From Rod Dreher

• How a new jobless era will transform America. Dreher’s commentary.
• Of course we should stop unprofitable government propaganda stunts — space travel — in a depression, as much as I like the cultural ’50s (the buzzcuts and boffins) that had the talent and discipline to put a man on the moon. (There’s the pain for those who remember the glory days that giving this up is a sign of the decline described in the article linked above.) Not to take that away from the guys who had the right stuff, but privatise it and if it’s meant to be — regular flights to lunar and Martian colonial cities for example — the market will do it better. Sidebar: things in ‘Star Trek’ that have come true. I picked up on that some time ago: our phones are like the walkie-talkies in the ’60s show. According to the science we know now (Einstein, Heisenberg and all that) travelling at light speed (warp drive) and transporters are impossible. BTW Gene Roddenberry explained he never meant ‘Trek’ to be a serious prediction of the future but to be commercially successful in the ’60s, so the people and fashions were intentionally ’60s, and to tell fables to promote his liberal, statist, interventionist mainstream American ’60s worldview, the downside of the optimism and confidence of the cultural ’50s. Which is a reason nearly the whole universe spoke English.
• More on the decline: sleepwalking our way to a bad place.
• The skyscraper or the cathedral? Reminds me of this recent news story: like the Tower of Babel, the world’s tallest building, beautiful like an update of the Empire State Building and built with Arab oil money, has closed.
• Wal-Mart, friend to local farmers. Really!

Labels: history, television