Wednesday, November 11, 2009

'Wall Fall'


Another day, another ... day of hating on Gordan Brown by the British people. As if the man wasn't despised enough already for various reasons already (war, economics etc), now a woman named Jacqui Janes, whose son died in Afghanistan, has given the British public a new reason to dislike the PM. According to Mrs. Janes, the letter the PM wrote to her saying how sorry he was for her son's death was full of spelling errors which Janes called "disrespectful." So because she made a big deal about this he called to apologize to her. And she refused to accept his apology. I'm sorry but I'm afraid I'm on the side of the PM here. She is blaming him for the death of her son clearly. She seems to be taking out her frustration out on him and involving him in her grieving process. I'm not a psychiatrist or anything, its just what it seems like to me. But in the British papers, it seems like Brown can't catch a break. So though I feel terribly sorry for Mrs. Janes' loss, I also think she should stop with the media war against Brown because-sadly- it won't bring her son back.

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The Fort Hood shootings have been in the news a bit here, more in US news sources obviously, and I'm still a bit confused as to the logistics of the situation, just that at a US army base an army major declared he was anti-American etc and killed 13 military personnel. I'll have to find out more details on everything to give you my opinion on this other than it seems like a terrible tragedy.

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I watched an interview with economist Niall Ferguson who claims the US's most important economic relationship is with China. When asked if he thought there would be a switch to China's currency as the reserve foreign currency he seems doubtful however. He predicts that the dollar's vallue will drop in the future (unfortunately for yours truly). I guess this would be along the same lines as what I've been reading elsewhere- that the US is not/ will not recover from the recession as quickly as UK and EU. Which does not bode well for this girl- as I am headed back to live Stateside in December.

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The recent issue of the Ecnomist gives a brief overiew of the fall of the Berlin Wall (on the 20th anniversary of the event). It's kind of funny, I haven't really read the Economist for about a year (mostly for my global political economics class anyways) and it realy struck me how much the article on the fall of the Wall was a glorification for capitalism in disguise. One section talked about how the Eastern European countries had to struggle at first with competing with Western Europe but concluded basically that the countries are so much better off now w capitalism than they would have been under communism. Also there is an article on Gorbachov and perestroika (sp?) saying that Mr. G was influenced from an early age from grandfathers who described to him some of Stalin's regime 'necessary evils' of his communism and it stayed with him his whole life. Well obviously telling a little kid about Stalin's evils will scare them out of their wits lol. But basically that section also praised the goodness of capitalism. I'm not going out on a limb and saying capitalism is evil, but this article on the 'Wall Fall' made it seem that capitalism is perfect in all its glory- which many enlightened people today know is not true. (However there are many many still in the dark). Anyways, bad job Economist on giving out a nice overview of the events surrounding the Wall Fall but 'good job' on telling me (in other words) why I should love capitalism.

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The end... for now.

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