3010 More bad attitude

Saturday, July 4, 2010

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs
is to be ruled by evil men.”
-- Plato --

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The above quote - again, random, it was just next in my long list of quotes - seems to fit my topics today. I have been amazed at some of the things I've found this past week. I wonder why bother to pay attention to public affairs when the people we trust make decisions that are obviously not in our best interests, and then lie to us about it.

This is a WTF example. I'd never heard about it before. In 1958ish James Van Allen announced the discovery of the belts of protons and electrons surrounding the Earth, held in place by magnetic fields, now known as the Van Allen belts. In 1962, the US military decided to set off H-bombs in the Van Allen belts to see if they could disrupt them, the theory being that if they didn't do it, the Russians would. On July 9, 1962, they did it.

It really happened.

Code-named "Starfish Prime" by the military, it literally created an artificial extension of the Van Allen belts that could be seen across the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand.

In Honolulu, the explosions were front page news. "N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling: Good View Likely," said the Honolulu Advertiser. Hotels held what they called "Rainbow Bomb Parties" on rooftops and verandas. When the bomb burst, people told of blackouts and strange electrical malfunctions, like garage doors opening and closing on their own. But the big show was in the sky.

I guess mass stupidity is not a recent phenomenon.

Various colors spread across the sky, like the Northern lights, but bigger, brighter, more colorful.

I still have trouble believing it. I'd never heard about this before. How could they do something so drastic when they had no idea what could result? How lucky were we? Where were the cautious people? The people watching out for us?

The NPR story is at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128170775&ft=1&f=1026.

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The next bit is about BP, and how they and the CIA created the current situation in Iran. Story at http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak02.html. It's pretty amazing and angrifying, and goes a long way toward explaining why much of the middle east hates westerners.

BTW, I own a lot of BP stock. Sale of it was supposed to pay a good portion of the new house price before the oil hit the water, but I never bought BP. That's a piece of the story linked above that's not quite accurate. I owned Amoco stock, and back in the '80s or '90s when a lot of the oil companies merged, BP either bought or merged with Amoco, and that's how I ended up with BP stock.

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Now I read that conservatives are trying to repaint Joe McCarthy as an American hero.

"On McCarthy’s first day in office, he called a press conference to air his proposal for the end of a coal miner’s strike led by labor leader John L. Lewis. His proposal was for the coal miners, including Lewis, to be drafted into the military, and then when they refused to mine coal, they were to be court martialed for insubordination and then shot.."

Yeah, that guy, the guy who destroyed the lives and careers of people he didn't like on the flimsiest of evidence. (Oops, I guess that explains why conservatives like him.) Story at http://field-negro.blogspot.com/2010/07/at-long-last-sir-have-you-no-sense-of.html, McCarthy bio at http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1774.html.

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And then there was the Marist poll which showed that 26% of Americans didn't know what country the US declared independence from. Of those 26%, 6% hazarded guesses ranging from France, through Spain, to Japan.

That's sickening. Prime products of US school systems.

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I saw a bunch of kids in some kind of ceremony on the TV news earlier today. They were holding lit candles that had been thrust through disposable cups, presumably to protect their hands from hot melted wax.

The cups were Styrofoam.

Um, am I to believe that not one single adult there knew what happens to Styrofoam when exposed to a flame? Was there not one thinking person present?

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Were you aware that in Arizona, Senator John McCain claimed illegal immigrants were deliberately causing fatal car crashes on Arizona highways, Gov. Jan Brewer claimed illegal immigrants were beheading people and leaving the corpses in the desert, and, strapped for cash, the state sold its public buildings, including the Capitol. Yup. All true.

In the US Senate, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama held up confirmation votes on more than 70 Obama administration appointees because he wanted two defense contracts for his home state, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky held up the confirmation of the deputy U.S. trade representative out of pique over a Canadian law banning the sale of flavored tobacco, Harry Reid, the majority leader, accidentally voted No on health care bill, the Senate dining room had an all-shrimp menu in support of gulf fishermen (allergics, Muslims, and Jews be damned), and Republicans invoked a rule prohibiting committee meetings from running past 2 p.m.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, two Republican consultants claimed they had had sex with the Republican gubernatorial candidate, the Lieutenant Governor compared government assistance to the poor with feeding stray animals, and the winner of the Democratic Senate primary turned out to be an unemployed man facing felony charges who had never campaigned.

(One has to wonder how many philosophic conservatives had temporarily registered as Democrats so they could vote in that primary. Nope, that's too smart. He probably won because his was the first name on the list and he wasn't the incumbent. Yeah, that more closely fits the expected level of voter competence.)

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Is it any wonder that the rest of the world considers Americans stupid?

I have retired from the workforce. I may retire from the world. It's getting awfully hard to care.
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