I admire NY Times columnist Tom Friedman. He always seems to write about topics I am interested in. I just wish he were more careful about his prescriptions.
Take today's column (Who Will Succeed Al Gore?). Unlike last week, at least today he wishes Bush had done something to "reverse our coming Social Security deficit". This implies he knows that Social Security is not in deficit today. I just wish he were more humble and not assume that there will be a deficit, but at least characterize it as a likely deficit. But only God knows if there will be a SS deficit.
The unasked question is, why is Al Gore not running for president? My guess is that the Clintons promised him their combined support to run for president in 2016, as long as he did not challenge Hillary for the 2008 Democratic nomination, and he accepted that deal.
I agree with Mr. Friedman that we need "greener" technology and industry. But when he uses "distributed solar power" for the army as an example, I disagree.
The most important thing we can do to strengthen our military and ensure that it stays the most technologically advanced fighting machine on the planet is simply to keep it out of stupid wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq) and use the money saved to research and develop nuclear fusion power generation and/or thousands of nuclear fission power plants across the nation. Then, we will starve our enemies of today of the funds which they are using to threaten and terrorize us, and our GDP will grow so far and so fast that we could increase R&D throughout all of our industries and government. In such a setting, our military could not help but to become smarter and more powerful, since a strong economy generates more government revenue, and that revenue can in turn purchase more R&D for the military and more technology for fighting future defensive wars.
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You are so right.
The South Koreans do not deserve liberty.
The South Vietnamese are much better off under the Communists. They only killed 100,000 out right after the war and drove a 500,000 out to sea where 1/2 drowned. Suppose it had turned out like South Korea. What a disaster that would have been.
The Iraqis? Turning them over to the head choppers and the mass murderers is what they deserve. It will be no worse that what it was under Saddam. We should have left him alone to fill the mass graves with women and children as he saw fit.
The Democrats have the right idea. Wash our hands of it.
It will be a better day when they are in charge.
Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
It has been funded:
Bussard Reactor Funded
The above reactor can burn Deuterium which is very abundant and produces lots of neutrons or it can burn a mixture of Hydrogen and Boron 11 which does not.
The implication of it is that we will know in 6 to 9 months if the small reactors of that design are feasible.
If they are we could have fusion plants generating electricity in 10 years or less depending on how much we want to spend to compress the time frame. A much better investment that CO2 sequestration.
BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.
The Japanese and Australians also have programs.
I agree that the South Koreans deserve liberty, communism brought a lot of death and misery to Vietnam, and Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who earned his execution. But the United States is not their Daddy. We are not the Policeman of the World. Far worse things have recently happened in Africa, and are happening this very moment all over the world.
Call me selfish (I confess) but I strongly believe two things: charity starts at home, and the US can do far more good by being the best example of what a nation can be.
The main point I try to make, indeed its very core, is to advocate what is in the American interest, not what is in the interest of Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq.
My heart bleeds far more for the thousands of dead and injured Americans from the cited wars than for the dead foreigners you mentioned. It is their compatriots who are responsible for their own people, and they are responsible for overthrowing any of their own governments which do not serve the interests of their people.
Regarding the Bussard Reactor: thanks for the info.
My main point here is that our priorities have been poor for many of the past 60 years.
Look what we, as a nation, accomplished with the Manhattan Project in the 1940s and the Moon landing in the 1960s.
Had we used the money spent on the Korean and Vietnam wars instead on a "Manhattan" style project to research and develop viable nuclear fusion power reactors, we could have accomplished that decades ago, and there would never have been a Gulf War in 1991, never a 9/11 attack on NY and DC, and never an invasion of Iraq in 2003. This list could go on and on.
It may take a century of American good deeds and pacifism before we can win back the prestige and respect which we earned with our blood in World War II but lost after fighting three stupid wars.
By the way, we also killed many thousands of Koreans, Vietnamese and Iraqis, who had never done us any harm. Of course, once we enterred those wars, all bets were off, and we became enemies.
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