Fattier
Fleshed
The
Helen Thomas web comic, by Mike
Hussein Stanfill
With a big old tip o' the chapeau to Gary Larson.
New comics every Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
Bookmark
this page • Contact
me
|
|
Mars Needs Robots
I spent thirty-three years in
the marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle
man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers.
In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.- General
Smedley Butler, Marine
 Let
me go on record by stating we don't need manned flights
to Mars.
To being with, there's no reason to go there as we
will never be able to colonize the planet. And don't
even
THINK of terra-forming as we've already shown we're
incapable of taking care of the planet we've got.
Second, humans can't survive in the environment outside
the Van Allen belt. You can shield a spacecraft to
resist cosmic rays, maybe, but that will make the craft
very heavy, which is where the third
problem comes in.
Mars has very little atmosphere and if you don't have
atmosphere your parachute won't work very well. This
means we have to depend on retro-rockets to land a
spacecraft. But Mars has roughly three times more gravity
than our
moon which
means more than three times as much force is necessary
to sustain a controlled landing ...in a much
larger and heavier spacecraft... falling towards the
planet at Mach 2.
The much better idea is to radically
increase NASA's space exploration budget so
that they can
afford to send large, sophisticated robots to other planets
instead of these miracles of miniaturization like Spirit
and Opportunity.
Ex-Texas Governor Bush was really gung-ho on the Mars program
back in 2004 but you don't hear him talk about it much about
it anymore. To him, it was just another way to funnel
boatloads
of Federal
dollars into useless programs designed entirely to enrich
his buddies in the procurement business. Exactly like the
Strategic Defense Initiative and the Iraq invasion.
=mike=
|
John McCain Fun Fact:
John
McCain,
2006: “I
agree
with
President
Roosevelt,
and I
remain
opposed
to full
repeal
of the
estate
tax.”
John McCain, 2008: "The estate tax is one of the most unfair
tax laws on the books."
---------------------
You like that? How about more recent John McCain quotes:
"Would I want Dick cheney back? Hell, yeah!"
"I am a computer illiterate."
"The fact is Ahmadinejad’s the acknowledged leader
of Iran" (Uhhhh, no, he isn't.)
"By 2008, I think I might be ready to go down to the old soldiers
home and await the cavalry charge there. " [2000]
“I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about
economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues.
I still need to be educated.”
“The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood
as well as I should,” but “I’ve got Greenspan’s
book.”
And finally, as the forward for the book "The Best and the Brightest"
the man who wants the U.S. to stay in Iraq for a million years
wrote this:
"It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere
through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing
experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for
a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders
so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than
our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor
requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and
the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men
in the field to carry it alone. "
|
|
The
Far Left Side is a minor personal conceit
of:
Mike
Stanfill, Private Hand
Illustration • Animation • Web Design
www.privatehand.com
|
100% Free
Bonus Snark!
Not...
too... important? Ground control to Major McCain. Come in,
McCain.
|
|
