Overreaching is a deadly sin for any empire in human history, starting with the Roman empire, the Byzantine empire, the Mongol empire, the Ottoman empire, the Spanish empire, the British empire, the Napolean empire, the Russian empire, and now the American empire with its 800 military bases around the world. In most cases the empire’s military and financial strength was not challenged by any external entity, but it ended up collapsing on its own weight.

A half-million army strong, all highly educated of various technical qualifications, healthy and energetic, disciplined and patriotic, creative and determined; sent to a far away desert to fight for the empire’s desire to dominate a region where it is admittedly unpopular and unwelcomed. Behind this half-million army there is a colossal crew of highly skilled (and well paid) support personels and private contractors of all sort, working at home and abroad, to handle the logistic of a remote war. It is estimated that for every soldier sent to the war zone there are two support personels behind him, so we’re talking of effectively one million additional head counts of highly skilled and well paid workers just for this war!

Just imagine for a moment, rather than being the most efficient killing machine of all time, if we could deploy this 1.5 million active people (roughly the size of a nordic country) to create value for America, such as building infrastructure, schools, hospitals and industries, how that would have been better? Imagine if deploying them to research on curing diseases instead of deadly explosive chemistry, research on green technology instead of blowing up the world, create high-tech gadget instead of high-tech weapon, give a hand to civilians instead of pointing guns at them? Not only America could greatly benefit from them to remain the world superpower for another century, the world could also benefit from a prosperous America!

Instead of spending over $3 trillions on the war on terror, if that could be spent on creating value to humanity, these people could stay in their country, with their families, and build a much stronger country. Wasn’t that the purpose of fighting terrorism anyway? Why is every empire so eager to “make” an enemy of its own and fighting that so relentlessly to a point of self-destruction?

Unfortunately, the empire is sticking on its own agenda………………………………………………………….

UK’s Northern Rock was the first major victim last year, then Countrywide Financial, then Bear Sterns and IndyMac, then last week Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae, now Lehman Brother and Merrill Lynch. AIG and Washington Mutual are rumored to be the next ones. After this domino effect of bailing out and bankruptcies, I wonder how many financial institutions remain alive as the pillar of american financial infrastructure after this crisis recovers? How many financial management text books will have to be rewritten? How many economic theories will be ridiculized? And most importantly how many years should Alan Greenspan be sent to the core of a volcano to redeem for his suicidal monetary policy during his two decades of tenure as chairman of the US Federal Reserves? Thanks to his money printing machine at the Fed, everyone at North America seemed richer during the past two decades but in reality felt poorer and poorer with money value depreciation and price inflation.

No one has the power to stop the Dollar printing machine at the Fed, but at this rate for another decade, the one dollar bill’s value be worth less than the cost of that piece of paper plus the ink on it, like a 1c coin’s buying power is less than the cost to make that coin. And because of this credit crisis, my gold stock is now worth less than half of its value at the beginning of the year! Thanks Alan! Wish you a good time in Hell.

The only positive outcome of this financial elephants going belly up is that oil price is finally getting down to a more reasonable price below 100$ a barrel.

Journey to the dark side – Tom Engelhardt

See more of these at TomDispatch and The American Empire Project sites.

And don’t forget to buy some imperial toys if you want to celebrate it.

For example Paris Hilton gets free publicity everywhere she shows up, or plans to show up, just like recently she plans to stay at the Hyatt hotel for her first visit to Shanghai instead of her own family’s Hilton chain, then all the local newspaper talk about it at page one. Tiger Woods gets the same attention from media as well, but he doesn’t bother tell people about his plan. Journalists, especially those without a functional brain, love those icons, they would happily write about their most insignifant events at anyday anytime.

So naturally, when you’re the emperor of the America Empire, you deserve at least the same attentions without doing anything. However, the current emperor is aiming squarely at world domination, nothing less will satisfy him, therefore he deserves way much more attention than anyone else on Earth, alive or death! Beside having his face hung in every federal office building, in uncountable styles of mugs and T-shirts, he also shows up in some comparison between him and a specie of mamal that resemble tremendously to human, for free and without his awareness. Sometime he is also compared to the worst leaders of our time, those monsters who reminded us that humans are still barbarous and evil, deep in our soul.

Artists and creators also devote huge amount of time to worship him. For example I’ve collected some snapshots here.

You can also buy electronic keychain to worship him.

And in case you don’t have enough money to buy the keychain to see the countdown everyday, I’m attaching a flash version of it here, so you simply have to revisit this blog once a day, I guarantee you’ll feel almost as good as having a real keychain.

Heck! All the time that was spent over the past 5 years by American students to hug, kiss, spank, give beer, send gifts, test likeness, each others; if they were sleeping instead, it would have saved America tremendous amoung of energy and Internet bandwidth, lower pollution, and most likely increase America’s future competitiveness because those students would have more sleep and therefore in better shape to study the next day! Moreover, if they were reading books or doing research instead of hugging each other online, the world might already have a cure for cancer or AIDS or a better supercomputer to cope with the crazy weather shift.

I enjoy doing stuff online, such as email, blog, IM, share photos, read news, because that is the new way of getting in touch with the world. But when people spend most of their time hugging and kissing and spanking their friends’ friends and write meaningless things on somebody’s wall, I don’t think that contribute so much to the friendship or social relationship in any significant way.

In fact, I think we’re going backward with this thing. To me, Facebook is almost like students throwing scrap paper in the locker-room area, on which short and meaningless messages were written and randomly thrown to their friends’ locker or written on their locker doors… And the worst thing is that they’ve just started to open this to the public, any kids in primary school or high school can waste their precious time on this, and all the employees in work, all the teachers, all the nurses, all the engineers, Oh My God! So much for all the hype about yet-another-priceless-invention of the late Internet era, after YouTube and MySpace.

So, let’s get together and save our little world. Let’s write an open letter to Bush asking him to order Facebook shutdown, let’s ask Al Gore to make a movie about how much this is wasteful, and asking Bill Gates to give up buying Facebook’s stocks! For the sake of our children and America!

Forget about crude oil, that’s for the middle class and riches who have money to buy goods and drive cars. Water is the most basic need, second only to fresh air, for the poors and very poors, and there’re lots of them in the Third World! Forget about liberty, democracy, security, health, pollution; water is about life, and there is no substitute for it.

Humans have been taking water for granted, just like they’ve been doing for other natural resources, such as forest, metal, oil, and so on. We’ve been abusing the natural network of fresh water supply without thinking that one day we might run out of water, or that the people at the next country might not get as much fresh water as they used to get. We build dam, irrigation, heavy industry, while pourring toxic elements into the river and ocean, navigate heavily on them, killing most of the fish species in those rivers, and by consequence, killing the whole ecosystem around those rivers.

If you do not believe that we may one day go to war for water, consider this… Canada and United States have the luxury of having two oceans at both sides of the country, and not having to share much rivers with the neighboring country, yet we’re starting to see friction between the Canadians and Americans over the Great Lake lately, and there is a mounting fear among the South America countries (especially Brazil) that US will attempt to draw water supply from there rivers.

Now think about the highly populous Asian countries who live mostly on agriculture and share many of their rivers with neighbor countries, as well as the North Africa countries, it’s just too easy to blame the neighbor country for water scarcity or water pollution. So far most of the international laws only deal with land ownership, by mean of border line, which is pretty easy to protect but yet people still dispute over that constantly. Imagine how difficult it is to deal with water supply ownership where you can’t really hold on the water or own the river, because ultimately you have to let the water flow to the next guy down the river.

It might be apocalystic to think that human race has grown over the level that our planet can sustain, I’m sure somebody must have said that long time ago while world population was just a fraction of what we have today, and yet human race have managed to grow more populous while still manage to have better life quality than half century ago, in overall.

My feeling is that, human race have manage to grow larger, by retaining more babies alive while living older, than their level of productivity can feed them. In other words, the more populous we are, the more foods and water we need, but we haven’t been able to produce (or recycle) as much as we need, globally. We need better science and technology that can recycle or clean our water more efficiently, grow crop and rice faster, in order to sustain the world population. And before that happens, those who do not have “their due water” will fight as hard as they must, to stay alive.

Today we go to war for oil (certainly not for democracy as Bush is claiming, and even if was for democracy, it wasn’t for the Middle-East people’s democracy anyway), but tomorrow we will go to war for water, and eventually for fresh air, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, we’re just human…

Well maybe there’s a temporary solution: if we could manage to move some ice out of Arctica and Antarctica to meld them in our rivers, maybe it would help increasing the rivers’ level and add some freshness to them, but the cost would be prohibitive with our current technology and infrastructure. Bottom line: better science and technology is our only hope!

So, based on these humanitarians’ logics, the civilians should take the responsibility of avoiding to indirectly funding civil wars, however, the weapon manufacturers have all the rights to cash on their record profits year after year, of course! Based on some publicly released information, the weapon industry’s profits at US is just a bit less than the oil industry. We can safely assume the weapons they produce are not for helping people around the world, neither for protecting people, nor for killing the bad guys. Statistically speaking, I think very few bad guys are actually shot by bullets, they’re so well protected by our legal system and international court that they can only die after a triumphing trial, nothing less; and sometime they seem to live forever or die happily on their own (Pol Pot, Milosevic, Pinochet, etc), while the good people would die cruelly under the bad guys’ weapons. And what do the diamonds have to do in all these? Nothing!

So if anybody sincerely wants to stop civil war and genocide, they should shutdown the weapon industry rather than making the consumers feel guilty for buying war diamonds. Otherwise anything else they say is just bullshit and absolute hypocrisy! There are many reasons that diamonds are good, but there is not a single reason that an AK-47 could be good for humanity, unless someone can give me one.

The US is not the only to be blamed here, Russia is as guilty, so does UK, France and China, but at least Chinese government don’t travel around the world spitting at others for funding warlords at Africa, they look at it as any other businesses. Meanwhile, the American government won’t skip a single opportunity to bash on Chinese government for doing business with “evil regimes” at Africa while at the same time they would happily accept cash (US$ please) or gold as payment for the next weapon shipment to the very same regimes they’re condemning! Or let’s just pretend that we forgot to count the total arms shipped to Iraq and let them run loose on the street, ultimately someone will use them to kill someone else, and the later will have the need to buy a bigger weapon to revenge, and there goes the strategy of creating a market out of none.

And this is from the new big brother that is supposed to look over world peace and democracy and freedom… Fortunately they won’t have enough money to do the job for long. Everyday there are people claiming for more affordable health care and better education, without any concrete act from the government. But when they need money to build a weapon industrial complex around the Pentagon, money is always abundant. I wonder if I should feel more secure today, or scare…

Meanwhile they are losing control of what they took for granted: global natural resources control, namely oil, and global economy control.

Here’s an interesting view of the Vietnam War, I’m quoting Henry C K Liu from Asia Times Online:
“If the US had given each Vietnamese what it spent in the Vietnam War, Vietnam would have been a rich country where communism would not have had much appeal. Instead, the money was spent on the barbaric destruction of the Asian country, with huge loss of lives and damage to the environment through military deforestation.”

The very same thing could be said to Irak, and to all the other wars that US is preparing to make in the name of democracy or liberty or civilisation. If US was to give Irakeses 500,000,000,000$ (500 billions) that they’ve spent (so far) on that war, the soon-to-be-kamikazes would have enough money to go learn some skills and earn their live normally without killing themselves!

Here’s another interesting quote:
“Six decades after the end of World War II, US posture on Korea and Taiwan remains basically the same, to prevent the unification of the two Koreas and the ending of the Chinese civil war with a no-war, no-peace status quo, thus preventing two major Asian nations from normalizing their wartime anomalies. All the talk about defending democracy and preserving stability is merely “to put ourselves [the US] into a defensible position”, as Dean Acheson so aptly put it half a century ago. And the Korea non-proliferation/missile crisis is merely a pretext to escalate this ongoing conflict.”

So much for the country who has been selling themselves over and over as the defender of world peace and democracy and freedom, all those legitimate and heroic motives, or pretexts, are all ranked far lower than the priority to remain the undisputed superpower and imperialist of the 21st century!

I grant them 50 years to remain on the throne, after which they will not have enough money and man power to continue to dominate the world. And even if they do, the global public opinion will be so much against them that they will have to fight alone… 1 against 20!