How cool, man!.

How cool, man!.

Just think what has to happen when you get a bunch of people investing their expensive taxpayer-underwritten educations into careers inside the military-industrial tent. Congress may blow off letters from ordinary constituents griping about TARP antics and such, but when the constituency for a “program” rolls into action, Katie bar the (Treasury) door.

You have lots of majors and colonels who would be generals circling the rings of the Pentagon looking for a “program” to hitch their would-be stars to. Knowing that successfully running a “program” is a pretty good ticket to a great efficiency rating and a rank raise and of course the golden showers that rain on them once they go out the revolving door and onto the “teams” pushing new “weapon systems.”

Hey, Ned, what do you do for a living? Are you in the business, in uniform or mufti, or are you just a True Believer who subscribes to Aviation Week and Space Technology, gets great satisfaction from mastering the arcane language of acronymy, can recite the specs and “missions” of multiply-targeted internal taxgrabbing vehicles, and likes the pictures of various “attack” devices on the covers of Popular Mechanix and Popular Science, zinging along and spitting fire in all directions? Do you really believe these “programs” buy any security, or is that just the boogieman you favor to keep the rest of us in fear that somebody just like you on the other side of the world is gathering “Communist” dollars to fund “programs” as incompetent, wasteful and destabilizing as the ones you favor? We are supposed to “trust” that the people who dream up these “really neat” gadgets give a rat’s patoot about the civilian economy that buys their toys for them, and that they have a prayer of perceiving actual “threats” to the continuation of civilization or even our own tribal nation-state?

Lockheed-Martin: That’s the outfit that puts out the morphing ads that appear on the Washington Post electronic front page, with pictures of dedicated young people vigilantly using L-M technology to save the rest of us, minute by minute, from all the other humans that they help ensure wish us harm. Under the copyrighted slogan, “We Never Forget Who We Are Working For.” And we are dumb enough to believe that the management of L-M, soaring on laughter-silvered wings of profit, is working for the “soft targets” and “cannon fodder” that gift them with trillions of dollars to play war games with? Yeah, probably, in aggregate, “we” are.

And Why do our elected representatives “listen” to the people who have lied about “threats” and “capabilities” so many times (Akira, where’s the “truth” to give these lies meaning?) that they all have the same long noses and shifty eyes and lipless square-jawed faces from trying to suppress their laughter and sneers as they toss another whopper on the committee room table? Bomber gap, missile gap, window of vulnerability, the vaunted “invulnerability” of Warsaw Pact troops (drunk, demoralized, abused, not even trusted to have maps of the terrain out of fear they would desert), the fraud that was the Sgt. York Division Air Defense System (apparently a sort of predecessor to the Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) — always have to include the acronym in parentheses, to show we are in the know and part of the team). The Matrix that makes its living converting Real Wealth into “smart weapons” and such a boggling range of gold-plated toilet seats to address who-knows-what “horrible threats” that the rest of us are as cast down as the inhabitants of Jericho when the trumpets started blowing?

Congresspeople like the tax money of all of us to be concentrated in a nice neat pile out of which they can (mis)appropriate as much as their seniority and clout allow. To ship back to the befuddled voters in the district or state, who gloat over “their guy’s or gal’s” ability to “bring home the bacon,” to wit: a larger share of the common pot than their population would per stirpes or pro rata be entitled to, as proof that the elected ones should be returned again and again to the vaults of the Imperial Capitol.

So let’s hear all the justification for maybe 20 years of efforts to create an electronic brain and nervous system for a device that can balance and hover on the thrust of a central rocket, shooting squirts of rocket exhaust out to counteract destabilizing motions, trying to get to a device that can do what any person can do — stand up in one place, move about a little, shoot various weapons. But after spending billions and giving “scientists” the chance to exercise their play genes at our expense, to make a device that is “really neat” but is of course billions more away from actual “deployment.” The divide that once crossed, as the Matrix has managed for the V-22, turns a turkey into “just another program.”

And of course there are other colonels and corporate executives planning strategies right now to defeat the threats to THEIR programs posed by colonels and corporate executives pushing their OWN programs to the battlefront:

“Pentagon acquisition chief [referred to elsewhere on the same page as "acquisition czar"] john Young is irked with the Air Force’s difficulties in providing a coherent Fiscal 2010 budget proposal to the Defense secretary. “There are too many games being played,” he says, citing the Air Force’s proposal that its sister services — the Army and Navy (Maybe sisters like Goneril and Regan) — should help pick up the tab for building USAF satellites. Air Force officers argue that missile warning, communications and navigation services are provided to all of the services and the costs should be equally shared. There is “a cancer on this enterprise that is the service-level competition for resources,” says Young, noting the services, particularly the Air Force, underfund programs intentionally while asking for extra money for pet projects and sometimes overstating requirements.” You can’t grab this text on line without a $103/yr subscription to Aviation Week and Space Technology, where this paragraph appeared in “Washington Outlook,” on page 27 of the november 3, 2008 edition. As a dumb-chit citizen taxpayer, with about a third of my taxes going to the military, I can’t afford the subscription so I had to just type this in.

That one little paragraph, among several others on that page, seems to me to highlight one little piece of what’s wrong with the world and serve as yet another proof that the human species has a death wish.

But of course I could be wrong.

Just think what has to happen when you get a bunch of people investing their expensive taxpayer-underwritten educations into careers inside the military-industrial tent. Congress may blow off letters from ordinary constituents griping about TARP antics and such, but when the constituency for a “program” rolls into action, Katie bar the (Treasury) door.

You have lots of majors and colonels who would be generals circling the rings of the Pentagon looking for a “program” to hitch their would-be stars to. Knowing that successfully running a “program” is a pretty good ticket to a great efficiency rating and a rank raise and of course the golden showers that rain on them once they go out the revolving door and onto the “teams” pushing new “weapon systems.”

Hey, Ned, what do you do for a living? Are you in the business, in uniform or mufti, or are you just a True Believer who subscribes to Aviation Week and Space Technology, gets great satisfaction from mastering the arcane language of acronymy, can recite the specs and “missions” of multiply-targeted internal taxgrabbing vehicles, and likes the pictures of various “attack” devices on the covers of Popular Mechanix and Popular Science, zinging along and spitting fire in all directions? Do you really believe these “programs” buy any security, or is that just the boogieman you favor to keep the rest of us in fear that somebody just like you on the other side of the world is gathering “Communist” dollars to fund “programs” as incompetent, wasteful and destabilizing as the ones you favor? We are supposed to “trust” that the people who dream up these “really neat” gadgets give a rat’s patoot about the civilian economy that buys their toys for them, and that they have a prayer of perceiving actual “threats” to the continuation of civilization or even our own tribal nation-state?

Lockheed-Martin: That’s the outfit that puts out the morphing ads that appear on the Washington Post electronic front page, with pictures of dedicated young people vigilantly using L-M technology to save the rest of us, minute by minute, from all the other humans that they help ensure wish us harm. Under the copyrighted slogan, “We Never Forget Who We Are Working For.” And we are dumb enough to believe that the management of L-M, soaring on laughter-silvered wings of profit, is working for the “soft targets” and “cannon fodder” that gift them with trillions of dollars to play war games with? Yeah, probably, in aggregate, “we” are.

And Why do our elected representatives “listen” to the people who have lied about “threats” and “capabilities” so many times (Akira, where’s the “truth” to give these lies meaning?) that they all have the same long noses and shifty eyes and lipless square-jawed faces from trying to suppress their laughter and sneers as they toss another whopper on the committee room table? Bomber gap, missile gap, window of vulnerability, the vaunted “invulnerability” of Warsaw Pact troops (drunk, demoralized, abused, not even trusted to have maps of the terrain out of fear they would desert), the fraud that was the Sgt. York Division Air Defense System (apparently a sort of predecessor to the Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) — always have to include the acronym in parentheses, to show we are in the know and part of the team). The Matrix that makes its living converting Real Wealth into “smart weapons” and such a boggling range of gold-plated toilet seats to address who-knows-what “horrible threats” that the rest of us are as cast down as the inhabitants of Jericho when the trumpets started blowing?

Congresspeople like the tax money of all of us to be concentrated in a nice neat pile out of which they can (mis)appropriate as much as their seniority and clout allow. To ship back to the befuddled voters in the district or state, who gloat over “their guy’s or gal’s” ability to “bring home the bacon,” to wit: a larger share of the common pot than their population would per stirpes or pro rata be entitled to, as proof that the elected ones should be returned again and again to the vaults of the Imperial Capitol.

So let’s hear all the justification for maybe 20 years of efforts to create an electronic brain and nervous system for a device that can balance and hover on the thrust of a central rocket, shooting squirts of rocket exhaust out to counteract destabilizing motions, trying to get to a device that can do what any person can do — stand up in one place, move about a little, shoot various weapons. But after spending billions and giving “scientists” the chance to exercise their play genes at our expense, to make a device that is “really neat” but is of course billions more away from actual “deployment.” The divide that once crossed, as the Matrix has managed for the V-22, turns a turkey into “just another program.”

And of course there are other colonels and corporate executives planning strategies right now to defeat the threats to THEIR programs posed by colonels and corporate executives pushing their OWN programs to the battlefront:

“Pentagon acquisition chief [referred to elsewhere on the same page as "acquisition czar"] john Young is irked with the Air Force’s difficulties in providing a coherent Fiscal 2010 budget proposal to the Defense secretary. “There are too many games being played,” he says, citing the Air Force’s proposal that its sister services — the Army and Navy (Maybe sisters like Goneril and Regan) — should help pick up the tab for building USAF satellites. Air Force officers argue that missile warning, communications and navigation services are provided to all of the services and the costs should be equally shared. There is “a cancer on this enterprise that is the service-level competition for resources,” says Young, noting the services, particularly the Air Force, underfund programs intentionally while asking for extra money for pet projects and sometimes overstating requirements.” You can’t grab this text on line without a $103/yr subscription to Aviation Week and Space Technology, where this paragraph appeared in “Washington Outlook,” on page 27 of the november 3, 2008 edition. As a dumb-chit citizen taxpayer, with about a third of my taxes going to the military, I can’t afford the subscription so I had to just type this in.

That one little paragraph, among several others on that page, seems to me to highlight one little piece of what’s wrong with the world and serve as yet another proof that the human species has a death wish.

But of course I could be wrong.

“If you don’t pay us we can not guarantee your security.”

It means the protection from themselves as much as others. Like glass merchants’ errand boys breaking glass. At the higher levels it is called “national and international security”.

The national and international security have to be taken to a transparent system. The police and military secrecy stink. Hiding places for the thugs. Just like the nation states.

“If you don’t pay us we can not guarantee your security.”

It means the protection from themselves as much as others. Like glass merchants’ errand boys breaking glass. At the higher levels it is called “national and international security”.

The national and international security have to be taken to a transparent system. The police and military secrecy stink. Hiding places for the thugs. Just like the nation states.