Why aren't we even talking about this?

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything. The situation seems so immune to change. But at least I can bellyache even if I can't change anything.

Why is it that in every discussion about budget cuts, including those coming from the President and other high-level Democrats, there is little to nothing said about the military? 

We have something on the order of over 900 Flag Officers (Generals & Admirals) each with million dollar retinues to cater to their every whim. They have six-figure salaries, government provided mansions, cars and private jets. And when they retire on their six-figure retirement plans, a lot of them join companies like Raytheon, GE, Lockheed or the like to peddle more waste back to Congress and their erstwhile colleagues in the military. The waste here is incredible! How many kids could we educate with the savings from just slashing these cadres in half?

Why do we need to have over 700 military bases scattered around the world, not even counting the ones we built in Iraq and Afghanistan? How long could we extend Medicare for just the savings of closing half of those bases?

Why on earth do we need eleven aircraft carriers, when the rest of the world combined has only ten? And most of those belong to our allies. How many billions are spent each year on these carrier groups? How many years could Social Security be extended if we just reduced the size of our Navy by half?

The Pentagon plans to buy a total of 2,443 F-35 fighters at a rough average cost of around two hundred million dollars apiece. For what? Blowing up more goat-herders in the Middle East? I won't even suggest depriving the Generals and Congress their shiny new jets, but if they just cut that number by half, they'd save $244 billion dollars! How many bridges and highways could be repaired with that money?

But what are we arguing about? How big of a tax break we will be giving millionaires and corporations. And how many benefits we will be slashing to the poor and the elderly.

What the fuck are we doing?

Well, it's a start

A year ago, the most virulent climate change deniers simply claimed the whole thing was a lie. I recall Sen Jim Inhofe (R-Az) declaiming something on the lines of "God is in His Heaven, and climate change is a hoax."

Yeah, I know not all were this locked into the far out claim that is simply wasn't true, but some were. I even heard claims that the earth was actually cooling! 


I check in at the Huffington Post ever once in a while, and it's wild to read the comments over there. There is a subset of trolls that insist on posting their far out right wing gibberish. They are particularly rabid whenever there is a story about climate change. I have amused myself by watching these guys slowly giving up their "Climate change is a hoax!" and "It was all made up to get AL Gore richer" story lines and more and more turn to a sort of laissez faire attitude of "The earth has climate changes, it gets warmer, it gets cooler. There's nothing we can do about it anyway. But the Left wants to impose more restrictions on our FREEDOMS!"

It's gonna be a self-fulfilling prophesy. If it's not too late already, by the time the right allows any hope of doing anything to stop the growth of atmospheric CO2, it surely will be too late to reverse anything.

But we can always hope.

I don't get it

Even after all the evidence, Climate change deniers are still convinced that there's some conspiracy to either:

a) take away 'Our Freedoms" (this deserves its own post)
and/or
2) make climate scientists/Al Gore rich

I mean WTF? All these scientists busily conspiring on this massive scale to con the world so they can be wealthy? Yeah, right. That's just absurd. And Al Gore is already rich. Sure, wealthy folks can be counted on to try to get more wealthy, but this?