At the request of 2 initial comments, I edited myself. I am ashamed of this. It will never happen again. To quote Fran Lebowitz:
Polite conversation is rarely either.
Here's the diary in it's original form.
In other words, Lighten up, Francis!
With all the recent talk and wringing of hands over the need for austerity, the tightening of belts, the slashing of entitlements in the never ending quest for the holy grail of reining in national debts and deficits and now federal pay freezes (does this administration even know what it's doing?) amongst the very serious, chattering, chittering, navel gazing, parrots in pancake makeup on the teevee machine, I thought it would be prudent to point out what no one and I do mean no one has even dared bring up the 800lbs fat man in the bathtub.
The DoD.
$750 billion per year. And every year they want a raise!
3/4 of a trillion dollars per anum!
Are you fucking kidding me???? Really? No one is seriously talking about this?
Front pager Lawerence Lewis laid out in stark terms the waste, fraud, abuse and down right felonious behavior that continues in the absurdity of our ongoing debacle that is our nation's awesome experiment with military contractors.
But that is truly the tip of the iceberg of our MIC. It is the tentacled monster that is literally sucking the life-blood out of this nation.
Allow me to lend some perspective to the reality of what a "trillion" is:
60 seconds in a minute, right? Multiply that by 60 minutes in an hour and you have 3600 seconds. In a 24 hour day, that's 86,400 seconds.
One million seconds is 12 days and change.
One billion seconds is, and I'm quoting because my calculator won't allow the number to be entered, (apparently, my calculator finds these extrapolations ridiculous as well) is 31 years! to be even more exact, 31.71 years, or 31 years and around 8 months
A trillion seconds? This is great:
One American trillion (ie. 1012) (Leap years counted & Century Leap Years Counted)
One Trillion Seconds = 31,688 Years, 269 Days, 1 Hour, 46 Minutes, 40 Seconds.
That's roughly, in years, around the time of the oldest known European cave paintings.
Now, we're not talking about years, are we? Nor are we talking about the age of the earth, or evolution, or any other fact that the deluded right-wing of this country poo-poos as scientific mumbo-jumo.
We're talking about money. Money spent at the Pentagon Casino every. fucking. year.
I just wanted to add some perspective to the massive monetary lay-outs that could instead be employed for peaceful, job-creating purposes. We all know what those jobs would look like and what our country could become should we choose to redirect a good portion of this obscene spending on more worthy and sustaining efforts.
I've never known a moment in my 50 years of living when this nation wasn't involved in the killing of other human beings, cloaked in the opaque shroud of "freedom". And I'm fucking sick and tired of it. This nation's posture of war is all I've known for my entire life!! And, again, I'm fucking sick and tired of it. It's all been an elaborate ruse and a waste of resources, human lives, whole civilizations, and, as far as tranches of time that predate the last ice age go, a trillion seconds translated into dollars, is an incredible amount of money.
Every. Fucking. Year.
So, someone drain the bathtub and kindly ask the 800 lbs. fat man to step out carefully.