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  hardie karges 12:44 pm on April 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: OIL ( 6 ), politics   

  POLITICS 

  Politics loves a vacuum; it sucks. Politics sucks in the best and the brightest and turns them into utter fools. No less than Einstein himself dedicated a large portion of his life to political activism, only to have it come to no avail, his best theories used for military ends, he himself advocating its use for one side’s advantage over the other. How do you know who the bad guys are anyway? Democracy may win by default, simply the best of bad systems. Let the law of large numbers rule, and everything should average out okay, safer than the eccentricities of dictators. But when governments start fighting over who gets to pump the gas, then you know something’s wrong. The struggle for power has always been about power. More and more these days that means, “oil”. The party’s over; now we gotta’ start paying for it, through the hose, through the nose. That’s the price we paid to win the cold war- we had to cut everybody else in on the deal. Now they want oil as much or more than we do. China and India have got some catching up to do, and they’re jamming on it. What happened to the days when government promised to create a perfect world for us, rather than just guard the pumps? I’m not complaining, mind you; I know we’ve never had it so good, but many are falling through the cracks of a world they can’t fathom.

   

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  hardie karges 7:10 am on April 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history ( 42 ), politics   

  MUSICAL CHAIRS 

  Politics is musical chairs.  Wherever you sit when the music stops is yours, more or less, depending on how fat your butt is.  In the case of our political map, the music stopped about 1948, with the demise of colonialism in the aftermath of WWII.  With only a few exceptions, boundary changes since then have been the result of realignment, not conquests or land grabs.  Circumstances like these have a life of their own, following topographical boundaries and ancient animosities.  Most of the action of the last century has been the break-up of empires, first the medieval Habsburg and Ottoman, then the colonialist British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, and finally the Communist Soviet and Yugoslav states.  These fixed borders just might be the cause of much tension and stress, the fact that some countries have much land and few people, and that the ability to change that situation is limited.  It’s even gotten a bit ridiculous with the situations in Timor, Biafra, Nagorno-Karabakh, and others, but laudable, in my opinion.  If there’s ever to be a world government that’s truly effective, then there will have to be world political units that are meaningful.  If Dixie tries to secede again, though, then that’s going too far.