I love you.

Not just 'cause you're Cave Guy, uh-uh, but 'cause you're a part of that whole Cosmic Mankind-Whale-Tree-Thing.

Nothing like "Freakazoid!" to lighten up an otherwise dreary day. Good thing I start my internship tomorrow.

The world is transforming into an interesting place, and in directions that I anticipated. The U.S. is setting the stage for pulling out of Europe and NATO, what with this whole threatening Belgium thing that Rumsfeld did. Developing a pretext for exiting the organization. The US military may be pulling out of Germany entirely, cutting off some $3 billion in commerce provided by the troop presence plus whatever costs are shared by military cooperation.

Conflict between the US and a few other nations is rising rapidly, and the end result could be more war, this time in several simultaneous locations.

Our new post-9/11 bull moose foreign policy is now in full swing, and we are finally extracting ourselves from our Cold War entanglements after the afterglow of the fall of the communist system faded away. There are, however, problems that arise when one attempts to remove oneself from certain routinized arrangements that others have become comfortable in...

And then, of course, there's terrorism. Nothing new in the discourse--the rhetoric of anti-terror and nonproliferation have been around for decades--but 9/11 caused us to shift our focus to it almost exclusively. This may or my not be a bad thing, we'll just have to see how long it takes for us to normalize, or at least how long it takes for the problem to subside. Looking at graphs of the number of terror incidents over the last twenty years, one can clearly see that 1999-2001 are, in fact, at the high peak...

I am slowly coming around to understand what is happening, to see past the rhetoric--my own included--and I see that it isn't madness. International terrorism has, in fact, increased drastically since the end of the Cold War, and has become an issue that needs to be dealt with for quite a number of valid reasons. However, I still am not sure that the approach to solving it that the Bush administration has taken is quite the right one. Of course, most of the nonaggressive tactics to deal with it are the same as the ones meant to remedy dug problems, failed democratization, and crime; most people fail to realize that terrorism isn't a phenomenon caused by socioeconomic inequality, it's an ideological phenomenon. As the Second World War proved, sometimes the only way to change someone's ideology is to shoot them.

I suppose only time will tell.

~Halcyondream~

last entry next entry