CSotD – Weekend Wrap
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I suppose it’s hardly surprising that someone called “First Dog on the Moon” is somewhat excited about the Artemis II mission, though if you’ve seen his cartoons before, it’s equally unsurprising that he’s also somewhat skeptical about it. This seems to be a common split: People fascinated by the space program are fascinated while people concerned about the situation down here on Terra are concerned and a lot of people are, like First Dog, feeling a bit of both.
Smith notes the affordable housing issue as one of the problems the money spent on Artemis could have solved instead.
But Hudson, I think, points out the real waste, and, like First Dog, he’s blaming it more on lack of resolve than in spending money on the space program. The space program creates a lot of jobs at all sorts of levels; it’s like the weapons program except that we don’t then use the products to blow anybody up, so that’s good.
And, as both Hudson and First Dog note, it’s not like we were going to spend that money on anything else.
Perhaps you have to be old enough to remember a world without Tang, but when Sputnik went up in 1957, the US panicked that (A) their science programs were ahead of us and (B) they could potentially do some truly nasty stuff with a good space program.
So we ramped up science-teaching in schools and set a goal of beating the Russkis to the Moon, which we did.
And we justified it by inventing Tang, which was very exciting, and astronaut ice cream, which was kind of like flavored drywall and you don’t see much anymore.
However, the key is motivation. If we’d just given all those billions of dollars to scientists and said, “Go invent stuff,” they might have come back with many of the things that emerged from the space program and perhaps some others. But I think maybe you had to be around to watch rockets blow up and various Lunas smack into the Moon instead of landing nicely in order to appreciate the race that was the point.
Sputnik caught us largely by surprise and Yuri Gagarin was like having the other team score right before the Two Minute Warning. And then Apollo was in-your-face-Ivan.
Which is why people who complain about $4 a gallon gasoline are willing to spend two grand to visit Disney World. It’s all about the glitter.
Rowe celebrates the re-entry of Melania Trump, though she popped back into the news more like an unexpected meteorite than a space vehicle, or at least one of ours.
But she held a press conference which her husband either knew about or didn’t, or knew about but didn’t know what she was going to say. It was Schrodinger’s Press Conference, and still is, since the multitudes continue to puzzle over what the heck that was all about, and opening the box ruins the point.
Anyway, what she said was that she didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein, or barely knew him, but only “barely” in the sense of “slightly” and if you said otherwise, she’d sue you like she nailed other people who suggested hanky-panky. I’m not sure anyone really cared.
But they do care about Epstein’s young victims and, as Espinoza notes, she also said that Congress needs to summon those young women to testify under oath in front of the American people about what he did to them, and I’m pretty sure Dear Leader didn’t know she was going to say that.
Trump has just put another notch in his belt with a massive, historic victory in the Middle East, or at least he’d have one if he could get his pal Bibi to go along with it, the prospects of which seem to vary from day to day but include shelling a residential area of Beirut, killing more than 300 people, and assassinating yet another reporter in Gaza, though it you try to look that up, it’s confusing because they also killed three other reporters, these in Lebanon.
As things stand, the Strait of Hormuz is open, which was the goal, or, at least, which became the goal once the Iranians began defending themselves, and it’s only open for those who agree to pay the toll, which also didn’t used to happen, but with Great Victories come Great Expenditures.
According to Broelman, Dear Leader sure taught them a lesson, in economics if nothing else.
I guess we’ll see what an additional two million bucks a shipload does to the price of gasoline, unless they listen to Fearless Leader, who posted on his social media platform
There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait — They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now! President DONALD J. TRUMP
That oughta do it.
Bok offers a differing opinion, which somewhat lines up with the theory that Iran declared war on the US just as Ukraine started the war with Russia. He’s forgetting that Barack Obama already had most of Trump’s “demands” nailed down in the multi-national agreement Dear Leader tore up when he came into office.
He also appears to think they’re no longer in a position to resist. Perhaps someone should introduce him to the region.
Kelley, meanwhile, seems confused about the difference between a defensive treaty and an agreement to join any hare-brained offensive attack a member has in mind. “Defensive” is like when America was attacked on 9/11 and NATO members assisted in the wars against the Taliban and Iraq.
“Offensive” is when America decided to join Israel in attacking Iran.
And NATO, not Linus, is the security blanket, formed when Russia was gobbling up Eastern European countries in the wake of WWII.
Russia will be with them as soon as it’s finished gobbling up Ukraine, one of Putin’s older demands having been to keep Ukraine out of NATO.
Getting the US out is simply a kind gesture from his pal in the White House.
Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with a monologue:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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