Comment Re:What, us worry? (Score 1) 1247
I'm with you part of the way here, certainly as far as blaming the decline of American intellectual competitiveness on Fox Tv. Any country that gets its model for how to regard education from The Simpsons and its models for effort and achievement from American Idol and its notion of political right and wrong from The O'Reilly Factor is clearly rolling down the rails to ruin.
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Seriously, sarcasm muddies the discussion. You have just dumped some odious kneejerk conservative stereotypes and xenophobia on us like it was a solution to China eating our lunch. Do you have a solution? Bush is just a stalking horse for far more intelligent people like Cheney, Rummy and Wolfowitz who share your selfish streak. Bush is too cozy with regligious fanatatics who don't know or care if the US fields well educated kids so long as Leviticus is made the law of the land and the bedroom. Bush didn't get us in the mess we are in vis a vis Asia's looming technology juggernaut. But he represents a party line obsessed with problems mostly of its own making on which our precious resources and dwindling time are being wasted. If we were pursuing international policies of justice rather than fear, reprisal and, lets face it, nailing down the oil supply, we could mount a better campaign to educate more Americans and make more of them productive [TFA emphasizes the output of universities but the country that has atrophied factories is going broke sooner or later]
Why not blame Bush? Who do you blame, [other than Fox TV]?
I am near to despair myself though obviously for different reasons. Liberals, the conservatives profusely write, are just whiners and blamers. They should talk to me, instead of just talking about me. I blame Bush but I also keep my skills up to date and manage to stay in work even as software jobs go abroad: thats MY solution. We can't keep China down, they aren't stupid people and they are used to their country's crappy ideas of personal and politcal freedoms. My bet is that their wages rise slightly and that new buying power then pushes up OUR prices, especicially for raw materials (some of which we still export). Then US wages effectively drift down to Asian levels and Asian wages stagnate as their govt's allocate more and more for the scarcer resources. Market force or government planned economy won't make as much difference as the Bush league would hope when the goal of not starving your factories becomes terribly near-term. My guess is the end-game has some gritty east-west parity where NAFTA-like agreements are seen as more important than nuclear weapons in shaping our future. That or we are all dead. I believe that what national survival is about is much the same as what species survival is about: getting the most bang out of the resources. That takes education, a point we seem to agree about. It does NOT take an administration that operates by banging on the countries that have the resources and spends our last nickel and borrows like crazy to play last super-power standing. We can't afford it...look east and see who can afford it.
.
.
.
Seriously, sarcasm muddies the discussion. You have just dumped some odious kneejerk conservative stereotypes and xenophobia on us like it was a solution to China eating our lunch. Do you have a solution? Bush is just a stalking horse for far more intelligent people like Cheney, Rummy and Wolfowitz who share your selfish streak. Bush is too cozy with regligious fanatatics who don't know or care if the US fields well educated kids so long as Leviticus is made the law of the land and the bedroom. Bush didn't get us in the mess we are in vis a vis Asia's looming technology juggernaut. But he represents a party line obsessed with problems mostly of its own making on which our precious resources and dwindling time are being wasted. If we were pursuing international policies of justice rather than fear, reprisal and, lets face it, nailing down the oil supply, we could mount a better campaign to educate more Americans and make more of them productive [TFA emphasizes the output of universities but the country that has atrophied factories is going broke sooner or later]
Why not blame Bush? Who do you blame, [other than Fox TV]?
I am near to despair myself though obviously for different reasons. Liberals, the conservatives profusely write, are just whiners and blamers. They should talk to me, instead of just talking about me. I blame Bush but I also keep my skills up to date and manage to stay in work even as software jobs go abroad: thats MY solution. We can't keep China down, they aren't stupid people and they are used to their country's crappy ideas of personal and politcal freedoms. My bet is that their wages rise slightly and that new buying power then pushes up OUR prices, especicially for raw materials (some of which we still export). Then US wages effectively drift down to Asian levels and Asian wages stagnate as their govt's allocate more and more for the scarcer resources. Market force or government planned economy won't make as much difference as the Bush league would hope when the goal of not starving your factories becomes terribly near-term. My guess is the end-game has some gritty east-west parity where NAFTA-like agreements are seen as more important than nuclear weapons in shaping our future. That or we are all dead. I believe that what national survival is about is much the same as what species survival is about: getting the most bang out of the resources. That takes education, a point we seem to agree about. It does NOT take an administration that operates by banging on the countries that have the resources and spends our last nickel and borrows like crazy to play last super-power standing. We can't afford it...look east and see who can afford it.
