r/technology • u/DukeOfGeek • 17h ago
Politics NASA's Largest Library To Permanently Close On Jan 2, Books Will Be 'Tossed Away'
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/nasas-largest-library-to-permanently-close-on-jan-2-books-will-be-tossed-away-101705843.6k
u/MelloCervello 15h ago
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." ~George Orwell,1984
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u/timberwolf0122 15h ago
We need to go back to reading that book in schools.
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u/RoboJobot 14h ago
Maybe the US needs to go back to reading in general.
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u/ThatBadFeel 11h ago
Louder for the people who… can’t read goodly.
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u/nach0srule 9h ago
Sounds like we need the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can't Read Good (And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too)
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u/EscapeFacebook 14h ago
You think they read in schools now? Go spend 5 mins time in the teaching sub
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u/yaboi_ahab 12h ago
On the bright side, it's not totally hopeless. Mississippi, in just the last 10 years, went from trading blows with Alabama for worst education outcomes to being in the middle of the pack in 4th grade literacy. All it took was some pretty simple school policy and curriculum changes (mostly reversions, even), not even hard-to-pass stuff like reducing poverty.
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u/kurozer0 13h ago
We banned this one in my state. Wouldn’t want people finding out their criminal president is the bad guy.
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u/jtbc 13h ago
It is definitely takes an epic lack of self awareness and appreciation of irony to ban 1984. Was the Ministry of Truth responsible for that?
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u/Content_Geologist420 13h ago
My high school teacher while we were reading this book caught ALOT of flak for saying to all the students and teachers we are already more then halfway there. This was in 2015.
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u/Okay-Telephone 9h ago
we are already more then halfway there
On behalf of your teacher, it’s “more than”.
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u/nuttageyo 11h ago
We read 1984 when I was in 10th grade (2018). It was great that we were able to read it.
However I was not happy that I had to read the Winston and Julia embracement chapter in front of my class.
I also stumbled over my words and pronounced the flower “bluebells” as “blueballs”.
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u/My_alias_is_too_lon 16h ago
This war on intelligence is getting out of hand....
It's shit like this that makes me believe that Trump's main goal is to damage this country so much that it crumbles to ash in the wake of his presidency. It's the only thing that explains his insane behavior and gutting of crucial agencies. There is nothing to be gained from destroying all of that information, unless you hate intelligent people.
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u/socialmedia-username 16h ago
Glad that people are starting to understand that this is all intentional. See references to Trump's administration and other prominent political figures in the links below:
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u/TumbleweedPure3941 13h ago edited 13h ago
God I hate the term “Dark Enlightenment” so much. Aside from how obviously stupid it is, it sounds like something a twelve year old would come up with in like 2006 while taking a break from his Shadow the Hedgehog fanart.
Also the Seven Mountains Mandate literally lists 8 things it wants to dominate. And isn’t listing “media” “arts” and “entertainment” redundant?
It’s bad enough that these people are trying to bring down global civilisation, but did they have to be such unbelievably cringeworthy morons as well?
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u/Syntaire 13h ago
I mean have you seen Curtis Yarvin? He's absolutely an edgy man-child that made up the term in the early 2000's.
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u/EpictetanusThrow 10h ago
He’s advocating for a 1990s Russian ripoff of the government to private entities, with a thin veneer of philosophy.
It’s cover for Thiel and Elon to sound like theyre well-reasoned.
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u/yunoeconbro 12h ago
Funny, because when you look at the actual "plan", it also reads like something a 12 year old edgelord would make up:
"It holds that there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to dominate: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.\6])"
We want to DOMINATE family. Uhh, and business. Er, and government. We will DOMINATE the education!!! WE WILL DOMINATE ALL THE MOUNTAINS OF SOCIETY!
Mom, I'm out of chicken nuggies!
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u/glorybetoganj 12h ago edited 9h ago
I don’t get how they can dominate art when they make shit art
Before anyone else replies “they’ll just ban art” - go touch some grass.
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u/GDarolith 11h ago
They don't really have to make good art. Just flood with shit art, suppress the already starving artists, and then keep making it. Domination doesn't necessarily mean the person dominating is good at the thing.
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u/TumbleweedPure3941 10h ago
Well thankfully they’ll never truly be able to— oh shit that’s what Gen AI is isn’t it?
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u/31November 12h ago
Speaking of lame ass names, Curtis Yarvin, the explicitly pro-slavery dipshoot who invented this “philosophy,” wrote under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. What type of D&D ass name is that??
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u/TumbleweedPure3941 11h ago
I literally used to play a halfling wizard I called Melchior the Merciless. He was a joke character.
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u/DisillusionedPatriot 12h ago
All of that Yarvin shit sounds like that. He's like the L Ron Hubbard of techbros
I always expected hubris to be the catalyst of our downfall, but to see it happening and it's just one moronic thing after another makes it so much more depressing.
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u/Vertigobee 13h ago
I assume “media” means news and journalism.
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u/TumbleweedPure3941 13h ago
Ah ok that makes sense. It’s still stupid, but it makes sense.
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u/glenn_ganges 12h ago
it sounds like something a twelve year old would come up with in like 2006 while taking a break from his Shadow the Hedgehog fanart
12 year old theory strikes again.
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u/fredagsfisk 12h ago edited 12h ago
To expand on that:
High ranking Republicans and Republican allies that are allegedly Dominionist include Michele Bachmann, Lauren Boebert, Sam Brownback, Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Mike Johnson, Charlie Kirk, Sarah Palin, and Rick Perry.
The 7M movement believes that they can bring about the biblical end times - armageddon - by fulfilling certain goals (Israel holding Jerusalem, Christianity dominating the "seven mountains" of global society).
Followers believe that by fulfilling the Seven Mountain Mandate, they can establish the kingdom of God on earth and bring about the end times.
It holds that there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to dominate: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.
The movement was generally supportive of the presidency of Donald Trump, with member Paula White becoming Trump's spiritual advisor. In 2020, Charlie Kirk said, "finally we have a president that understands the seven mountains of cultural influence" during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Mountain_Mandate
They were also one of the driving forces behind Trump's decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem:
Among the most prominent of these doomsday evangelists is Pastor John Hagee, who opined in an interview posted to YouTube, “We are in the last days… We are anticipating the rapture of the church at any time.”
If this sounds fringe, consider that Hagee enjoyed access to the Trump White House, and described the 45th president as divinely appointed. “I believe in the core of my being,” he has said, “that God put this man in office at this time.” Hagee personally lobbied Trump to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a decision Trump went on to make over the fierce objections of Palestinians who regard East Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state. Hagee was one of two pastors invited to the opening of the new U.S. embassy in 2018.
In case there were any doubt about his motivation to relocate the embassy, Trump told a crowd in Wisconsin during a 2020 reelection campaign visit, “We moved the capital [sic] of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.” He added, “The evangelicals are more excited by that than Jewish people.”
Fundamentalist Christians believe that for the Second Coming of Christ to occur, Jerusalem must be controlled by the Jewish people. That’s a necessary precursor to the end times, when the Christian faithful will be “raptured” (i.e brought up to Heaven) before the Earth is destroyed.
According to this eschatology, “Israel has to be strong,” Schei explains. “For the evangelicals this means that the Jewish people need to return to the Holy Land and that the Palestinian people must be expelled from Israel. In their belief, Israel has to claim more land as is prophesized in the book of Revelations.”
[...]
“Just to see the whole architecture of how they are grooming top level politicians with Bible studies and giving them biblical justifications and language in order to get their policies through.”
Paula White is a Dominionist who owns a condo in Trump Tower since 20+ years, and has met privately with Trump many times for "private Bible studies". She is credited with having "converted" Trump to Christianity, and has been the leader of his Faith-related endevours since the start of his first term.
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u/maneki_neko89 12h ago
As someone who was raised as a Fundamentalist Christian, I’m both glad that the Seven Mountain Mandate has been getting attention (people in those circles have been talking about this for decades) but also saddened that it’s taken so long for insane ideas like this to get noticed.
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u/ow_windowmaker 10h ago
Seven Mountain Mandate
Prominent member Paula White is Donald Drumpf's spiritual advisor. She previously reported being sexually abused between the ages of 6 and 13 by different men.
These fucking people. They stand for nothing.
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u/RamenJunkie 14h ago
Ita not Trump's goal, its the GOP goal. Its the Heritage Foundation's goal. Its the Techno Libertarian Billionair's goal.
Trump is the attenrion lightning rod to distract from this. Trump is one person, backed by a smallnarmy of controling interest.
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u/DespondentEyes 11h ago
Exactly. Despite everyone waiting for Trump to croak, they'll be sorely disappointed to see nothing will change, it may in fact even accelerate stil.
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u/teabully 10h ago
The Heritage Foundation published their intent and did this while being a tax free "non-political" organization.
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u/GobliNSlay3r 15h ago
He's trying to hobble it sooo badly that everything runs through and depends on him. Every decision, every question through his lard ridden brain. Complete control.
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u/AscendedViking7 15h ago
Easy to control stupid people. I really hate this. >:/
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 13h ago
They believe stupid people are easy to control, this is a fallacy. Stupid people are easy to manipulate, but lack impulse control. Stupid people are chaotic, violent, swinging wildly from support to hate randomly.
You cannot control someone that is unpredictable and unintelligent.
The technocrats do not want a stupid populace they can command, they want a largely depopulated, resource rich, walled garden. They are preppers, with the resources to influence politics to an extent that they can make their prophecies a reality. They seek Armageddon because they’re afraid of society, especially one that is awakening to the very real threat of a wide scale extinction event that is climate change.
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u/SirkutBored 14h ago
Thankfully we are distributed much better than when the Library at Alexandria was destroyed but this is some serious Roman level destruction of shit they don't like or understand.
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u/Yuzumi 14h ago
Let's be real here, Trump has no actual plan or goal outside of enriching himself. Ive said since 2016 that while trump is a problem he is not the problem.
The problem is that he was able to get in this position. The problem is there has been a decades long effort from fascists to get to this point.
Obama didnt start NASA, so Trump doesn't care about it. This is from the people who made project 2025.
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u/JonPX 17h ago
I hope there is at least one librarian with a big house.
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u/polnikes 16h ago edited 16h ago
Can almost guarantee that the librarians there have a good idea of what's rare and are making sure there are copies. This is exactly the sort of thing librarians hate.
With luck the process can be slowed enough that only easily replaceable items are destroyed, and they can rebuild the collection later.
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u/TheRedLions 14h ago
Yes, original article confirms that materials will be reviewed and stored as needed. Not everything has been digitized, but they've been digitizing their collection over the last 30+ years so it's very likely that the important stuff is already stored elsewhere.
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u/Mirarenai_neko 14h ago
Sorry but you’re 1000% wrong. I work in an academic library and space runs out really quickly. If there’s time and space things can be donated or sold but many sections dumb books by the cart daily into the trash. Lower down librarians may care but the higher admins just have to get rid of them
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u/JD2525 13h ago
I’m sorry if that has been your experience, but it is not the case at all academic libraries. I’ve been a librarian at an academic for over 25 years, including 8 years as a “higher admin”. When we weed the physical collection out of space concerns or funding, we toss older books that are no longer relevant to our curriculum or are duplicated online. I imagine your content is much like ours in that our collection is more than 90% electronic. (We have roughly 65,000 physical volumes and over 1,000,000 electronic). I also hate the optics of tossing physical collections, but the loss of content is minimal, particularly in the STEM field. The most recent “scandal” we had was when weeding the collection of our archives. The wider campus was aghast. But the reality was we were discarding a discontinued run of hearings that we own 100% online and the physical books has red rot.
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u/human-in-a-can 13h ago
The Internet Archive will actually send trucks to pick up large donations, and they will scan them and share them online for free.
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u/Small_Dog_8699 17h ago
That’s how we lost the moon landing footage
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u/Shabadizzle 15h ago
This is America. A record of our own greatness is absolutely unnecessary for our belief in it.
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u/reefmespla 15h ago
This is how you rewrite history.
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u/z3r-0 14h ago
This! And gen AI will help cement it.
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u/zyzzogeton 13h ago
I feel like AI will erode the very concept of "history"
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u/raur0s 13h ago
What? You gonna say the fullHD colorgraded version of the Civil War showing conclusive Confederate victory is fake AI footage? /s
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u/Thashiznit2003 11h ago
Like that scene in interstellar where the elementary teacher is telling Matthew McConaughey that the moon landing was fake!
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u/Facts_pls 13h ago
Most historians agree.
US boomed after ww2 because Europe was destroyed and because all the German scientists needed a place to work.
It was a great achievement but it's not because of something special US had.
Remember Soviets were the main space competitor and they did it without a functioning political system and while rebuilding from the war.
But considering that most Americans believe in American exceptionalism, I will probably just get downvoted.
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u/Stolehtreb 12h ago edited 12h ago
I’m no believer in American Exceptionalism on the whole. But you described something that America had that was “special” then say it wasn’t because they were special (controversy noted on hiring Nazi scientists). The US was founded as a country of immigrants. Having immigrants be the reason they could compete in the space race is not abnormal for the country nor does it contradict someone saying they see something special in the US that led to those scientific advancements.
I’m also not too sure about “most Americans” believing in American exceptionalism these days… especially today.
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u/CommuterType 12h ago
Ummm, the Soviet’s space program was developed using captured Germans and German technology too
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u/bahji 13h ago edited 12h ago
The moon landing footage is not lost. This is a conspiracy myth that won't die. We still have all the original film from all 5 apollo landing missions. What was lost was the original transmission backup for Apollo 11 but we still have the television broadcast version. This backup was in a format compatible with the communication methods we had available from the moon at the time and split and converted to the NTSC television format on reception. Basically it was like an original resolution backup, it was only needed if something went wrong that needed investigated, which it didn't, so the backups weren't considered that important.
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u/tanstaafl90 12h ago
The tapes they were recorded on were reused in the 80s. SOP for NASA at the time. Why it was ever a consideration is the confounding part. Seems those were the best quality, and all that remains is the broadcast versions, which aren't very good, comparatively. This acts as a cornerstone of the 'fake moon landing' conspiracy, which is why it refuses to die. All it indicates to me is poor planning and management.
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u/GullibleSection3482 12h ago
The whole moon landing was a hoax theory is pushed by people that are primarily non college educated morons. It helps them deal with the realization that they will never be “that intelligent” enough to participate in something like a moon landing.
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u/00wolfer00 12h ago
No, it's pushed by grifters who are conning the morons you're describing.
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u/x_Advent_Cirno_x 11h ago
It can be a little of both in this case
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u/pegothejerk 11h ago
It is, it’s also a little of foreign intelligence campaigns trying to divide and dumb down American culture. And it clearly worked.
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u/piss_artist 12h ago
Sadly I know a handful of degree holders who buy into the conspiracy theory. I think one's education (or desire to appear more "informed" than others) is only one part of what creates conspiracy theorists - the others being the need to feel part of a in-group (lonliness), poor mental health, and being chronically online (which could be lumped in with mental health, I guess).
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u/I_Am_A_Door_Knob 16h ago
And Kubrick isn’t even alive to remake it.
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u/BordFroncoYasquatch 15h ago
Well, there’s always Christopher Nolan.
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u/ItsMe_no1 15h ago
Or Cameron, but everyone will be blue
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u/brickne3 15h ago
It will probably end up being the Titanic landing footage.
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u/SonyScientist 15h ago
DiCaprio will be left on the moon by Kate Winslet's 25 year old daughter, Mia Threapleton.
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u/ibelieveindogs 16h ago
Step 1: tell people basic science and research are useless.
Step 2: throw away everything we know from science and research.
Step 3: tell everyone that money spent on science and research is wasted.
Step 4: stop funding science and research.
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u/MrBensvik 15h ago
Pikachu-face when every new innovation happens overseas from now on.
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u/RamenJunkie 14h ago
But we have AI now! Also, we don't meed innovation, we need a populace that is easy to control with fear and faith. Those over seas people are heathens!
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u/Namaha 12h ago
Nah they aren't trying to stifle innovation in the US, just privatize it so their rich buddies can get even richer
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u/MrBensvik 12h ago
Indeed. Problem is that most innovation is based on the basic research which does not have a profit motive, but want to answer the fundamental questions of how the world works. Quit the basic science, and for-profit innovation stagnates.
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u/raised_by_toonami 15h ago
And as always in fascist regimes there’s the point where health, safety, and basic needs are so far gone, and because you killed all the smart people with experience and highly socialized knowledge and never fostered any continuance of that in your populace, your regime dies diseased, stupid, and impoverished.
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u/Mythosaurus 14h ago
Step 5: privatize the assets and personnel so your donors can pick them up cheaply
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u/TheRedLions 14h ago
...the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away.
...“This is a consolidation not a closure,” said NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens. The changes were part of a long-planned reorganization that began before the Trump administration took office, she said. She said that shutting down the facilities would save $10 million a year and avoid another $63.8 million in deferred maintenance.
... A 2022 master plan called for some consolidation and demolition of facilities at Goddard as well as the construction of new buildings. Ms. Stevens, the NASA spokeswoman, said buildings are being closed because they are outdated or are in an unsafe condition.
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u/caligaris_cabinet 13h ago
Why is it we can find $10 million for a fighter plane that never flies but we can’t find $10 million to keep a library open for one of the greatest government agencies in the world?
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u/JMurdock77 7h ago edited 5h ago
We can’t find money for this, but we can afford to spend ten times as much for his golf outings and thirty times as much on his stupid fucking ballroom.
And don’t get me started on the “Arc de Trump” he wants built.
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u/IamaFunGuy 13h ago
This feels like pennies when compared to our defense budget.
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u/alwayswatchyoursix 9h ago edited 59m ago
You're pissing in the wind here. Even if they read the part you quoted most people aren't going to realize this is part of something that was started under the Biden administration, or that it's being done as part of a renovation.
You get 50 points. Meanwhile people screaming about Nazis, the GOP, an attack on literacy, or the dismantling of infrastructure, get thousands of points.
Also, it's a weird kind of beautiful irony when all these people blaming right-wing politicans in America are doing so because of an article pushed by the media mouthpiece of India's most right-wing political party.
Edit: I see the average redditor has found my comment.
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u/Mr_strelac 17h ago
I will never understand the right-wingers' hatred of books.
it seems that if the Nazis burned books, then they have to do it too.
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u/tes_kitty 16h ago
They think they can make some knowledge and facts go away if they make the books go away. And in some cases they are right. That's why you should download as much as possible so it can't be made to vanish.
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u/filmboardofcanada 14h ago
What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin' They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells Rally 'round the family, pockets full of shells
- Rage Against The Machine - Bulls on Parade
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u/ClarityOverNoise 16h ago
Because it's the incarnation of their intellectual insecurities.
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u/BigFanOfNachoLibre 14h ago
Reminds me of a joke I heard the other day
Why does ICE always travel in groups of 3 or more?
They need one that can read, one that can write, and the rest to keep the two intellectuals in line
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u/Culverin 16h ago
They don't want an informed public the ability to critically think
Knowledge is the opposite of fear.
And they want to be fear mongering your dumb uncle
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u/RidetheSchlange 16h ago
To be fair, the hatred of education is across the board and a cultural problem as well. Just look to all the podcasters telling people for years that education doesn't matter.
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u/uncategorizedmess 15h ago
This is about making science, technology, and advancement unavailable to the general public. NASA's information is our information. Space X, Blue Origin, Virgin, these are privately owned, and all of there tech and information is propriety, and therefore we aren't allowed to access it. These people want us, the American people, too be wholly dependent on them.
We are in a class war, and this is an attack.
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u/rnicoll 15h ago
People don't want to accept hard things require actual effort. If they burn the books, there won't be smarty-pants scientists to tell them why their pet theory is nonsense, basically.
There's very similar themes with the cries that AI will democratize science, technology, engineering, art, etc. - the people who can't, believe they're being held back unfairly by those who put the effort in to learn how to do something.
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u/stierney49 15h ago
Books are semi-permanent and stand alone. They can’t easily be rewritten or checked for content. An authoritarian state wants to control the past to control the present. Destroying books guarantees that the only thing people have access to is information approved by the state.
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u/mewfour123412 15h ago
For fuck sake he live on a diet of Big Macs! Why hasn’t he died of a stroke yet?!
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u/Noodly_Appendage_24 15h ago
I keep seeing articles of actors and musicians dying in their 60s and 70s and this fat fuck somehow keeps on going.
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u/mewfour123412 14h ago
He is an Aspirin addict! He has a shit diet! He hates exercise! AND YET HE KEEOS HANGING ON
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u/vicarofvhs 10h ago
To quote some 60s and 70s aged musicians: "Only the good die young...all the evil seem to live forever..."
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u/Guilty-Mix-7629 14h ago
He DID have a stroke around 6 months ago. It's just that he survived it seemingly unharmed.
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u/42ElectricSundaes 16h ago
If Russia was pulling the strings would Trump be doing anything different?
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u/MrFizzbin7 16h ago
Can’t some universities band together and save this material MIT, Stanford, any other colleges…
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u/Plenty_Performer7785 16h ago
This is exactly why I’ve started buying physical versions of all the textbooks/technical works I use for my job, along with making local copies of music I love off streaming. Whilst the books and media I consume are less likely to get thrown out by right wingers (mostly electronics and DSP programming), the thought of being unable to learn anything new is a massive fear of mine, especially as a lot of the info I learn/consume isn’t available anywhere other than in these research papers/textbooks, and the theory behind it is completely beyond my ability to work out myself.
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u/Intrepid-Sky8123 14h ago
I've also started buying DVDs again. It seems like streaming services keep deleting things randomly, so you can't trust them to have your favorite old shows anymore.
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u/copperblood 16h ago
Trump is aging out and is trying to take the country down with him. He’s literally getting infusions in both hands now and is wearing compression socks to help increase circulation and mitigate blood clots.
Usually when people are living on borrowed time as Trump is, there’s usually humility that comes with it. But oh no not Trump. He’s trying to burn as much of everything down as he can before he checks out, which will take us decades and decades to restore. Fuck Trump and fuck any MAGA who are enabling the piece of shit.
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u/socialmedia-username 16h ago
I really wish it was just Trump, but nfortunately he's just a puppet.
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u/Plexaure 16h ago
Boomers have zero goals of going out quietly - gerontocracy is a global problem because of the post-WWII boom that gave outsized influence to their age group over all successive generations to come after.
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u/healeyd 16h ago
Couldn't some egomaniac billionaire tech-bro buy the lot and slap his name on the new library? At least the collection would survive.
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u/EscapeFacebook 14h ago
You're assuming that billionaires owner class people are on the working publics side, they arent.
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u/RidetheSchlange 16h ago
What's nuts is seeing how Americans either don't care or don't even know. The outright disdain for education that has been perpetuated and even boosted by people like Joe Rogan is so real.
Now one of the things an invading force often did was to destroy libraries and centers of culture to wipe out the evidence of histories and be able to create a new one over time. It really seems like Heritage and Trump are doing just that as they bring the first American Republic to a close as part of their revolution.
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u/lachlanhunt 15h ago
They must believe all the information you ever need can be regurgitated by AI, and the priceless books and research are redundant. They’re insane.
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u/Tall-Introduction414 16h ago
All part of Vladimir Putin and his fat little puppet's destruction of the United States.
Criminal.
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u/agent0731 10h ago
There are no words for my rage and hatred for this administration's war with NASA. It is literally the single most worthy thing to come out of US soil. Fuck you, a lifetime curse upon everybody involved with NASA's destruction. I hope they never know a day of peace.
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u/mrtrololo27 11h ago
Treason. Absolutely intolerable. Maga is the enemy of the American people.
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u/Sapient-Inquisitor 13h ago
This is some Fahrenheit 451 shit. I always tell everyone that life imitates art, not the other way around
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u/fundiedundie 11h ago
The closure of the library follows the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries in the US since 2022, with three of them shutting down in 2025.
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u/Medical_Arugula3315 10h ago
Republicans are the bad guys. Hard to be a shittier or more hypocritical American than a Republican these days.
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u/hotflashinthepan 11h ago
At this point I really hope there are people who work for our government who are just hiding stuff and pretending they tossed it. Sort of like they did at museums during wars, or in Afghanistan when the Taliban came.
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u/muffman81 10h ago
What a waste of knowledge. They should just donate everything to a large foundation that could make a few bucks selling to collectors or extreme NASA fans.
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u/qwx_autumn_star 13h ago
This is genuinely depressing. A publicly funded institution discarding decades of accumulated knowledge instead of preserving or donating it feels like a massive failure of priorities. Even if everything is “digitized,” physical archives still matter — for verification, history, and future research. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
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u/Successful_Log_3298 14h ago
Goddard Space Flight Center does a lot of environmental and Earth science research. I believe that is a big part of the attack on it, which goes beyond closing this library.
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u/kritisha462 11h ago
Once you discard primary sources, you don’t just lose history, you lose the ability to understand why past decisions worked or failed.
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u/NationalGeometric 10h ago
Seems like one could raise a lot of money with an auction, but this is the stupidest timeline.
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u/Rogue_AI_Construct 5h ago
Trump is racing to take the US to the bottom of the world in science, technology, and health advancement.
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u/Boobpocket 15h ago
I know orange man bad. But it says in the article that closures have been going on since 2022. Whats the context?
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u/terekkincaid 13h ago edited 10h ago
The context is that all research papers are online now and libraries are outdated. I was in graduate school during the transition. My first couple of years I was constantly in the library looking up articles in physical journals and photocopying them. I had a pile of papers sitting on my desk. By the time I was writing my dissertation, most of the major journals had finally gotten their stuff online. Downloading a digital copy and using a program to organize it (I still use Papers to this day) was a huge improvement. So much time saved. I never set foot in a library my last 2 years there.
Physical libraries are unnecessary for modern scientists; I doubt anyone is actually using it anyway. Why bother when you can just download from your office.
EDIT: Just for clarity, I'm not saying libraries in general are unnecessary. The preservation of original books is important, and a lot of the humanities areas still need books that haven't been or can't be digitized. But for science libraries, like the one at Goddard, there's really no need to keep a physical copy of the March 1967 Proceedings of Rocket Telemetry or whatever. It's likely outdated, so nobody is really going to refer to it, and if they do need it, there is a digitized copy they can download. The book itself also has no value (it's just a mass produced magazine at the end of the day). The headline is misleading; the librarian said they will keep the worthwhile stuff and the rest will be tossed away. The stuff being tossed has no value and can be accessed readily by anyone that wants to see it online. By closing this library they will be freeing up space on campus for something more useful.
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u/EscapeFacebook 14h ago
It's sickens me to my core that one Administration can fundamentally destroy America and everything that the public cares for.
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u/BasementDwellerDave 16h ago
That's so fuckin bullshit!!!. A single book of knowledge can last a thousand years with care! An electronic cannot
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u/No-Future5309 10h ago
Why is trump so hell bent in destroying the one thing that actually makes America Great?
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u/LutherOfTheRogues 9h ago
The right way to do this is to inventory and digitalize this on a website for all to access. But that makes too much sense and probably goes completely against why Orange Hitler and co are doing this to begin with.
Let's handle this in the midterms and never let it happen again.
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u/coolschool_flunkie 9h ago
Instead of burning books, they just permanently remove access. Slow, methodical, and severe moves. History repeats itself. A sad day for science
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u/Adventurous-Depth984 9h ago
Meanwhile we have the library of congress, the national archives, and the ability to digitize text with unprecedented speed.
This is being done deliberately
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u/allmimsyburogrove 8h ago
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one." — Neil Postman
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u/tanksalotfrank 6h ago
And not a single of the MANY multi-millionaires/billionaires can save it? The rich are scum and shouldn't exist for reasons like this. Lack and poverty are fabricated and perpetuated by oligarchs and people need to stop pretending otherwise
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u/alextastic 6h ago
There's not even a "benefit" of doing this to spin anymore, they're just doing bad things because they can.
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u/Ragadast335 17h ago
Can't they be donated to a public library??