Still doesn't explain their terrible food

I've decided that one of the key differences between England and the US is a fundamental difference in the efficiency that directs decisions all across both of our cultures.

England is an island nation, 241,000 sq.km... or slightly smaller than the state of Oregon. It is home to 60 million people.

By contrast, the US dominates the North American continent, occupies 9.16 million sq.km and is home to 298 million people.

The US has five times the number of people and 38 times the amount of space. Our two nations, similar in some ways, couldn't be more different in population density. We've got space and they've got none.

So, the underlying efficiency that guides our decisions and our engineering and our strategic planning has been fundamentally different for centuries. The overarching principle of English design and engineering is space. The overarching principle of American design and engineering is time.

There are some cities in the US where space is the premium. New York City is a jumble of high rise buildings where people are stacked on top of each other like shoes in shoeboxes at Academy. In that city I suppose I could find more similarities with this English culture. Where I live (and thank God I do) in west Texas, like most of our great nation, we are more concerned with time.

I find it frustrating to go to the grocery store three or four times a week, as I have to do here because the fridge is tiny, the stove is tiny and more than that... the grocery stores don't sell large packages of anything. I can only do about three socks and a t shirt in each load of laundry because the washer and dryer are made out of stainless steel five gallon buckets.

As I've mentioned, their cars are shockingly small. Most of the vehicles parked on the street in front of this house would honestly fit in the bed of my pickup truck. There are several vehicles that are the same in England and the US so I can give you a good comparison. The Mazda Miata is the same in both countries, except for the driver's seat, and here in England the Miata is a mid-sized, two seater. In the US it's one of the very smallest cars a person can buy. There are four door, four seater cars here that are not as long as the Miata. A Volvo wagon is one of the very largest vehicles on the road here. The roads here would absolutely not accomodate a Suburban or an Expedition.

It's not that either of us are inefficient or wasteful... we simply choose to give precedent to one factor over another.

International Lampoon

Amnesty International has finally released a report about the prisoner abuses at Guantanamo.

I don't know about you but I couldn't wait another day. My summer reading list wasn't full yet... and I needed a good comedy so I believe this report will fit perfectly.

Calling out the US on it's human rights abuses is something like sending a shoplifting pre-teen to the electric chair. Amnesty knows that they will get press coverage for an anti-American story so they run with it but we are so far down on the world's list of abusers... I started to list the countries that are "really" abusive but it is actually easier to list the countries that are less abusive than the US... there's Lichtenstein, Norway, Iceland and the Federated States of Micronesia (which is actually a US dependent.) Canada used to be on the list but Celine Dion's music and their treatment of the French speaking Quebecois have recently moved them to the "Abusive" list.

Surely the world has more sense than to buy this bandwagon riding publicity stunt don't they? No, of course not. What am I thinking? America is the Great Satan... we've been tried in the world court of public opinion and because we don't live in absolute squalor or renounce our own success we must be terrible, hateful, imperialistic tyrants.