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What's Wrong With the Manhattan Project National Park
Lasrick writes Dawn Stover describes the radioactive dirt behind the creation of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, from its inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act (the park legislation wouldn't pass otherwise) and lack of funding for national parks in general to the lack of funding for cleanup at Superfund nuclear sites like Hanford. And then there is how the Parks Service is presenting exhibits: at least some of them are described in the past tense, as if nuclear weapons were a thing of the past. Here's the description of the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota: "Nuclear war loomed as an apocalyptic shadow that could possibly have brought human history to an end." Can the National Park Service be ignorant of the fact that missiles remain on station, nuclear weapons are still being stockpiled, and saber rattling did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall?"
Can the National Park Service be ignorant of the fact that missiles remain on station, nuclear weapons are still being stockpiled, and saber rattling did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall?
This shows a disturbing lack of understanding of how the world was then, vs. how it is now... we are vastly less likely to face a large scale nuclear assault than we were during the cold war. Even if a city or two is eventually hit by a terrorist nuclear weapon (likely), it's NOTHING like was was being nearly expected at the time.
Heck, Russia con indiscriminately shoot down passenger jets now without repercussion, it's not like nuclear weapons are going to go flying over just abut anything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The sky is falling.
I just checked and it already hit the ground...
There it is, just laying on the dirt. It's still pretty thick though...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Only a halfwit (or a Republican) would think that there was any possibility of any nuclear weapons ever being used again.
If we have them, it's an eventuality, not a possibility. That's the entire argument against keeping them around.
The argument for keeping them around is that the positive deterrent effects are worth that eventuality. Arguably nuclear weapons prevented the US/Europe from invading the Soviet Union as much as they kept the Soviet Union from invading Europe/US.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The US, post-Soviet Russia and post-Communist China are all following the same path to rule by oligarchy. The differences in how control is concentrated are not important to the continuing concentration of power in each system. In Russia, the economic oligarchs are only allowed to slavishly support Putan, or they are jailed or exiled and their wealth stripped. In China the oligarchs are either Party members themselves or the families of Party members. The rest of the rich know that they must participate in the endemic corruption. They were only allowed to succeed because they embraced corruption from the beginning.
In the US the oligarchs have, for the most part, taken over the government and the country is run for their benefit. Examples are too numerous to mention, but I'll highlight a few.
The 2008 market crash. The reason it was so horrific in the first place was that the Bush administration effectively suspended all regulation of Wall Street and Alan Greenspan got to fulfill his Libertarian fantasy. The result, unsurprisingly, was an epic failure. Lack of effective oversight is the wet dream of every oligarch. That's why they love secret unlimited secret campaign contributions, another gift to oligarchs the from the politicians and judges they own.
The bailout from the crash was another astonishing transfer of wealth to the ultra rich. Instead of calling Wall Street to task and making those responsible pay up, the oligarchs were rewarded instead. Many of them are have far more now then they did before 2008, and everyone else is worse off. The new stock market highs are the proof of that. Meanwhile, the job recovery is still lagging, and the jobs that are being generated pay significantly lower then before the crash. This is a mass transfer of assets from the general population to the rich. Again there is no other rational explanation.
An earlier example is Medicare Part D, brought to your pocketbook by Big Pharma and Billy Tauzin,
I'll even make a prediction: when the FCC announces what they will call "Net Neutrality" rules, it will be the end of the internet as an open platform. It will become just as closed, structured and overpriced as the current cable industry. Just like Wall Street and Big
Why is Snark Required?
its inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act (the park legislation wouldn't pass otherwise)
You guys seriously need to fix your shit. Having bill riders is a fundamental government fail.
In the civilized world, a bill has a strictly defined topic, and anything not directly pertaining to that topic simply isn't allowed to be attached.
The Soviet Union fell peacefully and dissolved into new, mostly stable and democratic governments. Well, stableish, democraticish. About the best the world could hope for, really.
No, it was horrible and should never have happened...
But no one wants to hear it...
What SHOULD have happened was at the end of WWII we should have rearmed and reequipped the Germans and turned on Russia and removed Stalin, who was just as bad, if not worse than Hitler.
Look at Germany today? Imagine if Russia today was just like Germany?
Now THAT would be better... and we had the chance to do it, we had the nuclear bomb, Russia did not, and we blew it.
We could have skipped the entire cold war, and a lot of nasty stuff that happened since, so before you say "oh but more people would have died", my reply is that those deaths would have prevented many others along with a lot of suffering in the past 70 years.
The world would be a very different place. Consider that if we had gone into Russia, China's civil war might have ended differently, with the communists losing...
Patton was right. He was maybe a little crazy, not very diplomatic, but he was right...
And you think the US overextended itself in Vietnam and Iraq...