A Day in the Life of...

I was joking about Armageddon. Since 2001 has come and gone and we are still here, obviously people were wrong about Armageddon happening at the turn of the millenium. Yet, it's still not gone away.

I, for one, was happy when the Soviet Union collapsed. There was always this threat of a nuclear doomsday hanging over us and Ronald Reagan rearming America, starting a Star Wars Project - an anti-ICBM system in violation of the ABM Treaty, and calling the U.S.S.R. the "Evil Empire" didn't exactly make me feel better about any of it. In fact, I was even more scared because the Russians wouldn't hesitate to launch a strike if they thought their missiles were useless as offensive weapons. Reagan's tactic worked, but at what ultimate cost?

So, here we are spending more money on an ABM system to protect us from North Korean missiles? At least, that is the official line. This is a government that was scared of Iraq, yet, North Korea is starving their people, has blown up airliners and they have crude atomic weapons most likely. What are we doing about them? Very little it seems. We're letting our buddies, the Chinese, handle them. Somehow, that doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

We give nuclear technology with no strings to India and give nothing to Pakistan. Yet, Pakistan is helping us contain militants who actually attacked and killed 3,000 people. Gee, one country is Hindu and the other Muslim. Both Pakistan and India developed functional nuclear weapons and the CIA and DIA were caught with their pants down having utterly failed to notice underground nuclear tests by both countries. To be fair to India, they didn't sell nuclear technology to other countries and Pakistan did, but this deal can't sit well with Arabs. It shouldn't sit well with Americans because we are giving civilian nuclear technology to India without any restrictions tied to nuclear nonproliferation. Nixon is starting to look like a foreign policy genius.

That's just the real world and politics. I haven't even touched on The Rapture when supposedly, the faithful will be taken to Heaven leaving the rest to suffer on Earth. I doubt that God works that way, yet again, that is the warped thinking of Man. The really scary part is that some people actually believe that this will take place some day soon. People have been believing this almost every century. There were religious movements in the 19th Century that believed that Doomsday was approaching at the dawn of the 20th Century. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. Even if the worst happens with global warming, the human race is likely to survive unless we somehow destroy one too many natural systems which affect global climate and thereby destroy our agricultural base. Even if 99% of humanity managed to wipe itself off the face of the Earth, that would leave 40,000,000 (40 million) people to start over again, which is more than enough. Humanity went through a population bottleneck over 100,000 years ago. All of the people alive today are descended from about 100 individuals. There's more genetic diversity in two chimpanzees in West Africa then there is between me and an Eskimo. So, think about it. We've gone from 100 people in 100,000 years to 4 billion. The 4 billion only happened in the last 100 years in spite of two major World Wars. Nature abhors two things, an empty space and a full one. Nature likes things to be balanced. Man likes straight lines and growth. Nature likes cycles. Who's going to win? Actually, that is the wrong question. Nature doesn't care about winning or losing. It just wants living things to live in balance with their environment.