Tuesday, January 06, 2004

The London News Review

This is from there from January 2 nd.
It’s very interesting the things we don’t know about as Americans. Or perhaps just me since I don’t watch that show.
Anyway…off to the quote:

“On Sunday, a convoy Musharraf was travelling in passed over a bridge that blew up a few seconds later. The President's life was only saved by an electronic jamming device installed in his car.
Of course, the nightmare scenario in Pakistan is that fundamentalist elements take control of the country’s nukes (by, for instance, assassinating the President) and Delhi is more or less erased from the map by the day’s end.
The US State Department and the elite Washington press corps were deeply worried about the risk of a coup in a nuclear-armed country, as was made clear by the following exchange, two days after the event:

'Question: Pardon me if we discussed this yesterday, but I don't think we did, the assassination attempt on President Musharraf and your reaction to it?'
'State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher: No, we really didn't.'
'Question: All right. I didn't think we did.'
'Boucher: Let me get you something on that.'

The State Department later put out a statement thanking Musharraf for his support in the 'Global War on Terror' and expressing relief at the fact that nobody was hurt. “

This is lovely. What a lovely thought.
Society has found new ways to scare the shit out of people. The American government is using things like this to ratchet us up like they did during the cold war so we’ll be behind them when they blow up another country for their oil. And apparently we don’t care as long as the price of gas stays low enough for us to feed our SUV’s.
I saw a picture online of a highway banner about the H2 that said something like, “Real Soldiers are dying in their Hummers So that you can play in yours” Also said something about 2 soldiers a day are dying (the 2 in the H2 or something). The point was it’s just a chevy tahoe with a different body but it only gets like 5 miles per gallon. Are you fucking kidding me? That’s insane! Does no one remember 1974? It’s when the big chevys and fords and dodges gave way to the Honda civic because of lines at the gas station and the price jumping from the 25cents a gallon it had been for a long time to a dollar before dropping back down but never to 25 cents again. And as Americans, unless we travel abroad (and I mean as close as Canada) we never even know how much more the rest of the world pays for gasoline compared to us. A few years ago I was driving to Canada regularly and I always made sure I got gas before I crossed the border because in New York gas was about a buck and a half a gallon and once you cross into Canada it was a little over two dollars a liter which (For those of us Americans who said “No Way!” to the metric system when the rest of the world said ok (talk about standing outside the car having a sandwich!)) worked out to….uh…like $7 a gallon maybe? And last year in Holland and Belgium although we really had to look hard to find a gas station (Yay Europe!) it was like 5 or 6 bucks a gallon (Sorry, Euros). I once heard our government subsidizes the price of gas for us or something. “We’ll sell you fast airplanes and lots of bullets for them if you sell us cheap gas for our SUV’s”???
But this rant was supposed to be about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and how someone is going to kill some dude and blow up India or is it Pakistan…I did poorly in geography…hey, I’m American…Europe didn’t really exist until November 2002 in my reality!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home