Ad astra -- and a booming economy
Last night, I went to Donald Trump's web site (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/; if you want to leave a message there, click on the "Contact" button on the lower right of that initial page) to leave a message to the effect that right now, our economy sucks. But it could be booming again.
Back during Lyndon Baine Johnson's presidential administration, late 1963 until early 1969, when Richard M. Nixon took that high office, we had tremendous financial boom, and, rather than having a national debt, we had a gigantic national surplus. Conservatives today can't see how that could happen under a "tax and spend" Democratic administration, but it did. The reason is that America's space program which President John F. Kennedy pushed for, and Johnson got under way, to fulfill Kennedy's drive to put Americans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.
Johnson certainly didn't suffer as a result of it. His home state, Texas, along with California, Florida, and some other states, benefited hugely from it, because they were manufacturing or research centers involved with aerospace industry and the space program, or, in the case of Florida and California, they were launch and recovery centers for the program. The rest of the nation and, eventually, the world benefited from the economic boost that was a collateral benefit of the space program. Research and development necessary to the program, university participation in it, technological and scientific advances resulting from it, created countless jobs for people, good, well-paying jobs ranging from janitorial and food distribution services, utility services positions, scientific and technological research and applications, materials specialists, world without end, amen. . . . And then, when Richard Nixon took office as US President, came close to killing the US space program, which has never really recovered from it.
Why Nixon did it is something of a mystery. Maybe it was due to the penny wise, pound foolish budget-cutting streaks the Republicans have been so prone to, even though the amount of the comfortably low taxes US citizens, businesses, and corporations were paying then had created a budgetary bonus and had made our country and its citizenry rich beyond the dreams of Croesus. Maybe something more sinister was involved, as some conspiratologists have claimed. Whatever it was, if Richard Nixon had not crippled the space program as he did, today we'd have bases and settlements on the Moon and Mars, and perhaps even Saturn's big moon Titan, numerous space habitats orbiting the Sun and various planets, and even Pluto. We'd be mining the Main Asteroid belt for iron, copper, tin, nickel, lead, mercury metal, transuranics and rare earth elements, and perhaps even gold, silver, and platinum, good and useful industrial metals. The scientific and technological spin-offs from the rapidly evolving space program would be increasing by leaps and bounds, benefiting us all. And eventually, we could be outward bound to the stars. And when, for whatever reason, Earth can no longer support life, the descendants of today's Earthly life, including our own descendants, could be thriving on worlds of other stars
In the decades since Nixon so terribly crippled the space program, killing both the Moon program and the Mars program, there as been a current of despair in this country that has been growing stronger and stronger every year. More and more, in communicating with the public, scientists concentrate more and more on what they proclaim are absolute limits and impossibilities than on what can be done and what might be possible, worth investigating, and worth trying. They ridicule anyone who becomes an investigator of and writer about scientistically tabu subjects and ideas, from paranormal and parapsychological studies to harnessing as yet unknown principles to travel interstellar distances within a year or less. More and more science fiction, very unlike the glory days of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, is written in despairing, cynical minor keys. Humor has been graying out when it isn't painted in shades of nightmare scarlet -- remember the Glory Days of MAD Magazine before Bill Gaines died? It never had to take advertising, because so many people loved it, subscribed to it, and bought all the other publications MAD put out. Now, their publication schedule has dropped from 8 issues of the magazine per year to 4 issues per year.
Heroes are now despised, and our country is hated, where once we celebrated our heroes and our country. The most notorious evil tyrants and their thugs, from Stalin and Hitler to Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-Dong, and Pol Pot are instead hailed as the new heroes and celebrated by our young, who in turn revile our country, their country, the land of the greatest freedoms the world has ever known. Religion, upon which people once based moral codes, and from which they drew endless thousands of words of poetry, history, and the will of G-d, is despised by idiot militant atheists who do their very best to kill the holiday happiness of tens of millions of Christians and most others . . . but who, for some strange reason (such as no guts) don't attack and harass Muslims and Islam that way. Our children are dying in record numbers from drug overdoses and suicidal despair. Other children harass and bully still other children into committing suicide, then go to their funerals, spit into their coffins, and declare, "I'm glad he/she is dead, right in front of the victim's parents and other relatives, their friends, the members of their community. More Americans are dying of deadly diseases such as cancer and kidney disease than ever before. Companies such as Monsanto Corporation have pontificating to their executive officers and boards of directors that their sole goal is to make all the money possible from their products, and that nothing else matters, including testimonials by their own scientists that their "food" is deadly to humans and other creatures and should not be eaten by anyone or anything. It has been made abundantly clear to us that we don't matter, never have and never will, by far too many of our politicians, philosophers, scientists, and others who profit by sending Americans into despair with their countless books. We have lost our vision, our purpose, our honor -- and nobody seems to care.
People have been getting sicker and sicker. They begun to stop caring -- caring about their jobs, their spouses, their children, their lovers, their friends, their communities, even their very lives and the lives of others, everything at the very heart of human existence.
Instead, people become hooked on gambling, alcoholic, addicted to hard drugs, and sex in any and every form, no matter how dangerous. Some turn to violent crime, ostensibly for more money than they could make at a regular job or power over other people, but also, unconsciously or otherwise, for the thrill of huge amounts of adrenaline that their risky and conscienceless lifestyles give them -- and become hopelessly addicted to adrenaline, and then, finally, trying just to keep going after the initial thrills wear off and their adrenal glands become so depleted and damaged over years of abuse that they can't feel anything any more.
Some somehow come back from the brink and make better lives for themselves and their children. But so very many don't, sinking ever deeper into homelessness, bankruptcy, alcoholism, and addiction to hard and prescription drugs, finally dying either by their own hands because of utter despair or due to the consequences of their risky and dangerous lifestyles.
And all that began about the time President Richard Nixon trashed our space program, and our economy began to go to hell. Could there be a connection between that and what's happened to our country ever since?
Last night, I left all that on Donald Trump's website. I told him, quite truthfully, if, as President of the United States of America, he can restore our space program to its former glory, as it was under President Lyndon Johnson, our economy, not to mention that of the whole world, will begin booming explosively, growing exponentially. And due to all those useful and valuable materials coming in from the Solar System -- the Moon, Mars, the Main Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, add your own -- our resources, which are desperately depleted now and becoming more so every year, will be replenished and then grow to unbelievably abundant levels.
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for enormous economic prosperity. Please check this out and make your political decisions in this election year accordingly.
Back during Lyndon Baine Johnson's presidential administration, late 1963 until early 1969, when Richard M. Nixon took that high office, we had tremendous financial boom, and, rather than having a national debt, we had a gigantic national surplus. Conservatives today can't see how that could happen under a "tax and spend" Democratic administration, but it did. The reason is that America's space program which President John F. Kennedy pushed for, and Johnson got under way, to fulfill Kennedy's drive to put Americans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.
Johnson certainly didn't suffer as a result of it. His home state, Texas, along with California, Florida, and some other states, benefited hugely from it, because they were manufacturing or research centers involved with aerospace industry and the space program, or, in the case of Florida and California, they were launch and recovery centers for the program. The rest of the nation and, eventually, the world benefited from the economic boost that was a collateral benefit of the space program. Research and development necessary to the program, university participation in it, technological and scientific advances resulting from it, created countless jobs for people, good, well-paying jobs ranging from janitorial and food distribution services, utility services positions, scientific and technological research and applications, materials specialists, world without end, amen. . . . And then, when Richard Nixon took office as US President, came close to killing the US space program, which has never really recovered from it.
Why Nixon did it is something of a mystery. Maybe it was due to the penny wise, pound foolish budget-cutting streaks the Republicans have been so prone to, even though the amount of the comfortably low taxes US citizens, businesses, and corporations were paying then had created a budgetary bonus and had made our country and its citizenry rich beyond the dreams of Croesus. Maybe something more sinister was involved, as some conspiratologists have claimed. Whatever it was, if Richard Nixon had not crippled the space program as he did, today we'd have bases and settlements on the Moon and Mars, and perhaps even Saturn's big moon Titan, numerous space habitats orbiting the Sun and various planets, and even Pluto. We'd be mining the Main Asteroid belt for iron, copper, tin, nickel, lead, mercury metal, transuranics and rare earth elements, and perhaps even gold, silver, and platinum, good and useful industrial metals. The scientific and technological spin-offs from the rapidly evolving space program would be increasing by leaps and bounds, benefiting us all. And eventually, we could be outward bound to the stars. And when, for whatever reason, Earth can no longer support life, the descendants of today's Earthly life, including our own descendants, could be thriving on worlds of other stars
In the decades since Nixon so terribly crippled the space program, killing both the Moon program and the Mars program, there as been a current of despair in this country that has been growing stronger and stronger every year. More and more, in communicating with the public, scientists concentrate more and more on what they proclaim are absolute limits and impossibilities than on what can be done and what might be possible, worth investigating, and worth trying. They ridicule anyone who becomes an investigator of and writer about scientistically tabu subjects and ideas, from paranormal and parapsychological studies to harnessing as yet unknown principles to travel interstellar distances within a year or less. More and more science fiction, very unlike the glory days of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, is written in despairing, cynical minor keys. Humor has been graying out when it isn't painted in shades of nightmare scarlet -- remember the Glory Days of MAD Magazine before Bill Gaines died? It never had to take advertising, because so many people loved it, subscribed to it, and bought all the other publications MAD put out. Now, their publication schedule has dropped from 8 issues of the magazine per year to 4 issues per year.
Heroes are now despised, and our country is hated, where once we celebrated our heroes and our country. The most notorious evil tyrants and their thugs, from Stalin and Hitler to Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-Dong, and Pol Pot are instead hailed as the new heroes and celebrated by our young, who in turn revile our country, their country, the land of the greatest freedoms the world has ever known. Religion, upon which people once based moral codes, and from which they drew endless thousands of words of poetry, history, and the will of G-d, is despised by idiot militant atheists who do their very best to kill the holiday happiness of tens of millions of Christians and most others . . . but who, for some strange reason (such as no guts) don't attack and harass Muslims and Islam that way. Our children are dying in record numbers from drug overdoses and suicidal despair. Other children harass and bully still other children into committing suicide, then go to their funerals, spit into their coffins, and declare, "I'm glad he/she is dead, right in front of the victim's parents and other relatives, their friends, the members of their community. More Americans are dying of deadly diseases such as cancer and kidney disease than ever before. Companies such as Monsanto Corporation have pontificating to their executive officers and boards of directors that their sole goal is to make all the money possible from their products, and that nothing else matters, including testimonials by their own scientists that their "food" is deadly to humans and other creatures and should not be eaten by anyone or anything. It has been made abundantly clear to us that we don't matter, never have and never will, by far too many of our politicians, philosophers, scientists, and others who profit by sending Americans into despair with their countless books. We have lost our vision, our purpose, our honor -- and nobody seems to care.
People have been getting sicker and sicker. They begun to stop caring -- caring about their jobs, their spouses, their children, their lovers, their friends, their communities, even their very lives and the lives of others, everything at the very heart of human existence.
Instead, people become hooked on gambling, alcoholic, addicted to hard drugs, and sex in any and every form, no matter how dangerous. Some turn to violent crime, ostensibly for more money than they could make at a regular job or power over other people, but also, unconsciously or otherwise, for the thrill of huge amounts of adrenaline that their risky and conscienceless lifestyles give them -- and become hopelessly addicted to adrenaline, and then, finally, trying just to keep going after the initial thrills wear off and their adrenal glands become so depleted and damaged over years of abuse that they can't feel anything any more.
Some somehow come back from the brink and make better lives for themselves and their children. But so very many don't, sinking ever deeper into homelessness, bankruptcy, alcoholism, and addiction to hard and prescription drugs, finally dying either by their own hands because of utter despair or due to the consequences of their risky and dangerous lifestyles.
And all that began about the time President Richard Nixon trashed our space program, and our economy began to go to hell. Could there be a connection between that and what's happened to our country ever since?
Last night, I left all that on Donald Trump's website. I told him, quite truthfully, if, as President of the United States of America, he can restore our space program to its former glory, as it was under President Lyndon Johnson, our economy, not to mention that of the whole world, will begin booming explosively, growing exponentially. And due to all those useful and valuable materials coming in from the Solar System -- the Moon, Mars, the Main Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, add your own -- our resources, which are desperately depleted now and becoming more so every year, will be replenished and then grow to unbelievably abundant levels.
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for enormous economic prosperity. Please check this out and make your political decisions in this election year accordingly.