The Sputnik satellite: in 1957 it changed the world
While China energetically trains young people in the sciences–including the sciences of hacking other countries’ computer systems, stealing intellectual property, and counterfeiting–our colleges and universities “squander millions on guaranteed-to-fail social engineering while China races ahead technologically,” writes Robert Weissberg, for The American Thinker (https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/is_covid19_our_new_sputnik_moment.html).
See, we Americans blundered into this stupid paradigm that everybody has to go to college. Well, everybody’s not cut out for college. But if you want to expand and expand the universities, and hire all sorts of people who’re gonna get fantastic pensions, you gotta keep the students coming. That means lower admission standards, or no standards at all, lower requirements to earn a degree, and a vast menu of intellectually vacuous nothing courses–and next thing you know, you’ve got 100,000 thumb-sucking young people with degrees in gender studies and what the mischief do you do with ’em?
Weissberg recalls the shock administered by the Russian satellite, Sputnik, which orbited the earth in 1957. Overnight, America’s priorities changed. Suddenly everything was science. Suddenly smart was cool. Because Sputnik proved that Fat Nikita now had the power to rain nuclear weapons on us from outer space, and we had to catch up, technologically, in a hurry.
Suddenly we had all these guys in white short-sleeved shirts with pen-holders in their pockets, and crew-cuts–and in 1969 they put a man on the moon. We had pulled ahead of Soviet Russia in the arms technology race; and you may have noticed there’s no Soviet Union today. Once we’d passed them, and were serious about staying ahead, they broke their own economy trying to catch up.
Weissberg says “the culture has to change” if we’re to avoid falling hopelessly behind China technological and economically. We have to stop doing stupid stuff. No more politically correctness, safe space, Play-Doh sessions, obsession with “white privilege,” no more wasting time and money and effort on “diversity and inclusion.” All of that is pure crapola and it gets us nowhere.
Red China is the bad guys, and it’s a bad bet to let the bad guys win.
It would be good for us, if this coronavirus panic taught us that.