ARTICLE: Nigeria to send astronaut to space, By Taye Obateru, Chris Ogbonna, Vanguard, July 26, 2007

In line with my post of goals driving reading, I guess New Core and their associated wannabes like Nigeria need similar JFK-like reaches to inform their development ideology. Good, bad, ugly? Necessary but insufficient, I would say. Animating but hardly compelling. Then again, kill aspiration and rule out happiness. There is no joy in just surviving. There has to be some sense of progress. Nigeria's made it's declaration, following the audacious example of its era: China. Legitimate? Depends on execution, especially in the realm of funding, as Nigeria's got its problems with corruption. But there is the utility, however strange it may seem to outsiders, to create that dynamic (part aspirational, part critical) that allows people to say, "If they can X, then they should be able to Y." America needs to ask itself: what are the similarly ambitious goals we should be setting now? Because our ideological brand is clearly in need of rejuvenation. We've got to get some rejuv in our nation! Thanks to MountainRunner for sending this.