“When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.”
—Noam Chomsky from the Chomsky Reader edited by James Peck, this is from the opening interview in the book.
Political Economics for Dummies
I grow tired of debating people who use terms and case studies incorrectly. I remembered coming across this online a few years ago so here’s a refresher lol…
DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
You push for higher taxes so the government can provide cows for everyone.
REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?
SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.
COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.
CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
BUREAUCRACY, CANADIAN STYLE
You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pour the milk down the drain.
AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows.
You are surprised when one cow drops dead.
You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.
FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.
JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.
GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.
ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don’t know where they are.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.
RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You drink some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You drink some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.
TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan , which are two.
You don’t milk them because you cannot touch any creature’s private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.
IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.
POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.
BELGIAN CORPORATION
You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he’s French, other times he’s Flemish.
The Flemish cow won’t share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow’s milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.
FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can’t figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best looking cow.
CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegal.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.
Saudi Crown Prince Nayef Has Died
nytimes.comCrown Prince Nayef, the hard-line interior minister who spearheaded Saudi Arabia’s fierce crackdown crushing al-Qaida’s branch in the country after the 9/11 attacks in the United States and then rose to become next in line to the throne, has died. He was in his late 70s.
Nayef’s death unexpectedly reopens the question of succession in this crucial U.S. ally and oil powerhouse for the second time in less than a year. The 88-year-old King Abdullah has now outlived two designated successors, despite ailments of his own. Now a new crown prince must be chosen from among his brothers and half-brothers, all the sons of Saudi Arabia’s founder, Abdul-Aziz.
The figure believed most likely to be tapped as the new heir is Prince Salman, the current defense minister who previously served for decades in the powerful post of governor of Riyadh, the capital. The crown prince will be chosen by the Allegiance Council, an assembly of Abdul-Aziz’s sons and some of his grandchildren.
“The point of my work is not to remind us that “sexuality” is experienced differently in different historical or geographical contexts, and that it has distinct “cultural” interpretations that shape it. Rather, what I insist on is that “sexuality” itself, as an epistemological and ontological category, is a product of specific Euro-American histories and social formations, that it is a Euro-American “cultural” category that is not universal or necessarily universalizable. Indeed, even when the category “sexuality” has traveled with European colonialism to non-European locales, its adoption in those contexts where it occurred was neither identical nor even necessarily symmetrical with its deployment in Europe and Euro-America.”
—Joseph Massad, The Empire of Sexuality
Medal of Honor: Warfighter
Anyone remember that air assault mission in southern Yemen where they conducted the raid on the building and discovered shit tons of explosives and mock up airplanes and train stations?
Well, that raid was cited in a security politics article and I get to use it in my case study for my Comparative Politics in the Middle East class.
#thisiswhyinternationalaffairsdegreesarecoolerthanalltheothers.
“Multiple sources have confirmed that the premise for the March 2003 invasion - the charge by the United States and the United Kingdom that Saddam hussein's WMD programs represented an imminent threat - was groundless. The U.S.-appointed Iraq Survey Group would later spend billions of dollars to verify that the international inspectors were correct: Iraq had not revived its WMD programs. nor, apparently, was the alleged WMD threat the real motivation for the U.S. and U.K. aggression. The famously leaked "Downing Street" memo from July 2002 was one of the several sources indicating that the decision to go to war had been taken well before the inspections ever began. To this day, I cannot read such accounts without reflecting on the thousands of soldiers who have died, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, the millions maimed or displaced, the families disrupted, the lives ruined - and I am astonished that there has not been more self-examination, more introspection on the part of the principal players. The shame of this needless war obliges us to all consider what went wrong in the case of Iraq and to reflect on how the lessons of this tragedy might apply to future crises. ...The United States and its allies must be genuinely engaged in the discussion, speaking with their perceived adversaries, demonstrating by more than lip service their commitment to a peaceful resolution of the underlying insecurities.”
—Mohamed Elbaradei, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times.
Elbaradei royally burns the United States and its allies on the ridiculous pretense that led to the Iraq war, and the untold suffering that follows. I’ve never felt more embarassed to be an American citizen than when I read his words. We are a good country, but we could be so much better. We have to hold our leaders accountable and demand we behave as a fair, rational player in the international system.
World War III?
I have been working on this map, collecting news articles and documenting trends over the past couple years, and was surprised when it revealed that the world is deeply divided by two major spheres of influence that dominate and dictate global affairs.
The two major organizations at the center of this are NATO, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) headed by Russia and China. Both are military organizations with each member state promising to protect each others interests and come to aid in the event of war.
This setup creates an interesting situation whereby, at its most basic level, if any two nations from differing alliances go to war, it has the potential, through the domino effect, to bring war to every continent of the world. It is this fear of global conflict that creates such tension points as North and South Korea, Israel and Iran and Pakistan and India.
Ultimately, the global powers of the United States, Russia and China don’t want to go to war but neither is willing to cave to the influence of the other. This simple division of the world helps to explain almost every decision made on the global stage in recent years and will be a good prediction of how nations will interact in the years to come.
Though it is impossible to completely predict the actions of nations and any attempt at doing so will warrant critique, I do believe the map reflects an extremely realistic situation that has bee forming. Though I will agree that many nations would not align themselves with China and Russia, and that East Asia is a new boiling point, especially with tension in the South China Sea, many nations are allied with other nations that are allied to China and Russia, thus the domino effect culminating in global conflict.
Though Africa might not be cut and dry, the domino effect extends even into these areas as states align themselves with regional powers that ultimately connect back to the SCO.
The cold war might be over as you say, but a more accurate comparison would be to Pre-World War I. Just as today, the world was deeply divided by alliances and it only took the action of one crazy man to send the entire precarious system crashing down. Nations are quickly realizing that joining together to protect each other’s interests is a much more effective manor are gaining regional power and influence and protecting their own sovereignty. It is through this realization that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, having only a few official members, is able to garner so much influence around the world.
Russia and USAID.
On Wednesday, Russia asked the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to leave the country. First, I’m not a journalist, but I feel that I should disclose that USAID funded a project I worked on.
The short version of this story is: the US says (USAID website) that in Russia USAID funds programs that
improve public health and combat infectious diseases, protect the environment, develop a stronger civil society, and modernize their economy.
The Russian government says (RT story) that USAID is seeking to
influence the political process, including elections at various levels and civil society.
Another few links:
- The Guardian: USAid covertly influencing political processes, says Russia
- Reuters: Russia says U.S. aid mission sought to sway elections.
- Moscow Times: USAID Exit to Hit Small Organizations Hard.
- The Washington Post editorializes that the U.S. should redouble effort to boost Russian democracy.
