More brains than a zombie butcher shop window
I just learned today of a fantastic, bombastic, utterly regressive idea called the Freedom Ship.
While it may sound like our government’s latest attempt to paralyze your sense of independent thought and subjugate you to their crushing will by adding the word “freedom” to yet another thing (you want fries with that?) it is actually a real ship. The boat variety, not the intergalactic type. Or, rather, it is an idea for a ship. The idea was devised by a man who was clearly strangled by his umbilical cord for several minutes at birth named Norman Nixon. He goes by “Foreman Norman,” “Doorman Norman,” “Mixin’ Nixon,” “Blitzin’ Nixon,” and “Dumbfuck McDumbass.” Furthermore, I just made all of those up. Those are just named that I call him. We go way back.
By the time you’re done reading about the Freedom Ship, I hope you’ll see why I think it’s so stupid. The Freedom Ship is actually billed as a “floating city.” You don’t just take a cruise on it – you live on the thing. When completed, according to its Website, it will include:
-18,000 living units, with prices in the range of $180,000 to $2.5 million, and a handful of “premium suites” up to $44 million
-3,000 “commercial units”
-2,400 time-share units
-10,000 hotel rooms
-a casino
-a ferryboat transportation system to get passengers to and from the nearest shore
-a hospital
-a school system that gives the students a chance to take field trips into a different country each week for academic purposes or to compete with local schools in sporting events
-an international trade center
-more than 100 acres of outdoor park, recreation, exercise and community space
And the physical specifications? Enough to make the Queen Mary have hull envy. 4,500 feet long. 750 feet wide. 350 feet from mast to keel. No idea what that means but it sounds very seafarin’. Let me throw a ‘yarrrrr‘ in there for good measure. 1.7 million square feet of living space. Here are some comparative photos, to scale, of course.
Figure 1.1: The proposed Freedom Ship
Figure 1.2: The U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701D)
Figure 1.3: My wiener
900 trillion tons of steel. 64 massive propellers, each approximately the size of the Louisiana Superdome, powered by 12 nuclear fusion reactors. An Olympic-sized soccer stadium. Its own subway system, airport, and parliament. Twin ionized magnetoplasmadynamic thruster engines to carry it into orbit in the event of a catastrophic extinction-level event, and a warp drive to escape our solar system if the Sun goes nova. This is all 100% true, I assure you. But it doesn’t say any of this on their Website, so don’t go looking for it.
Let us consider that the largest existing ship in the world, the Knock Nevis, is approximately one-third the length of the proposed Freedom Ship. Let us further consider that, currently, there is no existing design for a ship whose hull could stand up to the stresses of such an enormous span of distance, and no propulsion that could move the fuckin’ thing. The question then becomes: who is paying for this thing that, by all accounts, is a physical impossibility?
Well, Norman Nixon is investing his own money, for starters, and they’re in the process of vetting further investors. Also, people have already purchased real estate aboard the Freedom Ship. Which doesn’t exist yet. And when it does exist, won’t float. Or move. Let me know how that works out for ya.
The last question I’ll pose is this… does this seem like a really slow-moving and robust terrorist target to anyone else, or am I the only one who sees that?