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The Future Starts Now                     #248

By Hank Silverberg 


I spent part of this past weekend with my nine-year-old grandson. We took in a minor league baseball game on Saturday night. He stayed over and on

Sunday morning this fourth-grader beat me in Scrabble for the first time, 251-247. We have been playing the board game since he was five and he has been very good at the strategy of the game to go along with his growing vocabulary. His win came with the small words at the end when he was able to use all his letters, stranding me with two unusable C's.  

This game gave me hope for the future. At least until I went online and started reading the latest news. The enthusiasm for the rest of the 21st century then faded fast. 

I have tried for several years to figure out what approximately one quarter of the electorate sees in Donald Trump, and I just don't understand it. 

He has no "family values" by anyone's definition. In four years as president, he spent most of his time tearing down existing policies and programs while creating nothing to replace them except division.   

He's self-centered, authoritarian and quick to retaliate toward anyone he conceives to be opposition. 

Without even going into his actions on January 6th 2021, or his nonsensical efforts to overturn the totally fair and legitimate 2020 election for which he will soon stand trial, he is totally unfit to be president. I can't figure out how 74.2 million voters didn't get that after four years of chaos. (Biden got 81.2  million votes.)

So, I get infuriated at another quarter of the electorate and many elected Republicans who know just what Trump is now (a despotic moron?) and yet support him anyway. Can you explain Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz who seemed at least rational seven years ago and now seem as wacky as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert?  

The United States of America is at a crossroads, probably as dangerous as the fall of 1860. 

Our political system, from local school boards to the U.S. Supreme Court, seems to be deteriorating right in front of our eyes and frankly, no one seems to care.  

A minority on the right has curated a culture war where none really exists, concentrating on things like children's story books, who uses what bathroom and so-called family values that they have redefined to be whatever they say they are this week.  

An even smaller minority on the left falls victim to foreign propaganda and spreads misinformation about Israel and Ukraine. They mostly whine about the other side on cable TV.   

In reality, both sides ignore major issues like climate change, abortion rights, immigration reform or even world peace, just so they can point a finger at each other for the inaction. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us, those in the middle who work hard, take care of our families, pay our taxes and vote, get totally ignored and even maligned by the wing nuts.  

I'd like to think someone has the ability to counter all this and get the country moving again. We need a forward-looking agenda instead of the current rush back to the 1950's, but I don't see it. 

President Biden seems to be a caretaker, defending the Alamo walls until reinforcements arrive. But those reinforcements don't seem to be available.

The Baby Boomers may be burned out. Gen X is self-centered as they always have been. The Millennials are focused on paying off oppressive student loans and seem to care about little else. Gen Z? They don't care about anything that's not on YouTube or Tik-Tok. 

But maybe I'm wrong. A fourth-grader just beat me in scrabble. He's the future. 

The New Space Race

Here's some more about the future. There was a major setback for the Russian space program and Russia's Vladimir Putin, who promotes it as an example of Russia's place as a world power. 

Russia's unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft, which was supposed to land at the Moon's south pole this weekend, never made it. It crashed on the lunar surface. 

(Artemis rocket core under construction, courtesy of NASA)


The race back to the Moon has blasted off again with the political situation on Earth heating up. But there are more players than in the1960's when it was just the U.S. and the old Soviet Union. 

India is set to land it's first unmanned Moon mission this week, also on the Moon's south pole where scientists say there could be some frozen water in craters. A lunar water source would make it easier to put some kind of permanent base up there.  

China has already landed three successful unmanned missions on the surface of the Moon. 

The Moon is now considered the best starting point for any mission to Mars, and the U.S. space program is proceeding with that in mind.  

NASA's Artemis missions are already underway with a scheduled manned U.S. landing on the lunar surface in 2026. That will eventually lead to a lunar space station to serve as a platform for a mission to Mars in the 2030's.

The estimated cost of each of the Artemis missions is about $4.1 billion per launch, or about $40 billion for the ten planned missions.    

NASA Artemis

One interesting aspect of Russia's current failure: Sanctions put on Russia since the invasion of Ukraine have frozen their ability to get parts and technology from the west. That is something that does not seem to be hindering either India or China. 


Strange Numbers


Here is a good reason not to pay too much attention to the polls on the 2024 presidential race at this point in the election cycle. 

An Associated Press poll done with the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found 63%, or two-thirds of registered Republican voters want Donald Trump to run again--up from 55% in April. But at the same time, 53% of all voters say they would not vote for him next November, and another 11% say they would probably not support him next fall.  

The poll was taken after the latest criminal indictment of Trump, the fourth so far.  

Trump has consistently claimed the indictments are driven by politics and not by any actions he took after the 2020 election or on January 6th, 2021.  

I'm not sure what to make of polls like this more than a year out from the voting.   

Like all polls, its just a snapshot of what people were thinking on the days it was taken (August 10-14). The pollsters talked with 1,165 adults and the findings have a plus or minus sampling error of 3.8 percent. You can see some other results of the poll at this link: Home - AP-NORC (apnorc.org)

Also of note: many of the polls about the presidential race in both 2016 and 2020 turned out to be very wrong.  


Dumbest Quote of The Week!

Sorry to say this week's dumbest quote comes from The President of the United States, Joe Biden. Mr. Biden was well-known throughout his long political career of making some really bad gaffes. As President he's been a bit more careful until this week. He was in the East Room of the White House to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act. which is one of his more successful programs. In doing so. he got critical of "our friends on the other side of the aisle." meaning the Republicans who he said were always talking about "what's wrong with America."

Then he said:

"Name me a single objective we’ve ever set out to accomplish that we’ve failed on. Name me one, in all of our history. Not one! It’s never been a good bet to bet against America, and it’s still not a good bet today." 

Challenge accepted. America has failed many times in the past. The Vietnam War is the first thing that comes to my mind. The Bay of Pigs is another. And the "America is winning" statement that followed this quote sounds more like a Donald Trump boast than reality. Biden has now given the GOP a perfect target as 2024 heats up. 

Joe, please, by now you should have learned to stay on the subject and forget the ad lib. 

(Your comments and suggestions for this blog are welcome, see comment section below)  


 

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