Mission accomplished in Iraq !!!!

SUCCESS IN IRAQ!!!
It's time we leave Iraq. Our mission is accomplished.

We have been completely successful at training and equipping the Iraqi police and army well enough that they are able to kill several hundred insurgents dressed as civilians a day and will soon be killing thousands more.

The middle east is now completely destroyed and our ability to influence either Iran or anyone else is gone. Iran now realizes that we neither have the will nor the power to prevent them from carving up Iraq and starting a nuclear war to destroy Israel.

Let's take our victory and move on to North Korea. We haven't actually lost that war yet. There is still time to get another wing on the new Presidential Library. I propose it be built near Waco at the old Branch Davidian site.

In other news, the war on drugs has been almost as successful as prohibition, the Constitution is only a piece of paper, and Dubya is officially the worst two-term president in history.

Dear President Bush

You didn't lose the House and Senate because there is not enough progress being made in Iraq. You lost because YOU lied to us about needing to invade Iraq. There were no WMDs and you knew it but you wanted to prove how much better a leader you are than your father. You aren't. You are just a common liar.

You have lied to us, every day with everything you said and when we started to complain, you began revoking our freedoms under the Constitution which you swore, during your oath of office, to uphold. You lied during your VERY FIRST ACT AS PRESIDENT, by taking that oath.

Now we have given the Democrats a mandate to reverse your power grab and your attempt to revoke the Constitution and your eavesdropping on us all and your permission for Americans to torture prisoners and the disappearance of Habeas Corpus and those 800 little notes you appended to laws passed by Congress with which you give yourself permission to simply ignore the law if you don't like it.

You are not our king, pal. You are our employee. It isn't treason to disagree with you. Your war is wrong and illegal and has destabilized the entire middle east and America has no respect anymore from any country in the world because of you.

Who do you think you are to ruin our legacy, to ruin my chances of getting Social Security, to send our children to Iraq over and over again until they are killed to spend half a TRILLION dollars funding Halliburton when Americans have no medical insurance?

You ARE the emperor with no clothes. I love America and the Office of President but, as the vote proved, most of us hate YOU and your ignorant, muddled, slurred attempt to be relevant.

The Domesday book, Chapter VIII

My buddy from San Francisco:

You clearly need cheering up; besides large volcanoes smothering the planet in toxic gases (we're over due for those you know) the Earth's magnetic field is in the process of a polar shift and about to collapse bathing the planet in deadly solar radiation. Then there is China running out of water, unlike oil they can't steal if from anyone else (California long ago showed the limits of that). Resulting stress from a lack of food, pollution and radiation damage will make them wide open for a nice pandemic that will spread its deadly tendrils around the world.

You see, the great wheel of life will turn crushing countless millions to a bloody pulp in the process and things with turn out all happy.

Actually, I am looking forward to watching nature push back at our attempts to ruin the earth.

Super volcanoes: Yep, we ARE overdue and there are several possibilities, one under Yellowstone. That sulphurous boiling water is bubbling up for a reason, but we can't predict those things and we aren't even sure that another one will occur without some outside influence like an earth impactor. It's not something we created.

I am very interested in the perambulations of the magnetosphere but not particularly worried by it. That reversal occurs on a regular basis and is happening now. Sometimes it happens in a matter of days or weeks, sometimes it takes thousands of years. Our magnetosphere is weakening and becoming irregular and the polarity WILL flip, but no one knows when or why, or the result, or the actual dangers, but I'm thinking the worse that will happen is we take some hits from solar radiation that change our weather patterns. And cooks our satellites, or some of them. And I'll probably get a lot more basal cell carcinoma than I do now.

But neither of those things are due to overpopulation and all of my 'sky is falling' scenarios are a direct result of overpopulation and our inability, as a race, to deal with it politically. Someone has to go, but no one wants to be that someone. And no one really has the moral authority to decide who goes and who stays, so it boils down to who has the nastiest and most effective WMDs and is willing to use them to destroy much of the world. And THAT is controlled by who has the advanced technology and manufacturing capability to generate food and weapons at the same time and THAT is a function of who controls the energy resources. But the very dynamic of switching back to a coal-fired energy base to support all the people will ruin the planet. We have only 300 million people in the US out of 6 BILLION in the world, but we use 25% of the earth's energy resources and are the largest polluter and we simply are not going to stop 'til we drop.

I gotta tell you that the Muslims are more than willing to die if they can take us and the Jews out with them (although the logic behind that astounds me) but I doubt that living in a mosque in the desert and knowing of only one book in the world, the Quran, is conducive to creating agile politicians or freedom of thought. But the reality is that these sand turbans are going to have nukes and delivery systems in the VERY near future.

Pakistan, one of the most backward countries in the world has an arsenal already. They passed it on to Iran and Iran has the weapons NOW, but not enough of them to be able to offer us a shit sandwich and make us eat it. But they will, and they are not afraid to start lighting those things off. Here's why: Our military is seriously degraded. After Iraq we may not be able to get volunteers anymore. I certainly wouldn't volunteer for the military knowing I would be sent to a shit war over and over until I got killed. At least in Nam we knew we'd get out if we made it for 13 months.

And we DO have nuclear aircraft carriers and subs, but we have only a limited number of delivery vehicles. Once we shoot off the MIRVs in the boomers and the cruise missiles, we are done. The ships can sail, but if there is no jet fuel the aircraft stay home.

We must win a nuclear war in the first round and, to preserve the economy of the entire WORLD, we can't allow nuclear strikes on major US or allied cities. If that happened, it would prove to the world that we talk the talk but can't walk the walk. And we would no longer be a superpower, we'd be down in the dirt with everyone else. The problem is that nuclear war is unwinnable because everyone ends up dead. The USSR understood that. Iran doesn't care. We are better off loosing a biological but.......errr....we don't make them anymore. SHHHHHH!

Power, you see, is as much a matter of perception as ability. We didn't win in Korea. We lost in Viet Nam. We broke almost even in Panama and Granada, but we were run out of Lebanon and Somalia and our efforts in Bosnia....well, no one even knows WHY we were in Bosnia. Now we have destabilized the entire middle east and made ourselves the asshole of the world in the process. And the President's psychotic agenda pushed him to grab most of our constitutional right to privacy and protection from illegal search and torture and imprisonment forever without a hearing. We have become EXACTLY what Iraq was under Saddam and only today have the voters arisen in revolt and proclaimed Bush to be a failure and maybe the worst president ever. History will not look upon him kindly.

But no matter what, Washington rolls on wheels greased by special interests and they don't give a shit if everyone dies as long as they get more than their share. And there is big money floating around in Congress. 40 MILLION dollars was spent on just ONE Senate race. Missouri, I believe, where Claire McCaskell won with the help of Michael J. Fox and Rush Limbaugh who should have stayed home with John Kerry.

This has turned into an actual rant and I am off my subject, so I am going to stop. But as long as politicians and the religious fundies worry about same-sex marriage as though it is going to end the world and then sneak off to their own homosexual encounters, there isn't much hope.

The Domesday Book, Chapter VII

A Colorado reader comments:
I think the best thing to do at this point is to stop waiting for our governments to do something and instead, take personal responsibility for the problem. And this approach will work regardless of which crooks are running our government by growing the businesses that will create the change.

You are missing the point. And for the same reason everyone else misses it.

See, it doesn't matter whether everyone in America has hybrid cars. The energy it took to produce them comes from fossil fuel. The energy it takes to produce a photovoltaic array or a windmill farm far exceeds the possible energy return from them. The amount of fuel it takes to grow food and bring it to the marketplace is staggering and the electrical grid of the WORLD is powered by fossil fuels for the most part. The energy required to convert raw uranium to a fuel isotope and store it after it is used is more than the potential power produced by the plant over it's lifetime. That's why we aren't building any more...and you didn't address the reason we are running out of resources: overpopulation.

We have already used up most of the earth's natural resources. They are not renewable. When the oil is gone and the coal is gone and the forests have been burned for heat, we are really and truly ****ed. And that is not some fantasy humans will need to address in a thousand years. We will all be dead in a thousand years. GOD will not appear at the last minute and save us. He has never appeared at the last minute and saved ANYONE! He did show up once to to Show Moses His hindquarters. Moses was mooned by God. Holy Moses!

The only thing that will slow our complete extinction that is a mass extinction event or a huge nuclear war or an uncontrolled pandemic, and all of those are looming big. Depending upon exactly how it plays out, there will either be a few mammals left or none at all. If there are a few left they will immediately go about the business of killing or enslaving the rest.

But even then, the ice is already melting, faster and faster each day. Very soon, the weather will either go completely out of control and revert back to the premordial soup era with constant acid rain and rapidly increasing CO2 levels, or it will simply stop. The jetstream will stop, the Atlantic conveyor will stop and the seas will become stagnant ponds of red algae. Clouds will no longer form (I need an entire chapter to explain THAT) and there won't be any more rain. The Ozone layer will dissolve.

There is nothing you can do as an individual or a town or a country to stop it. Believe me, China is not going to stop burning coal and the US is going to start burning it again big time when the Mideast goes up in flames because of that ****ing idiot George Bush. My state has one geothermal plant which is clean....until we have an earthquake and it vents a million tons of SO2 into the atmosphere. As it is, our volcano tosses out a million pounds a month anyway, but it usually blows north over Maui and Oahu. And we are one of the three PRIME areas in North America to have a windmill farm. We actually have several of them, put in years ago at the cost of untold millions of dollars. But after the oil crisis of the 70s went away, no one wanted to fund their maintenance anymore, so they sat there and rusted. Now that we need them they are merely eyesores.

Our local power generation grid is coal powered and diesel powered. A collier docks here every month or so and offloads a whole shipload of coal. And a barge comes in with diesel and gasoline. And we have no industry here except growing macadamia nuts and orchids. Industrial states and countries cannot get enough power and will use force when it starts to run out, JUST AS WE ARE DOING IN IRAQ. But because Bush lied about it instead of simply saying "OK, we now own this oil", we have been ****ing around and will end up without it.

I think I need to write a book. I am not as good at connecting the dots as Richard Burke (Connections), but I have thought a lot of this through and every time I find another connection, it points to a closed entropic system which is nearing chaos. And when we start hemorrhaging, stop-gap political band-aids won't even begin to help.

The Domesday Book, Chapter VI

From our Australian correspondent:
"Umm....any chance of a rant that isn't about us all being doomed?"

Not much. But you can do what everyone else is doing. Pretend there is no problem. Pretend there is plenty of food to go around and pretend that the commercial I have been seeing on TV.....a little girl smiling and saying that there is 250 years of coal left so why worry....isn't propaganda.

Oh sure, there is plenty of coal left. High sulphur coal. When it burns and the Sulpfur Dioxide (SO3) mixes with water vapor (H2O), like it does around the volcano I live on, it turns to something else. What happens when SO3 dissolves in H2O? Anyone?

"You get acid. Acid rain. Another thing they're trying to deny the existence of."

Very good! The compound which is formed is Sulphurous acid, H2SO3. The reaction goes like this: SO2+H2O==>H2SO3 which is a weak, unstable dibasic acid. Now the point becomes why are we concerned with that? So what? So this: Without going into the chemistry, the bottom line is that Sulphurous acid solution is slowly oxidised by atmospheric oxygen to Sulphuric acid. So Carbon Dioxide and Sulphuric acid. Sound familiar? Think Venus.

Venus is THE runaway greenhouse effect poster child. The temperature and pressure of the atmosphere decrease with height, so water vapor rises in the atmosphere and encounters conditions that should cause it to condense back into liquid water and fall back to the surface. Rain.

On Earth the ozone layer prevents ultraviolet light from destroying water in our atmosphere. Our water is recycled through the atmosphere and most of it returns to earth. On Venus, there is no LONGER an ozone layer, and the atmosphere isn't opaque to ultraviolet light. This allows ultraviolet light to destroy water because, as water rises in Venus' atmosphere, UV light dissociates it into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The hydrogen is much lighter than the water molecule was so it easily escapes Venus' atmosphere. The water will usually quickly recombine with a carbon or carbon monoxide molecule to form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Venus' atmosphere is:

* CO2: 96.5%
* N2: 3.5%
* SO2: 0.015%

Heavy water, which is composed of one oxygen, one hydrogen, and one deuterium (a proton and one neutron), cannot reach the requisite height as easily. If it does, it can still be dissociated just like normal water, but this happens at a much slower rate. Thus, a measurement of how much deuterium compared with how much hydrogen today shows that Venus has much more deuterium in its atmosphere for each hydrogen atom than Earth does. This is the strongest evidence that Venus has lost a massive amount of water in its history.

Like we will. But probably not for quite a while.

I'm not a pessimist nor can I predict the future. I simply see what is going on and try to extrapolate it a few years.

"I know everything you've been saying in these rants is unfortunately true."

I believe it is, but there are many people who disagree.

"Is there absolutely no way to delay the inevitable though? None at all? Nothing anyone can do?"

Not in my opinion. Humans shit in their own nests because there have always been plenty of new nesting sites, and there still are. There is plenty of pristine land left, but 50 SQUARE MILES if it is turning into desert every day. In addition, our memories are short. Great grandpa is dead so we cannot directly compare his experiences with our own. So we cannot see ourselves sinking into oblivion.

But there isn't plenty of energy left and there isn't any way to feed more people than we have on a long-term basis without burning a lot of energy to produce artificial crops and artificial herds of animals to eat. We have almost completely depleted the oceans of fish since 1950 and I must make the point one more time that ALL life on earth that relates to us is controlled by a very tiny band of sea and air. I estimate it at fifteen meters thick, extending about 8 meters above and below sea level. If the balance of life is disrupted anywhere within that zone, biotic life will simply cease to exist.

In the natural scheme of things every organism competes with every other organism for food, living space and reproduction rights. Evolution allows random mutations to push up out of the status quo and continue pushing until they run out of food or living space. That's why dinosaurs got so big and that's why they ruled for millions of years. Until they ran out of food...or air. Then they all died. (this is not a treatise on the causality of major extinctions, so we will not postulate on the reasons they occurred....suffice it to say they did and left a fossil record.)

Humans started out with an opposable thumb. We don't have the best eyesight in the animal kingdom by far. Birds, the descendants of warm-blooded dinosaurs do. But then we did something no other terrestrial animal did. We started growing bigger brains faster than bigger bodies. It was exactly what no one could have predicted because it was an entirely new evolutionary strategy and it was too successful. It ruined the balance of nature. We broke out of millions of years of slow change punctuated by sudden global disasters into an organism that could, for the first time, create our own global disaster.

And we are not going to stop and think what we are doing until we have done it. We can't. The very recipe for our evolutionary success, which is 'breed 'till you bleed' precludes us from changing the reason we were successful in the first place. We got here by killing everything that got in our way and it is our destiny to meet that same doom. We have such a strong genetic imperative to breed that some people even try to breed with members of their own sex. I am absolutely NOT anti-gay. I am merely pointing out that the genetic imperative to breed is still there no matter what your orientation and there is nothing wrong with it.

But advocating an "Abstinence until you are twenty-one" policy is not only extremely stupid, it creates more serious psychological problems than just handing out a couple of condoms to your sons and daughters before they go on a date.

Just like the obviously ridiculous policy of Catholic priests not being allowed to have sexual relations with women after GOD specifically invented sex between a man and a woman. That's not right. It's not even wrong. It just promotes a priesthood full of kiddy-diddlers. Even if you are one of the superstitious fools who believes in a huge invisible pal in the clouds you know that isn't right. Hey dummies, GOD's ONLY job is to kill everything which ever lived. Your soul is no good to Him while you are still using it.

The Domesday Book, Chapter V

From our New Zealand correspondent:
"Cheerful little sod aren't ya!"

Yes.

"Our beloved (NZ) government has decided to "do something" about Global Warming...only nobody seems quite sure what, but no doubt it'll be something which: 1) The glorious opposition can attack & claim it's useless & 2) The entire country will find painful in some way,so we can bitch & moan & whinge constantly."

Well, you sure have that part down pat. The problem is that America won't let you do anything meaningful. We gotta have our air conditioners and our Hummers and our factories making things we don't need and we'll get them as long as we have the cash to pay for oil or the power to take it by force.

The planet is already crashing and even today there is no way to stop it. But we won't stop it. We will fight over the remaining resources until we go extinct.

People think it will be a slow process and we will be able to fix it with enough money or that Jesus will come back at the last second and save everyone.

I have no idea what the people on Easter Island thought as they were cutting down their last tree, but it is quite likely that I'll be here to see the modern equivalent.

The Domesday Book, Chapter IV

It is only a matter of time. No new weapon in history has ever been invented that was not eventually used by all sides in a conflagration, each one greater and more horrible than the last, with the possible exception of biological agents. We have 'em and will use them to clean up anything the nukes miss, but the problem with biologicals is that once they are loose in the wild they immediately begin to mutate in unpredictable ways. You can't stop them and you can't make them selective.

People in many countries have come to believe that they live in civilized societies and will be protected by the government or the police or God, so they pass anti-gun legislation and become victims waiting for someone to rape, rob and murder them. CSI is supposed to be a good show (I have never watched it), but the police.....and the CSI people don't arrive until someone finds the raped and mutilated bodies of the victims.

I would have been a victim several times over if I had not been given a rifle at a very young age and trained in it's use and the responsibility that goes with owning a gun at a very early age. But I was, and so I was ready to defend my home at age 6, which I did successfully. I believe that I live in a civilized nation, but I have been in several gunfights which I did not ask for or seek out, but they happened. I learned not to delegate my personal defense. I assume the responsibility for it. Marshall is another person who understands what I am saying. He has been there and he knows firsthand.

And MILLIONS.....that is MILLIONS of Americans a year prevent themselves from being victims of violent crimes by simply rejecting the mindset of victimology.

President Teddy Roosevelt, realized this and had schools teach kids to use firearms. Then everyone became lieberals and decided that Big Brother would protect them from all comers, and that boys needed to learn ballroom dancing. But it isn't true. If you want to be terrorized, forget the stupid Amber Alert crap you saw on the news. Lightning will strike more people than terrorists ever will.

Wait until you wake up in the middle of the night and realize someone is in your room. But when that person is in your room and you know you can't get to a phone and you know your kids are in the next room, you suddenly understand that you are no longer in control.....of your life, of your family's lives, of your body, of anything. Friends, THAT is terror. And the choices you could have made but didn't, and chose to be a victim instead, now guarantee that something really bad is about to happen. You can only hope that he strangles you BEFORE he mutilates your body. And regardless of what you see on TV, unless your attacker is a close relative, business associate or household member, if he doesn't leave a lot of forensic evidence, he (or she) may never get caught. Apart from druggies, there are probably sixty serial killers operating in the US right now. All they want to do is kill YOU. They have no mercy, and they haven't been caught. Most of them operate for years and most of them never get caught.

I am a strong advocate of people owning, and being proficient with firearms. "OMG!" you say! " I would never allow a firearm in my house because of my children". I know parents who won't let their kids learn to swim because they might drown. All you are doing is preventing these kids from being prepared to function in the real world. Don't take them camping, either. Don't let them play sports. God forbid they should fall down or get dirty.

Teach them that JESUS is in charge and won't let anything bad happen to them. Don't discipline them. Don't disrespect them by exercising any control at all. Then when they end up in jail for shooting all their classmates because they think it's a computer game or because they have been raised to be irresponsible sociopaths, blame society.

The Domesday Book, Chapter III

Carbon Dioxide storage is here. Compressing the gas into a supercritical fluid and pumping it underground is the way big oil is working to keep the greenhouse gases at a manageable level. They say there is enough room underground to store decades worth of CO2. Billions of tons. Maybe, if the plan goes big-time, trillions of tons.

But 'underground' doesn't mean the same thing as burying Aunt Mildred. She probably won't come back to haunt us during an earthquake. The first time we have even a small earth impactor, or a serious enough earthquake all of the undissolved gas is going to be ejected to the surface. Here's the problem. We can't breathe it. So when it DOES come out, it will overwhelm (1) every oxygen breathing organism it covers; (2) industry's ability to hide it again, and (3) will cause a sudden and immediate spike in the atmospheric temperature.

Some of it is going to leech in to the water table and turn the water acidic and some is going to push things like uranium and arsenic to the surface, but that's a whole other story.

Burying all that CO2 is like planting a huge asphyxiation bomb and hoping it doesn't go off.