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Post by missouriboy on Dec 2, 2023 23:38:52 GMT
Native Americans couldn't have said it better.
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Post by gridley on Dec 3, 2023 14:17:49 GMT
Native Americans couldn't have said it better. Fair point, though the most damage to them was done prior to there being a US to immigrate or assimilate to.
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Post by blustnmtn on Feb 2, 2024 12:50:10 GMT
The alphabet soup of government agencies in this country are completely out of control. The DOJ is completely corrupt and operates in opposition to the people. www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/the_fbi_again_tries_to_block_seth_richs_laptop_from_public_view.htmlReigning in these unelected agencies seems almost impossible in view of the self serving instincts of our elected officials. A Convention of States seems to be The People’s only resort to steer this nation back from tyranny. Term limits will never happen without it and bringing these lawless bureaucrats under control is an existential necessity.
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Post by gridley on Apr 17, 2024 11:43:45 GMT
www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-optimistic-conservative-s-guide-to-the-future/ar-AA1k3YEj?"Science fiction, at least in its pre-dystopian era, imbued American culture with the idea that anything was within humanity’s grasp. In turn, that spirit helped make high-tech breakthroughs possible by inspiring bright young misfits to pursue mastery of difficult fields." "To explain why midcentury techno-optimism fizzled, Pethokoukis borrows a concept from 1970s futurist F.M. Esfandiary. Esfandiary thought traditional right-wing and left-wing political labels were obsolete. Instead, he proposed the terms “Up Wing” to denote an ideology of hopeful futurism and “Down Wing” to describe a zero-sum worldview focused on limits and risk avoidance. In this framing, the years from about 1955 to 1973 were emphatically Up Wing. Boosted by new technologies, living standards and worker productivity soared, Pethokoukis observes, making the ‘50s and ‘60s “the fastest-growing decades of the past century.”" "But in the early 1970s, just as the last Apollo flight returned to Earth, everything changed. The economy soured, interest rates soared, and optimism sank. The “Space Age was suddenly grounded,” Pethokoukis writes, and “the Atomic Age began powering down.” Instead of predicting vibrant futures, leading intellectuals embraced a dour Down Wing outlook; they warned that population growth would cause “a race to oblivion” and stressed “limits to growth.” The era of techno-optimist entertainment was over as well. With movies like Soylent Green (overpopulation leads to cannibalism) and Westworld (robots run amok), science fiction took a dystopian turn that mostly continues to this day." "Pethokoukis calls this pivot “the Great Downshift.” Had we stayed on the economic trajectory of the ‘50s and ‘60s, he notes, the U.S. economy would be almost twice as large today, with a median household income of $125,000 instead of our current $70,000." " Starting around 1970, he writes, “America experienced a regulatory explosion that continues to reverberate.” The National Environmental Policy Act, passed that year, created an ever-expanding obstacle course for industries trying to grow. Environmental Impact Statements that originally required 10 pages generally exceed 500 today. Obtaining permits for infrastructure projects can take a decade or more. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a regulatory regime inspired by a “limits to growth” ideology wound up … limiting growth."
OK, but is it all bad news? Well, perhaps not:
"Pethokoukis’s prescription for bringing back Up Wing America has two main elements. First, we need to dismantle obstacles to progress. It is possible to protect the environment without the elaborate restrictions imposed by NEPA, he writes: “Let’s raze that bureaucratic barrier.”"
"Second, America should revive the Right Stuff ethos of the 1960s. That means rediscovering the upsides of rational risk-taking."
I've long felt the second point is the root of NASA's problems - they are so determined not to loose an astronaut in space that they won't take risks - but exploring new frontiers, trying new technologies, ALWAYS caries an element of risk. The 'golden era' astronauts CLEARLY knew that, as did the "TFNG" class that launched the Space Shuttle program. They knew darn well they were risking their lives and they believed it was worth it. Did they want to ensure the risks they ran were rational? Certainly - and there's nothing wrong with that. But you KNOW Neil Armstrong would have been told to abort today and would never have landed on the moon. And then there would have been a decade of studies on what went wrong before Apollo 12 was allowed to launch - if it ever was.
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