As events on the ground continue in a fine hoorah, EGWPATF turns its eyes to the heavens and offers a firm backhanding to the asinine shenanigans of Sean O’Keefe. The man is an avatar, an earthly shell into which has been poured the very essence of the bat-brained managerial types that plague science. He exactly typifies the ancient division between the NASA engineers and astronauts, heroes of science, and the blithering NASA bureaucrat.

But first, the news. Darth Janet and her Death Boobie still threaten the peace loving peoples of America with destruction, possibly in the form of a milky stream of horrible lactation. Some media watchers jape that the SuperBoing has received more television airplay than 9/11.

Certainly everybody on either coast is tired of it, and my hunch is that either A) this is a rare and salacious opportunity for middle America to pore over the footage again and again, exclaiming in high dudgeon, “Dear lord, think of the children!” every time Ms. Jackson’s unchained gland appears on the screen, or B) middle America is really ticked off that their representative in the symbolic recreation of American interracial shame was a big headed weenie in a plaid shirt. Do check the internet for some incredibly comic Photoshopping.

The other big news is, naturally, Microsoft. Windows has a new security hole the size of truck! Four people surprised and worried!

Microsoft source code leaked for 2000 and NT4! A large collection of manically lonely geeks now has fresh meaning to their lives, but the really big news is that MS programmers apparently use dirty words.

And a less hilarious, but still funny in a “My, wasn’t that headlong flight down the stairs funny?” kind of way, a high powered attorney from Microsoft’s army of legal darkness has been appointed to the U.S. government’s panel on anti-trust issues. Let that thought keep you company at night, right next to the decision by a Florida court that electronic voting machines aren’t subject to recounts. Pleasant dreams.

Now, as for Mr. O’Keefe and his decision to scrap the Hubble, currently under review by the august body that sits upon the nation’s issues, this reporter has nothing but contempt. O’Keefe announced that the Hubble, which is mankind’s greatest achievement in space since the moon landing, would not have a rather minor upgrade due to “safety concerns” and that its useful life will be shortened to about four more years.

Missions to the International Space Station, which has taught humanity that Russians can live in space longer than Americans and that bean sprouts grow all funny in zero G, will continue apace, despite that fact that reaching the ISS orbit is ten times more costly and dangerous than reaching the Hubble. And according to the Prez, we need to get a man on Mars to find out where they put the creamy caramel.

This is the instrument that saw the face of God, folks. Let’s spend the pocket change to fix it up, and while we’re at it, let’s have some new shuttles and make the money back selling sub-orbital shipping to anyone with a landing strip.

In the meantime, O’Keefe’s dizzy political glad-handing has left America with a NASA about to blow half a trillion dollars on a mission to Mars sometime this century and a floating submarine we share with Russia. This is just the thing that gripes people about the space program, and with good reason. Safety is important, but there is no earthly reason to let the Hubble die for a lack of a few new batteries because of the Columbia disaster. If we park NASA in Cape Canaveral with fairytales about Mars and let the bureaucrats steer science, then those astronauts will have died in vain.

And if nothing else, looking at outer space is far, far more interesting than the Death Boobie.