“NASA does not have the ability to put a man into low earth orbit.”
I’m beginning to think that the lunar landings were a hoax, a notion I used to laugh at.
This Black Pigeon nerd is growing on me.
I personally think that the answer to the video on our diminishing genius is to be found in the video on media persecution below [which I do not care for]. Creativity is the first casualty of censorship. The current trend in stripping dissenters of anonymity is so frictionless in terms of the state that “doxxing” must seem like manna from heaven to the master class.
Charles Murray, in "Human Accomplishment," wrote that the decline of great Western art and literature preceded the decline in technological advancement. My son the other day said that a kid in his first grade class told him that scientists had said we were going to Mars. I responded that we can't even put a man on the moon nowadays like we could in the 1960s, so how are we going to Mars?
I haven't finished Murray's book. I think a combination of factors are at work. Few great men are even born nowadays. Intelligent people do not have kids - dumb people are paid to. Take California: it went from first in the nation in standardized test scores to 48th behind Louisiana. What changed? We imported millions of people from the third world, particularly Mexico and Central America where average intelligence is in the high 80s or lower.
Secondly, our philosophy of science is terrible. WM Briggs documents this in his new book on probability. I am out of my depth here so I won't comment too much on it. Big Science has problems generating models that actually predict future events. The reasons for this may also have to do with chasing results that are politically correct (which usually means 'lucrative.')
Censorship, as you say, is also a huge problem in certain fields, particularly in sociology and psychology.
The F-35 program shows we can't build a fighter jet. I think it could be done and even done better but not in the structure that we have to do it in. We should cancel the F-35. We should also drastically pull back our military commitments. We don't have the Man power, money or will to do all the stuff we're supposed to do. We're bluffing. This is very dangerous as we could seriously get our ass kicked on the World stage and have it come back to the US. If we just protected the US it would be different and we could stomp anyone who tried to attack us. Right NOW is a golden opportunity. Most countries don't get these. We have lots of oil, electric cars coming on line, lots of coal, lots of food. We have everything we need.