Not an expert, a bigot is needed!

Once upon a time there was another Greek, being successful and patriotic, who wanted to help his native country in his field of expertise.
However he didn't know that Greece's ruling elites have an other worldview.

Obligations as head emeritus of the Space Department Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in the United States and at NASA usually keep Krimigis away from his native Greece, but the next two years will see him spending a lot more time in Athens after he was appointed at the head of the newly established Hellenic Space Agency. The task at hand is to “build an agency from the bottom up” by uniting disparate state agencies under one new body, he explains.

The next two years? He managed to stay for two days, because on the third he had to resign. The article was printed on 13/04/2018 and he wrote a letter of resignation on 16/04/2018. The letter was made public two weeks later.

“Excellence, meritocracy, performance and ethos are our guiding principles,” says Krimigis, noting that it took him some time to agree to the invitation from the Greek government.

In the Greek letter he spoke about assessment. Assessment, meritocracy and excellence... The ruling mentality is that all people are equal before God, no-one should judge other or he will be judged too, so unless God Yahweh makes the assessment himself, meritocracy and excellence are not applicable.

“I wanted certain assurances that the principles I have described will be respected and applied. Another reason I agreed was that many of my colleagues here asked me to help in this new endeavor and I felt it was something I had to do. This is not an opportunity that comes around again.”

The prime minister is voted by the people and this is interpreted as an appointment by God Yahweh. It doesn't matter if they are atheists, because actually they do not believe in the Bible, but have a more abstract notion of God, still that God being the monotheistic one. So the prime minister by divine right appoints ministers and general secretaries and a mere head of an institution, instead of being just thankful, demands assurances...

Since the 1980s, when he served as a business consultant, and as a member of at least five different committees, Krimigis has been championing Greece’s entry into the burgeoning space science market – one in which several Greek companies are involved.

Well Greek politicians aren't interested in profits, they need institutions and bureaus for their voters. They need people who depend on them, who know or think they do not stand a chance in a free market; and that not just by socialists, social democrats or communists.

“It is everyone’s duty to the nation, the duty of all political parties, to support this effort,” he says, stressing that Greece is a member of the European Space Agency (ESA) and needs to make advances in the field. “We’re not trying to build a spaceship,” he says, adding that the focus is on scientific instruments. “It is technology that is also important to the country’s security and this is the only way that we can acquire it. Our eastern neighbors figured this out 20 years ago.”

That is a problem for the politicians and the ruling greek elites. An independant and regulated economy dictates policy to them. A state dependant economy is fully controlled by its corrupt elites.

In his recent book “Taxidi sto iliako systima” (“Traveling in the solar system,” published by Papadopoulos), Krimigis describes his experience as the only scientist in the world who has “traveled” to every planet in the Earth’s solar system thanks to instruments he has designed.

His first successful mission was the launch to Mars of the Mariner 4 spaceship for flyby exploration in 1964, but his 50-year career hasn’t always been full of high notes. He remembers, for example, “24 hours of anxiety and terror” when the New Horizons space probe, launched in 2006, “went missing” on its long way to Pluto, or how the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission came close to failing back in the 1990s because of a technical glitch.

Today, every spaceship has thousands of microchips conducting a constant digital dialogue. Does all this technology help? “There is always a huge possibility not of error but of unforeseen circumstances, so we always use the first few months of a space mission to see how the spaceship is going,” he says. Voyagers which have been transmitting data to Earth for the past 40 years, he adds, operate with simple commands and just 70KB of memory.

Krimigis remembers the start of the space age and the West’s shock at the USSR’s launch of the Sputnik in 1957. He firmly believes that the space race saved the world from a certain war and believes that all future space missions will be the product of international partnerships, mainly because of their enormous cost. A planned 500 billion dollar manned mission to Mars is no exception.

“We will be stepping foot on Mars as explorers, not as colonizers,” the expert stresses, explaining that the possibility of inhabiting a planet that has almost no atmosphere and radiation levels that are lethal to man are zero. “Who wants to live below ground in order to be shielded from the radiation and to have to learn to grow crops on that surface in order to survive?” he asks.

The solar system is a frontier that has not been sufficiently explored, says Krimigis, adding that the space community’s focus is now on the quest for planets that are friendly to man and on closer exploration of worlds that have water, such as Europa, Titan and Enceladus.

A man of great experience who has been around for fifty years on the forefront of spatial technology since it beginnings for fifty years. However he wasn't the right man for the job.

Krimigis was born on the eastern Aegean island of Chios in 1938, growing up into an A-plus student thanks to his mother’s insistence for high grades. He started studying at the University of Minnesota in the US in 1956, where a chance encounter with Professor James Van Allen changed his life. The world-renowned academic saw something in the young student and invited him to his postgraduate program at the University of Iowa, where Krimigis also went on to do his PhD. Among other tasks, Van Allen asked him to build a special piece of equipment that would be used on the Mariner 4 spaceship to Mars. “I finished it just a month before the launch,” he remembers.

“Back then we always built two spaceships because one usually ended up in the Gulf of Mexico,” says Krimigis, explaining the fate of Mariner 3. “I was terribly disappointed, but the engineering team spotted the mistake and built a new spaceship within three weeks that went off to the Red Planet.”

Success in this field, stresses Krimigis, is not just about skill but also the result of cooperation, an esprit de corps. “Space is collaborative,” he says, explaining that it is important for the public to understand that these teams working day and night for years on end are not doing so just because this is the job, but because “they are making history and generating future knowledge.”

As long as he stays abroad everything is fine, one can be proud of him, one can pretend one doesn't know why the talented Greeks cannot evolve in Greece, but have to go abroad. However if they come in Greece and they think they know everything better, this means war.

So it came as it had to come!

Distinguished Greek-American scientist Stamatios Krimigis has resigned as director of Greece’s newly established Hellenic Space Agency (HSA) just weeks into his tenure, it emerged on Wednesday.

In a lengthy letter dated April 16 and outlining the reasons for his decision, the head emeritus of the Space Department Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in the United States accused Telecommunications Minister Nikos Pappas of making decisions that “effectively annulled the HSA’s entire purpose and rendered it an unreliable bureaucratic structure that could become subservient to any political chief.”

Krimigis went on to criticize the general secretary for telecommunications, Vassilis Manglaras, as a “space tzar” who sought to undermine the agency chief’s authority from the onset, “with the minister’s tolerance,” and even though he has “no knowledge or experience in this field.”

“It is my belief that there is a concerted effort to manipulate HSA toward specific goals,” Krimigis added.

e-kathimerini

Who is the right man for that job? A person that claims to believe monks can dilate time and posts stupid commentaries about Europeans who want to eliminate Greece and Romiosini, the latter being Christian Romanitas or Eastern Christianity. What he describes as "Europeans" is  Homo habilis and what "they" achieved was the achievements of  Hellenic Heathen Pagan Idolatric Greece and not the Byzantine Empire. Apart from being a member of different commitees his only true experience is introducing internet in Cyprus illegally and being in charge of the Cypriot Church's radio station.


Article in English

The new head of Greek Space Agency, Christodoulos Protopapas, was appointed just hours after the former head, astrophysicist Stamatis Krimizis resigned on Thursday. Within hours, the new space chief made it first to social media and then to websites not only because of his striking anti-Europeanism but also due to rather weird belief that Saints “can stop the time.”
In his blog, Protopapas wrote of a miracle Saint Porfyrios the Kapsokalivitis (1906-1991), the Saint who protects Technology, as he stresses.
The miracle was that St Porfyrios “achieved relativistic time dilation through prayers,” when a group of nuns on a taxi stuck in traffic jam were late to reach the Monastery before it would close the door for the evening. He did not write when exactly the miracle happened but the nuns had previously visited the Saint.
The Saint managed to hold time “for over an hour,” the Greek nasa chief notes adding “the last time such a miracle had happened was when Joshua raised his hands in the sign of cross and ordered the sun to stop, so that the day is prolonged and the Israelites win the battle.”
Of course, Joshua from the Old Testament was supposed to have lived long before Jesus Christ and his Crucifixion. But who cares? It’s the faith that leads Greece’s scientific agency.
“The difference between the two miracles is that St Porfyrios time dilation was implemented for only a group of people and not for the whole world” – as in Joshua’s case.
Convinced about the miracle he further notes “the miracle puzzled me for many years because for me it is one of the very few miraculous interventions in time space that have been recorded in our Greek Orthodox tradition and cannot be explained with the conventional scientific knowledge.”
He underlined that “scientists are overawed,” about the miracle.
St Porfyrios, an Athonite monk known for his gifts of spiritual discernment, a type of clairvoyance which he sometimes called “spiritual television.”
Many Greeks shook heads and rolled eyes as they considered it as “not appropriate” or even hilarious that the head of Greece’s top scientific agency is challenging metaphysics over real science. Relationship between religion and science is very delicate and the one does not exclude the other.
Then one more of his posts on social media dated April 2016 added the icing on the cake of ignorance and ultra-nationalism.
Here with English translation

Damian Mac Con Uladh @damomac

26 Apr

New head of Greek space agency is avowed admirer of St Porphyrios the Kapsokalyvite (1906–1991), "known for his gifts of spiritual discernment, a type of clairvoyance which he sometimes called 'spiritual television'" (Wikipedia) https://twitter.com/LubenMag/status/989483593981485056 …

Damian Mac Con Uladh @damomac

"Greece and Greekness never dies, you fucking Europeans. When we were building temples & writing tragedies, you were living in the mud, were eating raw meat, were dirty and had no spoken language. Sunset at Sounion" -- Christodoulos Protopappas, the new head of Greek space agency pic.twitter.com/6QmPFNgqk8