Notes from Whoopsie World:
An out of control secret U.S. satellite containing hydrazine gas, extremely toxic to humans as well as members of the animal kingdom, is due to crash to Earth in early March.
Apparently out of much concern as to where it might come down, the U.S. military will attempt to shoot down its own satellite when a window to do so opens up beginning next week. If successful and the satellite is destroyed in space, the upper atmosphere will be seeded with the deadly hydrazine.
Let's hope for success. It seems only fair all of mankind should share in our increasingly deadly atmospheric follies. By seeding this poison in the upper reaches of the atmosphere rather than allowing it to enter and disperse in the lower, closer-to-home atmosphere, precious time will be bought by the Defense Department, i.e., we'll all be dead before our grandkids begin wondering why they're dying miserable deaths from hydrazine poisoning.
Are there any misanthropes out there secretly wishing for a total screw-up that would get Homo sapiens off the face of the Earth as quickly as possible?
*****
Iraq contracts escape Bush's fraud crackdown.
(from an AP article by Lara Jakes Jordan, 2/13/2008)
"A Bush administration plan to crack down on contract fraud has a billion dollar loophole: the proposal to force companies to report abuse of taxpayer money will not be applicable to work overseas, including projects to secure and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan."
(Note: "The Justice Department, which pushed for the self supporting requirement, called the overseas exemption a mistake that should be fixed before the plan becomes final," which is probably the very bottom item on the Bush list of priorities.)
*****
Squeezing a lemon for all it's worth?
In his eighth and final State of the Union message last month, president Bush once more sprinkled his speech generously with images of clean energy, touting his state-of-the-art $1.5 billion FutureGen coal burning industry flagship that would capture 90% of its own CO2 emissions and store them safely undergound somewhere in Illinois.
How wonderfully promising that sounded, what with America rich in filthy coal deposits. (Whoops, make that "filthy rich in coal deposits.") But that being Bush's last State of the Union where he would need to spout such bullshit to the public, high-tech FutureGen was scrapped shortly afterwards. Reason: cost overruns.
The timely cancelation of FutureGen just after, not before, Bush's last SOTU speech was an unbelievable coincidence, wasn't it? But elimination of the project, saving taxpayers expensive cost overruns, will allow Bush to divert the savings of future overrun funds to fund overruns in Iraq where his fraud crackdown doesn't apply and the Bush administration is heavily invested in war profiteering reliant on unregulated cost overruns and fraud.
12 comments:
As a human who loves and cares for non-human animals, I'm upset about that toxic stuff in that satellite. I heard that the motive for shooting it down might be less about protecting us and more about keeping outsiders from discovering its technology.
Good point, Nona. After all, what if that damn thing crashed down in China of all things!
But DOD shouldn't be so concerned about communists trying to piece together a burnt, twisted contaminated train wreck from space, because as we've read recently, their spies will steal, and our best DOD contractors will sell, the Chinese all of our state-of-the-art military secrets.
I, like you, am way more concerned for the animals, all of whom exist without complicity in such games, many to serve mankind in his exploitations of them. That's why I tried to separate Homo sapiens in my blog from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Mankind is not of the animals. Mankind IS an ANIMAL (in the pejorative sense he enjoys using to place us above our nobler brothers and sisters).
I take your point and agree with you regarding humans feeling superior of our non-human relatives in the animal kingdom. Those who are inferior to others try to compensate by putting on a pretense of superiority. An example is Republicans who try to belittle the French while ignoring the fact that the French have a superior health care system for their citizens.
So too, we inferior human animals must desperately convince ourselves that our fictitious God created us to be superior to our non-animal relatives. We who destroy the habitat like reckless children while non-human animals suffer the consequences. We torture them in the name and pretense of creating safe cosmetics with which to paint our faces and we bleat about our superiority to them - a lesser species.
We could learn a lot from those who don't have spoken word with which to deceive but we're too busy feeling superior to notice that we're just plain stupid as a species.
Don't worry about dirty filthy coal operations... if they don't work out, the prez announced we can go to safe & clean nu-cu-lur power plants. Sleep better tonight!
You can't help but wonder if toxic satellite garbage would not karmically land, say, in an undisclosed location, on the head of some evil dolt who holds waaay too much power. I'm not namin' names.
In any case the overruns & overrun void coins a new phrase... Circular ILLogic. Round & round it goes.
The endlessness justifies the meaninglessness.
I, too, was worried about that satellite. Thank heavens I just read Fran's idea of where it might land! Like a douser calling lightning down out of the sky, I hope HE-shall-not-be-named wanders out in some forlorn field that day.
That deadly hydrazine gas, it is estimated on probabilities, would land in an uninhabited area and spread across two who football fields.
Give me a break, this is all about "I can piss higher up the wall than you can!"
Hey Cart, as long as Cheney is in those two football fields, eh?
And as far as the pissing contest, I think Putin pretty much won that one this weekend with his 5-hr oration. Can you imagine Bush standing up to that challenge? My Pet Goat is only 7-minutes. I guess he could fill out the time bungling his way though those 3 Shakespeares.
Cart: Not sure what you're saying here. Was that a pissing challenge? (grin)
But regarding deadly chemicals being indiscriminately thrown up in the space higher than any of us can piss, I have some serious reservations about.
There's a chance (while slimmer than the other possibility) that this thing could come down in an inhabited area; there's a chance the danger posed is contained to two football fields via gov't disinformation so prevalent today; and then there's the one that concerns me most...the cumulative results of a little poison here, and little toxin there.
We're waging that very battle here locally about the reopening of a unhealtful refinery with specious arguments that pollution already exists, what's a little more? Or, we can't control the crap just over our border in Juarez, MX so why should we worry about our own. My favorite was a caller yesterday saying it may be only a matter of time before Mexican drug cartel money pays a terrorist to lob a short range missile over the border into our local gas refinery....and we should be concerned about a little more air pollution from a smelter refinery?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment here, but you got to understand it comes from a deep concern of mine that if the U.S. continues waging war globally with illegal deleted uranium weapons, soon there will be no safe battlefields left on Earth for American soldiers to exercise their domination and suppression of Third World nations upon (not that our gov't gives a flying leap for the safety of its own soldiers and what they're exposed to).
And this is the gov't I'm supposed to believe as to the damage its errant hydrazine powered satellite may cause?
Cart: Not sure what you're saying here. Was that a pissing challenge? (grin)
But regarding deadly chemicals being indiscriminately thrown up in the space higher than any of us can piss, I have some serious reservations about.
There's a chance (while slimmer than the other possibility) that this thing could come down in an inhabited area; there's a chance the danger posed is contained to two football fields via gov't disinformation so prevalent today; and then there's the one that concerns me most...the cumulative results of a little poison here, and little toxin there.
We're waging that very battle here locally about the reopening of a unhealtful refinery with specious arguments that pollution already exists, what's a little more? Or, we can't control the crap just over our border in Juarez, MX so why should we worry about our own. My favorite was a caller yesterday saying it may be only a matter of time before Mexican drug cartel money pays a terrorist to lob a short range missile over the border into our local gas refinery....and we should be concerned about a little more air pollution from a smelter refinery?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment here, but you got to understand it comes from a deep concern of mine that if the U.S. continues waging war globally with illegal deleted uranium weapons, soon there will be no safe battlefields left on Earth for American soldiers to exercise their domination and suppression of Third World nations upon (not that our gov't gives a flying leap for the safety of its own soldiers and what they're exposed to).
And this is the gov't I'm supposed to believe as to the damage its errant hydrazine powered satellite may cause?
Dada, I don’t want to belittle your concern. This crap shouldn’t be hovering above us to begin with. It’s like my concern about central Australia becoming a nuclear waste dump. The fact is we shouldn’t be producing massive amounts of this waste without a means of disposal.
My comment was a more cynical view that the Admin, to use another body waste reference, full of shit! Why not just say it’s good target practice for the navy? But then why put the crap there in the first place, knowing its limited lifetime.
We used to say, ‘you don’t need to be a rocket scientist’. Personally I’m seeing little this class of professionals that is worthy of aspiring too. Just recently I saw rows of great bloody missile cases rendered redundant because the two chemicals used to fuel them were not only unstable when mixed, but were exploding on the ground as separate components.
I share your concern and anger, and try occasionally to hide from it.
Cart:
Thanks for the short turnaround time to my comment. Don't mind me, my fuse is short these days with the recent decision of our Envirnomental Commission's decision to allow a permit renewal for the copper refinery and those advocating for it with some of the most inane arguments.
I saw mention of the nuclear waste dump in central Australia, but haven't taken the time to read it yet. But I was reading this morning with interest the problems with our own disposal and laughing, trying to reconcile the reality with the bill of goods we bought when swallowing this "cheap energy" source 40 years ago. Seems the US is 20 years behind in starting up a disposal site and now the cost to the gov't is beginning to climb into the billions with no site in sight for another 10-20 years.
Maybe we should just rocket it into outer space? ;~)
"Maybe we should just rocket it into outer space" I was going to suggest that, but feared you would rip me a big enough hole to bury the waste in me.
Post a Comment