Psychotic Barefoot Children in the Rain

The news channels here in the United States more often than it seems necessary love to occasionally spotlight some poll showing how blatantly stupid Americans are when it comes to the most basic of historical knowledge. The most recent one I heard was last night on NBC Nightly News with the ever perky and wise Brian Williams. Without showing any real emotion over the stomach turning results, Brian reported that only forty percent of the American public can correct identify which party controls congress.

This information can be parsed several ways, namely that Republicans will be overjoyed that it means the average American is too stupid to blame them for being incompetence douchebags for the last six years. Before someone bust a partisan gut, I'm not touching their thinly concealed racism towards President Obama nor their Ayn Rand level of utter indifference to the poor but how they nearly destroyed our already crippled economy by wanting to allow the United States government to default on its debts. That is all another subject for a day I feel especially cynical and dejected by our national suicide attempts.

No, what I want to touch on is history and the fact that one-hundred years ago tomorrow Gavrilo Princip walked up to the car carrying Archduke Ferdinand and his wife and busted a couple of caps into the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne and his wife, killing them both. With the geo-political situation at the time being a complicated series of alliances sitting atop a mountain of exaggerated nationalism mixed with the gigantic-sized egos of various heads of state, events spiraled out of control plunging the entire world into war. Now, we can't stop there, once World War One petered out by 1918, the resulting peace was so screwed up by the same issues and people that helped bring it about that the human race couldn't help but have another global conflict roughly twenty years later.

Am I being a little too flippant over the death of millions? Yeah, but for all the gnashing of teeth over how terrible war is by the noble politicians, religious types, and even the poor putz that ends up doing most of the dying there is hardly a time when humans don't rush into war when their feelings get hurt. True, there are times when evil men bring on war forcing the honorable to defend themselves, such was the Second World War, but had European leaders back in 1914 kept their heads instead of acting like school yard punks maybe that whole bloody episode in human history could have been prevented in the first place.

Well you might be saying to yourself, at least we didn't let the missiles fly cooking Mama Earth in a radioactive haze along with every other living organism. That is correct! There were good men and women after World War Two all across the planet who dedicated their lives to prevent the idiots among us from starting another war. I guess that comes from the fact that many of these good people saw the horrors of war firsthand and knew that if atomic weapons ever used that would pretty much mean the end of civilization if not human extinction.

Here's where the smelly poop is going to hit the spinning air recirculation device. On the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the event that started us down the path to a collective suicide the geo-political situation is even more screwed up now.

Iraq, a Frankenstein monster of a country pieced together out of the remains of the ancient Ottoman Empire is coming apart. While the Sunni and Shiites fight out centuries old conflicts the Kurds are busy grabbing as much land they can in preparation to declaring themselves an independent nation. Of course the Shiites, which dominate the Iraqi national government absolutely do not want to see the Kurds break away nor allow them to keep control of all that new oil rich territory they recently grabbed.

Now throw in Shiite dominated Iran which is coming to the rescue of their Iraqi brethren and the mixture gets even more volatile. There are two elements to worry about here, the first being that Saudi Arabia is a Sunni dominated country which incidentally doesn't have anything good to say about Iran. Particularly, since Iran is sort of, kind of, trying to develop their own nuclear bombs, and that is the second element to this potential global disaster.

The idea of Iraq having the “bomb” frankly scares the living shit not only out of the Saudis but the Israelis as well who sort of, kind of, already have their own stockpile of nuclear weapons. But, don't tell anyone about the Israeli weapons, see it's one of those open secrets, like the one people in South Carolina ignore about Senator Lindsey Graham.

So what has all this to do with the good old United States of America? Well, I'm damn glad you asked because I have a beer, several of them in fact, and plenty of time to rant away this afternoon. It all revolves around the ungodly amount of oil in that region, Western Civilizations addiction to it, and the special interest groups in the United States that will roast in the lowest and hottest level of Hell before they allow a concerted effort to break our dependency on it. Just for fun, lets bring in a resurgent People's Republic of China and its own growing addiction to oil along with Russia just because they're still pissed off they lost the Cold War and desperately want to make the United States look weak and we have all the players for another round of global conflict.

No, I've haven't forgotten the warmongering elements in the United States. Since this latest crisis in Iraq all the old players that lied and scammed us stupid Americans into invading in the first play have all crawled out from under their rocks to beat the drums of war again. It's truly surreal to see that dried up shell of a man, Dick Cheney, get on television and say the black guy in the White House totally FUBARed his and George W. Bush's awesome victory. Really Dickster? Just out of morbid curiosity where the hell are all of those weapons of mass destruction you and your buddies said we find once we went into Iraq? And just for further giggles you again screwed up the estimate on how much that war would cost, didn't you say just eighty billion? Wow, you missed that one by a couple of light-years!

Now if I wanted to get weird and crack a couple of history books to refresh my memory Western Civilization's addiction to the Middle East's cheap oil began just after World War One. Which came about because some idiot Serb wanted his dear homeland free from domination. But, there is no real use in rehashing all these dusty old fact any further. Namely because few give a furry rat's butt, so I'm going to sit back and watch the new 2014 global players juggle the same old ancient hatred, sour nationalism, and as always, overstuffed egos just like they had in 1914 and see what happens. It could very well be a blast.