For those of you who were curious, no, that wasn't the original title of the post, but I decided to clean it up. Anyway, I've been doing some hardcore surfing in the last couple of days, and I've come across a couple of themes that I want to write/post on, so I'm doing it all in one fell swoop.
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First, I've had a couple of links tucked away in a text file since December, so it's about time they got posted.
On 6th December, U.S. Secretary of State Rice
signed a deal with Romania that will initiate an American presence in Romanian bases; this was the first arrangement of its kind between the United States and a former communist nation. On 7th December, Bulgaria announced that it, too,
was in negotiations with the United States to share its bases; the actual deal was
signed in April. What do these two nations have in common, other than being former Communist states? Both deployed troops to Iraq.
Now, it's no secret that American military assets are undergoing a lengthy and extreme shift in size and deployment. Many of our bases in places like Germany and South Korea are being prepared to shut down. Even redundant and obsolete bases in the United States are being consolidated, so that the Department of Defense can more efficiently structure its holdings. The Cold War is over, and assets that have been deployed in Europe for the last sixty years are being redeployed to better serve our new national security interests. So, why Bulgaria and Romania? Well, there are several reasons.
First, Bulgaria and Romania are closer to the Middle East/South Asia than American positions in Western Europe. Second, whereas Americans have encountered a great deal of political hostility from the German government in recent years, the Bulgarians and Romanians can understand first hand the value of American intervention. Third, they can appreciate the benefits they'll gain from an American military presence in their nation; just look at a quote from one of the articles.
"This agreement will add value to Bulgaria's strategic security because it increases the commitment of the United States to the security of the country."
Dimitar Tsanchev
Bulgarian foreign ministry
The Germans, South Koreans, and Japanese, for example, all have very respectable defense forces; however, none of them are capable of truly defending those countries in the event of a large scale conflict. Bulgaria and Romania realize this, and are apparently interested in strengthening their ties with the United States. Given the state of our strategic interests in the vicinity, and given our recent disputes with the French and German governments, I personally believe that shoring up our relationships with those countries that are willing to stand by us in the interests of international security is an excellent idea.
I think this is a very good move for us, and I think that it's a very good move on the part of the Romanians and Bulgarians.
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I bought a copy of
Dune when I was about fourteen, and I didn't get around to actually finishing it until I was twenty-two and living in the United Kingdom. I'd seen the
David Lynch film, and loved it; to be honest, the book was a pretty big disappointment. There was a lot of building in the first two thirds of the book, and a very rich and deep storyline; the last third of the book was positively craptacular, with a bunch of weird hogwash that didn't really even make any sense, and an anti-climactic ending that left me scratching my head.
One of the really interesting things about the book, written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965, is that there's enough terminology to warrant its own
glossary. On a whim, I plugged one of the phrases into a google search the other day, and found out that a great deal of this terminology is either
borrowed directly or adapted from Arabic. That page has two other links that are of some interest:
Islamic Themes in Sci-Fi Literature, and
the possible influence of Dune on Star Wars.
Having read a few of the synopses available at the above websites and
Wikipedia, I finally learned something that makes the book a lot more interesting, even though I still say that the last third of the book is pretty poorly written: the spice that serves as the central motivation for the actions of everyone in the book is actually a symbol for oil, and the CHOAM corporation is a direct allegory to OPEC. The
Spark Notes explanation says nothing about oil, instead equating the spice entirely with psychotropic drugs. Perhaps this explains a bit of my confusion a couple of years ago.
Though I don't agree with all of the statements and points Herbert made with his novel(s), I was still impressed with a number of the complex story elements he was able to piece together. Perhaps one day, when I've finished many, many other books, I'll go back and reread Dune and appreciate it even more. For now, I'm content to post the links above, and give my reaction.
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Thursday's Cox and Forkum cartoon poked fun at the climate change cult that seems to be developing around Al Gore and the rest of the folks who are going bat shit crazy over "climate change" and "global warming" and the "greenhouse effect". Cox and Forkum had a couple of great links, which I feel privileged enough to cite specifically here.
An article by the Canada Free Press documents an astonishing trend: actual
climate experts are
skeptical about global warming, and most of them don't support the craze that's being spurred on by Gore and his followers.
At JunkScience.com, there's a
complex analysis that offers a bit more perspective and realism regarding "climate change", the "greenhouse effect", and "global warming". As the author notes:
Who knew that so many blowhards are out there pontificating from complete ignorance?
And of course, there's no bad time to post the link to Michael Crichton's outstanding speech on the subject,
Aliens Cause Global Warming.
My position is this: the earth has been abnormally hot and abnormally cool within recorded history, and there's no reason to believe that we're in any different situation than we've ever been in, if we're in any situation at all. The supposed warming trend is well within the margin of error for even
measuring global temperature changes, so if there's a warming trend in the first place, humans are most likely a negligible contributing factor, if we factor in at all. Because of this, I think that radical measures like the Kyoto Protocol are irresponsible. Hell, I even live in the middle of the damned desert, and I can tell you that one or two degrees of climate change aren't even worth noticing.
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Right then, it's damn near 11:00 AM. Time for a pint... Er, lunch.
