Archive From Elsewhere: 1/24/2001
...BCCI began devouring caches of cash and opening up the original "annual deficit with the man in the moon" of the world economy, from $30 billion in 1978 to $110 billion in 1983. That was the 10% landmark...it all seems so long ago.
(Isn't being reminded that the world economy has become utterly dependent on interlocking networks of "investment elite" financial corruption boring?)
...
Here's another little secret. You know that "ABM" system, the one that they have to provide with a "handicap" in order for it to work for the cameras?
This program serves two purposes. First, the military-industrial power elite needs to lay the legal groundwork for the deployment of space weapons. Whether or not the initial system deployed is any more effective than a rubber slingshot is entirely beside the point. The real hurdles are statutory. Once the legal precedent for space militarization is set, the only remaining obstacles will be technical. The real action will be in space-based lasers, using satellite-based nuclear power sources, possibly in conjunction with energy stored by beamed microwave transmissions from the HAARP program's gigawatt-sized natural gas generating facility in Alaska.
Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, the current arguments in favor of an ABM defense comprise an experiment in testing the prevailing level of gullibility of the American public in response to bald-faced lying from official sources. If the Bush administration can convince most Americans that the world has become a more perilous place in the aftermath of the Cold War because of the supposed ominous future possibility of a threat posed by possible single-launch ICBM nuclear terror attacks from "rogue states" like North Korea, Iraq, and China, who don't even possess anything close to the counterweight of the Mutual Assured Destruction that the arsenal of the USSR once held, with the first two countries named not even presently possessing one single ICBM, and the third, our economically interdependent #1 trading partner, possessing exactly 20 (and who can all find much, much easier and more deniable ways to smuggle in and successfully detonate a nuclear bomb within US borders than through the suicidal move of delivering it via launching a ballistic missile), and that the answer to this hypothetical threat is the construction of a multibillion-dollar Maginot Line built from the most unworkable weapons system since the Osprey helicopter, then they can convince the American people of almost anything. Chickens have lips, snakes have hips, jazz music leads to mental dysfunction, Valvoline makes great pancake syrup- you name it.
"If something is green and George W. Bush says that it's red, it's red."
That's a power even greater than what a space-based precision-tracking laser death-ray system can provide.
(Isn't being reminded that the world economy has become utterly dependent on interlocking networks of "investment elite" financial corruption boring?)
...
Here's another little secret. You know that "ABM" system, the one that they have to provide with a "handicap" in order for it to work for the cameras?
This program serves two purposes. First, the military-industrial power elite needs to lay the legal groundwork for the deployment of space weapons. Whether or not the initial system deployed is any more effective than a rubber slingshot is entirely beside the point. The real hurdles are statutory. Once the legal precedent for space militarization is set, the only remaining obstacles will be technical. The real action will be in space-based lasers, using satellite-based nuclear power sources, possibly in conjunction with energy stored by beamed microwave transmissions from the HAARP program's gigawatt-sized natural gas generating facility in Alaska.
Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, the current arguments in favor of an ABM defense comprise an experiment in testing the prevailing level of gullibility of the American public in response to bald-faced lying from official sources. If the Bush administration can convince most Americans that the world has become a more perilous place in the aftermath of the Cold War because of the supposed ominous future possibility of a threat posed by possible single-launch ICBM nuclear terror attacks from "rogue states" like North Korea, Iraq, and China, who don't even possess anything close to the counterweight of the Mutual Assured Destruction that the arsenal of the USSR once held, with the first two countries named not even presently possessing one single ICBM, and the third, our economically interdependent #1 trading partner, possessing exactly 20 (and who can all find much, much easier and more deniable ways to smuggle in and successfully detonate a nuclear bomb within US borders than through the suicidal move of delivering it via launching a ballistic missile), and that the answer to this hypothetical threat is the construction of a multibillion-dollar Maginot Line built from the most unworkable weapons system since the Osprey helicopter, then they can convince the American people of almost anything. Chickens have lips, snakes have hips, jazz music leads to mental dysfunction, Valvoline makes great pancake syrup- you name it.
"If something is green and George W. Bush says that it's red, it's red."
That's a power even greater than what a space-based precision-tracking laser death-ray system can provide.
posted by cabdriver at 1:32 AM
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