Doug's Darkworld

OK, I had to work through the weekend so I didn’t get any pre-blogging done. In fact Monday was so crazy I didn’t even get any ad hoc blogging done. Such is life, but it’s Monday night now and I have a few precious hours to spare (I cut my work day from 15 hours to 12 at a loved one’s request) so here we go again. Well, sort of. I’m done with earth mysteries for now. The sad truth is that there is so much chaff and so little wheat my brain gets sore sifting through it. I’ll pick it up again someday, there are two mystery creatures with human fatalities attached to the mystery. Come to think of it, there’s some UFO cases involving human fatalities. So that will be a theme week someday, fatal mysteries.

For today though, mysteries in the news. OK, well, same ol same ol, but still, it’s a pretty strange world out there. In breaking news, today a world wide ban on the manufacture and use of cluster bombs goes into effect! Cluster bombs are tiny little bombs approximately the size of an orange. Then they are packaged into bigger bombs, and dropped out of aircraft. Most of them explode, but a lot of them don’t. And they sit there buried in the ground and continue to kill and maim people for decades. Mostly women and children.

It would seem obvious then that these are a terrible weapon that no civilized nation would use. So of course it follows that the  US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Israel are not signatories to the treaty. The typical excuse being that the use of these weapons “saves soldier’s lives.” The problem with that “logic” is that it could (and has been) used to justify any atrocity. There are more important things in war than saving soldier’s lives, avoiding civilian casualties being one of them.  They can’t always be avoided of course, but using a weapon that is guaranteed to kill and maim woman and children years after its deployment is avoidable. Plus they don’t work, we dropped zillions of cluster bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War. We still lost.

Sigh. In other weird news, the EPA has announced that the dispersant that BP used to hide the extent of the oil leak (what, you think there’s some other reason they used as much dispersant as they could?) isn’t any more toxic than oil. Well, that’s a relief. Wait, no, what? Yes, we’re supposed to be reassured that the poison they used to hide the poison was only as deadly as the poison they spilt in the first place. Hmm. Anyhow, if the cap holds it’s still the worst accidental spill in history. BP says they are going to lose a lot of money, but we’ll see. And the economic effects of this spill are likely going to be vastly greater than we are being told, most of it borne by the poor.

Which pretty much sums up life on our strange little world. Armies with more firepower than God claiming that horrible children maiming weapons are “necessary.” Greedy people causing a massive ecological and economic disaster, and passing the costs off to the poor. And not only aren’t people marching in the streets, a lot of them like it like this. Well, it is entertaining. We’re not serfs in the USA, we’re plebeians. Plebes. Technically free but politically impotent. We can go the the amusements and pretty much live off the fat of the land, and we can even apply ourselves and do pretty well for ourselves. What we can’t do is influence the decisions made by our government, which under a veneer of democracy, is simply a vehicle for the rich and powerful to become even more rich and powerful.

And even worse, most plebes are completely unaware of the incredible ravages our military and our corporations are inflicting on the world in order to fund their madness. Or worse, justify them. Yes, Americans live in a  country where it’s perfectly OK for our leaders to say that killing half a million Iraqi babies is “worth it.” It follows then that it’s OK to do so. See, that’s why the US needs cluster bombs, if killing a half million babies is acceptable foreign policy, what’s a few women and children? I mean, only about one Laotian a day is killed by old US munitions. Hardly anything to get excited about.

Next, maybe I’ll segue into a post about American exceptionalism.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, it is central to illustrating the post, and its use here in no conceivable way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. Credit and copyright: No idea, not even sure where the image was taken. Those are cluster bombs though, cute little things, aren’t they?)