Pre-emptive Nuclear Strikes?
It seems that the government is now considering making our official policy that we should be able to perform a pre-emptive strike with nuclear weapons. Granted, this has not yet been made an actual law/policy, but I find it really scary that they’ve even been considering this since at least March. Why is our nuclear policy so screwed up? We’re considering restarting development of nuclear weapons that can penetrate into underground bunkers, yet we can’t make a nuclear power plant (which would be both safer and more environmentally friendly than a coal-burning plant), because it would be far too dangerous. We’re afraid that Iran will somehow turn its civilian-grade uranium processing plant into a military-grade plutonium plant, but we see nothing immediately wrong with nuking an entire country because a couple non-governmental people living in it were simply thinking about doing something we don’t like. WTF?!
On a slightly more light-hearted note, here are 25 hilarious quotes about Hurricane Katrina and how the beaurocracies are screwing up relief efforts.
Also, there was an attempted ban on media coverage of the hurricane and the New Orleans area, over privacy concerns. Thankfully, CNN is suing and has won at least the temporary ability to go in and report, citing its tastefullness in covering Afghanistan, Iraq, and the tsunami in Asia. This sounds surprisingly like the government trying to hide its mistakes (note the parallels to my rantings on closed-source software and the GRE). Go CNN!
I’m not really this angry, I just get a bit worked up over all the stupid things happening in the world today.