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9426. Wombat - 3/16/2011 3:07:42 AM Bhel:
Qatar is worth a couple of days--possibly more. The National Museum and the Museum of Islamic Art are reputed to be world class (ran out of time, so didn't see either.
Went out to the camel racing complex about 30 minutes outside of Doha, which was enjoyable (loved the robotic camel jockeys). Stopped at the Emir Feisal Museum on the way back. Imagine a Victoria and Albert-like collection set in the desert.
Was in Iraq to work, so not much of a travelogue. Helicoptered all over Northern Iraq at night once, so saw the lights of Mosul and Kirkuk (the gas flares from the oil wells gave the latter an inferno-like aspect). 9427. bhelpuri - 3/22/2011 9:07:24 AM Sounds pretty cool, Wombat, thanks. If you have some photos, please share them.
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Also, because I have not been paying attention, can someone please explain to me the justification used by Obama and the USA to bomb Libya at this point. To me it appears a dog of a decison, really piss-poor even by GWBush standards.
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And further, old friends, can someone with appropriate game-constructing skills please work out a fair points system for a kind of Dead Pool to be run in this thread, this year, for the ME regimes/dictators/monarchs/emirs?
My concept: players list the countries which are going to see regime change in 2011, in precise order for bonus points.
For instance, I might fancy Saif is good to hold out a few weeks longer than the Yemeni dictatorship, and could read current events to indicate that Morocco is next, besides calculating that Syria and Iran are long shots.
So:
1) Yemen
2) Libya
3) Morocco
4) Syria
5) Iran
Sounds like fun, yes? So, who's in?!
9428. bhelpuri - 3/22/2011 9:25:16 AM About Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the rest of Arabia, these are particularly interesting countries to watch in the coming months. They might seem tough bets to take in our game, but look how quickly Mubarak became last century's man, completely buried by history after just a few taut weeks.
Similarly, it is far from inconceivable that one or more Emirs finds himself chased off to exile in Saudi Arabia or Texas. Time will tell. These states could wind up being the difference between defeat, and glorious triumph in The Mote 2011 Dead Pool for (Mostly) Middle Eastern Regimes.
9429. judithathome - 3/23/2011 1:28:42 AM Okay...I'll bite...why Texas? 9430. wabbit - 7/10/2011 9:33:55 PM Congratulations to the people of South Sudan. May their lives improve greatly, and may they have good people in charge. 9431. vonKreedon - 7/12/2011 6:31:59 PM Afghan President Kharzai's half-brother has been assassinated in Kandahar. He was the head of the Kandahar provincial council and widely regarded as corrupt and involved in the opium trade. So, is this a mostly bad or good thing for us and the Afghanis? 9432. wabbit - 7/24/2011 12:38:50 AM Norwegian police said Saturday that a suspect in the worst attack in Norway since World War II had used a car bomb to target Oslo’s government district on Friday, killing at least seven people, and that the suspect had gone on to use two weapons to fire for 90 minutes on a political youth group gathered on an island, killing at least 85. At least four people who had been on the island were still missing Saturday afternoon, police said.
The 32-year old Norwegian man taken into custody, whom Norwegian media identified as Anders Behring Breivik, has admitted to firing the weapons, police chief Sveinung Sponheim told reporters Saturday. Police officials have described the man as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist, a member of a small, largely Internet-based community that has been quiet in recent years...
wtf? Right-wing whackjobs are taking over. 9433. concerned - 3/15/2012 5:28:54 PM Karzai tells NATO pull back, Taliban-US talks off
Karzai is demanding that all US forces stay only in their bases immediately and pull out of Afghanistan completely by 2013.
As with everything else about the 0bama administration, they are arrogant and incompetent - worse than Bush and the Republicans in every way. 9434. jayackroyd - 3/15/2012 5:34:41 PM Is Pelle still around? I'd appreciate his opinion on the conversation going on about the Swedish real estate market at my youtube channel:
9435. jayackroyd - 3/15/2012 5:35:24 PM http://youtu.be/jFEVazV6W 9436. jayackroyd - 3/15/2012 5:36:11 PM Sorry. Thought the embed failed. 9437. jayackroyd - 3/15/2012 5:40:10 PM I'm fucking up all over here. Sorry. Here's the link, which you do need if you want to read the comments.
http://youtu.be/jFEVazV6WYM
A guy from Stockholm is saying that Johnston is wrong about real estate ownership in Sweden.
The video is an excerpt from an interview I did with David that will be broadcast on March 29th at Virtually Speaking.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/virtuallyspeaking 9438. concerned - 3/19/2012 5:07:15 AM Re. 9434 -
The PIIG's predicament will never be considered by this guy. So he should be discounted accordingly. 9439. concerned - 3/26/2012 6:45:34 PM Another great editorial by Mark Steyn, even though he gets the title of Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises' wrong:
U.S. Isn't Doing So Well Compared To Other Nations Anymore
After providing several specific examples of the USA actually being in worse shape than the majority of EU countries (even the PIIGS), Steyn concludes with this:
The reality is, given the dollar's decline over the last decade, that most Americans can no longer afford to flee to any place worth fleeing to. What's left is the non-flee option: taking a stand here, stopping the spendaholism, closing federal agencies, privatizing departments, block-granting to the states — not in 2040, but now. "Suddenly" is about to show up.
It's time to give fiscal sanity a chance.
9440. concerned - 3/27/2012 6:31:06 AM Anybody besides me getting the feeling that if an 'extremist' (using the latest LW term of art) like Rand Paul doesn't think we can balance the budget until 2040 with his 'extremist' plan to cut spending, that maybe, just maybe, we are about out of time to mend our profligate Federal ways? Or does any Lefty give a shit about not collapsing the US economy any more? Be honest here, Lefties. Are you really all baby Marxists now, since that is what you are by default if you don't care if the economy collapses? 9441. concerned - 3/27/2012 6:31:55 AM Or anarchists.... 9442. concerned - 3/27/2012 6:35:41 AM Of course, if you don't care if the economy collapses, you have to give up any presumption of ethical superiority, since you are advocating a great deal of law of the jungle dog eat dog suffering among millions of US citizens. Be honest and admit that you are at best being very thoughtless and stupid (= 'useful idiot') or quite possibly totally amoral. 9443. judithathome - 3/27/2012 7:22:14 PM Way to encourage civil discoure. 9444. concerned - 3/27/2012 8:04:59 PM Sorry, but it's difficult to express how frustrated I am by all this. There seems to be virtually no willingness by the Left to accept that current governmental spending policies are putting the whole country in a very bad place and that our descendents will have to pick up the pieces - whatever is left of them.
Increasing taxes has virtually reached the point of negative returns - less, not more, revenue is the most likely result of further tax increases, along with further stifling of the private sector.
Also, don't forget that the ever more fashionable Marxism among Lefties has not ever got along at all with the existence of a middle class or especially entrepreneurs - a middle class that is also the linchpin of the US economy.
In the Soviet Union, the kulaks who roughly corresponded to US entrepreneurs (in a very small way - their actual per capita resources amounted to $100 - $200) were declared to be 'enemies of the state', with the Politburo in 1930 voting for their extermination as a class. Most of them wound up in gulags or in Siberia. 9445. concerned - 3/27/2012 8:16:46 PM Who was considered a Kulak?
From Wikipedia:
In May 1929, the Sovnarkom issued a decree that formalised the notion of "kulak household" (кулацкое хозяйство). Any of the following defined a kulak:
use of hired labor
ownership of a mill, a creamery (маслобойня, butter-making rig), other processing equipment, or a complex machine with a mechanical motor
systematic renting out of agricultural equipment or facilities
involvement in trade, money-lending, commercial brokerage, or "other sources of non-labor income".
and:
Often local officials were assigned minimum quotas of kulaks to identify, and were forced to use their discretionary powers to "find" kulaks wherever they could. This led to many cases in which a farmer who employed only his sons, or any family that had a metal roof on their house, was labelled as kulaks and deported. The same fate was the end of those labeled as podkulachniks (подкулачник), so-called "kulak helpers".
A new wave of persecution against "ex-kulaks" was started in 1937. It was part of the Great Purge, conducted by Nikolai Yezhov after the NKVD Order no. 00447. Those deemed ex-kulaks were either executed or sent to labor camps. With few rich or middle-class peasants left to arrest, to satisfy the conviction quotas demanded by Stalin and Yezhov the NKVD terrorized more of the peasantry to induce more denunciations. In the wave of round-ups that followed, the term 'kulak' lost its previous distinction and became a general accusation (like wrecking), which could be leveled at anyone whom the troikas wished to convict. During the Great Purge, hundreds of thousands of peasants were falsely accused of being ex-kulaks and sent to the Gulag or executed based on circumstantial evidence, forged evidence or none at all.
This is the kind of thing that Marxism leads to to whichever extent.
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