Deepak Chopra: Iraq and the Problem of Evil

by Deepak Chopra
Fri Dec 22, 9:24 AM ET

It's not yet the last days in Iraq, but it might as well be. A recent poll shows that 71% of Americans oppose the way Pres. Bush is handling the war, and only 9% believe we will win. No such consensus was ever reached over Vietnam. Nixon was elected twice against opponents who would have ended the war sooner. A back-room agreement that could have been achieved with the North Vietnamese in 1969 was postponed for six bloody years while the Nixon administration finagled a way to save face.

They were permitted this delay because the public had been long persuaded that we were fighting the evil of Communism. The Iraq war has been painfully protracted already, since Pres. Bush has petulantly refused to admit that any course is right except his own, for the same reason. Terrorists represent absolute evil. This indisputable point, it seems, covers any wrong committed by the U.S. in terms of casualties and human rights violations.

If absolute evil looks so clear to us, why does the rest of the world disagree? Are we to assume that only America knows the truth? The reason we find ourselves so isolated and hated can be directly traced back to blinded moral certainty. The right wing promulgated the myth that Reagan brought down Communism by resisting "the evil empire" (no matter that the Soviet Union collapsed from its own internal corruption and decay), so now we get "the axis of evil," warring against enemy countries that can't be considered part of the civilized world.

The rest of the world isn't buying into this right-wing rationale, and it's time that the American public woke up from the trance induced by fear. The solution to North Korea is to unite it with South Korea, an end that both countries want. The solution to al-Qaida is to police it closely with the aid of the entire international community (we've already killed or driven into hiding over 80% of its leadership). The way to deal with Iraq is much harder, since such a catastrophe has been created over there. But Pres. Bush is almost certain to reject the unanimous recommendation of the Iraq Study Group that we talk directly to Syria and Iran. Why? Because they are too evil.

Thinking in absolutes almost never works. Even when fanaticism and extremism are involved, the only moral course is to weigh some difficult choices:

--Is it better to talk to your enemies or isolate them and make them more committed to their own ideology?
--Is it better to push slowly against Islamic fundamentalism or to destabilize entire societies by military means?
--Is it better to ignore religious beliefs that contradict your own or treat intolerance with equal intolerance?

It's pretty obvious which choices the Bush administration has made and thus far has coaxed the American public to go along with it. The dirty little secret behind the Iraq war is that Bush, the religious right, and neoconservative policy wonks despise the Iraqis. We are saving a barbaric, benighted, godless people so far as they are concerned. This is no surprise given that the administration hardly lifted a finger to prevent anarchy after the 2003 invasion. There was no follow-up plan because nobody cared enough in human terms. The Iraqi people were pieces on a chess board. Iraq itself was simply a means to an end, which was to wipe out Islamic evil. And since Iraqis are Islamic, they are tarred with the same brush.

This was a tainted rationale for "helping" a country we merely intended to use. As the mist clears from our eyes, more and more Americans will see how shamefully we have treated that country, and hopefully the entire doctrine of 'the axis of evil' will be forgotten so that the real work of winning the world back to our side can begin.

Click: www.intentblog.com
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This do-nothing Congress did all the wrong things

At 4:35 a.m. last Saturday, Sen. Bill Frist (news, bio, voting record) performed his last act as majority leader. To the handful of members still there, he announced the adjournment of the 109th Congress "sine die" - that is, forever - leaving behind the most unproductive session in recent history. Congress has been in session only 103 days this year, compared with 110 for President Truman's "do-nothing Congress."

It did not perform its most basic constitutional duty - to vote the appropriations necessary to run the government. Of 11 departmental appropriations, it had managed to pass only two - defense and homeland security. The rest of the government was left to limp along on a stopgap resolution that was constantly in danger of expiring - the next deadline is Feb. 15.

In its last throes, the 109th did manage to pass legislation establishing permanent trade relations with Vietnam and a nuclear trade pact with India. And, yes, it renewed a cluster of expiring tax breaks. The Democrats, flexing their pending muscle, secured a bill blocking an automatic pay raise for Congress until next year, until after a vote to increase the minimum wage.

What this Congress did not do is more striking than what this Congress did. It took no action on real immigration reform. It did not enact a budget. It produced no basic reform in Social Security or Medicare.

It did, however, have spirited debates on matters such as flag burning, gay marriage, and Terry Shiavo's feeding tube, an issue that seemed to absorb Senator Frist.

What Congress also left undone was any serious effort at ethics reform. What we got instead was retiring speaker Dennis Hastert's swan song, saying, "We promised to protect this nation from further attack and, by grace of God and with the leadership of President Bush, we have been successful."

This could also be called the Mark Foley Congress - a leadership that for years did nothing about a Congressman who made e-mail advances to adolescent pages. Mr. Foley resigned. The House ethics committee said members of Congress were negligent about protecting the pages. But it said no rules had been violated.

It may be that Congress has become, like the title of a recent book by scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, "The Broken Branch."

* Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst at National Public Radio.
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Chris Kelly: Stalag 9/11

by Chris Kelly

George Bush has done some iffy things since seizing power, but the one that really hit me where I live was ruining Billy Wilder's Stalag 17.

If you're not into old movies, you should know that Stalag 17 is a cynical, fast-talking dark comedy set in a prisoner of war camp, kind of a cross between Grand Illusion and His Girl Friday. Of course, if you're not into old movies, knowing it's a cross between Grand Illusion and His Girl Friday probably didn't help much. Let me start again...

Stalag 17 was a play written by two guys, Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, who had been actual prisoners at an actual place called Stalag 17 in actual Austria during World War Two. (Think of Austria as kind of a cross between Switzerland and Triumph of the Will.) Billy Wilder made it into a movie in 1953 with William Holden and it's a really terrific piece of entertainment, full of interesting characters and snappy wised-up dialogue and cool plot twists and bravery and Nazis. And you don't have to take my word for it. Ask anyone else who's old.

Here's where
President Bush comes in. While Stalag 17's prisoners are planning their escapes, and the Germans are trying to stop them, both sides keep referring to this dopey sort of rulebook called "the Geneva Conventions."

These appear to be rules about the fair treatment of prisoners - I dunno, not torturing them, for instance - and even the Nazis obey them. Weird, huh?

A lot hinges on them, as a plot gimmick, but the characters seem to take them for granted. Even though it's a war, there are still things you don't do. Which, if only for story purposes, explains why the movie isn't two hours of Otto Preminger holding William Holden's head under water.

(Otto Preminger? Nothing? Okay, think of a cross between Erich von Stroheim and... no, this is getting us nowhere.)

This isn't supposed to take anything away from the Nazis as the villains of the piece --you can see it in the kommandant's beady little burgher eyes that he wishes he could get around the Conventions - but the rules are the rules.

Even if the rules are - how did the Attorney General put it? - "quaint."

But here's the thing. If you accept that the Geneva Conventions are just an annoying formality, like recycling - and I guess we do now - it ruins the whole movie. There's no drama in it. Because the Third Reich isn't even trying.

The prisoners get mail from home. They get visits from the Red Cross. They aren't even kept in cages. No one hoods them, or electrocutes them, or pretends to execute them, or places them in a "stress position" or walks them around on a leash. At one of the darkest points in the story, one of them is forced to stand for a few days without sleep. Like that even hurts.

Don't the guards want their country to win? These guys -- the prisoners -- are all members of an organization (The United States Army Air Force) that not only is thinking of using weapons of mass destruction, they actually are. Night after night. From planes.

They have information that could save German lives. But no one seems to have given their interrogators the tools they need to get it.

And now my stomach hurts. Because sometimes even sarcasm can only get you so far.

In real life, the Nazis did commit atrocities against American prisoners of war. At Malmedy. At Mauthausen. That's why we hate Nazis. Because they were bad.

In real life, bombing Germany killed a half million civilians, but interned American and British airmen were generally treated according to the Geneva Conventions. They weren't systematically tortured. They weren't deliberately humiliated. They weren't held in solitary cells. International organizations were given their names and their families were informed of their capture. Their mortality rate was less than 1%.

And they were being held by the worst government on earth.

It's almost like the hippies at MoveOn have it backwards. When it comes to protecting his country, Hitler isn't George Bush.
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Look who owns U.S. debt now

Other nations hold a record 52% of it, leaving U.S. economy vulnerable. For most of U.S. history, the national debt was something that America owed itself. What was borrowed by the government was lent by its people. The liabilities of one were the assets of the other.

OPPOSING VIEW: Thank foreign investors

But that has changed as the federal government has increasingly looked abroad to finance its prodigious borrowing. Foreigners now hold a record 52% of the government's $4 trillion in outside debt, up from a quarter in 1995. Later this month, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke will go to China to ask the Chinese whether they could see their way clear to buy fewer IOUs and more iPods, Boeing jets and such.

There is nothing inherently wrong with foreigners owning American debt. In fact, these and other investments pouring into the USA help keep interest rates relatively low and the dollar relatively strong. To some degree, these investments reflect confidence in the American economy. But the very things that make this infusion of cash attractive also spell trouble.

The growing reliance on foreigners, in many cases foreign central banks, reflects a nation digging itself further into debt and denial.

Perhaps the best comparison is the many credit card offers that come in the mail each month. In the short run, by making borrowing so easy, they can prop up living standards. In the long run, the bills come due.

The foreign money is no different:

It postpones the day of reckoning, allowing U.S. policymakers to act like bankrupt shopaholics, running up debt to pay for tax cuts and new programs while leaving it to another generation to repay.

It props up the nation's other deficit - its chronic trade deficit. The purchase of treasury bills is part of a broader trend of foreigners recycling their dollars back to the United States to invest in everything from government debt to the home mortgages, instead of using them to buy more American goods and services.

It makes the U.S. economy hostage to the whims of foreign investors, including governments. Eventually, they could decide they have better places to invest than in U.S. debt securities. This might be a gradual decision. Or it might not be. If the latter, it would cause a surge in interest rates (because the Treasury would have to offer more enticing terms to attract buyers) and trigger a recession.

Many developing nations buy treasury bills not because they are deemed to be the best investment, but to support their own monetary polices. The Chinese, for instance, do so as part of a strategy to keep their currency artificially low against the dollar. This holds down the cost of Chinese goods, helping the Chinese economy but making U.S. goods less competitive.

The problem needs to be attacked from a number of fronts. The government needs to borrow less. And foreign holders of all of these IOUs need to realize that a gradual diversification of their portfolios would be in everyone's interest.

If that happened, maybe our products, rather than our debts, would be our leading exports. Wouldn't that be nice?

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Who am I?

Who am I? An everyday consumer of wordly goods, Bush lies, technology, gourmet food, media propaganda, rogue nations, great travel wonders and human psychology. These are my thoughts, my ideas, my perceptions - my ramblings...


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Happy Eid Mubarak!

A very hearty Eid Mubarak (wiki) to all friends and family!
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The War Against The Children (my first YouTube submission)

On Sep 11, 2001, 19 alleged 'so-called' Muslims hijacked a religion to back their view. After that day, the Bush Administration 'hijacked' an entire nation's freedom and the "right to oppose war" and waged war against the entire world.

Since September 11, 2001 (9/11), the US, Israel and Britain has "punished" the 1.2 billion Muslims around the world for what the alleged so-called 19 Muslims did on 9/11. This is a glimpse of the atrocities committed by our own troops when we fight the 'war against terror'.

Washington needs a deep reconsideration not just of how it engages with Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, but of how it responds to large-scale international challenges more generally. Under this president, the administration's international engagements have been skewed very strongly toward military action, while the solid, steady work of building international relationships and institutions has been derided and downgraded - with the results we now see in Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, and elsewhere. Redirecting Washington's focus toward diplomacy has never been more necessary. It is the only way, now, to restore order and stability to a world system that has been badly battered by the reckless US militarism of the past five years.

This attempt to show the images of a brutalized, humiliated, maligned, and shattered generation prove that we must do, understand more, and forgive more - if we want to sustain and have a prosperous future for all mankind.

The children are not terrorists. They deserve to live - regardless of creed, nationality, or religion.

Background music is in Urdu/Hindi language (the language spoken in most countries in South-Asia).
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Turn away from militarism

Washington needs a deep reconsideration not just of how it engages with Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, but of how it responds to large-scale international challenges more generally. Under this president, the administration's international engagements have been skewed very strongly toward military action, while the solid, steady work of building international relationships and institutions has been derided and downgraded - with the results we now see in Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, and elsewhere. Redirecting Washington's focus toward diplomacy has never been more necessary. It is the only way, now, to restore order and stability to a world system that has been badly battered by the reckless US militarism of the past five years.

* Helena Cobban is the author of "Amnesty after Atrocity? Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes."
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Jewish Propaganda #4569873753245

In yet another Zionist-controlled America, we are led to believe that everybody who is connected to Israel, Jews and Zionism is 'pure' and 'true' - everything else is 'evil'.

Read the story to understand more of what we are facing. The roots cause of the world's problems is Israel, i.e. Jews.

Control people's minds that anybody with a Christian, Islamic or Hindu streak is a "fanatic" - yet Israel continues to be the most racist, ignorant countries in the world. So, now we're taught by sub-conscisous inserts that a 'moderate' Muslim is one who never reads the Koran. Mr. Author and Isareli-Jewish controlled media - please do not spread hate and lies so blatantly. And stop using Christians for your proxy wars with your enemies. Everybody knows what you guys have been cooking up for the last 100 years. Enough of this 'God's Chosen People' bullshit and rhetoric.
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What I've Learned: Homer Simpson

What I've Learned: Homer Simpson
Nuclear-power-plant safety inspector, 39, Springfield
Interviewed by John Frink and Don Payne

When someone tells you your butt is on fire, you should take them at their word.

There is no such thing as a bad doughnut.

Kids are like monkeys, only louder.

If you want results, press the red button. The rest are useless.

There are many different religions in this world, but if you look at them carefully, you'll see that they all have one thing in common: They were invented by a giant, superintelligent slug named Dennis.

You should just name your third kid Baby. Trust me -- it'll save you a lot of hassle.

You can have many different jobs and still be lazy.

I enjoy the great taste of Duff. Yes, Duff is the only beer for me. Smooth, creamy Duff . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

You can get free stuff if you mention a product in a magazine interview. Like Chips Ahoy! cookies.

You may think it's easier to de-ice your windshield with a flamethrower, but there are repercussions. Serious repercussions.

There are some things that just aren't meant to be eaten.

The intelligent man wins his battles with pointed words. I'm sorry -- I meant sticks. Pointed sticks.

There are way too many numbers. The world would be a better place if we lost half of them -- starting with 8. I've always hated 8.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard "My God! He's covered in some sort of goo," I'd be a rich man.

Be generous in the bedroom -- share your sandwich.

I've climbed the highest mountains . . . fallen down the deepest valleys . . . I've been to Japan and Africa . . . and I've even gone into space. But I'd trade it all for a piece of candy right now.

Every creature on God's earth has a right to exist. Except for that damn ruby-throated South American warbler.

I don't need a surgeon telling me how to operate on myself.

Sometimes I think there's no reason to get out of bed . . . then I feel wet, and I realize there is.

Let me just say, Winnie the Pooh getting his head caught in a honey pot? It's not funny. It can really happen.

Even though it is awesome and powerful, I don't take no guff from the ocean.

I never ate an animal I didn't like.

A fool and his money are soon parted. I would pay anyone a lot of money to explain that to me.

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll get a hook caught on his eyelid or something.

I made a deal with myself ten years ago . . . and got ripped off.

Never leave your car keys in a reactor core.

Always trust your first instinct -- unless it tells you to use your life savings to develop a Destructo Ray.

When you borrow something from your neighbor, always do it under the cover of darkness.

If a spaceship landed and aliens took me back to their planet and made me their leader, and I got to spend the rest of my life eating doughnuts and watching alien dancing girls and ruling with a swift and merciless hand? That would be sweet.

I may not be the richest man on earth. Or the smartest. Or the handsomest.

Never throw a butcher knife in anger.

The office is no place for off-color remarks or offensive jokes. That's why I never go there.

My favorite color is chocolate.

Always feel with your heart, although it's better with your hands.

The hardest thing I've had to face as a father was burying my own child. He climbed back out, but it still hurts.

If doctors are so right, why am I still alive?

I'm not afraid to say the word racism, or the words doormat and bee stinger.

Always have plenty of clean white shirts and blue pants.

When that guy turned water into wine, he obviously wasn't thinking of us Duff drinkers.

I love natural disasters because we're allowed to get out of work.

When I'm dead, I'm going to sleep. Oh, man, am I going to sleep.

What kind of fool would leave a pie on a windowsill, anyway?

© 2006 by Hearst Communications Inc.
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Israel is our biggest welfare recipient

US taxpayers give Israel $3 billion per year, not including military equipment. US taxpayers do not give any money to the Vatican. Why? Because the Vatican gets along with all of its neighbors and Israel gets along with absolutely none of its neighbors. Israel has only one ideology and that is to steal the land of its neighbors, since 1920, thus causing all of these heated cauldrons. Syria and Lebanon kicked Israel off their borders over a year ago where Israel was trying to build new settlements.

Right now the entire population of Palestine is surrounded by walls the Israelis built to confine them in an open air prison; all the while Israel is bombing Gaza, Palestinian land. While we focus on Lebanon our attention is being torn away from Palestinian suffering at this moment.

Lebanon is under siege by the greedy and nefarious Jews killing innocent women and children.

Israel is our biggest welfare recipient. Even if Israel was living in peace it would require US taxpayers to continue sending billions of dollars to it as it is not a self-sustaining country. It has no income. It has no way to make money off of anything (tourism does not fill their food baskets). It depends on you and me, financially, to continue giving it an excuse to be there.

Israel began in 1897 when Theodor Hertzl of Austria wanted a nation state for Jews. He went to countries where Jews already lived, such as Argentina, Guatemala and several African countries to see if they had any nice places where the Jews could build a central home. Theodor Hertzl found the Palestinian area favorable as 5,000 Jews already lived there, in peace within the Palestinian neighborhoods. Hertzl brought 250 Jews out of Europe to begin his secular Jewish home. If you ever take the time to read Hertzl's works, you will find he was not a fanatic like the Israelis are today at your expense.

Pray for the children of Palestine and Lebanon. We (USA) are the cause of their suffering.
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Arabic T-shirt sparks airport row

Seems like Mr. Bush + Cronies have completely brainwashed us - so now, we have lost all tolerance? It's funny how the Jewish people have went from being persecuted to prosecuting, humiliating and subjugating the rest of the world. After all we all know that Israel and Jews control the U.S. Read the story below to see how you may be targeted next for wearing a shirt, listening to a particular album, etc.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006, UK

An architect of Iraqi descent has said he was forced to remove a T-shirt that bore the words "We will not be silent" before boarding a flight at New York. Raed Jarrar said security officials warned him his clothing was offensive after he checked in for a JetBlue flight to California on 12 August.

'Authoritarian regimes'

Mr Jarrar's black cotton T-shirt bore the slogan in both Arabic and English. He said he had cleared security at John F Kennedy airport for a flight back to his home in California when he was approached by two men who wanted to check his ID and boarding pass. Mr Jarrar said he was told a number of passengers had complained about his T-shirt - apparently concerned at what the Arabic phrase meant - and asked him to remove it. He refused, arguing that the slogan was not offensive and citing his constitutional rights to free expression.

Mr Jarrar later told a New York radio station: "I grew up and spent all my life living under authoritarian regimes and I know that these things happen. "But I'm shocked that they happened to me here, in the US."

After a difficult exchange with airline staff, Mr Jarrar was persuaded to wear another T-shirt bought for him at the airport shop. "We Will Not Be Silent" is a slogan adopted by opponents of the war in Iraq and other conflicts in the Middle East. It is said to derive from the White Rose dissident group which opposed Nazi rule in Germany.
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The Real Terrorist

In a dramatic statement, the Israeli Foreign Minister said, as reported in Irish Examiner:

In Copenhagen, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said “time will tell who is the winner” of the 34-day conflict, and she said Hezbollah had been weakened by the fighting.

“Hezbollah has to give some explanation to the Lebanese people,” she said. “They suffered for nothing.”

Wow. Splendid. Absolutely Fantastic. So, Hezbollah has to answer the Lebanese people about what some Israeli terrorists did to them? Interesting... we are truly living in crazy times!
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Wake up, Americans!

I understand that majority of the Americans agree with Ann Coultor and her likes (like the author of this document) just because they propogate Islam-bashing, are bigots, extremely right-wing and support the worst President aka Bush & His Cronies. Heck, 39% of us said that Muslims should wear badges in public (my, my - we have certainly learnt a lot from the Holocaust, heck we're practicing it!) Wake up Americans before it is too late! Our economy is in the tank, our jobs are gone, we make less, we are wasting billions of dollars in senseless wars, Dick Cheney and Halliburton are getting richer, Israel gets $13 billion a year from your tax money and we are the one of the most unpopular regimes in the world. Wake up, already!

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Lou Dobbs: It's good to be a superpower

This was a good article posted on CNN.com, so I thought I'd post it verbatim - enjoy!

Wednesday, August 16, 2006; Posted: 2:32 p.m. EDT (18:32 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Soviet Union, Marxist Leninism, the Evil Empire and their ugly metaphor, the Berlin Wall, crumbled and collapsed almost 17 years ago.

At the time, I thought it was strange that the United States didn't have the inclination to celebrate. There were no victory parades and no fireworks; nor did Congress declare a V-CW Day, as in Victory in the Cold War. There weren't even any grand speeches about America's emergence as the World's Only Superpower.

But a grand smugness did grip most of Washington. And hubris became the foundation of almost every national policy, foreign and domestic. And why not? We were entitled as the World's Only Superpower.

What a blessing, all these superpower advantages. What other people besides Americans can afford not to make their own clothes? The world has other people for such menial tasks, and they sell us all but a few of our shoes, shirts, slacks, suits, dresses and coats (and, of course, accessories). We now import around 96 percent of our clothing.

What other nation can afford to dismantle its manufacturing base and export high-paying middle-class jobs overseas to lesser, cheaper foreign labor markets and then buy back the goods those poorer people provide us?

And energy? Why, we Americans have money to burn. We spend $15-20 billion each and every month to import fuel for our cars, trucks, office buildings and few remaining factories and plants. We can be heedless to the consequences, because as Vice President Dick Cheney suggests, conservation doesn't work well anyway. So why be bothered with such irritating constraints?

Because we're a superpower, we needn't concern ourselves with silly little annoyances like trade and budget deficits. Who cares? What greater proof of our superpower status can there be than 30 consecutive years of trade deficits, evaporating surpluses in services and agricultural goods and even technology.

Our trade deficit in manufacturing soared nearly 300 percent from 1997 to 2005, surging to $662.5 billion. Our business and government leaders soothingly remind us that we are a technology economy and needn't be distracted by developments like the reversal of what was a $35-billion surplus in high-tech goods to what is now a $44-billion deficit. It's great to be The Superpower.

What about all that money we're burning? Not to worry. Spend it if you got it. Well, we really don't have it, actually. We're borrowing more than $2 billion a day to send to those lesser souls who are uncomfortably situated in poorer nations that can only aspire to our superpower status.

As to our government's budget deficit, again, that's not a problem. Our federal government keeps two sets of books: one that shows our budget deficit shrank to $319 billion last year and the Treasury Department set that shows $760 billion. Now, we don't want anyone to get needlessly anxious here. It turns out that our national debts and commitments actually stand at an incredible $49 trillion. But let's just keep that little number amongst ourselves.

The federal government uses a quaint accounting system that would be illegal for any large enterprise in America, and there are those who believe our government should be more transparent, or perhaps honest, if you will. One of those with a very unpopular wet-blanket attitude is David Williams of the Citizens Against Government Waste. "If this happened in the private sector, we would call the government 'Enron,' " Williams says.

David, David, David...A little less negativity, please. David Williams is among that small, insignificant and clearly irrelevant group of eccentric rationalists who care about cause and effect, truth and consequence.

Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, is among them as well. In his new book, Cooper writes about things like the fact that our federal government last year paid out $38 billion to the wrong people and that $20 billion of taxpayer money simply disappeared from the government's treasury.

Negativists like Williams and Cooper get all a-gaggle over the fact that the GAO can't certify the books of the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department and NASA. They're even upset that the federal government has failed its annual audit for nine years in a row. Talk about Nervous Nellies.

So what if the U.S. debt rating is heading for junk status by 2025, according to Standard & Poor's. That's a problem for nations that aren't superpowers, don't you think?

When it comes to international relations, our superpower status is even clearer. Though admittedly, it is a little embarrassing to watch how easily the United States imposes its will on the Middle East and brings aspiring superpowers like China to heel on issues like human rights and democracy.

Looking back, I'm grateful that we didn't celebrate our emergence as the World's Only Superpower those many years ago. In our current exalted state, it's clear we were wise not to do so.
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Free publications and print overload

The only publications that I "pay" to subscribe are Reader's Digest, Entreprenuer (did not renew), Fast Company (did not renew), Wired (did not renew), and the Wall Street Journal (did not renew). It seems that I get 11 other publications including eWeek, CIO, Computer World and a bunch of other print publications that I get because I am an "industry professional." The only problem is that keeping them is a chore, leave alone reading them all. Me, a mid-level management person. I really have respect for corporate-America's CEOs now. No, wait - I don't. It seems that us Americans are overworking and multi-tasking ourselves into chaos. Instead of working productively, we are working harder and toiling deeper. We need to work smarter - after all, we're not Indians. If we continue this trend, pretty soon, we'll be the ones opening up call centers, or cultivating rice - not that there's anything wrong with it ;)
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KFC - 'bad' has a whole new meaning

I like to eat out - so the other day, my about-to-be-divorced friend and me went to a KFC joint in The Woodlands, TX. Nestled amongst gorgeous trees and bushes lanscaped to perfection, you would think the food would be great. To the super inquisitive, the last time I had KFC food was in Rawalpindi, Pakistan (which I must say was finger-lickin' good!). So my friend and me order the KFC snacker (a teeny weeny sandwich) since both of us are not hungry - and behold, the stained teeth waitress serves us two hastily wrapped wrappers When I opened the wrapper, I almost threw up. The fried chicken strip looked like a tail from some animal - a shrimp shaped debacle. The buns were icy white - not even remotely close to what was displayed in the in-store advertisement (in vivid colors, of course). American fast food companies with stores in the US should realize that people will pay more if the quality is better - what happened to American values?
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Impressed with Avis... they do really try harder!

I normally hate car rental places - you stand in line forever to get a shitty -smoky car (not to mention the infinite bull you have to hear about their insurance coverage). My work wanted me to go to Chicago (I work for Hewitt Associates) and so I rented with Avis (their preferred vendor). I registered for their membership and was warmly received by a (irate) bus driver who would have been cussing and showign the bird (if not for me). He did promptly leave me at the preferred counter building (no shitty lines and frustrated employee - this is business class stuff). Needless to say, I was impressed. My return was even for convenient - I didn't even have to go inside the building!
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