Category: Miscellaneous

If you are a history buff, then what we are seeing in Ukraine is not exactly news to you. Indeed, it may be depressing how much history does repeat itself. And yet, looking at history does mean that you can look at the past and see the parallels to today and decide not to make the same mistakes. It also means that those who do choose to repeat the same mistakes are doing it because they are under the same delusions as their forbears.

And if you play computer games on Steam, you’ve probably at least heard of the Hearts of Iron series, and the last few times I’ve played that game I’ve noticed that the loading screens feature a lot of historical quotes that have at least ironic value, and some of them seem to be that much more ironic in the wake of the first large-scale war in Europe since 1945.

Gaiety is the outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

-Joseph Stalin

This is an example of how “truth” works in a totalitarian universe where everybody HAS to believe the government line (on pain of death) and so politicians don’t even need to lie well. It’s of a piece with the Winter War against Finland, where Finns invented the phrase “Molotov cocktail” but also invented the phrase “Molotov’s breadbaskets” because Foreign Minister Molotov insisted that Soviet bombing runs on Finnish cities were really just dropping food parcels for Finland’s starving masses.

Alternately, it could be that this phrase is just an example of Stalin’s famously dark sense of humor. But as Stalin was (inaccurately) quoted as saying, “Dark humor is like food. Not everybody gets it.”

Certainly not the Ukrainians.

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them.

-Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris

Harris was a leader of the British Royal Air Force Bomber Command in World War II, and like America’s General Sherman, he had a single-minded focus on destroying the enemy’s home ground as the most quick, efficient, and therefore humane, means of ending a war that was thrust upon his country.

In World War II, this led to the outright destruction of cities like Dresden from conventional bombs.

It’s been slightly less than two months, and already there are reports that Ukraine has been able to target supply depots in Russian territory with air attacks. Recently Vladimir Putin’s government acknowledged that the economic sanctions from the West would have an effect on his economy, contradicting previous government remarks. Which is funny, given that shortly after the invasion started, Putin’s main protege (or perhaps ingenue) told his own fan club that the invasion was a genius move because Putin got access to all that territory for maybe $2 in sanctions. But that’s understandable, given that said protege launched his own half-assed attack on a national capital over a year ago and hasn’t even paid two dollars for it yet.

Yes, despite all the carnage in places like Yemen and Palestine and all the violence previously committed by Putin, the attack on Ukraine was what finally got the world’s attention. Even then, if Putin had succeeded in taking Kyiv in the first week and sweeping through the east, the international community probably would have had to take it as a fait accompli like his other aggressions. But then, the feat has not been accomplished. Because Ukraine fights back, it exacts a price for aggression, and that makes it a lot easier for the rest of the world to do likewise.

It brings to mind a much more famous quote by wartime prime minister Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

That’s the part of the speech most people know. The part that isn’t quoted as often is: “Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent, or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations — all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.”

People don’t matter, only what they represent.

I would rather live in a swamp of Greater Romania than a paradise of small Romania.

-Ion Antonescu

Ion Antonescu was a general in the Kingdom of Romania leading up to World War II, at a time when the political spectrum there ranged between pro-German and people who thought the Nazis weren’t anti-Semitic enough. Antonescu’s faction ended up winning control of the government by 1940 and Romania ended up joining the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union next year. Part of this was to take back territory that the previous government had conceded to Stalin, even though Romania had also surrendered Transylvania to Hitler’s other ally Hungary. The rearranged borders were defined by Antonescu as “Greater Romania.” Of course the Axis lost that war and Romania ended up losing that eastern territory again.

Antonescu’s quotes above reflect the philosophy of collectivists, whether they be left-wing socialists or right-wing fascists. They don’t see people as individuals. They don’t think that individual lives matter, or even the collective impact of government decisions. All that matters is the collective – the State, or the race. Any deprivation the individual people suffer is irrelevant to the goals of the state (or rather, the people who currently own it).

Which is why, contrary to some analysts, I don’t think that Putin is going to acknowledge a timeline. They say he only has a few months worth of supplies and financial reserves to wage a war, but that assumes he actually cares about the discomfort of the civilian population, or even his elite allies. So of course he’s going to let the government default on its debt, of course he’s going to create a national draft, of course he’s going to institute rationing and of course he’s going to come up with even more restrictions on public activity that would make all his “freedom-loving” fellow travelers in the US howl and scream if they were enacted by a Democrat. I mean what else could he do, back off and admit he made a mistake? See, that’s the beautiful thing about fascism. Fascism means never having to say you’re sorry.

Germany will either be a world power or it will not be at all.

-Adolf Hitler

In review of Putin’s career, there are a lot of quotes that indicate certain ideas are consistent in his mind even if he has not always been so reckless in pursuing them. The press has brought up where he said that the death of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20^th century.” More recently in December 2021, Putin did an interview and said that the event was ” the disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union”.

Further back, Putin made a speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007 lamenting the “unipolar” state of the world, namely a world in which America and the West were dictating terms without Russian influence. A few months after his Munich speech, Putin spoke at a meeting with members of the Valdai International Discussion Club. In that speech, he elaborated: “I know that, unfortunately, in some Eastern European countries, not just the candidate for the post of defense minister but even candidates for less important posts are discussed with the U.S. ambassador. Is this a good thing? I do not think it is very good for all the countries concerned because sooner or later it will provoke the same rejection that Soviet domination once provoked in these countries. Do you understand? It might seem welcome today, but tomorrow it could lead to problems. Even old Europe is obliged to take NATO’s political interests into account in its policies. You know how the decision-making process works. There is probably no need to explain. Sovereignty is therefore something very precious today, something exclusive, you could even say. Russia cannot exist without defending its sovereignty. Russia will either be independent and sovereign or will most likely not exist at all.”

Similar to the quote about Greater Romania, the status of the nation is more important to the fascist than its living conditions. In the case of World War II, it’s worth noting that the main nations of the Axis Powers – Germany, Italy and Japan – were all latecomers to empire after the great powers of Britain and France had already taken the best colonies in the undeveloped world. Germany had lost World War I while Italy and Japan were on the winning side but both thought they didn’t get enough spoils from the war, and both (like later Nazi Germany) wanted to re-assert themselves via imperial expansion at the same time that Britain, France and the United States were seeing colonial empires as not only contradictory to their humanist ideals but more hassle than they were worth. The Axis nations’ struggles against not only the West but neighboring nations endangered their economies and in the long term lowered daily living standards. And that of course was before full scale war in 1939, which ended up with the Axis being bombed into the Stone Age and occupied. And yet Germany and Japan in particular recovered from that occupation and became economic powers with an arguably better standard of living than America or Britain.

Germany ended up losing its colonial empire and Great Power status, just as Britain and France did, and had to suffer a lot more for it on the way because it decided to force itself on the rest of the world rather than adapt to it. Now, maybe Russia isn’t going to be fucked in the way that they (literally) fucked Germany after World War II, but like them they might find out that in the long run, plain old market liberalism is better than empire after all. But in the immortal words of Wesley Snipes, “Some motherfuckers just gotta ice skate uphill.”

GIRAFFES ARE HEARTLESS CREATURES

Well, yes.

It was recently announced that Norm McDonald died after fighting cancer for years, which no one knew about cause he didn’t want to tell anybody. But don’t worry folks, I’m sure that’s just his idea of a joke.

Okay, that wasn’t very funny. Here’s a better joke. My best friend is dead.

It’s been about two months since September 14^th. That’s when I found out. I am still trying to process it.

Don Garner has been a friend of mine since… I can’t even remember. More than 30 years. I was still hanging around UNLV and met him through one of the Dungeons & Dragons groups, along with at least one other close friend and a few other guys that I’ve run into a few times since then. And even more than most of those guys, I had a lot in common with him. He knew that much more about Star Trek, and about naval history, than I did, though I think a lot of that was precisely because he’d researched the military history of every US Navy ship named “Enterprise.” He had a great sense of humor. I’ve posted some of his stuff on Facebook. Like: “In the news this week… Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos into outer space by nine days… and Richard Branson does NOT have over 56,000 people’s names on a petition to not allow him to return to Earth the way Jeff Bezos does”.

But Don had been in a decline for years. And years. Such that when I learned for sure that he had died, it was sort of like how my roommate’s cat passed away. He took him to the vet and they found out the little guy had lung cancer, and they told my roommate that the cat maybe had weeks to live and it turned out to be only a few days. So it was sad, but we knew it was going to happen at some point, we just didn’t know when. The difference being you expect your pet to be completely dependent on other human beings, and you don’t think there’s anything else you can do if the pet goes terminal. When you’ve got somebody who’s otherwise able to take care of himself and who doesn’t do so, it’s that much more perplexing.

When I said recently on a completely different subject, that I had told someone “you can’t expect other people to care about your life more than you do”, that was Don I was referring to.

For example, Don was the guy who invented the sixburger. That is, you go to Wendy’s, you order two Triple cheeseburgers, and you put them on one bun. I mean, I weigh over 300 pounds, and I couldn’t compete with this. The thing is, for whatever reason he didn’t even have the same work ethic I did. I don’t see why anybody actually wants to work, but this was different. Like, years later when he was on SSI, he frequently seemed surprised that I couldn’t put him into my schedule cause I had a job. It was like, Don was intellectually aware that other people had to work for a living, but that wasn’t really part of his reality. It would have gotten in the way of his hobbies.

And as he aged, his metabolism slowed and he was less able to absorb the results of eating like Dagwood Bumstead. And if you, like me and Don, are on the Standard American Diet (or what Penn Jillette calls ‘SAD’) it’s that much more likely that you’re going to end up with heart disease or Type 2 diabetes and then you’re that much more likely to need consistent long-term medical coverage. And in this country, if you don’t get that coverage through your employer, you need to rely on the generosity of the state – or lack thereof.

If I can think of a point of real divergence, it was around 2006 or so. Prior to that Don had been going from job to job and eventually wound up living with me and my Mom, and we eventually had to kick him out cause he was unemployed and we needed a roommate who could support the household. Don ended up moving in with Jason, a gamer friend of ours down in Henderson. In the summer Jason referred us to jobs with the call center where he worked. It sucked, frankly, but I stuck with it, because it paid for medical insurance and I could see where I was going downhill and how Mom was going downhill with old age. This is how I got to see a regular doctor and how I got diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. That sucks, and I can’t tell you I have been good with my diet, but I have been eating less sugar than I did before then, and smaller portions. I have also been given prescriptions that have kept my blood sugar under control.

Don meanwhile quit the call center job after only a few weeks cause he couldn’t handle the work. He stayed at Jason’s and gamed with us, but spent a lot of his time asleep. He wasn’t looking for work, or looking into the issues with his health. And when I talked to him about Jason’s place, he would always grumble and complain about his living circumstances (living not only with Jason but his mom and other relatives), but would always move to whatever room they put him up in, as long as they gave him a place to stay, and food to eat, and they didn’t ask questions and they didn’t make him get up and look for a job. His illness was getting to the point where he had band-aids on his toes all the time, and one of his legs looked like a rabid wolf had ripped it up then pissed on it. And because Jason was at that point living with his sister and her two young children, she started to object. His other sister was a social worker who had tried to get Don to get some kind of public assistance and help with his issues, but he had refused. Eventually they forced the situation, and by that time, my roommate had moved out, and then my older brother, so I was once again asked to move Don in. I told him at that time, “Don, the only reason that I am taking you in now is because this is your LAST CHANCE to not die on the street homeless.”

In fact now that I recall, it was my mother of sainted memory who really saved Don’s life, or least gave him more years than he would have had. A couple days after he came back in the house, it was about 2 am or so and Mom had gotten up and noticed Don on the couch and saw that he was unresponsive. She eventually got him up, but from her own experience with Type 2 diabetes realized he was going into a coma. She immediately got me up (even though I had to work in the morning) and take him over to Sunrise Hospital to be checked in. I dropped him off for the ER overnight and they decided his condition was bad enough that they were going to take him in with no questions even though he had no insurance. That’s when Don was first diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. But that was the good news. It was good news in that at least we knew what was going on. But then he had to proceed from there.

After being at Sunrise about 5 days, he got a veritable grocery list of prescriptions and other scripts he had to take to the UMC (University Medical Center) hospital, because that was the only place where he could get those prescriptions filled with no insurance and only state support. So one day I took him over at 11 in the morning, thinking it would be a couple of hours. They told him that in order to fill the prescriptions from Sunrise, he would have to go through the whole admissions process again at UMC. So I dropped him off. He was there til about 9 pm.
This involved going through several hours of admissions procedures at the ER, going into the Pharmacy line several times- where they had only ONE teller processing orders for a line that (not coincidentally) averaged over 20 people deep, finding out that the doctor at Sunrise who made the prescriptions was not listed in the UMC roster of doctors authorized to prescribe, and in any case they had to change at least one of the prescriptions because they didn’t actually have the brand of pain medication the doctor wrote. While waiting, my friend also went through blood sugar crash at least once BECAUSE he was waiting for the prescription to regulate it, and in direct contrast to the Sunrise staff, no one really bothered to do anything for him at the time.

Compare this to my barely-adequate insurance from work where at most of my jobs I’ve been able to schedule an appointment with a doctor, get regular checkups, the doctor will fill out a prescription with a pharmacy I specify and I can go to the drive-thru and pick it up less than an hour after the fact.

But we eventually managed to get that prescription regimen, and Mom and I both told Don that one of the conditions of him staying with us was that he had to do SOMEthing to support himself. And in a couple weeks we got him to go to the welfare office down the street and got him on food stamps/EBT. And that’s ALL he did. Even after Mom died from her own various co-morbidities he did not do anything to support the household other than get the EBT, which was often not enough to cover his usual diet (which hadn’t changed all that much). So I had him living in the house, I was still paying rent to my sister who has been managing the house ever since, but I was the only person making money and Mom’s Social Security was gone. (If I made enough money to live by myself, I wouldn’t have been in my Mom’s house.) I knew by now that Don was really not able to hold down a job even if he’d wanted to (which he didn’t), but he should have at least been able to call someone to arrange social services and expanded coverage. He did not do that. There was no way I could babysit him or get him to do what he needed to do if I had to work full time during the day. Meanwhile I still had to cover bills by myself on ten dollars an hour even as he jacked the air conditioning up and pushed the power bill past $200 a month because his circulation had made him intolerant to heat. After a few months of this, I told him, flat-out, ‘I don’t care if you get a job, get on welfare, or suck cocks on Boulder Highway, you are GOING to do something to pay your way here.’ He did not. He didn’t want to admit that he needed to be on government dole, but at the same time he had absolutely no problem with couch-surfing at my place, or Jason’s or anyone else and expecting us to cover his upkeep on our budget while he did the absolute bare minimum to maintain his own life. So again, a few months after the ultimatum I had him move out.

And at that point, he really was homeless. He’d been at Catholic shelters for a few weeks and that basically convinced him that he needed to actually get some professional assistance and support. He was in this flophouse downtown at Ogden for a little while but eventually after getting SSI the state moved him to the apartment in Henderson where he stayed for the rest of his life. Once he’d gotten that much stability, we were able to resume social activities again, see movies and play role-playing games with our friends again. And it mattered a lot to me that we just managed to get together, tell jokes and have fun, even if it was just the two of us and a couple other guys. He wasn’t in the same game group with Jason, even though Jason and his sisters did ask if he wanted to come back. I guess in retrospect Don didn’t want them to see what happened to him. Among other things, he lost both legs over the years, mostly due to diabetes but partly because the people tending to his various infections were no more attentive than the people at UMC.

My current job obliges me to work graveyard (just about dusk to dawn) and September 12, I got a call from our mutual gamer friend Hugh just before I was about to get ready for work. He normally helped Don with rides to games (since he lives on the other side of town) but his truck broke down and he hadn’t heard from Don in about a week and he feared the worst. Unfortunately I had to work Sunday and Monday and I had no time to get out to Don’s place, which is over 13 miles away. Not only that, on my next day off (Tuesday the 14^th) I had two doctors’ appointments set up back to back starting before noon when I only left work Tuesday at 4 am. So I was already on the other side of town from where I live, that much further away from Don’s, and had barely gotten any sleep.

At this point I had every expectation that Don was dead, but I didn’t know. I also knew from experience that he could sleep for over 24 hours and not respond to the phone or even to a knock at the door. So as I drove across town, needing to move yet getting caught behind every construction cone, red light and dumbass driver in Vegas, Don’s status was unknown. He could have been dead. He could have been alive. Schrodinger’s Don.

I was on the road stuck between lights and I was scanning rock radio. It started with AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” I thought not. I turned to another album rock station and got Alice in Chains:

I believe

Them bones are me

Some say

We’re born into the grave

I feel so alone

Gonna end up a big ol’ pile of them bones

I got to the apartment complex after 3 pm or so, went upstairs and the first thing I noticed was all the empty paper bags left out from Amazon’s delivery service. So clearly Don hadn’t left the apartment, or he would’ve taken them to the garbage. I hit the door several times, and called on the phone, and when I got no answer either way, I warned him I was calling 911. So I did. The Henderson Police came out 20 minutes or so later and interviewed me for what little I knew, then they had me go to the ground floor to talk with one of the cops while another one got the superintendent from the office. Then they opened the door, and as I was talking about the situation with the cop and Don’s downstairs neighbor, we smelled it. All the way from upstairs.

You know that weird combination of stale locker and festering wound? That’s the first time I’d ever smelled that.

The neighbor told us that he’d smelled something odd in the pipes in his bathroom for a few days, which supported my suspicion that Don was dead even before Hugh called me.

My friend Hugh is one of those Trump guys who considers Don’s treatment to be an example of state “death panels” deciding who gets to live or not, and I kind of agree that this is what happens if you rely too much on the government, or on anybody. But that just raises two points: One, the alternative to Nevada’s indigent health care system would be to sink more money into the state government to establish reliable care for everyone, including the indigent. But that would be socialism. The only other option is to go back to the previous American standard which is that everybody only gets health care depending on the plan given by their employer, and Don was already psychologically unable to hold down a job even before he was physically too sick to hold a job.

Two, if there is no collective system of care, that just brings the issue back to individual responsibility. If there is no socialized system, that means you are solely responsible for your own upkeep, and that means holding down a job to get medical benefits whether you like working or not. Because again, no one is going to care about your own life more than you do. Even if they’re paid to care.

Don was not of subnormal intellect. He knew what day it was, at least when he wasn’t zonked out on painkillers. He, like me, and many of our gaming friends, started off as politically right-of-center, and like me but unlike most of those friends came to realize that voting Republican these days is like sticking your dick in a drum of radioactive waste. I’m saying, he wasn’t an idiot. On some levels, he was one of the smarter people I knew. But even more than those guys who want to court Trump Virus to own the libs, it felt to me that there was some broken gear in his system that I didn’t know how to fix.

A few days after the event, my sister suggested I post on Don’s Facebook page to find his next of kin, and his cousin in town managed to reach his sister and brother who both live out of state. The next week I had a long talk over the phone with his sister, who confirmed that all of the issues that my friends and I had noticed with Don’s behavior were no news to her.

This Monday, November 8, would have been Don’s birthday, which is just a week off from mine. And every time that holiday season rolled around I was always wondering if Don would survive for another Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I was always kind of impressed that he did. And that won’t be the case anymore.

There will be no real funeral. There will be no formal obituary. It took over a month for Don’s sister to get a cause of death from the Henderson office. After all this, I have taken it upon myself to summarize another person’s life, and as before I ask myself what more I can do, and again reach the conclusion that no matter how much it is, it will never be enough.

Don had a lot to offer. And like a lot of people I’ve known, he deserved a lot more out of life than he got.

If I can’t do anything else, I can at least speak here. So, Goodbye, Don Garner. You were my best friend for over half of my life. Your life mattered. To me and to those of us who saw the best of you.

You are still remembered.

You are still loved.

So the latest uproar being generated on social media is the left-wing attempt to cancel the capitalist space race in which Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson and Elon Musk seem to be in some kind of competition to get themselves in orbit with various private space programs. The Left’s opposition to this is almost as superficial and useless as the billionaires’ own publicity efforts, though to be sure, bitching about them on Twitter costs a lot less. And that is kind of the point. Robert Reich on Twitter: “With just their increased wealth during the pandemic, America’s billionaires could pay for 10 years of the Child Tax Credit that goes into effect today for one year, cutting child poverty by half. And they’d still be as wealthy as they were before the pandemic. “

Ha Ha Ha. Right.

The budget bill for fiscal year 2021 – passed under a Republican president, mind you – was 4.829 trillion dollars. Now never mind the deficit this causes, because deficits clearly don’t matter to either ruling faction. A trillion is a million million. As in, one trillion of a quantity is one followed by twelve zeroes. A billion is a thousand million. As in, one billion is one followed by nine zeroes. A trillion is a thousand billion. As Nathan Lane might say, “do the math.”

The level of money that government, specifically the US federal government, operates with is an actual exponent of what most billionaires get to work with. Even the richest guy on earth, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is worth $214 billion, at least according to USA Today. Forbes puts it at “only” $193.5 billion. Let’s say we round to $200 billion. Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God (and probably more than the Catholic Church) would need to multiply his wealth almost by 25 to get as much as Washington already has.

So if we’re not feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and solving climate change and all the other stuff, it’s because of the government we have now, because that government could be doing all those things right now cause it already has more money than Jeff Bezos will ever have, and if for some reason it actually needs more it can just rocket the deficit farther past the stratosphere than Richard Branson will ever get. And that would be the case whether we had a 90 percent tax rate on the upper class or not.

I had mentioned a while ago that there was one event in my life that had as much to do with me becoming a right-libertarian as anything Ayn Rand ever wrote. Believe it or not, it was Live Aid. To briefly recap: I like a lot of young adults at that time contributed to the Live Aid fundraising campaign to get food and support to the starving in Ethiopia, because Bob Geldof and the other organizers of the Live Aid campaign did make a convincing case that enough people working together could solve the world’s problems. But then after the money was raised and the food was delivered to the Horn of Africa, Geldof and his people found that a lot of it was left to rot on the docks while some of it was actually confiscated by the Ethiopian government to use as leverage against its own people.

The lesson I got is that even when there is collective action from private actors, and even when that is backed up by some governments, the government on the ground can burn all that altruism and effort to dust. Because if government has far more scale to do good than any one philanthropist, it has far more scale to do evil than any individual criminal.

In the case I mentioned, the people getting in the way of feeding the world were the Communists running Ethiopia, but in the modern day the obstacle is a faction that is even more vicious, collectivist and devoted to Russian ideology: The Republican Party.

This is especially obvious in regard to their state voter suppression efforts, but I have already touched on those to some extent. With regard to the subject at hand, it was indeed a liberal (Jack Kennedy) initiative that got America first to the moon. It was the government, under NASA, that first had to get us to space. According to Wikipedia, NASA’s share of the total federal budget peaked at around 4.41 percent during the Apollo project, but by 1975 (after we’d reached the moon more than once) it declined to 1 percent and actually decreased from there. “Despite this, public perception of NASA’s budget differs significantly: a 1997 poll indicated that most Americans believed that 20% of the federal budget went to NASA.” In a March 2012 hearing of the United States Senate Science Committee, science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson testified that “Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.”

But for practical purposes, our government doesn’t really have a space program.

Oh, but it has Space Force. Yes. Cheeto Jesus himself, our small-government, tax cutting, regulation cutting Greatest President Capitalism Ever Had decided to add a bureaucracy to our already bloated government for reasons I still cannot explain. It’s not like Trump seems to grasp Gene Roddenberry’s message of peace, reason and infinite diversity, much less George Lucas’ moral that maybe turning a flawed Republic into a blatantly evil Empire isn’t such a good move in the long run. But in any event, we now have a Space Force, even though in five years no one has told me what the fuck it does.

What, are we handing out parking tickets to Martians? Are we busting the illegal smuggling trade in Green Orion Slave Women? What is this?

Now given that there is a real national security interest in protecting our satellite network and responding to any Russian or Chinese attempts to weaponize space, you would think this alleged branch of our military would have some kind of military shuttle program. A monitoring system. But have they explained what we’re actually spending the money on? As far as I can tell the US Space Force’s only official expenditure is for the field uniforms that are done in standard BDU/desert camo, y’know, cause apparently that’s the color pattern you need to camouflage yourself IN FUCKING SPACE.

If you wonder why these nose-in-the-air billionaires are investing their wherewithal in space exploration, well, it’s because we used to have a government that did that for the country, and we don’t any more. So why not them?

Now, there is one aspect to this leftist complaining that is completely legitimate. To such extent as NASA actually exists, it seems to exist to outsource its former charter to these guys for their space side projects. NASA provided $2.9 billion to Musk’s Space X to build a moon lander. New Mexico, “one of the poorest states in the US”, paid $220 million to build “Spaceport America” for Branson.

However, I don’t see government spending taxpayer money for billionaires who could pay their own way as a big endorsement for more government spending. It does however help explain why things are the way they are. Libertarians have been pointing out for years that the problem with our government being as big as it is is that its power and money makes it a more attractive target for business to manipulate. But the other side of the matter is that government would rather hand out money to billionaires and corporations than homeless and powerless people because the corporations and rich guys can actually do something for them. In the Business Insider article, they focus on the small town of Truth or Consequences (which, ironically, took its name to attract publicity from the audience of a then-famous game show that has long ago left the air) which has yet to see much trickle-down from Virgin’s use of the area, even as the town’s mayor assumes that the town will get more business once Virgin’s commercial space travel service becomes fully operational.

Personally, I would think that a real laissez-faire policy wouldn’t punish businesses and rich people just for being rich, but neither should it give them unearned rewards when they already have natural advantages and the resources to develop their companies without government help.

It’s not that there aren’t infrastructure and other projects that need a government to execute, and it’s not as though those shouldn’t be under a public authority as opposed to an individual, otherwise Elon Musk could just buy I-95, call it private property and then charge a subscription fee to drive on it. But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.

If you want to avoid that state of affairs and actually have an activist government, you need to get involved and be an active watchdog on that government. Billionaires or no billionaires (which is what most socialists want), you’re not going to have that activist government unless you consider that the Democratic Party is failing to apply even the technical majority in the Senate that they currently have, and maybe you should start investigating exactly why that is.

Not like any of these billionaires need me to defend them, and not like they’re really going to be hurting if we rolled back most of the Trump-Ryan tax laws. But if you really think we can solve all our problems by soaking the rich, first you’re going to have to convince me that government at all levels is not lazier and piggier than any zillionaire in this week’s Two Minutes Hate. And when the government includes people like Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert, that’s gonna be pretty hard.