amicus
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2003
- Posts
- 14,812
This is a political thread, obviously, but I want to word it so as to not incur the usual rancor of the Left when challenged.
Rather than address Partisan issues, and there are many, I choose to address a more basic danger that could affect the entire nation and all who reside here.
In less than a year the Primary Elections will begin. Although there seems to be an eerie quietude insofar as debate of the issues is concerned, when the word wars begin, the real ‘danger’, I propose, will not be discussed.
The ‘social’ issues, Abortion, Gay Marriage and the Middle East war will most likely get top billing, followed on a lesser scale by Education matters and possibly the ‘entitlement’ programs, such as Social Security and Health Care.
I am going to develop my point slowly, so please bear with me and try to understand that I do not bring this up as a chosen political ‘flame’ thread, rather, the theme occurred to me through a recent acquaintance I made and has slowly taken shape over several days.
I have been digging tree stumps and rocks from a garden area for several days now, weather permitting, (it rains prodigiously in Western Oregon this time of year), and during my forays in the mud, a gentleman in his forties ambled by and visited several times, even offering to help dig some roots and pry out the six to eight inch in diameter stumps.
He is a bit of a social gadfly, I thought, at first, walking from cottage to cottage, visiting with others and stopping to chat now and then.
I discovered he is very talkative, usually about mundane things, often repeating himself on certain issues and personal foibles. Not being much of a social critter myself, after several visits, I complained mildly that he never spoke of anything substantial and that I didn’t really have any gossip to share or time to socialize as I usually am self involved in my mind, composing a story or a scene as I work away.
Then my internet connection was completed and the cable guy came around and the rains kept me inside for a few days and, what with my attitude, I expected the brief acquaintance to fade away.
Well, it didn’t. Seems like the guy is a bit of a computer geek and asked a few questions at our next chance meeting about the capacity of my machine and what I used it for..
It also turns out that the gentleman is a graduate student at nearby Oregon State University, in the final stages of perfecting his ‘product’, his final thesis for a Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering. No wonder I thought he was just a lonely gossip, no one around here was smart enough to understand a thing about what he was involved in.
Well…I think I am a fairly smart ‘cookie’ myself. I have some degrees, a Stanford-Binet in the top one-half percent, but when this fella got down to it, he had to use lay terms for me to follow the content of his final project. It has to do, in the simplest terms possible, with factoring all the essentials existing in a given material for it’s ability to resist and shield, for instance, the radiation emanating from a hospital X-Ray device.
His, ‘product’ is about twenty pages filled with a seventy-two step mathematical formula beginning with college freshman Calculus, moving to graduate level Calculus, Linear Algebra and Multi-grid mathematics.
He gave permission and I thought to copy and paste the first page of his ‘product’, to impress you readers of the complexity of his work, but I cannot manage to tell my computer to accept the math symbols that make up the paper.
He remains a very social and talkative person yet, but at least now, I started learning things and actually looked forward to his visits….and I might add, his assistance digging out stumps and boulders in an area that used to be river bottom land. I have quite a rock farm going now.
I even managed to ask a few pertinent questions and discovered that he wants to finish his studies, get his, ‘Paper’ and apply for a job at the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Washington State. His preferred line of work would be involved in the manufacturing of the fuel rods for Nuclear Reactors.
Strangely enough, we had both twice visited the now decommissioned Nuclear Power Plant, “Trojan”, located near Ranier, Oregon. He as a young high school student in Physics, me as a talk show Host in nearby Portland, Oregon, some years ago.
I asked him about job opportunities in his field, noting that there has not been a new reactor constructed in over thirty years.
He sighed…and then the conversation turned almost in a political direction; not necessarily by choice, but almost by function, and I learned a great deal more and had many other things confirmed in my mind from yet another direction.
It was really a quite remarkable conversation and something I surely did not expect nor manage, from this rather awkward looking, geeky sort of a fellow who has never been married or even lived with a woman, to my understanding.
For those of you who have faithfully read the above, thank you, and I now broach my original subject, the Danger of a Democrat in 2008.
Roughly forty consecutive years, slowed only slightly by the two Reagan administrations, the impotent and ineffectual Nixon and Bush senior peccadillo’s; hindered by a Democrat controlled House and Senate, and thus, an entire Federal Bureaucracy, hand picked, unionized and fully supportive of programs and a mindset that sprang from the Kennedy years in the early 1960’s and firmly in place since then within the agencies of government.
I want to stress and emphasize the above as I think it is crucial to realize and fully comprehend the role the seldom noticed regulatory agencies of Federal, State and Local governments play in the overall political picture.
For example, a program called ’Headstart’, just to name one, has long been called a failed program, expensive, ineffective and wasteful, yet, like a tenured professor or a unionized laborer, impossible to correct, replace or abolish.
Another example is the Air Controllers strike during the first Reagan administration. The threat to blackmail an entire nation by unionized workers vowing to shut down air transportation until they received higher wages and benefits. Union members still curse the memory of President Reagan for his act in firing those union members.
Hundreds upon hundreds of similar programs from agricultural subsidies, to programs that pay farmers not to produce and limit what is grown and harvested, land and mineral use curtailed, forbidden, controlled by these agencies and demonstrably in the recent cases of eminent domain, with no legal recourse for the injured parties.
But, I digress.
My new friend disclosed that there are only about a dozen universities in the entire United States that offer graduate level studies in Nuclear Engineering. The education and the cutting edge of the industry have moved to Japan, India, China, France and Germany. And, most importantly, the jobs have gone also.
The anti-nuclear movement in the 60’s and 70’s, a social issue at the time, moved into the political arena and became laws and rules and regulations that have effectively strangled the entire industry in the United States.
The environmental and ecological movement of the same era, has followed the same course of laws, restrictions, regulations and high taxes and fees. Thus not only no new Nuclear Power Plants in over thirty years, but also no new oil or natural gas fields, no new refineries or pipelines and the entire east and west coast continental slope oil resources locked away.
Just these two aspects of left wing democratic social policies have already done great damage to the people and the economy of the United States. Higher energy costs for gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, jet fuel, plastics of all kinds based on petroleum products. Loss of jobs overseas, higher costs for electricity means not just difficulties for normal residents, but higher costs for large users of electrical energy, industry, retail markets and of course, transportation of all kinds.
Even the much heralded ‘green fuel’ revolution, making automobile fuel from corn products, has already had the side effect of rising food costs as corn products are being used for things other than food.
I only briefly mentioned the effects of environmental and ecological restrictions and regulations that have also slowed growth and raised costs on housing, building and construction of all sorts, mining, crop growth and grazing on federal and state lands, all programs put in effect by that 60’s generation that has so shaped the future. Even the policies in effect for federal and state timber lands had led to disastrous uncontrollable fires set in motion by law, rules, restrictions and regulations that forbid logging, even thinning to lessen deadfall fuels for forest fires.
I sincerely think the United States cannot survive a Democrat in the White House and the corresponding influx of the left into the inner workings of government regulatory agencies.
I have yet to mention the Courts, not just the Supreme Court, but the entire Judicial system, from state to state most of which have politically appointed Judges, not answerable to the ballot box and anointed by Democrat politicians from the 60’s on. During which time, Abortion, which had been murder before, became a woman’s ‘right’, and homosexuality which was classified as a mental illness even into the seventies and a crime, is now an accepted ‘alternative’ life style.
For those of you who wish to see the theme of my little piece, I am sure I have presented far more than enough for you to comprehend.
For those of you to whom the free market, capitalism and a firm definition of human rights, an adherence to constitutional guarantees, of individual rights and liberties, to those who stand in absolute horror of a free society, you need not reply. It is not my intent to engage in a political debate with this thread, merely to express my viewpoint and provide some foundation for those of you who may have questions about the future and find that the left does not offer any solutions to some of the problems I have touched upon.
Thank you…
amicus...
Rather than address Partisan issues, and there are many, I choose to address a more basic danger that could affect the entire nation and all who reside here.
In less than a year the Primary Elections will begin. Although there seems to be an eerie quietude insofar as debate of the issues is concerned, when the word wars begin, the real ‘danger’, I propose, will not be discussed.
The ‘social’ issues, Abortion, Gay Marriage and the Middle East war will most likely get top billing, followed on a lesser scale by Education matters and possibly the ‘entitlement’ programs, such as Social Security and Health Care.
I am going to develop my point slowly, so please bear with me and try to understand that I do not bring this up as a chosen political ‘flame’ thread, rather, the theme occurred to me through a recent acquaintance I made and has slowly taken shape over several days.
I have been digging tree stumps and rocks from a garden area for several days now, weather permitting, (it rains prodigiously in Western Oregon this time of year), and during my forays in the mud, a gentleman in his forties ambled by and visited several times, even offering to help dig some roots and pry out the six to eight inch in diameter stumps.
He is a bit of a social gadfly, I thought, at first, walking from cottage to cottage, visiting with others and stopping to chat now and then.
I discovered he is very talkative, usually about mundane things, often repeating himself on certain issues and personal foibles. Not being much of a social critter myself, after several visits, I complained mildly that he never spoke of anything substantial and that I didn’t really have any gossip to share or time to socialize as I usually am self involved in my mind, composing a story or a scene as I work away.
Then my internet connection was completed and the cable guy came around and the rains kept me inside for a few days and, what with my attitude, I expected the brief acquaintance to fade away.
Well, it didn’t. Seems like the guy is a bit of a computer geek and asked a few questions at our next chance meeting about the capacity of my machine and what I used it for..
It also turns out that the gentleman is a graduate student at nearby Oregon State University, in the final stages of perfecting his ‘product’, his final thesis for a Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering. No wonder I thought he was just a lonely gossip, no one around here was smart enough to understand a thing about what he was involved in.
Well…I think I am a fairly smart ‘cookie’ myself. I have some degrees, a Stanford-Binet in the top one-half percent, but when this fella got down to it, he had to use lay terms for me to follow the content of his final project. It has to do, in the simplest terms possible, with factoring all the essentials existing in a given material for it’s ability to resist and shield, for instance, the radiation emanating from a hospital X-Ray device.
His, ‘product’ is about twenty pages filled with a seventy-two step mathematical formula beginning with college freshman Calculus, moving to graduate level Calculus, Linear Algebra and Multi-grid mathematics.
He gave permission and I thought to copy and paste the first page of his ‘product’, to impress you readers of the complexity of his work, but I cannot manage to tell my computer to accept the math symbols that make up the paper.
He remains a very social and talkative person yet, but at least now, I started learning things and actually looked forward to his visits….and I might add, his assistance digging out stumps and boulders in an area that used to be river bottom land. I have quite a rock farm going now.
I even managed to ask a few pertinent questions and discovered that he wants to finish his studies, get his, ‘Paper’ and apply for a job at the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Washington State. His preferred line of work would be involved in the manufacturing of the fuel rods for Nuclear Reactors.
Strangely enough, we had both twice visited the now decommissioned Nuclear Power Plant, “Trojan”, located near Ranier, Oregon. He as a young high school student in Physics, me as a talk show Host in nearby Portland, Oregon, some years ago.
I asked him about job opportunities in his field, noting that there has not been a new reactor constructed in over thirty years.
He sighed…and then the conversation turned almost in a political direction; not necessarily by choice, but almost by function, and I learned a great deal more and had many other things confirmed in my mind from yet another direction.
It was really a quite remarkable conversation and something I surely did not expect nor manage, from this rather awkward looking, geeky sort of a fellow who has never been married or even lived with a woman, to my understanding.
For those of you who have faithfully read the above, thank you, and I now broach my original subject, the Danger of a Democrat in 2008.
Roughly forty consecutive years, slowed only slightly by the two Reagan administrations, the impotent and ineffectual Nixon and Bush senior peccadillo’s; hindered by a Democrat controlled House and Senate, and thus, an entire Federal Bureaucracy, hand picked, unionized and fully supportive of programs and a mindset that sprang from the Kennedy years in the early 1960’s and firmly in place since then within the agencies of government.
I want to stress and emphasize the above as I think it is crucial to realize and fully comprehend the role the seldom noticed regulatory agencies of Federal, State and Local governments play in the overall political picture.
For example, a program called ’Headstart’, just to name one, has long been called a failed program, expensive, ineffective and wasteful, yet, like a tenured professor or a unionized laborer, impossible to correct, replace or abolish.
Another example is the Air Controllers strike during the first Reagan administration. The threat to blackmail an entire nation by unionized workers vowing to shut down air transportation until they received higher wages and benefits. Union members still curse the memory of President Reagan for his act in firing those union members.
Hundreds upon hundreds of similar programs from agricultural subsidies, to programs that pay farmers not to produce and limit what is grown and harvested, land and mineral use curtailed, forbidden, controlled by these agencies and demonstrably in the recent cases of eminent domain, with no legal recourse for the injured parties.
But, I digress.
My new friend disclosed that there are only about a dozen universities in the entire United States that offer graduate level studies in Nuclear Engineering. The education and the cutting edge of the industry have moved to Japan, India, China, France and Germany. And, most importantly, the jobs have gone also.
The anti-nuclear movement in the 60’s and 70’s, a social issue at the time, moved into the political arena and became laws and rules and regulations that have effectively strangled the entire industry in the United States.
The environmental and ecological movement of the same era, has followed the same course of laws, restrictions, regulations and high taxes and fees. Thus not only no new Nuclear Power Plants in over thirty years, but also no new oil or natural gas fields, no new refineries or pipelines and the entire east and west coast continental slope oil resources locked away.
Just these two aspects of left wing democratic social policies have already done great damage to the people and the economy of the United States. Higher energy costs for gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, jet fuel, plastics of all kinds based on petroleum products. Loss of jobs overseas, higher costs for electricity means not just difficulties for normal residents, but higher costs for large users of electrical energy, industry, retail markets and of course, transportation of all kinds.
Even the much heralded ‘green fuel’ revolution, making automobile fuel from corn products, has already had the side effect of rising food costs as corn products are being used for things other than food.
I only briefly mentioned the effects of environmental and ecological restrictions and regulations that have also slowed growth and raised costs on housing, building and construction of all sorts, mining, crop growth and grazing on federal and state lands, all programs put in effect by that 60’s generation that has so shaped the future. Even the policies in effect for federal and state timber lands had led to disastrous uncontrollable fires set in motion by law, rules, restrictions and regulations that forbid logging, even thinning to lessen deadfall fuels for forest fires.
I sincerely think the United States cannot survive a Democrat in the White House and the corresponding influx of the left into the inner workings of government regulatory agencies.
I have yet to mention the Courts, not just the Supreme Court, but the entire Judicial system, from state to state most of which have politically appointed Judges, not answerable to the ballot box and anointed by Democrat politicians from the 60’s on. During which time, Abortion, which had been murder before, became a woman’s ‘right’, and homosexuality which was classified as a mental illness even into the seventies and a crime, is now an accepted ‘alternative’ life style.
For those of you who wish to see the theme of my little piece, I am sure I have presented far more than enough for you to comprehend.
For those of you to whom the free market, capitalism and a firm definition of human rights, an adherence to constitutional guarantees, of individual rights and liberties, to those who stand in absolute horror of a free society, you need not reply. It is not my intent to engage in a political debate with this thread, merely to express my viewpoint and provide some foundation for those of you who may have questions about the future and find that the left does not offer any solutions to some of the problems I have touched upon.
Thank you…
amicus...
