LINKS: 5 NOV 09

Some items of interest:

• The UN pulls 600 staff out of Afghanistan.  The recent Taliban attack on UN staff quarters worked.   It destabilized the organization by piercing the "organizational veil."
• WSJ.  Big Mexican pot farms on US Indian reservations.  A little on the economics:  "The math is tempting. Start-up expense for about dozen plots, with 10,000 plants each, is well under $500,000, U.S. officials estimate, including the cost of hiring 100 workers to plant marijuana and then several "tenders" to water them for three to four months until harvest. Incidental costs might include generators, PVC pipe and food supplies for the growers. Those plants could fetch about $120 million on the open market."
• Naked Capitalism on invoking God to defend greed.  This is as old as the hills.  Not only does it make greed righteous, it makes economic failure damnable.
• It costs $500,000 a year to send a soldier to Afghanistan.  Hilariously, even mercenaries are cheaper (that includes the relatively expensive people from the company formerly known as Blackwater).

Comments

[Eminence Grise]

Polizeros has an excellent post on super-empowered individuals in the financial sector, "What if The Joker lives in the financial sector too":

http://polizeros.com/2009/11/05/what-if-the-joker-lives-in-the-financial-sector-too/

[Duncan Kinder]

Re: invoking God to defend greed.

Those looking for a different worldview might consider reading _The Greek Praise of Poverty: Origins of Ancient Cynicism_ by William D. Desmond.

http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Praise-Poverty-Origins-Cynicism/dp/0268025827/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257438098&sr=8-1

Cynics were ancient philosophers, exemplified by Diogenes, who lived in a barrel and went on a quest for an host man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynics

Cynicism resembles the subsequent Holy Fools of Eastern Orthodoxy as well as St. Francis of Assisi in the West.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_fool

It resembles, Zen, Taoism, Hindu gymnosophism, as well as many Sufi strains.

John has advocated experimentalism as a response to Global Guerrillas. However, many if not most people have other temperaments and skill sets. Which gives rise to the question of what is to become of them.

Something like Cynicism would be part of that response.

[ThomasG]

Those bankers seem to conveniently forget the following quote
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

[Hans Suter]

40 000 surge soldiers cost what 25 000 000 afghans earn!

[10st]

mercenaries are dirty filthy pieces of shite. please do not attempt to defend or rationalize their existence or deployment. they are disgusting and evil and if i were still in uniform on active duty i would fire upon them well before i fired upon any perceived 'enemy'.

[Hatty]

10st, why are they pieces of shite? They fight for money and so do you. You both serve territorial monopolies which claim rulership over areas delineated by lines of maps. Only you fight for a single territorial monopoly and are unwilling to fight for others? Why? Is it because they are culturally different from the state you serve? It can not be for freedom, as states and war exist and thrive off violating the very freedoms they claim to protect. And besides, there are far less oppressive states than the U.S. Government, the Swiss National Government for example, why don't you fight for them or another state which is more tolerant of freedom than the U.S. Govt?

[EN]

Talk about system disruption. The attack on Hood, "might even be considered beautiful in another context." It ruins the entire reason for fixing Afghanistan. Of course the "Major" involved is one of us... sorta. This combined with the attack on Brits in their beds is a nice bit of work.

[Benny]

@ Duncan Kinder

I see cynics everyday on my way to work, stepping over several of them on the sidewalk in fact.
But, OK. Homeless people aren't real cynics because they didn't actually choose their lifestyle and still crave what cynics reject- status, money... food. It's not the lack of these things that hurts, rather the unfulfilled desire for them.
Authentic Rastafarians (not the little middle class doobie brothers) are probably the most cynical groups out there. An authentic Rasta "priest" won't even wear clothes beyond a scratchy brown sack. Being stoned 24/7 certainly takes the edge of a grim economic situation too. The Rasta population does seem to be growing pretty fast where I am.

[SA]

Polizeros has an excellent post on super-empowered individuals in the financial sector, "What if The Joker lives in the financial sector too":

"http://www.study-aids.co.uk"

[SA]

[url=http://www.study-aids.co.uk/economics/econ0007.html]""Global Energy Security Order: Deconstructing The Security Debate""[/url]