|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Nurturing Whiffs of the Future |
|---|
| TABOR, Bush Rangers as our Civil Service, Creationists in charge of education, it's all of a piece and Bruce Benson is the latest installment |
|
This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, February 20, 2008. Today is a big day, locally and nationally. The University of Colorado Regents are going to decide if an unqualified oil baron and alumnus of CU should be its President because he can raise money. And President Bush is going to try to shoot down a spy satellite of our own because it never achieved sufficient orbit and would best burn in small pieces rather than retain its size and shape, which is that of a school bus, when it falls to earth. This Star Wars ability to shoot down objects traveling at 17,000 miles an hour is impressive. Well, it is when it works and only then if you don’t study it too hard. The Chinese accomplished this a while back, and apparently the US wants to show the world we can as well. Understand, none of this is reflective of the sort of activity that would occur in a war. The United States was aglow with its abilities to destroy any enemy with nuclear fire in the 1960’s, and decided the way to properly intimidate the Soviet Union would be to test fire our new solid fuel rockets from their actual silos around the US and deposit them in Kwajalein atoll in the Pacific, our normal target. Wow, impressive, eh? Well, yes, it would have been had not three of the selected test missiles with dummy warheads failed to show any signs of life whatever and the remaining fourth blew up. Fortunately, we hadn’t announced our intent ahead of time, so the public, if not the Soviets, were spared the humiliation. From then on, we selected a missile to test and prepped it for months by experts before firing it, demonstrating nothing of particular value to the point of the exercise. It would be superfluous of me to mention that the tests for Star Wars anti-ballistic missiles have been extremely well prepared and even so fail the majority of the time. Even if successful, the amount of time preparing intersecting flight plans makes claim of relevant ‘success’ rather dubious. Absurd, actually. So, today we have a test that might be tried. Already, my faith in its success, and in the feasibility of the entire premise, is wobbled by the announcement that the test might not occur because of weather. We all know nobody would launch an attack when it drizzles, and satellites of our enemies would be switched off because of the clouds. But if the sun shines and the computers hum and the rockets actually ignite, what if it misses? What if, as not unoften is the circumstance, our rocket scientists make an error or something unpredictable happens and we miss? We’ll have shown ourselves inferior to the Chinese in Space Age defense. Normally, that would not be an issue, because this is America, we’re open about our errors and in any case we’re so incredibly competent and sharp that it wouldn’t even slow us down. But we are today in the last year of the George Bush administration, and America looks to the world like a large, obese, incompetent, and quite stupid super power. We no longer can cast a glance at strutting Third World gang leaders and thugs who pose with medals on uniforms for slaughtering unarmed civilians and quickly get their attention out of respect if not affection. That’s because Dubya is one of them. Losing military face is now not just a known and accepted public stumble. It looks like more evidence of our inability to defend ourselves, and the ceding of scientific and industrial competence to others. We screwed up a lot at the beginning of the Space Race, but we caught up and walloped the Soviets quickly. After Katrina, after Bush Rangers in positions requiring high end competence, after Condi Rice and her marvelous record of incompetence and instilling no regard for herself and ourselves, a potential failed shootdown would be a significant disaster. Disasters can be seen or felt without solid evidence ahead of time. When Douglas Bruce, that belligerent reactionary, first proposed TABOR, his Taxpayers Bill of Rights, conservatives real and pseudo supported it, both for the temporary savings and because the term 'citizen' was replaced by 'taxpayer.' Republicans like Bruce Benson supported it. Because of TABOR, state funding for CU and public schools is now at the predicted dangerous level, where it is dependent upon support of the rich and corporations and fears their disapproval, which was the intent. It is mind numbing to see Benson presented as a Savior against the threat he helped incubate and hatch. |
| Post your views and reviews on The Boulder Lout Forum. |