Your patience exceeds mine, in extricating the 'changes of scale' and other twists in this streamofconsciousness challenge to attention span. Thanks for the worthy stab -

Some fillips from the fast-food:

"From the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who has admirably criticized her country's policies on nuclear weapons and development ... ...
Never mind her non sequitur of a capsule predicate of 'why' and who is hated. But the first phrase does relate to general topic here (if there is one): it appears that there is more of a likelihood of facing the nuclear dilemma without euphemisms (like the Reagan "Peacemaker" MIRVed first-strike weapon of mass destruction) - amidst the New members of the Doomsday Club, not US. I note little discussion or even awareness today in the US of:

What M.A.D. means. That it is the extant strategy right now. What 'spasm war' means and why it is a hairbreadth away from.. about any imaginable launch of anything larger than a firecracker -- after the trajectory is plotted back to origin. 'Nuclear Winter' - seemingly a passing fad re any discussion of what exactly a spasm war would lead to. Not any awareness of the fact that: our weapons can launch within Two Minutes of *GO (DIE)*.

Yet it is our nuke arsenal which is the trump card in all our wielding of power in $$, weapons and in social engineering attached to 'bequests'. Want our med stuff for your epidemic? - use Christian theology as your guide to birth control, or No Dice. Want that IMF loan? - here's how to run your government. If you want the loan. So many examples. These will have to do for a sampler. But always: the nukes underscore the other persuasions.

We must abstain from the fairy-tale pleasures of oversimplification."

Hasn't most of this article been oversimplification? That there is some unidentified union of anti-american americans?
{sigh} Seems an inescapable part of the paranoid style in Murican politics (a book title, yet) that we labor under the delusion still, that there is such a thing as The Murican Peepul. So why not "The Anti-Murican Murican Peepul" too ?? From such a lazy delusion follows the turgid styles of the day: mixed metaphors and scale changes mid-paragraph. And usually (though little in present example) the Polar Opposites come out to annihilate each other.. like matter and anti-matter.

Still.. give him a few Brownie points for trying to cover It All in one essay (?) and avoiding mostly the dread Polar War.

Which is why we must look at how our actions to "protect" our "interests" have resulted in the world we now live in.

And, once the flaws are found, we must strive to correct the situation and work to remove those flaws from our national character.

The first requirement is removing our dependancy upon their oil.
Would that we could even discuss sanely! our habits, assumptions and - how others at the receiving end of our policies think and 'feel' about those ... (Not caring at all about how others perceive you; isn't there a word for that?)

That we are so late in spending more than token $$ on alt. sources of energy - is I think, adequate proof of an attitude of denial, not only of our incessant appetites but especially an aversion to imagining what it is we actually do -- to obtain a valuable and not infinite earth resource: as near to 'for free' as we can manage. [oil] is US.

I doubt that these habits of generations can be addressed head-on, in language or in demonstration. Still, it's always better to hope for a surprise = preferably one such that we might recover from it...


Ashton