In a world where the memory-hole is universal, NOTHING has gone down the media-history memory-hole like the Civil Rights’ mule-train. No one knows it now, but the day before the moon-launch in 1969, the entire Civil Rights’ “leadership” joined in a massive protest. A huge train of mule-driven wagons came to the Kennedy Space Center, protesting that the money to be used to go to the moon was not spent on welfare for blacks.
I have heard the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation bitch endlessly about how “money was blasted into space” instead of being given to THEM to add to their lifetime benefits. Half of the people I listened to bitch had some version of pacers for their heart of other devices which had been developed by the basic research involved in the huge moon landing effort.
The space effort was the basis of Silicon Valley, CA, now America’s biggest export, even beyond wheat, in the age of a declining dollar. That effort was the biggest BASIC RESEARCH effort in human history by far.
Our society spends a fraction of a percent of its money on BASIC research. The reason for this is that BASIC research, unlike development, is a general benefit to the society. You can’t get a patent on the results, and the benefits do not accrue directly to the person or company that does it.
But almost ALL of our advancing living standard, disease fighting, and all the rest derives from BASIC research, which development only DEVELOPS. So BASIC research has to compete for funds from the same donors who support welfare, vets’ benefits, “education,” housing, litigation for the poor, and all the rest.
I had to personally save the Hubble Telescope in its beginning stages because the all-important subcommittee which controlled NASA funding was entitled, “HUD and Other Independent Agencies.” So its chairman was a big-city liberal Democrat who wanted money for housing and none for NASA, and its ranking Republicans was a Philadelphia liberal who wanted likewise.
To save the Hubble telescope and the space effort in the first year of the Carter regime, with both houses and the administration anti-space, we had to do the impossible: beat the chairman AND the Republicans’ ranking member on a floor-vote.
Before that, we had to delay the whole House until the weekend when the four hundred thousand telegrams could show up and the scientists flown in. It was a trick move, so we had to move fast.
So the mule-train was just one more effort by the civil-righters and “Greatest Generation” to stop the last trickle of basic research money.
Now the group that calls itself “The Greatest Generation” is dying out. It could have lived a lot longer and a lot healthier if some of the money the Claude Peppers got for it had gone into the same basic research its pacemakers came from. There was PLENTY of time for generation-old basic research to filter into the huge benefits it always brings.
But they were with the Mule-Train crowd. They were for integration since they were out of school, and it was just a Great Cause for them to enjoy. But it cost them life and misery in the end. It even diverted huge sums of potential vet benefit money to welfare programs, mostly benefiting bureaucrats and the inside-the-Beltway consulting industry.
Great Society Washington had a saying, “If you want to make money, get into poverty.”
And, of course, the New America produced those muggers who kept the old folks imprisoned in their homes, or beaten in them, at night.
I’ve heard it a hundred times: “I was for integration, but the thing has gone too far.”
And I have said a hundred times, “We TOLD you it would go this far, and you laughed at us.”
Beware of what you ask for …
p
#1 by danerebor on 01/12/2008 - 2:07 pm
Speaking of poetic justics, is Obama the beginning of the end of the Faithful Colored Companion?
Even the Clintons have to speak ill of the PC Messiah. Eventually *someone* will have to mention publically that he’s either a black muslim or that he belongs to a black nationalist church. It’s either that or they lose power.
#2 by AFKAN on 01/12/2008 - 5:46 pm
in reply;
I strongly suspect that the vertical component of Race is manifesting in ways few could see, much less understand.
ALL of the Mule Train People – apt metaphor, that – were part and parcel of the worst of the Self-Proclaimed Greatest Generation, and simply could not comprehend that ONE Bill Gates, ONE Steve Jobs, could have the qualities of Mind that would allow them to transform entire industries, and, in time, the entire social order.
It seems raw, basic research builds until a critical mass of it gets together, and connections are made.
The social equivalent of this is the idea that implicate orders manifest themselves when systems get to a certain level of complexity; it’s reorganize, to take advantage of the opportunities, or die.
That was true with the Elite Aristocrats who founded the Country in its current form; put Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Franklin in the same room with one problem to solve…
I also see the vertical component of Race coming forward in our own country, where people that can are damn near “spontaneously” organizing what could be the foundation of new, White Communities.
Look at all of the U-Hauls leaving Southern California, loaded with people who are smart, focused, disciplined, and intelligent.
Their cars give them the mobility missing in earlier Diasporae, but this is surely based on both of the components of Race – horizontal (White people), and vertical (Smart, Quality White People, at that), acting at a Racial level to avoid the consequences of the Levelling that takes place once the supersatured solution of society begins to precipitate out; such precipitations, as you will recall, QUICKLY develop, following the formation of the first visible crystal…
Talk with the long-haul truckers operating out of the Southwest; they will tell you story after story about pulling into a truck stop, and seeing a veritable wall of White FAMILIES, their minivans loaded up like something out of “The Grapes of Wrath,” with U-Hauls and Ryder Trucks all along the way.
They are going SOMEWHERE, and I suspect this is not good news for the Self-Proclaimed “Greatest Generation,” and their Colored Companions…
GOOD!
#3 by YearningForFreedom on 01/12/2008 - 5:52 pm
The space exploration funding makes so much sense vis-a-vis the last post. Any sane person would hold the mule train people in contempt.
#4 by Simmons on 01/12/2008 - 9:01 pm
Bob you are institutional memory with the “Mule Train” and all. The respectables will pay hell for this I tell you. BTW I for the life of me cannot remember a GG who expressed enthusiasm for the space effort, the defence portion of science yes but going to the moon no.