To Be a Superpower or Not To Be a Superpower, That Is Not the Question…

22/52 : Tian an Men
Eric Constantineau – www.ericconstantineau.com / Foter / CC BY-NC

Whether China is or is yet to be, or if it even wants or wants not to be a superpower are not the important questions to me. One way or the other, the answer is or will be yes. An important question for me is, how will China manage its increasingly powerful role in the world while also managing the consumption requirements of its increasingly demanding and aggressive population.

Of course, controlling the flow of information — internet censorship, for example — within and without of the country, will be key to its strategy of ascent to the highest heights of global power. But even censorship and governmental intimidation and societal manipulation will serve little purpose when the country’s water wells run dry from its hyper-industrialization and the ongoing desertification of large swaths of the country. When this happens we can certainly expect an explosive rise in the price of global food commodities. And as we’ve seen in our very recent past, when food prices rise beyond the reach of the least affluent, tempers rise right along with them.

And when tempers rise…

Governments fall.

Resource Wars are inevitable, and I foresee China opening up the first major front in the assault.

Exactly when this will all happen?

Now, that is the question.

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Look it up, folks. It’s all out there.

Scary stuff, for sure.

But scary as it is, it’s all delectable fodder for the imagination of the author intent on creating a world of horrific dystopian proportions and perfection…

 
 

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Butter

Butter

Boy, I want you to butter the bread.
And remember, I like it buttery.

But Dad, it’s too hard for me to spread the lard.
Can’t Sister do it instead?

Boy, it’s up to you to butter the toast.
Cuz the only way for you to learn

To do the things that you can’t do
Is to do those things the most.

So every time there is bread to butter
I want you to spread the cream.

And soon you’ll be the best bread butterer
That the world has ever seen.

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Butter is from Poem Man, a children’s book of poetry that my family and I put together, – literally put together: the poeming, drawing, covering, printing, stapling, etc. – back at the turn of the century.

I must admit, that when my children were young I had aspirations of being the next Shel Silverstein, my favorite poet of all time. While that didn’t quite work out for me, it sure was a lot of fun fooling around with children’s poetry back then when the kids, and the internet, were still young.

It’s hard to believe the original Poem Man website, circa early 2000s, is still out there. Check it out if you’re in the need of a good chuckle.

Guess I was doing Indie before Indie was cool…

Poem Man Website

Almost forgot that I’ve already exploited Poem Man some time ago, tying in a poem, or at least attempting to, called Petey Peter the Garlic Eater with my review of W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece Of Human Bondage.

Yeah, I know… but what the heck, right?

 
 

The Long War

I’m no dove – my twenty years in the navy will attest to that – but lately I’m feeling like a character in George Orwell’s 1984.

“No matter how hard he digs at his memory, Winston is uncertain whether a time existed when Oceania was not at war with someone.”

But still, I guess a Super Power’s gotta do what a Super Power’s gotta do…