Huh?

[swake]

GRETA: Governor, last night there was a lot of discussion about the Sputnik Moment the President wants us to have. Do you agree with him? Is this our moment?

PALIN: That was another one of those pancakes moments, when he has so often repeated, the Sputnik Moment, that he would aspire Americans to celebrate, he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory and that race to space, yeah, they won, but they also incured so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union so I listen to that Sputnik Moment talk over and over again and I think, no we don't need one of those.


Really?

[Townsend]

Well just be thankful she's being placed in the fringes more and more each day.

Her "W-T-F"  statement didn't help her faction.

[Hoss]

Paging 'Guido the Protector' and waiting for his latest PDS rant.

[Gaspar]

Actually, though delivered very poorly, she has a common sense point.  Her inability to clearly define it is yet another reason she has no hope of ever being president.

Society is not an engineering project.  Social engineering has always proven to be a failure.  As has every system based on treating a population as less than a dynamic variable.  Keynesian economics, socialism, communism, and any other program that attempts to qualify free people as a mass that can be calculated and controlled.

Actually LBJ used almost the exact same comparison as President Obama, when campaigning for Medicare "If you do that for space and send a man to the moon, why can't we do something for grandma with Medicare?" and with this we passed the Medicare act, and his poverty programs, none of which have turned out well.

The wave of innovation after Apollo was due to the fact that we had an absolute booming economy.  It took the mask of the space race because after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon national pride was at an all time high, and every product on the market wanted a piece of that marketing.  Garbage bags advertised "space-age" materials.  Cars, hats, shoes, carpet, dishwashers, and dog leashes all attributed their very existence to the "space-age".  Sure we learned some things, but the marketing was fantastic, and continues today.

I think Palin did a poor job of delivering an obvious flaw in the current administration's view of society.  It is not the role of the government to engineer the economy.  To draw comparison to Sputnik or Apollo, and say "this is how we solve things" is beyond flawed. 

The very idea that he recycled this analogy, and his previous allusions to the "Manhattan Project" as models for solving social problems is slightly disturbing.  The idea of some government group in a research facility determining my future is creepy.

[Townsend]

Paging 'Guido the Protector' and waiting for his latest PDS rant.

There's only so much support you can give a bad cause before you look looney tunes yourself.

[patric]

Her inability to clearly define it is yet another reason she has no hope of ever being president.

She could be the electable pretty face if she had her equivalent Rumsfeld and Cheney to actually be the ones holding the reins.

[waterboy]

Her remarks were nuts. Probably real good stuff for her followers but just, really off target. You weren't on the planet at that time Gas and your analysis is really a stretch. The Sputnik remark was aimed at folks who are learned enough or old enough to know what that was all about. It was a great analogy to the problems we face today. Ironically, Katie Couric shares the same view as Palin. All she could say was that it was a mistake to use the analogy because like many others, she was born after Sputnik was launched and therefore couldn't relate to it. Both of them totally missed the point because they really haven't done much reading about that time.

To take you back to that time, everyone knew that if Russia could put a satellite into space they could do the same with missiles, or at least we thought so at the time. Kennedy campaigned on our failure to keep up with the Russian nuclear threat and this seemed to confirm it. It also was hard for us to fathom since we had been told how unproductive Communism was and how far superior our capitalist system was. Yet, here were these moron Rusky's beating us into space and reaping technological benefit to boot.

I suppose you would rather our country sat back and waited for corporate America to mobilize and meet the threat but Kennedy knew that wouldn't happen and focussed the nation on a goal that we could all agree on. It was exciting. The technological benefits were tremendous and helped to bring us out of a recession that occurred around 1960 with high unemployment. Unfortunately our dalliances with overseas wars dampened the economic and social benefits we derived but like you said, the economy fueled by baby boomers was hard to stop. The aerospace industry blossomed and the country realized that we could indeed outperform a Communist country that had a big head start and even use it as leverage to bolster our economy. Nobody was conservative, liberal, wealthy, poor, republican or democrat when we launched those Redstone rockets into space. We were all Americans, proud as hell and excited to be alive to see it. That's the power of the analogy.

Palin messed up the criticism worse by wrongly alleging that the race to space damaged the Russian economy which robs Reagan supporters of their claim that it was our military build-up that they tried to match that eventually collapsed them.

[swake]

Actually, though delivered very poorly, she has a common sense point.  Her inability to clearly define it is yet another reason she has no hope of ever being president.

Society is not an engineering project.  Social engineering has always proven to be a failure.  As has every system based on treating a population as less than a dynamic variable.  Keynesian economics, socialism, communism, and any other program that attempts to qualify free people as a mass that can be calculated and controlled.

Actually LBJ used almost the exact same comparison as President Obama, when campaigning for Medicare "If you do that for space and send a man to the moon, why can't we do something for grandma with Medicare?" and with this we passed the Medicare act, and his poverty programs, none of which have turned out well.

The wave of innovation after Apollo was due to the fact that we had an absolute booming economy.  It took the mask of the space race because after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon national pride was at an all time high, and every product on the market wanted a piece of that marketing.  Garbage bags advertised "space-age" materials.  Cars, hats, shoes, carpet, dishwashers, and dog leashes all attributed their very existence to the "space-age".  Sure we learned some things, but the marketing was fantastic, and continues today.

I think Palin did a poor job of delivering an obvious flaw in the current administration's view of society.  It is not the role of the government to engineer the economy.  To draw comparison to Sputnik or Apollo, and say "this is how we solve things" is beyond flawed. 

The very idea that he recycled this analogy, and his previous allusions to the "Manhattan Project" as models for solving social problems is slightly disturbing.  The idea of some government group in a research facility determining my future is creepy.

Yeah, let's just toss the study of things like Economics, Sociology and Statistics, it's just creepy...

Knowledge is bad yall

[Cats Cats Cats]

Paging 'Guido the Protector' and waiting for his latest PDS rant.

Can somebody check on him?  Its been two hours.

[Gaspar]

Yeah, let's just toss the study of things like Economics, Sociology and Statistics, it's just creepy...

Knowledge is bad yall

It's not the study that is creepy it's the concept of centralized planning.

and Watherboy, don't allege that it's necessary to live through history in order to comment on it.  I am no expert but I have been a very good student of history through that period.  

[dbacks fan]

Well just be thankful she's being placed in the fringes more and more each day.

Maybe that explains why Bristol moved to Arizona.

[Gaspar]

Maybe that explains why Bristol moved to Arizona.

I hear she's doing a radio show.  I wonder if it will be anything like Howard Stern?

[swake]

It's not the study that is creepy it's the concept of centralized planning.
 

So the study of history, economics, human behaviors and trends are fine, just so long as we don't make any changes based on what we learn?

Perfect.

An infant has a better thought out plan than you do, if a baby grabs something that's hot, the baby has the sense to not grab that item again. You apparently don't.

[Gaspar]

So the study of history, economics, human behaviors and trends are fine, just so long as we don't make any changes based on what we learn?

Perfect.

An infant has a better thought out plan than you do, if a baby grabs something that's hot, the baby has the sense to not grab that item again. You apparently don't.

Two different subjects:

1. Study

2. Social Engineering

I am commenting on the second not the first. 

It's sad that I have to be this clear.

[dbacks fan]

I hear she's doing a radio show.  I wonder if it will be anything like Howard Stern?

Not even close to Stern. Here is the latest, she hasn't taken the offer yet. The house she bought, she paid $172k cash.

http://www.azfamily.com/news/local/Will-Bristol-Palin-join-Arizonas-Mix-969-114574989.html