A Random Thought

It just occurred to me. There's something that's really gotta piss off the left-wing, communal, kum-bay-yah, tree-hugging crowd. Something they probably didn't realize.

They're always so busy, toting around their iPods filled with music written by socialistic-thinking musicians. You know, the ones who tell us over and again how capitalism is the bane of utopian bliss.

Surfing the 'net till their eyes bleed, writing on their blogs how evil president Bush is, how America is so wrong. How we've never done anything right, and never will so long as we're beholden to the ideals of a free market. Such an unruly, unregulated behemoth -- it crushes every delicate thing under the mighty wheels by which it advances.

They're texting their cohorts incessently about every annoying minutia of the day. Stuff that couldn't matter less, filling the communications network infrastructure with profit-making data packets that ultimately make the quarterly statements of the familiar industry giants.

It's alright with me if they do these things. Hey, it's great to be able to do all that. What a wonderful technological playground we have in our lives. I don't know how we all got along without it. And for sure, it has opened up the "information age" in ways we barely could imagine only a scant 15 years ago. A blip by any account, when considered in the context of what we would say is modern history.

So what's this silly little thought?

While those folks are busy bashing the military as a factory of evil, they're doing it via the global internet, which was a direct product of our military's research efforts ... we know that better as DARPA, the defense advanced research projects agency. That's a little ironic.

Of course, the military didn't make the net what it is in totality; not at all. It was innovative things laid upon this infrastructure that made it really amazing. Things like the world wide web. And e-commerce.

How did we find all those Starbucks shops without it? Or anything at all, without Google maps?
Or what about the definition of "defenestration" at a moment's notice? Or where to get a good recipe for Swedish meatballs?

Yes, the human need for things of every manner drives the creation of those things, and gives rise to ways to profit from them. It's called free market capitalism, and it made the internet a richly filled universe unto its own. Irony number two.

And it's comes via the network that was spawned from the devil's hand itself - the military research budget.

How can you possibly write any more text messages knowing it's likely going to pass through a communications satellite? Those satellites are directly a result of technology produced in our space program - a race with the Soviets in the 60's to ensure our military and strategic superiority.

Yes indeed, the Code Pink and Daily Kos crowd would have to find this a little hard to explain. Without those cool toys of the 21st century, life would just, well, suck. But you wouldn't catch 'em ditching all that to stand by those leftish ideals. Seriously, now - are you kidding?

All thanks to your wicked US military and the firey hellspawn that is capitalism.

What to do... oh what to do...