Star wars is back!
It seems fitting to post this resurrection story on Easter Sunday.
The reanimated corpse of Reagan’s Star Wars program walks among us again. As a national security program, it was stupid then and it’s stupid now. It’s back because billionaires have figured out how to repurpose it to shovel more of your tax dollars into their pockets.
“It now emerges that Musk’s SpaceX, Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Ardruil have combined forces to build what Trump is calling ‘Golden Dome’. Needless to say, since Musk basically controls federal contracting he’s essentially giving the contract to himself.”
*snip*
“Musk and Thiel propose making this network of hundreds of surveillance and attack satellites into a subscription service that the Musk/Thiel/Luckey consortium would own and the Pentagon would subscribe to. Not only is this crazy and absurd but it goes without saying that in no normal time would anyone at the Pentagon be okay with the US not owning the hardware at the center of national defense. We’ve seen how this goes with Starlink, where Musk routinely threatens to turn the system on or off based on his whims and opens up separate lines of communications and perhaps deals with adversary leaders like Vladimir Putin.”
This appears to be a new and unfamiliar use of the term “government efficiency. But hey, grifters gotta grift.
The resurrection of Star Wars
The reanimated corpse of Reagan’s Star Wars program walks among us again. As a national security program, it was stupid then and it’s stupid now. It’s back because billionaires have figured out how to repurpose it to shovel more of your tax dollars into their pockets.
“It now emerges that Musk’s SpaceX, Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Ardruil have combined forces to build what Trump is calling ‘Golden Dome’. Needless to say, since Musk basically controls federal contracting he’s essentially giving the contract to himself.”
*snip*
“Musk and Thiel propose making this network of hundreds of surveillance and attack satellites into a subscription service that the Musk/Thiel/Luckey consortium would own and the Pentagon would subscribe to. Not only is this crazy and absurd but it goes without saying that in no normal time would anyone at the Pentagon be okay with the US not owning the hardware at the center of national defense. We’ve seen how this goes with Starlink, where Musk routinely threatens to turn the system on or off based on his whims and opens up separate lines of communications and perhaps deals with adversary leaders like Vladimir Putin.”
This appears to be a new and unfamiliar use of the term “government efficiency. But hey, grifters gotta grift.
The resurrection of Star Wars
There’s an internet meme going around that says: “Why is the news from the US always something like – wheelchair ramps outlawed because they’re not in the bible while the news from Finland is that they’ve made ice cream free?” For the money we’ve pissed off on the star wars missile defense, we could give every American tons of free ice cream.
Joel:
Germany had the Siegfried and the Atlantic Wall. France had the Maginot Wall. They failed. Just about ant defense will fail in part or as a whole. The war shifted to bombers which flew over the walls.
The devastation by one missile or bomb getting through is catastrophic.
Having them available is one thing. You do not need more than just a few. This is just another reward to feed the mega-rich at our expense and reductions for those of low income.