|   Went on my first-ever wartime bike ride yesterday... | Lobo
Mar 22, 2003 9:14 PM | | It's nice to see that Briones is still there. I find it pretty strange that even though everything looks exactly the same, cow poo still smells bad, my bike still won't downshift under heavy torque, and Lafayette is still full of psychopaths, one of the biggest changes in the world ever to take place in my 20 years has just happened: the United States has blatantly disregarded the wishes of the UN and the principles of diplomacy to launch a full-scale attack on an impoverished Third World nation.
The lack of justification for this attack is an ugly kettle of fish in and of itself (Does Saddam have The Stuff? Maybe. Can he use it to attack the US? Hell no. Could he use it to attack his neighbors? Probably, but Israel, Iran, and most everybody else in the region have been perfectly capable of smashing Iraq to pieces without US help since the last war). What I find the most disturbing is that the Bush administration made almost no effort to prove it's case to the rest of the world, and has in attacking Iraq pissed off several countries whose support we may need in the future. Most notably China; the nutcase in Pyongyang depends on China for his very existence, and now that the US has gone off crusading by itself a couple doors down from China, they may be less than willing to put the bridle on North Korea if our conflict with them ever comes to a head.
On top of that, I'm stupified at the ignorance of other Americans on these matters. Iraq was not involved in the WTC attack in any tangible way, but there are people who will tell you that not only were the bombers all Iraqi, the Iraqi government planned and payed for the attack. Beyond that, the UN has conclusively said that Iraq has no nuclear capability, but as recently as Wednesday I heard somebody expounding about the danger of Iraqi nukes. You can't really blame people for this; American journalism being what it is, it takes some real digging to get at concrete information these days. But it's scary as hell.
And now they're saying that we'll be installing an American client state in Iraq after the war. Does anybody remember what happened when Kennedy and Johnson, both of them far better diplomats than Bush, tried to do the same thing in South Vietnam? The Iraqi people may be happy to see American tanks now, but five years down the road when the oil is flowing, Saddam's power structure is still there, and they're still starving, what will they do? The 9/11 attacks were inspired by, among other things, what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians with American money and weapons. With another US-funded client state in the region, another 9/11 seems to me to be painfully likely.
These are dark thoughts, and time in the saddle doesn't help as much as it used to. God help us all. |
| my bike is silver | Jm
Mar 22, 2003 9:31 PM | | nm |
| cool...mine's black with red letters | Lobo
Mar 22, 2003 11:28 PM | | |
| cool, mines black and red too! So Fast (nm) | TM
Mar 23, 2003 1:11 PM | | |
| Mine is silver AND blue! | Twilight Error®
Mar 23, 2003 5:09 AM | | Blue bikes are faster!
But my fork is black. I wanted silver and couldn't get it. |
| Black is where it's at. (nm) | Stine
Mar 23, 2003 5:13 AM | | nm |
| I really enjoyed the AZSF posts GREATLY | dlowell
Mar 22, 2003 10:15 PM | | NM |
| wow, you should check this out then... | Kitchenware
Mar 23, 2003 7:12 AM | | http://www.homestarrunner.com/fhqwhgads.html |
| I seem to ride epics every time it hits the fan | club
Mar 23, 2003 3:33 PM | | I rode Broad Mt. above Jim Thorpe in deep snow and temp. in the teens the day the last Iraqi war started. Still remember that ride, it has way hard.
On 9/11 I was climbing the CO Trail from Durango up to Sliderock all alone, 20 some miles of the most classic CO singletrack you'll ever see,if you're lucky. And passed about 10' from a big black bear, yeah they're usually brown here, but this one was black, just like back east. He stood up and looked at me, I talked to him and kept a'goin'. Had a big canister of bear spray on my, might have stopped and waited otherwise, but he was cool with it all.
And going further back, the day the last folks left the US Embassy in Saigon via chopper, I was doing a 140 mile road ride in the PA countryside. Couple years later, I served with the crew chief on the last USMC chopper outa there. But not the last chopper, the very last was a CIA Huey.
I hope I'm out riding the day the ChiCommie megatons land, should be an awesome sight above timberline. |
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