If It’s Not the Oiiiilllll…

…it’s the killbotification. Yes, folks, the Prez’s new plan is just a clever plot to turn the Moon into the Death Star, while bankrupting us out of the ability to pay for our precious social programs. Our old friend Bruce Gagnon seems to be slipping deeper into Kucinichoid moonbattery:

Ulterior motives
For Bruce Gagnon of Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, the big issue is purpose. Reached Thursday at his Brunswick home, he said there were two reasons why he believes the administration introduced the proposal.

“One reason is to cause a massive budget deficit to allow the government to drop social programs,” Gagnon said. “This goes back to the Reagan administration and ‘Star Wars,’ an attempt to reduce government.”

Huh? Star Wars was an attempt to reduce government? Deficit spending is an attempt to kill social programs (which account for the lion’s share of federal spending)?

The other reason the Bush administration is renewing talk of manned flight to the moon and Mars is China, according to Gagnon.

“China is entering the space race,” Gagnon said, “And it’s driving this administration crazy.”

Funny, there’s a whole lot of people hoping and praying for just such a development, for a redux of the post-Sputnik hysteria and all-out space race it kicked off, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to signal that such a thing is happening. Shenzhou didn’t take us by surprise, isn’t an immediate threat to us militarily (since we already knew China could lob nuke-sized payloads our way any time they cared to), and isn’t even much in the way of civil space competition for the near- to mid-term future. Color me unconvinced.

In a paper released before Bush’s speech, Gagnon wrote that there are legitimate reasons to question the plan to establish a base on the moon.

Oh, he didn’t wait for the policy to be revealed before criticizing it either. Guess I can’t call the kettle black on this point.

“The military has long eyed the moon as a potential base of operations as warfare is moved into the heavens. The moon is also the site of rare helium-3, which many view as the replacement for fossil fuels as supplies dwindle on Earth,” Gagnon wrote.

The former is silly — the military may have flirted with bases on the Moon at one time, but what are the benefits that would overcome the objections to the cost? No, nuclear powered orbital battle platforms make soo much more sense…even the welfare-stealing killbots in Arlington can’t be blind to the wisdom in spending the money they tear from the mouths of starving children on a dozen orbital assets for every moonbase of dubious utility they might otherwise procure.

The latter is dubious — “many” view He3 as a replacement for fossil fuels? How many, and how credible are they? And if the hype about He3 fusion’s possibilities turns out to be true, isn’t He3 fusion replacing fossil fuel consumption exactly the kind of thing environmentalists would want to see happen? Ahh, right…the issue here isn’t the merits of He3, it’s the fear that He3 will become another profit-producing, corporate-exploited commodity, used as a stick of oppression by the Man. If it were granolanauts in tie-dyed moonsuits gathering He3 on microcapitalized co-operative solar wind farms, well, that’d be something else, I’m sure.

According to Gagnon, the United States never signed the 1979 Moon Treaty created by the United Nations to prevent a rush on land claims and military bases.

We didn’t! It’s true!

And this is an ominous revelation because….?

“Just as the Spanish Armada and British Navy were created to protect the ‘interests and investments’ in the New World,” Gagnon said, “space is viewed today as open territory to be seized for eventual corporate profit.”

Someone’s got to develop it. If we leave it to a bunch of granolanauts to astrally project us to orbital communes, we’re going to be waiting a long time for humans to do anything constructive in space.

Hm. For the historically challenged, a little reading on the Spanish Armada is in order.

Gagnon said his group is not opposed to space exploration per se.

…so long as it is space exploration that doesn’t send humans anywhere, doesn’t use any technology they disapprove of, doesn’t involve the military or defense contractors, and doesn’t profit any corporations.

“There is a benefit to the space program,” he said. “We have gotten some good things from it. What we are opposed to is the kind of seed we are planting for future space programs. We are afraid that space will be given over to war, greed and environmental degradation. Before that happens, the American people need to get involved. We need to debate what kind of space program we want.”

I think we’ve been having that debate for the past year, Bruce, while you were distracted by other matters.

The sheeple haven’t thought things through, talked things over, and come to a reasoned conclusion about what they want until and unless they adopt your point of view, right?

Another Brunswick member of Global Network, Loukie Lofchie, summarized her feeling about the proposed plan with one word: Inappropriate.

“To spend billions of dollars on manned flights to Mars when there are people in this country who can’t afford health care seems ridiculous,” she said.

And you think that spending an extra billion dollars a year on the bloated, wasteful, bureaucratized federal medical charity system would make any difference whatever? Me, I’d call that ridiculous.