Well, our election’s over folks, so let’s get back to what’s really important – laughing at Americans.
Well, not all Americans. Not even red state Americans. Not even Obama and McCain, tripping over each other to be the most warlike. Not even Sarah Palin.
No, let’s just take a moment to chuckle at the fantasies of one sector of the military industrial complex that met in Washington for a couple of days last month to plan THE NEXT BIG THING – rocketing (literally) squads of fierce Marines wherever they are needed to strike down evil-doers within two hours of whatever evil-doing needs undoing.
Flash Gordon lives on in an idea that dates to the time Popular Mechanics was a popular magazine.
It boggles the mind. Here’s a gang that can’t win a war. Really, they can’t. They are getting their imperial backsides kicked in Afghanistan, even though they have bombed just about everything that can be bombed. They’ve lost Iraq, though it will be years before they admit it publically. All they are good for is pushing around the poorest of the poor, like Haiti, where they overthrew the first honest democratic politician Haitians had had in living memory.
And they are bankrupt. Wall Street is crumbling and the U.S. government can only operate because of the largesse of international lenders. Fidel Castro, bless him, recently found the perfect way to express the enormity of the US public debt, which he estimates to be $10, 266 trillion. (Maybe he meant S10.266 trillion. However, when you roll in all undfunded public liabilities, the number zooms to $59.1 trillion, but who is going to quibble over a few trillion here and there?) Says Castro:
A man working eight hours a day, without missing a second, and counting one hundred one-dollar bills per minute, during 300 days in the year, would need 710 billion years to count that amount of money.
And these space cadets want to build enormously expensive rocket ships to dispatch small squads of Marines through space to strike “terrorists.”
Sigh. Chuckle. Smirk.
Pentagon envisions spaceship troops
By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY, Oct. 14, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon wants to rocket troops through space to hot spots anywhere on the globe within two hours, and planners spent two days last month discussing how to do it, military documents show.
Civilian and military officials held a two-day conference at the National Security Space Office to plan development of the Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion (SUSTAIN) program. The invitation to the conference called the notion of space troopers a “potential revolutionary step in getting combat power to any point in the world in a timeframe unachievable today.” Attendees included senior Army, Marine, Navy and Air Force officers.
Paul S. Graham 