Sharks, with freakin' laser beams

Rarely does the Pentagon pass up any new ideas about how to kill people and, as is appropriate to our current epoch, about half of all US government research and development monies are spent by the Pentagon. Some $78 billion per annum of taxpayer money goes for funding the newest and, in some bizarre cases, the craziest weapons systems the American "culture of life" can dream up.

Case in point: "Gay bombs."

Just this month, the government confirmed that an Ohio Air Force laboratory had asked for $7.5 million to build a nonlethal "gay bomb," a weapon that would encourage enemies to make love, not war. The weapon would use strong aphrodisiacs to make enemy troops so sexually attracted to each other that they'd lose interest in fighting.

On the surface, this has the appearance of being one of the least offensive "weapons" one might imagine, until one realizes that enemy soldiers, once incapacitated by lusty notions, would be mowed down with little resistance. If it would work as advertised, anyway.

My favourite, though, has to be the idea, which appears to be borrowed from the The Day of the Dolphin, that the military would harness the cool cache and cold-hearted stealth of the shark by "arming sharks with chemical implants and cameras to work as spies." Of course the Pentagon had to turn to the shark instead of the dolphin, which really is a creature no one wants to see turned into a weapons system. Besides, a shark is practically a weapon system already. And there's no happy, grinning face to make you doubt that.

But I want to know is where are the freakin' laser beams? How can you have a shark weapon without a laser beam?!