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USS Ronald Reagan Commissioning Tomorrow
wessman writes "Being an employee at Northrop Grumman's Newport News shipyard, I cannot help but be proud to see one of our products commissioned by the U.S. Navy, especially considering how long it takes to build a $5 billion Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. And I'm sure the other 18,000 workers here feel the same way. The ship is being commissioned Saturday, July 12 at the Norfolk naval base. It is obviously the most technically advanced carrier in the fleet, taking the term "hardware" to new levels. Pick a local story. From the Hampton Roads Daily Press: Anchors Aweigh, Changes Abound Aboard Carrier, Some Wanted CVN-76 Named after Daredevil Flier, 20,000 Expected for Reagan's Rite, USS Constellation Retiring Too Soon?. From the Virginia Pilot: The Carrier Reagan - Ahead of Its Class, Carrier Construction is All in the Family, Former President's Son Michael Reagan Excited about Commissioning."
I'll never figure out this country's tawdry fascination with celebrity. Reagan was a great actor, but one of the lousiest presidents of all time.
So, what's the deal? Why are we honoring a man who destroyed America by naming the most expensive carrier ever built after him?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Sure, we haven't tackled illiteracy, child poverty, acid rain, inequality of opportunity, inner city ghettoes, organized crime, global warming, space exploration, the garbage crisis, smog, cancer, AIDS, rainforest clearing, renewable energy or affordable social security, but looky here! Our zillion dollar aircraft carriers now come with a screensaver!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Ever more expensive ways of
a) Killing people
b) Rewarding the military-industrial complex for their campaign donations.
News for nerds, stuff that matters? I hope not.
Cripes, my grandchildren will still be paying interest on the man's wastefull stupidity, and probably be wondering why that damn missile defense thing still doesn't work.
Now its time to send the warship I paid for over to kill thousands of Middle Eastern children.
Let the young blood flow, baby!
Fire on Babylon!
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.
You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?
If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.
You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.
And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.
On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragmen
And who exactly gives a fuck?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Democrat stupidity is no excuse for Republicans.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The submitter certainly will feel proud of their achievement, and we've all been at the point where we pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.
Honestly, don't people think about the things they work on? Is life just a paycheck and fuck whatever someone does with my work? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that potentially hundreds of thousands of people will die using a machine I proudly built and put into the hands of one of the most prolific users of war machinery in the world.
One popular way to rationalize the enablement of murder is by turning things into blacks and whites. This will only be used on the "bad guys", the "evil men" who want to do terrible things to us. These are word games. A vital prerequisite to committing murder is reducing issues to black and white.
Maybe you wash your hands of the moral responsibility by saying "I just built it, it's not my fault if the buyer does something horrible with it". Hey, if that's what it takes to sleep at night, I can't fault you. I'd probably say that too.
To the victims of this machine, however, all of these rationalizations are irrelevant. You worked to cause this effect, whether you supported it, cared about it, whatever. Your name is on it.
Being proud of it speaks volumes about your character.
bankrupted?
how's that national debt of YOURS doing these days?
That was classic intercourse!
Do you really need a leader (which translates to Führer in German btw), can't you think for yourself?
You mean they use cans and string to talk on
aircraft carriers? And this costs 5 billion
dollars?
And, and this ship has, like cool things like
hand-winches? And this is supposed to be an
example of brilliant foresight?
Boats have had speaking tubes and tackle for
several hundred years, Mr. Bright Bulb.
I expect you are another fine example of the
brave and stupid who defend this glorious
land and the profit making of our glorious
defense contractors.
Please, frag yourself, right now!
Think? I think you give them too much credit. :)
Listen. I've been seeing a lot of posts to the tone of "Why is the government spending $5 billion when we have a shitty economy" or "$5 billion could have been used to end poverty". These are just not thought out comments listen.
/. article) and those 18,000 families had food on the table and contributed large portions of that $5 billion back into our economy, thus helping it greatly. Do you really think that even half of the $5 billion was on materials as opposed to labor? Labor is nearly _ALWAYS_ the most expensive cost in any production.
A $5 billion aircraft carrier probably took nearly 5 years to build. During that 5 years, 18,000 jobs were created (from the
FIrst of all I am not sure why the parent to your post got modded as a Troll. Just because you don't agree with something it shouldn't be modded down. I will hopefully take care of that in meta-mod.
Second, the US is far, far, far away from bankrupt. Do you even understand what national debt is? Even if you don't - I have am in debt up to my ears but I am not bankrupt.
I have long read your posts and I don't think there is anybody on slashdot that makes more stupid, inane comments (except maybe Physics Genius). I truly loathe you.
We are millions of people not understanding the object of your pride. You are devoting your professional lives to design and build war-supporting machines. What are you proud of?
I'm amazed to see that people are working day after day on such project. I'm unable to imagine how you can justify yourself.
what? You don't work on the bullets? ah... well in this case: you're clean!
It's sure is a headline but surely not in the happy-happy-joy-joy category. I'd like to see this 5-billion monster sinking.
All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Socrates is dead.
Its funny you called the Republicans conservative, because in most other parts of the world they are classified as Nazis. Their economic and warfaring goals are very similar, you must agree.
Damn! I thought this was /. Crap! It is slashdot, unless my browser is lying to me.
It sure looks like a Yahoo! message board to me, though.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
>> its sole purpose is to threaten or attack other countries that get in America's way
> No asshole. Its sole purpose is to defend US interests.
What's the difference?
Wow, sherlock, put the cuffs on me. I reposted it so it'd get read instead of being burried on page 3 of 600 comments. Couldnt care less about the karma (capped) but who wants to put a bunch of time into something to have it never seen?
We are witnessing a revival of fascism in the United States.
When living individuals are "worshiped" as Reagan and George (the First) are by GOP legislators through the renaming of existing airports ("Houston Intercontinental" became "Bush International," and "Washington National" became "Reagan National") that is fascism. GOP legislators are saying (and we are allowing them to use our money and voices to say) that Reagan and Bush are more important than the previous namesakes, George Washington and Sam Houston.
The Republicans are going for name recognition, whitewashing the memories of mediocre (Bush) or even corrupt and anti-American (Reagan: Iran-Contra) administrations, in the hopes of drawing more support from soft-headed fools, who will see these names displayed in prominent places (and printed upon millions of airline tickets) and vote Republican because they want to be on the "winning team."
This aircraft carrier and its sister ship under construction, the "George H.W. Bush," are just two more examples of this.
...great, another $5Billion baby-killing machine.
How appropriate. Another productivity-sapping waste of money that adds to the mountain of debt being built up named after the guy who (nevertheless cluelessly) started this type of thing.
One can only hope it doesn't end up like it's namesake: a mindless blubbering dangerous puppet aimlessly serving the evil or ill-conceived agendas of a violent wannabe plutocracy.
You don't understand. It is ok to make fun of him because he's a rich white guy. You seem in need of a lesson in the liberal thought process (bit of an oxymoron, isn't it?).
Liberals believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.
Liberals believe that guns, in the hands of law-abiding Americans, are more of a threat than U.S. nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese communists.
Liberals believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical, documented changes in the earth's climate, and more affected by yuppies driving SUVs.
Liberals believe that gender roles are artificial but being homosexual is natural.
Liberals believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity.
Liberals believe that hunters don't care about nature, but loony activists from Seattle do.
Liberals believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn it.
Liberals believe the military, not corrupt politicians, start wars.
Liberals believe the NRA is bad, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.
Liberals believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.
Liberals believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, General Robert E. Lee or Thomas Edison.
Liberals believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial quotas and set-asides aren't.
Liberals believe that homosexual parades displaying drag, transvestites and bestiality should be constitutionally protected and manger scenes at Christmas should be illegal.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Yeah, its a great thing we have a huge military so we aren't constantly being invaded like Australia and New Zealand have been.
You call the missle crisis an accomplishment? We gave up strategic advantage in Turkey because the soviets bluffed in Cuba. We could have hit those targets strategicly or done a multitude of other things. That was in no way putting your foot down, that was compromise. We have nothing to gain from compromising with evil empires. You need a dose of morality and intelligence. You keep voting for the rapists and moral degenerates and we'll keep taking election after election.
"Alright, lets compare that to Reagans feats. When did he ever get on national television and draw a line in the sand, saying that if the USSR didn't stop what they were doing right now, it would amount to "an act of war?""
"Mr. Gorbachev TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!" You're obviously to young to remember the evil empire speech and Reagans very public support of Polands Solidarity group. Like I said, you need some real history lessons. It's pathetic you couldn't even recall this.
"Sure buddy, keep smokin that cheap crack. Addicts can vote, too."
And if you haven't noticed they all vote Democrat thanks to you're free hand outs and welfare programs.