[outworlder]

> Is it really that smart ? By doing so the president commits crimes against humanity, incentives lots of people to attack the US, kills privacy for the sake of security and does so while violating the constitution. The list goes on and on. Meanwhile, the people (not the government !) end up paying for this madness. Literally and figuratively.

[Disclaimer: this is a foreigner's point of view. US citizens are welcome to step in this discussion and correct my points]

Not all of that follows. For instance, it is not automatically true that the US commits crimes against humanity by not using its own reserves. It can be argued that it shouldn't be buying oil from some countries, but it is really not its fault that the government of said countries is using the spare dollars to fuel their own agenda.

I see no merits at in any terrorist attacks on US soil, even if they resulted in no casualties. If some of these groups had a point, even then the responsibility must be shared between the US and other countries. "Oh, the US did such and such to my country!". Well, aren't we talking about sovereign states here? And again, not all foreign policies are about oil.

Yeah, I agree that it would be even more logical to spend more resources in order to develop alternatives to oil, at least as a fuel - there are other things we extract from it that are valuable and perhaps not as easy to replace, such as fertilizers and plastic. But research takes time, and oil is needed now. Furthermore, with such a huge military force, the US needs a lot of it. I can't imagine an all-electric airforce anytime soon, or electric tanks.

Now, if you want to argue that some (but not most, and certainly not all!) resources could be diverted from the military towards such programs, then I would agree. But I am not so sure that isn't happening already, it could as well be. Some of that research might be classified, even.

[_k]

Back in the 70s a lot of alternative systems were coming available when oil prices were sky high due to an oil embargo. A lot of initiatives were started all over the world to become independent and to develop alternative sources of energy. It's very unfortunate all that innovation was stopped soon after the oil price went back down again.

What it always seems to come down to : a threat followed by a political decision. But as soon as the threat is gone, almost all innovation is being stopped. And that's very unfortunate.

We've seen something similar when the US got the first human on the Moon. There was a threat, a political decision, a lot of innovation and then the threat disappeared and the funding dried up.

I wasn't born yet in 1969 but I do remember reading about it as a kid. And when I grew up I was wearing a sweater with the letters USA on it. I wasn't the only one, far from it.

And here we are. Decades later. There's another threat, imo. All we need is a political decision.

If it comes, I'm gonna try and be the first one to say it's a smart decision.