The world is fucked.

I don't want to get into it right now, but man, are things fucked. This Israel/Iran thing right now is just peanuts to the reality of the energy crisis that is barreling (no pun) down on us, and we are not even beginning to discuss it from any kind of realistic perspective.

The free ride is over folks. We've been living on resources that took billions of years to create, and we've burned through them in a few centuries. It started with coal and steam power, which allowed the first phase of industrialization to happen. Jump a few steps, and you get electricity, which brought about a whole slew of advances and benefits, but also deepened our addiction to energy because it became pervasive. But the killer is oil. That thick, dark, mysterious liquid we discovered not only got us hooked on gasoline to power the combustion engine (which is sooooooo inefficient itself, and that's another story altogether...) but it is now the lifeblood of pretty much anything we do. And I don't just mean the gas that powers the motors. The carbon based chemistry that has developed from the discovery of oil has been used to prop up and enhance allllll sorts of aspects of modern life. From the manufacturing of pretty much ANYTHING you buy - if it's not made of plastic, it's packaged in plastic - to the food you eat - our soil is dead, we just pour oil on it to make it fertile - everything involves or directly depends on oil.

You think this Iran thing is about nuclear weapons? Get fucking real. There are literally THOUSANDS of nuclear weapons already made, ready to go, lying around the world. The threat of a country actually being able to enrich enough uranium, or mine enough plutonium, or even build a hydrogen bomb... well it' just pretty fucking slim. For the enriching, it is INCREDIBLY expensive and energy consuming to enrich uranium. The threat of China, or Russia, or any other nuclear country, selling/losing nuclear weapons and the the necessary delivery systems to use them is more of a threat than some rogue terrorist state developing it themselves. Not that I am saying Iran is a rogue state... because it is not. It has been a country for thousands of years and has a relatively stable economy and government. They just don't like being told that they aren't allowed to sit at the adults table and possess nuclear technology.

So Iran is about oil. It's all about controlling the oil. We are like crack addicts that have somehow learned to actually nourish themselves with crack. We've been getting so high for so long we don't even realize we are actually living on crack. AND our dealer is about to run dry.

Good luck with that.

b/w

I need to print this out and just hand it to people who ask me why I don't want to have kids. lol