Space Force – RAnt(hony)-ings

July 4, 2020. American Carnage.

Twitter (I consider it a personal insult that these pieces of shit live in my house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I’ve endured this insult for almost four years. Patience is what is needed now. -ed.)

The post asked me to defend the words in the image when it appeared in the Facebook group. Defend the words in the image? Why? But then one of the Stormtrumpers asked the question.

What’s wrong with it?

What I see in the image is two guys standing at urinals talking trash. That’s what I see in that image. Oh, wait. There is a Spacex launch in the distance. Neither of them are Spacex employees. Not sure what they have to do with that. They have everything to do with the fact that there are 120,000+ Americans dead due to the Coronavirus pandemic rampaging unchecked across the American landscape, but they have very little to do with the success of private industry taking us back to the Moon.

Manifest Destiny? We are the children of the enslavers, the inheritors of the fruits of genocide. That is who we are, that is what Manifest Destiny meant. To conquer the continent and claim it as our own at any cost. Going to the Moon? Spacex is going to the Moon. Corporations will slice the Moon up and fight each other over the spoils if we continue on the current course.

Americans are the collected rubbish and cast-offs of every other continent, fueled by their own aggrandized image of themselves. That’s what is wrong with Manifest Destiny. Our destiny is what we make of it, and it certainly isn’t manifest. Don’t get me wrong. Humanity should spread throughout the solar system and explore all the places we can get to in order to discover everything we can about the universe that makes us what we are. I’m just not comfortable with the first and last White president and his Christianist cohort declaring that it is our destiny to own the moon.

Youtube – New Book Shows Depravity Of Trump Admin Family Separation Policy – Rachel Maddow – MSNBC – Jul 7, 2020

Separated: Inside an American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff

We cannot continue as we are. We cannot look toward the future while standing on the bodies of this many innocent people. To do that is inhumane and cancels any hope you might have for a brighter future.

The US has to find a new way now. Better to fail than to spread these corrupted beliefs any further than our shores. We need to accept that not only are we the conquerors and the enslavers, but that we are the conquered, the oppressed and the descendants of slaves. We need to liberate ourselves from our own history, and we do that by rejecting the racist notion of Manifest Destiny right now. Today. We can do it if we try.

Facebook

Youtube – NPR.org – Frederick Douglass Descendants Read His Fourth Of July Speech

Oh, you think I’m piling on now? You think this negative attitude isn’t warranted on Independence day? Listen to the voices of those children recite the words of their father from over a hundred years ago and realize that we haven’t done anything to deliver justice for these people. Don’t point to the Civil War as proof of doing something. We restored the nation and then turned our backs on the former slaves. A hundred years and we still have cops killing them in the street over a minor provocation. We trample on the poor and the homeless and leave the refugee starving on our doorstep.

Monuments to Traitors

ranthonyings.com

We don’t deserve to go the Moon. Maybe the next country to raise its head above the level of shit we’ve left floating in the common pool will be worthy of escaping this planet. But not us, and not now.

That is what is wrong with Manifest Destiny.

The Ezra Klein Show – Bryan Stevenson on how America can heal – July 20, 2020

I’m just so worried that my grandfather might have been one of the people that lynched that man.

Editor’s note. This was the first article written for ranthonyings.com.

Starfleet? Space Force?

Back in 2018, I was laughing at the stupidity of the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) and his Stormtrumpers.

#MAGA: Space Force. The Stupid Dreams of Stupid People

RAnt(hony)-ings

I’m not laughing anymore. This was on the Stonekettle Station Facebook wall today.

I’ve done a cursory look online (check out the image credit on that wikipedia page) and the symbolism does seem to be official if not actually adopted by the branch of military service that Congress funded last month. I’ll try to forgive congress the insult to American intelligence that their funding of one of the idiocracies pet ideas legitimizes.

Yes. That is potentially a theft of intellectual property in the form of a proposed device for the OHM’s Space Farce. …er Force. While you are laughing remember that, to the rest of the world, you are what they are laughing at. You the reader, not you the president. Not you Stonekettle Station. You, dear reader. All of you who count yourselves as Americans. You are a joke if this bullshit is not brought to an end.

Facebook – Stonekettle Station

Well okay. That was funny.

As far as who owns the rights to the IP in question, that isn’t clear.

I thought of “Mirror, Mirror” after seeing the Trump administration’s new Space Force logo, which the president tweeted out Friday with a characteristically awkward nod to our “Great Military Leaders” of the “Sixth Branch of our Magnificent Military!” (caps and punctuation his). Within minutes, the logo was lampooned widely for appearing to rip off the logo for Starfleet Command from “Star Trek.” Indeed, with the two logos placed side by side, the resemblance is so remarkable that I had to wonder whether Melania Trump was part of the design committee.
Apparently, the new logo is just another iteration on the former Air Force Space Command logo, which also featured an upward pointing delta, but the final product with its concentric rings and swooping orbits looks so much like Starfleet’s, I fear it could easily confuse any Vulcans and Klingons who see it.
This somewhat comical appropriation of “Star Trek” imagery carries a certain irony. The universe of “Star Trek” has always provided a hopeful, near-utopian vision for humanity, where we have finally learned to set aside things like racial prejudice and gender inequality, and we all work together toward a common purpose and quest. Money is a thing of the past because no one wants for any material need, and we have united much of the galaxy in a peaceful assembly of sovereign worlds.
Contrast that for a moment with the current administration’s values and practices: racial resentments and fear stoked for cynical political purposes, the wealthy made even more obscenely so through grift and political influence, coarse and bullying behavior masquerading as diplomacy, to name but a few. Even the notion of a “Space Force” seems patently absurd coming from an administration where science is mocked and disregarded.
At times it truly feels like the past three years have had us beamed into a parallel universe, where instead of a president we have a mendacious thug, and where notions like the U.S. Senate being a deliberate, serious body that serves as a vital check on presidential power now seem quaint and naive.
George Takei

If, however, the government took orders from the OHM, and the OHM’s intent was to mimic the Starfleet insignia (being an idiot of very little brain, but then I repeat myself) then the logo for Space Force as it is presented by the OHM probably constitutes theft of intellectual property. Proving the theft, proving the OHM’s intentions, then becomes the next hurdle to clear.

The Starfleet insignia as we know it today didn’t exist until the motionless picture (my second favorite Star Trek film) back in 1979. This was long after Gene riffed on the theme of the gold pins that NASA gave to astronauts on going to space to create the various ships insignias seen in the original Star Trek series (1967-69) None of those pins have an upward delta device with a star, also pointing upward, in the center of them. That insignia was just for the Enterprise crew, and the star inside the stylized delta represented command crew. A real fan will know what the two other symbols inside the delta were, and what they represented. The Air Force Space Command insignia does have a delta pointing upward, and that has been acknowledged to be a Star Trek reference. There is your bit of trivia for today.

#MAGA: Space Force. The Stupid Dreams of Stupid People

The latest whiz-bang idea from Donald Trump is this idiocy he calls the Space Force. Even his Vice President, a strangely quiet man lost in the shadow of Trump’s vast vanity, has gotten in on the deal. Yesterday he was promoting the idea publicly. Today on the Texas Standard I hear that Maddog Mattis is gungho to get right on this stupid idea and make it a reality. That’s weird, because I thought even Maddog was against it. When a guy nicknamed Maddog doesn’t want to do your idea, you should know it’s probably even crazier and dumber than you might have thought.

Let me spell out just how dumb this idea is, from the perspective of decades of Science Fiction reading. The Earth sits at the bottom of a pretty deep gravity well. It’s face would be more visibly pockmarked than it is were it not for the wind and water action on the surface, not to mention the verdant tree growth, masquing the damage inflicted on the Earth from simple rocks that it has encountered in it’s annual journey around the sun. There are tons of rocks out there in space. Tons of them. Asteroids that could extinguish all life on this planet, in an instant. If we want to destroy any spot on the globe, that potential is out there right now. It is just waiting for anyone, anyone, to go out there, strap a rocket motor to the thing, push it this way or that and hey, presto! you’ve vaporized the target of your choice on the surface of the earth, and probably several hundred square kilometers around it.

The stupidity of believing we could continue our warlike ways into space was spelled out quite well in Robert A. Heinlein’s libertarian exploration novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In that book we accompany the main character as he plots revolution against the Earth that sent him to a penal colony on the Moon. In order to avoid any major spoilers, I will simply observe that lobbing rocks at the Earth figures heavily in the plot of that novel. A Space Force is akin to the stupidity of placing the exiles from the Earth at the top of the Earth’s gravity well and daring them to get back at us. I expect a lunar penal colony will be the next great idea that Trumpists will come up with, that’s how dumb the idea of a Space Force is. The world of Starship Troopers is waiting for us down that route through time, and I don’t recommend that future, either.

What life on this planet needs to understand is that we are at war with the rest of the universe, because the universe wants to kill us. Everywhere outside of the blanket of atmosphere that covers the Earth, death awaits. Gasping, freezing, boiling, death. We don’t need a Space Force because we don’t need to militarize space. Everything about going to space is a weapon. The rocket engines are weapons, the ships are weapons, that lug nut you forgot to tighten properly is a weapon after it comes loose, hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour just waiting to intersect some habitat somewhere and destroy it. We cannot be at war with other people in space, because killing each other is far, far too easy to do out there. A moment of carelessness and everyone dies. Not exactly the place for the murderous or the stupid. Our only hope for the future is demilitarization, and it’s a pretty faint hope at that.

The demilitarization of space is the opposite of a Space Force. This is all aside from the fact that a Space Force is probably just another boondoggle like Reagan’s Star Wars. A boondoggle that will go nowhere and cost billions. It’s a stupid idea endorsed by stupid people. Or as Stonekettle Station put it, the money goes in the black hole and never comes out.

Splitting this so-called space force off from the Air Force (and presumably pulling the space-related components out of the other services as well), what does that give us that we don’t have now — and not just give us, but give us to such a degree that it justifies the cost and significantly increased complexity? What are the distinct requirements, the technology, skillsets, logistics, communications, training, facilities, targets, strategies, tactics, objectives, and missions that will define this space force? And how are those distinctly different from the current Air Force, distinct enough to warrant an entirely separate service with its enormous associated cost?
Why both an Air Force and a Space Force, instead of a single Aerospace Force?
Like everything else with Trump: what are the details?
Stonekettle Station on Facebook

Postscript

Apparently I was being too subtle in the article above. Let me be more blunt. If you think that militarizing space is a good idea, if you think that Donald Trump isn’t proposing this project just to the line the pockets of his donors, then you are a member of group I refer to as stupid people. You are the kind of person that watches Iron Sky and masturbates to the images of swastikas on the screen.

Just FYI, if you watch Iron Sky and find you can’t laugh at it, then you have no sense of humor. You take yourself too seriously. You take your country too seriously (if you are an American) It is a European film made specifically to poke fun at Americans. Watch it again and again until you find the humor in it. That is my suggestion to anyone who finds they can’t laugh at themselves. If you undertake this effort maybe, just maybe, you will cease to be a member of the group I labeled stupid people.

We can’t realistically militarize space. Believing otherwise is to fall for storytelling tropes. If we don’t get past this self-hatred, we are done for as a species.

Featured image screencapped from empireonline.com. De-Orangification completed here.