Once again your spot on Kiddo. That writing was on our History wall......but as they say history does repeat it self
Especially when the powers ignore what the past has taught us if we chose to learn.
"Bring um on" *Sigh*

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
as Leonard Cohen sings in Anthem

the dove is never free.

you know...
...you're making me a real Leonard Cohen fan

YouTUBE Linky

Yeah, Vietnam's a pretty entrepeneurial place these days. Entrepeneurship comes about with property rights from which is based, or property rights come about from the need for entrepeneurialism, to lift a nation from poverty. With prosperity, children change from servile assets to expensive kids requiring education, healthcare, etc, thus reducing population growth.

I would guess that the environmental returns on population reduction and prosperity would be quicker and greater than any from something more ineffectual, such as the Kyoto Protocol, especially when emerging countries can just leapfrog to cheaper, greater efficiencies (such as the famous post-WWII scratch build of cheap foreign steel, or today with cheaper, more efficient drip irrigation), or to disruptive or revolutionary innovations, or the marginally suspect (such as grain ethanol), especially in light of recognition of resource shock recession that much of the developed world is mired in legacy baggage.

So, the democratization of the world is pretty key, since the state of property rights in the world is pretty abyssmal. The world's dead capital, the value of the land in the world that is not legally owned by the individual(s) equals the total value of the companies in the stock exchanges of the world's developed countries.

It's 46X the World Bank loans of the past three decades, 93X all development assistance to the developing nations from all advanced countries during the past thirty years. There would be little need for aid if the asset value of dead capital was available to the poor of oppressive countries.

However, bombing countries into democracy is no way to accomplish this.

With the global penetration and ubiquity of the internet, mobile web and cellphones, the certainty of unsustainable disparities in expectations/realities differentials, recognition of alternatives, recognition of hope, the dreaded capacity to dream, the ability/means/tools to organize, the more catalytic nature of the transformation of the global village into the global theater, revolution will foment. People turn from faith in their unanswering gods to faith in fertilizer, or selling neighborhood cellphone time. The U.N. perhaps needs to cast off its impotent testicles and grow a pair, and put its full might behind just wars of the populist will.

The revolution will not be televised. It will be uploaded, emailed, modulated and demodulated, digitally converted, etc. It will eventually be a distributive entrepeneurial capitalism, quicker, better, and with even more benefits of scale than conventional state capitalism.

Ed

Compare Vietnam and Afghanistan , not to sure

1 - They are very different wars waged on very different reasons

2 - Mind set one is religious the other ideological

The only similarities is bullets are used

Maybe you could compare the Russia Afghan War ? that would make more sense

The theocracy, ideology, whateverocracyology that ultimately wins is property, opportunity, betterment.

Only monks and bureaucrats pray to some semblance of their true gods and demagogues.

Everybody else, much to the consternation of monks and bureaucrats, pray to a heavenly bellhop or benevolent daddy.

They eventually recognize that property and opportunity delivers the goods, and without some massive tip required, such as their children, etc.

Property, opportunity, betterment, capitalism, making a living requires no propaganda. It's a virus - It just works - It's a natural impetus of man.

Ed

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drSDhlnm0e0[/video]

With the dominant population growth of nations
subsisting on almost nothing but bamboo... all
I'll say is the West better watch their grass.

Just heard on the news no link yet

Pakistan is saying that Taliban is murdering Pakistani civilians and blaming the government for collateral casualties ? I guess the apple from the tree don't fall to far from Swat Valley to Afghanistan .

I call for all Taliban leaders to be charged with war crimes

No worries, Mate

If it can be proven
I'll gladly volunteer to pull the switch myself!

I suppose this goes against the Geneva conventions (but perhaps not a war on terror), but suspect with Taliban leaders and cadre, that any extermination may require systemic, i.e., identification and extermination of male lineage and relatives, if they are 'family heritage/business' oriented as Latino cartels.

This applies only to leaders and cadre - Followers are like everyone else, they follow, they're human, and make do as best they can under changed circumstances.

This is why some nations are more favored for outsourcing, like China, than others - They don't get hung up on family stuff, feud, disrupt supply/production ecosystem continuity, etc - Business is business.

However, in other countries' leaders and cadres, vendettas, feuds, etc, occur. They cannot let go of insanity.

And so, you have to avoid the problems, or vertically integrate your system, or as in the case of the Taliban, perhaps systemically eliminate the problems. Remember, despite millennia of history and past civilizations, many of these countries are now stuck in primitive social organizations and conventions at the mercy of a relatively few feudal familial hierarchies.

So, this madness has existed for millennia, and so the question is do you allow it to continue, or do you end it somehow. What are the acceptable options? This was a common attempted solution in the ancient barbaric world, because it was an ancient barbaric world. Now we face a modern barbaric world.

Ed