Journal Mysticalfruit's Journal: Well... where to begin! 1
Well... Things haven't improved much since my last posting I see!
North Korea tested a nuke...kinda. I guess it misfired or something. Good thing they don't have weapons of mass destruction and are hell bent on destroying the world like Iraq was... oh wait. Oh their country doesn't have a strategic commoditity on it. I wonder what'll happen with Kim Jong-il chokes on a bon-bon and slinks off this mortal coil. Hopefully cooler heads will pervail, though I highly doubht that.
I suppose I have to talk about Iraq. I'm not sure what else to really say about it. Our government and by extension, us fucked up. That's right, we're to blame. Luckily in the last election those of us who voted explained in clear language we thought that Congress rolling over and not providing any oversight and giving the president a blank check was a mistake that they should lose their jobs. I could go on about this, but so much has been said and written that I think my musing about it would merely be a full repeat. However, go read "Fiasco" by Thomas Hicks. It's horrifyingly educating, but like anything else, realize that your seeing one side of the argument and keep that in mind.
There's something that a good freind of mine said and I'll repeat it here because I think it's really intelligent point of view on the overarching "War on Terrorism". I'm at best paraphrasing, but you'll get the jist.
After September 11th, George Bush had an opportunity to take this country in a different direction. He in that single moment in history could have stood up at the podium and said "Listen the people of America. Those who just attacked us, were funded by us. Everytime you fill your tank, you're funding terrorism. America will no longer be beholden to the oil barrens of the middle east. I propose by the end of this decade that America will cure itself of it's oil addiction. I know that this will be hard and America will have to sacrfice, but I know that our tenacious spirit and unparalled wisdom will prevail." He could have then gone on to explain how we were going to build massive wind farms and decommission all of our oil fired power plants. How we were going to build massive Thermal depolymerization plants that would turn our organic waste into usable oil. He could have mandated that the big three and any auto maker that wanted to sell cars in America would have to meet super strict emission and fuel economy standards.
And you know what, we would have gone along with it. We as a nation would have looked at the craters in NY and the blacked facade at the pentagon and said "Your right, we need to change course". We all know that oil is a dead end enterprise. That at some point we're going to have to get off that bandwagon. However, the future argument is always made. The idea that over the horizon is some super techology that's going to fix everything. Well, unless we start working now, that super technology might never come.
Tragically, instead we went down this path instead. Five years later and we're arguably in a more precarious security situation. Our military is streched to the limit. We're using use more oil then we've ever used.
North Korea tested a nuke...kinda. I guess it misfired or something. Good thing they don't have weapons of mass destruction and are hell bent on destroying the world like Iraq was... oh wait. Oh their country doesn't have a strategic commoditity on it. I wonder what'll happen with Kim Jong-il chokes on a bon-bon and slinks off this mortal coil. Hopefully cooler heads will pervail, though I highly doubht that.
I suppose I have to talk about Iraq. I'm not sure what else to really say about it. Our government and by extension, us fucked up. That's right, we're to blame. Luckily in the last election those of us who voted explained in clear language we thought that Congress rolling over and not providing any oversight and giving the president a blank check was a mistake that they should lose their jobs. I could go on about this, but so much has been said and written that I think my musing about it would merely be a full repeat. However, go read "Fiasco" by Thomas Hicks. It's horrifyingly educating, but like anything else, realize that your seeing one side of the argument and keep that in mind.
There's something that a good freind of mine said and I'll repeat it here because I think it's really intelligent point of view on the overarching "War on Terrorism". I'm at best paraphrasing, but you'll get the jist.
After September 11th, George Bush had an opportunity to take this country in a different direction. He in that single moment in history could have stood up at the podium and said "Listen the people of America. Those who just attacked us, were funded by us. Everytime you fill your tank, you're funding terrorism. America will no longer be beholden to the oil barrens of the middle east. I propose by the end of this decade that America will cure itself of it's oil addiction. I know that this will be hard and America will have to sacrfice, but I know that our tenacious spirit and unparalled wisdom will prevail." He could have then gone on to explain how we were going to build massive wind farms and decommission all of our oil fired power plants. How we were going to build massive Thermal depolymerization plants that would turn our organic waste into usable oil. He could have mandated that the big three and any auto maker that wanted to sell cars in America would have to meet super strict emission and fuel economy standards.
And you know what, we would have gone along with it. We as a nation would have looked at the craters in NY and the blacked facade at the pentagon and said "Your right, we need to change course". We all know that oil is a dead end enterprise. That at some point we're going to have to get off that bandwagon. However, the future argument is always made. The idea that over the horizon is some super techology that's going to fix everything. Well, unless we start working now, that super technology might never come.
Tragically, instead we went down this path instead. Five years later and we're arguably in a more precarious security situation. Our military is streched to the limit. We're using use more oil then we've ever used.
Kim Jung comment (Score:2)
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/41251874/ [deviantart.com]
Damn I wish I could draw stuff like that