Federalism
Real Southerners are not successfully federalized and really do not believe in the Federal government.
From early on in my life I was federalized because we lived in a multiplicity of states and I more over identified with being an American.
The trip to the Moon was the sort of Federal program that made a kid proud to be an American.
Somehow it is hard to feel pride about being an American even with a semi functioning space program.
All that money spent on all that wonderful science and pictures of Earth seems run by Science Fiction stories from a time when there was a difference.
It is time the Space Program, embodied in the Federal institution that is NASA was run on facts, and not fictions.
The facts are that the Moon and Mars and Venus may well be eventually useful to mankind, but they are not practical evacuation destinations for large numbers of people and are better viewed as useful for defensive purposes, such as places from which to defend the Earth from Asteroids or Aliens.
In fact neither threat is an impossiblity, though I consider the Asteroid threat more likely.
The most sensible thing to do now with the Space Program is to give a mission of concrete utility to those of us who are going to be living and working here on Earth.
That mission really does need to be a Planet Defense System that is similar to the Coast Guard and it may well be best to put the Coast Guard in charge of NASA to make it happen.
The Coast Guard is a good Federal institution with a clear mission that insulates it from politics generally so well that a hero tv show about the Coast Guard is called for.
I see them as the US equivalent to the Canadian Mounties.
Too many of us do live in the past.
The world has not changed, but what we know about it has, and it is sad for the working people that so many of our leaders do not even live in the present, and are incompetent to lead us into the future.
Religion is not necessarily in favor of the facts.
On one hand this is a good thing, for otherwise there seems little reason to try to be something more than an animal, but on the downside religion is a denial of the fact that one has only for certain one life and there is no real evidence that things will be better in another life, if there is even one to be had.
Some say God is Love, and others say God Knows all, and others say suffering is God’s Will for the sinner.
I say that once your religion inhibits you more than it inspires you, it is useless.
This is my main measure of the goodness of any set of religious beliefs.
In relation to government then I look at religious beliefs as helpful when they inspire both leaders and followers to make more satisfying lives for their citizens.
A satisfying life is a life of building things, making things, growing things, cleaning things, or in general working and having that work appreciated.
Really we know that honest work ought to be rewarded honestly and in the United States the reason it is so hard these days to feel pride is that workers are looked down on because they must work, and must take any job that is in-front of them and must take whatever pay offered because otherwise they will have no work at all.
All the poor working people are encouraged to hate themselves for not being rich employers who can abuse those that work for them, and further hate themselves because they no longer can even get jobs making things, which does satisfy a human need and does produce some pride that infects even salesmen of a nation.
New Orleans was the present, in that it was the Service Economy that the Right Wing has sold to the American workers on the back of Religion.
Say we just fix everyone’s house in New Orleans, and send them back to the same jobs they had, and just pay them more to do them? The Government of the United States, which is Corporations and the Catholic Church has turned the US into a "service economy" and the Chinese are proud that they are making everything.
Everything they don’t make, or invent, they get to steal.
As far as the fortunes of the American Working Classes are concerned since the economy is divorced from making things at the same time it needs to have things to sell for a profit and everyone is getting old we can count on the end of US prosperity as it once might have been.
The only thing to possibly help would be enforcement of international laws concerning intellectual property rights in China and Russia in conjunction with an international minimum wage.
It is a good time for the creation of a Planet Defense System which is something the US could make, and sell shares of to other nations.
Transcendia, if it had a budget would build a planet defense system as its "Service Economy".
The problem with building a Planet Defense Service is that protecting the Earth from Asteroids and Aliens does not allow one to be selective. In other words it will not work for me to say that if you have not paid your share of the service fee, I will let an asteroid, when it is coming, and not going to hit where others have paid for the protection, hit your nation, since the hit will likely affect those who have paid for the service and those that have not.
Therefore I am best to make the technology and sell it to the UN.
It is too bad that the UN is so fucked up, the EU so complacent, the US so out of control, and China and Russia so dependent on peasants, while the Catholic Church and Islam conspire to maintain the Crusades of the Dark Ages.
Looked at realistically one would be inspired to commit suicide if one lost all faith in themselves as having hope of arguement with rational minds.
The Space Elevator Concept does offer an economical bridge to outerspace that really must be built.
It would be a big project that would cost a good deal of money and would turn the tower of Babel into something useful.
Love- Russell