Tag: international relations

Money, and capitalism, are in and of themselves soulless, neither good nor evil.  Like all tools, they come alive in the hands of their master.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.     Henry David Thoreau, Life without Principle

I agree.  I much prefer to work at some task that satisfies my mind and spirit, and need not think about it feeding my body, unless I am uncommonly hungry. Yet even that great Transcendental anti-materialist, Thoreau, had to admit the native wisdom of woodcutter  Alex Therien’s reasoning for the utility of cash:

When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount.    Walden

For more discussion about the utility of having an economy, vs. the valuing of money over people, please follow me, beyond the Infinity symbol a la kos.

Israeli decision to strike Iran is almost final . . .

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have “almost finally” decided on an Israeli strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities this fall, and a final decision will be taken “soon.”

Militarily, an Israeli strike would prompt missile attacks on Israel, attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah from the south and the north, and upheaval on the Arab street, in the leadership’s assessment.  Diplomatically, an Israeli strike would prompt a confrontation with the US, global protests, international isolation for Israel, delegitimization, and a situation in which Israel was seen as the aggressor. But Israel’s two key leaders believe that if Iran got the bomb, Israel would be defeated and humiliated diplomatically, and would become a liability to the US.

Netanyahu is convinced that thwarting Iran amounts to thwarting a plan to destroy the Jewish people.  He considers Iran’s spiritual leader to be acting rationally in order to achieve “fanatical” goals.

So Netanyahu has formulated a foolproof plan to foil Khamenei.  He’s going to act fanatically in order to achieve rational goals.  That’ll show those stupid Persians who’s rational and who isn’t.    

It looks like this is going to go down.  Bebe’s precious bodily fluids are bubbling and foaming with excitement . . .    

That idiot is going to attack Iran, and the shit’s going to hit the fan everywhere.

We are in day whatever it is of the Crisis In Egypt, and we have now reached the part where, in the USA, we begin pointing fingers and ducking and dodging as we begin to address the question of why no one saw this coming.

Now, as Thomas Barnett would say, the race will be on inside the Pentagon and around the intelligence community to have the best explanation-and to turn that explanation into the greatest PowerPoint slide the world has ever seen.

And we all know it’s going to be the same old story: “Nobody could have anticipated this event…but if you would just give us a few billion more to develop some program or another, we, along with our contractor partners, will get a handle on this.”

Well I’m here today to break that cycle: with no PowerPoint, no contractor partners…and no fat consulting fee required…I will give the US Government all the forseeing they could ever need; that way, when the next uprising happens, no one can say “we never saw it coming.”

We’re a week into the Egyptian uprising now, and it’s time to reassess what has taken place so far and what might come next.

We know a few things, and we don’t know a lot-and from what we can tell, the folks on the ground are also not sure what might happen. That said, we do know enough to begin to figure out the right questions to be asking.

As was true Friday, things are moving fast, so let’s jump right in.

It has been a couple of years since we first started writing about Egypt; at that time we did a series of stories that described how the country’s Constitution is designed to ensure that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) remains the ruling party, how corruption and torture and rape are part of the justice system, how there’s a looming Presidential succession crisis, and how we better pay attention, because one day all of this was going to blow up into a national emergency, with the potential for disastrous consequences that ripple all the way from Turkey to Morocco to Pakistan.

And now…that day has arrived.

After protests that led to a change of government (sort of) in Tunisia, rioting is spreading across Egypt, quickly, the ISI (Egypt’s internal security police) is out grabbing citizens and doing what they do (we’ll talk more about that later), and the question of Presidential succession, which many people thought was headed in one direction, may now be headed off to a place that outside observers might not have previously considered.

Lucky for you, I have some reach inside Egypt, and we’re going to get a peek inside the story that you might not have seen otherwise.  

Dear The United Kingdom,

I just wanted to take a minute to say hello and to see how things have been for you lately, and to maybe bring you up to date on a bit of news from here.

Well, right off the bat, we hear you have a new Conservative Prime Minister and that his Party and Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems are in partnership, which I’m sure will be interesting; you probably heard that us Colonials are again having Tea Parties, which has also been very interesting.

I have a Godson who’s getting married this September, so we’re all talking about that, and I hear Graham Norton was even better than last year at hosting Eurovision, despite the fact that it’s…frankly, it’s Eurovision.

Oh, yeah…we also had a bit of an oil spill recently that you may have heard about-and hoo, boy; you should see how the Company that spilled the oil has been acting.