Interrogation techniques reliably documented to be used at US detention centers in Guantanamo or Afghanistan.

The only voter fraud that really exists is the fraudulent disenfranchisement of voters by the conservative party. They do this by cadging low income voters at the polls, undercounting their vote, and of course, using the specious charge of voter fraud to push through laws that intentionally frustrate their ability to exercise their constitutional right to vote. (for instance, the voter ID law is Georgia's new poll tax.)

Sen. Chuck Shcumer (D-NY) said in an interview that it wasn’t Israel’s fault its bombs were killing innocents (up to 37 kids at a pop) in Lebanon because Hezbollah uses civilians as shields. Ok, then using that logic, next time an armed robber takes hostages in New York and uses them as a shield it would be perfectly acceptable for NY police to blast straight through their bodies to get their man. Yeah, try selling that one at home, Chuck.

Everything is about oil -not red herring issues like banning gay marriage or frustrating stem cell research, but everything really important. Even 9-11 was about oil. Osama bin Laden wanted the US military protecting Saudi Arabia to get out so he could overthrow the royal family and control the oil himself. Two days prior to the Mission Accomplished publicity extravaganza, Donald Rumsfeld ordered the troops out, so in the end, ObL got exactly what he wanted. That’s why our Oilman in Chief now says of ObL "I really don't think that much about him... he's no longer a threat."

Invading Iraq was about oil, not so much for the oil itself, but for what could be done with it, that is, for its usefulness in gaining control of ALL THE OIL in the Middle East. The neo-clowns wanted to privatize Iraq’s oil industry and sell it off to wildcatters who would pump like there was no tomorrow. That in turn would drive the price of oil down so low that Iran and Saudi Arabia would be weakened. They could no longer withstand internal pressures and be overthrown -or else invaded much more easily. They would be replaced by democratic (read: weak, venal, and cooperative) governments that would let the US effectively rule the world oil market.

Iraq was the first inning in a game to bring the Middle East into line for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately for the neo-clowns, the Big Oil boys in Houston had a problem with the "drive the price of oil low" aspect of the plan so they stepped in and pulled the neo-clown pitcher, Paul Bremer, and replaced him with a Houston southpaw. This was a real setback to neo-clowns' aim of bringing down Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. With crude now at around seventy dollars per barrel, Middle East oil producing countries can afford unprecedented levels of bread and circus to pacify their people. 

This takes the wind out of ObL's sails just as much as it does the neo-clowns'. ObL also lusted for the overthrow of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia so that he could control Middle East oil. Thus, his aims diverged from neo-clown aims only in the matter of who should reap the prize at the end of the sought-after mass upheaval.

The reason Captain Codpiece was forced by President Vice President Cheney to stroll hand in hand through the irises with a Saudi prince was obviously related to oil. Bush had to whipsaw back to courting the Saudis once neo-clown/ObL hopes had been dashed by the Houston boys. All's forgiven now, and the Saudi prince (now King) has assuredly consented to begin pumping more and more oil as the November elections approach to bring the price at the pump down, thereby reducing the anger of the average US voter. So even the government we select in our quasi-free elections hinges on oil.

Also, why do we villainize Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and seek his overthrow? Because he has the audacity to act as if the oil beneath the surface in his country belongs to the Venezuelan people. Why did Jerry Falwell call for Chavez' assassination? Jerry is into oil too, to the point of planning to build an oil refinery himself. He would be more accurately referred to as the Reverend Jerrycan Falwell.

Finally, keep in mind that President Vice President Cheney’s energy policy was written by Enron and BP, and transcribing it took so much of his time and energy that it preempted his ever holding even a single meeting on anti-terrorism, over which he was in charge, in the months prior to 9-11. Yes, oil is everything in this world.

The US has been reduced to an oil company with a military, and it will be noted in history as the last oil venture George W. Bush drove into the ground.

Ideally, the free market could and would spur a drive toward better automobile fuel economy, without the need to mandate it through legislation. But the oil market does not even come close to being a free market. 

Oil supply is governed by a time-honored system of international price-fixing and collusion, and the price at the pump is a minor fraction of it's real cost, which includes military expenditures and diplomatic "inducements".

If focus is placed on ensuring the economic health of the US as a whole, rather than on the welfare of Big Oil and other special interests, the only practical and expedient way to address the problem of "oil addiction" is to reduce the individual dosage now, by law.

Tony Snow said the President considers public supported stem cell research "murder". Does this imply that his Justice Dept. will henceforth be prosecuting CEOs of all the private US companies pursuing stem cell research for capital murder, or is this another case where privatization renders it less offensive (as in the case of torture, for example)? Just wondering, because I’m a simple Democrat, and therefore can’t fully comprehend all the nuances of the Republican Values System without patient explanation.

While reading "Armed Madhouse" by Greg Palast, I keep thinking back to the debates we used to have in '03 about why the US was really invading Iraq. On page 121, Greg Palast states the reason as: Saddam was jerking oil prices around by alternately shutting down production and then producing to the max allowed under the "Oil For Food" program; the Saudis didn’t like this, and neither did the Big Oil boys in Houston, so they whacked him. 

How the neo-cons got their foot in the door after that for a short while -but long enough to royally screw things up- is covered in an earlier part of the book. All that really matters is that in the end President Vice President Cheney decided to "dance with those that brung him", threw out Bremer, Wolfowitz, Perle, et al, and put texas oilmen back in the driver's seat.

The neo-cons had been gunning for the Saudis, Iran, and OPEC. They hoped to flood the market with an ocean of Iraqi oil after invasion in order to bankrupt the Saudis and the Iranians. As you can imagine, Big Oil balked at the "drive down the price of oil" aspect of the pland, and the Saudis were not amused either.

But that’s all behind us now, and to show his contrition, Cheney even made Captain Codpiece hold hands among the irises with that Saudi prince -to pour oil on troubled waters, so to speak. They reconciled, and Saudi Arabia will pump gushers of oil to make US gas cheap just before the November election.

As for Saddam’s vicious and unforgivable "gassing his own people" being a reason for war, Kurds were first gassed to death en masse in 1920 by good old Winston Churchill. I don’t remember our invading London as payback though, but perhaps there are still plans...

The book shows that the US/British policy regarding Iraq's oil since 1927 has been LEAVE IT IN THE GROUND so it doesn’t drive the price per barrel down. Proof: number of oil wells in texas is one million, whereas the number in Iraq has never exceeded a meager three thousand! 

In fact, that’s what made Saddam so mean. He invaded Kuwait because they were ripping off their common oil reserves that Houston/OPEC wouldn’t allow him to pump. Ironically, if he’d been allowed to produce as much as he wanted to, the price of gas would be a buck and a quarter now! However, Houston’s profits wouldn’t be nearly as great, so forget that.

Oh well, it’s good to know that young American men and women in uniform aren’t dieing for nothing in Iraq. They’re having their brains percussed to guacamole by insurgent’s bombs to keep the price of oil high and predictable! (Not to mention bringing democracy to the Iraqi people, the ones who are too poor and uneducated to leave, that is.)

Young people entering the workforce today have no inkling that their parents at the same stage rightfully expected job protection and security, a living wage, and health benefits. Largely due to unions and the GI Bill of Rights, an ordinary working person back then could own a house, raise a family, have security, and lead a decent life. All just for being a dependable employee! Ridiculous! Absurd!

That anyone other than a successful businessman, what Ronald Reagan dubbed the "entrepreneur", should be feted in this way is incomprehensible to today's young. They have been so indoctrinated to their station as disposable workers that to think otherwise would seem to them bizarre, weak, and perhaps even un-American. The corporatists have got their heads, and we Boomers let that happen.

It's obvious to me that this short-changing of our youth is grossly unfair, immoral, and further, will prove fatal for the country. I realize also that mine is a minority viewpoint. Co-workers have teased me about my views, countering with a mocking "Viva la revolution!" and calling me "comrade". While I take this kidding in stride, I am saddened by my peers' callous indifference toward their own sons' and daughters' plight.

How can we in good conscience deny the average young person the hope of a reasonably good life through dint of his or her own striving? How did we arrive at the view that only a lucky few should henceforth be guaranteed freedom from depravation while the rest, having less opportunity or more modest abilities, must pin all their hopes on winning the lottery, regardless of how hard they work? 

The causes for our betraying our young are multiform and subtle, but not unfathomable. The salient drivers have been mass media, conservative propaganda, and the effects of aging in the baby boom demographic. TV has provided continuous diversion with the effect of precluding serious thought and questioning. Vested interests, using the techniques of Madison Avenue at their disposal, have successfully denigrated the value of work and those who perform society's everyday functions. Finally, the pig in the python, we baby-boomers, have moved the political center from left to right as we became older. Creeping conservatism typically accompanies aging, but because of our commanding numbers the surge to the right has been a tsunami.

There are still other contributors, but in the end the causes are far less important than the consequences. I think I've seen where we're headed, and it isn't pretty. As a twenty year old buck sergeant stationed  in the Philippines I saw a haunting view of what now seems to be our own future:

As I walked alone through a Manila slum late one night  I watched street vendors pick spoiled fruit from their carts and toss it into the gutter. Then came the horror: small children swooped in like sparrows and snatched up the garbage for food! I've told this story to people, but they seemed unmoved. I guess you had to be there. 

Under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines was a stark two class, winner take all society with a few very rich families at the top and millions of poor people below whose only reward was crumbs fallen fallen from the table of the corrupt rich. Begging and prostitution to GIs and Japanese businessmen were the core of that country's service economy. Given the way we're short-changing young workers now, it looks like were on the road to a similar society ourselves.

I'm close to giving up. If you attempt to speak for the common good,  few will heed. Say anything that isn't straight down the line pro-corporation in a "letter to the editor" and prepare to get an invitational letter from the Communist Party and a complimentary copy of the Worker's Daily in the mail. That's where the country's at right now: speak up for justice and people from all sides just want to call you "comrade".

Republicans: doing for America what Pinochet did for Chile!

It’s much better to let surplus fertilized embryos thaw and then dump them down the drain than to recycle them for stem cell research. The Bible says so, apparently, at least that’s someone’s interpretation, someone with king-maker leverage.

Even though the logic for a ban is muddled, the message at the President’s stem cell veto cum daycare festival was as crisp as an egg floating in a liquid nitrogen bath: stem cell researchers want to murder all those sweet little toddlers he was using as props! Of course, stem cell research in no way precludes couples’ adopting embryos, it just wants the ones that were going to be thrown into the sink.

The central issue for those anointed with Excessive Influence is that they know God does not want certain kinds of research done. However, He obviously didn’t intend infertile couples to have children, so aren’t any means of assisted fertilization wrong because they disobey His will? That means those fertilized embryos should not be there in the first place! 

Furthermore, where do you draw the line between interference and acceptance? If your naturally-conceived toddler has appendicitis, do you take her to the hospital, or just read her stories until God decides whether or not to end her suffering? What’s the criterion?

If you want to be God’s Spokesman and Interpreter of His Will on Earth, don’t pick and choose conflicting positions, because your lack of consistency defines your Hypocrisy.

Let’s go full-on religious-authoritarian for a second: if a constitutional ban on gay marriage is necessary to protect the institution, then let’s really protect it and root out the many, many philanderers from the Senate and House of Representatives. Had and affair? Get out! Divorced? Leave! 

The invasion of Iraq wasn’t necessary, but on the strength of lies and fabrication we went forward with a pre-emptive war. This was wrong, but what followed was even less necessary and infinitely worse.

Had General Jay Garner been permitted to restore order quickly after the fall of Baghdad to US forces, the tragic disintegration of Iraqi institutions and its descent into chaos would never have occurred. General Garner planned to let the wounds heal by holding free elections right away. Thus, the economy would be allowed to recover rapidly, the government would be reinstated -sans Hussein, and sectarian rifts would be prevented from forming.

That’s not what the neo-cons in the Pentagon had in mind, unfortunately. Garner was abruptly removed and replaced with Paul Bremer, who put the brakes on elections so that the economy of Iraq could be transformed according to a plan drawn up largely by Grover Norquist. Bremer also instituted "de-Baathification", which completely overturned the government of Iraq. The result has been a magnificent opportunity for US and British corporations, along with a descent into hell for Iraq involving hunger, deprivation, destitution, and mayhem. It also set up US military men and women as sitting ducks for insurgents.

This could all have been avoided if General Garner were allowed to follow a rational approach to Iraq's restoration. But that wasn’t good enough for the Pentagon neo-cons who needed to offer Iraq up as a love-poem to Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss. Their hubris-fueled experiment has resulted in 50 to 100 thousand Iraqi deaths, many of them children turned into “red mist” as Mike Malloy puts it. It has resulted in 60 percent unemployment and the social and economic breakdown of Iraq. It has ushered in a miasma of sectarian violence and brought lifetime disability to tens of thousands of American military personnel.

Again, this interminable horror is the neo-cons’ gratuitous addendum to the war, and not caused by the war itself. These Pentagon darlings thought they had the right to put two nations into the crucible just to test their boneheaded dream-theories. It amounts to this: not content to have merely broken a single vase, the neo-cons came back to the Pottery Barn afterwards with baseball bats and shattered everything in sight.

Even given the indolence of the lapdog press, how members of the administration are still able to pass the war in Iraq off as a war on terror is baffling. Anyone not in a profound delusional state knows full well that WMD was a marketing ploy fabricated to propel us into Iraq. Everyone also knows that if you put Saddam Hussein in a room with Osama bin Laden and locked the door, bin Laden would rip Hussein's throat out with his bare hands. There's no way these two ever collaborated over 9-11or anything else.

For those left who cling to the idea that invasion was still justified because Saddam Hussein "had to be dealt with sooner or later", I have two words: Muammar Gaddaffi. Gaddaffi had a hand in blowing an airliner out of the sky over Lockabee, Scotland years ago in which hundreds were killed, including American servicemen. But lately he's been cheerfully writing checks out to Halliburton, and the Bush Administration just removed the "terrorist sponsoring nation" label from his country, Libya. So you see, invasion isn't always necessary to rehabilitate a rogue. Anyway, Saddam was a toothless tiger in 2003, and no threat to any of his neighbors or the US.

I guess it all comes down to cognitive dissonance. We think of ourselves as a moral, some insist Christian, nation. It's therefore unthinkable that we would invade a country just to allow American and British business to usurp that country's resources. Neither would we permit Pentagon Hannibals to invade in a prelude to attacking others for the sole purpose of controlling the world's oil supply. We're not robber barons or imperialists, we're good folks! Therefore, we're there to promote democracy and fight the war on terror.

That must be it, fighting evil-doers, yeah. And making the world safer. And defending virginity. And saving the Easter Bunny. Sure, the Easter Bunny, that's the ticket!

"To stop throwing virgins into the volcano now would make the deaths of all previous virgins meaningless."

Henry Paulson worked at Goldman Sacks for 6 months this year before going to work in the Bush Administration as Treasury Secretary. In addition to being paid around 36 million per year, he also recieived an 18.7 million dollar bonus for six months' work. Now, if you work for a living, don't you think this is a little our of whack, or do you really believe you are only worth 1/3,500 th of what he received just for a bonus? 

Goldman Sacks believes he's worth at least 7000 of you or each of your working sons and daughters. That's what the Republicans think too, and if that's what you think, then you might be right. Otherwise, shake off your complacency and start standing up for yourself and your working kids by voting for someone who believes you have value and that your children deserve healthcare and the chance to earn a decent living.

This isn't the politics of envy, it's a demand for justice and a call to thwart galloping classism.

I know a kid in his twenties who drives an old junker. Of course, he hasn’t any money. He’s a hard worker and all, but so far he hasn’t climbed the ladder, so he drives what he can afford, which isn’t much. To no one’s surprise, being swarthy and driving an old car is a magnet for police in a Southern town. Having a cracked window is a ringer.

The policeman who stopped him was in the end gracious enough to let him off with a warning. However, he did detain the kid for a considerable length of time, during which he patted the kid down and searched the car. Keep in mind that the infraction was merely a cracked window.

He interrogated the kid at great length about where he worked, where he was going, etc. He was obviously searching for contradictions and inconsistencies in the kid‘s story, fishing for something substantial. There was an old, knobless TV in the back seat, and he accused the kid point blank of stealing it.

Sadly, the policemen was just performing the general duties of his office, the task the good burghers of his city pay him to do, which is to harry those who by their standards don’t belong there. Part of the job is to make it so difficult, that is, degrading, for "undesirables" that they will drive around the city limits just to avoid being harassed. Thus, order is upheld and property values maintained even at the expense of disregarding someone‘s liberties.

The second paragraph of The Declaration of Independence contains the phrase "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Those are nice words, noble words that raise the hackles on the back of your neck when you hear them. But the culture has yet to match the rhetoric, and I don’t see that it’s even headed in that direction.

So when fireworks went off this year, it was just spectacle as far as I was concerned. Yes, there was the general feeling of patriotism, but the deeper meaning was missing. The Fourth of July is a day off work for barbecue and bright lights, and not much more than bread and circus. When I heard the explosions in the distance, I didn’t even go to the window to look.

By the way, has anybody else every heard the adage, "Call a man a thief and he’ll steal"?

Who needs voters when you have Diebold? 

The bulk of American youth, and I’m not talking about valedictorians, just your regular kids, have a much harder time starting out today than we boomers did. Most of the high-paying jobs for non-college grads evaporated in their childhood.  Now they enter the working world without job protection or health insurance. They are the most disposable working generation since the depression, have no rational expectation of owning a house, and barely eek out enough to make each month’s rent. 

And who will speak for them? Certainly not we boomers, who are too preoccupied with our retirement portfolios to give a thought to the tough row they have to hoe. Certainly not the fatuous boneheads in Washington indulging in antic sideshows like the flag burning amendment! I guess the message we're sending to all those young adults whose upward mobility is half what it would be if they lived in Europe and whose only hope is to hit the lottery is this: sink or swim, we don't care either way.

The Congress' recently accepting a cost of living increase while at the same time refusing to raise the shamefully low minimum wage, betrayed a contempt for the little guy that the French Aristocracy would have thought callous and invidious.

We boomers must demand government change its policies to assure young Americans have the chance at a decent and secure life. They're not speaking up for themselves because sadly, unlike the kids in France, they have no expectation of anything better than the crumbs they've been handed. Raised in a culture awash in Horatio Alger mythology, they meekly accept their situation, pinning their hopes on the lottery. But their only real hope lays in we boomers stepping up on their behalf. 

The economy has been as broadly rewarding and strong as it has been throughout our lives largely because of the GI Bill. It afforded returning WWII veterans the opportunity of an education and a chance to own a house of their own. Rather than be restricted to the ranks of low wage labor as their fathers had been, returning veterans were permitted to achieve according to their abilities, and many more finally had the chance to raise a family in conditions above the poverty line. The GI Bill broke the stranglehold of privileged entitlement in education and business and ushered in an era of meritocracy. That’s how we boomers were able to do better in life than our parents.

The GI Bill did not waft down from heaven. It was the brainchild of Huey P. Long, and veterans of WWI were adamant -to the point of threatening armed insurrection- that the men and women coming home from Europe and the Pacific would not return to the same state of neglectful exclusion to which previous veterans were relegated. The GI Bill was a gift to the young -and to all of us who followed- from the cheated veterans of the First World War.

It’s time for my generation to similarly step up for today’s young people. To do anything less is vain, self-indulgent, and cowardly.

The one sentence that impressed me to my core when I first heard it and that remains with me still is, "Ask not what your country can do for you -ask what you can do for your country." If you want to awaken the better nature in people, it’s pointless to appeal to their self-interest, you must speak to their sense of altruism and duty. Americans must be admonished to stop eating their young and take their place beside the ancients.

Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

               -Ambrose Bierce

The war is over. It ended after the fall of Baghdad and the White House hung up that huge banner, Mission Accomplished, on the USS Lincoln. Now it's an open-ended police action, and the Vice President of Iraq, with the full support of the Iraqi President, asked President Bush during his very recent visit to begin pulling out.

They asked us! We have said all along that this is not an occupation and that as soon as they can take care of their own security, we'd leave. Iraq now has a functioning government, a fact heavily touted by the Administration and Congress, so what right do we have to override their judgment and subjugate their authority? Really, either they are a puppet government under occupation or else a sovereign one. You can't have it both ways. 

In his 2006 SOTUA the president of the United States made the declaration that we are addicted to oil, as if it were an epiphany. Belated as the revelation my have been, the metaphor of addiction bears scrutiny. Like any addictive substance, oil produces demands exclusive of its initial benefit to the user and dictates continuous use even to the addict's detriment.

Petroleum made things easier initially, and there are things for which it will always be indispensable because it multiplies the ability to do useful work, many times over what could be provided through the power of man and beast. But carbon fuels in general have created needs that require steadily more of their use, whether or not they are of any real advantage. It has done this by facilitating mankind's follies right alongside its achievements, sometimes simultaneously.

I live in the South, having moved here for employment almost twenty years ago. Above all else, what makes the South's economic boom possible is air-conditioning. The electric power for homes and buildings is derived from burning coal. This pollutes the air with a smorgasbord of poisons like mercury and nitrogen compounds, but also a lot of CO2. As most of us have accepted by now, this is heating up the atmosphere, which in turn requires that more electricity be produced to cool us, so that the effect is runaway energy consumption, not to mention pollution. 

Gasoline significantly abets use of coal by allowing families to move out of cities to suburbs, where farmland has been destroyed to make room for ever larger houses that demand more coal be burned for air-conditioning. Oil and coal work in tandem to increase each other’s demand. Huge diesel powered road building machines level, grade, and pave broad highways to reach the new suburbs with asphalt, which is largely made from petroleum.

By default, the over-sized houses cannot be reached by any means but automobile. Houses are too widely scattered for public transportation to be feasible, so every occupant of every house drives a car. Without it one is marooned in a boring repetitious expanse of lawns and driveways. To reach work one must negotiate miles of congested roads -thank goodness our cars are air-conditioned, although not by cheaper coal.

The downtowns of America, needless to say, have been replaced by (air-conditioned) suburban malls, temples of merchandising set in the middle of hundreds of acres of parking lots, some so large that there are shuttle busses provided during the Christmas shopping season. Malls are more than places to merely shop for necessities, of course. They are hubs of social interaction, as the downtown areas once were. They differ from the old downtown though in that commercial interests more directly control them. 

Everything, beginning with their layout, is pointedly designed to extract your money. They are planned to confine your activities to that purpose alone. You will not be pestered by kooks passing out handbills there as in the old downtown, because malls, unlike Main Street, are private property. Your shopping experience will be confined to just that, with no ideas presented that are unrelated to buying. I suppose the more you shop at malls, the more acceptable, even desirable, this becomes.

As for grocery shopping, you don't send you kid to the store on his bike to get a loaf of bread in suburbia. The supermarket occupies a strip mall on a secondary road that can't be reached by bicycle, even if it is only a mile or two away as the crow flies. Suburbs are destination-oriented. There’s no oasis between your driveway and the strip mall, nowhere to stop and rest, just more subdivisions, and the roads are made for cars, not bicycles. There are no sidewalks, and the intersections are too hazardous for a kid to negotiate. The roads are just wide enough for either cars or insane adults in Spandex, not for drifty nine year olds toting a loaf of bread.

So if you want to keep your kid from getting fat from lack of exercise, if you don't want your kid to turn into a suburban squab, you have to drive her or him to a soccer field or a ballpark to play an organized sport. The days of a kid pedaling down to the park to do his or her thing in a serendipitous way while mom and dad hang around at home are long gone. If your kid's any good at a sport, count on turning over your weekends to driving a hundred miles or so for games. In a way this isn't all bad, since it at least forces you out of your sterile suburban tract to meet other people. The problem is they are sports parents, a noxious breed. And of course, you burn up a lot of gas and spend even more hours in the car.

Other than mowing your oversized and useless front lawn with a power mower, you get very little exercise either. When you become alarmed by your girth, you join a gym. It’s in the strip mall near the grocery store, so you have to drive there. You could try walking around your subdivision first, but that rapidly becomes boring. You try to work off those pounds, but because you sit in your car idling in traffic for a good part of the day, you can't seem to make any real headway and eventually give up. 

Even your work is located in an office park, just as separated from everything else as your house is, so you must drive to lunch too. No opportunity for exercise there. Accept that you're fated to be middle aged, overweight, and stressed out. Buy a new car; it'll make you feel better for a while, but that feeling will fade long before the payments are done, so at some point you'll trade it in for another. 

The above are all lifestyle issues, they concern quality of life, and they are all dictated by the totalitarianism of the automobile and wholly dependant on burning gas. Cheap gas made the suburbs possible, and now they’re inescapable. It’s a motorized treadmill from which there is no escape. The smarter people -and I’m not one of them- moved back into the city before property values there launched into orbit. They’re not fat. That’s not opinion, they're thinner than suburbanites, it's a fact. Not only can they reach their destination on foot or by a combination of public transit and walking, but they’re also not as bored. Whereas we only walk between our cars and mall exits across parking lots, they motivate along something called "sidewalks", where cars aren’t allowed, so they aren’t constantly on guard against being backed over. They are free to look around or converse while they walk. What a concept!

So much for lifestyle, now let's talk about the nitty-gritty, life. All those suburbs occupy land that was once farmed. Not to worry, because petroleum fertilizer has made more intensive and productive farming possible, so less land is needed to produce our food. Trucks bring food from farms to processing plants and from there to our strip mall supermarkets, so the land turned over to asphalt and big front lawns isn't missed. But it takes seven calories of petroleum to deliver one calorie of processed, canned, or shrink-wrapped food at the checkout. It’s a darn good thing energy will remain cheap and limitless forever! Oops. Houston, we have a problem.

Actually, there's still plenty of oil left for the immediate future, although it'll cost more. The price at the pump isn't the whole cost either. As far-fetched as this sounds, it's entirely possible that someday we will be fighting a war, or wars, in the Middle East over, if not oil itself, the politics of oil. It’s even conceivable that at some point, some of our leaders may consider it to be in our economic interest to interfere with the internal politics of South American oil producing countries, but I hope it won't ever come to that. And I hope above all else that Big Oil or energy companies like former Enron won’t dictate our own political decisions. Heaven forefend.

In the perceptible world though, food production is already being impacted by our overall energy profligacy, independent of its intense use in agriculture. We’re already on thin ice. It’s hot and getting hotter, and even the Reverend Pat Robertson has recently, reluctantly, come to the point of view this is being caused by greenhouse gasses, rather than godless northeastern intellectual elites and homosexuals. Agriculture depends on water as well as petroleum, and hotter weather requires more water. Unfortunately, the supply of water in places where the bulk of our food is shipped from is limited, finite. We are running out of water faster than we are running out of oil. Not only may we starve, but our front lawns may burn up! Horrible.

This is the worst case scenario: as the coal soot settles on our air-conditioned McMansions, we will be poised in our dens waiting for the sun to sink and the heat to subside just enough for us to go outdoors to lavish graywater on the shriveling cucumbers we've planted in a garden that once was a Scotts champion lawn in front of our suburban house. This is a truly disturbing scenario.

I think there may have been a mistake in attribution. It wasn't Teller who said, "Behold for I am become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds!" at the first atomic bomb blast; it was Eisenhower, when he finished the first interstate.

The US media isn't  misrepresenting the situation in Iraq by over-emphasizing the negatives. To the contrary, they are soft-soaping just how really bad it is, and further, while we play the unwanted police in Iraq, Afghanistan is reverting back to the Taliban. Afghanistan, along with Pakistan, always was and still is where the terrorists are. The few that are in Iraq now were drawn there only by our presence. Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with 9-11, and if you put him in a room with Osama bin Laden, the latter would rip him apart.

As for our being in Iraq to promote democracy, how stupid and culturally isolated must a person be to buy that one? The assertion is so disingenuous, even ludicrous, that it’s insulting. It’s just a fall-back marketing pitch used to replace the discredited WMD rationale. The irony is that until the emphasis shifted to "bringing democracy" to Iraq, our own radio talk show pundits were engaged in an all-out propaganda offensive against democracy. The ditto-heads were out parroting lines like "This isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic." And there were numerous stories floated that conflated democracy with communism. Why would we spend six billion dollars per month to export what we disdain and denigrate at home?

George Herbert Walker Bush stopped before his armies reached Baghdad because he understood, by instinct as well as by a reading of history, that toppling Saddam Hussein would open a Pandora’s Box of ethnic and religious strife. Unfortunately, his son listened to the same strident and radical people whose advice his father took with more than a mere grain of salt, and the result is the miasma that now exists in Iraq. You can’t really believe that staying there for another two, ten, or twenty years will change the way these people feel toward one another. These people have generational memory. They are not a nation of amnesiacs like we are. In fact, they will never be a nation at all.

The pity is that Saddam didn’t have to be "taken out" any more than Libya’s Kaddaffi did, less so in fact, because Kaddaffi WAS a terrorist. Now he’s an ex-terrorist who writes checks to Halliburton and other American and British corporations, so it is patently untrue that there was no other way to deal with Saddam than invading his country.