Equally Convenient

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

-- Henri Poincaré (1854 - 1912), French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and philosopher of science, Science and Hypothesis (1901), Preface, Dover abridged edition (1952), p. xxii

What Do We Get For That?

The total actual 2024 budget to run the country was about 7 trillion dollars.  That means the NASA budget was only 0.004 of the national budget -- less than half a percent.  For every hundred dollars the US government spent, it put 40 cents in the bucket for NASA.

And what do we get for that?  The Universe. 

Missions to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter.  Landers on Mars, telescopes that peer through the depths of the cosmos, a fleet of spacecraft monitoring the Sun, the star to which we owe our existence.  The abject awe and wonder of images of a glorious cosmos.  The first A in NASA is for Aeronautics, too; research that makes air travel better, faster, and safer.  NASA science includes observing and monitoring our own planet as well, making satellites that track our water, atmosphere, and land. NASA scientists study climate change, one of the single biggest existential threats to humanity.

NASA employs about 18,000 people across all 50 states (and that doesn't include contractors, of which I was one for many years, and people such as  academics who have NASA grants).  NASA partners with space agencies around the world, a diversified portfolio that guarantees the best scientific research always pushing past the cutting edge and accelerating our understanding of, well, everything. 

-- Philip Plait, Bad Astronomy Newsletter, "Trump threatens to eviscerate NASA" (2 June 2025)

By This Embrace

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

-- Karl Kraus (1874 - 1936), Austrian journalist, satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, and poet, Beim Wort genommen (1955); as translated by Harry Zohn

Destroy The Institutions

The way the Trump administration treats many Americans is as a defeated enemy, not as fellow Americans.  Like, when you conquer a society by force, when you defeat another nation at war, you conquer them, you often will destroy the institutions that undergird it, to ensure pacification, to remain in power.  And then maybe you rebuild them in a form you like.  

I think what has been so confusing for so many people, because I think we tend to think everyone acts in good faith, is that the Trump folks are treating, like the EPA and Harvard, not as fellow Americans and American institutions that are trying to act for the good of America, but as a defeated enemy.  

-- David Plotz, host of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast, on the show's 29 May 2025 episode "Why Destroy Harvard?" @25:50

No Limits

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.  If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.  Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951), Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) 6.4311

Better And Smarter

I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter.  And these both are one and the same.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951), Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England, In a letter to Paul Engelmann (1917) as quoted in The Idea of Justice (2010) by Amartya Sen, p. 31

Does Not

Truth does not blush.

-- Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (c. 155 - c. 240), theologian in the early Christian church, known for his powerful denunciations of many influences he considered heretical, "Against the Valentinians" Adversus Valentinianos, 3.2