Reply #60: As the United States Circles the Drain...

[hunter]

Every day the United States becomes a little bit more like that crazy old toothless alcoholic paranoid neighbor sitting on the front porch with a shot gun.

You can make a little bit of money bringing the old man his booze, but you don't let your kids or your pets play near his house.

Nuclear power is probably not going to be the magic solution to the end of "cheap oil" but I'm pretty sure most solutions will not be developed here in the United States anyways.

At this point our nation is corrupt and ineffective.

To the bitter end we will cheer for Arnold as he drives by in his big hydrogen powered Hummer, and we will wave the flag and sing "God Bless America" and proclaim ourselves the leader of the free world. Meanwhile kids in other lands who walk or ride scooters to school and work every day will be kicking our economic ass.

While eastern housewives are cooking their dinners with gas, I'll probably be fumbling around in the dark looking for enough sticks to heat my cold Kelly-Kettle half full of day old chicory-black-market-coffee.

So yes, I agree, with you BeFree, here in the United States, ...solutions will be indivdual in nature, since the centralized contollers have failed to protect the lifestyles of this society and they can not be trusted to start now.

There are many nations that will do what they have to do to maintain and improve the standard of living of their average citizens.

But because we, here in these United States, are the "world's only remaining superpower" we will strut around like little bantam cocks, preening and crowing, totally oblivious to the fact that every new year is a little bit worse than the last year for the average American worker.

Crappy schools, crappy healthcare, crappy food, crappy government are all accepted as perfectly normal, and few are striving for anything better. The Hubble Space Telescope will go down with a whimper, and never be replaced, all our industry both high-tech and low-tech will be "outsourced" and we'll be left without anyone who knows how to run a coal power plant cleanly, much less a nuclear power plant...

God Bless America! We're number one! We are the best... (don't you know? The man on the television tells us so!) Heh. There's a song in there somewhere...)

So yeah, until we cast off our corrupt leaders, we are on our own.