A Paean to Stupidity

So Guy and I hiked in the Petersburg Battleground Park today and I thought of all the wasted lives. When I was in High School everyone in a history class received a war and a cause as a project. We had to take that cause and argue either that it was the sole cause of the war or was not a cause in the slightest. I got the Civil War and economics. What a no brainer. You have a country, the US, invade another country, the CSA, depose it's leader, Jefferson Davis, because the attacking country needed the natural resources of the attacked country to feed its economy, the textiles that the Northern factories used to manufacture goods to sell to Europe and back to the South. It's a good thing that we learned so much over the past 150 years and we would never attack another country, Iraq, depose its leader, Hussein, for a natural resource that fueled our economy, oil. OOOPPPPS, not a very good example, eh?

Well, look at it this way. It's not like we can use the billions that we are spending in Iraq each month to help our economy. It's not as if all the medics and corpsmen, engineers, air traffic controllers, mechanics, etc have any skills that we could use to rebuild our decrepit infrastructure and moribund manufacturing sector. OOOPPPPS, another bad example, eh? I warned you with the title of the post!!!!