DID I HEAR ONE TRILLION?

[alma]

Did i hear right? --that this war has cost around 1 trillion dollars?

How many houses would that buy for american citizens?

How many kids could have a college education?

How many people could have adequate health care?

I hear about how many ne'er do wells have their hands out for another handout, but i am wondering how many warmakers have their hands in the pot, and are living well in this era of the military industrial complex with it's revolving doors.

People who work for the military and then have lucrative jobs with the free training they got while american taxpayers footed the bill, big time.

--and then they have all the training and the good will extablished with this imperial empire builder to get any other job they desire to have, and all paid for by average citizens whose sons and daughters are also on the front lines in this god awful war.

--and now, i ask you, whose hand is overflowing with the profits of war that have cost us all an arm and a leg.

How many houses would one trillion buy, how many college educations would it buy for us, and how much
health insurances would it pay for the 40,000 who have none at present?

--and you think that the ne'er do wells are bringing this country down. Think again.

Like i've said before, the war on poverty is a fiasco, the war on drugs is a disaster, the war on sin is a lost cause, and the war on war beats them all. love, alma

[Ernie]

Love the way you think, Alma. So now the number is up to a trillion? When I last did the math, we were only at $409 BILLION and this was the math ...

The price of oil is concerned with two factors: geology (how much is left in the ground) and geopolitics (where is what’s left and who sits on top of it)

Everything else is price manipulation by the oil companies (gouging) or the government (dumping). It’s not in the interest of the oil companies for the true price of oil to come out at the pump. Awhile back on CSPAN I heard the figure $409 billion come out as to the cost of the war in Iraq. Let’s assume that this war is entirely about gaining control of oil and crunch some numbers here.

Estimates vary on how much oil we’ll get out of that territory. The DoE says 112 billion barrels, while other independent agencies say it may be anywhere from 200 to 300 billion barrels. Per some stats I got off of an oil consulting firm, 1 barrel of oil yields 19.5 gallons of gasoline. Ok, so that’s 2,184,000,000,000 gallons of gasoline. According to some other stats I found, each American household consumes roughly 4 gallons per day. Overall, industry and average citizens pooled together consumes 400 million gallons of gasoline per day.

If you take the $409 billion and divide it by the number of barrels we’ll get out (the DoE’s conservative estimate), it shows that the MILITARY cost alone (so far) means the true cost of gasoline is somewhere around $3.65 per gallon. At a usage rate of 400 million gallons per day, the oil we get out of Iraq will last us 5,460 days or 14.95 years. So this is a very liberal estimate here. It doesn’t include Exxon-Mobile’s costs at getting the oil out of the ground and to the pump. It doesn’t include how much longer the war will continue, or the cost in lives (and then the associated financial costs of the deaths) of the soldiers who will be guarding this oil for the next 15 years. It also doesn’t take into consideration exactly HOW much oil is being used by the military in order to secure the land long enough to get the 112 billion barrels out of it. So departing from the hard math a moment, I’ll estimate that you could probably double the price per gallon ($7.30 per gallon) and subtract a third off of the number of years (10 years). So now the true cost at the pump is known, as is how long the oil we’re getting out of Iraq will last us.

Do you think that someone in the government should have maybe done some numbers crunching too and determined whether or not this is worth it? Iraq would have SOLD us all their oil for far less than $409 billion. Or just think for a moment about how much R&D into alternative fuels, public transportation, and greener technologies that $409 could have bought us. Even if you take out all the ideology, the morality, and the political out of the equation, invading Iraq was STILL a bad idea, as is throwing good money after bad. There’s simply not enough oil there to sustain our gasoline-guzzling economy. Iraq is the SECOND largest oil reserve in the world (Russia has the first) and it’ll give us 15 years at best. That’s how much time we have, ladies and gentlemen, before the lights go off. Before traffic on the street outside comes to a standstill. One year after that, our bloated, corn-driven agribusiness system powered by dead dinosaur plants will come grinding to a halt and the 6.5 billion people (according to the CIA factbook) who live on this planet will suddenly find out that there’s not enough food to go around and that the carrying capacity of the planet has been grossly exceeded. James Kunstler called it the “Long Emergency”. I call it the “Terrible Adjustment”. I tell you this, out of the depths of my love for you. Start preparing now.

[DaNgEr_KiTtY]

yeah i guess the upper 50% income earners paid for 97% of the cost of the war. the people below 50% income level got a good bargain then by only having to pay for 3% of the cost of the war or nothing at all. so looks to me like the filthy rich took the soaking on this war......& THEY DESERVE IT cause none of them worked hard for their money anyway!

[Ernie]

Who is dying in this war, Danger Kitty? The sons and daughters of those upper 50% income earners? Or the kids in the trailer parks and ghettos?

Recently in Tulsa I was in a hotel that was hosting a convention of Army recruiters. At night in the bar they sat in small groups or alone, talking quietly or just staring morosely into their drinks. It must weigh heavy on the mind to be the one sending kids off to die.

[333]

Peace,

Ernie,

6.5 billion people (according to the CIA factbook) who live on this planet will suddenly find out that there’s not enough food to go around and that the carrying capacity of the planet has been grossly exceeded.


That is one piece of math I would like to know, cold hard math, on that which you referred to as the "carrying capacity" of planet earth.

333

[alma]

Thanks for the correction, ernie.
--and thanks for doing all that math. I couldn't even write one trillion. Had to ask my hubby how many zeros were in one trillion.
--and thanks for caring about our kids who are carring the burden that these war profiteers have dumped in their laps.
It is true that the profit of war is the loss of peace, and it always has been in my time on this planet.
Eisenhower had it right when he warned of the military industrial complex as he was leaving office.
Maybe this war is "the war to end all wars", like all the others. love, alma

[Ernie]

333 - I don't know how you'd figure out the true carrying capacity of the Earth, but I can guarantee you we've exceeded it. Those of you who have read the works of Daniel Quinn (Ishmael, in particular) will be familiar with this concept.

When hunter/gatherer societies went out, it took a lot of land to feed them. The invention of agriculture, growing crops for food, increased the carrying capacity of that same amount of land. More food could be "confined" in a given space and therefore the number of people that land would carry went up. The next big invention was the plow and that increased it further. Then domestication of animals, then crop rotation ... all these things continued to increase the carrying capacity of any given amount of land. Right up until the 1920's, the ratio was about 1:8 for calories obtained by agriculture. For every 1 you put in, you got 8 more back out. Now the current ratio in our gas-crazed, factory warehouse farming system is 30:1. That's right ... 30 calories are burned for every 1 calorie we get back from food. What allows this to continue is oil. It's fossil fuels that creates the synthetic fertilizer and carries it to the enormous fields that are plowed by enormous tractors powered by fossil fuel. The harvest is brought in with fossil fuel, distributed by fossil fuel, and then next year the whole cycle goes again. Don't forget that oil is simply a billion year old compost pile. The same energy that's heating up your compost pile in the backyard to a nice warm center is what's trapped in oil.

So this carrying capacity that's exceeded ... that's how many people we can feed WITHOUT oil. Because we've had oil in agriculture since at least the 1920's and that's fueled some pretty powerful population booms. When we run out of oil (in the next 15 years), the first 2 years are going to really suck for a lot of people. That's about how long I figure it will take for the carrying capacity to adjust itself.

Don't think it will? There's not a single natural law that mankind has proven that it's above. When the rains come and the clover spreads, the rabbit population booms until there's no more clover. Then the coyote population booms until the rabbit population booms, and then the coyote population dwindles because there's not enough rabbits. Folks, we're seriously running low on rabbits here. Right now, too many people think food comes from the grocery store or the Taco Bell drive-thru window. It's going to be a rude awakening.

Alma - No correction at all ... just some support. I got to thinking one day awhile back that pretty much everything material can come down to a number. If my family eats 10 eggs every morning for breakfast and I open the fridge and I have two cartons for a total of 24 eggs, I know that I've got 2 full days of eggs left and then we're short. So why can't the numbers also be done with oil? The numbers I'm plugging into this equation are publicly available, but whether they're true or not depends on how much you trust your government and the oil industry. The equation stays the same, however.

And as to this being the war to end all wars ... well, I don't believe it will be, but I think that in my children's lifetime, men will walk to war and fight it with swords and bows. It will be less over ideologies and more about the contents of granaries.

[DaNgEr_KiTtY]

Who is dying in this war, Danger Kitty? The sons and daughters of those upper 50% income earners? Or the kids in the trailer parks and ghettos?

Recently in Tulsa I was in a hotel that was hosting a convention of Army recruiters. At night in the bar they sat in small groups or alone, talking quietly or just staring morosely into their drinks. It must weigh heavy on the mind to be the one sending kids off to die.

of course all of the men & women being sent off to die are kids from trailer parks & ghettos! thats the whole idea! LMFAO! gee how far from the truth can we go. Ernie i understand that your news sources are intentionally blocking all of the stories about people that were inspired to join after 9-11 & leave out the fact that a huge amount of established, successful & financially secure people joined the armed forces. i must be living in some make believe town here in the blue ridge, or maybe its cause we dont have enough trailer parks or ghettos, but the people i know that have joined since 9-11 were people that you more than likely would not have seen working in burger king or on welfare if the war hadnt happened.

i always send one of my best friends posts like yours. he will be deploying to iraq in the near future as Sgt Jeffrey (i have to leave out his last name cause he doesnt like attention) in Army. he is ex-marine somalia vet, speaks 5 languages & 3 of them are spoken in that region, college educated & sure as heck could be an officer. cant get back in marines cause of their age limit but can get in the army at 38. he doesnt want to be in intel or anything else but infantry as an enlisted grunt. i would pay $1000 dollars to see you 2 sit at a table, have a beer & discuss your opinions about this war & who is & who will be fighting it if we dont take care of business now.

i am personally at our local Army recruiting office about once a week. i will ask SFC Montgomery USAREC about the this look of guilt you saw on these recruiters faces & if he was actually there. if recruiters from VA were there he prolly was too. he also joined after 9-11 & had a much better paying job. he must be just another victim of bush & evil corporations & had no other choice but to join. BAHAHAHAHA! he is just more pissed off about the fact that he was re-assigned to recruiting & wont be serving his 3rd tour in iraq with his buddies. oh & the other thing is we have people from all walks of life down at our recruiting station & from talking to these guys there is no doubt i would hire anyone of them if they hadnt already made their choice.

is tulsa a boring town these days? i just cant believe this picture of a whole convention of army recruiters at a hotel bar, thinking of nothing other than how guilty they feel for sending our poor people off to die for nuthin. this had to have been a monday night! this is not the morale level of our troops nor our recruiters as i know it, but if your ideas succeed it will be.....but of course i am misguided by my personal experiences. i believe that this sort of scene you describe ernie will take place after we surrender in iraq & 20 million people die here, there & around the world.

[Ernie]

Tulsa's always been a boring town, but it was about 12 guys. Three at one table making lewd drunken comments to a waitress and then a sprinkling of others. Hardly any of them could fit in their uniform.

I'm sure the good recruits you know were off rescuing orphans from burning buildings or out in the parking lot keeping a weather-eye out for terrorists that might be infiltrating the Marriott.

There are some smart folks in the military, but the facts speak for themselves. Military recruitment is primarily occurring in rural areas and urban ghettos. Saying you know some smart military guys doesn't change any of that. And I'm sure your friend is gung-ho and believes in the war. You'd have to be to follow someone else's orders, fly halfway around the world, and put yourself in the middle of someone else's business. I know I was gung-ho when I was there. And I know I didn't know squat about the big picture then either.

Don't act like us speaking out against the war isn't justified. I earned that right by serving. I didn't have much of a social conscience when I went in, but I sure did by the time I got out.

[alma]

About this so-called "war on terror"-

How can i get excited about that, when 1/3 of our population is dying, and will die of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes each year.

Is there any greater terror than that?

Why doesn't the government have a search and destroy mission right here in this country against that very very real, and very very clear, and very very present dangerous enemy among us that is killing over 400,000 american citizens each year from lung cancer (according to the american cancer society), and all for their own personal profit.

Surely, there is no greater terror than this.

The 35,000 Iraqies who have been killed in this war didn't do it, nor those of equal number who were seriously wounded, nor those of our own soldiers whose lives have been lost to this god awful war.

Cigarettes did it! --and those who sold our kids on the idea before they were ever of the age of consent.

--and 1,500,000 babies are aborted each year (the last numbers i heard of the casualities perpetrated on potential american citizens by their own parents who are supposed to love them and be their best friends.

--and the 50,000 people killed by drunk drivers each year.

Who is our enemy? Who are the real terrorists among us in this world?

Now, these are the terrorists that concern me. How can i get excited about enemies abroad, when we have some real "terrorists" who are a very clear, and very present danger to us? love, alma

[DaNgEr_KiTtY]

ernie i dont understand how i am acting like speaking against the war isnt justified. i guess i shouldnt disagree with people with your position.

i will get back to the direction the thread is going & try to decided if we would all live happily ever after if we banned cigarettes & cars. then i would figure out how many houses or college educations the government shoulda bought with our tax money.

[333]

Peace,


Ernie,

333 - I don't know how you'd figure out the true carrying capacity of the Earth, but I can guarantee you we've exceeded it. Those of you who have read the works of Daniel Quinn (Ishmael, in particular) will be familiar with this concept.

I am certainly not trying to be confrontational or argumentative, I just figure that the "brains" in our world can crunch all kinds of facts and figures, then make their financial killing accordingly.

What I have a hard time believing is that "they" have not already calculated theses facts and figures regarding the "carrying capacity" of earth. But alas would they tell the public at large. X = amount of usable farm land, that yields, Y- amount of produce, that leads to Z maximum population support. Along those lines. I do not think they would divulge.

I agree their may be way to many people already, and people like to breed exponentially.
Wars are the result of greed, sentiment and lack of truth, usually idealist's trying to conform the world according to their model.
More accurate though wars are about survival, food stores, energy stores, and a standard of life that each side wants to perpetuate. There are plenty "rich" folk in the history of war, but more often than not its the poor and middle class that carry the burden, naturally so because there are many more poor and middle class then there are rich folk.

Disproportionate absolutely, but do the poor/ middle class really benefit as much as the rich from war.?

The way I see it is that humans have created a model of the world that is not sustainable with the current technology, and food/energy resources. Cars good, 3-4 per household not so good, cell phones and satellites good , throw away technology that changes every 18 months, seems like a waste. 400,000,000 gallons of gas a day, is gluttonous, to base a society that runs solely on this product, not to mention short sited ly stupid.

333

[alma]

Yeah, the leaders of th is country are aware of figures, sure! they are!

Than why are the farmers still allowed to use artificial chemicals and pesticides and herbicides all around this nation, knowing how many people will die of cancers from these carcinagions, and factories allowed to dump their toxic waste into streams, etc.

--and animals grasing on this polluted land, and all the toxins used by farmers are stored in animal fat and find their way into our food supply, and consequently into our bodies and causing so many cancers, and they don't know it yet.

--and produce coming into this country are loaded with other chemicals not allowed to be used in this country, but used profically there, and they don't know it?

30% of all cancers come from cig smoking. 60% comes from the toxins in the food we eat.

Animals are loaded up with estrogens, hormones, and anti-biotics, as well as the toxins they eat on polluted land, and they don't know that some cancers are estrogen fed, among other kinds? These things that should and would terrify us if we knew the extent of the problem?

My daughter reminds me that the lifetime of care for wounded soldiers, past, present and future, and the hospitals to maintain them, etc. would finally add up to that trillion.

It is the profit of war that is the loss of peace, and the loss of attention that should be given to these, and other vital terrors among us.

They can afford to spend billions, at least, on war and killing and maiming, at home and abroad, but can"t afford to take care of the first things, like health care, education, housing, and care of the old and infirm among us that would and could make life more aboundant for us all in the end. love, alma

[daphodil]

Intelligent folks profit in just about any 'era.' Empires rise and fall, wars are won and lost: the fittest remain--genetically, spiritually, and financially.

[Ernie]

333 - No worries. No argument from me, I just ain't enough of a scientist to figure out the math you're wanting. Here's kind of the way I see it ... if I dump toxins and pollutants down my toilet it goes into my septic tank and destroys its function. The toxins end up in the soil out beyond the leach field and eventually pollute the entire 5 acre farm. If I leave trash out there, the same eventually happens. If I try and run 50 head of cattle on a property than can reasonably support 3, then it's going to get grazed down to nothing.

Nobody needs a degree in enviromental science or agriculture to determine this. I think what everyone forgets is that the world isn't really any different than a 5 acre farm ... if you exceed the capacity and don't give it time to recharge, you're going to ruin it.

Ultimately though, it's going to get its time to recharge. I just think the human race may not be too happy when that happens.

Alma - Everyone these days is talking about the Chinese dog food issue. I take every opportuntity to point out that if they'll take the time to look at the list of ingredients on many products they're using every day, they'll find a dozen other poisons that American companies have been using for a long time. Some poisons kill you slow and the FDA approves them. I think they're testing process means that if you ingest it and can make it out the door under your own steam then it must be safe.

Danger Kitty - Um, I don't know how we went astray here but now we're starting to get back to common ground. :)

[333]

Peace,


Hey Ernie,

Yea, it would seem that common sense would tell us not to destroy our own environment for the sake of maximum profit. I know if i were given all the facts in a given case I would chose prudently to not destroy the prospects of the future, for exploitation today.

But then again my meager lifestyle does not need the spoils of huge profits to exist. I don't have a jet or helicopter to fill up with gas, I don't have 50 million in campaign funds to manage, I do not have multiple mansions, in multiple countries, to pay for, and I certainly do not have 400 billion to throw down the toilet staving off the inevitable end of oil.

Nature has a way of balancing herself out.

333

[daphodil]

The very Earth itself is a source of destruction. Maybe we should get rid of tornados, volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis.
How 'bout some men since they go around impregnating women which leads to overpopulation; we'll thin them out like the deer--make it a seasonal type deal.
Anyone complaining about today's world and the environment ought to plant themselves back on a street during the Industrial Revolution--then get back to me.

[Ernie]

The very Earth itself is a source of destruction. *Maybe we should get rid of tornados, volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis.
How 'bout some men since they go around impregnating women which leads to overpopulation; we'll thin them out like the deer--make it a seasonal type deal.
Anyone complaining about today's world and the environment ought to plant themselves back on a street during the Industrial Revolution--then get back to me.

That didn't make much sense of me, since we're essentially saying the problems come FROM the industrial revolution. How 'bout we say about circa 1850?