That would indeed be nice.
Category: politics
The mightiest force ever lost some stuff in the desert it seems.
Annie Leonard talks about stuff Whoever she is.
I am with her. To a point. The breastmilk part is a bit much, and on technology she is just plain wrong. Which discredits the whole piece somewhat. And that is a real shame. Since the whole consumerism / consumption stuff weighted against diminishing returns in respect to happyness is a very important point. And there are others in this presentation that are pretty obvious and get equally ignored. Still worth the link, and maybe even worth watching.
War really sucks. It happens if people feel they can gain from it.
According to this article China holds 1.4336 trln US$.
Big number. Each Chinese seems to make 1500 dollars a year. There are 1,321,851,888 Chinese. Which would mean that all Chinese would not need to work for 8.6 months if they would just spend the Dollars that the chinese reserve holds.
Or they could finance a seven year Iraq war. Out of the cash they have sitting around. And with the kind of spending the US military got used to. Something tells me that the red army has a different pricelist then the military in the US.
So, it seems that having stuff made over there for years somehow gave them allot of money. And therefor power.
Garry Willis writes about Abortion in the LA Times.
He says:
Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons.
There has been allot of hollow talk like “we didn’t know anything about it” after WW2 in Germany. And that is wrong. It also is wrong to try to escape the responsibility of the Holocaust. It is a part of German history. But this sentence suggests that Germans in general agreed to kill Jews. Which is bullshit. Some did. And some built an industry around killing people. Yes, as horrible as that. But to suggest that there was a poll and that just happen to go against one part of the people is simply senseless.
It is pretty strange to open such a piece by invoking Godwin’s Law
Abortition is a tricky issue. Such is Holocaust. Mixing them up in one piece is not really what makes a good start. The article itself rambles around some valid points, and then falls into total pointlessness.
According tothis article the war in Iraq costs two billion dollar. A week. I am sure that those 160,000 troops risking their life will be glad to know that that amounts to 12,500 US$ a week for each of them. Or we could just leave and pay each each 75 US$ a week. Does not sound like much, but the GDP per person and week is 64US$. So, yes, the US spends more on the war than the country is producing on its own. It used to be one of the wealthiest countries with a larger population in the arab world. Now this war has been gone for quiet some time.
And, no, we still have not found those weapons of mass destruction. That was the reason why the US had ot go there. So we have been told. That is a old story you might think. Exactly that kind of thinking helps this administration. They told us that war was the only option because of those weapons of mass destruction. We should hold them to their own arguments, instead of falling for their next story version about the ‘front in the war on terror’. Some things are simple. This one is.
This ‘news’ about generating energy from burning saltwater is ridicolous bullshit.
Here we are, using those internets, which are run on computers (just ask Homer) and other products of science to mock it’s very contents and basic laws.
Of course it is an extreme example. But the same principle seem to apply frequently: Those creationists should be consequent and stop using the products and merits of science. All of them. If they don’t like what science has discovered.
Two hundred years ago when people even in the more developed countries were dying left right and center on odd diseases and epidemics there simply was no question: Science was good. Now, that we are reaping all those benefits and so many of us have these careless existences some people think, that the current state of society and wellfare would just be ‘normal’, or god given.Well, it is not. The default is much much more grim. Over the last four hundred years people worked really really hard to make all this possible. It was not easy to harvest all this knowledge our econimies and factories run on. All these efforts were based on the absence of stupity. Now it seems as if some people start to take stupid stuff serious. Since it seems that they can afford to. People living in Rome two thousand years ago were in a similar position. Why would they care? Of all Shakespear plays I liked Coriolanus the least. Now that’s starting to change. Somehow I think that it’s message is not that off after all.
Funny how names become somewhat Harry-Potterish at a certain level:
Seven Sisters
White Shoe
Magic Circle
Also interesting that they all seem to run asp website. Nothing is easier to hack. Maybe even the tough kids in Russia know whom to mess with and who has future peer potential. Better erase that, would be no fun to get in trouble with those twenty companies all at once.
Obama wants to go to Pakistan to fight Terrorists! Is he crazy? That’s where they actually are. Doesn’t he understand that the right strategy is to concquer a country a couple of thousand miles east, because. Well, because. Ah, yes, because it’s a family tradition or something. Next thing this crazy man might do is to prevent the since 2002 booming heroin industry in Afghanistan from growing any further. Doesn’t he understand that the solution is to sell more weapon systems to the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. That very strategy that gave the Iran those lovely F14s. We certainly need more than that. And does he understand that that “Roadmap to Peace” by Mr B. was the hugest success. I mean, Israel is more peaceful than ever, right?
It feels somewhat orwellian to revisit phrases like “Coalition of the Willing” “last throes” or “roadmap to peace”, it all started with “compassionate conservatism” I believe.