Tag Archives: iraq

Crumbling

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End of a BridgeSince I had all the Twitter traffic from @MichiganDOT and @MDOT_Southwest automatically sent to my phone via SMS I’ve been able to catch various things that they post on their Twitter stream. One of those things is a political advertisement from Michigan farmers and their campaign “Just Fix The Roads”.

I stand behind the farmers for improved maintenance of our roads and I certainly support Michigan DOT in their efforts to raise awareness of our crumbling infrastructure problem. Every day I have to dodge potholes, wide cracks, poor drainage, and bridges that I really don’t trust completely. Every day I cross many bridges, across train tracks, across the Kalamazoo River, those sorts, and I have faith, weak as it is, that my trips across the bridges and over these roads won’t put me in danger. It’s faith, have to have it that way because our infrastructure has been ignored for so very long that what once was new and strong is now weak and crumbling.

After watching that video on YouTube, I can’t help but think back to around 2003 when we, as a nation, decided that declaring war on Iraq and Afghanistan was a really great idea. Back then it was before the housing bubble broke and before the criminal banks were unmasked for being as corrupt as we eventually discovered – and we thought two unfunded wars would be just neat as hell. Well, now that we have made our bed, it is time to sleep in it. I sympathize with the Michigan farmers, and I certainly support infrastructure repair, but what money do any of us plan to assign to such an expensive endeavor? It’s going to take a whole lot of cash to do correctly what must be done. Where will that money come from? The Federal Government can’t help – they just beat out the sequester, the federal budget is a rotten mess, congress is idle, filled with backbiting idle celebrities behaving poorly. So it’s up to the state to fix it’s roads, again, where is the money?

So this is what two unfunded wars get us. Awesome cosmic military powers come at a cost and surprise! This is what many of us on the left were trying to say while the right was busy getting it’s patriotic on. There is a lot of blame to go around, most certainly, but in the end it does the rest of us no good. Not only do the farmers struggle with our crumbling roads, but also the rest of us who have no choice but to dare the paths that Michigan calls roads and to dare our rusted out bridges. It was going to be expensive before the unfunded wars, now it might actually kill us. Either the roads will kill us (slowly, by a billion paper cuts) or financial apocalypse will because we’ve saddled our government with prosecuting wars when we should have been directing them to work on internal matters, like roads.

So, feel good about our proud military. They’ll have the funds and resources to do their job. Their incredibly important, more-important-than-everything-else job in Iraq and Afghanistan. Feel good, wrap yourself up in the flag, and be the proudest chief patriot when the bridge your car was on failed, the roadway crumbled and you ended up with the front-end of your very expensive SUV stuck in the mire of the filthy Kalamazoo River.

photo by: Kecko

PAD 2/2/13 – Think Global, Act Local

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“”Think global, act local.” Write a post connecting a global issue to a personal one.”

This platitude is something you hear bandied about by people trying to pose as activists in the first world. They use this phrase too much to try to sway people who are really not interested in changing what they are doing. Life is comfortable in the way we are living it, imposing our comforts on the entire world is actually what is working to damage it. We hop in our cars which is damaging the climate. We pay taxes to a government that is besotted with war, so in that way, we are washing our hands in a fountain of blood. We are against cruelty to animals but eat agricorp chicken, beef, and pork. The fact that we are cruel to the ugly animals and kind to the cute ones is a hilarious batch of double-think.

We think that by imposing our will on the world, a world that doesn’t share our cultural background or our religion or customs is somehow not going to end in a blaze of destruction and ill-will returned to us in spades? It would be far better to let the world develop all by itself without the mighty hand of the American Empire. We can handily defend our borders, Canada is affectionately inert and Mexico has been providing us with slave labor for so very long that we should actually be sending them little thank you cards. Illegal immigration is the pot calling the kettle black. All we need to do is defend our waters and leave the rest of the world to fend for itself.

This isolationist policy spits in the face of globalism and it doesn’t matter if you are for it or against it, it’s going to be the only option left to us very soon. How much money does it take to fund American interventionism across the planet? How much money do we spend on our bullshit wars? We defend places that no longer hold interest for us. We defend Japan, the Philippines, Germany, the DMZ in Korea. We perpetrate a hopeless war of irrelevant stupidity in Iraq and Afghanistan against foes that may or may not be there. It doesn’t matter what your politics are, what you think is right or wrong to do in a time of war. Eventually we will just RUN OUT OF MONEY and then what? What happens when there is nothing left, no more money to be had. When our debts overwhelm us? Will we die by the sword or by trillions of tiny little paper cuts? It’s folly to think that we can buck the trend that has been established for thousands upon thousands of years. Empires come and go and they last for about 250 years before they start to erode away. America is 237 years old. We’ve got 13 good years left to us, and we’ll be slated to die of natural causes in 2026. We can of course kick the can down the road, but to do so we will need to stop being foolish with money. For as long as America has existed, we’ve been at war almost constantly. What has it gotten us? A broken world that resents us. We will eventually run out of money which will mean we will have to abandon our designs on “The New American Century” and give up aspirations on an eternal American Empire. It’s just not going to happen. It would be better to admit this sooner rather than later. Dispose of war, leave these regions for good and let the people there sort out their own affairs. Leave Korea for the Chinese and Japanese to puzzle out. Germany and the Philippines no longer require our presence, they are doing just as well without us as with us. Call back all our overseas troops and concentrate our budgets on matters of home and hearth.

Either we can do this sooner, when it’s comfortable for us to do so, or we could wait and then run out of money. I’m sure our military will continue to serve as proud Americans after their paychecks stop coming. It’ll be really quite nasty when we can’t send food to them and they have to start fending for themselves. Alas, that’s the choice we have before us. Either we can retract or we can let what we’ve sent abroad starve. It’s just a matter of time.

LJ – I Hate George W. Bush A Lot

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From 10/14/2003

I started on a particular jag in this post here about our wonderful selectident. This got me thinking about what we’ve pretty much come to accept as the truth when all you see is a kaliedoscope of lies coming from our government, that eventually the lies show fault lines and one can piece together bits of a roadmap to the truth.

I think everyone can agree that the entire campaign in Iraq was driven by two primary factors, the first being Greed, the lust for money stored as oil underneath Iraq; the second being Pride, the fact that our Selectident is a A-1 class wimp just like his father and to prove his masculinity needed to exercise his will upon the people of Iraq. We’ve watched as US Military Servicemen are killed, blown up, commit suicide, or go AWOL for this meaningless sandbox exercise. What first had the inklings of Vietnam is now just a REALLY expensive Vietnam – one could call this Vietnam II – more expensive and lacking in a ready supply of reason to fight.

We went to war in Iraq, at least in the adverts for the war, because Iraq wielded Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Nearly every civilized and industrialized country has WMD’s including the US, France, Britain, Israel, Pakistan, and India. We were told that Iraq had WMD just after Dick Cheney wrote up his still-obfuscated Energy Policy which upon lots of digging turned up analysis maps of oil reserves in Iraq shortly before the war. We were able to dupe ourselves that we are in Iraq to “Win the hearts and minds” and “Remove the WMD threat” and over time these threadbare lies started to show their seams – now we’re there for the oil and we’ll bleed as much as we need to to start the pumps and hook our Hummers up to the tap. Turns out that Iraq didn’t have any WMD at all, therefore there was zero real threat, just Saddam gallivanting around. We could have with our immense and well-paid Intelligence Services discovered the truth behind WMD, but instead we had allegations of WMD and a false report of Yellowcake from Africa. So we know we are literally dying for Iraq’s oil.

Now we’ve seen North Korea rant and rave about having WMD, in fact they have jumped onto the world stage and admitted to processing weapons-grade plutonium! To hell with Yellowcake from Africa! What are we doing in regards to North Korea? Absolutely nothing. I think it’s because there isn’t any easily exploitable natural resources in North Korea. We can’t find a hole to rape so why bother? Because our entire point was to unmask Saddam’s WMD (Which don’t exist) and that led us to an invasion and hostile occupation of Iraq – we are failing to invade and occupy North Korea.

I think our Selectident has sent hundreds of Americans to die, and impovershed the rest of us so that he could line the pockets of his profiteering oil-swine friends, to make them squeal with abject delight knowing that cash will be flowing like a mighty river. The inconsistency is the rub here, we go after Iraq for allegations of WMD, yet we ignore North Korea when they *admit* to having WMD. If logic is to persevere then we must plainly attack North Korea and then rebuild that country. I suspect we shall do no such thing. I would go on to suspect that we would have gone after Saudi Arabia much earlier if they didn’t have the necessary cash to buy us off – we won’t rape that hole, even if it’s gushing with crude oil.

So what is the bottom line? Bush, our selectident wasn’t popularly elected, he ruined the American Economy, he plunged us into an unwinnable war, he ordered American Servicemen to their deaths for personal profit, he defaced the American Flag, which is worse than burning it and it is a FEDERAL CRIME TO DO SO, he completely botched our relationship with The United Nations – he set an entire soverign country on fire – and committed each and every one of us to an atrocity of genocide against the Hussein family and more generally, anyone in Iraq who doesn’t lick our feet.

How to resolve this? The Selectident must be recalled. He must be impeached. He simply must not be allowed to acquire any more power whatsoever and he absolutely must not serve another term in office. He will ruin the United States and with his concentrated cowardice, fear, and lust for blood he will render unto the Earth a new kind of Corporate Hell – with fire and suffering for each and every American Citizen. Anyone who votes for Bush in 2004 is clearly voting to ruin whatever is left of our nation, our way of life, and our liberty.

LJ – Shrublet In Hell

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From 3/17/2003

Here we all sit, on the brink of war… and all I can think of is “We are a Nation of Peace” as a flying image, colliding with the notion that we are essentially going to flood the Euphrates and Tigris rivers with blood. We’re going to most likely bomb Iraq into the stone age – so much for being a nation of peace. I see Dubya’s new anti-war stance not as some honorable position but rather it’s the “Get the Hell out of Dodge” policy, that it’s just about Dubya and Saddam. Why don’t they simply just sit down like civilized people and try to bludgeon each other to death with their own hands? I’d go so far as to say that this may very well be Generation Y’s Vietnam. Our proud soldiers go off to fight some foreign battle and what of them when they come back? How many Vietnam Vets came back to a chilly America? How many “Rumble in the Sandbox” troops will come home facing a public that doesn’t believe in them because they fought a war against one single man and an idea? Where is good old fashioned 20th century thinking? Ah yes, right here in the enlightened 21st Century. I suppose it’s better to bomb Iraq into the stone age and create thousands more little Saddams than it would be in pursuing a more peaceful and more lucrative solution, say, flooding the middle east with American goodwill. Hah, fat chance of that happening now. The best way to battle terror is to blindly lash out, that way you can create destroy it with a war.

I sit back and think upon loftier thoughts because all of this depresses me, and I find my mind wandering towards what Jesus Christ said, that the solution was to not kill, but rather to forgive and to love. I find it quite engaging to hear Dubya invoke a God he is currently plotting on rendering moot. What footing does any good Christian have if they in good conscience allow this war to proceed, knowing that they have turned away from the teachings of their God because of laziness? It’s far easier to bomb and kill and murder than it is to forgive. I can just imagine the knot in the pit of the Pope’s stomach when the first bomb falls on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

In brighter news, the Yahoo! main page is a cavalcade of good news items:

  • Bush Says Saddam Has 48 Hours to Leave or It’s War
  • U.S. Raises Terror Alert Level Due to Iraq Crisis
  • U.S. Sees Signs Iraq May Use Chemical, Bio Arms
  • Turkey to Debate Helping U.S. on Tuesday
  • Annan Orders UN Staff Out of Iraq
  • Deadly Pneumonia Defies Global Health Experts
  • Charges Delayed in Elizabeth Smart Case

The part that particularly drew my attention was this one: * Deadly Pneumonia Defies Global Health Experts. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?