Time to get out of the Mid-East until "countries" like Egypt and Libya learn to behave. Pull EVERYTHING out, including all those billions of dollars of aid they get from us one way or another.
If they want to return to barbarism that bad enough, who are we to stop them?
Maybe someday such technology will let us get really lucky and help us to find Jimmy Hoffa :-P
In a way Egypt is demonstrating why I was always against the Iraq War that began in 2003. And it's also demonstrating why the American government is never going to feel safe about pulling out of that country.
Because once we do, Iraq is going to very quickly turn into what Egypt is becoming now.
The uprising in Egypt began in large part to long-festering mistrust of Hosni Mubarak (who has been ruling Egypt since I was knee high to a grasshopper). That's thirty-some years. Way too long for anyone to be in power. I don't blame the Egyptian people for wanting to peaceably put an end to his regime.
But increasingly I'm seeing the efforts of the "nice 'n peaceable" Egyptians getting co-opted by radicals like the Muslim Brotherhood.
And in short: what's now happening in Egypt is looking insanely like what went down Iran way in 1979.
I can understand why the average Iranian was honked-off at the Shah. There was plenty enough of that to fuel the urge to overthrow his government in Iran at the time. The thing is, the average Iranian didn't care to be ruled over by wackos like Ayatollah Khomeini. The politics of the revolutionaries was immaterial. They just happened to have enough momentum to be the ones to topple the ruling order.
Sorta like what happened in Vietnam. Anyone seriously believe that the Vietcong were Communists purely because of its ideology? Feh! Communism was just a means to an end for what Ho Chi Minh and his gang were promising: an end to a thousand years of fighting for Vietnamese freedom.
My gut feeling: Egypt is going to wind up as another Iran. Maybe not as quickly as Iran turned into, but yeah: basically a bunch of good people who will realize too late that they are being ruled by a small band of nutcases. If you want me to use the words "radical Islamic state" then I suppose I've reason to.
And if we pull out of Iraq now or anytime in the foreseeable future, the same thing is going to happen there: people wanting freedom only to be co-opted by the radicals. And then we're looking at a bunch of Mid-East gone Islamic theocracy with a lot of shootin' irons and worse.
Awright, that's my analysis. G'nite!
Has archaeological evidence for the biblical account of Joseph been found? That's what the Middle East Media Research Institute is reporting in a translation from an Egyptian newspaper. Scholars sifting through countless artifacts stored at the Museum of Egypt are now saying that numerous "charms" are actually coins dating to the time Joseph was said to have been in the court of the Pharaoh chronicled in the Book of Genesis. One of the more intriguing discoveries were coins..."...that bore special markings identifying them as being from the era of Joseph. Among these, there was one coin that had an inscription on it, and an image of a cow symbolizing Pharaoh's dream about the seven fat cows and seven lean cows, and the seven green stalks of grain and seven dry stalks of grain."You know what would be really cool? If we found Egyptian coins from the same period depicting the face of Elvis!Some years ago a tomb was discovered dating back to the same supposed period, apparently of a high-ranking official: not only were there no remains but the name on the sarcophagus had been obliterated. Some have speculated that it might have been the tomb of Joseph and that when the Hebrews split the scene, the honked-off Egyptians did what they could to blast Joseph's name out of the history book... errr, scrolls.
(Yes Chuck, I wrote that just for you ;-)
