Think about this truth.
The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 billion.
First 6 Days of Iran War Cost U.S. $11.3 Billion, Pentagon Says
David Ho
Anyone who wants to defend our war with Iran needs to justify the expense. The NSF provides a material benefit, discovers new knowledge, and enhances the reputation of our country. It is a net advantage to support the NSF; you could reasonably argue for a different kind of positive investment, an argument that goes on in congress all the time while they hash out the yearly budget.
The Iran war, on the other hand, is an illegal action triggered by one lunatic executive without congressional approval, that is destructive of human life and property, and does not succeed in it’s stated goal of reducing threats to Americans and others. For my selfish fellow citizens, it’s also going to raise the cost of oil. It’s also a war we cannot win, and that’s just the beginning of an escalation that will make that $11.3 billion look like a bargain.
It is a no-brainer to choose between those two alternatives.
Also, it wasn’t long ago that the president raged at a few congresspeople who put out an ad stating that soldiers don’t need to follow illegal orders. That ad did not go far enough. We need to pull a few generals into a courts martial and explain to them that the president does not have the authority to unilaterally tell you to launch your missiles at civilian citizens of a country we are not at war with. You must first be informed by congress that you are at war, which is the minimal requirement before military action can be triggered. Learn to tell the president to shut the fuck up and get authorization first.
The officers that ordered the pushing of the buttons are war criminals, and that’s how history will regard them.
Also, I oppose capital punishment, but I’d reconsider my position for Trump and Hegseth and, hell, the entire presidential cabinet. See how open-minded I am?
I agree… but the same already went to nothing with George Bush and Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m not holding my breath, just hoping we are going to hold out here in Europe…
I often hear this kind of statement about what “we” should be doing, and I never understand what this “we” is supposed to represent.
“We” the nation?
“We” the citizens?
“We” those against the war?
I think behind that “we” hides the divide between those who actually have the authority to make it happen, and no interest and no incentive to make that happen, and those many whose voice can be ignored.
That “we” keeps up the pretense that you have a say in your own government.
It’s a heinous war crime from a criminal administration. Let’s be honest, though, given the chance to do so, Congress would absolutely rubber-stamp it. They are reliable whores for the military-industrial complex, and partisans will break ranks to make sure there’s no way a direct approval could fail. Or, as recently happened, two Republicans defected and voted in favor of a bill expressly forbidding war with Iran, so four Democrats defected in turn and voted against it, ensuring it did not pass.
Too many Democrats, when they bother to voice any opposition to the war with Iran at all, couch their reservations in a couple points of propagandistic cheerleading: “I’m glad the Ayatollah is dead.”, and, “We are bringing freedom and democracy to the people of Iran.” Consent is manufactured this way, and it’s being done by both parties.
It is once again time to repost why science is the main driver of our civilization.
If you’ve read this before, good, and skip it.
Science has been the main driver of our civilization and explains the USAs preeminence in the world, up until a year ago.
This is a critical and well known fact, that is now being widely ignored.
US GDP per person has gone up 9-fold in a century.
85% of that increase is due to advances in science and technology!!!
About the only way to increase economic output per person, i.e productivity per worker, is through advances in science and technology.
Attacking science is like attacking your own feet and hands. It is national self harm.
Our lead in science Research and Development funding explains our lead in the world in terms of the world’s largest economy and…largest military. The military is well aware of the value of science and has a good incentive for spending money on research and development. Better weapons means fewer soldiers dying in battles.
The world’s leading nations all spend relatively high levels of their GDP on science, about 3%.
Spending on science is estimated to yield a ROI of 20-60%.
If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
In the long term, we would just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
Yeah, with you on the capital punishment thing PZ, and this is a real annoyance, because I am just about at the point where, I think, the only way to salvage things would be to arrest the President, and all the idiots in the military that went along with it, then tell the Iran, “Right, they broke our laws, but they murdered your people, so, while we disagree with a lot of your policies, we will let your courts take first crack at these idiots, and what ever is left will go to trial in the US after.” I doubt any of them would make it back to the US for trial. Maybe, and this is a huge maybe, they would go for another international trial, over war crimes, but it would depend a bloody lot on the outcome. What I fear, a lot, is that, if the US, again unilaterally, “held them accountable”, our “punishment” would end up being something so worthless, or include acquittals of some involved, as to just purely piss off the victims even more. I see no way out of this, at this point, that doesn’t require either a complete change with regard to our interaction with the Middle East, and fundamental changed in our own state, to prevent this kind of stupidity again (or at least greatly curtail it, because.. stupid is as stupid does), or spending the next 100 years trying to regain trust, while being in a constant state of, “When is the next terror attack going to happen to us for our past actions?”
The people who think otherwise are, not surprising, the same idiots who actually seem to think, somehow, that their insane religious rhetoric makes sense – aka, “We lie, cheat, steal, and even murder, but we are absolutely certain that its god we believe in, and he will forgive us our sins, never mind that every thing we do sounds more like the actions that would be taken by a follower of our equally fictional, ‘lord of lies’, who, by our own logic, would use false piety, false promises of salvation, and the spreading of war, instead of peace, to create chaos, and corrupt the very people who think they are following ‘god’.”
Mind, I have often stated, personally, that the evidence suggest that, where the devil real, instead of a later invention, the Bible, and every other work that promotes supposed peace via faith, but encourages injustice, inequality, and division, would have been written “by him”, as a means of deception and corruption, so…
Ask Obama and the Dem leaders why they let Dubya and his cronies get off scot-free.
And they also let criminal bankers get away with ruining the world economy.
Biden and his crowd sure showed no interest in going after Trump et al.
Even during the Vietnam war it was obvious the legal system was a farce, and it got worse under Reagan and every Republican since.
Nixon got in trouble because his actions were seen as a threat by the bipartisan elite of that time. They are long dead.
The number of things wrong with this war is…everything.
Poorly planned, no clear objectives, no clear reasons, no exit strategy.
The whole idea that we are going to defeat Iran and have a regime change by bombing is just wrong.
We dropped a huge number of bombs in Indochina. It was triple all the bombs we dropped in World War II. After 6 years of this, the result was that we lost.
It is easy to see why.
The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese lived there and had nowhere else to go.
Retreat was not an option so they had to keep on fighting.
We, on the other hand, could just get on a plane and fly to Hawaii or California.
The death toll on the Vietnamese was terrible with at least a million killed.
And, here we are again, having learned nothing from these losses.
@8 Well, to be fair, this is how conservatives always seem to do everything, Public: “Its not working!” GOP: “Try again, but more extreme and inflexible!!” For them the quote is not, “Doomed to repeat them.”, its, “We just didn’t repeat the same mistakes the right way.”
By coincidence I was just looking at the ‘Mr Neutron’ episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in which the US military destroy the entire planet to prevent Mr Neutron from destroying it.