Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Conspiracy Theories

Do authors of suspense and espionage novels provide ideas to politicians, terrorists, and anyone else that would like to rule the world or are they just excellent at predicting what the bad guys will come up with in the near future or do they have special access to people in the know or secret information that is already available but on a restricted basis?

We all know of Tom Clancy’s 1994 novel, Debt of Honor and the sequel Executive Orders that was so prophetically reminiscent of the September 11, 2001 attack using planes to crash into American buildings.

When I heard last Friday of the new secret nuclear facility in Iran I immediately thought of Christopher Reich’s 2008 novel, Rules of Deception, which starts off with the discovery by an Iranian soldier that their secret facility was discovered by someone else. I just finished the book, barely a month ago, so it’s still fresh in my memory, and again, like in Clancy’s novel, one could draw comparisons between some of the side plots in the novel and the stories that are playing out on the front pages of the newspapers or on the 24 hour news networks.

Creepy!

Saturday, September 26, 2009

New York’s Annual Diplomatic Circus


The friendly get together of world leaders in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly's 64th annual country fair looks rather like a tea party of rich bitches of the Divided Nations.

How much you have to take what these guys and dolls are saying serious, is an unanswered question. And it could even be answered with another question: “Who cares?”

There was Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who continued with his Jew-bashing and holocaust-denial and 12 countries stood up and walked out during his speech. If you look at the list who walked out one might think they had prior meetings scheduled to discuss more interesting topics. The possibilities are endless. The Costa Ricans could have been interested in selling tropical vacations to the Germans and Danes, while Australia, New Zealand and Argentina might have strategize how to introduce the Pumas into the Four Nations rugby tournament in 2012.

And if you look at the picture, I don’t know why there is such a fuss about the walkout. It seems many countries didn’t even rock up in the first place to listen to Ahmadinejad. The place is half empty before the walkout.

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy took a swing at America and Britain with his “the behavior of those who still continue to grow indecently rich, after leading the world to the brink of disaster.”

Pardon Monsieur! You’re wrong…But you’re also slightly right!

Wrong, most Americans aren’t growing rich, certainly not indecently rich, any time soon, and right, about leading the world to a banking disaster, rather than to the brink of disaster. Isn’t a brink of disaster more like standing on a precipice of a ginormous sinkhole that gets bigger and bigger, you staring open-mouth, unbelievably, until you eventually realize the world is falling through its own ass.

After this I don’t think the US and Britain wanted to talked to France anymore, but then most Frenchmen would have shrugged their shoulders, gave a Mona Lisa smile and said “Vous savez…politiciens.”


And the Americans weren’t talking to their best buddies the Brits in any case because Barack Obama snubbed Gordon Brown…again. He snubbed him in March 2009 too. This time it is more like a diplomatic cold-shoulder, but not too far away from a slap in the face with an aristocratic riding glove.

[No, I don’t think Obama has one of those.]

President Obama has refused five separate requests from Prime Minister Brown for a private meeting when Brown will be town. Five times? Wow! That’s close to begging! Rumor has it that the snubs came after President Obama expressed how pissed off he is at the Brits for releasing the Lockerbie bomber. The release is a sore point for many Americans.


Talking about Libya. What’s up with Gaddafi? Setting foot in the US for the first time in 40 years, (I have no idea why he was given a visa in the first place) he was really the clowning jewel on the fairgrounds.

Looking like a cross between Mr. T with all his medals and someone who is having a bad hair day and tried to cover it up under a pill-box hat, Gaddafi wanted to pitch his tent in New Jersey.

[His tent?]

Eventually he was demonstrated out of the idea by a feverish local Jewish Rabbi and many of his friends. Gaddafi then crossed the Hudson River and tried to pitch his tent in the backyard of Donald Trump’s joint north of New York City. But the local council blocked it because he didn’t get a permit to put up a tent.

[Gee, I didn’t know you had to get a permit to pitch a tent in your backyard?]

And couldn’t anyone in Gaddafi’s entourage tell him that New York is actually a concrete jungle and not a sandy desert. Putting up a tent? I’m sure they could have found a reasonably good hotel room, redecorate it to look like a tent, and even put some sand on the floor. Hotels will allow anything these days to get clientele.

[Doesn’t seem like they have any bright lights in that entourage chandelier.]

All that was missing from this circus was Robert Mugabe. Well, he actually was at the Assembly, and he even gave a speech, but there was no silly, stupid comments like “We are not hungry... Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked. We have enough.”

[Yeah Right!]

This would all change again on Friday morning, after the circus packed up and moved south to Pittsburgh, when Obama, Brown and Sarkozy became big buddies once more and presented themselves as a united troika to announce they caught Ahmadinejad with its hands in a new and “previously unknown” nuclear cookie jar.

An interesting week in politics can be a very long or a very short time! So much depends on which way the wind blows and on which side of the fart you are standing.

Monday, September 14, 2009