Can to ten backwards in Japanese?

What the heck is going on here?:

It has been many decades since we explored the Moon from the lunar surface, and it could be another 6 - 8 years before any government returns. Even then, it will be at a large expense, and probably with little public involvement.

...

To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE ($30 million) a team must successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a "Mooncast", back to Earth.

That was published yesterday. Just in case you haven't read the news today:

Japan launches lunar probe

Could these businessmen really be so up their backsides? The Chinese send up one of their own next month. You'll find that their public is actually involved, by agreeing to have their taxes spent on it, and celebrating it as a source of great national pride.

Trust our business elite to formulate an economic theory that implies without any evidence that a particular means of funding is a source of virtue.

In translation, the words "privately funded" can only mean "billionaire joyrider". The Ansari X Prize paid out $10 million dollars for a space-ship that was built at the cost of $20 million dollars by the co-founder of Microsoft -- and it probably cost less than his taxcut.

After all, what else are they going to do with that money? Go for joy-rides into space on former Communist rockets sold off cheap like the rest of the Russian economy? You can read it everywhere:

Google's billionaire founders are also paying $1.3m for a space connection of a different kind.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page have struck a deal to park their personal "party plane" on a restricted Nasa airfield near the internet company's headquarters in California. In return, they will allow the US space agency to put scientific instruments and researchers aboard their Boeing 767 and two other Google aircraft.

Back in the old days we just lifted the $1.3m from their bank accounts using the tax system and only allowed scientists and engineers who moved the project forwards onto the site. In this new era we'll have to waste time putting wrapping plastic over the experiments to prevent Martinis being splashed over them.

Anyways, what kind of scientific instruments can you put in the back of a party plane, exactly? A thermometer? I think we should be told. This is soon going to get out of hand, and we'll have embarrassing incidents like when "14 high-rolling CEOs" took the controls of a nuclear powered submarine in 2001 and sank a Japanese ship with school children.

When you are super-rich, the whole world becomes your play-ground, and everything which the scientists, engineers and mechanics have built up over the decades are just as toys to be used and broken.

By adding a small bit of show-biz glitz, combined with years of mass mis-education, the Western public can be sold the lie that this could possibly lead anywhere, and that the space-tourism movement isn't one vast self-indulgent, counter-productive drag on any human progress no matter how you define it, when we should all be pissed about it, not applauding it.

Our expectations have become this low and this stupified.