Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Rezwan]

There are vast tracts of land on this planet with no one on them. Plop down a desalinization plant and energy, and hey presto, you have useful, cultivable land. Suddenly – a gazillion more acres online.

Maybe that just means a gazillion more wars?

Power – true, something people want. But usually those around them suffer their power-lust because they provide a valuable service, and that service is stability, security, some semblance of societal order. Looking at Iraq, Hussein was a power hungry fellow who shed a lot of blood and caused a lot of misery. Eliminating him is still resulting in a lot of bloodshed and misery and the best trained army in the world has its hands full with no immediate resolution of conflict in sight. So the cost of trying to find a more egalitarian, humane power structure is possibly as high as the thing its replacing. But the real problem in the region is that the natural resource base is so degraded (deserts, salty soils, drought, etc.) and the only resource worth talking about is oil. And oil is an easily centrally controlled resource. This is one reason the mid east has been a chess game for so long with limited grassroots development. Cradle of civilization has long been depleted and needs massive restoration efforts.

If you want peace, have a vision of what that peace will look like and how it will be inclusive.

But yeah, self-defense techniques always come in handy.