Wow, "slept in" until 5:00 today. Bahah!
Interesting to see all the turmoil in the Middle East lately -- given our policy of supporting dictatorships in the region for generations, we're definitely on the wrong side, relative to the protesters. Our foreign policy there was focused on access to oil; we didn't want a more democratic Middle East, because it might diminish the flood of oil that came our way, so we supported (and funded) dictatorships in the region, which then kept the oil coming. Of course, this pissed off everyday Arabs, who saw us as the pimps for their respective autocrats, oligarchs, and dictators -- and when you're giving $1.5 billion annually in military aid to, say, Egypt, it's pretty hard to pretend to be pro-democracy. Anyway, our policy there certainly fueled the Islamist movement, who just wanted us out of there. All of this points to why our country has desperately needed an energy policy, even though the benighted Carter was the only president to even try, to be serious about it. We still don't have an energy policy, unfortunately. We're still mired in the Middle East, supporting the bad guys, without a diplomatic hand to play. Oil's not the future; it's the past. So is supporting dictatorships and pretending that it has anything whatsoever to do with democracy. We need to get the hell out of that region, rather than get further mired in it.
In other news...
Good piece on SF's cultural role.
