Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for President in 2012. And this in spite of running one of the worst campaigns ever. In fact, his campaign mismanagement thus far is certain to take the crown from the previous winner in this dubious category: John McCain, whose own campaign against Barack Obama was so horribly misguided and riddled with mistakes and errors in judgement that a casual observer from another planet might have suspected the campaign was engineered to lose!

Hahaha. That’s a good one. Two men who’ve wanted to be president for almost their entire adult lives, mounting such hopelessly inept efforts that they never had a chance. Hahahah.

Wait a minute.

There is just enough conspiracist in me to be deeply skeptical about this. John McCain may be old, but he is not stupid, and he did not have stupid people working for him. Mitt Romney may not seem too bright at times, and his workers have certainly made some serious gaffes (“After the convention, it’s like an Etch-a-Sketch”). This is especially surprising given the enormous financial resources at his disposal. He should be able to afford to hire people smart enough to avoid such mistakes, and circumspect enough to keep Mitt from putting his foot in it.

But something has kept that from happening. Something led the McCain campaign to choose Sarah Palin as running mate, and to “suspend his campaign” to return to Washington during the financial crisis. These are not the actions and decisions made by campaigns to win elections. These the actions of madmen, or idiots.

Or else they are the most deviously calculated actions imaginable.

Consider the McCain effort. By the end of the CheneyBush regime, even Republicans realized that this country had been driven into such a deep pit that climbing out of it was going to be a virtually impossible task. The economy was in shambles, our standing on the international stage was dismal, we were pissing billions into two wars that were no longer supported by anyone, the housing market had just collapsed, the auto industry was about to implode. Given the overall situation, any reasonable person would have bet dollars to doughnuts that the next President was guaranteed to be a one-termer. No one, short of a deity, would be able to overcome the mess CheneyBush had created. And anyone who tried would inevitably receive all the blame. The American memory would never remember how we got there, only that we hadn’t gotten out of it yet.

The Republicans didn’t want to win that election. And I maintain that when this election cycle began, and the recession recovery was still foundering, jobless rates still stagnant and no good news in sight, somebody high up in Republicanville decided to let Obama have it for another term. To wait for things to settle down, presuming that the hated objectives of the “socialist, Islamist, un-American” Obama would surely drive the American public into their waiting arms in 2016.

How else to explain that none of the heavy favorites in the GOP camp chose to join the fray: No Chris Christie. No Tim Pawlenty. No Jeb Bush. Instead, the GOP trotted out the biggest succession of loonies and wackos the political arena has seen in recent memory. The obviously incompetent Bachmann, Cain and Perry were sifted out one by one. Leaving here near the end those who could at least construct coherent thoughts: Santorum and Gingrich. Oh. And Ron Paul. That is to say, a religious zealot out of touch with the mainstream, an obese bag of fatally damaged goods and a man nobody listens to. None of them electable.

Yes, Romney will prevail, but then what? The Republican base is wildly blasé about this man, and the religious fundamentalists (necessary for any Republican presidential victory in the modern electoral map) think Mormonism is a cult. How do you turn that into the massive turnout Republicans absolutely require to win?

No, I guess I don’t really believe all this represents a calculated attempt to actually lose the race. But nobody on the GOP is doing anything that looks calculated to win it. In fact, all we can safely say is that their strong suit seems to be miscalculation.

© 2011 Chuck Puckett

Forget for the moment the venerable conspiracist belief that the 16th Amendment was never legally ratified. That quagmire of messy paranoia has been circulating for years, along with the the somewhat parallel quagmire (parallel quagmires?) w.r.t. the creation of the Federal Reserve. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books and websites that delve into every aspect of how these institutions were foisted onto the citizens of the United States in a less than aboveboard way. Personally, I’ve yet to decide whether we are the puppets of the Illuminati or merely the victims of untethered, outrageously greedy corporate barons.

The point is that, legal or not, when the income tax was enacted, it was only paid by the very rich and by corporations. Corporations were actually taxed beginning in 1909. The 16th Amendment changed the constitution so that personal income tax would be legal. The personhood of corporations was obviously not properly understood back in the day. In any case, even though it was now legal to do so, nobody in the government even dreamed of taxing ordinary Americans. Middle class and poor people probably weren’t even aware that such an idea was possible.

And so things stood until World War II. America’s involvement in the Great War of 1914 only lasted about a year, from the Lusitania in 1917 to Armistice in 1918. Apparently, contributions from the rich (who undoubtedly made some tasty profits from the war) were sufficient to pay for General “Lafayette, We Are Here” Pershing and the AEF going to Europe’s rescue.

Ah, but when WWII cranked up and Pearl Harbor crashed down on a sleeping America, even the vaults of the rich weren’t big enough to fund the most massive war effort the world has ever seen. And Congress responded by taxing everybody. In the fervor of patriotism that gripped the nation, this was easy to do. The main obstacle was the complete lack of know-how by Joe Blow in Peoria in filling out forms. Or even that he was supposed to start doing so. The IRS marched out Daffy Duck, and his cartoons, shown in the local cinema, explained everything to Joe. Sure it was a hardship. But so was rationing. And shortages. And women working in factories. And Victory Gardens. But we were at war, dammit, against the Axis, and no hardship was too much.

By the time the war was over, everyone was used to the new norm. And we still had an enemy: communism. And pretty soon, a new war: Korea. The ratchet principle had taken effect. Once the ratchet advances, it does not go back.

But here’s the irony. Somehow, in the ensuing seven decades, the whole income tax thing has been turned completely upside-down. Now, via punditry and sloganeering and propaganda and sheer chutzpah, the public has somehow been largely convinced that the rich should pay less. That they are “job creators”. That we all get a piece of the ungodly huge pie that they have managed to bake for themselves. That taxing the rich is spoiling the American Dream. And all these “arguments” are repeatedly shown to be so much empty rhetoric.

The income tax, for almost four decades, was paid only by the rich. In that era, we had both boom and bust. Jobs were created, and then many, many jobs disappeared. Fortunes were made and lost. But nobody ever claimed that taxing the rich was evil socialism. It was just the reasonable thing to do.

Until the rich decided they wanted it all. And convinced the rest of us poor slobs to go along.

Take Me Home

Chorus:
I wish you could take me home
To some place I know I’d love to be
I wish I could go back home
But someone took my home away from me

I walk all day around this city
Looking for a place to stay, a place to lay my head
I’m not really hoping for your pity
In fact I’ve lost my hope, my only hope is I can find a bed

They say that your home is your castle
But my castle’s made of dreams, my castle’s made of sand
And I wake up to nothing but a hassle
A struggle to get by without begging for a hand

It could be worse, I might have a fam’ly
Then I’d worry how’ll they’d eat, how they’d warm their bones
We’d be living like Little Orphan Annie
The clothes upon our backs substituting for a home

Back Home Again

Home is a heartbeat, home is a good smell
Open the front door, breathe in the air
Walk down the back hall, climb up the stairwell
Stand in the front yard and whisper a prayer:

Back home again, always bring me
Back home again.
When the road is long and lonely
And the night don’t seem to end.
Back home again, I want to get me
Back home again
When I’ve seen enough,
And the world has grown too rough
I’m always glad to get back home again.

The world is a fine place, full of adventure
Full of excitement, I follow the flow
The roads that I travel I’ll always remember
But when I’m done trav’lin, I know where to go

The windows are dark but a candle is burning
Under the doormat, she’s left the key
I knew when I left here I’d be returning
And she’d be there waiting, waiting for me

© 2011 Chuck Puckett

Look, I know why we went in the first place. After 9/11, the action against Afghanistan was about the only sane thing we did: Al Qaeda and Osama bin Ladn operated from there, the Taliban had provided them a base of operations from which they launched the 9/11 attack. Afghanistan deserved to be invaded in righteous retribution for the most heinous act ever perpetrated on American soil.

U.S. airstrikes in Tora Bora

And invade we did, in the way that only America can do when we’ve got the moral and ethical edge. We pressed the Taliban and Al Qaeda, hounding them into the caves of Torabora, seeking them out, destroying them. Our forces were warriors, fighting for their country against a truly bad set of people who had harmed us first. That’s our mythos, and it is a good one.

But then CheneyBush did their magic trick. In their bid to take advantage of America’s righteous rage, they managed one of the most disgusting misdirections of all time. Like a gargantuan tai chi master, they used faulty intelligence and our fear of horrible weapons in the hands of a madmen to deflect our nation’s intensity from Afghanistan to Iran. They mounted a carefully crafted misinformation campaign that convinced the masses that Hussein was somehow responsible for 9/11, and that he was that close to unleashing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons on a hapless world.

The American public, for the most part completely unaware of the geography of that part world, and who any of these people were anyway, and showing their usual attention span of the dog in “Up” (“Squirrel!”), allowed themselves to fall for this thinly disguised ruse. The focus left Afghanistan entirely. Iraq, and more specifically, Saddam Hussein became the target of all our war-making. Yes, yes, Hussein was a bad man. But he had nothing to do with 9/11. And he did not have weapons of mass destruction. But he did have what many have estimated to be the world’s largest petroleum reserves lying conveniently beneath his feet. This latter sin was unforgivable compared to the things he did not do.

America’s collective response? “Squirrel!”

But now, the Iraq question has all been settled. We are out of Iraq after almost a decade. And Afghanistan resumes its role as “target of choice”. It’s like we can’t exist properly without someone to fight. Chris Hedges wrote the excellent book, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” that tries to make sense of this American predisposition to conflict. But Afghanistan? There’s nothing there. Nothing we need, no oil, no minerals. Not even Osama bin Ladn (who’s now dead) nor much of Al Qaeda (which has decamped in favor of places that have lots fewer American troops). It makes you wonder why the British and the Russians ever cared about this godforsaken place. Until you do what most Americans never do, and look at the map.

The region

Geographically, the Afghans sit squarely in the middle of Iran and Pakistan. China’s just a little ways over, and Russia not too far to the north. Our fear of ungovernable terrorist forces in the Mideast requires us to maintain this presence, or so our military believes. And they’ve either convinced the President of the same, or, as is more likely, the military-industrial complex really calls the shots, and the President is continuously marginalized.

Whatever the reasons, and whoever decides them, the fact remains that we would be under no terrorist threat whatsoever if we just left the region to its own destiny. But that we will not do, and so is revealed the ultimate chip in this poker game of thrones.

Oil.

Free ourselves from the need for this oil, and we could walk away in a heartbeat. Oh, sure, some would still make the claim that Israel required our protection. But ultimately, Israel will stand or fall by the Israelis’ efforts. No, it’s the oil that keeps us in the region. And it’s our presence in the region that drives the Islamic terrorist fervor to attack us. And until that chain of dominoes is either dismantled, or else falls in cataclysm, we will continue our dance with the devil.

© 2011 Chuck Puckett

As a result, they don’t know very much. And thus the whole arc of high school, the first time they venture into the unaccompanied world, is one continuous gasp of amazement as each individual consciousness realizes a little more how that world works. One of the saddest corollaries that our culture forces on them is that, adrift in this sea of ignorance, everyone must act as if they know everything. And that the greatest shame is ever admitting you don’t know what everyone is talking about, that you might lack sophistication, regardless of the fact that there is no way your experiences heretofore in life could have provided you with, say, the proper amount to tip a valet at a swanky restaurant or how to avoid saying stupid stuff publicly (hint: avoid saying stuff publicly).

We might like to think, on this side of verbal consciousness, that a newborn also has a similar view of the world, that everything is brand new and exciting. But the baby’s sense of wonder… it’s not even wonder, it’s so much more primal and immediate. The newborn’s is a wordless apprehension of the world, a perfect satori in which no concepts intrude to separate the baby from his environment. A state of mind that we can literally never recall, because the memories were made before we had words to make sense of them.

No, the adolescent encounter with the world is too much in the world. He and she meet this newness carrying tons of baggage comprised of expectations, based not on personal experience, but chiefly absorbed from manifold forms of media: television, movies, music, video games. With a little thrown in from watching their parents, perhaps. But precious little.

And yes, we know about the hormones, the overriding component that drives the adolescent psyche. These surging hormones are surely the defining flood that overwhelms so much of the adolescent experience. And when the blinding flash occurs, the soul-destroying act of actually eating that Eden apple, then the doors of innocence close forever.

But even adolescents don’t copulate continuously. No, the majority of the day is taken up with trying to act as if they know exactly how to confidently deal with life. And all the while, they hide the fear that one of their equally clueless peers will penetrate their facade and expose them for a fraud.

Hell, no wonder it usually takes us decades to finally and freely admit ignorance. Building armor out of bullshit is more impenetrable than you might think.

© 2011 Chuck Puckett

Mitt Romney is pathetic.

I mean, really. Southern Super Tuesday came and went and the nominal nominee from Massachusetts (and Michigan. And Utah, sort of) could do no better than third place Deep in the Heart of Dixie. Even after spending about 100 times more than his cash-strapped opponents. Even with Jeff Foxworthy’s endorsement. Even after getting Randy Owens to sing his famous hit, “Sweet Home Alabama”. (What kind of fraternity did Romney belong to? Mormon or Baptist, everybody knows the song was Lynyrd Skynyrd).

Even after pandering in the most embarrassing way, proud of his pitiful attempts at saying  ”Y’all” everywhere he went. I guess that’s the epitome of “Southern Speak”, the equivalent of going to Paris and handing out “merci beaucoups” at every chance regardless of the occasion.

“Monsieur, your wife seems to have fallen into ze Seine.”
“Well, merci beaucoups, amigo!”

“Governor Romney, what you think you can do about these dadgum gas prices?”
“Howdy, y’all! Do you have any more of those delicious cheesy grits?”

Apparently, Mitt, realizing that a Southern Strategy has been the keystone to every Republican presidential victory since Richard Nixon, got a little desperate. Or maybe the man simply has no idea how pitiful his excessive attempts at “fitting in” were.

But here’s a surprise: Gingrich came in second in both Alabama and Mississippi. This would seem to imply that his (Deep) Southern Strategy to gain the nomination has failed utterly. Or so it would mean to everyone in the political universe except Newt, who has vowed to plow on to the convention, even though everyone, including Callista, knows he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Georgia. We can only hope that the casino tycoon who is the sole source of funds for his campaign will pull the plug and shut Newt up for good.

And the real surprise? Obviously it was the success of Yankee Santorum, who won both of these sister states. Not outright, and delegate wins are proportional, but still: he beat the crap out of Romney and he beat fellow arch-conservative Gingrich in his own backyard. Together, Gingrich and Santorum gathered 70% of the votes cast. Together, they beat Romney two-to-one. If Gingrich were to drop out, all that Romney dislike would coalesce into solid Santorum backing. And then the Republicans would have themselves a race.

A race I welcome, by the way. Hell, I hope Santorum gets the nod. Like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, I’d love to see the Republicans field the furthest rightwing nut they can muster. Toe-to-toe nuclear combat between an ultra-conservative and the freedom-destroying extremism of Obama. Of course, the only thing Obama is extreme about is his extreme moderation. But still…

Meanwhile, locally, things were pretty dismal. Tea Bagger Mo Brooks slaughtered his Republican rival, Parker Griffith. Statewide, Mr. Ten Commandments Roy Moore easily defeated his challengers in a bid to regain the Alabama Chief Justice seat. Given the color of this state’s politics, Moore is, tragically, almost guaranteed to win in November. Mo’s primary victory may not be as indicative. After all, judging by the presidential results, most Alabama Republicans were voting far right, and turn-out was embarrassingly low. If enough moderates and Democrats can be urged to the polls in November, we may have a chance of ousting Brooks. How much of a chance depends a great deal on who the Republican presidential candidate is. If it’s Romney, Alabama Republicans have demonstrated that they would stay away from the polls in droves, which would surely hurt Mo Bro.

And really, I think Obama can beat any Republican in the current field. So, as much as I would love to see Obama go tete-a-tete (that’s French!) with the wackiest of the wack Santorum, from a purely selfish local perspective, I gotta hope Romney manages to hold on and get the nomination. Still, it’s a lot of fun watching Santorum beat the crap out of him as he reels to the finish line.

Maybe he’d feel better if he had a nice, steaming bowl of cheesy grits. Y’all.

© 2011 Chuck Puckett

Why should the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, care whether China is doing its level best to extract these minerals from the ground? The simple answer is that rare earth metals are used extensively in electronic devices. In fact, we wouldn’t have a semiconductor industry without the addition of these strange-sounding metals. They call it Silicon Valley, and silicon is one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust. But silicon only forms the basic substrate of all the chips that enlighten our electronic and digital zoo. It is the presence of minute quantities of these strange intruders that ultimately transform and elevate sand (eg, silicon) from beach stuff to your IPhone 4. Without these, and a few other trace elements, the sand just stays sand. You can talk to it, but, unlike SIRI, it won’t answer back. Unless you are very, very high.

Okay, then why should China, which has about 30% of our planet’s supply of these rare earth substances, but which produces 97% of them for manufacturing, why should China not just go balls to the wall mining this stuff, and keep making gobs of international money? Two reasons. One, of course, is that by restricting production, they can keep the price higher. They’ve watched OPEC enough to figure out how to game the system when you control the lion’s share of whatever the system needs.

The other reason, the one they’re defending themselves with in the WTO, is that mining rare earth metals is environmentally horrible. The environmental impact is the main reason nobody else will do it. Even though we call them “rare earth metals”, in reality they are not that rare, only very hard to extract without screwing up the land from which they are extracted. China has not been terribly careful about such things. In past decades, they’ve build coal-fired power plants out the wazoo, regardless of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. They’ve recklessly dammed huge rivers with not a care about endangered species and hydrological impact. They’re pretty much fixed on expanding their GNP as fast as possible. So it may seem a bit disingenuous to claim worry about a little messy mining.

But this is very messy mining. And to be fair, even China has shown evidence in the last few years that they are in fact starting to pay attention to environmental impact. Thick, sulfur-laced smog from coal-burning power plants makes even the most avid industrialist have second thoughts.

Mining for rare earth metals in China

The fact is that the world needs these metals in order to sustain the digital wonderland that we have built and in which we are all so comfortably ensconced. A wonderland that, if suddenly removed, would likely result in massive cultural shock and rebellion. We don’t just play with these devices. We need these devices. But the First World refuses to pay the environmental price  for mining the materials that the devices in turn need to work. And the Third World is waking up to the fact that the profits they make for destroying their world are a fool’s bargain in the long run.

There is always a catch. You can read countless articles and books touting the use of computers and all their cousins and distant relatives in any number of complicated, sophisticated schemes that can be used to solve energy problems, commerce problems, transportation problems, all kinds of problems. The finesse of digital control, on the microscopic scale, from toasters to nuclear power plants, has enabled a veritable technical miracle to occur in modern life.

But in every fairy story when miracles and magic are offered up to the hero, there’s always a catch. There’s always something that must be paid for getting the three wishes, the palace, the kingdom.

There’s always a dark place out back, where they try to hide all the ugly stuff.

© 2011 Chuck Puckett

A friend on Facebook today posted an article about efforts by Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem and others to have the FCC kick Rush Limbaugh off the air, using some argument about stations that carried the Fatster not serving the public interests, or abusing those interests, or… well, really, whatever the reason was is immaterial. They were basically saying that Rash Limburger’s recent verbal excesses were sufficient to ban him from the air.

You know, I could not agree more, emotionally. But not constitutionally. To paraphrase the famous quote, I despise what he says but defend forever his right to say it. And besides, we need the absurdity of Rush. A successful Fonda/Steinem campaign to have him removed from the airwaves would only recharge his dwindling influence. The people that blindly follow Rush are truly blind and completely irredeemable; best to leave them alone and let them all stew in their own poisonous juices. But as long as he keeps spouting his absurd hatred, more thoughtful minds will continue to be offended, and that’s a good thing. And his time is limited: he’s already floundering as sponsors abandon him. It will be a fitting end when the precious “market pressures” so beloved by the Right reach out their Invisible Hands and squeeze him out of radio existence. Forcibly expelling him would only give some moderates a reason to sympathize.

Listen, it’s a fact of existence: living organisms cannot maintain their existence living in their own waste products. Shit and piss are poisonous to the shitter and the pisser. Let him continue to fester in his pool. He will eventually go the way of all cancerous flesh.

Sen. Joe McCarthy in the HURL hearings

Besides, market pressure  comes in many forms. In addition to having his sponsors bailing out, it is certainly a legitimate tactic to put as much pressure as possible on Clear Channel to drop the Rotund Blubbermouth. Pressure on Clear Channel is equivalent to sponsor pressure: pushing back wherever the paycheck comes from. Furthermore, a successful Fonda-esque led attack via the FCC would be disastrous politically and image-wise: the attack on Rush has to come from a morally-outraged hinterland, and not be viewed as cultural elitism. It must be the effort of reasonable men and women in Middle America stating the equivalent of Joe Welch’s famous deconstruction of Joe McCarthy: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Joe Welch dismissing Joe McCarthy

My friend had posted the article in part, as he explained, because he was worried that the kind of invective, destructive language that Rush used might become normalized. But I’m afraid that ship has already sailed. Between Rush, Beck and Fox News, the nature of “debate” and “commentary” has been forever and drastically changed. And yes, MSNBC also exhibits its own occasional excesses. This is the new “normative discourse”, at least until the next major change in the definition of social normalcy washes over us. Just as we can no longer retreat from the outrageous excesses that are now standard fare in “regular television programming”, we cannot undo the new “standard” for what passes as legitimate commentary.

We can only, in both cases, steel ourselves and our spirits from indiscriminately absorbing it. And more importantly, we must teach our children. Not insulate them, because then the world will sneak upon them and subvert them without their knowledge. No, we must help them to develop the ability to discriminate fact from fiction, shock value from content, art from lurid display, logic from rhetoric, reasoned argument from vitriolic bombast. And never fail to realize the same distinctions ourselves.

© 2011 Chuck Puckett

Better off without the knowledge
Better off not knowing how
The story ends
Or even if you’re in it at the end
Better off just living in the here and now

We see what we’ve been used to
People amplify their past
Going nowhere is not news to
Anyone who believes that things will last
It’s a lovely apparition,
So Ulysses wants to hear
Then he screams in desperation
‘Cause he knows that he came so very near

I’m not making no excuses
For the way I choose to be
I’m not a man who refuses
Facing facts when facts are right there plain to see
But it’s not necessary
To remind me when I fail
Since every mem’ry that I carry
Left a marker on the road out of hell

© 2011 Chuck Puckett

Nagasaki

The worry is “What if Iran makes nukes?”. One scenario, besides the obvious one of the Ayatollah lobbing a missile over to Tel Aviv, is that all of Iran’s neighbors would have severe fissile envy and develop their own weapons.

But here’s the thing: the secret of turning uranium into a weapon that embodied more destructive power than the human mind had ever conceived, that secret has been no secret at all for six decades now. Sixty years. For sixty years, the human race has possessed the knowledge to blow itself out of existence. And for sixty years, we have managed to avoid doing so.

Sixty whole years.

Which is to say, a blinking eye in the history of mankind. A history that can best be described as one continuous war, waged between some people who consider themselves bitter enemies of some other people, hell-bent on wiping said enemy off the face of the globe. And we have shown essentially no capacity to change that fundamental behavior. It seems to be part of our DNA, this propensity to fight to the death. With no rational restraint, regardless of consequences.

Our ability to ignore consequence and deny that which is ultimately self-harmful, to do anything other than satisfy our immediate lust, either for blood or booty, this character flaw runs very deep. Witness the broad-based refusal not only to do anything to avert a planet-threatening climate change, but to even admit the obvious is happening. And acting on climate change is merely academic, an intellectual decision. Using all available weapons against sworn enemies is an emotional choice, made in the reptilian complex of the brain, not the frontal lobes. And emotion always trumps reason.

To put any confidence in the fact that our species has not used atomic weapons for six decades after their first horrible introduction is to ignore the long march of history. Barring some species replacement for humanity, as suggested by the advent of the Indigo Children or Arthur C. Clark’s “Childhood’s End”, it is only a question of when these weapons will be deployed, not if. Yes, the fact that we survived the Cold War, when humanity undoubtedly came closer to extinction than it ever had, that is a a positive sign. The chances of global annihilation are indeed much less than they were when the Soviet Union and the United States maintained an eternal vigil against each other, each poised to press the button and retaliate against any threat, real or perceived. And the total numbers of weapons standing at the ready has been drastically reduced.

But untold numbers of them still exist, and in the states that comprised the USSR, a great many are simply unaccounted for. We may have avoided, for the nonce, the possibility of global self-extermination. But the use of atomics in an attack, in a war? That probability increases every day, and will approach certainty as the years go by. Hell, the missing soviet nukes alone could make every nightmare scenario a real possibility.

We have known how to convert mass to destructive energy for the briefest instant of our species’ existence. Make no mistake about it: Iran, or North Korea, or Pakistan, or India, or perhaps some unforeseen entity… In the long run, this genie cannot be put back in the bottle. It will be unleashed. And the wishes it will grant will once again make us become as Shiva, the Destroyer.

© 2012 Chuck Puckett