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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« Last post by Glaurung on Today at 12:04:44 PM »stool
Ceglowski has posted a long essay in the style of a business or policy paper with his criticisms of the Artemis program. I sure would take a bet that NASA will not land astronauts on the moon by 31 December 2026 but having some manned spaceflight seems better than dropping more bombs on Arabs or tax cuts for billionaires or other things the actually-existing United States would do with the money. https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm And half a dozen countries or alliances have serious space programs now so if the USA loses interest the rest of us will keep going.I substantially agree with you, though I'd be more worried for the future of space exploration about things like the critiques he makes of the lander system: having a bunch of astronauts die on the moon after their multi-storey landing capsule fell over feels like the sort of thing that would really tank wider support for space travel.
Teachers take after their worst-behaved students: tell them not to do something and they're possibly more likely to do it. Speaking from experience.I think that's true in terms of attitudes, but threatening people's jobs can have a certain chilling effect on that sort of thing, and make it harder to get time when it's not on the curriculum: teachers are also in my experience very stretched! It would almost need a level of full civil disobedience to get it to work on a "you can't fire all of us" basis, and I don't know if that's something anyone's quite prepared to organise sadly.
There's one thing that one should keep in mind as he or she follows the developments in Ukraine.
The people of Ukraine are actually fighting two wars at the same time. Apart from the Russian invasion, the largest war of aggression in Europe since Adolf Hitler, there's another war -- a domestic war of our people against so many things that undermine us from within.
It's about corrupt officials, it's about incompetent and populistic decision-makers, it's about those who embezzle our money allocated on fortifications and defenses, it's about those who give exemptions from military conscription to sports-betting firms (with very murky tax records), and don't it to charity foundations providing the military with fast and vital aid.
It's also, for instance, about entire departments of the SBU security service spying on anti-corruption investigating journalists during the war with Russia.
It's a war against so many things that try to drag us back to what we used to be - a weak and corrupt informal Russian colony.
Just like the "military" war with the foreign invader, this internal war for saving this country from its own dark side has had its victories and setbacks.
Every time high-profile malpractice is exposed in the open, it is fought daily, triggering a scandal and a public uproar.
And these two wars are interconnected.
A favorable outcome of the war against Russia's aggression is not possible without significant victories in this domestic war of ours.
That's our life and the struggle for national survival in the last... ten years!
And I must say that sometimes I look through the news, I can't help but keep thinking about the fact that so many of those insolent pen-pushers in high cabinets don't deserve to even hold a candle to all our men and women who save this country every single day and do the impossible on the fronts of Russia's war.