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The lightening fast uprising in Egypt, making the fall of the Mubarak Government almost a certianty began barely a week ago and it has been covered on media, including the Internet, even though the authorities in Egypt shut it off for a time, as even small ammounts of info are getting through and going viral. It is a stark picture of processes of revolution, the confusion and the violence and the factions and of a vacuum yearning to get filled, as a leader for reform is just emerging, as the impotance of the current government is revealed in a series of misguided events.
This revolution reveals much about Egypt, and the U.S. response, and why it isn't Iran of 2009. It reveals how an entrenched top-down hierarchy with a festering mistrust of its population can come down so quickly, like Tunisia recently, as opposed to a police stte with a large appratus within the population to keep tabs on them, like Iran. Social Media can shorten the fuse as we have seen, but any technology, if understood, can be used by a repressive regime. The Iranians have been able to use information mined from social media to find and imprison people who participated in the revolution there. The difference is that there are still many stake holders in the regime of Iran who want things to stay the same. When people feel that their government is not engaged in their lives, and the ills of low wages, rising food prices, and high unemployment drive discontent. Often the maintainers of status quo are the last to see this comming and only get to the facts afterward. This is the U.S. response. Mubatek is our strongest ally in the Arab World, and the uncertainty of his being forced out and what succeeds him has made the response difficult. I think that Hillary Clinton's making universal human rights the top concern is a good initial response, warning Mubarak not to overreact with force, but charting a course with a sucessor is nuch less certian especially if that succession leads to an Islamist persuasion.
TopDespite the warning from Sinclair Lewis in the 1930's, we in America pride oursleves in the resiliancy of our institutions to prevent the disconnects that lead to revolution elsewhere, that our system leads to solutions to injustice and want without lots of violence, the Civil War was caused by a failure of compermise which is at the core of the longvetity of our system.
It is instructive, however, to imagine what path we would have to go down to get to the demise of our system. It may be that even beyond economic determinism, some call it Marxism, that people here have far greater hope than that high unemployment and low wages could lead to a loss of faith in our system. The "Jobless Recovery" we are in still doesn't come close to the levels experienced in Tunisia or Egypt. The lopsided income distribution and plutocratic power in the political process with persistance of the current joblessness could eventually lead to pre-revolutionary tensions here, but that would take some events that have not occured.
The complaint the Egyptians have about their government is that it is corrupt. That means that they have given up hope that it fairly treats them, that it acts justly, and that it does the right things in their interest, such as creating jobs and making prices remain stable and in line with wages. Here, in the U.S., a major scandel involving the electoral process with Big Money abusing its power to steal an election, or a discrediting of candidates, along with inflation, high unemployment, and wages not keeping up, could lead to trouble, especially if a fiscal crisis renders the government unable to act.
Something as simple as the inability to fund Social Security and Medicare could lead to trouble, the talk of some Conservatives about doing away with these programs is just silliness, because the economy could not absorb all the people affected, some 50 million and growing as the Baby Boomers hit 65, some 76 million people. The economy can't create enough jobs now, for those who are still looking. There are other ways to fix the fiscal problems with entitlements, but how this is done and the intergenerational conflict it signifies may well tell if our system can survive.
TopLast week, after an update to the kernel for Ubuntu 10.10 and the file manager, Nautalis, I began experencing hangs with the windows in the file manager going unresponsive for a minute or more, either remaining blank or having a spinner. Since the distro version is supported, I reported a problem out of nautilus on Friday last, which opened a bug. In fact I have yet to hear the the bug has been accepted and maybe it won't since there appears to be a workaround, but I did leave it with the troubleshooting that a deadlock situation arrises if one accidently open two identical file operations. This happens because one of my external drives is notoriously slow to respond to requests and one creates deadlocking processes by thinking the first one didn't go through. Maybe the bug is that the file manager doesn't prevent that.
TopThe weather, the world over, has hit record setting extremes, with floods, heat waves, record cold, record snows. Whatever the base cause, I believe that proponants of global warming due to greenhouse gases have predicted the types of events we are experiencing and that their critics have a Conservative agenda to resist the idea that their business plans are wrong and have to change rapidly. Climate change can be found at the basis of the type of uncertianty Conservatives abhor, that unstability caused by shortsighted business practices is undermining the very urge to protect the status quo.
Oil companies are paying lip service to alternative energy sources, but claiming that they can create jobs by burning more carbon creating greenhouse gasses. We always have to wait for business models to change and for entrenched intersts to retool, when we may eventually come to a situation where there isn't time for buniness people and investors to change. They will take their money and run, leaving others to pay the consequences. Maybe the upshot is that all of us will die, and you can't take it with you.
I have concluded that the fickel behavior of markets worldwide is the most damning argument about the wisdom of Capitalism and especially the idea of Conservatives that it doesn't need to be monitored and controlled. The idea here is not that market behavior is bad by itself, but that it does need watchdogs, public policy and government to mitigate its weaknesses, one of which is its lack of courage and the magnified effect of instant communication on its stability. If people need stability and predictability, many forces unleashed in the name of the profit motive, have undermined that very basis of the Conservative clamor for less regulation and less government, to provide inertia against chaos. It is as if the market is like the mob in the streets of Cairo, it needs a leader and ideas to bring it discipline and focus, selfishness, as in "I got mine, screw you", which I think is the true message of Conservatism, is not enough. In fact it is that which leads to the corruption that now threatens the status quo everywhere. The looters in the streets of Cairo are not different basically from the con-men in a Wall Street Bank.
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