Lady Laura 
The crew of Apollo 17 took this photo 19,473 days ago.
If all goes well, we should have a new one in six days' time.
Ashwin DixitWhy are we feeding the Military-Industrial-Complex, when we can't even feed all our people?
What do these staged Moon missions do except tickle the fancy of the TV-addicted, sci-fi addled bourgeoisie, as they ignore the underclass of broken people on the sidewalks, in tents, who are hungry, cold, homeless, without medical care, and have no voice in the system, because of systemic hurdles that prevent them from signing up to vote?
If they could vote, they'd shout, "GIMME EAT!"
BeeCycling@purrperl @cmconseils NASA's budget is $24.4 billion in 2026. US Military budget is $892.6 billion and actual spend is expected to be over $1 trillion. I think the latter is a better place to start clawing back some money, rather than cutting money for space science and research.
The point is this — lots of smart people have been kept distracted by the rich, peering through expensive public funded telescopes into deep space, or using super colliders to peer into cold vacuum chambers, provided with cushy jobs, ignoring the poor, homeless people on the sidewalk, interested more in distant, abstract, esoteric things, than in the here and now. They think their research is funded by "taxpayer dollars" and so they kowtow to the rich taxpayers.
1/n
The money is "public funds" not "taxpayer money". The homeless person on the sidewalk they ignore & disdain has an equal share in how that money should be allocated, but that person is marginalized, and kept from voting. So the smart people, keep walking past the homeless, thinking — "Those ne'er do wells should have studied & worked as hard as I. They are just stinky bums, addicts, undesirables. I can safely ignore them on the way to my lab. Off to kiss rich ass!"
2/n
The smart folks would have comfortably continued ignoring their social responsibility. Now that their cushy jobs are being called into question, suddenly they are waking up to the fact that they should have been using their intelligence, education, & privilege to serve the poor, not just engage in highfalutin' curiosities & wonders of distant galaxies. So the smart folks are suddenly pointing fingers at the rich folks. "I'm just a 'poor scientist'. Blame the rich!"
3/n
This is where things get interesting. Scientists suddenly develop social conscience, and turn on the rich to save their own cushy positions. Public money should be allocated fairly. The homeless should not be disenfranchised. We have a responsibility to bring them into society, from the margins. We have been kept distracted by the rich, into diddling our intellectual curiosity, rather than engaging with our conscience. We need to serve the poor, not ignore them.
4/n
So it's good that Science funding should be cut. If those poor people could overcome the hurdles to vote, they would want food & shelter, not fancy pictures of distant nebuale, or quantum visualizations of subatomic particles. Scientists, are so, so, done, unless they wake up and put their intelligence to the service of all. Really bring wealth equality, not just suck up to the rich who they think fund their research. The revolutions is happening now.
5/5
@purrperl @cmconseils This is just wrong. Smart people who take an interest in science and research and approve of it being publicly funded after also more likely to be socially progressive and empathetic. They're the people out there at the No Kings protests and similar. The people more likely to think of homeless people in the way you describe are the willfully ignorant, socially regressive, who are "distracted" by reality TV and Fox News, not by rocket launches.
Those watching reality TV and Fox news may be distracted, but they don't suck down public money at the scale of scientists, who get Billions in grants. It's the rich keeping the nerds distracted, lest they empathize with the less fortunate, rather than treat them as "deplorables", ignorant Fox news watchers, and those even further below in income level, the marginalized unpersons, those who can't even vote.