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Joe & Mark do these now! My own post-mortem can wait.
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*Here I offer two time-critical suggestions, below.*
*So skip past my blowhard prelude!*
Like everyone else on the Union/non-Putinist side, I was bollix...
6 days ago
2 comments:
My favorite TV show was "Star Trek." It was almost uncanny how some of the technology portayed in the show became reality. Examples: Mr. Spock's "tri-corder" became today's smartphones. The diagnostic beds used by Dr. McCoy are now in every hospital.
The sad part is this type of thing doesn't get enough publicity. We're too bogged down in petty politics and power-grabs. We're stil stuck in the kindergarten sandbox, WCG. And the Republicans keep dumpnig pails of sand over our heads.
BTW, it's no coincidence that the Republicans keep trying to cut NASA's funding. IMO, shutting down the Space Shuttle was a gigantic step backwards.
We're not bold anymore. For all our faults, we used to be a bold, 'can do' sort of country. Can you imagine going to the Moon using 1969 technology? You have more computer power in your cell phone than NASA had back then.
But Republicans have made us timid and fearful, because it's the timid and fearful who vote for them, not the bold and adventurous. Republican leaders want us to be afraid, because that's what they're peddling.
They want us to fear other races and other countries. They want us to fear crime. They want us to feel poor and victimized and helpless, with even our own government a threat, rather than being... you know, ours.
They don't want us to realize that we're a rich nation, because then we'll start to wonder why we don't have nice things. They want us faith-based, rather than evidence-based, afraid of the future, rather than looking forward to it.
We can't trust science, because science is a liberal plot. Education just turns children into communists. Our government can't do anything right, but somehow it's still run by masterful super-villains. And we can't afford anything but guns and prisons, though we can never have enough of those.
Timid and fearful is how Republicans want us - timid and fearful and faith-based. They sell fear. They use fear for political advantage. The more afraid we feel, the more likely we are to vote Republican.
We're the richest nation in the world, but we don't realize that because all of the wealth stays at the very top. We live in a highly technological society, but we neither value nor trust science, because science tells us the truth, and the truth is a threat to the GOP.
Crime has dropped in recent decades, and the world has never been as peaceful as it is right now. But fear is at an all-time high, because fear - like racism - benefits the Republican Party.
I agree about the Space Shuttle, Jeff. The Shuttle was bold - maybe too bold, I don't know. But we don't do bold anymore. Other countries built the Large Hadron Collider. Other countries build high-speed maglev trains.
We have all the money we need for prisons and unnecessary war, all the money we need for the military industrial complex. But we feel more and more afraid all the time, because fear works politically (and, for media companies, economically, too).
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