God, Religious Ideology, & the Legitimate Fall of Al Qaeda

So Al Queda claimed the recent subway bombings in London.

With the IRA and WWII London saw more bombings than most people could ever imagine, so it took London no time at all to recover from the recent terrorist bombing. There are already we are not afraid websites promoting worldwide peace.

Interesting to note that the effects in London were not of much note the next day over there, yet it is a reason for everyone in the United States to BE VERY AFRAID:

Code orange indicates a high risk of attack, and in the U.S. system is the second-highest terror alert behind red. The lowest level is green, followed by blue and then yellow. Chertoff is considering changing the system amid complaints that it is to vague and confuses the public.

“I’d love to say we’re going to see green in our lifetime,” Chertoff told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s kind of an aspirational state, but I can’t tell you in the foreseeable future we’re going to be below yellow.”

And there in rests the truth. Our terrorism rainbow will never go away. Al Qaeda is just a marketing tool.

If you are afraid there is ALWAYS a military budget where the government selects which companies to pay from your pocketbook based on the best bid prices, the best value, past performance, who knows who, where the defense contractor is located, who donated to finance the political campaigns, and how many shares the politicians and their friends own in any given company.

In the real world murder is real. It happens. Terrorism happens, and even in the wonderful United States 1 in 138 US citizens are in prison for one reason or another.

We seem to have a short memory about when we blow up other countries airplanes, but it's no real secret that it happens too. Even admirals in the military admit to some of the lies:

Three years after the incident, Admiral William Crowe admitted on Nightline that the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time of the shoot down. This directly contradicted the official Navy claims of the previous years.

Sometimes we are even so kind to drop in on a wedding with bombs. Of course when we do it it is only an accident.

The biggest problem associated with terrorism is fear. Fear prevents people from focusing on things they believe in and also promotes a misallocation of assets. The media is trying to help remind us that we really do need to be afraid, but it would be hard to picture a functional government which had any more debt and spent more money on national defense against invisible enemies. US military spending is around $400,000,000,000.00 annually.

I sorta agree with Benjamin Franklin's & Abraham Lincoln's philosophy on freedom and military spending:

• "Those who are willing to trade freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security." - Ben
  
• "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abe

If smaller countries were stable in the longrun it would cost less because we would not have so many expensive conflicts. Additionally if smaller less stable countries became more stable they could help advance technology, which would give us competition and help us advance more quickly as well.

Sure that will mean we would have to balance limited resources sooner rather than later, but wouldn't improving technology help that along?

Gas prices are still going up. The additional oil burned due to military consumption does nothing to make us less dependant on foreign oil. China and India are still growing fast. China is trying to buy US oil companies.

The oil demand will outstrip supply. While we want to control the middle east and are trying to use religious idealologies to get their oil, it is not a practical solution because it only solves the symptoms. If there is not enough oil in the world then bad shit will happen, no matter who controls the oil. Instead of looking forward and leveraging our current position the twits in the US government are (and I will use their own words back at them) "risking national security" by ignoring reality and letting rich oil companies leverage their postion to make money for international oil companies.

Rather than try to look at our problems and how to make our society future proof our government is pampering us with short term fixes and projecting blame for all that is wrong on some arbitrary group in a far away place based on some religious ideals other than the most common religions here.

Brute force is the act of a reptilian thinking tool. We can't keep forcing our way, because that just escalates more reptilian thinking. For example:

"If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," Maj Gen Zhu told an official briefing for foreign reporters. source

I appreciate many things in life, but I am ashamed of any God that could have created someone like Bush, and put him in his current position. The love, respect, and understand is supposed to be a two way street there, at least with MY God. I am not sure who they are, but you probably will not read about them in any of the most popular religious books, especially any of the books Bush would read.

Posted at July 11, 2005 2:42 AM