Saturday, May 29, 2010

Lahore Bombings, The LSD Foreign Policy...

Ted Nugent
Dilip Hiro
Ban Ki-moon

"Irrespective of their politics, flawed leaders share a common trait. They generally remain remarkably oblivious to the harm they do to the nation they lead. George W Bush is a salient recent example, as is former British prime minister Tony Blair. When it comes to foreign policy, we are now witnessing a similar phenomenon at the Barack Obama White House." - Dilip Hiro
"Here is the Obama pattern. Choose a foreign leader to pressure. Threaten him with dire consequences if he does not bend to Washington's will. When he refuses to submit and instead responds vigorously, back off quickly and overcompensate for failure by switching into a placatory mode." - Dilip Hiro

I have the most diverse set of opinions in the links above. Who could resist to link to an article written by Mr Cat-Scratch Fever himself? Ted Nugent, being a rock star of limited talent, has also proved to be an extreme right wing wacko of limited mental agility. He writes that the media has all but forgotten the soldiers who have gone to war, and that we should keep them in our hearts every day. Good sentiment, but its clear that the Tedster doesn't read any newspapers, magazines, watches news programs on television, or go to any news web sites, because there are stories from both Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq almost daily. I guess he'd rather go hunting with his bow and live in his imaginary world, not a bad place to be if you have a feral personality... One of the things that I force myself to do every day, is to read the names of the soldiers who died, spend a minute pondering their biographies, and wishing God's mercy on their souls... What would be more surprising this Memorial Day, is finding someone who doesn't have a veteran to remember and say a prayer for. Living next to both an Army and an Air Force base, as well as the Air Force Training Academy, it does make holidays like this one a lot more personal and heartfelt.

Dilip Haro explains the passive-agressive nature of Barack Obama and how he conducts foreign policy. A pattern emerges, one that shows how new to all of this Obama really is, and suggests that he's still on a learning curve on how to be in charge. domestically, we knew that, having witnessed the health insurance bill and the recent handling of the BP oil spill. I'll bet that Obama often wishes that he could go back to the beginning of his Presidency and start all over, correcting the mistakes he made. Isn't that how we all live our lives, in a constant replay of shoulda, woulda, coulda?


"We are Pakistanis and this is what they do to us,"
Pakistan is such a melting pot of religious minorities and ethnic tribes, fueled by the inherent racism and paranoia that is Islam. For a religion that professes to be peaceful, it certainly produces an abnormal amount of aggression and violence. You would have to be pretty far down on the suicide bomber's list to volunteer to blow yourself to smithereens along with fellow Muslims, but there seems to be no lack of candidates. The latest attack, blamed on some amorphous Taliban group, is the bombing of two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore: "More than 80 worshipers of a minority Muslim sect, the Ahmadis, were killed and more than 110 wounded Friday in a coordinated assault by seven well-trained attackers on two mosques in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, the authorities said.


At the mosque known as Dar-ul-Zakir, near the train station, two attackers blew themselves up inside the prayer hall after spraying the congregation with bullets, police officers said. The target was the Ahmadis, a group of about two million Muslims in Pakistan who are considered heretical by many mainstream Muslims because the Ahmadis believe that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded their movement in 1889, was the messiah foretold by Muhammad, the prophet of Islam." The Sunni intolerance for minorities like the Ahmadis is similar to the Shia intolerance for Bahais in Iran, and they all project intolerance for Sufis...

The main difference on how we treat our cults in America, is that we let our government blow up their compounds in Waco and harass their leaders. We also have far too many cults whose leaders claim that they are a prophet, or Jesus, or the second cousin of Jesus, or had a vision of Jesus, or Jesus whispers in their ear in the middle of the night. My personal favorites are the ones who have had visions of Mary, because she is gentler and far less dramatic than the butch male visions from scrawny illiterate bible thumpers...

As I get older and less patient with these forms of madness, I think the best possible thing that we could do is to start acid diplomacy. Yes, bring back LSD in legal form and use it to bridge the religious and political gaps. Can you see Netanyahu, Abbas, Hillary Clinton, and some representative from Hamas all kicking back and tripping together in Cairo? The only problem I could see is if Hillary gave Florida away as the new home for the Jews... We could set up a Department of Tripmaster as part of the State Department, have some serious diplomatic acid trips to resolve international crisis, and the heads of state who were fundamentally unbalanced would veer all the way over into la-la-land, their own fear and paranoia rendering them incapable of causing any future situations... If we're going to create a Brave New World, let's open the Doors of Perception first, use a substance that melts the viewer's individual barriers and shows them the common spiritual thread that binds us all instead of the cocktail of methamphetamines that countries like China gives its soldiers to crank them up worse than a beserking Viking...

old technology...
The most depressing news about the BP oil spill stoppage and cleanup attempts, is that they are using the exact same technology that was used on similar spills thirty years ago. The stuff that works on land doesn't work in the water, and nothing new has been developed despite BP bragging that they have spent $1.5 billion in research and development with third party companies... Just off the top of my head I can come up some ideas in two minutes, why can't an entire industry have better ideas and technology in thirty years? Again, look at the caliber of people involved in the oil industry, people like Dick Cheney and George W Bush, and you can see how cronyism developed at the cost of innovation. We really should force George and Dick out onto the oil slick in a dinghy with a butterfly net, and film them... The ex-CEO of Shell Oil, who wrote a book on why people hate the oil companies, said that there are a lot of supertankers that can start sucking the oil out of the ocean, all we have to do is get all of the other oil companies to help out. A biologist said that we could be pumping seawater continuously into the collapsed pipe, it would keep the oil from flowing out, until the "bottom kill" relief well has been drilled. It will take about three weeks, and all of the engineers agree that the "bottom kill" method is sure to plug the damned thing... At least the entire oil industry and how they work to drill for oil will be scrutinized. But there is a frightening similarity between how companies like BP work, and mining companies that have caused disasters and loss of life in West Virginia. Add to the mix the crappy way we deal with emergencies such as Katrina, and we can see how our whole infrastructure for emergency relief and industrial safety needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, no exception to the rule...


time for some cheering up with late night political jokes:

"Well, folks, here's the latest update. I guess this is good news. BP officials say the 'top kill' plan is working. The bad news — BP officials are a bunch of lying weasels." –Jay Leno

"British Petroleum is still trying to minimize the PR damage. You know what they said today? They said all the oil that spilled this month is on the house. No charge." –Jay Leno

"Obama looked pretty mad, if you watched his press conference today. President Obama said the head the Federal agency in charge of regulating the oil company is no longer there, but he didn't know if she resigned or if she was fired. Didn't know if she resigned or was fired. I got a better idea. How about arrested? Let's try that." –Jay Leno

"And a new study shows that fathers can suffer a form of postpartum depression after their child is born, especially if they're John Edwards." –Jay Leno

"A new poll found that 43 percent of Americans think President Obama is doing a good job at handling the BP oil spill. Of course, the same poll found that 43 percent of Americans hate pelicans." –Jimmy Fallon

"And today at a press conference, Obama said that the government does not have better technology than BP. That's a nice thing to announce to the world, that our government has fewer resources than a company that tried to plug a hole with a 'top hat.'" –Jimmy Fallon

"In fact, President Obama fired the head of the Mineral Management Services, because of lack of oversight of offshore oil rigs. It's got to be tough finding another job after that. It's like, 'I see you were head of the department in charge of preventing oil spills? And this was during the huge oil spill?' 'Yeah, that's right.' 'You may not be Wendy's material.'" –Jimmy Fallon

No comments:

Post a Comment

Hi! Thanks for commenting. I always try to respond...