Comments by "TaichiStraightlife" (@TaichiStraightlife) on "Amanpour and Company"
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Pres. Carter had some bad luck in the '70s, as did this country... part of it was his feuding with a democratic congress... and then in came Reagan, which led to a 40 year blue collar union slide.
Maybe it was inevitable; we'd had our 7 fat years, so to speak (because right after WWll, we were the only nation that still had an intact industrial plant) , and by the the '70s the rest of the world started to kick our collective butts, started to make up for lost time... and while it's no doubt true what Alter said about a 14-fold increase in petroleum prices, what he left out is what level it started from; I think it was around $2 a barrel; so oil companies had been paying $2 for 42 gallons of oil... so at long last it was time to pay the pipers... and of course the Arabs.
Funny; while unions were weakening in the US (Reagan, a former union president, destroyed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization- PATCO as a specific signal for the beginning of reactionary change), cartels like OPEC were flying high and ruling the roost.
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@svukic1041 - My pleasure. That was from the Mothers Of Invention Freak Out album (Historical note: Frank Zappa here introduced the first "concept" album to rock & roll. First double album in the history of rock.) . What a genius, dead way too soon, perhaps because he was poisoned as a child by mustard gas and radium while in Baltimore.. Wiki: "Zappa was often sick as a child, suffering from asthma, earaches and sinus problems. A doctor treated his sinusitis by inserting a pellet of radium into each of Zappa's nostrils. At the time, little was known about the potential dangers of even small amounts of therapeutic radiation,[12]:10 and although it has since been claimed that nasal radium treatment has causal connections to cancer, no studies have provided significant enough evidence to confirm this.[13]
Nasal imagery and references appear in his music and lyrics, as well as in the collage album covers created by his long-time collaborator Cal Schenkel. Zappa believed his childhood diseases might have been due to exposure to mustard gas, released by the nearby chemical warfare facility, and his health worsened when he lived in Baltimore...
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Arsenal Bismarck "In Europe we are tought history as it was." how smug a comment that is; if you know anything about history, you know that WWII was almost yesterday; in terms of books, diary entries and declassifying secrets, and it might take another 50 or 100 years to have even a hope of understanding what went on, then. Add to that, there are many vested interests in the West and the East with an interest in destroying or burying relevant facts for as long as possible. My essential points:
1. I really doubt that von Braun had anything to do directly with 25,000 deaths. I'm not saying these people didn't die, although I've read the number 20,000 as an approximation for Mittelbrau-Dora deaths. I'm saying he probably had nothing directly to do with that as he was a highly prized rocket technician (who, by the way, was once jailed due to a perceived insufficient loyalty to the Third Reich).
2. My main point however is the situation from a realpolitik viewpoint. As I wrote earlier to you earlier (the bulk of which also seems to have disappeared):
The main problem with your thinking is that of its simplicity about how the world really works. The truth of the matter is that as WWII was winding down, the British, The Americans, and the Soviets were scrambling as quickly as they could to round up as many of the German Peenemunde rocket crew as they could, along with their data. For example: Helmut Gröttrup was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of the smart card. During World War II, he worked in the German V-2 rocket program under Wernher von Braun. From 1946 to 1953 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for the Soviet rocketry program under Sergei Korolev. (Wiki)
Then during the night on 22 October 1946, a selected group of more than 170 German scientists and engineers - plus equipment - from the Zentralwerke were unexpectedly and forcibly (at gunpoint) moved to the USSR by 92 trains as part of Operation Osoaviakhim with more than two thousand German specialists .[3] From 1946–1950, Gröttrup was in charge of the more than 170 German specialists brought to Branch 1 of NII-88 on Gorodomlya Island in Lake Seliger. The German team was indirectly overseen by Sergei Korolev, the "chief designer" of the Soviet rocketry program.
Gröttrup helped Korolev with the R-1 project, a recreation of the V-2 missile using Russian manufacturing and materials. At Kapustin Yar, he helped Korolev supervise the launching of 20 rebuilt V-2 rockets and analyzing failure causes. In October 1947 they succeeded for the first time. As a reality check on Korolev's missile proposals, official Dmitriy Ustinov asked Gröttrup and his small team to design several new missile systems, including the R-10 (G-1), R-12 (G-2) and the R-14 (G-4) which was similar to the A9/A10 long range missile von Braun designed during the war.[4] Gröttrup was also asked to consult on the R-13 (G-3) cruise missile. None of these projects went beyond the design stage. However, the theoretical work of the German scientists proposed improved solutions due to lack of material, and new ideas significantly contributed to the later success of Soviet space program. Some ideas were incorporated in the R-2 and R-5 missile systems.[5] The launcher Vostok 1 for Yuri Gagarin's space flight in April 1961 was based on a bundling of a total of 20 A4-like engines with conical rocket bodies, as already proposed by the German scientists in 1949 in Gorodomlja. For political reasons, however, the contributions made by the German collective of rocket scientists to Soviet missile development have long been considered insignificant by the public in East and West
Don't forget, it was the Soviets who were first into space with their Sputnik program, which scared the bejesus out of the US, and that fear gave the US the needed impetus for our own space program, which, yes: eventually landed us on the moon.
Finally, my summation: 1. everybody was grabbing German rocket guys, it wasn't just the US. 2. Of course this is what happens when one country shows the world it has unlocked the door to an advanced technical military future; when that country disappears, their technicians and inventors and data are grabbed up but pronto. Of course! This is how the world works! Is the US supposed to just sit around and let the Soviets have the skies, and space?!
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@Evil Rev - As is usual with you guys, everything you say (or write, here) is a broad-based slogan, could fit on a button or a banner, and is bereft of specifics; it always seems to be about emotionally lashing out, in anger and bitterness, with no hint that you understand any issues in depth or are prepared to write about them. Politics has often been called, "the art of the possible" but your attitude is anything but; it presents itself as nothing except argumentative, destructive and nihilistic at its heart... and you even present yourself, at the outset here, as "Evil".
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Arsenal Bismarck - You're being naive and simplistic. I wrote you a long and detailed rebuttal that google completely disappeared on me, so I'm not doing that again. I'll summarize some points:
1. Wernher von Braun was for the most part a technician and not a high ranking one, though certainly a member of the Nazi party. I don't know where your claim for his responsibility for 25,000 deaths comes from; he was not in charge of that facility (Mittelbrau-Dora) or any facility for that matter.
2. These are murky moral waters for a variety of reasons; the Nazis detained von Braun for shakey loyalties:
According to André Sellier, a French historian and survivor of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, Heinrich Himmler had von Braun come to his Feldkommandostelle Hochwald HQ in East Prussia in February 1944.[47] To increase his power-base within the Nazi regime, Himmler was conspiring to use Kammler to gain control of all German armament programs, including the V-2 program at Peenemünde.[13]:38–40 He therefore recommended that von Braun work more closely with Kammler to solve the problems of the V-2. Von Braun claimed to have replied that the problems were merely technical and he was confident that they would be solved with Dornberger's assistance.
Von Braun had been under SD surveillance since October 1943. A secret report stated that he and his colleagues Klaus Riedel and Helmut Gröttrup were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening in early March 1944 that they were not working on a spaceship[5] and that they felt the war was not going well; this was considered a "defeatist" attitude. A young female dentist who was an SS spy reported their comments.[13]:38–40 Combined with Himmler's false charges that von Braun and his colleagues were communist sympathizers and had attempted to sabotage the V-2 program, and considering that von Braun regularly piloted his government-provided airplane that might allow him to escape to England, this led to their arrest by the Gestapo.[13]:38–40
The unsuspecting von Braun was detained on March 14 (or March 15),[48] 1944, and was taken to a Gestapo cell in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland),[13]:38–40 where he was held for two weeks without knowing the charges against him.
Through Major Hans Georg Klamroth, in charge of the Abwehr for Peenemünde, Dornberger obtained von Braun's conditional release and Albert Speer, Reichsminister for Munitions and War Production, persuaded Hitler to reinstate von Braun so that the V-2 program could continue[5][13]:38–40[49] or turn into a "V-4 program" (the Rheinbote as a short range ballistic rocket) which in their view would be impossible without von Braun's leadership.[50] In his memoirs, Speer states Hitler had finally conceded that von Braun was to be "protected from all prosecution as long as he is indispensable, difficult though the general consequences arising from the situation."[51]
3. The main problem with your thinking is that of its simplicity about how the world really works. The truth of the matter is that as WWII was winding down, the British, The Americans, and the Soviets were scrambling as quickly as they could to round up as many of the German Peenemunde rocket crew as they could, along with their data. For example: Helmut Gröttrup was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of the smart card. During World War II, he worked in the German V-2 rocket program under Wernher von Braun. From 1946 to 1953 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for the Soviet rocketry program under Sergei Korolev. (Wiki)
Don't forget, it was the Soviets who were first into space with their Sputnik program, which scared the bejesus out of the US, and gave the US the whole impetus for our own space program, which, yes: eventually landed us on the moon.
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@womanofsubstance8735 - Yes and no; people are people, yes, but if you look at history things have changed radically and not just the forms. Slavery used to be worldwide; everybody had them, kept them, bought and sold them. Now they're relatively rare. Colonialism in the 16th through 19th century: gone... yes, things are still unfair and to some extent probably always will be (people being people) but you can't argue that societies are the same as they were back when Princes, Kings, Emperors and Electors with their divine rights ruled unchallenged and their subjects were drawn and quartered (and worse) for merely questioning that right... and after they'd given up the ghost their heads were put up on spikes on castle walls and city gates, to serve as an edifying warning to others similarly minded. I won't even mention the plagues that every couple of years (whether typhus, typhoid, smallpox, or bubonic or pneumonic plagues or sometimes several at once) ravaged and sometimes decimated local and occasionally the world population because, though it added to the general misery, it's not directly germane; only tangentially so.
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Funny Girl - I don't agree, really. Postmodernism is (or was) more focused on skepticism about the established order and associated power structures. I don't know about that inverted pyramid you build, with GOD at the bottom and the individual at the top, either. Surely postmodernism, like any ism, had excesses, but skepticism is warranted certainly, when you look at the world we've created, what with trump at the top and ever-rising disasters, environmental and economic both, rising ever higher.
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Funny Girl - You love "your" president? You mean putin's president, because putin's the one who owns him. You're living in a hall of mirrors determined to see what you want to see.
You see a narcissistic president lacking all empathy who, speaking of 215,000+ American dead says: "It is what it is" and you say: "this is the man I love".
You see a corrupt man, possibly a sociopathic, who has directed millions into his coffers in exchange for lucrative favors, high appointments and pay-for-play contracts and you say: "I must live in a loving world". I'm guessing that you're hopelessly lost in your hall of mirrors but, luckily for you, I don't have the last word on your ultimate fate. You sound very young & may change in time, though personally, I doubt it.
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The implications here about human nature and our society are Wildly disturbing... but, it enlightens us to the darkness that's enveloping our culture; it's very well done. PS- Most of these fools, lemmings, gullible morons, knuckle-draggers, knaves got their "information" (noise) off of FB; you will never see me on Facebook, a corrosive business acting as poison to a once thriving, honored democracy, that works by splintering us into yammering tribes, too many of which are very angry and destructive. This is smoke, this is fire and this is lava threatening a downhill racing pyroclastic flow... ignore it at your peril.
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