I'm repeating this story pretty much verbatim from last night's Daily Show. As I wrote at the time, last week about 5,700 more US soldiers were recalled from their civilian lives (ie. drafted) and forced to go to Iraq to risk their lives to make defense and oil contractors wealthy. Among them were “two trumpeters, one trombonist, four clarinetists, three saxophone players, an electric bass player and a euphonium player“. The below exchange took place between Rep. Vic Snyder (D-AR) and Gen. Richard Cody (Army Chief of Staff).
Snyder: Is there not a way to do without the euphonium player? Do we need to really draft an electric bass player, to pull them back in? Is there not a way that we can't let that kind of thing slide?Cody:
Unfortunately, as you know, our bands do an awful lot of our burial services. Our bands are stressed across the nation.
As Jon Stewart put it, when you start responding to high troop casualties (now approaching 10,000 US casualties in Iraq and over 1,000 dead) with “let's hire more bands to play at the funerals”, it might be a good time to start “thinking outside the coffin”. (Oh, and if you don't know what a euphonium is, it's sort of like a baritone with an extra valve, or a small tuba if you don't know what a baritone is either.)
There's a related story that I wanted to mention as well, about the space hotels that Budget Suites of America is putting up in the immediate future (more). This story really helps you understand why America is potentially going to collapse (and why the “official” space station has a cost of something like $50 billion)… One of the problems he's been having is that costs are too high. Now, maybe you're saying “hey, it's not going to be cheap to build a space hotel”, and that's true of course, but…
Because space and advanced aerospace work in the US is almost exclusively government contracts, costs are exceptionally high… after all, everyone knows you can screw the government. We all know about the $1,000 toilet seats the military buys. Anyway, to give a few examples, he had to buy a valve for the life support systems. US companies wanted to charge him $1,000,000 dollars, whereas European companies were happy to sell it for $5,000. His entire life support system was going to cost $100 million in the US, so he bought it from Germany for just over $1 million.
When US companies hose the government for hundreds of times the legitimate cost, they are screwing over the people of America. They do it when they conspire to have them die in needless wars, and they do it doubly so when they siphon off America's future. To be very clear — America and Europe are already heading toward a cataclysmic economic showdown. France and Germany are making military alliances with Russia and China, and if America doesn't cut this rot out of its government, it will be the slum of the 21st century. The nation that rules space rules the future of mankind.
There is still time for America to climb back on top, but the clock is ticking.
Post a Comment