Here We Go Again

Would be credit union robber
mumbles, fumbles, stumbles,
drops gun and flees.

Here we go again. Now we want to put missile defenses in Rumania, ostensibly to protect Europe from potential missile attacks from Iran. Russia is concerned again, just as they were over our attempt to put such defenses in Poland, and rightly so as near as I can tell. One might well ask, what missile attacks? Does anyone really believe that Iran is going to start firing missiles at Europe or Russia or anywhere else for that matter? What on earth is the matter with us? We seem to keep insisting that Iran is some terrible threat to us, Europe, Israel, or presumably even Iceland or Tasmania. I repeat myself, why would Iran with a military budget one (1) percent of ours, and far less than Israel’s or most any other major country, want to start firing missiles at anyone and thus bring about their inevitable demise? This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I can only conclude from our recent build-up in the Persian Gulf, and now this, that we are deliberately trying to provoke Iran into doing something that will give us an excuse to start yet another “war.” I guess now that we are (presumably) going to get out of Iraq, and Russia is no longer considered a mortal threat, we don’t dare attack China, and we can’t attack Saudi Arabia or anywhere else where we have to get oil (like Venezuela, Mexico or Canada), we have to make certain we have another “enemy” threatening us and Iran fits the bill. Without such an enemy how could we possibly continue to justify bloated defense and Pentagon budgets that exist for little reason other than maintaining our absurd military/industrial/political complex and thus fattening the already obscenely fat cats that demand it? This belief that Iran is a threat to the world is obviously just manufactured and promoted for no other reason as it has no basis in reality. Let me repeat it again, Iran is not a threat to the U.S. or the rest of the world. There is no evidence they are anywhere near building a nuclear bomb, nor do they have enough missiles to make them a serious threat to the world. They have not attacked anyone for more than 200 years, the Iranian people admire the U.S., and if Israel and the U.S. would stop threatening to bomb them they would most probably be happy to negotiate whatever it is that needs to be negotiated (but obviously they are not going to negotiate a regime change with us). This whole business with Iran is stupid beyond belief.

And speaking of stupid, I see that our country continues to muddle along with a political system so absurd it ought to be the subject of a comic book. In what is supposed to be a democratic system nothing can happen in Washington because of threatened filibusters. That is, the majority does not rule in this democracy, instead there must be 60 votes out of 100 to get anything done and the Republicans have 41 votes and threaten to filibuster everything. For some unfathomable reason the Democrats refuse to use their 51 vote majority to overturn this ridiculous situation and so the stalemate continues. If that is not stupid enough, it turns out that one Senator (in this case Richard Shelby) can single-handedly hold up not one appointment, but all appointments the President wishes to make. This is democracy at work? And what makes this worse is that the hold-ups have nothing whatsoever to do with the qualifications of any of these appointments, but, rather, with the fact that Shelby wants a bunch of money for some project or other in Alabama, in other words, a kind of legal blackmail. And don’t forget that our Supreme Court has now insisted that corporations are actually persons and are allowed to contribute as much money as they wish to influence politics, which for all practical purposes means that no one but the corporations will be able to determine who the candidates will be, who will be elected, and what they will be allowed to do once elected. This is not a whole lot different from what happens now, but they are so much in charge now they feel they can be perfectly open about it, come out of the closet as it were.

LKBIQ:
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
David Brin

TILT:
Cinnamon is native to Sri Lanka and was imported into Egypt as early as 2000 B.C.