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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
"It's fine to trash Reagan, but don't you dare insult the Free Market!"
What's it going to do, start to exist or something?
everything I know about Reagan is shit my dad said.
Perhaps your dad knows what he is talking about?
You might close the mouth and open the ears, you might learn something...
Reagan wasn't perfect, he was human like anyone else, but he did stare down the USSR with one hand and held out an olive branch with the other, giving Gorbachev something to take hold of.
The USSR was going bankrupt, Reagan unveiled program after program, from Star Wars (not real) to the Stealth Bomber (very real) and it made the Russians take note that they could not keep up and win a military solution, so perhaps peace was worth a try.
Yes, Reagan ran up a large debt doing it, but what would war have cost? It was cheap by comparison, and the really bad debts didn't come until Bush Jr and Obama anyway, we were fine up until Clinton's term ended.
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It would also be worth a read of WWI and WWII history, as well as what really lead to those wars, which requires a study of history going back a few hundred years... and it is a shame that I find most people have no idea whatsoever about the history of humanity, then are surprised when we keep doing the same stuff.
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
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