I think it’s cool that China successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon today, but it makes me feel sad because we can’t even fix our own bridges. I’m not saying that I wish we were spending money on frivolous space missions, only that it’s depressing that China is doing cutting-edge research and we are struggling to keep our lights on.
I truly feel like 30-plus years of ascendant post-Carter conservatism has hollowed out our country. We used to have a right to feel proud of our accomplishments, but I feel like we’re living off the reputation of older generations.
I truly feel like 30-plus years of ascendant post-Carter conservatism has hollowed out our country.
Of which the elites of the Democratic Party bought into, and still do.
It’s not that we can’t fix our bridges, it’s that we won’t allocate funding properly or raise taxes on the wealthiest even a teeny tiny bit.
We can do anything, we just choose not to.
this …
a thousand times this..
I feel the same way. But do you know what’s really depressing? If you ask a conservative, they also will acknowledge the decline of our country, but they will say it’s the “libruls” fault. It’s like they see the same reality, but through a completely different narrative. Which causes them–again and again–to support the very things that will make the situation worse.
The US lands robotic rovers on Mars, not the Moon.
Exactly, we have a very robust space program that is very cooperative with other countries. I watched the live feed of the Rover Curiosity landing on Mars and it was every bit as exciting as watching the moon landing. We are still doing big things in this country. I’m still very optimistic about us. Yes, we suck right now at allocating funds for restoring our infrastructure, and we’re lagging behind in education, but steps are being taken to correct these things. Get our President a Congress he can work with and watch a resurgence happen.
“…we’re lagging behind in education…”
I really, really, really want to see this zombie lie finally put to rest.
US public school education for non-poor kids is as good as any on the planet. The problem isn’t with public education, it’s with the same class and income disparity problems that are tearing at every other part of the social fabric on the nation.
Anyone telling you that, in general, schools are failing our kids is selling you something.
A membership to a charter school, perhaps.
Another Drum reader?
M. Night Shyamalan calls it educational apartheid. Inflammatory word, but not inaccurate at all.
No, just an anti-charter school movement person.
I find it very depressing that it takes a book by a hack director to get any traction for something close to the truth.
I don’t know, if someone like him can correctly diagnose the problem (we care 0 shits about minority/inner city schools) maybe the average person is close to getting it.
What, the poors of other countries are not included in the testing? They have no poors? Or we have so many more poors?
We have more poors, because our safety net sucks. The US GINI index puts us on a par with the Philippines, Bulgaria, Guyana and Uruguay.
Since we are routinely being compared to OECD countries, their GINI coefficients are much lower (meaning less inequality).
The EU as a whole has a GINI of 30.4, and the US’s is 45. The global average is 39.
Now the US is a wealthy country, so our poor are much better off than the poor in the Philippines or Guyana, but that gap between the top and bottom doesn’t exist in the countries that we are being compared to.
lol What, our poors get to look at nicer things?
They faked it. Just like we did.
</wingnut>
Its depressing when I read the word “frivolous” and “space missions” in the same sentence. These missions obviously add further understanding of our planet and the larger universe but also provide direct and indirect contributions to technology and many other fields of study that are innumerable. Space is a dangerous place and every mission is a stepping stone to grander endeavors such as potentially mining asteroids for greater resources to the protection of our planet from the civilization ending dangers. I realize there are more pressing concerns like our crumbling infrastructure and abysmal educational system but these missions are far from frivolous.
No. These missions are frivolous to the starving and frivolous to the hopeless. They are frivolous to the badly educated, the badly cared for in terms of health and the seriously in debt. They are frivolous in light of the utter chaos we are causing in the natural world and frivolous to those who are bearing the brunt of our equally frivolous wars. First you take care of things on the ground. Once you get that together, then maybe it’s time to go exploring. Until then? Get your house in order. First.
AG
Tell that to the people alive today because of the kidney dialysis improvements that were a by-product of the Apollo program.
Scientific advancement is never frivolous. If you disagree, feel free to go Luddite and start sending your comments to Boo as mimeographed broadsheets.
How many kidney patients are alive today because of that? As opposed to how many dead because of our Blood For Oil Wars and other economic imperialist adventures? How many dead, dying and sick because of the massive pollution we are bringing to this earth? The balance sheet is way out of kilter here. You do not see that? I feel sorry for you.
AG
Arthur — the music you play is frivolous to the starving. Michaelangelo is frivolous. Science is too. Yet these achievements are what separate us from our animal cousins and are what will ultimately save us.
You want to take care of “things on the ground” at the expense of the arts,music and the sciences? Wrong move, man.
I actually want to “take care of things on the ground” by the use of the arts, music and the sciences. We are not taking care of our culture. The music that I play does nourish people. It tunes them up and puts them in good, human rhythm. Most of the crap that is touted as “music” in the media is as poisonous as a fast food diet. Worse. Michelangelo nourishes if his work is given to people in its true glory, as does the work of any real artist in any form. That’s what real education is supposed to do, not lockstep people into automatic multiple choice answers. Warhol and a whole lotta others? Bullshit. Fake art. No content, just pose. Science? I am all for science. Let’s use it to create safe energy sources, to provide real medical care instead of foisting one hottest-thing-ever-Big Pharma investment after another on a dumbed-down citizenry. Let’s use science on the ground. Safer transportation. Healthier foods. Better educational/communication systems. Real one-vote/one-person democracy without all of the middleman hustle and cheating. We don’t have to go to Mars to use science. We need some right here. Lots of it.
AG
P.S. Making real music…music that is directly connected into the divine harmonic series, music that is the sound of God made manifest? Frivolous?
Hell no!!!
Is a writer for The Onion doing a parody of AG here? If not…good Lord, Arthur’s better than this.
Among the many things we learned today: the music that Arthur plays is more than entertaining- his productions nourish people and are the sounds of God made manifest. OTOH, your musical tastes and performances as poisonous as a fast food diet to you- unless you have Arthur Gilroy’s taste, then you’re healthy.
You may want to make sure you enjoy his celestial work in person, though. Otherwise, you run the risk of destroying its full nutritional potential because you refused to accept it in its full glory when you bought that digital representation of his art. If you’re going to buy that jazz CD, just remember to check with Arthur first; he’ll let you know if your purchase passes cultural muster.
I suppose it’s a blessing to us all that AG didn’t find BooMan’s 1970’s music thread this weekend…oh damn, should’ve kept it quiet!
I love you, AG.
I am not “better than this.” This is as good as I get. It is information gleaned from a lifetime immersed in the highest level of musical arts in the most active musical city in the world, New York. The arts nourish a culture if they are well-made. They poison a culture if they are not. On plentiful evidence…the evidence of my ears as a musician and the evidence of my mind as I watch children marching into schools with shotguns and Molotov cocktails to kill their peers and teachers while other children gangbang on the street…on plentiful evidence this culture is now in a truly toxic state of being.
“Promiscuous cleverness.”
You do not see or hear this in all of the most profitable music and arts of the day??
I pity you.
Glitz is not information, centerfielddj.
It is disinformation.
Bet on it.
AG
It’s only frivolous when we choose not to take care of things on the ground.
There isn’t a financial crisis in the United States.
There is a crisis of government not doing what governments are supposed to do, which is to help the people it asserts power over to justice and equality.
Yes.
Exactly.
AG
This comment is exactly why the US is stuck in a race to the bottom.
NASA is frivilous for the poor. Food stamps are frivolous for people that make more than poverty wages. Universal health care is frivolous for people with good jobs. The FAA is frivolous for people who never fly. Social Security is frivolous for people diagnosed with cancer during childhood. Public transportation is frivolous for people in rural areas. etc… etc… etc…
Don’t you see that YOU are the problem?
We live and die as a country. That involves planning for the future; and the future is beyond the horizon.
Good luck on creating a country where anything that is frivolous for the poor isn’t funded.
You try to act leftier than anyone on this site, yet can’t see the big picture.
You are the problem.
You write:
What wonderful, high-flown words. Too bad they are full of shit.
Yes. We do live and die as a country. But how can you not see that the country is presently dying? The culture is dying. Children…and not necessarily so-called “disadvantaged” children…are walking into schools w/automatic weapons and shotguns, ready to kill their fellow classmates and their teachers. Other children are gangbanging on the streets. The most profitable “music” scene is a system that basically creates heroes of thugs, thieves and killers in the minds of its consumers. Ditto the most profitable video games. We have created a huge subculture of media-hypnotized young criminals, a subculture not comprised of only people from minority/poverty-level areas of the population. Just last week a fraternity at a prestigious NYC college that specializes in business studies basically beat one of its own pledges to death during hazing and then tried to cover it up. If we do not get down to basics…on-the-ground basics like real education, real nutrition, real shelter and real work on the nation’s physical infrastructure, its social system and the state of the environment worldwide…we have no future other than disintegration and chaos.
Plan for the future? Beyond the horizon? Right now the only “horizon” that is presenting itself is a totally surveilled society in order to stop the rapidly growing criminal activity that is paralyzing the nation. That may indeed work over the short term, but long-term it will simply paralyze all individual activity or initiative. I got yer “horizon,” right there!!!
Mars?
Please.
First Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, Newark and the other several hundred small and large cities that are coming apart at the seams. Then maybe Mars.
WTFU.
AG
P.S. I “try to act leftier than anyone on this site?” Bullshit. I have come to despise “the left” in this country and have no desire to act anything like it. Left, center and right in the U.S. are all media-constructed holograms that have no reality on the street and no real reference to what is truly happening either in the halls of power or to the people who live here. None. We are now simply a mediocre kleptocracy, from the top of our economic food chain right on down the the meanest of our mean streets.
Where the hell do you live, pstanley88? Do you do your shopping in some sterile, stylized mall, someplace so covered with upper middle class glitz that you can’t see or smell the rot going on in the basement? Betcha. I live inna Bronx. I live where the worker bees live. Come visit sometime. Maybe you’ll wake the fuck up.
I live in Bugfuck nowhere, MT, working for barely above poverty wages in a kitchen. My radiator couldn’t beat the -25 degree temperatures last week and I had to turn on my tiny electric oven to 500 and open it to survive. Do not lecture me on upper middle class glitz.
The problem with our country is our inability to see overlapping priorities. Ya, helping the poor is important; but an attitude that something else has to be cut to help the poor is idiotic.
The US is operating at least 6% below potential right now. Thats $1 trillion. Per year. NASA’s budget is less than $40 billion.
Tearing something else down won’t help the poor. Any demand we can create in the economy will help.
Our common goal should be in building things up, not fighting for scraps.
I know I was over the top in my comment to you, but my main point was that cutting NASA’s budget won’t do a damn thing to help people like me. In fact NASA is one of the few things that can convince the general population that the US government can achieve positive, real goals. Why tear that down?
Nasa’s budget is actually less than $18b/year. My bad. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/622643main_FY%2013%20Budget%20Presentation.pdf
Officially or not, NASA’s budget is part of the military budget. All near-space exploration has as its main goal the continuation of military supremacy on earth…I believe the PermaGov calls it “defense”…and finding what kind of profit can be made…if any…from mining the resources of the various planets and moons and/or possibly colonizing them in some way.
On a broader level, the same thing goes for most so-calld “scientific” endeavours. They are for the profit and continuation of the Corporate State, nothing more. If you do not understand this then you really have no grasp of how the U.S. Permanent Government works. We are no different in terms of goals and aims than have been any other imperial systems. It’s conquer and use at whatever the cost whether we are talking about strip mining in W. Virginia, dominating in the Middle East or exploring the solar system. Bet on it.
This system has to be reined in before it breaks us economically…it’s simply too expensive to both conquer the world and care for the population…and/or causes a nuclear or environmental disaster that blows up civilization in general. I do not give a flying fuck about the propaganda values of space exploration…propaganda is just advertising, and like almost all advertising it is by its very nature a lie. Let people hear and see the truth of what is going down here and perhaps things will get better. That is what Edward Snowden and the rest of the whistleblowers appear to believe, and I agree with them. Even if it just tears the blinders off of some effective portion of the population and make the PermaGov control apparatus drop some of its camouflage in order to maintain control, it’s worth it.
Step by step…
Step by step until we get to the forces behind the curtain.
Vaya!!!
AG
P.S. The real war now being fought here is between Big Gov…they have the guns…and Big Corps, especially Big Tech. They have the brains. Since Big Gov can’t really use its guns or take overt police actions on Big Corps for fear of upsetting the precariously balanced economic applecart here and thus being forced to open military rule…which would in turn mean largely abandoning the whole militarily enforced economic imperialist system that continues to feed and support what is left of this economy…my bet is that Big Corps will increasingly take over control of the government.
By proxy, of course.
To the victors go the spoils and to the bagmen go the elections.
Bet on it.
Watch.
Just going to add that NASA’s budget was 0.48% of the Federal Budget in 2012. So those of you worried about NASA burdening our citizens and taking from the sick and poor in order to go on their joy rides might have bigger fish to fry.
http://www.sciencebuzz.org/topics/cost-space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C_1958-2012
I don’t know, if we could build space habitats that didn’t have Republicans and escape to them, that would be pretty non-frivolous.
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Can’t disregard globalization in space programs: Russian build rockets ferry capsules to the ESA build ISS space station. A joint effort on the Hubble space telescope and many, many exploratory space missions plus all the relavent data from satellites for purpose of earth’s eco systems, global warming and support of agriculture.
With feet back on the ground, we shouldn’t have cities like Detroit and Camden NJ. Many more suburbs that are no-go places where gangs and mobsters rule the scared populace. Too many deaths on US streets and hopelessness for youth and whole families. Poverty is a crime and hunger should have been eradicated in the 21th century. Instead the world community is battling sex exploitation and trafficking of girls and women. Did anyone mention drugs deaths from harvest to outlets in Boston, LA or Southside Chicago?
Even the Dutch spend taxpayers money on frivolous space projects in Noordwijk (where I was born) and through some excellent technical universities in Delft, Eindhoven and Twente. The latter just succeeded in providing superconductor cables for the global effort fusion energy ITER program. Cost approx. $16bn, a fraction of global military expenditures.
No, in The Netherlands we don’t have cities like Detroit or Camden or failing infrastructure. We do have problems like Geert Wilders and immigrants seeking the ‘promised land’ and live the European Dream.
I watched Neil Armstrong on the moon on TV as a 12 year old. I held these same dreams and felt the same loss as the author of the link below when I realized America could/would no longer put humans into space. This is well worth your time.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/08/elegy-for-age-of-space.html
I don’t think it timed to post Carter conservatism. Though that has had a lot to do.with it. Even Carter talked about “malaise”. People started giving up on our cites in the 50s. Maybe a third of the nation never supported the voting rights act, don’t today and have no clue why it is needed. Vietnam said we actually can’t expect to win every battle and war. Silent Spring. There were riots. Watergate. ERA failed. Hostage crisis. And Carter couldn’t get the nation to adopt an energy policy we still need today and which in all likelihood would have avoided two or more wars. Not a lot feel good wins until maybe the First Gulf war, except it shouldn’t have been necessary and they didn’t finish the job.
Can’t put it all on one group because at very least the voters have more than once decided they had better things to do than participate in and care for a great nation. Too many distractions I suppose to focus on what’s really going on.
The main stroke against the cities was forced busing. People forget how angry Bostonians were when their kids were forced to go to other schools. Nothing destroys a city faster than the inability of parents to control the school of their children. Brown was the right decision, but forced busing was the wrong approach to implementing it.
Places like Newark, Brooklyn and Detroit were in pretty full white flight decay from the mid fifties on.
Brooklyn had stopped being the diverse working middle class community long before the Dodgers left and was one the reasons they. The neighborhood was going hell
That’s probably true. But the inability of parents to control the schools in the big cities was a huge, huge blow. In addition, I date the busing situation as the beginning of the “school hater” movement.
It’s interesting that in Europe the most desireable places to live are the cities, where people have good public transportation, access to stores and restaurants, and very expensive gas. I don’t know about the schools there.
So far, we have replaced a SF bridge with Chinese steel and also the Verezanno Narrows Bridge. This is deeply stupid and deeply wrong.
The Chinese are our enemy. We are building infrastructure in China and destroying our own infrastructure. We won the Civil War, WWI and WWII by out-producing the enemy. Today, we have outsourced our industrial capability to China, and they are the country that we are most likely to be in the next war against.
If we see the Chinese as our enemy, then we will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the Chinese steel is cheaper than US steel, which means we can buy more of it to repair more bridges.
The problem was that we embraced a gutting of the safety net at the same time we embraced a liberal trade agenda. So we hollowed out the working class wages in the pursuit of cheaper goods. So you get Walmart prices and Walmart wages all at the same time.
That’s not China’s fault.
You don’t see the world like the Chinese do.
Take the rice story on Friday. Chinese H-1B workers stole intellectual property from an American agribusiness. This is not what an ally does.
http://kmuw.org/post/two-chinese-scientist-try-steal-rice-ks-research-facility
China is actively, deliberately, and successfully drinking our milkshake. And people who do not consider the Chinese as our active enemy will be sitting in darkness as our infrastructure, our industry, and our companies are taken over by the Chinese.
It really is frustrating to listen to politicians talk about what we can’t do. We put men on the moon! We have a space station circling the Earth. We managed to wipe out diseases. Yet, to listen to conservatives, and even some moderates, we are a country that can’t achieve anything these days. And why? Because it’s economically impossible! Which makes no sense; I grew up in a society that was reaping the benefits of all the scientific advancements that occurred because of the space race. An economic boon that transcended life for billions of people.
One of Gandhi’s programs was the swadeshi movement. The swadeshi movement was aimed at self-sufficiency – the ability of each town, each country, to produce the materials that it needed.
In the US, we used to be the country of swadeshi. We produced everything here. Americans had a can-do spirit.
Now, we ACTIVELY PROMOTE the hiring of foreign STEM graduates, even though WE PRODUCE more than enough. There are hundreds of thousands of US IT/STEM workers who have been laid off and replaced by Indians and Chinese. This is wrong.
We buy Chinese steel to fix our bridges. This is wrong.
We buy Spanish solar power systems with Obama stimulus money. This was wrong and deeply stupid. We need to promote US solar, not Spanish solar.
We need to promote our own students and not those of other countries. US citizens should have priority for hiring in the US, which they do not. In fact, employers get a TAX BREAK for hiring J-1 visa holders. A TAX BREAK!! That’s insane.
.
In the 1950s, the US youth were leading other nations in ẞeta courses such as math and the sciences. Today, it’s completely reversed and are the Asian countries leading. Greatness starts with kids and the education they get. Don’t blame “them” foreigners, it’s a competitive world but the US has too many old jacka$$es in Congress.
○ The Third Age of Financial Globalization
Here, change one word:
and your post is redstate ready!
I am mystified by your comment. You don’t believe that having the US as a technology leader is important? That we should not be replacing our bridges? That we should not have a space program?
I can characterize the US approach to science (and to infrastructure, and to a whole host of other things, I suppose) with a simple phrase: penny wise but pound foolish.
You think it’s cool? It should make you a little nervous.