By DEXTER DUGGAN
The space race for three free-spending billionaires was one way to break the fetters of Earth, while angry Cubans coincidentally protested Communist shackles here on the face of the planet in July after 60 years of real oppression, not just something theoretical thought up for the front page by dominant U.S. media.
Was a new age of tourism breaking out early in the third decade of this millennium — both for the wealthy paying plenty to fly high for a sight of the Blue Planet they’ve trod all their lives, and also for those forcibly impoverished by Marxism on a Caribbean island who’d like to savor spreading their wings while welcoming more vacationers’ cash for their homeland economy?
Expanding on freedom of private citizens to devise their own rocket jaunts, not government flights, billionaire Richard Branson and five other voyagers had about four minutes of weightlessness on July 11 aboard the Virgin Galactic Unity after departing New Mexico, where they later returned for a smooth runway landing.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos was scheduled to go aloft briefly with three others on his New Shepard on July 20 (after this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer was printed on July 15), launching from Texas, while billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX pursuits envisioned “the long-term goal of making humans a multi-planet species by creating a self-sustaining city on Mars,” according to his Tesla website.
July, a month of fulfilled and also blighted aspirations, observes American Independence Day on the Fourth, the French storming of the Bastille prison on the 14th to reject the old order, and Cuba’s 26th of July Movement that brought Communist disaster, not freedom and dignity.
Nearly 150 years ago, French author Jules Verne proposed breaking travel bondage in his adventure novel Around the World in 80 Days, where a wealthy Englishman bet half his fortune that he could complete such a nineteenth-century journey by that deadline while spending the other half for the required expenses along the way.
How far we’ve come in global travel since. But what about the thought that a man could dispose of his wealth as he preferred?
The billionaires’ space-travel efforts spared taxpayers from having to foot a lot of expenses, but the three still faced criticism for having used their own money this way at all, when it could have been spent as others preferred.
Shortly after returning to Earth, Branson addressed the issue on NBC on July 14, saying he completely agreed that wealthy people should spend money tackling certain issues, “but we should also create new industries that can create 800 engineers, and scientists who can create wonderful things that can make space accessible at a fraction of the environmental cost that it’s been in the past.”
One of Branson’s co-workers who joined him on the flight, Sirisha Bandla, said this was a way to “make space accessible for everyone,” and also enabled scientists to do their own experiments aloft instead of handing off instructions to someone else.
The late liberal U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.) had undercut government/taxpayer-funded space development by arguing in the 1970s that the money would be better spent for causes he favored on Earth. (How did his winning this battle work out?)
Meanwhile, the current billionaires demonstrate that their own resources can accomplish much — even though the wherewithal of the federal government no doubt provided powerful early impetus for going into space.
But if it can be said that the muscle of big government simply gets things done, that could be an argument for allowing government to do everything, at least on a large scale, including the development of the motor car — a self-defeating proposition demonstrated wherever Marxism prevails, including Cuba.
Although a government may be a total failure and destroyer of its people’s well-being, it intends to remain in power as long as it has the clout and keeps confiscating resources — unless they overthrow it. Even seriously declining Joe Biden slurping ice cream may not be so ready to step aside for a Kamala Harris presidency after a while, as many had speculated.
On July 11 Keith Naughton, a consulting firm’s co-founder, posted at The Hill political site: “Not factoring into that neat equation is that Biden and his loyalists did not spend the last 40 years slogging and scheming their way into power just to hand it over to a newcomer.”
But did Biden spend those decades lusting to get into the White House in order to destroy the United States — as about everything he touches now is intended to do — or did his Democratic Party change so much during those years that by the time he served as socialist Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden saw the only way forward for him was as a radical leftist?
In last week’s hardcopy Wanderer, dated for July 15, we noted liberal Democratic journalist Kevin Drum acknowledging that progressives have driven his party far to the left, which he’s okay about. Still, he continues to recognize that means trouble for Dem politicians. Drum posted this, in part, at his blog on July 13:
“I want to make clear yet again that nothing I’ve said is meant to suggest that progressives are wrong. Generally speaking, I’m all on board with most progressive change. But my personal opinion doesn’t mean anything, and it’s simply a fact that liberals have moved very far to the left in recent years. This has placed them a long way away from the median voter and made it very difficult to win in centrist states.”
Divorce The Party Of Death
One Democrat I know from an extended family of longtime Democrats once told me, “The government is us.” That’s probably a very different attitude from that of many conservatives, and also the nation’s Founders, who often, although not always, view government as at least a rascal, if not worse, something to be guarded against and restrained, not buddied up with like a close family member.
However, if you consider government like dear old Dad, you may indulge or excuse what you see as mere foibles although they appear as larger faults to others. Another Democrat I know looks for reasons to excuse — and finds to his own satisfaction — what I’d regard as grounds for divorce from the Party of Death.
These days, liberal writers Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and moderate-liberal Andrew Sullivan are among those accused of becoming conservative, when in fact their critics have gone so far to the left that these three, and others, appear to be off in the distance. Well, they are off in the distance, but it’s not they who did the moving.
When Taibbi and Greenwald had to attack dominant media for whatever the latest frenzy was against President Trump, the reason wasn’t Taibbi and Greenwald cozying up to Trump but being appalled by the lying hatred these media allowed themselves to descend to. And also appalled by the soft treatment bleary Democrat Biden received.
One hallmark of current Dem radicalism is spreading Critical Race Theory while pretending it does no harm. Or, actually, does good. However, Washington Examiner writer Quin Hillyer took a look at CRT being taught in the public school system of Evanston, Ill. “It is no overstatement to say the school system’s practices are vile,” Hillyer said.
A lawsuit filed against it, he said, “confirms that school officials use the ‘fighting racism’ excuse as cover for teaching that individualism and meritocracy are oppressive, that the ideal of ‘equality’ and even the nuclear family itself are both racist, and that true anti-racists will question ‘the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and principles of constitutional law’.”
A lesson plan for third-graders — yes, third-graders — “says that ‘during our lesson on whiteness, we discussed how white culture shows up in the way that we think about family structures. There is a belief that a “normal” family consists of a mom, dad, son, daughter, and pet. We’ve learned that this isn’t true’,” Hillyer quoted it, going on to add:
“These are all pushed by the school system, not as merely interesting ideas for debate, but as essential and inarguable parts of the mandatory ‘anti-racist’ agenda.”
Societies, like individuals, often change step by step, not leaps and bounds, although it seems that we’re in a leaping mode now. After certain things are made to seem desirable, then attaining them, even if previously undesirable, becomes a good.
The vices of Western colonialism in, for instance, Africa, were denounced by Westerners themselves as liberation movements freed that continent from colonial control more than a half-century ago. But not so many years passed before the old white overlords were back to start pressuring black nations into artificial contraception, abortion, then “same-sex marriage.”
A July 14 story at LifeNews.com noted the pressure continues: “Joe Biden, UN aggressively push population control and abortion on African nations.”
Especially at this time when we’re lectured that “white privilege” is the source of all evil and must be banished, we see some of these very same powerful liberal white people using the power of their privilege to slap blacks into line for the Culture of Death.
Neither logic nor consistency matter, but just what the left-wing cause of the moment is.
Unfortunate Cuba, like unfortunate Venezuela, was an economically developing Catholic country driven into ruination by left-wing fanatics much like in the Biden administration these days.
Joe obviously doesn’t believe his own raging rants that expecting people to show their ID for the very important task of voting — just as they do to board an aircraft, or enter a government building, or check out a book, or maybe cash a check — is a racist blockade. Like any incipient totalitarian, lying Biden wants to destroy voting security so his thugs can have permanent power.
From inflation to debt to immorality to domestic warfare between Americans to you name it, Biden is there with his monkey wrenches. He raises prices on energy while making it harder to get thanks to unreliable greenie nostrums. (Hey, there’s a way to save money. No matter how expensive goods become, you can’t spend money on them if they’re not available.)
Pointing to those big, bird-killing turbines on the landscape, he thinks your power should be generated on a wind and a prayer (errr, except forget the prayer stuff).
When billionaires in space look down on Earth, they’ll probably think it’s a pretty good place because that’s where they made all their money. Unless they have to make an emergency landing in Cuba, Venezuela, someplace like that, where money is worthless, like in Biden’s Washington.
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