Where’s Waldo?

In today’s installment of Heave Steve, I must posit this question:

Where the hell was he for the past few days?

The majority of the G-20 leaders from around the globe were having a pow wow at the United Nations headquarters in New York City to discuss a varied slew of issues that are relative to global unity and security  – but where was the Right Honourable Stephen Harper?

Not in New York, I can tell you that right away.

Who was in New York?

Among the major players were Barack Obama (United States Of America), Gordon Brown (the United Kingdom), Nicolas Sarkozy (France), Dmitry Medvedev (Russia)… hell, even the world’s snappiest-dressing/Jew-hating/terrorism-endorsing/nuke-wanting and all-around assclown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in attendance.

This was a meeting of the United Nations Security Council – the people who penalize countries when they do bad things (whether it be in the form of military strikes, or the more common strongly worded letter) – a council that Canada really wants to be on so it will have a say in how the world works, or at least the illusion of doing so.

The big topic of this meeting?

Nuclear weapons: who has them, who wants them, and who is not allowed to have them.

Sounds like a good conversation that the Canadian people should have a voice in, doesn’t it?

What makes it a great place to be for world leaders is that you get to step up to the dais on – what is quite literally – the world stage and address the peoples of the entire planet, telling them what your particular country plans to do in the coming months and years and what that means to global peace.

From here, you explain to the world how your country’s actions, programs, policies, and military operations will effect nations and people around the world – either for the better, or for the worse.

The big drama this week?

Ahmadinnerjacket – errr, Ahmadinejad – announced to the world that he had a secret uranium enrichment facility (on top of the one the U.N. Security Council was already aware of) humming away at an undisclosed location in the Iranian desert… which is the type of place where you can turn regular uranium into the type of fuel that either powers a nuclear power plant OR a thermonuclear weapon.

This is somewhat distressing because:

A) Iran is the number one exporter of terrorists in the world.

B) Iran hates Israel and has repeatedly said that it intends to wipe Israel off the map – which is one use for a stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Crazy, eh?

You know… it would have been really great if someone of global import had spoken up on Canada’s behalf during the fallout of that revelation – someone who could step up to the podium and say how outraged we as a Canadian people were at such a unacceptable revelation.

Wouldn’t that have been great?

Yeah, but Stephen Harper – the Canadian Prime Minister who is supposed to be the focused voice of 33,792,000 Canadian citizens – wasn’t anywhere to be found at the United Nations building.

You know what building he WAS found at?

A Tim Horton’s store in Oakville, Ontario – from which he dutifully blasted Iran’s secretive nuclear shenanigans with all the authority he could muster.

At a Tim Horton’s.

I’ll give you a minute to process that information.

Need a bit more info?

He made this declaration after bragging about how Canada was once again the home base for Timmy’s.

Just wrap your mind around it.

You good?

Need another minute?

Two or three?

Okay… I’ll wait.

Got it?

Good.

Some might say that the neighborhood Timmy’s is the best place to make a Canadian statement – and I would agree to a certain extent if it wasn’t a matter of global import where image is everything.

I mean… seriously.

C’mon, man – give your head a shake, Steve!

What the hell were you thinking?!?!

Remember…

Remember, remember…

The 11th of September.

Here we are 8 years down the winding path that time always leaves behind in our wake… beyond all the twists and turns, obstacles and ditches, and friends and enemies that we have passed by on our way to wherever we are going.

Who here remembers what they were doing on 9/11 before they learned about what had happened in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania?

I can’t specifically remember, but that period in my life, I was going through a homeless phase after splitting up with my ex-fiance Aimee for a spell – which happened a few times over the 5 years she and I were together.

How many of you remember what you were doing exactly when you found out?

This I do remember.

I was sitting at the public library, using the pay-for-play internet service to check my email and surf for whatever it was that I was interested in at that point.

Through my travels over the interwebs, I caught snippets of stories out of New York about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

This was at about eleven o’clock in the morning, long after the towers had come crashing down – but in the circles I was browsing, news wasn’t exactly front and center so I was missing the whole story.

As far as I knew, some idiot had forgotten which way the sky was and had plowed his Cessna it one of the WTC towers.

While I was surfing, a MSN box popped up and said my friend Steve had popped on.

Steve had been attending a bible college in Florida over the summer and we only chatted here and there, so I messaged him and made some lame joke about how he should watch out because planes were falling out of the sky that day.

Now remember, I had no clue about the scope of what was going on south of the border.

Man… did I ever get an earful – which left me a bit pissed off (because I didn’t know what his deal was) and a bit more curious as to what the actual story was with the plane that I had read about in passing.

It didn’t take me long to get the whole scope of the situation, or at least the essentials as my $10 dollars was running out.

After that, I waited until the evening news to get the big picture with video and sound and a lot of ‘Oh my god’.

Suddenly, being homeless didn’t really seem that big of a deal.

Fire fighters from my city traveled southward in hopes of helping the victims in New York.

Days later, I moved into my new apartment and got my utilities and internet connected.

The Time Magazine subscription I had set-up online began to kick in a week or so after that and I began to learn about the who’s and why’s of what actually happened during that fateful day

Names like Osama bin Laden.

Organizations with names such as Al-Qaeda and Taliban.

It seemed so extremely bizarre and otherworldly that crazy old men who lived in caves in the middle of the desert could strike out and destroy so many innocent lives in an orgy of seething hatred – thousands upon thousands of miles away on the other side of the globe.

So when the decision came down that the United States of America was going to invade Afghanistan in efforts to root out these evil doers, I was all for it.

I cheered every time I saw a bomb fall from a plane.

I became excited every time I saw ordinance explode.

I compared the military hardware that was in theater to the encyclopedias both on my shelf and in my head (I’ve always been a warfare enthusiast… World War II was my specialty).

However, as the war raged on, I began to realize that the U.S. Marines were not going to catch up with Osama… all they were going to get were his Taliban flunkies whom he gladly hung out to dry.

Eventually, the full-scale war in Afghanistan wound down when U.S. commanders came to the same conclusion that I had.

They left token forces behind to make sure the Taliban stayed out of Kabul, and left the cave-by-cave manhunt to NATO forces who had tagged along.

Things were quiet for a while before George W. concocted some crazy-ass bullshit about how Osama was chillin’ with Sadam Hussein and decided to throw an entirely new war in Iraq – hoping to finish what George Sr. had started a decade earlier when Iraq had invaded Kuwait.

As time went by, it became very clear as to how much bullshit George W. Bush’s administration had cooked up in order to roll tanks down Main Street, Baghdad.

It didn’t really matter, though.

What was done was done.

The idiot managed to get himself re-elected based on the Terrorist Boogeyman that he had convinced the American people was hiding around every corner – which may well be entirely accurate, but any accuracy was diminished by the fact that it was political gamesmanship at both it’s finest and worst.

Sadam Hussein was tried in a kangaroo court and sentenced to hang.

The man did deserve to be hanged for things he had done to his own people over the decades that he had been in power – but the judgment and sentencing should have been carried out with more decorum in someplace like the Hague… instead of inside former Sadam palaces staffed by angry Iraqis who were being propped up by the Bush Administration.

To add insult to injury, Sadam’s hanging was graphically broadcast over YouTube for all the world to see.

During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, countless Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives had been captured by U.S. forces and quietly scuttled off to the internment camp set up at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – without legal rhyme or reason beyond having been labeled ‘enemy combatants’ by George W. Bush and his cronies.

These poor bastards (and yes, I do recognize that these are people who want to kill every single man, woman, and child in the Western World) have been tortured for 8 years off and on with no one able to do a bloody thing about it since the Bush Administration and it’s point-men at the C.I.A. and the Defense Department were above the law in their own eyes.

To this day,  nobody knows exactly what to do with these prisoners since they present a serious problem to the new Obama Administration and the world at large.

What do you think would happen if Barack Obama signed an order today to magnanimously allow all these detainees go home right this instant?

They would go back to whatever country, town, or mountainside that they came from and tell everyone who would listen to them EXACTLY what happened to them over the course of the last eight years – or they might embellish their tales somewhat… but it’s hard to imagine any sort of embellishment that would top the actual torture that went on in the cells at Guantanamo.

How do you think that would make their compatriots feel? Like giving all the westerners a big hug?

Or… what do you think would happen if all these people went on trial and we sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty?

Will we all get flower bouquets from our friends at Al-Qaeda head office?

I find that prospect to be very dubious indeed.

So here we are, eight long years later and the forces that conspired to kill and maim so many people on that sunny late summer day hate us more than ever.

Doesn’t that make you feel warm and tingly inside?

Or does it fill you with abject terror?

What is it that you think we as citizens of the ‘civilized’ world should do to rectify this situation?

I’m slightly partial to an angry mob showing up at the Bush compound in Texas and grabbing Dubya right out of his bed before sending him to the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan via UPS while he’s still in his pajamas.

That’s gotta be worth something to Osama, don’t you think?

However, I honestly don’t know if there can ever be an end to this circle of hatred and violence in the Middle East.

The fact that Barack Obama has tried to open a dialogue with the Islamic world gives me a faint glimmer of hope that at least the damage that has been done will stop happening.

If the Islamic peoples of the world at least take a moment to hear calmer head speaking to them, maybe they can calm down as well.

If you take away the people’s anger and mistrust towards us in the West, how are organizations like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda supposed to function? Where will they find volunteers?

Maybe then we’ll all be able to sit down and sing a global chorus of Kumbaya.

Then again, maybe not.

You know what?

I don’t frikkin’ know.

Durrrrrr…

Hey.

How are you?

Fancy a seat?

Yes?

Good.

Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

No. That’s not fair.

Nobody died today (well, to be honest, averages say that 123,000 people have died today so far all around the globe) – nobody of any global importance anyhow.

However, today was the moment that a lot of us hopefuls realized that for all the good Barack Obama means to do in the world, he’s only going to accomplish maybe 40% (and that’s being generous).

Why is that?

It’s because the politicians on the other side of the aisle from his party – namely, the Republicans – will find a thousand different ways to tear the president down in the eyes of the general voting public.

For every honest and forthright statement that Obama puts forward, some Republican pundit in the back offices of Congress sends out a fax to all the other Republicans on how to disqualify what he said.

Today’s broo-ha-ha over Obama’s back to school speech aimed at STUDENTS is the most stunning example of this.

Barack Obama’s speech to America’s youth was meant to do one thing, and one thing only: encourage the students to be better.

The U.S. president is aware enough of today’s youth culture to realize that students are okay with being stupid – and decided (rightfully) that this was not acceptable in any way, shape, or form.

How can anyone fault the guy for doing something most of us over 25 would love to say today’s idiot youth?

Today’s kids are encouraged by peers – and by popular media to an extent – to be absolutely dumb-as-rocks and asinine to the point where it borders on lunacy.

How is this trend even remotely acceptable?

My fellow Canadians and I could only dream of someone of national import – someone with social clout – to take the time and branch out to the disenfranchised young people of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and other places and give them a talking to.

Someone who could pull on the collective ear of today’s public school attending young people and tell them to stop being little douche bags.

Alas… we don’t have ANYONE like that. Our prime minister is far too busy collecting knit sweaters and handing out tax breaks for the ultra-rich.

However, I’m focusing on our American neighbours today.

The Republicans have packaged their partisan politics in an easily digested package that appeals mainly to the people most likely to be the most vociferous in the media – John & Sally Six-Pack.

John and Sally are the people who most resonate with the Republican party – mostly because they are uneducated (or barely educated) rednecks who just love to see their own faces and hear their own voices on the six o’clock news – which works out extremely well for the Republican party because the incapacity for independent and rational thought makes John & Sally VERY programmable.

All the Republicans have to do is wind them up and point them in the general direction of the nearest television camera broadcasting from the field.

What else are they going to say since they can’t come up with ten intelligent words strung together? They have no choice except to say exactly what they heard from any random Republican talking head on Fox news, or heard on the radio from Rush Limbaugh.

This strategy has been used to great effect during the American health debates that are happening all over the U.S.

In this instance, however, they’ve narrowed down the subject quite a bit.

“They don’t need to be told by the president what their responsibilities are. It’s the parents’ responsibility to teach them that, not the government.”

That was the comment from an actual redneck parent (whom flunked high school and now cleans carpets) who had pulled their children on the first day of school so as not to be exposed to the evil Democrat’s clearly-socialist indoctrination attempt.

I suppose that would be a perfectly acceptable statement to make if that parent – or 60% of parents in North America – had any intention to teach their kids ANYTHING! And I do mean ANYTHING.

By and large, today’s parents can not be bothered to deal with their children in any meaningful way – whether it be hanging out with them and throwing a ball around, or taking an interest in their school studies (other than to yell “Do your homework!” up the stairs to the second floor where the kids will dutifully ignore them). Hell, sit down with your kids and play video games… because you will at least gain SOME insight into that portion of their lives.

I’m not sure who’s fault this is, really. I can only say it’s a confluence of trends that started in the 60′s and went into the 80′s – from the women’s liberation movement demanding women have equal jobs in the workplace, to the consumer society that arose from the yuppy culture which required all adults to have 9-to-5 jobs so they could keep up with the material wealth of their neighbors.

Today, parents don’t have the time to do any actual parenting – and those who do can’t be bothered.

Don’t mistake me. There are some really exceptional parents out there who are absolutely stellar at parenting – but they are just that: exceptional. They are the exception to the general status quo.

So where else are today’s kids supposed to get any sort of positive influence?

Celebrities?

If you said ‘yes’, then I must really stop and say: are you freakin’ kidding me?

Girls aspire to be Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, or Kristen Stewart – who may have a collective I.Q. of 110 all together.

Boys aspire to be 50 Cent, Eminem, or Dane Cook – and really, do any of them really rate kids looking up to them?

So, yes… I’m all for President Barack Obama – arguably the most powerful man on the planet – having a candid sit down with today’s youth and telling them to smarten the hell up.

I applaud him telling kids to stop being little dumbasses and to aspire to being something greater.

I know that somewhere out there, in today’s public school system – whether it be in Canada, America, Britain, or some other place on this planet – is a kid who’s going to make a very important discovery that will alter the direction of the human species in a positive way.

I can only hope that Obama’s speech today – or some other well-meaning talk given by someone else of gravitas to that one special kid – will fall on their ears and make them want to be that someone and reach out for their destiny.

Or… that kid can be the next idiot doing something stupid on YouTube.

Lost In Space

So, I was just watching ISS coverage on NASA TV and was suddenly struck by the sheer futility of it.

No. I don’t mean that space exploration is not a worthy endeavor. To say so is pure ignorant folly -and I try VERY hard to refrain from that sort of thing.

It’s pure folly because where else is the human species going to go? There simply isn’t enough usable land area to support human kind at the rate that we’re multiplying. Roughly 40% of the entire species lives in one concentrated area in Asia, and eventually that will start spreading itself outward.

We simply do not have the resources to feed a projected 13 BILLION people at the end of the 21st century with what we have right now.

Wars will break out over territory, food, and energy. Our atmosphere will continue it’s downward spiral until it reaches near breaking (assuming it hasn’t already), and only then will governments see the problem squarely.

The disease that is the human species – and we are a disease, make no bones about it(Agent Smith pointed out that we’re a virus in the first Matrix movie, which is fairly accurate when you look at us from a macroscopic view) – spreads to all points possible before killing the host i.e. Planet Earth.

For us to have any hope at all for the continuation of humankind far into the future, we must learn to expand beyond terra firma out into the solar system… and from there, out into the universe perhaps.

To get there, we must conquer space flight and space habitation – the ability to stay in space for long periods of time without ill effects on our fragile human biosystems.

The first major stepping stone in this quest is the International Space Station (ISS for short), which is currently being built in orbit over our planet by the astronauts that we’ve all come to take for granted due to the fact that space flight has become very routine in the eyes of the general public.

The only time that it becomes non-routine is when something goes horribly wrong i.e. the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters – and only then does Joe Q. Public realize how fraught with danger space flight actually is at this stage in it’s development.

This is also the time when the politico nay-sayers come out in droves to denounce the space program and all of it’s dangers and expenses, saying that humans have absolutely no business flitting about in the heavens and that all the space funding should be spent on more worthwhile endeavors like education and health.

However…

However, they could not be more fundamentally wrong in this assumption if they tried!

Where are we going to go?

Where are humans going to live in the distant future, far beyond those particular politician’s lifetimes? Far beyond any time that what they say now will even matter?

Are we going to simply stop breeding? Starting tomorrow, are they going to legislate that every human get themselves spayed and neutered to help control the people population? What is the end game that these morons foresee? Mega cities with more than 500,000,000 citizens a piece?

The impracticality of those solutions is almost laughable.

Humankind’s only true hope is amongst our neighboring planets, and someday, amongst the stars…

…And this is where the previously mentioned futility comes in.

When the ISS is finished construction sometime next year – after 10-11 years of assembly (process slowed down by the Columbia accident), we will have this wonderful orbiting outpost that we all can see with the naked eye from the ground if looking in the right place.

This outpost is where we are going to test our mettle against the cold, hard vacuum of space… testing ourselves to see if we can make it where life isn’t expected to exist or survive.

This is solid science, folks. The kind that our very existence hinges upon. The kind that trumps all the defense program spending in the entire world. The kind that provides each and every one of us with a destiny – perhaps not for ourselves, but for our descendants who may live to see humans flourishing on the surface of Mars and mining the asteroids and moons of the solar system.

This is science that will have cost 100 BILLION dollars by the time the station is complete.

All of this is going to come crashing to a halt in the very near term unless politicians wise up and see beyond the end of their political terms.

NASA is teetering on the edge budgetwise. They simply do not have the money to fulfill any of the goals that humanity so desperately needs to achieve… which is so tragic that it makes me want to laugh at the clear insanity of it.

NASA’s current plan is to abandon the ISS in the year 2016 when current funding runs out, and burn the station up in the atmosphere via a de-orbit.

$100 billion up in smoke – quite literally, instead of sticking it out and making the full use of the tax payer’s investment.

Would you spend $100 billion dollars building a house and then only live in it for 6 or 7 years?

Hell no! You’d live in that house until the walls fell in around you.

But NASA doesn’t have the luxury of that kind of logical thinking.

Why? Because nobody will give NASA any more money.

George W. Bush commanded that NASA put humans back on the surface of the moon by 2020, and to prepare technologies to send astronauts to Mars 15 to 20 years after that.

That was a very ambitious plan and I can commend the forward thinking – even if it was his attempt to make a presidential legacy for himself.

The problem was and still is, no extra money was allotted to NASA for this ambitious program. In fact, the NASA budget has decreased since then with the thinking that when the space shuttle is forced into retirement at the end of this decade, the $3 billion a year in savings can be folded back into the budget for technological development.

Which sounds great on paper, and sounds even better when U.S. senators and congressmen say it out loud to themselves and the voting public…but doesn’t add up at all when you crunch the numbers in a realistic fashion.

What they see is that in today’s dollars, the Saturn V rocket (the vehicle that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon) cost approximately $7 billion all in – which is two years shuttle expenses. However this doesn’t include setting up a proposed base on the moon – and completely ignores costs that will be incurred by planning a trip to Mars.

The basic truth is that NASA does not have enough money to do all the things that it is tasked to do i.e. space science (probes, telescopes, astronauts programs), earth sciences (satellites studying the planet and all of it’s systems), and aeronautic sciences (aircraft design studies, future engine study, etc.).

There is a current task force that is about to meet with President Obama that is going to tell him precisely what NASA can afford to do within it’s current budget without him authorizing bonus money for the agency.

The task force has already said publicly that NASA can’t do all of the jobs tasked to it with the cash it’s getting, and that they are going to recommend removing programs from NASA’s purview.

So now it’s up to Barack Obama to save the space agency.

With a costly war heating up in Afghanistan, I’m not sure there’s any money to send NASA’s way to pay for the programs that will – in the end – save the human species.

Yes. There are other space programs out there. The Russians, Europeans, the Japanese, and even the South Koreans have space programs. Hell, the red Chinese have an ambitious space program that intends to put Chinese soldiers astronauts on the moon before the Americans go back.

But NASA has always been the heavy lifter when it came to space exploration.

What will happen if it’s human spaceflight programs get canceled?

I don’t know.

I don’t have the answers.

However, I do know this: time is running out. Maybe not soon, maybe not in 20 years, but eventually the clock will run out on when we as a species can develop ways to move beyond this planet and save ourselves.

Isn’t this a goal worth a few extra billion dollars?