The terrorists have aleady won

Soon after the attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001, president Bush extolled us to not let the terrorists win by changing our daily routine. Go shopping, he said. Go to a movie, he said. Show the terrorists they can't beat us by changing our daily lives.

Lets leave out the obvious implications of offering up consumerism as the definitive shape of our daily lives.

Instead, lets focus on what we have changed, just so we could keep on with our shopping and movie going.

With the changes in the bill that just went through Congress, there is no clear definition of torture. Torture in the United States of America is, for all intents and purposes, solely up to the desecration of the president. Not only does he and only he decide what constitutes torture, he doesn’t even have to tell anyone what he decides. The great decider apparently isn't the great letter of knowing what the hell he's up to.

Not only does the president and the president alone get to decide what torture now is, he also gets to decide solely, and based on nothing more than his opinion, who our enemies are. This new authority to see enemies where ever they may or may not exist also includes the authorization to include any American citizen into the decision of who's an enemy. And guess what? It doesn't matter if they're Americans or not.

But the best part of not having to change our shopping and movie going habits, is that we never even need to worry about any of this, because Bush doesn't have to tell anyone what he's doing, ever. Because he also gets to have secret prisons that no one but him and whomever he personally decides needs to know where they are or who is in them or what is being done to whom is in them.

This is not a stretch, people. From this day forth, the president of the United States of America can snatch an American citizen off the streets, detain them in a secret location, and torture them, and never have to tell anyone about it. If they die, well, no one knows where they were, right?

And now for my obligatory swearing, just one word though, nothing heavy, just to illustrate a point; If anyone here thinks that this extreme level of secret authority will not be abused, they're a fucking retard.

And I'm talking a retard of the highest order. The sheer magnitude of their retardedness is simply overwhelming. It's monstrous. I'm talking so retarded that if breathing wasn't a reflex they'd suffocate in the open air.

By Bush's own words, the 'war' on terror will never end. That means these powers will never be given back. Everything we do in this knee-jerk happy election cycle will not be easily undone. When was the last time the federal government, under ANY party, gave back expanded or even temporary authority? How do you think we got the federal income tax?

I'm amazed, outraged and saddened, in that order, that so many American, despite their political affiliation, are so willing to alter our core ideals of liberty, justice, and the law, so they can go continue shopping and seeing a movie. I never, in my darkest thoughts, that America would fall so far in fear and loathing.

This is the price of free war. No war is free. But Bush not only wants to wage free war, he wants to pay us off with tax cuts during full scale war for our support. At NO time in history, never in our history, have we not increased revenue to pay for war time operations. Until now. Hell, not only were we told Iraq would cost us nothing, we'd make money off it!

We bailed out of Afghanistan and shoved that onto NATO. We're failing in Iraq. We're crippling the ability of the military to respond to any subsequent threats, of which we currently face many that are growing in urgency. We now have, because of the Iraq War, a greatly limited capacity to protect our interests across the world.

Iraq by many measures was one of the weakest nations in the Middle East. Saddam’s vaunted army was a shadow of its former self, a ghost of an army. It was more threat to itself than to us. Iraq only has 27 million people in it, not much more than a third of Iran’s population. And we couldn't even pacify it. We couldn't even beat the weakest nation that we perceived as a threat to our national security. WE picked the weakest punk in the neighborhood and couldn't even kick his ass.

But it's not so bad, I went shopping at the mall earlier (no local stores around anymore selling what I was looking for). And later on tonight I'll probably watch a movie I reanted, so at least I haven't had to change my all important consumer habits.

But we have fundamentally changed our very understanding of rights and freedoms. We have now restricted who they apply to and given the power of that restriction to one man with no oversight what so ever. And in this way, in the only way that truly matters, the terrorist have already won.

US reliance on foreign oil

Does the US need to decrease its reliance on foreign oil?

Or do we need to decrease our reliance on oil period?

Seems we have a possibly very significant new domestic oil find off the Gulf Coast. Of course this is good news, as anything that lessens our reliance on volatile Middle East oil is a good thing, even if it's simply finding more oil at home.

And this is nothing like the oil in the Alaskan refugee, this find is actually significant, it has the possibility of raising our known reserves by 50%, that is truly significant.

And personally I'm certain that as technology progresses we'll find new reserves, as well as newer more efficient refining and extraction capabilities that will all improve our yield.

But it seems like every time we get to a point as a nation of accepting that we have to kick oil itself, not just our source of it, we find something that makes us backslide into our old thinking of it's our right as Americans to drive gas guzzling SUV's and to own as much cheap plastic crap as possible.

Someone here not long ago argued that, in fact a few people have, they argued that because 'poor' people in America could afford cell phones and TV's they weren't really poor. They have no health care, no retirement funds, and possibly not even a land line phone which might be why they have a cell phone, but the fact that they can afford to buy cheap plastic crap from China means they aren't really poor.

Poverty, like everything else dealing with human existence, is subjective. But the fact that we are addicted to cheap plastic crap from China is not, it's simple reality. Having poor people in America owning cheap plastic crap from China doesn't mean they aren't poor, just means China sells really cheap plastic crap. Besides, cell phone manufacturers make their real money in lease plans with service providers, not off the phones themselves. And pretty soon after everything goes digital, if it ever does, people won't have to buy cheap TV's anymore anyway unless they can afford the cable bill as well, because broadcast TV as we know it will end.

But what does our reliance on oil and the availability of cheap plastic crap from China have in common? it's simply that plastic is made with oil. It's made from petroleum byproducts. Or at least it used to be, but that was low grade plastic of the 60's and 70's. Today’s plastic is high tech and pure, it takes a lot more petroleum to make plastic today when it was more of a cast off novelty 30 or 40 years ago. And China makes a *lot* of plastic crap.

And neither China nor America seems ready any time soon to slow their reliance on cheap plastic crap. In fact, as China industrializes and spreads the wealth at home, their standard of living rises, and they can start affording the same cheap plastic crap we do.

America is at the zenith of its gluttony. At no other time has America used so much to produce so little. When we raped our mountains and forests and polluted our waterways during our industrial revolution, at least we were advancing something. Now our advances are in science and technology, not manufacturing, and the populace loses out on even that as the related jobs go overseas for cheaper labor costs.

We are in Iraq because of oil. Oil is intimately tied to our national security. Our military runs on it, our infrastructure runs on it, our very social fabric is held together by oil and our continued access to it.

I had hoped that we were finally accepting that gasoline was going to go up. Actually, as much as I gripe about it, I was hoping it would hit $5 a gallon in the next year or two. Only that kind of system shock is ever going to get us out of our oil dependency. Now we find reserves right off our cost that can up our know reserves by half. But even before that gas prices have been not just falling but in a free fall almost.

I'm sorry, there just is not enough going on the world that's going so good as to warrant that kind of drop in gas prices. Gas has dropped locally from a high of $3.37 not six weeks ago to $2.71 or less today. That's almost 0.70 a gallon in five or six weeks. Please tell me what situation in the world improved so dramatically as to initiate that kind of a slide in gas prices. Did we suddenly win in Iraq? Did Israel crush Hezbollah? Did Iran not tell the world to fuck off?

Tell me there's not some pressure going on somewhere here. Either there's unknown pressure from somewhere pushing gas prices down, or all the increases over world instability have been total bullshit lies. Plus, oil itself has not dropped enough to warrant this much of a drop in gas prices. Donning my tinfoil hat, I'd say this is payback from the Saudis for Bush's continued support of their corrupt, despotic, Islamic fundamentalist fanatic breeding regime.

There are, at least there should be, certain things that societies need to be willing to do for the greater good. This is not socialism. During WW II, the entire nation conserved rubber, tin, coppre, green dye among other needed supplies for the war effort. They grew victory gardens, bought war bonds, and drove the same style of car for five years in a row. They decided, as a nation, to sacrifice for a greater good.

If we are truly at 'war' with some vaguely defined 'terroristicaly inclined' culture of hate, that hate us for being free enough to rape and pillage their homeland to the point that we have over the last 100 years, then we have to take a few things into consideration.

One; there is no free war. War is not free. It costs a nation to wage war, no matter whether the people fighting it 'volunteered' or not. We're paying the price right now, with a national mood so ugly and divisive the like of nothing seen since prior to the Civil War. We're paying the price of the hubris of one party rule. It's costing us, literally, trillions of dollars in the long run, none of which is funded. In fact, not only are we not paying for the war, we're giving away tax cuts during God Damned war time!

*sigh*

Two; they do hate us, and it's not because we're free or because of our morally self-righteous beliefs. They don't hate us for our wealth, or even for our decadence and gluttony. They hate us because we built it all on their backs. Pont of fact #1: In 1953 the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran because it was going to nationalize it's own oil industry and kick out the greedy US oil companies that had been sticking it to them with impunity until then. we installed the Shah, who was by all measures a despot and tyrant. He was overthrown and here we are today, a direct result of our involvement in that country. Pont of fact #2: we sold Saddam anthrax spores and gas gangrene, as well as other controlled substances used in the creation of various nerve gasses. Pont of fact #3: We have consistently propped up the Saudi royal family despite decades of knowing for a fact they are every bit as despotic and tyrannically as Saddam was, they just have a lot fewer people to grind under their boot heel. The Saudi regime in the 70's was particularly bloodthirsty. Point of fact #4: Most Middle Eastern nations were ruled until recently by a minority Sunni block, whereas the majority of the downtrodden were Shiites. This is true especially in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but also in some other ME countries as well. For decades we have propped up and rewarded despotic regimes in the Middle East while they oppressed their Shiite minority, and it's supposed to be a wonder why the Shiites now coming to power in the ME hate us?

Three; All the terrorists are coming from the Middle East, where we've supported despotic regimes for the last half plus century. Is that just coincidence? Do they really hate us for our freedom? Or do they ahte us because we've historicaly denied them the very same freedom we claim to be fighting for? We have to acknowledge the sins of the past before we can move forward.

And finally, Four; if it weren't for oil, we'd have never been over there in the first place. Our over reliance on oil and cheap plastic crap has forced us to compromise the very morals and values we now claim to be pushing onto the Iraqi people whether they want it or not. That's called hypocrisy, people, and it's far easier to hate for that than because of some subjective moralistic claim of freedom that somehow makes us better than they are.

In short, they hate us because of oil.

We can never have enough domestic oil to supply our current level of demand. A demand that puts cell phones in peoples hands even if they're homeless. A demand that forces us to compromise our values to secure some notion of national security, a way of life that has no natural bases or reason to exist or to even be expected. So we either continue to fight 'terrorists' that 'hate' us in a 'war' that will never end, ever. Or we change our very culture, we make sacrifices for the greater good, we pull together as patriots and believers. We sacrifice.

One of the greatest let downs of Bush for me, on a personal note anyway, was his failure to ask the American people to sacrifice in any way after the Sept. 11th attacks. Not only did Bush not ask us to step up to the plate, he told us to sit back down and the plate would be brought to us. That he actually said, that in the aftermath of the greatest attack on our nations shores since Pearl Harbor, that after that emotional trauma on an indescribable scale, he tells us to go shopping. See a movie. Don't change your daily routine. We had, in his words, had war declared on our very existence, yet we were to not sacrifice, not pay, not even be inconvenienced in any way because of it.

That ain't war, people, that's 'war.' Like the 'war' on crime or poverty or drugs. It's a fucking sound bite. Bush reduced it to nothing more than an evening news sound bite, nothing more than a fucking campaign slogan, electionering at best, the height of cynicism at worst.

I say cynicism because Bush seemingly has no faith in the American people. He thinks we're all like him. He had no faith the people would stand up, step up, and offer themselves in sacrifice to the greater good. That’s something that Bush has never had to offer, and in my pointed opinion he simply has no concept of it.

It's oil, people. It's always been about oil, and it'll always be about oil, as long as our cheap plastic crap economy is based on it. It's also an illusion. We can keep thinking people aren't going hungry, or without shelter, or without a means of support as long as they can afford a cell phone or a cheap plastic crap TV. we can feel better about ourselves, living in a nation where if even the 'poor' can afford a cell phone, certainly those without must simply be lazy. But in the reality of it all, even Jesus would have had a cell phone.