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Well... Things haven't improved much since my last posting I see!

North Korea tested a nuke...kinda. I guess it misfired or something. Good thing they don't have weapons of mass destruction and are hell bent on destroying the world like Iraq was... oh wait. Oh their country doesn't have a strategic commoditity on it. I wonder what'll happen with Kim Jong-il chokes on a bon-bon and slinks off this mortal coil. Hopefully cooler heads will pervail, though I highly doubht that.

I suppose I have to talk about Iraq. I'm not sure what else to really say about it. Our government and by extension, us fucked up. That's right, we're to blame. Luckily in the last election those of us who voted explained in clear language we thought that Congress rolling over and not providing any oversight and giving the president a blank check was a mistake that they should lose their jobs. I could go on about this, but so much has been said and written that I think my musing about it would merely be a full repeat. However, go read "Fiasco" by Thomas Hicks. It's horrifyingly educating, but like anything else, realize that your seeing one side of the argument and keep that in mind.

There's something that a good freind of mine said and I'll repeat it here because I think it's really intelligent point of view on the overarching "War on Terrorism". I'm at best paraphrasing, but you'll get the jist.

After September 11th, George Bush had an opportunity to take this country in a different direction. He in that single moment in history could have stood up at the podium and said "Listen the people of America. Those who just attacked us, were funded by us. Everytime you fill your tank, you're funding terrorism. America will no longer be beholden to the oil barrens of the middle east. I propose by the end of this decade that America will cure itself of it's oil addiction. I know that this will be hard and America will have to sacrfice, but I know that our tenacious spirit and unparalled wisdom will prevail." He could have then gone on to explain how we were going to build massive wind farms and decommission all of our oil fired power plants. How we were going to build massive Thermal depolymerization plants that would turn our organic waste into usable oil. He could have mandated that the big three and any auto maker that wanted to sell cars in America would have to meet super strict emission and fuel economy standards.

And you know what, we would have gone along with it. We as a nation would have looked at the craters in NY and the blacked facade at the pentagon and said "Your right, we need to change course". We all know that oil is a dead end enterprise. That at some point we're going to have to get off that bandwagon. However, the future argument is always made. The idea that over the horizon is some super techology that's going to fix everything. Well, unless we start working now, that super technology might never come.

Tragically, instead we went down this path instead. Five years later and we're arguably in a more precarious security situation. Our military is streched to the limit. We're using use more oil then we've ever used.

To continue the discussion about NK is to wonder what'll happen to the crumbling infrastructure and their ?nuclear? arsenal.

At a certain level, even though Kim's a wack job, you'd have to think that at some level there's a general who has the brains to go "Ya know, even if we had a dozen of these bombs, we're going to lose." Though if people weren't aware, NK has managed to drop missile parts on Alaska. So, if they wanted they could with drop a bomb on San Francisco. What's a more frightening prospect is NK starving would degenerate into a civil war and it's nuclear material would go to the strongest general or the highest bidder. (though the strongest general wouldn't be too bad provided they didn't have the intention to use it) So, in a nutshell, NK worries me.

The next area that frightens me in terms of future stability is China (and India). China has a couple of major problems that it doesn't like to talk about. I'll mention the first one and then talk about both of them when I talk about the second one. The first problem is AIDS. Right now China has an out of control AIDS epidemic that it isn't talking about or doing much about. The second and more serious problem is peasant unrest. The great divide between the peasants and "haves" in chinese society grows every bigger. These "haves" have the money to buy the medicines to stave off the effects of AIDS. The peasants who have little or no education about safe sex practices come to the cities (most of them male) come to the city to make money to bring home to their village. Once in the cities they engage in risky sexual behavior. In one region 11% of sex workers tested postive for HIV. They then go home to their village and well you get the idea. The thing that's dangerous is that this is directly effecting the cogs of chinese industrial might. What happens when large numbers of it's working age population can't work anymore, i.e. start dying in droves. Now the government has gotten off their asses on this, but so far it's been really slow to react. When the unrest bit comes in is that at a certain point the workers are going to realize that the government a) knew this was happening b) did nothing about it. That's when the shit will hit the fan. Though at that point it's a bit like beating up the captain after the ships already gone over the waterfall. China's social fabric will start to rip when there isn't enough food. Then international investors will start bailing out (though that will have happened earlier (probably right after the communiest party is dragged out in the street and dismembered by 100 million enraged peasants).

India frightens me for all the same reasons as China. Rampant poverty, population explosion combined with an explosive HIV situation.

If you've been following the news, you'll see that there are some major issues in the Ukraine right now. Basically, according to the exit polls the non russian backed canidate should have won, but the russian backed canidate won instead. To top it off, international monitors reported voting irregularities. Though they haven't said what those were. In any case, right now there are tens of thousands of Ukranians in the street demanding that the "winner" be redecided. This brings up the next question. What if russia has been trying to influence the election in Ukraine? It's not that inconcievable. Considering that 15 years ago, it was just a satelite state of the USSR. Everybody thought that Putin was pro-western president until he suddenly ignored all kinds of russian properly law and gutted russians largest oil company on grounds that people have argued are "flimsy" (such as the company suddenly having massive tax bills out of nowhere). Could we see a new soviet union reemerge? IF it did, what ramifications would that have on our current military strategies? We've moved away from fighting the monolythic enemy (USSR) to the current situation where we're basically the worlds targets... Though we do have to remember that alot of messes that we've made in the past were to harrass the USSR and now those messes have come back to haunt us. (i.e. Afghanistan)

Back in the day there was this doctrine about how the foreign policy of a country should be to promote stability in the world.

Looking at the existing situation the world is in, I see a couple of things happening the near to far future that I think will have a profound effect on the quality of life here in America.

1. Saudia Arabia. I see in the not to distant future the Saudi's losing control of Arabia. There are a number of factors to why this will happen, however the most profound are these. Firstly, the royal family skims something like 40% of it's countries wealth off for itself. This while people live in extreme poverty. Secondly, In order to keep the people from wanting to march into the palaces and string them up, they Saudi's have had a tactic of keeping the people pissed at some other group of people... you know... us. They've done this by allowing extreme forms of Islam to flourish in SA. So, now you've got a group of fantical people who believe that all their problems (both real (I'm not going to pretend that we haven't thrown some gas on the fire) and percieved) Though the problem with this strategy is that, the Saudi's are actually in bed with the current administration (Bush & Co.). So, now that the princes have cultivated this core group of religious zealots who believe that all things american are unholy, they're losing control of them. This is double bad. For one, because of our short sighted knuckleheaded policies, without the Saudi's oil, we've only got about 6 months before we start hearing this loud sucking sound out where our strategic oil reserves are. For two, the Saudi's need us just as bad. So, when the royal family's heads are living out in the sand cleanly removed from their bodies, the timer starts on our economy and it's already run out for theirs. Then the only export SA has is terrorists. Think about it. If you add up all th exports from the 22 oil producing countries in the middle east and then subtract oil from their exports, it's smaller than Finland. SA doesn't produce anything other than oil.

2. North Korea. I highly suspect that their's no clean rules for power transition in that country and I don't think Kim's getting any younger. The countries offical flower is the kimjongilia (I kid you not, I couldn't make this shit up if I tried!)
Thus I suspect that when the time comes it'll degenerate into a messy internal power struggle between the generals and their armies, etc.

This POST isn't finished, though feel free to comment...

So, I went yet a whole other year without writing in my journal.

Well, I'm now 28. Since I was 27, my wife and I bought a house.

No promises, but I'll post more as things progress...

Yeah, I haven't written in my Journal in a whole year ;-)

Pretty much, not much has changed.