Continuity, not so much

The finale to the WWIII series is coming before the Pakistan episode, but I haven't finished writing the Pakistan one and I wanted to get something up tonight, so, here you go. Besides, this post is sure to be edited later anyways.

The influence behind just about everything that happens in this world is money. And the influence behind the possible WWIII is just a proxy for money. It's, of course, oil. Oil is the reason that the first gulf war happened, and it's the reason for the second as well. So how did we go and start a war centered on oil? Let's take a closer look at the events that led up to it.

Well remember Dick "The Blind Sheik" Cheney's Energy Taskforce meetings? No? Then go and look it up, I can't link everything for you. Well in these meetings it's been supposed that he was gathering information on remaining world-wide oil reserves and how much longer they would be producing. See Mr. Cheney had recently been quite convinced of the threat of the "peak oil" theory*, and was quite concerned with what it meant for the future of America. He knew that the future of America depended on securing energy sources, and his friends at Halliburton had told him that if we turn towards alternate or renewable energy sources, we would suffer the fate of all the rest of the granola-eating hippies. Less-than-extravagant lifestyles! God forbid any American should ever have to endure the indignity, so Dick knew he had to get to work. He had to secure the future of oil production for the United States. The world community won't let a country invade and seize another country's resources without a backlash that even the US couldn't survive, but if a strawman were set up then he could safely be taken out. And if the result of this action were that the country liberated were beholden to the US, AND was an oil-rich nation, then the stars would be too damned aligned not to start that war. Of course, Dick already knew exactly who this strawman was, he had had intimate dealings with him before as Secretary of Defense under H.W. Bush. And his close friend Rumsfeld had an even closer relationship with the man (http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/rumsfeld-hussein.jpg) So, as the Dick who said in 1992, "And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."(http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/192908_cheney29.html) turned into the Dick who will advocate the veracity of the Iraq war until his dying breath, the US was plunged into a war that in the end will benefit only those soulless enough to yearn to profit from it. And now that the eventual cost of the war will settle in at almost 2 trillion dollars, enough money to replace almost every car in the US with a hybrid car, we as a citizenry are left to wonder what else that money could have paid for. That money could maybe have made us energy independent. It may have been able to build enough solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, etc. plants that we would never again have to give a fucking dime to another country for energy. It may have built for us the technology that would once again make us the world leader, so that other countries would once again be dependent on us for their salvation, and that our continued success as a nation would once again be in the interest in the world as a whole. Of course, all it did pay for was a few thousand dead American men and women, and countless dead Iraqis (some estimates are over a million, with more than 3 million displaced from their homes.)

I feel sometimes like an isolationist. History judged the isolationists wrong in the late 1930's. If America hadn't stepped in to aid the rest of the world against the insanities of Hitler, then the world would certainly have been such a dark place that few of us would like to contemplate. Still today, I feel right in being an isolationist. America is drowning in it's own problems and can hardly afford to try to be liberator to the world right now. The Euro is worth almost 2 dollars. The Canadian dollar is trading damned near even with the American dollar. Markets across the world are gearing up to no longer use the American dollar as their standard. Money is the bellwether that shows true influence, and ours is drying up. It won't be long until Columbian drug lords bury stashes of Euros instead of American dollars in order to safeguard their investments. Fuck, actually they probably were the first to switch. As much as GW likes to crow about how he's spreading freedom and democracy, the pendulum is swinging towards dictatorship across the globe. Oppressive China is quickly becoming one of the strongest world powers. Russia is racing backwards towards the days of Stalin with Putin at the helm, arresting or assassinating anyone who so much as glances at him on the subway. And the US, the shining beacon of freedom, is seeing it's citizens lose civil liberties at the pace of about one a week. Don't get me wrong, it's still better than Britain, which has the highest ration of "security cameras" per capita in the world. But it's a shadow of it's former self, and a disgrace to the men and women who gave their lives to ensure that it would remain the freest nation on the planet.

The question is, "what is there for us to do about it?" Well there are a million different things that you can do, and it's up to each one of us to decide what it is that we will do. Each of us needs to think about what it is that we want our country to be, and decide how best we are able to bring that about. If you've got the drive and the means to make a big difference, then god bless, go forward. If you only have the time or the desire to make a small change, then every little bit still helps. And I don't mean towards any certain ends, but towards any ends that you would like. The important bit is to stay attentive, to stay informed, and to fucking care! Everybody has heard the saying "Of course we must fear evil men, but there is another evil that we must fear more… and that is the indifference of good men.". But the nuance to that is that you aren't supposed to be outraged at the blatantly outrageous. Once it gets to the point that EVERYBODY realizes what is happening is unjust, it is too damned late. You have to get outraged at the steps that lead up to that point. Stand up and make your voice heard, in any way you can.

This will tie in nicely to what I hope will be my next post, a quick look at some of the presidential candidates. The election coming up is an excellent chance to make your voice heard :)