04.11.11
The Empire’s Dogshit
DoD weapons programs are some of the best demonstrations of crap lots of money can buy. At a time when everyone gets told that they’ll have to tighten their belts, the only people who don’t are the wealthy and arms manufacturers.
So I point to Wired on-line’s story about the Maritime Laser Demonstrator by Spencer Ackerman, who — it is advertised — writes stories on weapons of doom, aka the plutocracy’s tech dog excrement/corporate welfare jobs programs.
Fatuous quote of the day, from the piece, which as an unimpressive video of a 15-kilowatt laser taking a long minute to set the engine of a motorized harbor scooter on fire:
“This is an important data point,??? the admiral says, “but I still want the Megawatt death ray.???
Only 985 kilowatts and a quarter the size of the Rock of Gibraltar to go.
Immediately followed by the teasingly entitled piece, Libya 2030: Lasers vs. Tyrants, presumably a fun read based on the idea that the way things are going here it’s another place where we’ll be stretching out a war 19 years from now.
You’d be hard-pressed to make a comic book better than this stuff.