“Finally We are Free”
The cry of the protestors in Cairo, as they greet the news of the military coup that has toppled Hosni Mubarak. What's next? An interim government, perhaps the troika proposed by Mohammed El Baradei, with the reality of power remaining in the hands of the military. Then comes the countdown to the day when the first emergency blows up--perhaps the disclosure that the Mossad is fomenting unrest. Then a struggle between the Brotherhood and the military or a union. How many months till the emergence of a popular leader, and how many years before that popular leader is denounced as the evil dictator? Oh, I forgot. The Fellahin have been liberated by Twitter, and everything is going to be all right.
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Look on the bright side - Egypt could end up like Turkey. That is, a nationalist state with a military that keeps the religious passions of the Islamists at bay - with coup after coup.
The problem is that Turkey seems to be taking the slow train toward an Islamic state. That is obviously better than a fast train, especially for those of us who want to revisit Turkey and who sympathize with some of the secular Turks we have met, but it is not very encouraging in the long run.
I asked on another thread, is secularism the best we can hope for for the Muslim world? I really hate the idea that in a sense we are hoping they adopt some of our 18th century errors, that of Napoleonic nationalism. While Islam is of course a foul religion, I cant help but think we would be putting them a course similar to that of our own civilizational suicide.
I think it is none of our business. Either convert them to a better religion or leave them the inferior one they have. Islam has been around long enough to have produced or tolerated poets, musicians, and scholars who from time to time have tamed some of its bloodier impulses, and civilized Muslims can behave honorably. They have a code that goes beyond the code of Frank Sinatra, which defines the American way of life. I don't want them here, but I don't see why we should bother them over there, unless they commit acts of aggression that demand a response.
How will this influence Islam in Europe?
I think it is none of our business.
Amen. In your latest Chronicles there is an excellent column by Mr. Philip Jenkins, "Forgetting a Villain," about one Abu Nidal. He has been dropped down the Memory Hole to be replaced by Al Qaeda who has not only cost Glenn Beck insomnia, night terrors, and Epiphora, but Al Qaeda has supplanted Russia as the Evil Empire - even though they have no industrial capacity.
We Americans can't even keep current with the power-mad creeps and fools at home and so there is almost no hope of us keeping-up with the cretins over there in Satan's Sand Trap.
In my mind, I substitute Al Qaeda for Boll Weevil in Brook Benton's song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVwjYptcnAY
They can have a home over there, over there. I don't care.
"I don’t want them here, but I don’t see why we should bother them over there, unless they commit acts of aggression that demand a response."
I agree completely. I've never understood the American reluctance to cultivate their own gardens. Instead, many of them get quite giddy at thought of being the world's nanny/policeman.
The US went on a pain medication of interventionism while the cancer of world wide communism was being removed during that cold winter's night known as the Cold War. But now that the cancer of communism is gone, the doctor has not weaned us of our pain med. We now find ourselves in madness, addicted to way beyond any medicinal level and the head doesn't know it but the heart does at it pumps ever harder to meet the demands of drug.
Who are the doctor, head and the heart?
"How many months till the emergence of a popular leader, and how many years before that popular leader is denounced as the evil dictator?"
I say five years. Who is up for a betting pool?
Don't be so pessimistic. Egypt will now get "democracy" and "free and fair elections." If not, perhaps we will bomb the hell out of them until they do.
Those of us who can remember when satire was possible, might remember a wonderful song by Tom Leher, "Send the Marines!" This songs is definitely germane to current American foreign policy.
"When someone makes a move
Of which we don't approve,
Who is it that always intervenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,
They have their place, I guess,
But first send the Marines!
We'll send them all we've got,
John Wayne and Randolph Scott,
Remember those exciting fighting scenes?
To the shores of Tripoli,
But not to Mississippoli,
What do we do? We send the Marines!
For might makes right,
And till they've seen the light,
They've got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
'Till somebody we like can be elected.
Members of the corps
All hate the thought of war,
They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means.
Stop calling it aggression,
O we hate that expression.
We only want the world to know
That we support the status quo.
They love us everywhere we go,
So when in doubt,
Send the Marines!"
If skyrocketing food prices come to the U.S., as they have North Africa and the Middle East, then what happens in Egypt may seem to be of little consequence.
United States has a food surplus, as I understand? All US government will have to do is to stop ordering crops burnt or stop paying farmers to cultivate less land.
I'm no expert on the economics of food, but from the half dozen or so articles I've read on skyrocketing food prices in the Middle East and North Africa I understand the cause to be more an inflated US Dollar than a shortage of food. From my limited understanding, the US has doubled the number of dollars in circulation in the past two years and countries like Egypt, which use the US Dollar to buy food, are suffering inflation. And, yes, overall, the US has more farmland and (in many areas) a lower population density.
Well, it's a very complicated issue where any answer might seem wrong.
But the USFDA statistics show wheat's price elasticity of demand to be 1/25. That means that it takes a 25% rise in price to create a 1% fall in consumption.
So if we had a 3% fall in wheat production, then we will see at least a...75% rise in prices! And did we have fall in food production? Yes, we did, in Russia, Central Asia, and all those other wheat-producing regions. Why? Because the sun is like a generator. Back in 2004, some sun spots found by NASA showed that the sun was cooling down. It is basically reducing its heat for some time so that it can run more efficiently and become more hot again. The result was record winters and stunning fall in food production in poorer regions.
On the other hand, if Ben Bernanke's printing money is causing prices to soar across the world, may be we should also be just as concerned.
or stop paying farmers to cultivate less land.
Dear Mr Sanjay. It is clear you have difficulty with some aspects of America. If what you propose came to pass, what would happen to Major de Coverley’s descendants?
Major Major’s Father
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age.
He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism.
He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any.
The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa that he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. (Catch 22)
Even the collectivist kook, ABC's former flack for foolish policies, the redoubtable Sam "Mohair" Donaldson, has received over a million bucks of Fed. Farm Support for raising Angora Goats.
I am practically the only American not on the Ag Dept's Dole and my one attempt at applying for Soc. Security Disability Insurance was turned down when an SSA functionary ruled that my claim I was born without Abs was, "silly."
Mr. Sanjay, you have no idea how beneficent Uncle Sam is.
I have it on good authority that sun spot activity has nothing to do with the lack of global warming. It is due to water vapor in the upper atmosphere:
"Atmospheric scientist Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has set her sights higher, on the stratosphere, examining a thin layer between 10 and 12 miles overhead. Using 30 years of satellite and water balloon data, she and her colleagues have found that water vapor there has actually declined by about 10 percent after the year 2000, slowing warming by as much as 25 percent. The findings might help explain why temperatures over the last decade have not skyrocketed as sharply as they did in the 1990s."
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/may/20-climate-change-gets-wet/?searchterm=climate change gets wet
Regarless of what happens in the future (global warming or global cooling), we're doomed.
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/dec/04-hot-zone-warming-planet.s-rising-tide-of-disaster/?searchterm=june 2009
Mr. Crank, thanks for the Catch 22 clip and your own added hilarity. I wish you the best in finding your six pack, though perhaps it's missing because it's already been drunk.
I had also forgotten how tightly twisted in his writing Heller's satire was. Maybe that's too much sugar in the lemonade for some, but I did really enjoy that book.
Whether Egypt becomes am Islamic republic or not, is immaterial to the US so long as it stops going down the fools path of trying to engage Mecca. The proper path is to, as wholly as possible, disengage from Mecca. Let the barbarians have their way with each other. so long as we don't attempt to engagethem, we need not worry "Islamic radicals" working Jihad against us. Islamics, like most professed religious belivers, are at their essence heretics, and we may thank god for it.
The shock of losing decades of power has been so great for Ben Ali that he had a stroke and went into coma!
Islamics are not heretics. They are operating consistent with the Koran, the Hadith, and four school of Islamic jurisprudence. You people in the West think you know something about Islam but know nothing of their religion, ethics, morality, or psychology. You project yourselves into them, believing them to be what you want them to be.
This wave of the Islamic Jihad that started in the 1920’s is coming at us no matter what you do. You can fight them, or not fight them, it won’t matter. Europe is already lost; it just doesn’t know it yet.
Arius
You missed my point entirely. The average Islamic, like the average Christian, picks and chooses his religious dogma to suit his immediate end. The typical believer knows, or cares, little of the intricacies of his religion's dogma except insofar as knowledge may support some petty desire, some culturally held belief, what have you. Religious believers, by and large, know only what they are told from the religion's ruling class, and they manipulate dogma to suit their ends. No religion is purely practiced, so there is bit of the heretic in all of us. The difference between Christianity and Islam is that the Christian must engage in heresy to be a murderer, while Islamic must engage in heresy to be peaceful. Still, the average believer, Islamic or Christian, knows or cares so little about the dogmas of their respective faiths that it can hardly be said that they direct their actions because of their beliefs. They simply do what their leaders tell them to do, without much through in the matter. Such is always the way of the mob.
The Islamic mob, as opposed to an insignificant fraction of Islamics, is hardly so dedicated to "Jihad" that would invade our shores to create the Umma. If they happen to have an infidel handy, they will do him violence because their leaders tell them to. If we are not there, they will not be here.
If Americans want to worry about an immediate enemy, we should be more concerned about our own military, who, like religious believers, swear allegiance to a Constitution, but in reality are in allegiance to the power structure that tells them what that Constitution requires. You see, as I said to begin with, most "believers" are heretics because they are effectively ignorant of what their faith/constitution actually teaches. If told to begin herding citizens in to "medical quarantine facilities" because of a presidentially declared "health emergency" our soldiers and homeland defense authorities would happily commence operations, regardless of Constitutional implications or their oath to defend the document's principles.
Don't worry yourself about the 4 tyrants 4,000 miles distant, worry about the 4,000 tyrants 4 miles distant.