The Trap

Our problems in Iraq are now becoming apparent to more and more people; the problem is that people on both sides of the political aisle are speaking the truth. Take the simple debate of withdrawing troops; one side of the political aisle says that if we withdraw, Al Quaida will claim victory.

The other side says that if we stay, Al Quaida will continue to say that we are occupying a mid-east country for oil, and Al Quaida will continue to use that occupation for recruitment purposes.

The problem of course is that both things are true. No matter what we do, Al Quaida will claim either victory or moral superiority. It is the nature of the insurgent struggle that they should do this. It is also part of the struggle that either option now has no clear ending, and neither option has a good ending in sight.

We can stay, and we can keep the violence tamped down to an unreasonable level - but the tensions that exist between the Sunni and Shiite populations of Iraq will not simply disappear in the next year. What good will it do, if we stay there for ten years with 30,000 American troops dead and a couple hundred thousand wounded if when we leave they devolve into civil war anyway?

On the other hand, if we withdraw completely or withdraw to isolated bases and use our troops only for force protection, training, border protection and anti Al Quaida operations and hundreds of thousands more civilian deaths mount from the escalating civil war, who would think that was a good solution?

I doubt the Iraqi's would, and once again Al Quaida and other extremists would use our actions against us.

The bleak truth is this; no matter what we do our enemies will use our actions against us, because we have painted ourselves into a corner and few actions we take can be justified. The reason for that is the reason for the war in the first place.

I do not care about the arguments of weapons of mass destruction, or whether Saddam was a bad, evil person. There was a reason he had the resources to pursue those weapons, and there was a reason the US Government at one time supported Saddam - just as we now support many other horrible regimes, the Saudis among them.

That reason is oil, and it is never mentioned in the debate about Iraq.

Ask yourself why that is, and you will begin to see the true problem that all the ancillary problems stem from; the President himself talked of our addiction to oil, and has not mentioned it since. Neither has anyone else in any meaningful sense.

I watched on the public news tonight the names and faces of 12 soldiers who had died in Iraq, young and middle aged, white, black and Hispanic - they died for country and freedom, but the reason they were sent to the deserts of Iraq was because of one thing, in the end - and that thing is our addiction to oil, and our willingness as a nation to do whatever it takes to keep that supply flowing freely.

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The Cup is Half Empty

It is easy for me to see why so many American’s do not vote, but for some

reason it is a fact rarely mentioned by the press; this continues to puzzle me, but in fact if you listened to the press, you would think the country was split fairly evenly between voting republicans and democrats, with a bit of

independent thrown in.



But that is not the case; that only describes about half the country. The other half do not vote, and rarely even follow politics. They simply look at things having to do with the government as they look at the weather - sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad and hopefully most of the time it won’t interfere with the way we live our lives at all.



Now more than ever this is becoming true; the last of the old ways are

beginning to fall to the wayside; the effects of our country's institutional racism will be with us for a while longer yet, and we have work to do there, but in that area as in most areas of civil rights, things are better now than they were in the past, and continuing to improve.



They are good enough, in fact, that a lot of us have decided these areas no

longer require our attention. They have been on an upward climb since the

fifties and sixties when actual battles over issues of color and sex were

necessary, and that climb has been aided by activists for these issues and

others.



But as always, in every generation there is a need for vigilance, there is a need for paying attention to what our political leaders are doing. The people in America who do not normally pay attention need to awaken on some level - if you have children, or care about people who do, then you need to be aware of exactly what our elected leaders are doing in the long term interests of our country.



Those interests are not being served now by either party, and they are both knowingly squandering our resources in ways which will not help us in the long run - indeed, seen from a hundred years in the future, I think it will be obvious that the major policies we support as a nation are steering us directly towards disaster.



On this website, and at many others, these problems are being discussed by non partisans. When you listen to the people of either party, though, please pay more attention to their actions than what they say. It has been a ploy in American politics for many decades now to say one thing, and then simply ignore that promise once power is attained.



The easiest example, and the most pertinent is that of our energy supply. Al

Quaida is funded in large part by those countries which we call ‘allies’ in the

middle east; the simple fact is that every time we buy a gallon of gasoline we are helping fund our enemies.



What makes this so egregious is that our government and leaders have not

done one single thing to address this issue; they do not talk about it, they have not raised the gas mileage standards yet (and the amount they want to raise them will do us no good), they have not even tried to get people to use car pools or other means of avoiding cars.



There are not many explanations for this behavior, and there are even fewer that explain why both of the major parties are complicit in this behavior. They are not easy conclusions to come to when thought through, but they are reality at its core.



We can do much to eliminate this travesty, but our leaders have not lifted a

single finger; in the meantime, lives are being lost and the enemy is

winning - and they are getting richer than ever, every time we buy gasoline.



But that is the rub; it is not just our enemies who get richer, and who we continue to fund - it is international and American companies as well. Simply look at the profits from the major American oil companies. It is easy to see, from their point of view, why they do not want to give up their monopoly.



And yet, that is exactly what must happen.



When I see someone who I think will actually address that problem and the others that we face, then I will vote - but neither major party candidate has any trust stored with me; I have been an observer to long, and take a dim view of the current state of government. That knowledge has soaked down into the public, with the result that half the nation believes quite accurately that if they did vote for either viable candidate it would not make the slightest difference in the way the country is run.



Of course, that is just a theory - but so far, the democrats in the Senate and Congress, despite their big talk of 'making changes', have done nothing of import, and continue to do just that - nothing of real importance.



I don't care if they can succeed - they haven't even tried.

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McCain and the American Policital Morass

From The Newshour, quoting Ed Rollins, Republican Analyst on John McCain:



"Equally as important, John [McCain, Ed.] has been on television more than
anybody else, and it's getting to be a tired message. He needs a new
message. Why can I lead this country effectively as a man who's going
to be in my 70s? What is my vision for the young people? Where are we
going to take this country? How do we basically come out of the morass
that we're in as a party and as a nation?"



This is the problem we face as a nation - more and more people are beginning to feel the pinch of reality, and the standard answers of those in power do not any longer seem to make the same sense they once did.



One reason for this is the fact that you can only repeat something so many times before it begins to pall. And that is where we are at today. Sure, we defeated communism - I am not saying there were not some tense moments, especially with the nuclear war issue, or that it was not a great struggle - but that does not give license for the failure of the last thirty years to recognize the growth of the issues which face us today.



I have dealt with these issues before, and will again before any change is made. John McCain is supposedly the maverick, the truth teller of Washington, and on certain issues he has been. But there comes a time for any presently successful politician where they cannot tell the truth and maintain their position.



The first example, of course, is oil.



He tells the truth as he sees it about Iraq - the consequences of failure would be severe and catastrophic; yet while he can construct a solid argument for the continued deployment of larger numbers of troops, he does not acknowledge in any way the underlying truth of the situation - we are absolutely dependent on the oil pumped from the Mideast. We could not maintain our current society and standard of living without it.



The only true answer to that problem (because everyone else wants what we have - air conditioning and cars) is to figure out a way to get off of oil. The problem is so simple to see no one bothers to draw the lines - however it is not a simple, or inexpensive, problem to solve.



But it can be done, and doing it would do more to end terrorism than any other strategy we could come up with.



More later . . .

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The Shielded Vision of Disaster

The democratic congress passed a spending bill today; the New York Times says this:



"The legislation aimed at accelerating an end to the war passed on a vote of 218 to 212, with all but two Republicans
opposing. Even as the debate moves to the Senate, where a less
restrictive plan is to be considered next week, Mr. Bush dismissed the
action as “political theater” and promised to veto attempts
to manage the war from Capitol Hill."



And then look at this story, in The Street (thestreet.com):



"Crude prices climbed for the third consecutive
session in New York Friday on news of increased instability in the
Middle East and higher gasoline prices in domestic markets . . . "



And, later in the article:



"Energy futures were rattled in early trading on
news that 15 British Navy sailors were detained at gunpoint by Iranian
soldiers while they were boarding an Iranian cargo ship. The British
Foreign Ministry says that its sailors were operating in Iraqi
territorial waters, but Iran insisted they were in Iranian waters."



And yet, as our politicians debate the war they continue to say nothing about oil or our dependency on it. Any modern society depends upon energy for its very survival; the fact that we are further away from energy independence every day should give everyone pause. We will not run out of oil, but the world situation will make our current lifestyle impossible to maintain.



The only way to truly solve the Mideast's problems, and it will take a long time, is to eliminate the need to buy oil from them.



That addiction to oil is obvious to anyone who even does even a bit of study into this situation, and other western countries are to blame as well; we are all at least in part responsible for the situation in the middle east, and it is a situation that has grown to its current dimensions through decades of bad policy, through decades of supporting and enriching regimes that are and were repressive and totalitarian at the best and brutal at the worst. Do not forget, we supported Saddam Hussein at his outset, and armed him against Iran when that country broke away from the ruler we had put in place.



I understand not wanting to talk about these things, but they are the situation we are dealing with. We need to figure out a way to produce our own liquid fuel, someway, somehow, and combine that with more electric cars and drastically increased mileage requirements for cars.



It is often commented how only a tiny portion of America is paying a price for the war, but that must end. We are in an epic struggle - everyone agrees on that. But then they go blithely on to ignore the cause of that trouble.



It is possible to do get off of gasoline, but it will take great sacrifice - and in the end, it will be worth it. We need to act in the immediate future, though - the quality of life for all that come after us will depend upon our decisions in the very near future now, and the window of that decision making is at a point where the ability to enact a successful plan will be diminished - at that point, disaster will have struck while we are completely unprepared - what that means is six to eight dollar a gallon gas, heavily rationed, and a general collapse of the dollar and the economy. At that point, things will get dicey for a lot of people.



So the next time you can ask a question, ask this one - why do we fund the terrorists through the purchase of their allies' gasoline, when we can get off of it?



We can do this - so if we are funding our enemy through the purchase of oil, and if it is the epic struggle of our generation, then why don't we get off of gasoline?

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The plight of the Bees

A Cornell University
study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14
billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits,
vegetables and nuts. “Every third bite we consume in our diet is
dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food,” said Zac Browning,
vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.











The above statement, and the graph supporting it, are the type of story that should trouble us greatly. Instead of talking about oil for a moment, lets look at some other aspects of a changing climate - and that is the shifting of viable large scale food production.



The bees, as seen from the above chart, are responsible for pollinating a large amount of the foodstuffs that we consume; more than that, they are indicators of the general health of our environment.



Now, don't get me wrong - in the long run, we can't do much to hurt the planet. What we can do is make things bad for us and other species which share this planet in the short run.



Society has come a long way, but in any society as large as ours, and so dependent on technology and energy to transport food, it has weaknesses. Famine is an age old problem for humanity, and our modern society will not necessarily protect us from it.



The bees, like many small things, are an indicator that we need to take seriously - one small thing or another may not make much difference, but we are seeing to many small things, and they are all pointing in the same direction.



Like to many things, we need to start treating these matters with the seriousness that they deserve; Catrina and the gulf coast destruction is a timely reminder, but one which we seem to be ignoring.

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Immigration Reform

Here is an idea on immigration that I got from a person which I admire quite a lot; some of the embellishments are mine, but the main thrust of the idea is this;



Let them in; legally, and with hardly any interference at border crossings. As they come in, they will be assigned a social security card and a laminated, federal ID - they would also be fingerprinted and photographed, and records could be run on those items and against their names for criminal background.



If such were found, they would be turned away.



With so many people no longer pouring over the border, our border assets, which are not equal to the job of keeping out the vast number of well intentioned illegal immigrants, could instead concentrate on the much smaller number of ill intentioned people trying to move across our border.



At the same time, a national system of checking social security numbers before job hiring would be put into place; the vast majority of illegal aliens work with legitimate companies, and fake social security numbers now are extremely easy to find.



A system could be set up within months to do this; in fact, the basic system is already in place vis a vis the NICS check system for firearms transactions approval. There could easily be a departmental shift, and extra resources added to the existing infrastructure of NICS to check Social Security numbers. f the Social Security number comes back bad, there can be no hire. If a company is caught with new, bad social security numbers the penalties would have to be stiff.



The above solution solves several problems at one time; the social security number issued would not be citizenship, and if laws were broken the person could be sent away, with their photo and fingerprints on file.



With hi-tech surveillance and quick response teams our border agents could then concentrate on the only people that would be left crossing the border in desolate stretches at the dead of night; those people would be criminals, and could be dealt with accordingly.

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