Well, let me start off by emphasizing

As distasteful as it was, I'm not sure the United States had any choice with Operation Paperclip. If we hadn't gotten those Nazi scientists then the Soviets would have gotten them.


"I like simple pleasures like butter in my ass and lollipops in my mouth." - Floyd Gondolli

This is not the United States. These are elements of the government and in the name
of defense or survival some people sometimes to stupid or unproductive things.

It is easy to look back and say these things were terrible, and some of them were, no
argument there. It is not so easy for any government to monitor what it is doing, who
is doing what, and who gets to make judgements about that?

Life, survival, power is all about politics, and everything done is not done to make things
a fair fight. The US, in my opinion, is about full-spectrum-military-dominance, and that
is an ugly thing from some points of view, but it is also a necessary thing to avoid having
to fight for survival. Do we want a fair fight ... hell, no, we want to win, and we want to
prevail to survive into the future - that is priority #1.

These operations, I think, I don't that much about them, but I think they are all in line
with this goal. It is someone's idea of an area of something we can exploit to make
victory, or some necessary action ( to them ) possible.

If I had to say, how can things be better, there are two choices.

We could give up all this stuff and try to live by our Constitution, to give up empire, to
break up powerful groups of rich and powerful people, to run our country as a democracy
and not a rather sad unrepresentative democracy, and in my opinion it would be
destabilizing to the world, and more war would probably break out. I have no research
to back that up, but that would be the argument there. The problem with this is that
as soon as the US loses it's grip so to speak, how will there ever be another state like
the US. There is no ground on with the seed of the what the US stands for ... even if
it does not implement it or does so hypocritically in some ways - it's just gone. So,
we put up with a lot. We also put up with a lot in our criminal system where lots of
criminals get away with crimes. Every system has imperfections, and you must be
sure to at least try to weight those imperfections objectively and pragmatically.

Then on the other side things could effective remain the same, but the US could bind
itself to certain outcomes and remake a social contract with its citizens, and the citizens
of other countries, as to what the US is fighting for. i am not sure how this would work,
but it would be something like here is what you get if you work for the democratic
republican socialist model. If you maintain good citizenship you get to vote, you get
access to information, you get a universal basic income, you get a job if you want it,
you get free health care, free education, basic communication, transportation rights,
but you need to support morally and if you volunteer militarily to police the world and
fight against the system that do not meet these standards in the world. Realize, this
is one paragraph in an IMDB comment, so it is not as nuanced and complete as I would
like, but somehow a world order of individualism needs to come about or we will have
the same war, inequality and tyranny that we see all over.

The US even with all the programs you mention supports the freest country economically
and socially for the most people. Of course there are going to be mistakes and problems,
and some people who are brave enough to be whistle-blowers are going to have a bad
end. I mourn for these people ... but most places in the world you would never have
heard of these people, they would never have gotten their say, and they would end up
dead.