The Art of War and Nonsense:

Ye gods man, there is nothing more disgusting than cable news. The leviathan has risen and he is one ugly son of a bitch. Our country is in a major state of disarray, we stand at the brink of chaos, utter collapse, and the globe has a fever and BUDGET OVERRUNS!!! The deficit, woe is the dollar for its day is nearly done. The time has come for us to pay the piper and our tab is long and ugly. The nation, and the world is coming to from a long carbon fueled binge and the hangover is going to be wicked.

As I write, I am stricken with second degree burns on the bottoms of both of my feet. I would like to tell you that the wounds were received in the course of a noble action, where I rescued a kitten from a burning tree, but alas, no such truth will be had here.

With all that being said, let’s review the current state of affairs in these here United States. Given the urgency of this correspondence I will forgo any further platitudes and get right to business.

The Earth has a fever that Tylenol won’t fix…

According to experts, the year of our Lord, two thousand ought six has shown to be the hottest year on record. This summer has seen heat waves that have scorched crops in multiple states, spiked electrical usage to record levels and caused numerous deaths among the young and elderly.

In my research I have learned that many of the world’s glaciers are melting at unpecedented rates. Glaciers are masses of ice that form over centuries of winters, they are slowly moving rivers of ice, and they are melting. They are melting faster each year.

According to a recent BBC article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4346211.stm) Glaciers in the Himilayan mountains stand on the brink to hit humanity with a one two punch of devastation that could impact two of the largest population centers in the world. These glaciers have previously melted at a much more conservative pace. This annual snow melt feeds rivers that provide drinking water to hundreds of millions of people in China and on the Asian Subcontinent.

With increased melt, experts predict that these areas will be flooded, raising the levels of rivers such as the Mekong, Yangtze, Ganges and Indus. These same experts predict that this flooding will last for a few decades. Ten, twenty or thirty years of annual flooding in regions loaded with people that live in flood plains, in minimal housing. This will create the first catastrophe that will utterly devastate tens of millions of lives and send shockwaves throughout the rest of the world.

As if nature could not do enough, the period of flooding will be followed by periods of excessive drought. Farmers that depend on these rivers for irrigation will no longer be able to rely on a steady source of water. The impact to food supplies will be as devastating if not more so than the preceding flooding disasters.

The increased rapidity in the melting of glaciers is one and only one example of many. Couple this on a global scale with: heat waves that are more severe, droughts that are more pronounced in their intensity and duration, and hurricanes that pack a more severe punch ripping through oceans, tourist areas, population centers across the globe…

Starbucks Credit Cards and the death of the Dollar…

Why put off buying today what you can purchase and pay for tomorrow. Today an ever growing amount of purchases are made on Credit. The American People as well as the Federal government refuse to acknowledge the bottom line. We live in a consumer culture that is addicted to spending, and does not mind borrowing to get what it wants.

Early in ’06 Congress raised the debt limit to 9 trillion dollars. One dollar is about 6.4 inches in length; laid end to end a line of 9 trillion dollars would reach from the earth to the sun over four and one half times. This equates to about thirty thousand dollars in public debt for each citizen of the United States.

Like our government, We the People are addicted to our lifestyles and seemingly unwilling to make the adjustments to live within our means. According to The Motley Fool (http://www.motleyfool.com/) We the People carry approximately 1.7 Trillion dollars in consumer credit card debt, which is a fairly hefty debt to carry.

Nearly 75 % of credit card company revenues are derived from finance charges assessed to card holders, a debt free American public is not profitable for the corporations that finance our debt, the cycle is perpetuated by marketing to consumers that uses deferred interest charges (“Buy now – Pay later”) schemes that serve as a dangling carrot that is luring more and more American familes into the black-hole of debt.

In our culture, the status symbols that people are driven to attain have risen in cost to the point where consumers find themselves spending more on credit cards than ever before. With all this increased spending, household savings are at an all time low. In fact Average Household savings was in the negative in 2005, the first full year of a Negative annual average household savings since 1932 and 1933. That’s right - that was during the Great Depression…

Our country is spending itself silly. At both the household and Federal level we are sacrificing future economic stability for the short term. Pork Barrel spending, the War in Iraq and plush limousines for members of Congress are far more important than the future our children and their children. We the People need to come to grips with reality, the reality of our finances at home and in Washington D.C. and the reality that if we do not make hard choices now, the cost of waiting will be too much to bear.

The taxman cometh, bearing gifts for the rich…

Good times, good times. One day we might look back at our gaudy lifestyles lit by plasma televisions, cell phones, iPods, Blackberry’s and the like and collectively wish that we had done some of this a bit differently. I am afraid that not too enough of us ponder our place on this earth and what we are doing here, or what our species is meant to do.

I hope that after all of this is done, we turn out to be more than a plague of locusts that came and stripped this planet bare of resources, bare of life and bare of value. There is no time better than the present to take notice of our state and make a course change. That is if we wake up in time…

Amazing news today, authorities in Maine have found the body of a hybrid animal of some kind that has been killing dogs and cats around rural areas. This may be the creature that is the source of legends stretching back over the last few decades. The supposed half wolf-half dog met his end while chasing a cat across the street. His wild nature led him out of his habitat and into civilization, into traffic to his death… unaware of the peripheral circumstances.

Benjamin Franklin and other members of the 1787 Constitutional Convention often wondered if the chair with the carving of a half sun, used by the President of the Congress, George Washington, represented a rising or a setting sun. The optimistic idealism of the time has surely proven that the sun was and always will be rising in the unbreakable spirit of the American people.

It is time for us wake up and take off our blinders, and see what is occurring in the peripheral, to take note of our path. We must start to change our course to return our nation to the greatness that it deserves, the bastion of innovation, equality and freedom that it should be, an example to all the nations of the world, leading by example.