I don’t care what Ray Nagin said. He’s a man who’s just too small for the role that’s been thrust upon him. He shot his mouth off (as politicians will do). He has missed his opportunity for heroism so now he’s the mayor of a city that no longer exists. Will that city exist again someday? Perhaps, but he won’t be its mayor. Move on, people. Nothing to see here.
I don’t care that Hillary Clinton doesn’t like Republican control of the House of Representatives. What would you expect? I don’t care what she says about it. I don’t care that other Democrats agree with her. Most districts these days are “safe” districts. The Republicans are likely to retain control of the Congress for a long, long time. In the event that she becomes president of the United States, that’s the Congress she’ll be dealing with so she’d best get used to it.
I don’t care what either the Republicans or Democrats are proposing with respect to lobbying reform. Until and unless they’re proposing that no Congressman or Senator or Congressional or Senatorial staff person can accept anything from anybody for any purpose whatsoever and put a Grand Inquisitor in place to ensure the rule is enforced, there’s going to be corruption in office and lots of it. Don’t try to convince me that political corruption is uniquely Republican. I live in Chicago.
I don’t care if the federal government is eavesdropping on phone calls made to or from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and so on. We’re in a war, dammit. You don’t think the federal government monitored overseas mail during World War II? Get used to it. Unless we get a lot more aggressive this will be the Forever War. We can accept losses to our privacy or we can kill a lot more innocent people. Any notion that we can successfully prosecute the struggle we’re in right now without it touching us in any way and without it violating values that we prize is a fantasy.
I don’t care if Iran has The Bomb. Some other really awful regimes have had it: viz. the Soviet Union, China. I do care that the current Iranian regime may not be rational and may not be deterrable. I don’t care what kind of sanctions are put into place: so long as we want cheap oil more than the end of a regime that supports terrorism and, apparently, considers the obliteration of another country with a preemptive strike using nuclear weapons an acceptable risk, Iran and other terrible, evil people will have nuclear weapons. I also care that the American and Iranian people do not understand that, if Iran uses their nuclear weapons against us or our allies or if their nuclear weapons fall into the hands of those who wish us harm and they’re used against us or our allies, that it is the policy of the United States that we will retaliate massively and in kind. This has been our policy for more than 60 years and is our policy today. Such a retaliation would mean in all likelihood that there would be no Iranians in Iran.
There are lots of other things I do care about. I do care about the people of Iraq and the people in America who are willing to leave them to their fates. I care about Jill Carroll, the freelance journalist kidnapped by thugs in Iraq. I care that none of the reforms that have been proposed for reforming health care in the United States will really control the rise in health care costs and that Americans don’t understand that we can’t control health care costs without either getting insurance companies out of health care or controlling salaries in the health care sector. Or both. Tort reform and prescription drug benefits won’t do that.
I care that we’re spending more than we make and that we’re not making or designing things in the United States any more and that we’re staking our futures on minimum wage jobs and that the United States isn’t as safe or optimistic a place as it was when I was a kid.
And I care that both the blogosphere and the media seem a lot more interested in things I just don’t care about.
and that we’re not making or designing things in the United States any more
I’m going to disagree with you on this one, Dave. An incredible amount of R&D has resulted in some amazing engineering and invention in the last few years. It just isn’t getting high profile attention because an awful lot of it is in homeland defense and security applications at the moment.
10 yrs from now it will have migrated into commercial use and whole new industries will have been spawned. That’s what has happened with each cycle of major defense / security challenge. It’s where this Internet that will carry my comment to your server came from, along with the integrated circuitry that made Silicon Valley and much of the software advances.
The Teflon on my frying pan, OTOH, came from the space program. 😉
The unemployment rate among electrical engineers in this country is the highest in history. Most new large-scale software projects are going overseas. And it’s a cliche that technical support help desks are mostly overseas. Once upon a time these positions were held by junior engineers who would someday become senior engineers.
The physics job situation here is so tight that, basically, a physicist has to die for a physicist to get a job. That’s been true for more than a generation.
I have many, many physical and inorganic chemist friends who are scared to death because the departments they work in have shrunk to a shadow of their former size.
Yes, there’s still design being done over here. But fewer and fewer American kids are going into engineering and the sciences not because they’re stupid or lazy but because they don’t think there’s a future in it. And right now it looks like they’re right.