With President Obama’s impending August 2nd deadline only three weeks away, I couldn’t have said it better with just words.
Jul 06 2011
Random Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from Brazilian author, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, whose magnum opus (arguably) I am currently reading.
“Never until that day had I peered into the abyss of the Inexplicable. I lacked the essential thing, which is a stimulus, a sudden impulse…To tell you the truth, I mirrored the opinions of a hairdresser I’d met in Modena who was distinguished by having absolutely none. He was the flower of hairdressers. No matter how long the operation on the coiffure took, he never got angry. He would intersperse the combing with lots of maxims and jests, full of a certain malice, a zest…He had no other philosophy. Nor did I. I’m not saying that the university hadn’t taught me some philosophical truths. But I’d only memorized the formulas, the vocabulary, the skeleton. I treated them as I had Latin: I put three lines from Virgil in my pocket, two from Horace, and a dozen moral and political locutions for the needs of conversation. I treated them the way I treated history and jurisprudence. I picked up the phraseology of all things, the shell, the decoration…Perhaps I’m startling the reader with the frankness with which I’m exposing and emphasizing my mediocrity. Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man.”
–The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (translated)
Jun 01 2011
Summer Hurt in Short
An unnamed person in favor of one-party political systems once pointed out that opposition parties only do one thing: oppose. With the recent rejection of a preliminary House bill, intended to increase America’s debt limit, by its very proponents, the GOP, that point rings true. The combination of the current European sovereign debt crisis and an uncertain U.S. debt landscape will only encourage a highly volatile environment for the financial markets, in particularly bonds. The Capitol Hill political sideshow should continue through the summer to eventually end in a Faustian-esque ‘midnight’ deal from both parties prior to the August deadline set by Treasury head, Tim Geithner.
Furthermore, the Fed’s QE2 stimulant program is scheduled to end by the end of June amid rising food and gas prices and high unemployment.
Apr 25 2011
Reality in Segues
With the Royal wedding or “circus act”, according to Jerry Seinfeld, approaching, it is only appropriate that i join in with the sycophants of orthodoxy and offer my congratulations to Prince William and Kate Middleton. As forced as my congratulations sounds, it actually is sarcastic. My reality check to the global media: the Royal wedding is not the most important event of 2011, let alone this decade, so please give me back my attention. If there is one thing I admire the French for, it’s for banishing that pseudo-hereditary farce to its rightful place into that abyss known as history. I am all for the preservation of culture/customs and they do have their place in modern society…in museums.
On the topic of traditions, the e-commerce giant, Amazon, has finally joined in on the bandwagon to offer its US Kindle users access to the OverDrive database of digital publications from over 11,000 American libraries. Unlike Apple’s devices, the Kindle previously had compatibility issues with OverDrive’s file format and vice versa. As promising as the e-books/e-readers industry is, there is something unappealing to me about turning countless pages without the feel of paper, and reading, for hours at a time, on a computer screen. Reading a book for pleasure is my escape from the digital world.
Speaking of the digital world, while IT, via optical character recognition (OCR), is revolutionizing the print industry, the health-care industry, according to the BBC, is “stuck in the dark ages“. An health-care IT executive quoted, “Cans of tomatoes are being treated better than patients”. To the health-care industry’s defense, while I do think that medical records should be digitized, I do not think that the data should be globally centralized nor cloud-based as being proposed and implemented by IT experts, due to the high sensitivity of medical records. Furthermore, the Amazon EC2 crash earlier this week proved that cloud computing is still very vulnerable. The focus should be on digitizing records and centralizing them within hospital systems as well as easing communication between medical professionals on a global scale in order to enable quicker access to sensitive information when appropriate.
Mar 19 2011
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (S/RES/1973)
My critique of S/RES/1973 isn’t particularly on its goals, which includes “authorising all necessary means to protect civilians and civilian-populated area”, but rather on its sheer hypocrisy. Bosnia-Hercegovina, Colombia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa, and permanent Security Council members France, the United Kingdom, and the United States should very well have come outright to supporting anarchy and declaring war on Libya rather than hiding S/RES/1973 under the code name “no fly zone”. As a side note, it’s no surprise that the strongest proponents of the measure, France and the United Kingdom, were once Libya’s former colonial rulers.
Disapproval of the measure, in the form of abstention, came from Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Russia; its not that these five countries are not interested in the welfare of civilians but rather that they simply disagree with a “trigger happy” military action against a sovereign country. Oil-rich Libya may very well be in a civil war, putting the lives of civilians at risk, but the Libyan crisis is one of a handful of ongoing civil wars. The Somali Civil War, ongoing since 1991, and the most recent Ivory Coast crisis are two more that come to mind. The Security Council’s resolutions/international community’s actions that have been geared to both conflicts had more of an emphasis on peackeeping and humanitarian aid as supposed to the outright declaration of military support for one group/political ideology. Furthermore, the UN Security Council’s actions on the Ivory Coast crisis have been nothing more than “condemnation”.
Rather than focusing on more serious conflicts involving unarmed civilians in places like Yemen or Bahrain, the United Nations Security Council has chosen to inappropriately intervene in a conflict that it simply cannot win, given that Muammar Gaddafi, a true patriot, has no plans of ever leaving his country. If genocide was a factor as it has been in countless crises then S/RES/1973 would be tolerable, but in its current form, it will simply prolong the crisis into a stalemate civil war. The irony of the situation is that Ghaddafi came to power in a bloodless coup.
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