The National Administration of Self-Esteem and Assimilation

E3 was boring.

Well, that's a bit harsh, but it was pretty forgetful, in any case. The main show was the Nintendo 3DS, the 3D portable console. It was really funny to see both Sony and Microsoft so obviously upstaged by Nintendo, when both of them are pretty much trying to emulate the Wii in the next year.

But enough about that.

I read an article about NASA last week. It would appear that Obama is trying to change NASA's goals. Instead of "going where no man has gone before", NASA now has goals that are a bit closer to Earth: To inspire children and young adults to pursue scientific careers, and to reach out to the Muslim community.

Now, like many people, I scoffed. I scoffed hard. I scoffed like Steve Jobs at a Microsoft convention. 40 years ago, NASA was the only agency to land on the Moon. Today, NASA is still the only agency to land on the Moon. The difference between this is that now, nobody is landing on the moon. Nobody has gone beyond low earth orbit since 1972, when Gene Cernan stepped on the moon for the last time (and yes, I do believe the Moon landings were real. I might do a post later on why I think that). Now Obama's trying to get them out of even going into LEO. It's a bit crazy.

But then I thought on it. Last summer, I was big on space. Of course, last summer was the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. I really wanted to go into space. In fact, I'm sure everyone has really wanted to go into space at some time. So, NASA actually can inspire people to pursue scientific careers. But it was able to do that before. It was able to inspire by undertaking grand projects, like the moon landings and the ISS. So why take the US out of orbit?

I took a good look at the second of NASA's new goals. Obama wants the American scientific community to partner with the Muslim scientific community, to get space programs in the Middle East. This is instead of partnering with Russia, the EU, and Japan, with whom the US could achieve more great projects. This has more of a political goal. One of the main reasons that the Middle East is so violent, no matter what anyone tells you, is jealousy. One way to get the Middle East to co-exist peacefully is to get them on an even footing with the rest of the world, and with each other. One way to do that is to get them their own space program. Or so Obama hopes. It's still up in the air if the Middle East will accept this help. It certainly would be nice to see more independent space programs out there, and it is also nice to see Obama trying to win back the American reputation of multilateral leadership. It could turn out that

In conclusion, this could turn out to be an important part of Obama's presidency. But only time will tell if this would make him one of the "great negotiators", or if his presidency was a waste of time.

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CNN this week

Wow, that's scary. Last time, I said I wouldn't make it to 2:00 PM without sleeping, and that's right when I fell asleep.

So, I've been paying attention in Social class - which is rare for me - and after watching a bit of CNN, I think I'll try and watch that channel more often.

Sure, most of the correspondents are opinionated and biased, but there was one man who didn't actually seem that way, and that made me think.

He was talking about the current economic status of the United States, and how the health care bill would be digging a bigger hole for America. He went on to claim that he wanted to abolish Social Security, which to me seemed extremely radical.

He said that not only was Obama to blame, so was George Bush. That struck me as odd. Here, this guy was talking about Republican views, but he said the Republicans were at fault. Now, I support the health care bill, but it seems to me that he has a good point. He said that the government was paying out Social Security with IOU's, which was true. He said that for the government to not have the money that they took from the people to pay social security means they've been scamming the American people, which is also true.

But it works in places like Canada, the UK, France, and many other places in the world. So why not the US?

Two reasons: Tradition and Corruption (or, less radically, misplaced ideals). That money had to go somewhere. Name your area, and it's a good bet there's Social Security money in there. Bailout, energy, war fund. But it's time to own up, government. Give the people the money back.

This last comment is directed toward Rick Sanchez, who hosted Campbell Brown tonight: You promised John Fund and Craig Crawford, mano a mano. There was no fistfighting that I could see. Get your facts right.

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The United States bubble

Whew. Heavy stuff yesterday. And another late day today. I might consider taking naps in school. Either that, or get an IV full of coffee to take around every day.

Somehow, I managed to stay awake in Social class today, and we were talking about economics. He explained different government spending systems. it boiled down to two ideals; in one, you spend mostly during a recession, and in the other, you spend mostly in an economic boom. One thing that made it difficult to understand is that there isn't really a system that is loyal to either one. In many poor systems, money is hardly ever spent. In rich countries, money is almost always spent, such as the US, where nearly every fiscal budget results in a defecit (I checked this on Wikipedia, and the only presidential term when the debt fell in the last 30 years was Bill Clinton's second term, and predictions say that Barack Obama is going to run the debt higher than Ronald Reagan and George Bush combined). In fact, throughout the history of the US, there has only been one day when there was zero public debt: January 8, 1835.

I'm an analogy person. If you haven't figured that out, then I haven't been trying hard enough. But the US's debt was a big pill to swallow. Then, I found it. Remember the dot-com bubble and bust? The bust happened 10 years ago today. But the basic story is that the dot-com companies were getting lots of money with the promise of a huge return. But they didn't have a plan. Once people figured that out, down goes NASDAQ. Think of the US like that. Not to offend anybody, but there hasn't been a real plan to pull down the public debt since Truman was president (though Clinton did help a bit). But, there are two main differences. One is scale. The United States is the one country that props up the world's economic system. As shown by the recent recession, if the US goes down, so does everybody else. Kind of like the dot-com companies were the main reason that the NASDAQ ever got above 5000. The other difference is the time frame. The dot-com bubble built up for about 3 years. The US has been in debt for 180.

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