Uh-Oh

[Something completely different]

Post Script. We were the first to put a man on the Moon...we put rovers on Mars and sent Voyager to Jupiter and beyond...what did you guys do?

do you know the songlyrics:

"Once the rockets are up. Who carez where thzey comez down! Thzats not my department! Szays Werner van Braun!"

The amazing thing about american culture is, that there is no such thing as american culture. For centuries you have sucked up culture from imigrants and combined it with other culture from other imigrants and then repackaged and exported it throughout the world. The diversety resulting out of a imigrant population certainly gave you a up in technology and science. The power of your nation is the result of imigration from dutch sailors, british economists, german ingeners, italian bankers, jewish artists, and eaven a nazi war criminal.

Further, you may have sent rockets to the moon and beyond during the sixties, and the chinese and indians didnt.
But mainly because they were under bad policies.
China was in the middle of the cultural revolution and still recovering from the catastrophic "great leap forward", India under the rule of Lal Bahadur Shastri and later Indira Ghandi, engaged in policies leaning more to the left in solidarity to the Udssr, wich resulted in the banning of foreign investment and a sitback in science and technology.

But now since India has opened, and Deng Xiaoping has opened China, they have started to rise out of that intelectual dark era.
China sent a man into space 2 years ago, India has recently announced its Mars mission. And China is about to overhowl the USA in the number of released scientific publications. Although one must mention that indias qualety of scientific papers is better than those made in China:

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ar...778366.ece

I have met a lot of islamists who talk about the grandure of their religion by constantly repeating how great the first caliphate was. Wich doesn`t change the reality that in the current muslim world, for example 30 % of the egyptian population is illeterate and that a great number of people in the muslim world live in poverty and under tyranny.
So constantly hailing ones great past is never going to be the right way to let your nation remain in the place it is.