the irony was lost on the general population (but in our defense, we didn't know we liked this song until they showed us). In this commercial, they decided to rub their cleverness in our faces.

The song goes on to list the casual liberal's litany of vices: "Plastic bottles, imported water/ Cars we drive wherever we want to/ Clothes we buy, it's sweatshop labor/ Drugs from corporate enablers." Apple, who rebranded themselves as a consumer products company, should be more cautious about garnering too much inquiry into their eco-bourgeois credentials: despite pledges to 'green' their product line-up, Apple still regularly lags in the environmental rankings: