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People Believe NASA Funded As Well As US Military
QuantumG writes "An essay on the Space Review site is reporting that a just-completed study indicates the average citizen has no idea how much funding NASA gets. Respondents generally estimated NASA's allocation of the national budget to be approximately 24% (it's actually closer to 0.58%) and the Department of Defense budget to be approximately 33% (it's actually closer to 21%). In other words, respondents believed NASA's budget approaches that of the Department of Defense, which receives almost 38 times more money. Once informed of the actual allocations, they were almost uniformly surprised. One of the more vocal participants exclaimed, 'No wonder we haven't gone anywhere!'"
where no one posted before.
If NASA's budget was increased, it would probably be at the expense of education, or something else, but not the military, so increasing their budget may lead to even bigger problems elsewhere and would not benefit humanity significantly.
With what has been spent on the Iraq war, the US could have funded a national health service.
I just can't believe USA people put up with spending 21% of their national budget on the military.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
One of the more vocal participants exclaimed, 'No wonder we haven't gone anywhere!'"
We've gone to war, where you wanna be!
So, 12%?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Bombing stuff is important.
FAQs are evil.
that the Iraq and Afghanistan War aren't even part of that massive DoD budget!
War does.
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
The amount of resources the US spends on the military is obscene, IMHO.
/. post earlier this month
As I referenced in my
( here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=352789&cid=21263533 )
The US spends almost 60% of all global military spending, not counting the 2 undeclared wars, Iraq and Afganistan. That is $623 Billion out of a total of about $1.1 Trillion. The Iraq war is estimated to cost over 1.2 Trillion(ish), with about 500B spent so far. Those are direct costs - cash spent, and does not count indirect costs or opportunity costs or the human toll.
Some details can be found here:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm
and here
For me, I'm done keeping quiet. I'm done being polite. I'm done hoping that these wrongs will be corrected, eventually. I bring up the reality of what is happening in the US in common discussions with people. It makes people uncomfortable, as it should. Criminals are running the show, and no one has or will step to stop them. Now that the US has installed a chief lawman that is covering up past crimes, there is no more room for polite waiting and hoping things get better legally.
I think they do that.
FAQs are evil.
From CIA Factbook https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html:
Military expenditures - percent of GDP: 4.06% (2005 est.).
Does this 4.06% (~530 billion dollars) of GDP (2006 est.) correspond to 21% of the federal budget?
If this is true, the federal budget represents ~2.524 trillion dollars, or ~19.3% of GDP... It seems a lot.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
Americans might not know NASA versus Defense Department budgets and all that useless crap, but I bet the majority could pick Britney Spears' crotch out of a line-up.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Worse are what people think we spend on "welfare", especially in "red" states.
And people who think illegal immigrants are getting welfare and other such benefits.
FAQs are evil.
Now that puts things into perspective....
That said, even though NASA could probably use more funding, misallocation of resources is still a huge problem. I agree heartily with this recent comment by Clark Lindsay over at RLV News:
http://hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=4926 Keith Cowing responds to Mike Griffin's claim that he did not cause the VSE budget problems: Mike Griffin on VSE Woes: "I did not put us into this position" - NASA Watch - Nov.15.07
You most certainly did get the agency into the predicament that it is in today. Instead of going off and reinventing the wheel (Ares 1) you could have bought EELVs off the shelf from a ULA catalog and focused only on CEV development. You forced a rigid and recycled architecture upon the agency - one that requires large monolithic launchers - when in fact you could have come up with one that used existing launchers or straightforward derivations thereof.
I can certainly support that scolding. I think Ares 1 is a disaster and Ares V is a bad dream. However, rather than NASA choosing an EELV outright, I would have preferred a Super-COTS competition in 2006 that went something like the following:
* A budget of two or three billion dollars for Phase 1
* As with COTS, the systems proposed should be capable of supplying a minimum amount cargo to the ISS per year but be upgradable to crew operations no later than 2011.
* The ULA firms would be invited to enter their proposals along with the entrepreneurial rocket firms
* Four commercial launcher proposals would be selected for Phase 1
* The entrants would decide for themselves whether a capsule or lifting body or whatever is the most cost effective system for cargo/crew delivery.
* Assuming at least two firms successfully fulfilled Phase 1, the two with the lowest cost/kg to the ISS would each be guaranteed half of all NASA launches to LEO in, say, the period 2010-2015.
* NASA would focus on lunar exploration systems that would work within the capabilities of the COTS transports. (This would no doubt involve a more modular approach than is currently envisioned.)
Too late now, of course, to run such a COTS competition. It's possible, though, that Lockheed-Martin has used the current studies with Bigelow and SpaceDev to prepare a proposal for NASA launch services just in case the next administration cancels Ares 1. On the other hand, if the Falcon 9 initial flights go well, there will be no need for such alternatives.
As many of you are already starting to realize, governments are not working for the total benefit of the public. They can be manipulated into making our lives harder than necessary, and they do it quite efficiently. Wars are invented, monetary systems hold a fierce grip on people making them their slaves, etc.
All this anxiety, hate, disillusion, and sorrow is one of their aims. Why? because an ignorant, weak and depressed humanity can be more easily manipulated into its own destruction, whether it be by itself, or by a treat from outer space, and this is the final goal.
What can we do? Wish for a change, spread the good, think positive, and motivate a change from within. The world is not as bad as they want us to believe, there is more good that anything else, but that doesn't make the news.
All I am saying: The darkest moment is right before the dawn.
There is no desperate need to balance the budget, and the deficit is certainly not "killing" America. America's debt is about 65% of its GDP right now - how does your debt compare to your income, and what does the bank think of you as a credit risk? - and federal receipts are currently growing faster than federal outlays, leading to a budget balance some time by late 2009. America has practically infinite credit, and millions of people are willing to lend to us at a very reasonable rate. At the height of our debt-to-GDP ratio, after World War II, the federal debt was over 200% of our GDP, yet we survived.
Don't trust anyone forecasting the imminent doom of America. As Adam Smith said when told the loss of the states would ruin Britain, "there is much ruin in a nation." People have been predicting disaster for America and the world forever, and it is easy to find many examples. So far, all of these people whose predictions are not still in the future (I'm looking at you, 2012 cranks) have shown to be cranks.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
While the allocated military budget may be 21%, once you take into account all the related costs (i.e., costs you didn't have with so large a military), the military probably accounts for more than half of the federal budget.
What is truly scary, however, is not this little factoid about NASA, it's that people who are supposed to live in a democracy and keep whining about taxes have no idea where their money goes.
So, let me summarize it simply: if you want lower taxes, don't vote in a militaristic nut next time.
Considering that medicare has cost us significantly more during the course of the war than the war has, the money we've spent on the war is probably not enough to pay for national health care. We spend about $300,000,000,000 on medicare each year, while the total budget for the iraq war has been less than $500,000,000,000. Then again, it depends what you mean when you say "national health care". Perhaps the program you had in mind is significantly smaller medicare?
What ever happened to calling it "universal health care" or "socialized medicine". Calling it "national health care" almost makes it sound noble and patriotic. If it's a social program, what's so wrong with calling it what it is? Once we have it, it's more likely that we will refer to it with swear words anyway, just as we would any other government program or agency. Maybe we should just call it "bitch care" or "fucking shit" right now and get it over with.
Fun times will be had by all.
Not True! We have been to Iraq, Kuwait, Afganistan, Panama ... Soon we will be going to Iran, Pakistan... What rot these guys are talkin' 'bout?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
A strong military is essential to safeguarding liberty and the Republic. But a strong military doesn't have to be one of excess. The military has become a tool for delivering profits to Lockheed Martin and Boeing and other conglomerates under the auspice of national security. It's a tool congressmen use to allocate military projects to their districts, whether or not such projects benefit the mission at hand.
Some examples of the Pentagon's famed waste and corruption:
The Crusader artillery project, finally canceled in 2002 after $11 billion was spent on it. Donald Rumsfeld said it wasn't mobile enough for the 21st century. What is so wrong with the current Paladin artillery platform that this project was required in the first place?
And what about the Coast Guard's troubled modernization efforts, contracted out to Lockheed and Northrop? The project is $7 billion overbudget and nine years behind schedule, yet both of these companies still continue to work on it. And Lockheed and Northrop will continue working on projects for decades to come despite this.
The Air Force and Navy have F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s. But they're building the F-22 and some F-35 joint strike aircraft, too? At what point is enough enough? If the branches could afford dabbling in that stuff, then they should go for it. But it's a matter of prioritizing; money is not infinite, despite what the debt-ridden government believes. Maintain the systems we have, many of which are at the breaking point after years of service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Churning out more wonder weapons seems pointless when our current crop of fighters perform just fine.
There comes a point where we must see this game for what it is. The challenge is in creating a ready, able, and fearsome fighting force while not indulging the excesses of the military-industrial complex. And I know that many great things have come from Pentagon-sponsored R&D projects. But these programs can still exist without spending countless sums of money.
And this doesn't even take into account that such a fearsome military is all too often misused in wars of choice like Vietnam and Iraq. So we spend all of this money to build a huge military, then spend even more money to misuse it...without ever having declared war. Brilliant.
much like Al Capone provided to Chicago in the 20s.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Although we will be fine for the near future, anything can happen. Don't believe America is an empire that can last forever.
You may be right, but that doesn't change the fact that someone will be screwed over. I'm 20 years old right now and I don't want to be in the working class that has to suffer in order to change the federal debt. I guess I'll have to start looking for a job in Canada.
There is no desperate need to balance the budget, and the deficit is certainly not "killing" America....At the height of our debt-to-GDP ratio, after World War II, the federal debt was over 200% of our GDP, yet we survived.
Actually, the reason that worked out is that the US was the only industrialized nation that didn't have her infrastructure hosed by war or owed another nation (looking at you UK which did just finally pay off their WWII debt to the US just recently) and the only other nation that was comparable industrial capacity wise was the USSR which was in its Stalinist era which didn't need a real GDP to get things done (Need a public project done? Thats what millions of German Pows and Russian prisioners for! No need to pay anyone)
Anyways, the point being is that the reason the US could afford to have such big debts is that there was no other player in town when it came to currency. You might as well be trading in gold because the US dollar pretty much was the life blood of Marshall Plan postwar Germany and Japan.
Secondly, the US produced more oil than it consumed and exported more products than any other nation (actually back then the US was a major exporter in oil) so it could deal with such large debts.
The problem now is that we don't produce much in our factories, import massive amounts of energy from overseas, and our currency isn't valued as much on the international market.
I'm not predicting doom and gloom, but unless we actually do something about our foreign energy addiction, debt, and weakened dollar we will have problems economically. Big energy exporters like Russia and cheap goods manufacturers like China will be the winners of the 21st century.
I'm sure some of you are saying "But with a weakened dollar, it will make US goods more desirable on the foreign market!". Even if China completely floated the Yuan to a fair and free market value against the dollar their goods would still be cheaper. Secondly, America has burned a lot of its goodwill overseas and most foreigners are currently frowning on US good due to political reasons.
Again this of course leads to the issue with energy imports. If Chinese goods were more expensive and it pushed for more manufacturing in the US it would still be at weakened pace due to the fact that energy costs of production, transportation, and wage inflation due to the fact it now costs more to ship and have people drive to get to the stores will mean the economy will be up the creek with a paddle of a while.
Again, we'll live and it won't be a place of anarchy but until we do something about the strength of the dollar and energy costs then things will be rather troublesome for a while.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
NSF entire budget in FY07 was ~37% of NASA's budget (16B vs 5.9B). Of that 5.9B
$215M went to astronomy. ~56% of that $215M went to facilities like NRAO, NAIC, Gemini and NOAO.
NSF has a much better track record than NASA in terms of ROI it's just not as sexy.
While I'd love to see NASA's budget increased I'd prefer to see NSF's increase.
http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2007/tables.jsp#tables
Belthize
seriously, this is the dumbest comparison I have ever read... how many people work for the military & how many vehicles do they have to maintain compared to NASA? Thats like bitching that the Oswego NY school system doesnt get as much as the NYC school system...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
You can't just compare one time to another without considering the differences. And don't forget that we were paid back a good sum from WWII nations for our war efforts (In fact, the final payment was just two years ago or so).
:T:R:A:N:S:
Virgin Galactic et al will bring humanity into space, not central planners and their boondoggles.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Here you go. here is a second. How do you figure that our deficit actually went down under GWB? Or are you doing fox news math?
We HAD the capablity to absorb monster deficits at one time. As you point out (and I have as elsewhere), We have burned our resources and have lost our export capacity. Worse, America had a GREAT reputation post WWII (even post 911), but now, due to our invasion of Iraq, our friends are neutral to us, and all else would rather see China as the leader, than US.
I did not predict gloom and doom, but I feel that our deficit is already limiting our options. Congress debates the issue of adjusting NASA's budget, when its total budget is already less than 1% of our fed. budget. The servicing on reagan's and W's deficit is now at about 1/3 of NASA's budget.
Then top it off that politicians are pushing for illegals to come here to lower a business's labor costs. But that has the negative effect of preventing us from moving labor intensive jobs to automated jobs. Worse, the ppl are typically paid close to minimum wage, but even if we paid them 1/4 of our minimum wage, it would still be above China, and even Mexico's prevailing wages. That will lead to more jobs going overseas. IOW, we are burning our future in so many ways. Will we survive? Certainly we will. England, Germany, Italy (or Rome), Mongolia, China, Egypt, and even Persia were all once a mighty world controllers. They survive. But where would they rather be? In their current state or back to where they in control of their future, rather than others?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Part of NASA funding goes to the Stargate that the Military runs.
The average citizen doesn't know the difference between a billion and a trillion. The Pirahã with one, two, and many. We have 1 to a million and more money than we can imagine. I don't think we can conclude anything from the survey, except that people have no concept of how much money we're spending on the military.
-Dave
This study is done once very year or two, and people always seem to have forgotten the results by the next time it's done again. The key thing to know is that since the end of Apollo (which barely got NASA above 4% of federal spending) NASA has basically hovered at 0.5%. That's for nearly 40 years now (Apollo funding peaked around 1967), which I think represents an amazingly stable national consensus about how much we want to spend on the civil space program.
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stick_Diplomacy
Big sticks are fine, until they start swinging. When all you have is a hammer...
|plastic....or gasoline?|
Canada also has a national debt - about 40% of GDP as I understand. In fact, I think just about every country has a national debt. And most companies have corporate debt. And most individuals have personal debt. People seem to miss the fact that governments collect taxes and borrow money in order to provide social services that would otherwise be lacking. Things like... police protection, running water, a sewer system which disposes of waste in such a way that it doesn't end up in your drinking water, a public road system that anyone can drive on, a safe food supply, etc. It all seems very expensive until you imagine what life would be like without those things. Sure, it would be nice if those things could all be done more cheaply and with less waste, inefficiency, and corruption, but even so I have no plans to move to Baghdad any time soon. I'd probably pay less income taxes but it wouldn't be worth it.
that statement actually closer to 21% so irritated me with its fallaciousness I had to reply. the question should have been "Do you keep up with the latest budget shell game of how we can hide spending for the military-industrial complex?" You have only to glance at who ran this poll to realize their obvious conflicts of interest. In fact, 21% is absurdly low, as is 33%. It is actually 64% of net discretionary funding now. Wake the _uck up, sheeple
tcboo
You seem to think that air superiority is still important. This is an old point of view which has been superseded with the renewn interest in improving the army.
The Army can hide under bunkers and buildings, hide amongst the population, camouflage its tanks and anti-air guns and artillery. The army can move and occupy land. Not the air force.
Bombing before landing is important but the navy can do that more easily than the air force so why the need for air superiority?
The only reason is to be able to use helicopters and cargo airplanes. They can make your grunts move faster and safer but that's pretty much it. And don't forget that you can get air superiority thanks to anti-air guns and missile systems. As a matter of fact, do you still believe there are dog fights in the sky? Air planes are now airborn missile platforms to bomb and intercept. Small and stealthy pilotless aircrafts are the future.
The air force is not obsolete but it is definitely not the most important part of the team. The ground troops are the most important. The others are just gravy.
The Top Gun era has ended. Time to move on.
You do know that the US exports were a larger percentage of GDP than ever in 2006? http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:HTP0L7C38GUJ:www.commerce.gov/NewsRoom/PressReleases_FactSheets/PROD01_002835+U.S.+trade+2006&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=us&client=firefox-a Exports were 11.6 percent of GDP in 2006. They were 5.2 percent of GDP 50 years ago.
As for the weak dollar, the dollar is (mostly)falling against currencies of countries that fall into one of two classes (or in some case both classes), commodity(oil, for example) producers (Canada, for example), or higher central bank interest rates (Brazil and Canada, for example). The primary exception to this is the euro. However, the EU's central bank interest rates were lower than the US Fed interest rates until recently, when the Fed lowered interest rates and the EU central bank raised their's. We did not see a lot of "the sky is falling" talk about the euro when it dropped in value in 2005, why should we buy such talk when the U.S. dollar is falling in 2007?
The best evidence still suggests that the U.S. economy is the strongest in the world and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Which I would say is at best 5 years. However, considering that all of the current potential contenders to displace the U.S. as the number one economy have major demographic issues that start in about 10 years, I believe that the U.S. economy will remain the strongest in the world for at least the next 20.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Hey, are you the same guy who last year said "Oil at $60/barrel is historically high, but there's *no way* it will hit $70/barrel -- anyone saying that is out of their mind!"
Good to see you again!
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
"The problem now is that we don't produce much in our factories, import massive amounts of energy from overseas, and our currency isn't valued as much on the international market."
The last point will eventually correct the first point. The overvalued dollar nearly destroyed the domestic industrial base because all those lower-valued currencies made it cheaper to build new factories overseas. That situation is rapidly going away. Capital is starting to flow into the country again. My employer is putting in multiple expansions that add up to about $1.1 billion. Now Singapore got the $4 billion expansion, but the tide is starting to turn.
The second point is the intractable one, but not as bad as it seems. The imports are in one sector, transportation. Fixing a structural problem in one sector is easier than trying to do it all at once.
As to the point that "Even if China completely floated the Yuan to a fair and free market value against the dollar their goods would still be cheaper" I'm not so sure. Their demand would soar as well if they weren't being systematically kept poor. And they are still building heavy infrastructure.
Did you know that their government will not allow Chinese steel to be used in high-pressure steam piping? There was a minor scandal where some company bought Chinese pipe, routed it Texas, stamped it Made in USA, and sent it back to China. Where it blew up under pressure killing 6. This won't last, eventually they will figure out how to make a good pipe, but if the dollar comes down we can still compete.
And it better. The '90's dream that we would close down all "that nasty polluting industry" and get rich off of software and media content has been shown to be pretty hollow.
Now, back to my Death to the Dollar dance....
Odd, but since WWII the key to economic prosperity is to drive down the value of your own currency. France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, China...(not sure about about the rupee) now it's the US's turn.
Canada also has a national debt - about 40% of GDP as I understand.
According to NationMaster, the level of the US public debt is around the same level as that of Austria, France, Canada, Germany, and Portugal, around 65% of the GDP, give or take. These numbers are across different years, but are probably still accurate to within a reasonable degree.
Looking elsewhere, the deficit for FY2007 came in much smaller than predicted at $163 billion, about 1.2% of the GDP for the country. Comparing this to the deficits run by several European countries, such as France (2.5%), Germany (1.7%), and Austria (1.4%), it's not that bad (though it should be a mild surplus). The next year should prove interesting to watch, though, as various financial issues may hit tax revenues. We shall see.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Lets not compare to individuals. It is more reasonable to compare the federal gov to a business. So for all the proponents of deficit spending, ecspecially our "republican" politicians, I have a very simple dare: If you can find large publicly traded companies with a debt that is 3 to 4 times their annual revenue, then I dare you to invest your own personal money in those companies. Afterall, if this type of borrowing is a sound fiscal policy as you have suggested, then it should benefit those companies in the long run.
Okay, lets here your excuses for why you will not put you money where your mouth is.
The US spends almost 60% of all global military spending,
Don't forget that we also have higher labor costs. The paycheck for a typical soldier in China or India is going to be something like 1/7th that of the US.
Table-ized A.I.
There is war in Afghanistan?
Yeah, even if they are, it's racist to think so.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Although we are making more money than ever before from our exports (as you point out), we are still losing money overall (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_deficit for stats). What does that mean? We're still (overall) losing money on our trades when you bring imports into the question.
Long Story Short: We're making lots of money, we're just losing even more money.
As an empire, no. As a nation we'll be around in some form or another till the end of time. The nukes guarantee that. If we go, we'll take the world with us.
Then again I can't just devalue the currency in order to reduce my debt.
Support SETI@home
Sorry bad math. 3.8 times not 3.1
Support SETI@home
By the way, you have an excellent point about the artificially restricted supply of health services. The AMA and its equivalents around the world are the last of the guilds.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You failed to explain why you think that we cannot pay for things now and why instead our children should have to pay several times as much due to interest. Maintaining a debt is just blowing money on interest until you decide to pay it back. Pay off the debt (or at least work on it) and you free up that money that would be spent on interest to do things. Borrowing money to pay for World War II makes sense, the entire country was engaged in huge war and sacrifices were made across the nation (rationing for example). However, look at today: we are taxing our children without giving up anything ourselves.
Yes, if you completely forget the cost of maintaining that military that fights the war, then you're right. Too bad the defense budget (DOD, Homeland Security Allocations to DOD, and Veterans Adm.), even when there's not a war is about $500 billion a year. Furthermore, Medicare services the most health care intense portion of our population. Using it to generalize the overall cost of a national health care system is completely inaccurate.
and guess what, it wouldn't have been spent on National Health care anyway.
There is enough money being spent on earmarks and such to fund SCHIPS but we don't see the press wailing on Congress for it.
We already spend how much on medical care and support (income redistribution) that the money going to Iraq would have vanished without a trace anyway.
Iraq is just a convenient bogeyman, unfortunately Congress is so damn corrupt (regardless of which party actually runs it) that it took an Iraq war to keep people from seeing it
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
So, most citizens think NASA makes the same $ as the US Military? Sounds like NASA needs a better Marketing Department more then another tecno-widget.
We actually haven't lost export capacity. In fact we haven't lost manufacturing capacity. We manufacture more total stuff (measured in terms of prices adjusted for inflation) than ever before. Despite all the talk of manufacturing jobs moving over seas, we have more manufacturing jobs here than 20 years ago. Of course they aren't all in the same cities or industries. Manufacturing is still growing in the US, just not as fast as other parts of the economy. Manufacturing employment grows even more slowly than manufacturing output because the productivity gains in manufacturing have been much greater that other industries due to technology. So while more people (in terms of absolute numbers) work in manufacturing today, it hasn't kept pace with the growth of the population. It's shrunk relative to everything else, not in absolute terms.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Have fun living without the hundreds of things invented by NASA that we now get to enjoy as consumer products thanks to their research efforts.
NASA just won a nanotechnology award and people STILL think they're useless? Are you retarded or something?
I'm willing to go along with the media hurting the war effort. Hell, I'll even come out and say the media is the single largest problem with a war effort. But to say its all a plot by the Democrats bypasses sane rational logic and takes a turn down Ludicrous Boulevard.
Here's the truth about this. Reporters report, if they see a US Soldier shooting a kid holding onto his mothers leg while crying, they take a picture of it and write up a story about it because its a strong visual and emotional image. If they see a suicide bomber running into a crowd of US Soldiers and passers-by, they take a picture and write up another story for the same reasoning. Its what they do, sometimes they'll shade a story because an editor thinks it plays better one way over another, hell, they've even been known to outright lie. But for the most part, the news is accurate enough that between a few conflicting accounts from the different outlets, you can usually figure out what is actually going on. Which brings us to the ugly truth of why the media hurts a war effort
Mothers and Fathers don't want to think about their sons and daughters shooting the child in the first scenario any more than they want, say.. to think about their child being blown up by the suicide bomber in the second . Nevermind thats what war is. Also nevermind that its how wars get won.
As the old saw goes: War is the continuation of Diplomatic Negotiations through Non-Diplomatic means. Everyone knows that adage, everyone has heard some form of it. But, no one wants it to be real to them. They don't want to think about how their family members may have to do things that aren't considered good, and just, and wholesome; just to break the other sides will or ability to fight. Nor do they want to think about what the other side tries to do to their family members to achieve the same goal.
Everyone wants to think that war is some god damn morality play. Good against evil, over-writing injustices, keeping the world safe for all mankind, and other such derivative bullshit non-sense. Well, guess what, its not. War is exactly what the old saying says it is; brutal, bloody, nightmarish, and yes, evil. The damnable thing about it is, its a necessary evil. Sure, I wish we could all live in a world singing kumbaya and put all of our differences behind us, thats an unreasonable request though.
And whether you want to believe it or not, its an unreasonable request to keep a group of people from trying to capitalize on the emotional backlash of the situation. You call them democrats, but there are a lot of republicans doing the same thing. Why? Because of another sad fact. That is how you get elected. You find an emotional charged issue, in this case; mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins, friends.. of people who are out on the front lines, and then speak about their fears.
You tell them its wrong that their loved ones have to face the things they do, when everyone knew damn well going in that it was wrong before the war started, if only everyone had stopped and treated at it as a real issue instead of relating it to a Sunday Matinee. You tell them that you understand their plight, and that you'll do everything in your power to put an end to it then you throw a few pieces of work out to prove that your serious about this, when everyone knows that if as many politicians truly gave a damn about it as they are saying.. the issue wouldn't exist anymore.
So please spare me your political crackpot theory about "Why Things Are The Way They Are". There are no grand conspiracies, no plot by one party or another to destroy us all. Just a self involved apathetic population, who doesn't have quite enough foresight to think about tomorrow; a news industry who wants to get paid, and move everyone to their way of thinking so they'll have an audience down the road; and some politicians who want to get re-elected, so they can continue to do whatever it is politicians do. Thats all, the same as it ever was, and the same as it will always be.
Human kind is a fucking joke. We gladly accept spending our resources on destroying resources. Hay a 100000 dollar bomb! boom. Ah! we destoyed a $10000000 building at the same time we destroyed our $100000 bomb! and we killed 20 people! who cost the iraqi taxpayers $100000000 toghether in education! What an archivement! Lets bomb another building! and so on... That's humanity, we will probably never find intelligent life in the universe, maybe intelligent life has found us - but don't want anything to do with us... ET: "Look at them... they are insane *ET laughter* - they prefer killing and destroying themselves instead of expanding their horizons and explore the universe, they obviously don't want our help..." - *ufo woosh*.
HTH
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The federal government has absolutely no reason to balance the budget or to erase the debt. Why should they? All that debt gives them control over the economy. As long as they're the biggest debtors around, Wall Street will tremble about every quarter-point increas or decrease in the prime rate. Why would anybody give a rat's ass about the federal reserve if the feds (i.e. outstanding accounts against the feds) weren't the largest collective asset in the economy?
If you're a hundred grand in debt, the bank owns you. If you're a hundred million in debt, you own the bank.
Why do you think the republicans want to privatize Social Security? Because it will make the federal government the largest single investor and thus the most powerful economic force in the country. It will give the federal government control over the economy.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.