An Inconvenient Truth

[Merlinios]

The arms race, the chest thumping, is a never ending cycle.
Occhi

Not quite. It does have an end, but no one wants to admit it's there. It's not a pretty end, at least from the human perspective. Notions that humans can kill the planet are nothing but illusions of grandeur. The possibility that we kill ourselves, however, seems to be quite realistic.

I don't pretend to know enough about nuclear power to either decry or endorse it, but Three-Mile Island seems kind of...odd to me. Chernobyl was cause for panic. Three-Mile was, if anything, something to justify nuclear power. There was a meltdown. It was contained completely. And this inspires panic and not faith?

The drug addiction has sucked money out of the American economy into the hands of criminals...

The solution here is actually relatively simple, but politicians don't want to hear it. Legalize and tax them. This completely undercuts the black market, unless the taxes are completely obscene AND it regulates them AND it will help pay off, if not completely destroy this enormous debt that the current administration has accrued. For historic examples, one need look no further than Prohibition. How many Al Capones are completely incapacitated if we take out their primary source of funding?

As for the oil addiction...that one's a little harder. The answers are out there, but the lobbyists won't let the majority of them in. Brazil is running largely on Ethanol now. A combination of Big Oil and protection for US farmers (Good Idea™) is killing the idea in the US at the moment...so why can't we irrigate all of that Texan oil-land and turn it into cornfields? Ethanol is obviously not the only answer, but it's the most concrete at the moment. And lest we forget, it burns MUCH cleaner than standard gasoline. But the infernal combustion engine has been run on everything from cooking oil to pig excrement, and hydride engines are (presumably) in development. There are simply too many political and mental barriers for a conversion to happen right now, though.

'Course, we could always go with giant hamster wheels filled with republicans...erm...the dregs of society. And no, not the guys who are living out of the garbage. That isn't (necessarily) their fault. Howsabout the ones that drop out of school and work at McDonalds forever to get by and stay in a perpetual state of stoned...ness? I've heard it said that SOMEONE has to do that job. No they don't. If there's anything America doesn't need, it's McDonalds. Genius marketing idea? Maybe. Good for the country? Not really, except in the sense that it creates jobs. Maybe we could get some of those idiot politicians and media icons into the wheels as well (not just the Republicans this time <insert smilie here, because I refuse to>.

--me