continued from previous post As cultures desire capital, they face competition mowing their laurels out from under them and must seek the golden fleece of innovation. As those selfsame cultures seek to find new margins and tools whereby to secure their capital, they will push closer and closer to the walls of taboo and the outmoded, irrelevant rules of religious proscription. And thus we come to a cave in Afghanistan: Do we act to safeguard our mores from the reaper of innovation and its attendant capitalism, McDonald’s, Lexuses, and Britney Spears? Do we forego capitalism, Westernization, globalization and attack its symbols and its home?

George Bush would like us to believe that the threats against America are the collusion of Saddam Hussein and al-Quada (unsubstantiated) or the ready-to-go WMDs in Iraq (not found) or the moral anarchy inspired same-sex marriage (riiiight), but his own Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld’s playground, is reporting that the number-one likely cause of an imbalance in world stability will be attributed to neither homosexuals or botched war justifications. It will be… Global Warming That’s right, the Republican administration who withdrew the US from the Kyoto protocol in a fit of long-sighted stewardship of the global ecosystem but a few short years ago, has now been hit by a surprise of its own, the number one threat to US security, the thing most likely to spike the number of red days according to the Department of homeland security is Global Warming.

So I woke up this morning and found out from Bob Edwards that almost 200 people had been killed in Madrid in what is suspected to be an attack by Basque separatists. I was a bit worried because my sister is studying there and I am planning on visiting in 3 weeks. The good news is that my sister is fine and dandy. Like me, she has a great deal of sangfroid on matters such as these and is simply taking it in stride. I suppose she must feel like the tourists who were in New York City on 9/11/01 (actually, one of my co-workers and her family were tourists during the events – they had gone to the WTC on 9/10/01 - imagine that!

Today on the way to get a bit of tea I ran into one of my English co-workers, Abdul and he reminded me of how you don’t really see quite as many fat people over in the UK. I think it’s because they drink more tea than us. It keeps the metabolism high and helps them lose weight. With our multi-million dollar teeth bleaching industry, I think we can afford some tarnish for some vanished poundage. Look at Kate Moss for golly’s sake.

Once you learn Unix you see things differently. With Apple having embraced Unix as an underpinning, perhaps one could now “See and Think Different”. In any case, Unix users will laugh at this interpretation of the “War on Terror’, as Unix systems administration.

I’ve been morbidly obsessed with the Brexit process. I happened to be working a late night when the vote came through and my phone pipped with an NYTimes news alert that Britain had chosen to exit. But I’m inclined to wonder, based on my recent readings of “Connectography” whether some of the global cities will come to view the nation-states that bore them as less and less necessary to their continued prosperity. Noted Khanna: …the more London…[props] up England’s depressed and depopulated regions…[Londoners] view the rest of Britain as a liability sapping London’s finances rather than a strategic asset. (p. 75)

I think that the two most considerable politico-economic happenings of the moment are the rise of Donald Trump and the “Brexit.” While the former is galling and the latter astounding, both of them are upheavals that I choose to contextualize in a political phase that I have taken to calling “The Globalized World” realignment. In the US, I believe, this realignment will culminate in half of each of the main-line political parties finding more common cause across the aisle and may lead to a fracturing of the current political party order into new parties that I call “Big World” and “Small World.