Notes from a new Hole

So in my search for new places to spend my time, I've found Innovox and made it my new home away from home. So far the place seems ok, and the connection rates are cheap and the pipe is fairly fast. Food is pretty good too, and the have Red Bull, which makes Ness happy.

So I got the first 3 days of the trip typed up, but that’s all really. I'll work on more of it tomorrow or later this evening.

I just wanted to rant about something here for a minute, seeing as it’s the six month anniversary of 9/11. The US had been an island of ignorance until then, the stories of terrorism and war distant things from our shores until that day. I can't really fault us for not caring and protecting ourselves from terrorism better - why should we have? I'm no stranger to bombings and terror - I live in Atlanta, after all, and remember both the Olympic bombing, and the nightclub bombing. The later was less than 2 miles from my house, close enough you could hear it in my living room. But there was no way we could have known to what scale these attacks would be, not legally and ethically. The rest of this country saw it as a wakeup call. I just saw it as confirmation of the escalation of the obvious.

The US has made allot of enemies in the world - we have been worse cultural imperialist than the British Empire was. But is that a bad thing? Is it wrong of us to have brought the desire for running water, electricity, and telecommunications to lands where the populations knew nothing but cows and dust? We brought people literally out of the Stone Age into the information age. But what we have forgotten is a simple lesson - there will always be haves and have nots... but now it is simply the haves and the have less. There is no way the entire population of earth can have equal everything - our goal should never be this. Our goal should be to see that every part of the world has what it can sustain, no more, no less, and to raise the level of sustainability as high as we can without breaking it. There are some parts of the world where nomadic herding is the only sustainable form of life. Fine, I would think a place like that would be the perfect niche for cellular phones and wireless development. Conversely, there are places where large cities are sustainable, and where sprawling metros are the way of life - such is the world. We cannot expect life to be the same everywhere, but we can introduce those aspects of technology and culture which best suit the existing ways of life without the sort of Nike and McDonald’s mentality we have in the past. That is what won us enemies.

So what more should we do? Let's go finish kicking the Taliban’s ass, and then take care of Iraq. After that... I would be very afraid to be the country that did something to piss off the US next. Don't expect us to take things lying down any longer.