Doug's Darkworld

Well, there’s a number of things going on in the news that deserve attention, and in fact each and every one of them could be expanded into a full blog post. However, there’s huge amounts already being written about them, so I decided to make a meta-post so to speak and then get back to the fun stuff like alien marshmallows, historical miscalculations, and alternate dimensions. Also, they are kinda depressing and frankly I’m tired of being depressed.

First up, Israel. What’s to say, it’s not like Israel has ever been a respecter of international law before. Why they had to board a shop full of peace protesters with guns blazing is anyone’s guess. And now they have a few hundred more political prisoners to add to the millions of Palestinians they are holding hostage.  If any other country behaved the way Israel behaves, they would be a pariah state like North Korea. And now just to make sure everyone gets the message that Israel wants to have a war with Iran, they have stationed nuclear armed submarines off Iran’s coast. Those peace loving Israelis, what will they think of next? The good thing is that Israel’s increasingly bellicose if not actually psychotic actions are increasingly alienating younger Jews in the USA, and the day may come where the Israeli lobby in the USA no longer has a strangle hold on US foreign policy. A man can dream, can’t he?

We’ve now spent a trillion dollars on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have made America less secure if anything, have killed and maimed tens of thousand of Americans, and the two countries we are supposedly trying to help (snort) are violent failed states. A trillion bucks, and all we have to show for it is a picture of George Bush smirking in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner.  And just to put a trillion dollars in perspective for my American middle class readers, a trillion dollars would pay for college tuition for every American in perpetuity. Yeah, that was money well spent.

The leaking oil well. It’s made me think of a whole new way to look at problems. I now think: “What would the Romans do?” Well, after the last failed attempt to stop the leak, if not before, they would have sent in teams of crack Roman engineers to fix the problem. And they would also have rounded up every BP executive and manager that had even the remotest amount of responsibility for this debacle … and stuffed them in the leaking pipe to try and stop the leak. Yeah, it wouldn’t stop the leak, but it would go a very long ways to making sure that something like this never happened again. There’s a reason the Roman Empire lasted as long as it did, they didn’t fuck around when people screwed with the Empire. In the modern USA, screwing with the Empire gets you huge bonuses and government bailouts.

Then theres the sabre rattling about Korea. As many have pointed out, how was an antiquated North Korean sub able to penetrate a fleet of ultra modern US and Korean warships, sink one, and get away undetected? Either the story about a North Korean sub is a lie, or our much vaunted and highly expensive technology isn’t nearly as good as we have been led to believe. Neither option is terribly palatable. And the sabre rattling continues last I checked.

Lastly, the economy. Especially in Europe. Now the Europeans are passing out trillion dollar bailouts to keep their economies afloat and keep the Euro from turning into toilet paper. This is not good, the people who have been saying all along that “borrow and spend” is simply a ponzi scheme that can’t go on forever are seeming more accurate every day. Not to mention that transferring wealth upwards in the long run is a bad idea. It either all falls down in some sort of revolution as the peasants start to starve, or we are all converted into serfs and slaves again while a tiny elite owns everything.  I don’t know about my gentle readers, but even if I have Direct TV, I still don’t want the Middle Ages to return.

In conclusion, my big fear this summer is that the burgeoning economic holocaust that is threatening the foundation of the entire west has gotten too big to ignore, and the USA has decided there’s only one solution. War. Now that Obama has succeeded with his diabolical (and brilliant)  plan of merging the two political parties in the USA into one giant pro-war, pro-bailout, pro-arms and oil industry, anti-environment party … who is to stop him? More than one empire has gone to war in a last desperate bid to hold things together. The increasingly bellicose actions of the USA in Korea, Pakistan, and Iran make me suspect that like the war with Iraq, the decision has already been made and all that needs to be done is provide a plausible casus belli. Even worse, I’m beginning to suspect that the folks who have been worried about incipient fascism and martial law in the USA aren’t as off base as I thought.

Have a great summer everyone!

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, it’s central to illustrating the post, and its use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. Arguably the opposite. Credit and copyright: Steven J Warren.  2009 All rights reserved. It was obtained on this fine site: The UK Storm Guide. And yeah, a lot of the above is unbridled speculation and opinion, might as well exercise my freedom of speech while I still have it.)