Star wars is back!


The reanimated corpse of Reagan’s Star Wars program walks among us again. As a national security program, it was stupid then and it’s stupid now. It’s back because billionaires have figured out how to repurpose it to shovel more of your tax dollars into their pockets.

“It now emerges that Musk’s SpaceX, Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Ardruil have combined forces to build what Trump is calling ‘Golden Dome’. Needless to say, since Musk basically controls federal contracting he’s essentially giving the contract to himself.”

*snip*

“Musk and Thiel propose making this network of hundreds of surveillance and attack satellites into a subscription service that the Musk/Thiel/Luckey consortium would own and the Pentagon would subscribe to. Not only is this crazy and absurd but it goes without saying that in no normal time would anyone at the Pentagon be okay with the US not owning the hardware at the center of national defense. We’ve seen how this goes with Starlink, where Musk routinely threatens to turn the system on or off based on his whims and opens up separate lines of communications and perhaps deals with adversary leaders like Vladimir Putin.”

This appears to be a new and unfamiliar use of the term “government efficiency. But hey, grifters gotta grift.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-to-force-pentagon-to-build-and-them-pay-him-to-use-network-of-killer-satellites

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