Are you under the impression Reagan started the cold war? If so, you're off by about 34 years - it started in 1947, under Truman. Would be hard to argue he knew nothing about politics, particularly at that point in his life...

The last stupid fuck who knew nothing about politics when elected started the Cold War. We aren't even 2 full years into this stupid fuck's term and he's already trying to drive the world into a recession.

Good point, and of course, you know, the whole cold war thing that went on with Russia for some 60 years...sure they didn't actually fight, but that's only because it would have had catastrophic results, but they nearly did, which is why everything was designed to fight a soviet military.

Typical regressive leftist history revision to suit their own virtual signaling. "if we don't count any of the white people wars, then we're only fighting brown people" lol

The Russians played around with this sort of design a lot during the cold war. They never really got satisfactory results.

See "Ekranoplan"

Ultimately the program was scrapped because there were too many limitations on how the vehicles could operate.

Your absolutely right that characterising an entire generation as the 'same' is flawed.

However, I also believe there is more to the whole 'entitled millenials' view than just the bias of 'those darned kids again'.

I think the lumping of generational groups is just a miswording and but reading of the problems facing society at different times. Baby-Boomers as a generation were just people, same as millenials, same as anyone else. The thing is, kids born between 1910 and 1930 grew up in a world at war. Baby boomers grew up in a post world war/cold war era. The societal problems that shaped those times and people still existed, so dismissing the problems as just perception or bias isn't necessarily a good idea.

I've been out of high school 20+ years, and the notion of participation ribbons for everyone was already starting then. The notion that losing or winning isn't important, even if you lost because you were lazy, or won because of years of hard work was already starting. The problem of basically denying hard parts of the real world has been building for 20 years, and the current generation has been buried even deeper in it.

For anyone born in Canada or the USA to cry that no amount of hard work, talent or anything else can help them get ahead and that the system must be changed to help them is insidious. When 80-90% of everyone born in Canada or the USA will never know real hunger, never face homelessness, never have a warlord burn and destroy everything they own, complaining about the inherent injustice of being born where you were as a Canadian or American is just wrong.

The ideology that has grown up in the western world over the last 20+ years has the stink of the rich, entitled world we've enjoyed here. We have a society so removed from hardship, that hardship is working 10 hours a day, 5 days a week to lead a life more comfortable than 90% of the world.

It's not millenials, it is however the society that millenials are growing up in(so all of us).

I think you are missing the historical context that he came to power in. Yes Trump is a compulsive liar. Feeds on Narrow minded slogans he took from the cold war.

The American electoral system is corrupt as hell, The Democratic primary was rigged. And they are doubling down on rigging it for 2020, and pushing out progressive thinkers internally. Half the states have been gerrymandered in the South for Senate and House races.
People don't seem to realize in the US that most corrupt Illegal practices like bribery, money laundering corporate money to and from candidates, are considered an illegitimate election in third world countries by vote monitors even. The US internally legalized their corruption. Basically bribery is legal.

Sad that high school history lessons in USA rarely mention that > 20 million Russians died in WWII, and they were our allies. I guess these facts started to be purposefully forgotten due to the Cold War and anti-communist sentiment.

That's some serious old school cold war behemoth sky crabbing.

If this is from Russia, I think they're tourists. Russians don't use parachutes. They'd climb down that vertical cable using their balls.

Also, I think this cable set up is for catching low-flying aircraft trying to sneak, nap-of-earth, during the cold war. Either that or it's the World's most epic rope swing.

So...long and short of it seems to be that Reagan didn't really win the cold war and now we're decades behind.

I really wish we could make the whole region international, like Antarctica. The idea that even the poles will be dotted with oil platforms soon is really depressing.

Precisely. They have those guns in their hands, and don't shoot people.



The only things that I ding Hillary on are :

- Being a part of installing missile launchers on Russia's eastern border, and giving the asinine explanation that it's "to defend against Iran". Antagonizing Russia is so unnecessary and so old. I swear some people are just thirsty for the cold war to return.

- Cheating with the DNC in the primaries and screwing Bernie out of a win... who by the way could have carried the general election against carrot head. I'd rather have the Bern than either a sellout or a clown.


One side sees the other as paranoid.
The other side sees the first as short sighted.

I don't expect to be in a crash, I still prefer to wear a seat belt. But by all means, I don't care if someone chooses not to.

-scheherazade

Not the *only* thing.

We also don't invade if you don't have anything we want, or if you can't be exploited as a pawn in a proxy war.

N. Korea doesn't have anything we want, so they would generally be safe on that account. On the other hand, the Korean War (particularly support from China, Russia, and the US) was very much tied into early and continuing Capitalism vs Communism proxy wars wherein those major players downplayed direct confrontation (why the Cold War was cold) but were quite happy to ramp things up indirectly.

Things frequently don't go real well for countries tied up in that history. We arm Afghanistan to indirectly prod the USSR, decades later that comes back to bite us and we hit them back with a rather disproportionate degree of destruction. The USSR sets Cuba up as a potential proxy Communist threat to the US, which pushes us pretty close to nuclear war. Fortunately we avoided that, but the fallout for Cuba in trade sanctions etc. persists to this day. And on and on.

So I concur, N. Korea has plenty of reasons to see the US as the bad guys. Personally, I think Obama's strategy of patience was probably the best. Either they are full of hot air and won't ever actually do anything, or they'll eventually do something so provocative that China will have no choice but to withdraw that lifeline. In the meantime, N. Korean people are the ones suffering the most. Not much to be done about that, because the US has an even worse track record when it comes to interfering "to save the people of {wherever} from their terrible leaders"...

I understand, and "pollution per capita" is a logical argument. But from my point of view there are some critical problems and many flaws with following such reasoning. For example:

The US isn't the greatest emitter of Co2 per capita, but when that's brought up...the argument falls back to emissions in absolute terms. Many would say that that's hypocritical.

Wealth inequality is particularly bad in the US, with the top 20% of the population holding upwards of 88% of all wealth (while the total wealth of individuals isn't GDP, it does correlate with income flow). Doesn't this skew GDP per capita, holding the poor in the US to an unfair standard, vis a vis emissions? If it doesn't, then how is it unfair to poor, rural Chinese?

No international organizations agree on the definition of a "developing" country. Without this, aren't these types of arguments extremely subjective and open to abuse? The point being that there are very, very few "apples-to-apples" comparisons available. For example, would it be a fair comparison if I told you that China's per capita Co2 emissions exceeded the per capita emissions of the EU starting back in 2014?

But you're right...in that the US has polluted the most in absolute terms historically (with China catching up pretty fast). We didn't have a "God-given" right to do it; for most of it, we didn't even know that "it" (Co2) was a pollutant.

You're also right that as individual Americans we have more power to demand change. I understand and accept the dangers of climate change, and I very much want to do something about it. This is why I'm so frustrated with our current administration.

I just want you to understand that I'm not strictly pro-US and/or anti-China. In my opinion, climate change is giving us one resource to either take advantage of or to squander. That resource is time. And time isn't going to make accommodations for any nation, big or small, rich or poor.

This is why I'm troubled by a government like the CCP, that has plans to accelerate their emissions. We know better now (re. Co2), and so such actions on their part are unreasonably selfish. They know their actions will likely hurt or kill all of us, and yet they continue...with the hope that other nations will sacrifice so much as to be properly weakened while they themselves are strengthened.

I understand that in a perfect world, we'd have an equality of outcome. Wouldn't that be great? But we don't have the time left to make most of South America, much of Asia and virtually all of Africa economic equals. What we can do is get our own emissions down to as close to zero as possible, and help these nations build up an infrastructure using green energy. In this way, maybe we can try to foster at least an equality of opportunity energy-wise. The Chinese government has the funds to not only fully transform their own nation, but also to help to some degree in the aforementioned global initiative. But instead of being honestly proactive, they're creating a new cold-war mindset. This is not only wasting time, but also resources (both their own and those of the US in seeking to maintain their strategic edge militarily) that could be better used to help the less fortunate.

So what do we do? Well, I'm not entirely sure. But I can tell you that having other countries paint the US as a villain in this issue, and China as a saint certainly isn't helping.

Exactly -- or they become symbols of cold war oppression and are taken down as a political symbol. IIFFF this "Trump wall" gets finished, it will almost certainly be knocked down as a similar effigy to oppressive and ineffective bullshit in the not too distant future. I'm sure it will be considered unAmerican by ethnic nationals and a symbol of peace to EVERYONE ELSE in the entire world, including America.

Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.