Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Crumbling

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

“”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.

Federal Budgets

Posted on by
Reply

Watching bloggers go bonkers reporting that Social Security may be cut to balance the government’s budget has me laughing all the way to Apocalypse. What is it that people thought? Social Security is a time-shifting Ponzi Scheme that isn’t illegal because the government runs it. It gratifies the liberal in me and makes absolutely no sense economically especially when we have an upside-down-triangle shaped population as ranked by age (thanks WW2 baby boom!).

When people catch wind that an entitlement as big as Social Security or one as fundamental as Medicare is threatened everyone instantly closes their eyes and power-stuffs their head into the sand – wham wham thhhwap plork!

I tweeted a while back that it would be an interesting time when the government was faced with Social Programs vs. Military Spending. This particular versus is an insidious one, because if either side wins it’s an economic apocalypse. It’s a Catch-22 as well, since you can’t keep this kind of spending going forever, eventually China will go apeshit and demand that we take the borrowing we’re fleecing them for seriously. In many regards, USA(SSI vs. DoD) Vs. China. If we cut Social Security we’ll have outrage, panic, and most likely a spike in heart attacks. If we cut Medicare we’ll have a lot of dead elderly as medical care will become catastrophically unaffordable. If we touch military spending then we’ll harm the military-industrial complex and the massive flow of cash out of the DoD and back into the general economy will squelch and then we’ll have another economic collapse. So, if we all play a very good game of pretend, we can ignore that problem as long as none of us do any kind of simple mathematics. That is until China can’t stand the Catch-22 they are in with us and stop lending us money. They know that it’s disaster if they stop, but eventually they’ll have to, and then we’ll stop buying all that cheap chinese plastic crap and their economy will tumble as well.

This is epic level drama whore material. “May you live in interesting times!” Indeed a blessing and a curse! Afghanistan nearly broke the Soviets, and it’s going to break us. What’s the practical upshot? Massive hyperinflation as the US Treasury prints billions of worthless dollars in a last-ditch effort to keep the mighty US economy from total collapse. Those of us who are filthy debtors are going to be the only ones dancing in the streets as our debt, which is not keyed to inflation quickly pay off the numbers, and then we’ll follow the rest of you down the whirling economic toilet hole that is our collective future.

All it takes is time. In the meantime it will be interesting to see how the Federal Government responds to these ever-mounting pressures. Which will buckle first? Entitlements or Defense? Anyone care to toss the dice?