Just a quickie today. Just took a fall off the bicycle this morning, so the next order of business is to find out whether my shoulder is going to fall off!!

Speaking of business, though, among all the other essential things we need to change in this country one of my favorites is to shift our corporate attitude from the notion that their only responsibility is to make money. That's actually the law here, you know, and that along with the legal recognition of corporations as human individuals is something that desperately needs changing. How else could we operate?

Last week the BBC ran a wonderful interview with the founder of a company that puts environmental and societal concerns ahead of profits in their mission statement. A look at their website can show you who they are and how they operate. A click on www.goodenergies.com will get you to their mission statement, and there are plenty of other pages to peruse. It's great food for thought.

Finally, a predictive news story I noticed last year has now come to fruition, and I think it's worth careful consideration. The paper today announced that the U.S. will soon send and unmanned attack plane to Afghanistan and then Iraq. On the surface this sounds like a reasonable thing for a nation to do. It can fight battles without risking the lives of its military personnel, but it doesn't take much reflection to see the flaws - especially while BushCo is in office.

Robotic weaponry that could be used in defense of the nation makes sense to me. Robotic weaponry that can be used to attack distant nations that have never attacked us does not. The American public is already too far removed from the realities of war. Already we can sit in our living rooms and eat popcorn while financing a war with our grandchildren's money. With robotics we can do it without asking our neighbor's son to go fly the bombers. When the most powerful nation in the world can wage war with minimal risk to itself and its people, the potential for abuse of the Iraq war variety is far too high for us to accept this "advancement" with alacrity. This is an alternative that should be examined closely and restricted in its usage by international law.

Just think about what the world would be like today if Hitler had had this technology in his hands while the rest of the world did not. Yes you can argue that we had atomic bomb technology and didn't use it to dominate the world and that is true to the extent that we didn't demand political dominance of the world at that time. Still, BushCo has threatened to use it in Iran, and these folks don't impress me as having the moral turpitude not to use it if they saw a way to gain more control of the world's resources - not to mention that there is some level of balance with regard to nuclear weaponry. Can we afford to give any military and people like W totally free rein with this potential?

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M.K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR