OK, maybe that’s a bit drastic but it does seem as if we’re embarked on a period of doing all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. We won’t do anything to ban landmines and small arms sales to terrorists because the NRA is against it or chemical/biological weapons because it might hurt the biotech industry’s profits. We simply must build a worthless, unworkable, unreliable, unproven and risky missile defense system because the defense contractors won’t have any way to make huge profits otherwise. And if we don’t do something pretty quick to piss of enough of the world to make defense contractors necessary they’ll go out of business entirely and our Colonels, Generals and Admirals won’t have anywhere to go to work when they retire from the military. To say nothing of political campaigns having to make do with much less money.

Maybe I’m just a cynic, or maybe it’s just that my wife has been out of town for the last 2 1/2 weeks and I’m getting a bit looney. It’s tough when half of you is missing for any significant period of time, throws off the balance don’t you know.

I’ve gotten to the point where I tend, more and more, to feel that people ought to suffer just a bit from their own hubris, or at the very least the consequences of their actions. Unfortunately, in our world which is becoming a smaller and smaller community, it seems to be increasingly possible for many, especially those in power, to engage in actions which harm a significant percentage of people in the world yet remain untouched themselves, even better off. They see their personal benefit as sufficient justification for their actions and dismiss as irrelevant those who suffer the consequences. There is most certainly a special place in whatever hell they believe in for folks like DeLay, Cheney, Bush et al.