USA dropped A-bombs on Japan and 25 years later walked on the moon ''in peace for all mankind.''

[Octafish]

What great things have we -- the USA and humanity -- done in the 45 years since walking on the moon "in peace for all mankind"?

[Maedhros]

1. Well, we have Twitter, so that's something...

[Octafish]

16. The Fakebook keeps faking me, the No New New Deal part.

Good point, though, Maedhros! The technology developed for use in the Apollo program led to revolution in electronics leading to the computers on which we get to enjoy each other's company.



They needed to make a computer so the LEM could meet up with the CSM orbiting the moon.

Best I can tell, JFK wanted to use the New Frontier as his administration's New Deal. It worked, as almost a half million Americans earned an excellent living while their work got us to the moon. Imagine where would could be if his work continued?

[LibDemAlways]

2. The USA, not much, Octafish, and we still

have the distinction of being the only nation on earth to deploy two nuclear weapons, on civiliian populations no less. Peaceful? Um, no.

[onenote]

17. Yet, we're also the country that "conquered" the moon and didn't claim it as our

territory or militarize it, which is pretty unusual in the history of exploration.

It is notable that the plaque left on the moon states "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD." Not "men from the United States". "Men from planet Earth."

[former9thward]

18. We did not have the capability to do it.

Landing on the moon was certainly an achievement but we were not remotely close to be able to colonize it. Still aren't.

[onenote]

20. But we didn't even make a claim on it.

Pretty unusual.

[former9thward]

21. Outer Space Treaty was signed in Jan., 1967

Two and half years before moon landing. Forbids any nation from claiming it. Signed initially by U.S., USSR and UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

[onenote]

22. We unilaterally foreswore any claim a decade earlier than that treaty

NASA's 1958 declaration of purpose and policy, as enacted by Congress, expressly declared that "it is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind."
Thus, the "we came in peace for all mankind" statement on the plaque.

[Octafish]

19. ''Money trumps peace.'' -- appointed pretzeldent George Walker Bush, Feb. 14, 2007

Apart from that and a national debt of $18 Trillion, there really hasn't been much added to the story apart from war without end for profits without cease.

[packman]

3. Here's something interesting

if you got 5 min. or so to spare - every A & H bomb blast since 1945 and countries doing them. Gets rather scary after the first few minutes:

[Glassunion]

11. USA! USA! USA!!! Fuck yeah, we won!

Stupid French. They only hit land like 1/10th of the time.

[Octafish]

25. Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was a turning point...

In 1959, radioactive deposits were found in wheat and milk in the northern United States. As scientists and the public gradually became aware of the dangers of radioactive fallout, they began to raise their voices against nuclear testing. Leaders and diplomats of several countries sought to address the issue...



Over the next two months, President Kennedy convinced a fearful public and a divided Senate to support the treaty. The Senate approved the treaty on September 23, 1963, by an 80-19 margin. Kennedy signed the ratified treaty on October 7, 1963.

-- http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty.aspx

...too bad, the scoundrels who have followed cough AQ Khan and Brewster Jennings.

[KG]

4. ''in peace for all mankind.'' all the while slaughtering thousands in Vietnam

[GGJohn]

15. What I've got to say to you about your post

would get hidden, so I won't say it.

[catnhatnh]

24. He worded it provocatively...

...but I was just pondering similar thoughts-there is a weird feeling I get when I remember that quote came the same week my brother received a draft notice that ultimately put him in the A Shau valley during the Siege of Firebase Ripcord. There's certainly something profound to be said but I haven't the words...

[Octafish]

29. LBJ and Nixon wanted war in Vietnam.

People like George W Bush, his father, and his grandfather have all used their public office in benefice of Big Oil, including in Vietnam.

CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture

A Real News exclusive, first published on The Huffington Post
By Russ Baker | January 7, 2007

Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

“Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

CONTINUED...

http://whowhatwhy.org/2007/01/07/cia-bush-senior-oil-venture/

Kennedy thought national resources should go toward things that made life better for all Americans. Like universal health care.

[NuclearDem]

5. Eradicated smallpox and rinderpest.

Constructed the ISS.
Sent a spacecraft beyond our own solar system.
Mapped the human genome.
Landed spacecraft on Mars.
Made the Internet available to the world.
Prosthetic limbs for the disabled.
Gene therapy as a treatment for debilitating conditions.
The Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs-Boson.
Revolutionary study of quantum mechanics.
Double helix model of DNA.
Laser eye surgery.
Microelectronics.
Radiology.


And those are just the ones off the top of my head.

[SidDithers]

14. Yeah, but apart from all that...

Sid

[NuclearDem]

23. But wait, there's more!

Mapped the ocean floor.
Explored the ocean's deepest trenches.
Significant production of electric automobiles.
Mass production of photovoltaic cells.

And then there's what's in the near future:
Powered exoskeleton.
Nanomedicine.
Fusion power.
Manned trip to Mars.
Commercial space tourism.
Genetic engineering.
3D printing.

[Ykcutnek]

28. How dare you interrupt Two Minutes Hate.

Unless you have lighter fluid and an Old Glory ready to go, I'm afraid I must revoke your membership card.

[stevenleser]

31. I check DU in the midst of my vacation to see the negative nationalism continues

Quelle surprise

[onenote]

6. The point, of course, was that we were not claiming territorial sovereignty over the moon

Which makes it pretty unusual in the history of exploration.

But you knew that.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. There's a lot of false advertising about America and Peace.

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. Marie Beyle (Stendahl)

[LanternWaste]

8. Semi-conductor, digital communication, green revolution, birth control pill, LED, high-yield rice...

Semi-conductor, digital communication, mapping the human genome, green revolution, birth control pill, LED, high-yield rice, MRI, GPS.

No doubt, my list is both highly incomplete and rather subjective.

[Initech]

9. We mass marketed Jesus?

[dissentient]

10. Inventing the Internet is a pretty big achievement, I think. Al Gore

should be very proud. (It's a joke, folks)

America does still seem to make lots of innovations and inventions, which is good.

People might think I'm always "down" on America from my posts, but that is not true. I just think America could live up to its potential a whole lot more.

[Glassunion]

12. NASA apparently has a mission statement that differs from our politicians.

[Octafish]

30. When Mitchell walked on the moon, the president was a son of a bitch.

A traitor, truth be told.



George Will Confirms

Nixon’s Vietnam Treason

by BOB FITRAKIS & HARVEY WASSERMAN
CounterPunch, Aug. 13, 2014

Richard Nixon was a traitor.

The new release of extended versions of Nixon’s papers now confirms this long-standing belief, usually dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” by Republican conservatives. Now it has been substantiated by none other than right-wing columnist George Will.

Nixon’s newly revealed records show for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon’s interference with these negotiations violated President John Adams’s 1797 Logan Act, banning private citizens from intruding into official government negotiations with a foreign nation.

Published as the 40th Anniversary of Nixon’s resignation approaches, Will’s column confirms that Nixon feared public disclosure of his role in sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace talks. Will says Nixon established a “plumbers unit” to stop potential leaks of information that might damage him, including documentation he believed was held by the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank. The Plumbers’ later break-in at the Democratic National Committee led to the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/13/nixons-vietnam-treason/

THIS is why Secret Government is undemocratic and evil and that quote from Edgar Mitchell so profound. Thank you, Glassunion.

[Glassunion]

32. Oh I have way more where that came from.

[LeftishBrit]

13. Contributed to plenty of medical advances

Cancer can now be cured in about 50% of cases, including the majority of cases of childhood leukemia; smallpox has been abolished completely, and polio in most parts of the world; and global life expectancy has increased very significantly.

People of many countries have contributed to these advances, but America has certainly played an unusually big role.

[JEB]

26. Sports stadiums

ideal venues for jingoism.

[Octafish]

33. 43 years since humans last stepped on the moon.

Incredible how much football we've enjoyed, Super Bowl XLIX or whatever is wonderful way to salute our troops and thank them for their service without actually remembering to ask "Why are they fighting for, anyway?" Thank heavens for Carlyle Group, Booz Allen Hamilton and Adnan Khashoggi.

Remember Richard (PNAC/Another Pearl Harbor) Perle? Just after September 11 and the Washington-Wall Street axis of war profiteering was heating up, Perle hit up Adnan (Iran-Contra/BCCI) Khashoggi for $100 million to make his new "Trireme Partnerships" take off.



Khashoggi's money would help launch the Carlyle Group-like investment group Perle founded. The petromoney was not for arms, directly. It was for investing in companies that were going to be making a killing off of homeland security related areas.

Interesting selling point: Perle already had secured financing from in from Boeing and some other bigwigs like Henry Kissinger.

One of the most important articles The New Yorker ever published:

Lunch with the Chairman

by Seymour M. Hersh
17 March 2003

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact

A bit on the new TRIREME business...

At Hollinger, Big Perks in A Small World

By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page E01

It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International, the publishing empire that includes Chicago's Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph and is quickly slipping from Conrad Black's control.

Let's start with the board of directors, which includes Barbara Amiel, Conrad's wife, whose right-wing rants have managed to find an outlet in Hollinger publications.

And there's Washington superhawk Richard Perle, who heads Hollinger Digital, the company's venture capital arm. Seems that Hollinger Digital put $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup. As luck would have it, Trireme's managing partner is none other than . . . Richard Perle.

Perle, of course, has been pushing hard for just such a military buildup from his other perch at the Pentagon's secretive and influential Defense Policy Board, where there are a number of other Friends of Hollinger.

CONTINUED (archived nowadays)...

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-309818.html

Traitors, Warmongers and Banksters walk free. The to-bomb list grows longer and the system stronger every damn day. Those who remember the JFK Administration know it wasn't always this way.

[Ykcutnek]

27. We've made mistakes.

But the world is undoubtedly a better place because of America's existence.