Open Thread

I actually like Carter, he’s one of the more decent and kind humans to be president ever, and his continuing work shows it.

Like a lot of presidents, including this one, he had a lot of bad timing against him. He seemed unable to fix the Iranian hostage crisis, which went on for 444 days. The military sent a rescue mission, which basically crashed and burned in the desert. Had it been successful, he might have been re-elected.

OPEC was created which caused a gas shortage and skyrocketing energy prices, and lines at the gas pump. Instead of nuking the middle east he got on TV and told everyone to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater–he wore one on TV.

Nevertheless the energy conservation measures he put in place drove down energy consumption by something like 12%, a huge number, and was instrumental in the veritable collapse of OPEC (along with oil finds in the North Sea).

Then, to control the resulting inflation, his Fed chief, Paul Volcker, raised interest rates until the 30yr bond was almost 20%. The general populace screamed, but it was the right thing to do to get inflation in check. His successor Reagan knew it also as he could have replaced Volker but didn’t.

I’m sure benson will be here in a minute with a few corrections, lol.

Don’t think I agree with the connection implied in some of the ignorance posts between ‘lack of factual knowledge / education’ and ‘lack of moral sense’. As in – Americans are badly educated, thus they must be susceptible to being duped, or just be bad people.

It’s an interesting question as to how far one might relate to the other.

Also, not quite related – it’s a big country. A lot of British people’s knowledge of other countries is limited to their beach resorts.

um whatever, i know tons of random stuff that lots of other highly educated people dont know. i dont judge them as being stupid. im sorry but identifying some backwards ass country in the bumblef*ck hemisphere is irrelevant and not not impressive.

*rob*

“myself educated and i probably couldnt find iraq on a map either. why would i want to or care? totally useless information really.”

Useless information to know the location of a country where we have sent thousands of troops, and spent millions of dollars, waging a war? Well, I guess if it doesn’t affect the price of the chili you eat for lunch, maybe it is useless to you. But you’re illustrating my point about the ignorance of the American populace — even the college-educated portion of it, apparently.

Carter is someone I’ve heard referred to as a “man ahead of his time” by several people. I wasn’t born, so I can’t confirm any of this. They claim he had a lot of great ideas, but society at large wasn’t open to any of his ideas.