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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 19 2018, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the The-only-good-bug-is-a-dead-bug dept.

Trump orders creation of space-focused U.S. military branch

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he was ordering the creation of a sixth branch of the military to focus on space, a move critics said could harm the Air Force.

"It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space," Trump said before a meeting of his National Space Council. "We are going to have the Air Force and we're going to have the 'Space Force.' Separate but equal. It is going to be something," he said later.

The United States is a member of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bars the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space and only allows for the use of the moon and other celestial bodies for peaceful purposes.

The idea of a Space Force has been raised before, by Trump and previous administrations, with proponents saying it would make the Pentagon more efficient. It has also faced criticism from senior military officials. Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein told a 2017 congressional hearing that creating a new space branch would "move us in the wrong direction." The Air Force oversees most of the nation's space-related military activity.

The move would require the budgetary approval of the U.S. Congress, which has been divided on the idea.

President Trump orders the creation of new Starship Troopers/Space Marines memes.

We should have a separate "Space" topic on SoylentNews at this point. We are all going to be drafted to fight aliens eventually.

Also at BBC (#winning image).

Previously: The United States Space Corps Wants You...
Congressional Panel Puts Plans for a US Space Corps in 2018 Defense Budget
The Case for a U.S. Space Force


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 19 2018, @02:43AM (9 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @02:43AM (#694798)

    We're not up to ethnic cleansing yet, what he is (and therefore we are) doing is being the biggest asshole he thinks he can get away with just to frighten brown people into staying out of his orange spray-tan world.

    There are no gas chambers, there are no(t a significant number of) killings - there's just a bunch of legal-bureaucratic ratcheting up of TSA and border control nightmare stories into real life: who the fuck is stupid enough to bother with that hassle? deterrents to discourage brown people from even trying to enter the country, much less get legal right to work papers.

    It's the same shit they play on the poor: oh, you are starving are you? Well, let's see just how unpleasant we can make this free food, affordable housing, affordable healthcare, etc. You've got a mental disability? Oh, too bad so sad, wait for 18 months while we find somebody to help you navigate the system.

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    🌻🌻 [google.com]
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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 19 2018, @03:42PM (2 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @03:42PM (#695071) Journal

    I hate the TSA. Throwing poor people into cells for the crime of wanting a better life and holding them there for years is despicable. Bureaucracies very much want to make everything as difficult as possible for everyone, no matter what it is, no matter who they are, because that's the creatures bureaucrats are.

    But let's take a step back and look around. Are these practices new and unique to Donald Trump? No, they are not. Obama did it before him, and Bush & Cheney before him, and so on.

    If you have studied American history you know that after those nice Chinese built the transcontinental railroad for us, and set the table for the dramatic economic expansion that powered the US to global supremacy, the Main Stream Media of the time ginned up the Yellow Peril and had them all ethnically cleansed out of the country. The Irish immigrants who were fleeing starvation in the Potato Famine were literally impressed into the Union Army at the docks when they got off the ships and sent to die in the tens of thousands fighting the Confederates. That was a warm welcome to America, now, wasn't it? How about ostracising ethnic Germans and Austro-Hungarians in WWI, cleansing the language of terms like "sauerkraut," and subjecting them to constant government surveillance? How about rounding up all the Japanese and putting them in camps in WWII for the crime of being ethnically Japanese?

    So please spare us the, "Donald Trump is the only one who has ever done this," spiel. It's a stain on American character, and always has been.

    We can take a further step back and ask ourselves what other advanced countries do.

    In Japan there are generations of ethnic Koreans who were brought over as slave labor and still to this day are not Japanese citizens. In Switzerland, that bastion of neutrality and fairness, women were only granted the right to vote in, what, the 90's? It also has a substantial Tamil minority that has been there for generations and are not granted Swiss citizenship. Even Canada limits its immigrants such that half of them have to be francophones, to placate Quebec. In short, most other countries in Europe and elsewhere don't practice open borders, either, and many of them are worse than America.

    Taking a further step back, we can ask if it's fair for the citizens of a country to take on the burden of more, poor people when the country doesn't even supply their own needs. And why, if those more, poor people must be taken in, should the burden of their upkeep be shouldered by the poorest in the country they're entering? Shouldn't those desperate people be taken in by the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts and hedge fund managers and such, first? Surely they have the estates and the outbuildings and the acreage to house them, and the deep pockets to feed them. They have their own private doctors who can tend to their wounds and private security to make sure they're protected and organized.

    How about that, instead of asking the poorest, most desperate corners of our own land to host them?

    I don't necessarily hold those views myself, but reasonable people can and it is worth discussing them in a reasonable fashion. So insinuating what's happening at this moment is unprecedented and one step shy of ethnic cleansing does not create a discourse where that can happen.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 19 2018, @05:17PM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @05:17PM (#695133)

      Are these practices new and unique to Donald Trump? No, they are not. Obama did it before him, and Bush & Cheney before him, and so on.

      Absolutely, and we were absolute flawless gems of humanity during World War II [wikipedia.org] also, weren't we?

      ratcheting up

      Instead of moving "forward" in our treatment of fellow human beings, we do seem to be going backwards, faster than any time since the years immediately post 9-11, and we didn't even have a big scary event to prompt it this time (unless you count the election...)

      My Indian colleagues are considering pulling up stakes because of the uncertainty, and that's exactly what he wants - too bad he can't see how that hurts the businesses that the brown people work for.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:57AM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:57AM (#695488) Journal

        Yeah, I don't even know that we can discern that change in the rate of change. A lot of people loved life when Bill Clinton was president, and that was while he did jack to stop the genocide in Rwanda, which he totally could have.

        Bush & Cheney did awful things to muslims in the US after 9/11; it hit Brooklyn hard, where there's a large muslim population, and nobody stuck up for them except for me, my best friend the Orthodox Jew who is the most humane, principled guy I know, and a few hapless Green Party people nobody ever listens to. The progressives around us were almost totally mute about the actual torture they were inflicting on those guys, the black sites the CIA was running overseas and on American soil. The extraordinary renditions (read, "kidnappings") they were doing. And on and on. They were fine with all that stuff being done to muslims, because they were bad guys.

        Latinos have gotten a raw deal throughout. Always have, and still always do. I delve a lot into educational data nowadays in NYC, and of all the immigrant groups they have it worst. They get stuck in the worst schools, with the worst resources, the worst teachers and principals, and have the worst educational outcomes. That's been going on for decades and Trump had nothing to do with it.

        So given all that, I don't know that South Asians have much to worry about. They get carte blanche thanks to the H1-B program. They're goodies, not baddies.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 19 2018, @04:41PM (5 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @04:41PM (#695116)

    We're not up to ethnic cleansing yet

    Kinda sorta.

    The goals of the Trump administration's immigration policy sure seems to be "Round up all the brown Spanish-speaking people who can't prove they're citizens and send them south of the US-Mexico border." And the policy in Puerto Rico sure seems to be "Let them all die through neglect." It's not genocide a la Bosnia or Rwanda, but there's a definite tinge of trying to change the ethnic composition of the US through force of arms.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 19 2018, @05:53PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @05:53PM (#695165)

      If he's not careful with Puerto Rico, they're going to end up with more modern, efficient and desirable infrastructure than New York.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:09PM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:09PM (#695177) Journal

      If you think he really cares whether they are citizens or not, you have more respect for him than I do. My take on it is that he just feels limited in what he can get away with.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:33PM

        by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:33PM (#695199)

        I think his people care about the citizenship issue for appearance's sake. They want to be able to tell the public that this is to crack down on criminals, even though what they're really thinking is "Finally getting rid of more of those damned wetbacks".

        Some more stuff worth noting:
        1. It's entirely possible the kids in question are US citizens. The burden of proof in deportation hearings is on the kid, and the kid doesn't have access to either their parents or a lawyer or (and this is really key) their own paperwork. So if you're, say, born in Fresno, and are rounded up by ICE, you might still get deported because you can't get the birth certificate from Fresno because you're a kid who's been locked up incommunicado.
        2. Many more had arrived seeking asylum because drug cartels were trying to kill them.
        3. Even if the kids did arrive illegally, it's not like they really had a choice in the matter. Imagine your 7-year-old self, and your parents decide you're moving to a different state, it's not like you're going to be easily able to say "No, I'm staying here", nor are you really going to understand that making this trip is something you might get in trouble for.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:40AM (1 child)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:40AM (#695501) Journal

      Latino immigrants are treated worse than others. Chinese don't get treated that way. South Asians are welcomed with open arms, thanks to the H1-B visa program. Muslims have been rather persona non grata lately, but that's relatively recent.

      But none of what the Latinos are experiencing can be compared to genocide or ethnic cleansing, unless you want to bleed all meaning out of those concepts entirely. Latinos who acquired citizenship legally are not being stripped of their passports and deported. Latinos who have been here for generations are not being uprooted and sent back to Cuba, or Mexico, or whereever. Those things would render comparisons with ethnic cleansing relevant.

      If we want open borders, fine, but that should work both ways. We should be able to go anywhere we want, too, and have those people indefinitely give us free food, housing, education, and walking around money indefinitely, too. I like to ski, and would be perfectly happy to be able to spend half the year in South America, Chile, say, skiing on those suckers' dime, get to vote out the politicians there that want to cut off my free ride, and then come back to North American when the powder picks back up here. But, what's that? Those countries won't let us do that? Why not? If it's such a good idea for the US to do it, then why not for them?

      Me, I hold the belief that the ultimate wealth of a country lies in its people. Drop the right people with the right skills and the right practices onto a bare slab of rock, and in a couple decades they will have really built something. So oppressing the majority of a country whose people do have all that, and grinding them into poverty or desperation such that they will go anywhere else, is monumentally economically stupid. It's as stupid as the Khmer Rouge exterminating the entire skilled, professional class in Cambodia, or Idi Amin kicking all the South Asians who constituted the merchants and professionals out of Uganda.

      So having a bunch of people knocking on your national door, people with the grit and gumption to get there, is like getting a gift of human capital from the source countries that are too stupid to hold onto the wealth they have. But shouldn't the recipient country get to pick & choose who gets to stay? Shouldn't the people who are citizens of that country get to dictate terms?

      If not, then such a country is kind of asking for the catastrophes that befell the Palestinians who indiscriminately let unlimited numbers of Zionists in, or the Wampanoag who took pity on the bedraggled and starving Pilgrims.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Friday June 22 2018, @08:12PM

        by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Friday June 22 2018, @08:12PM (#696929) Homepage Journal

        WRONG! I told my USCIS, take a look at the naturalized citizens. Because a lot of them are liars, they lied on their applications. Or they didn't have the right documents, they showed their documents to Obama's people. Well, Obama's not the President anymore. I am. And they have to show those documents to MY people. And so many say, "so sorry, I lost my documents, I don't have those documents anymore." That's too bad. Because we do what we call DENATURALIZATION. Fancy way of saying, congratulations, you lied, you fooled Obama, you don't fool me, you're not American anymore, go back where you came from!!!!