Teleportation, Money, and Enemies

[Doug]

Just this month, the government confirmed that an Ohio Air Force laboratory had asked for $7.5 million to build a nonlethal "gay bomb," a weapon that would encourage enemies to make love, not war. The weapon would use strong aphrodisiacs to make enemy troops so sexually attracted to each other that they'd lose interest in fighting.

Last year, scientists at Boston University developed brain implants that could steer sharklike dog fish with a phantom odor.

Just three years ago, the military funded a specious study of psychic teleportation, according to the Federation of American Scientists. An 88-page report prepared by the Air Force Research Lab contended that moving through mind powers is "quite real and can be controlled."

...But Alexis Debat, senior fellow for national security and terrorism at the Nixon Center in Washington, D.C., told ABC News that many of these inventions have had "little value in the fight against terrorism."

"It's a very American thing to think that everything and anything can be solved by technology," said Debat, a consultant for ABC News. He said the military needs to focus more on human resources, recruiting more Arabic speakers and using old-fashioned police work in communities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

..."Living here in Washington, you have no idea how we are inventing enemies," said Debat. "Hundreds of people are trying to figure out how to make China our enemy because there is so much money and power in the Pentagon."

Read the rest here.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The scary part isn't the nutso things they investigate, or even how much of the Pentagon budget is devoted to developing higher-powered versions of "cold war" technology, but just how dependent the U.S. economy is on Pentagon money. If one day Congress said, "We aren't fighting a cold war or any war with a major military power. We already have more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world put together. We're cutting the military budget in half." the stock market would drop like a rock. This is the dirty little secret nobody wants to admit - and the reason why Dems and Rs both "support the troops" with Pentagon budget increases that do diddly for the troops. And nobody can figure a way out of this trap.

I don't mind the Pentagon actually doing some R&D - nobody else is - and if some of it is totally off the wall, well we don't know that until we look into it. (Truly sometimes "looking into it" shouldn't take more time than to read the proposal, but who "woulda thunk" the internet would be what it is today 30-odd years back?)