All About the Star Wars
Bear with me for a minute:
We all know about Star Wars, no not that one SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative... the satellite warfare program during the Cold War nicknamed "Star Wars" by Reagan staffers? The ruinously expensive plan to put giant death star lasers into orbit that... okay, maybe the name "Star Wars" was sort of appropriate.
Anyway, Star Wars led to SALT which ended with START and almost preceded on to IRNFT, which I'm guessing is a word in Icelandic.
That would be the talks were Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to an bilateral 80% reduction in nuclear armaments in the US and USSR. Pretty cool that! At once point we were going to scrap 100% of the world's nuclear weapons -- the Russians (!) were even the ones to propose this -- but Reagan refused to scrap his beloved Star Wars.
This was part of a long-term Reagan policy to wage economic warfare against the USSR. A massive and costly arms race whose developments the other side would feel compelled to match -- regardless whether or not the things actually worked. Basically we both dug two big holes in the ground and started dumping money into them; The USSR's economy collapsed first and we declared ourselves the winner.
(To be fair, trillions of dollars in national debt is is better than a worldwide thermonuclear exchange.)
Anyway:
This is an old article about The Panetta Doctrine that got me thinking:
A forthcoming book from Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism analyst with the conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, contends al-Qaida’s primary strategy against the U.S. is economic. Provocative attacks like 9/11 don’t just kill Americans. They goad U.S. leaders into doing counterproductive things like overspending on endless, bloody wars, like Mohammed Ali patiently baiting George Foreman into exhaustion.
I'm considering whether or not Conservative Knobswallower might be right! Terrorists pull off a scheme that costs, say, ten thousand dollars to implement and we commit one hundred billion dollars in defense spending and new draconian regulations to defend against. They sneak on a $80 shoe-bomb (which failed to explode) and we spend eight billion dollars on full-body scanners. They shake their tuckus on the internet and we break the internet so no one can use it.
What I'm saying here -- and I know this will sound crazy -- is that if we step back and look at these events there is only one possible conclusion:
Ronald Reagan is alive and working for Al Quaeda.
We all know about Star Wars, no not that one SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative... the satellite warfare program during the Cold War nicknamed "Star Wars" by Reagan staffers? The ruinously expensive plan to put giant death star lasers into orbit that... okay, maybe the name "Star Wars" was sort of appropriate.
Anyway, Star Wars led to SALT which ended with START and almost preceded on to IRNFT, which I'm guessing is a word in Icelandic.
That would be the talks were Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to an bilateral 80% reduction in nuclear armaments in the US and USSR. Pretty cool that! At once point we were going to scrap 100% of the world's nuclear weapons -- the Russians (!) were even the ones to propose this -- but Reagan refused to scrap his beloved Star Wars.
This was part of a long-term Reagan policy to wage economic warfare against the USSR. A massive and costly arms race whose developments the other side would feel compelled to match -- regardless whether or not the things actually worked. Basically we both dug two big holes in the ground and started dumping money into them; The USSR's economy collapsed first and we declared ourselves the winner.
(To be fair, trillions of dollars in national debt is is better than a worldwide thermonuclear exchange.)
Anyway:
This is an old article about The Panetta Doctrine that got me thinking:
A forthcoming book from Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism analyst with the conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, contends al-Qaida’s primary strategy against the U.S. is economic. Provocative attacks like 9/11 don’t just kill Americans. They goad U.S. leaders into doing counterproductive things like overspending on endless, bloody wars, like Mohammed Ali patiently baiting George Foreman into exhaustion.
I'm considering whether or not Conservative Knobswallower might be right! Terrorists pull off a scheme that costs, say, ten thousand dollars to implement and we commit one hundred billion dollars in defense spending and new draconian regulations to defend against. They sneak on a $80 shoe-bomb (which failed to explode) and we spend eight billion dollars on full-body scanners. They shake their tuckus on the internet and we break the internet so no one can use it.
What I'm saying here -- and I know this will sound crazy -- is that if we step back and look at these events there is only one possible conclusion:
Ronald Reagan is alive and working for Al Quaeda.