Oil Addiction (The President said so)

140 billion gallons of gas per year.



Maybe it will look better with zero's, instead of the word:



140,000,000,000















Nope; the number is just as depressing. I have to pump about ten gallons a week through those contraptions which stretch across our country from one side to another, and I depend upon that liquid for every facet of my life.



It has been proven by Brazil that alcohol can be produced on a scale necessary to meet a countries needs. Brazil has much fewer cars; they also have much less land, technical knowledge and work and industry forces. We can do this.



Every time I buy gasoline, and every time every other person buys gasoline, they help to finance



1 - Despotic Rulers (In three different continents)



2 - Arms and fighters flowing into Iraq



3 - The International arm of Al Quaida



4 - The groups and countries arrayed against Israel (I am not taking Israel's or the other's side).



5 - Government and business corruption on a vast scale.



At the same time, we are spending and have been spending our national treasure and world standing for the steady supply of this energy.



This has amounted to an invisible subsidy for the oil interests, on top of all the subsidies which are in plain sight.



When the true cost of doing business in the Mid East is figured into the price of a barrel of oil, alcohol comes out cheap.



And the best thing about it out of all the reasons to switch is this - no one can turn the tap off.



They can with oil, and they have before. That was about 32 years ago, and it was when Brazil started to switch to alcohol, and away from gasoline.



It took them almost that whole time to make the switch one hundred percent, which makes me think, if we can send a man to the moon, how soon could we switch? If we really put our minds to it?



Whatever the answer is, it will not be quick enough.

powered by performancing firefox

What can I say?

What can I say, that I have not before?



You are familiar with a lot of my beliefs - perhaps this is what God thought, and instilled in us with Her sense of purpose. Perhaps that is why we incessantly invent religions that end up being misused by people with low moral courage.



And yet, even in religions that are misused, there are usually good things to be learned (and good people that learn those things) - just as there are in science, and nature itself. About the face of God I have no clue - even if we are an experiment by some creature, and our reality nothing more than a bunch of cells in a petri dish it does not deny the existence of the Great Architect, or our own self awareness - and by that self awareness, our uniqueness. Is that a byproduct of our soul, or do we owe the simple fact that we have a soul to that one trait?



The magic is that either way it does not matter.



My most innate knowledge of our reality is this: that it is the birthplace of our soul, and that just as we leave the womb in pain and rebirth, so we shall leave this reality in the same way - in inevitable pain, and inevitable rebirth - never to return to this existence again. That does not deny some tenuous connection, perhaps, with those still present here in this reality.



Just as in the womb, we can never see what lies behind the viel of the belly of God; to my mind, we can never doubt that there is a further reality, one that we can barely imagine being born into. That is one of the reasons that the way we behave and learn is more important than the animal instincts which drive us.

powered by performancing firefox

I have been wondering for a while now how odd it is that the current events of the day, while pointing to the larger problems of our nation seem to obscure the roots of those problems.

For instance, the relationship between illegal immigration and the drug war.

The federal and state governments involved in fighting the drug war will say that the connection between the two is simply the fact that drug dealers pay illegal immigrants to carry a load across the border when they go. This undoubtedly does happen, but other experts think that most of the transportation of drugs across the border is done by professionals who do that for a living.

The actual connections are much deeper, and much more subtle; as with all social problems, history has to be considered, for it is what has made Mexico and Central and South America so dysfunctional.

For many years after Cocaine, marijuana and other drugs were made illgal in the 1930's the new drug laws had a very subtle effect. There was not widespread usage of cocaine, which is the drug we are concerned with here. The farmers which produced the drug, until the 1930's had been dealing with a free, legal market and it took some time for that market to become corrupted.

In the sixties and seventies there was an explosion of drug use across the country; in the early seventies, President Nixon declared the first War on Drugs, and that policy was reaffirmed and strengthened by President Reagan.

These policies had unintended side effects - they drove the price of the drug up in the market; the more expensive the drug got, the more power and money it gave to the gangs who now controlled the farming population.

This building momentum led to weakening governments in the drug producing nations; the US pushed all countries to adopt the same drug policies, and the drug cartels' influence over the governments and army and police forces became stronger than the governments themselves, despite our best efforts to help these countries.

There is a dirct line between our drug policies and the failed governments and economic policies of those countries to the south of us. We are not wholely responsible, but our policies have ensured the destructive influence that would go with any huge illegal industry in a country which is not very strong to begin with.

It has taken decades for this problem to develope; now we see people fleeing across the border every day, striving so hard, fighting with death itself to get away what they are leaving behind as much as what they are coming towards.

Until our policies on the drug war change, there will be little change in the levels of corruption that are found in Mexico and Central and South America. Until that happens, there will be little or no real ecomic developement, and the imigration trend will only become worse. In this situation, as in our energy policy and the study of the influence of money on the system, we are guided away from the root causes of our problems. The drug war is not the whole story on illegal immigration, but it is a factor that is to large to be ignored.

It is also one that has gone on long enough without being discussed in a senseible way.

To return to the Meeting Grounds, click here!