The first monkey in space. Only the beginning.
Back in 1969 scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were keen to know just how much space travel a primate could stand. In July of that year, just days before the crew of Apollo 11 set out for the moon, NASA flew a monkey named Bonny around the earth 130 times in a tiny, cramped capsule called Biosatelite 3 before calling off the mission early (hundreds of additional orbits had been planned) and returning Bonny to earth. The monkey died shortly after landing. NASA never figured out why. Evidently, 130 orbits had been too many.
In 2010 the federal government remains keen to know just how many revolutions of the political merry-go-round Americans can survive without unemployment benefits, health care, mortgage relief and basic public services while shelling out $100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion dollars) annually to accomplish, essentially, nothing useful in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the rate Americans are losing their jobs, homes and lives it would seem that nine years and more than $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars) in war spending have been too many and too much. It’s a dizzying number, and taxpayers are getting woozy. It’s time to call off the test before the monkey’s dead.
Meanwhile, along the Gulf Coast vast numbers of wildlife and entire American industries are already dead, casualties of greed and sloganeering (see video at right). Still, Republican experimentation on the boundaries of human gullibility will continue with new, still deadlier, slogans planned for the mid-term election campaigns.
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We have about as much power as lab rats because we won’t use the power we have.