Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Infrastructure

Just as "Location, location, location" is the thing for any business, so infrastructure is "the thing" which glues societies and economies together. And ours is not doing so very well.

From The Economist

QUOTE The need is undeniable. Many old industrial cities have rich networks of roads and railways, dating from a time when they were much bigger. These are now crumbling. Last year a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, killing 13 people. A tunnel that brings water to New York sprang a leak in the 1980s and is currently losing about 20m gallons a day. Philadelphia has been flooded with sewage. The most recent infrastructure “report card” by the American Society of Civil Engineers contains nothing but Cs and Ds.

Matters are even worse in the desert West and lowland South, where population growth has been so rapid that basic infrastructure is often non-existent. Las Vegas (population 560,000) is linked to Phoenix (1.6m) by a rural road that trundles over the Hoover Dam. The West struggles with a water system, built by the federal government in the early 20th century, that serves farmers much better than city-dwellers. The scarcity of power lines is holding up efforts to generate electricity from sun and wind. UNQUOTE

Cognitive Disconnect: Rice On Military Might in the 21st Century

From Salon.com

" Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that's its military power. That's not the way to deal in the 21st century. " - Condoleeza Rice

As the playground taunt goes, it takes one to know one. Historically stable empires, as opposed to developing ones, have usually been fairly careful with force -- if only because their most dangerous source of regime change came from their armies. That's the big problem with America's current course -- the "successful" bit. Constant and endless war, torture winked at as policy and hypocrisy in our leaders can and will bankrupt us, fiat currency and Dick Cheney notwithstanding. It also makes a mockery of our history and principles and burns our flag more definately than a 17 year old anarchist.

We are feeling the effects of decades of misspent national wealth. All our manufacturing has gone overseas taking our jobs with it, save weaponry. Our physical infrastructure is inferior to that of many less powerful nations, and our schools, health care and energy independence likewise.

An excerpt:

"Just during the time Rice has served in the Bush administration, we bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan; did the same to Iraq; repeatedly bombed Somalia, killing all sorts of civilians; fed bombs to Israel as they invaded and bombed Lebanon; top political officials (led by John McCain and Joe Lieberman) have repeatedly threatened, and advocated, that the same be done to a whole host of other countries, including Iran and Syria. That's to say nothing of the virtually countless interventions and bombings in the pre-Bush, "peacetime" years -- from the Balkans and Panama to Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and on and on and on.

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