For all the computer nerds out there, this sign brought a smile to my face.

The Daily Show gives it’s take on the history of funding wars in the Middle East and how every attempt to balance and solve the problems with arms just makes it worse.

We’ve already explored these issues HERE and HERE, but this video will at least make you laugh to avoid the sadness.

I think it has come to the point where humor is the only way to deliver these realizations to keep us all from punching ourselves in the head.

We visited Iran some decades ago. We being US.

There are some who would like to sell the American people that we should visit again:

Iran must be attacked. The main reason it must be attacked is that it shares THREE of the four letters with Iraq — and if you want to get serious, it is the FIRST three letters. This non-coincidence means jupiter is in the seventh house and cheney aligns with mars (the war god not the bar).

Back to Cheney. If i were cheney, an embarrassment to a nation, how could I get a country with no interest in attacking Iran to attack Iran. Having an anti-mandate and impeachment fervor would make this hard. I would probably start with showing that we are trying diplomacy, at the same time doing things like declaring their revolutionary guard a terrorist organization. Coincidentally four days ago, the administration announced just that this — though not widely enough reported. That should trigger some type of response from Iran’s main military organization which would illicit them to “punch” us. Again coincidentally the claim of a future punch came yesterday. And if they do something, the administration has blanket power to retaliate based on the global war on terror.

Will they need a Gulf-of-Tonkin-type permission or is the war-on-terror card good enough?

Finally! A politician with a clear view about the dangers of invading Iraq!

This post from Mike on LaneBus.org about the US planning to sell $20 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia, really got me thinking (and depressed). How will spreading more ways of killing people help increase the peace? It made me remember a speech given by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 called “CHANCE FOR PEACE”. Amazing that well over 50 years ago one of our leaders had the right idea. It is too bad very few leaders have learned or listened to that message since. Even in 1953 his words still apply today:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

…aspire to this: the lifting, from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and of fears, so that they may find before them a golden age of freedom and of peace.

Should we sell $20 billion in arms to any country? The US has a plan to sell $20 billion in arms to saudi arabia. What will this do? This will be used to buy guns, bullets, bombs that will be used to intimidate, maim, and kill. This is the typical knee-jerk escalation that views solving the problems of terrorism as killing more terrorists. The collateral damage is a stable society. What gets left behind is all the direct and indirect effects of putting $20 billion of arms in the middle east.

The weapons that are constantly being used in all these areas came from somewhere. We need to add no more. For $20 billion, we could add infrastructure for roads, schools, water for those that are the worst off. The best way to combat terrorism is to strengthen those people who have the least care of their futures and their country.