Going where no president has gone before

President Obama’s “foremost” mission for NASA isn’t going to Mars or colonizing the moon. No, it’s to reach out to the Muslim world. Seriously. Here;s NASA Administrator Charles Bolden:

“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering,” Bolden said in the interview.

Many Muslim nations may seem to belong on another planet, but this is a ridiculous mission for a space agency.

The Protestant ethic and capitalism

Glenn Reynolds posted something this morning that reminded me of a photo I took in Austria last week. Here’s the quote he posted from Robert Heinlien:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

And here’s the photo I took in the city museum in the town of St. Johann im Pongau (I added the red underlines):

Max Weber famously wrote that the spirit of capitalism rose out of the Reformation. St. Johann, it seems, paid a heavy price for expelling entrepreneurial Protestants, that despised and condemned minority of which Heinlein spoke.