It seems like as if it was just yesterday when I was at work, excitedly anticipating four whole days off. Work has become a pain in the ass (more than usual), and I really needed the time off. And now, it’s over. Back to work tomorrow, with a five-day week to face. That really suck. What we need is a good old-fashioned war to take our minds off of things. Not this Afghanistan nonsense (that’s not a war; we need tanks and aircraft carriers and John Wayne-type stuff). Fortunately, we may just have one in the works over there in Korea. And it’s got everything we need.
It’s got that olde-tyme feel to it (hell, it was never even officially over, so we can pick things right back up and boogie like it’s 1953 again – and, let’s face it, everything was better in 1953: men were men, women were women, gay people hadn’t been invented, let alone served in the military, and white males – the ones not stuck in Korea, anyway – had it great). Plus, it would, in theory, be two little countries fighting each other (one, a version of what the US used to be with a strong economy, innovation, and manufacturing tons of shit for the global marketplace, and the other a vision of what Republicans and teabaggers are driving this country to become – a pathetic, terrified, backward little nation living in the 21st Century equivalent of the Stone Age, with just enough military strength to be an annoying pain in the ass to the more civilized parts of the world), but in reality be two big military and economic powers fighting a proxy war.
We might even be able to get China to lend us money to fight a war against N. Korea, who they would also be funding at the same time. It could go on for decades, with lots of money to be had by all (well, not all, of course, but you know what I mean).
Granted, it’s a bit of a twist in that it’s usually the US of A that funds both sides of a war, but it would still be pretty interesting. And good for the economy (and by the economy, I of course mean Haliburton, the Carlyle Group, and Exxon-Mobile).
Also, there are a lot of idle people out there that need jobs, and this would put the young ones to work serving their country in the armed forces (where Haliburton could make tons of money feeding them and whatnot – and if a few get electrocuted in the shower, well, there’s plenty more where they came from), and the company formerly known as Blackwater could provide us with all the Christian Jihadist mercenaries we could use. The question is, would we have a WWII-style manufacturing ramp-up to put folks to work in the factories by producing tanks and planes and ships and guns, or would we outsource all the manufacturing to, like, China? Heh. I guess that’s a pretty silly question.
A pretty good scam, there. China lends us money to produce weapons, which we give back to them to manufacture using slave labor. A win-win.
Plus M*A*S*H was a very popular teevee show, so another Korean War should be very good for ratings.
And in the end, it’s all about the ratings, isn’t it?
In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, he ( Retired Justice John Paul Stevens) wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,†had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/us/28memo.html?hpw
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