is the united states certifiably insane?

Sadly, no.. We dó have a very liberal drug policy and freedom of speech, but the government is planning to forbid mushrooms and many people get killed or phisically abused for speaking their minds.. so there goes free Holland

 

I have the feeling the Netherlands are a lot less insane then the states though.

 

While the US has the best law system, or used to, in the world, it is very corrupt and causing us to become conforming sheep. The US government scares me, with whatever they may be hiding or not.

 

Yeah that's true, but we're all taking after the stuuff in the States I've noticed: Hiphop culture and violence.. globalisation is not working. The system worries me too. America ís the dominating continent right now... not for long that's afact: they've gone bankrupt and Japan is increasing in popularity. Bush can't handle money that's a fact..

 

The sentance starting with "Bush can't handle....." could be ended with any word one can think of and it would be just as true. Not only is he a puppet president, he's so stuped he can't even do that right!

 

I've heard he's being controlled by a whole shitload of rich oil people.. He's not going to be re elected, thats for sure^^ and when he's out maybe there 'll be some changes

 

So much sucks one barely knows where to begin. But plenty is improving as well. I grew up knowing the Soviet missiles were less than an hour away at any moment. Then someone figured out that it's darned hard to make a buck with Soviet style communism. The wall came down. And for a while I had a different view on life. These days half of the nuclear fuel in America comes from decommissioned Russian weapons that were designed to arrive under hostile conditions. Now they charge Gameboys.

But all was not Disney yet. It became known that black market nukes were a potential reality. Rumor is that Israel buys every one that pops up and bids top dollar. Who can blame them? They know any one that gets loose will likely arrive in Tel Aviv. Another published plan is called the "American Hiroshima" plan by the radical folks at Al Qaeda who hope to nuke 7 American cities. 1 would likely destroy the American economy, built largely on a house of cards supported by the Chinese, Japanese and Saudia. 2 would seal the deal. 7 would avail America to worldwide plunder.

I'm no fan of Bush, but after such a LONG spate of crooks and wimps in the Whitehouse, America may have needed a trigger-happy Texas braggart just to remind the planet that screwing with America is still dangerous and likely to get people killed. I have nothing against any faith except to say that the taking of a human life is ssomething only a God should be allowed to consider. When a man kills another man in the name of his God he is not serving that God but is being arrogant in the face of that God and shaming himself. While all murder is evil, the murder of swaths of innocent people for the sake of terrorizing people into political change is most revolting.

Prior to him we had Nixon, who was shamed out of office for being a crook. Ford, who fell a lot but thankfully didn't cause much damage. Carter, who sat on his hands for over 400 days while Americans and American allies were held as hostages by Iranian "students". Reagan came in talking tough and managed to magically get Iran to release them. But he was doing it with crack money, not bravado. And when 241 Americans were killed in their sleep by a truck bomb in Beirut, Reagan had us pack up and run away. So we could go invade some obsure Caribbean island full of American med school retreads and a few armed commies. Then Bush 1, who turns back at Saddam's gates on Powell's advice, forgetting all about Iran hitting the USS Stark with a french-made Exocet cruise missile (among other things). Then Clinton who kept a precarious Middle Eastern stability by keeping the radical elements paid and happy. But paying off any "bully" only makes the bully worse in the long run. 9/11 was already in the works before Lewinski failed her attempt at social climbing. Sweating him out with impeachment wasted American resources and compromised our security even more. Naturally the Bush folks came into office giving the "yea yea" treatment to ALL of the advice from the previous administration including crucial facts about Middle Eastern radicals. The bribes dried up, the information dried up and somebody knew it was a powderkeg and managed to find us a defender. So we basically hired one bully to deal with another. So far the results are questionable.

I think war proves we humans have a LONG way to go before we can consider our race as "civilized". One thing Bush did though was change the rules for older power plants in America. Right up to 2000 the older power plants were forbidden to make modifications unless the entire plant was recertified. This included modifications to emissions controls. Like it or not, Bush is the guy who changed that. Now old, but reliable coal plants are getting Selective Catalytic Reduction which reduces NOx emissions by 75-90%. Soon they will have CO2 sequestration, mercury and sulfur extraction combined with existing combined cycle technology and will actually qualify as a "Green" power source! These innovations don't exist in a closed society. Only freedom to create leads to this. Why else would the Chinese want to go to the moon? They KNOW it's not made of cheese.

CF

 

Totally agree! Human kind is too arrogant. I'm sometimes wondering how we could ever think that we are ábove' all other species. That's complete nonsense, we just assume that we are better than other animals because we can invent things and have a strongly developed language, but we're really not that clever obviously: If we were we would not be using all of our technology this way, leading to the demize of our own species as well as those around us. We cannot cope with our own power to create, and commuincate: we abuse our powers to our own destruction. (A clear example being a bomb wich can destroy an entire continent, just to boast to others that you are most powerfull..)

 

Well, I really don't have faith in any of our polititians to really change much of anything. It will be nice though if we see either a woman or a black guy become pres. Either way would be a milestone in the equal rights dept. Then again, they might rig the election again to get Exxon Mobil for president.

 

Well, you can't really be a president without doing some good....Bush has come pretty close, but even he has to do some good, when it's put in front of him to do. I don't buy into the idea though that Bush was tougher on terrorism than another president would have been. Not when he was in on it, and even if he wasn't,....but I'm pretty sure he was.

 

Yeah, just that

Anyway, Bush isn't the only president who screwed up as is said before (think about Nixon or Roosevelt, Johnson too,although he might have been able to improve things if he wasn't elected in such a time,,). The peoplehave to make a change here, but most of the people are deaf to the world, and sucked in by commercialism and consumerism. These things have been brought into existence when mass media came to the world wich enables large companies to deceive multiple people at the same time. The tv and radio and now the computer are used as means to control people and keep them from waking up and see.The multinationals sort of rule this world.
People can now be enslaved to products on a large scale.
Since this is possible, and media have become international, America, and with this a big part of the rest of the world, has gone crazy, focussing on consuming, not caring about the rest of the earth or the environment. Before the globalisation people were deceiving eachother too with commercials and lies about products, but not on such a large scale as is possible now because of television and computers. Also the industrial revolution has enables us to build bigger weapons, so as we all know war has become something even more dangerous. So those are a few reasons I think.