Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

During war, those “helping the war along” with political action, supplying arms, gasoline, whatever, become monstrously wealthy while simultaneously living in total luxury and safety. With billions being spent on the war, every dead American soldier makes some company other million dollars. How is that right? Here's what I see: idealistic brave young people dying to make traitors rich, tricked with the aid of an ignorance the rich have worked very hard to ensure through the destruction of the rural economy, the school system, and every other tool of the people.

I was watching CNN yesterday and they were talking about some program the US government has started to help soldiers' familes donate money to properly supply the troops with the things they need… I guess it's no problem to come up with billions for Halliburton, but the men and women who are sacrificing their lives aren't worth that much. Does no one see how wrong it is to try and “trick” their equally poor communities into paying the bills that the government can't pay because they've already handed it all to wealthy buddies?

Imagine if America was chock full of oil. Now imagine that China has run out of oil. So, the Chinese government strikes a deal with the US government to buy their oil. The US government then suspends elections, destroys civil rights, gets rid of the education system, the free press, blocks internet access, bans pop music and movies, and makes everyone but the wealthiest families slaves living far below the poverty line. All of the profits go to the country's rulers, and none of it goes to the people. Wealthy Chinese workers come and stay in five-star hotels, occasionally rape US schoolgirls for fun and are never punished, and on and on. To make matters worse, they try and ban your religion and tell you that you have to stop flying the stars and stripes.

That's what life is like — with the country names changed of course — from the point of view of the terrorists who chopped off Paul Johnson's head. Don't tell me that every patriotic American wouldn't wage the same guerrilla war if the roles were reversed. Like it or not, Paul Johnson was a part of an occupying force that was destroying the lives of millions of people in the area. It's not much of a shocker that they were brutally pissed off about it. But that should be obvious and it's not what I want to talk about.

They say did it because their “demands” were not met. Those demands were for the release of various terrorist suspects, as well as the complete withdrawal of Westerners from the Arabian peninsula.

Here's my advice to America: DO IT. Call their bluff.

Complete withdrawal.

Fuck 'em. Pull out of the Arabian peninsula. Pull every single US asset out of the Middle East. Call in any debts they have to us. Repossess all the jets, missiles, bombs, tanks, guns, and Hummers we've sold them. Stop buying oil from them and cut off their income totally. See how happy they are without our money. Cancel all foreign aid — don't even sell them food. In America, use biodiesel and other domestic sources of fuel (it's cheaper anyway). Let them figure out how to live on their own without our help, since these messed up dictatorships that we keep supporting (and unsupporting) are clearly not helping us or them.

Here's a truth, and it's one that humans had better figure out if we want to be the Gods of the universe. I don't know about you, but I want humans to not only dominate this solar system, but I want us to spread out over the entire galaxy and beyond. But I digress:

The Earth will again face a natural disaster that has the potential to wipe out much of the human race and the rest of the life on the planet. It has happened many times before, and it will happen many times again.

We will go into another ice age like in The Day After Tomorrow. An underwater earthquake or island collapse will cause 500 foot tsunamis to strike the world's coasts (which is where nearly every major city is located). An asteroid will strike us. All of those will happen — we just don't know when. It could be in a thousand years or it could be tomorrow. We could also face runaway errors of our own creating; a robot apocalypse or a plague. While we can try and avoid the problems we create ourselves, we can't stop the ones fate throws at us.

We're really going to feel like a bunch of dumbasses when we realize we've frittered away all of our resources on something as ignorant as war when our species is really put to the test.