Continuing the Egyptian theme.

Spooner's cartoon (our own little pissant sucking on the military-industrial titty) in The Age Aug 11th is a nice contrast to the Cindy Sheehan story. (Maureen Dowd, Jeanne, and lots of others).

What a choice - Darwin/Stalin (genocide is OK as long as it's progressive) or Cindy.

 

We won't know how quickly Iraq will fall apart, until the new Constitution is presented on Aug 15th.

In The World is Round John Gray, at New York Review of Books, reviews arch-neocon Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.

The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx's vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx's view of globalization lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the writings of Thomas Friedman. Like Marx, Friedman believes that globalization is in the end compatible with only one economic system; and like Marx he believes that this sys-tem enables humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind. To his credit Friedman recognizes the parallels between his view and that of Marx. He cites an illuminating conversation at Harvard in which the communitarian political theorist Michael Sandel alerted him to the fact that the process of global "flattening" he examines in his new book was first identified by Marx, quoting at length from The Communist Manifesto — including the passage cited above — and praising Marx for his prescience. This acknowledgment of the parallels between his view of globalization and Marx's theory of history is welcome and useful.
Gray quotes from Friedman -"Islamo-Leninism, in many ways, emerged from the same historical context as the European radical ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fascism and Marxism-Leninism grew out of the rapid industrialization and modernization of Germany and Central Europe, where communities living in tightly bonded villages and extended families suddenly got shattered."

Another view of Iraq -
Weapons of self-destruction
Iraq is like a nuclear weapon that is already fully armed, and the countdown to detonation begins when parliament receives word on the (failed) state of the draft constitution. Iraq, as a nation, cannot survive the coming detonation. - W Joseph Stroupe

Female circumcision surfaces in Iraq

First task for the new Iraq - the rights of women, or more power to the sheiks and mullahs?

Lock the doors, we aren't stopping at Lascaux. We are bombing ourselves back to the Pleistocene.

There's a message in this story Ancient Egypt provides key to storing nuclear heritage from Guardian.

... The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority has undertaken an £8bn project to dismantle 26 research reactors and bury nuclear waste (that will remain dangerous for thousands of years) in concrete bunkers and storage facilities. ... ... David Gray, who led the project, said: "Our successors in the years and decades ahead must have access to detailed and reliable records of the stored radioactive waste as part of its long-term, safe management. For this reason the authority carried out a thorough study of all the options before deciding on the permanent paper solution. We hope that it will now be adopted across the industry."

While waiting for enlightenment, I will relish the thought of our fabulous media demagogues, a.k.a Nuts and Bolts Australia, getting into the nitty gritty of our future energy policies.

What's the chance of the assembled wisdom of the Senate (G_d help us!) coming up with a solution, to anything?