OT: Osama ben Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Don't be ridiculous. Dubya is paying that money to the U.S. military-industrial complex - the guys who pay for all those pro-Republican television ads that turn up on your TV every couple of years.

Do you think Osama ben Cassidy would spend any of his newly acquired money on TV ads recommending Dubya or his colleagues if they suddenly got rational and bought him off?

King Ethelred's error (google for Ethelnet the Status.Ready == false):

...if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.

Better to pay the money not to him, but to the people who otherwise might support him. A bit of real development in some marginal countries could well work wonders.

Paul Burke

Well - *everything* can be resolved with appropriate dialogue, ;-)

The Norman kings were vikings themselves so they knew how to communicate effectively: Rather than blather about forgiveness, tolerance and understanding they put the heads of pirates on stakes along the coasts, especially entries to the waterways.

That made the Danes prefer visiting the friendly Ethelred instead where one would get a free sermon and 50 kilos of silver after barely a few days work of rape, pillage and torching.

Vlad Tepes used a similar form of communication with the Turks with excellent results.

Every penny sent in that direction will be wasted on propping up the existing system, thus *preventing* any development - at the moment the West and the Middle East are experiencing the "giving" relationship of the wealthy crack addict and the violent gangsters supplying the habit! As long as that money flows, the situation will grow worse.

Amen!

...Jim Thompson

Obviously, you don't want to prop up the currently exisitng political systems in the oil-rich countries of the Middle East, but to persuade them to move a rapidly as possible to more equitable and correspondingly more stable political arrangements.

Nobody seems to have a clue what this political arrangement might be. Representative democracy, as practised in some oil-rich countries like the U.K. and Norway, does seem to work for them, but the current attempts to introduce it in Irak don't seem to be working too well.

In the U.S. the original more-or-less representative democracy has degenerated into a pultocracy, in Iran the people apparently opted for a theocracy and in Egypt it looks as if the people would opt for a theocracy if they were ever givne the chance to vote one in.

Iranian theocracy looks pretty stable and does seem to be reasonably equitable, but the imans do have some funny ideas, and could destroy their whole system on some theological whim.

skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...

From the European history the main source of persuation is the total and obvious failure of the existing system ...

It's because it is the wrong people to start with - all the present industrialised nations have, parallel with the introduction of democracy, more than decimated their rural population and basically destroyed the rural culture totally. Some peacefully like f.ex. Denmark by migration into the cities, some not so peacefully like China or Russia.

The Arabs are dead against culture change, instead of evolving they spend the oil money supporting the growth of the unproductive population and spreading their ideology making the chrash that much larger when the oil eventually runs out.

The US democracy killed about 20% of the population during the argument over slavery, the Eropean arguments over Catholicism v.s. Protestantism killed about 30% of our population and the latest argument over Hitlers Paganism killed another 20%.

It is a mistake to think that democracy can just be introduced into a country with hardly any losses.

That is indeed what they will do - as a rational choice.

The iranian theocracy are in exactly the position as Herr Schickelgruber was; all alight with blazing ideology and rapidly going bancrupt. In only a decade or so the country will be weakened by the effort to support a still larger population that cannort even produce food enough for themselves: They will *have* to grab someone elses "stuff" and get about 1/3 of the population killed in the process for the nation - and theocracy - to survive.

However there is, I.M.O., no need for the "West" to get dragged into that mess. The Arab Oil dependency is mainly an US problem - the sad part is that the US could drastically reduce it's dependency for a very small price, but they do not want to. They would rather waste 2 trillion USD per year on becoming another Saddam in Iraq.