Ah, higher education...

Political things I've been following recently:


Ethiopia invades Somalia with implicit US backing, easily conquers Islamists who are of course supporters of terrorism by definition (it's right in their name!) but also are the first people to bring peace and order to Mogadishu and surrounding area in a decade, US backed "transitional" government, who until now only governed a very small portion of Somalia which didn't even include the capital, is now failing to keep peace and order in Mogadishu as old clan rivalries, which the Islamists had largely dealt with, are resurgent and Ethiopian forces want out because the poor country does not have enough money to support a continued occupation which is deeply unpopular with the Somali's who have a history of conflict with Ethiopia. A.K.A. MORE BAD NEWS. I've been trying to pay attention to Somalia ever since I saw a map of the world with all the countries colour-coded to show what type of government they had, and Somalia was the only one labelled "Anarchy".


A nice and actually somewhat encouraging article from Chomsky about the movement of leftist governments in South America to cooperate in coordinating their economic and political goals as an organized block.


Bush's big "solution" for Iraq, and the first real test for the newly-powerful Democrats: the proposed troop "surge" in Iraq of at least 20,000 new troops plus a billion dollars worth of aid to create new jobs for Iraqis. While the second part of the plan seems fairly reasonable, the troop surge seems to be a downright terrible idea, given that US troops are still the number one target of attacks in Iraq. More troop == more attacks. The American occupation of Iraq is hugely unpopular with Iraqis and, at least given the distribution of where attacks are being aimed, causes far higher passions amongst Iraqi's then any of the perceived sectarian conflicts. But, y'know, we can't let these poor Arabs try to govern themselves, we have teach them what freedom and democracy is first, otherwise they'll never figure it out on their own. Odds of Dem's more-or-less rolling over on their backs and giving this one to Bush (they'll tout their "modifications" to the proposal, but whatevs), I'd say about 3 in 4.


PS. Actually, it seems like prime blogging-time is when I'm at school and have things I should do but aren't really super urgent. A little bit of school work apparently INCREASES blogging. I might have to redraw my graph :)