World War III? I'm scared...

It only took some anarchist shooting a minor Austrian aristocrat in Serbia to start World War I. The economic hardships of the Thirties and lingering, unsolved problems from that useless slaughter led to the Second in which over sixty million died. We’re now facing a critical situation that could easily lead to a Third, and our leaders seem to be doing a better and better job screwing up that situation with every day that passes.

The Middle East is blowing up in our faces. Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Queda. They all seem determined to butcher as many of their perceived opponents as possible as the West stands by and wrings their hands in helpless, clueless distress.

There’s only one thing to do. Get off oil—as soon as possible! The only reason the region holds any interest to the West is petroleum. And we all are the users and abusers, all of us who drive monster SUVs that get 10 miles per gallon, who drive when we should walk, who go to work one to a car, clogging highways and polluting the air, shooting up once a week like heroin junkies as we fill our tanks. It’s time to stop this insanity. We need to kick our oil habit. At some point the Arab states are going to realize they can cripple us in just a few short months by refusing to sell us oil, and then this country will spiral into chaos in mere weeks—forget drugs or gangs, those would be minor ripples compared to a serious oil shortage. If we keep pissing them off it’s only a matter of time before they react. And make no mistake, even moderate Arab countries are growing ever more leery of supporting our misguided policies. They have conservative constituencies of their own to deal with and if it comes down to their own survival, you can bet the Saudi ruling family and other ‘friendly’ governments will act in their own interests, not ours. And if you think that would hurt them economically, all they need do is look East to the Chinese, whose ecomomy sorely lacks for petroleum; they’d be eager to snap up any supply the Arabs didn’t want to sell us.

So better beware America, the oil addiction of ours is going to come back and bite us in the ass, hard like a pit bull that won’t let go. Maybe we can’t go cold-turkey, but we can certainly wean ourselves off this dangerous habit.

So what’s the solution? Alternative energy. We need to get going on efficient technologies that use something other than petroleum. You want jobs? This would create thousands. You favor education? We’d need more scientists and would have to fund education. You want America to stay a world leader? This would help do it; others would be coming to us for our technology. You want a cleaner environment? This would reduce pollution. All of these positives lie in exploring alternate energy.

So why the hell aren’t we? Because of big oil--watch ‘Syriana' if you have any doubts about that. We need to kick big oil out of Washington D.C. if we can’t get big oil out of the hair of our government, be prepared. For lots of things, all of them bad. You under thirty, maybe even forty? Get ready for a new draft (you girls too, by the way). Get ready for escalating warfare, get ready for thousands, maybe millions of deaths. Get ready for a conflagration in the Middle East. And get ready for what could quite possibly be the next World War, this time a religious one, the Christian West versus the Moslem East.

Hecate

Drowned bodies on a beach
once white-sanded, but
now death-blackened, lovers’ coral
dream turned nightmare purple;
sun in a darkened sky from
gold to bleak gray like jaundiced
Hecate

She lurks in moonlit shadow
bereft of heartbeat and breath
to engulf and suffocate such as
find happiness on a bed of sand,
her gold-painted façade to
hide the nighttime of an ebony
soul

Leave her to lie in her faded-
stardom boudoir, dressed like
the whore she truly is, not
like Selene whose beauty,
unmarred by time and space
will glory her in crystalline
heavenlies

For Selene blesses but
Hecate yields only afflictions
of mind, her secreting of love
plunged in sinister scars and
maiming the beautiful, supple
flesh into stony, craggy
granite


7/6/06

Bush Generates Too Many ‘Signing Statements’

The functions of this government are limited by the system of checks and balances the founding fathers so wisely put in place. No one branch must be allowed to accrue too much power to itself or the system will be OUT of balance. That is what we have here. If Bush does not want certain laws to be enacted, that is what his veto pen is for. One cannot sign a bill into law while simultaneously stating ‘I’m going to ignore what I just signed because I don’t agree with it.’ And just because these signing statements have been used by presidents over the last several decades does not make it right; slavery was legal for centuries but I don’t think I’ll see any comments that it shouldn’t have been abolished.

Congress has a duty – not an option, a duty – to check presidential power. That’s what the document says folks.

I do not buy the administration’s argument that laws hamstring them from acting. There is plenty of leeway in existing law for that. I realize we are at war but we must not allow that fact to undermine our principles of law – otherwise the terrorists win regardless of the outcome in the field. We should not allow the freedoms bought with the blood of generations to be degraded, not for anything. Down that path lies the way to tyranny.

We must safeguard the freedoms we have or we wind up with abuses of power like those that occurred in the Nixon administration, where under the guise of protecting the country from communism, government agencies were busily spying on U.S. citizens doing nothing more than expressing disagreement with policy, and during the McCarthy era where merely suggesting someone was a communist was enough to blackball them for decades.

If conservatives want the president to have that kind of power, you should look at countries like Russia and China, where that kind of power structure does exist and dissent is violently crushed. It doesn’t take long for high ideals like protecting security to fall into oppression – that is what the founding fathers understood and what we need to learn from them. Just ask any Japanese-American citizen interned during World War II.