Skip to main content

Profligate waste.... and folly and stupidity to boot

What can one say?  Despair and frustration immediately comes to mind when reflecting on misguided and irresponsible politicians, and their military "people"  who make dumb decisions......

"Last week, just days before its long-planned, much-hyped international debut at a U.K. airshow, the entire fleet of the endless boondoggle known as the F-35 II Lightning, or Joint Strike Fighter, has been grounded after one caught fire on a runway, the latest in a years-long series of disasters almost every time it's tried to leave the ground. The plane's current pricetag of $398.6 billion equals a cost of about $49 billion a year since work began in 2006 on a project now seven years behind schedule and estimated to cost over $1 trillion when done. No doubt entirely coincidentally and in no way connected to the fact that the project is still alive, its maker Lockheed has spread its jobs, suppliers and contractors across almost every state, thus ensuring broad support in a Congress whose members want to keep their jobs. If that doesn't make you angry enough, here are a lot of cool things we could have done - provide every homeless person with a $600,000 home, feed every hungry child, fund every current humanitarian crisis - with the money."


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?