uncle ken's foreign policy

I did misspeak in comparing the stock market to parimutuel betting in that parimutuel betting is a zero sum game whereas the stock market is not. At the end of the day for horse racing there are losers and winners, whereas for the stock market some days everybody wins and some days everybody loses.

Always spooked me the way money could just appear and disappear. Money, the most important thing in the world, and here it is all a voodoo game. But I guess it has been ever thus gold was only currency because it was pretty and rare and everybody else thought it was worth something.

Ah see I have been talking about money for two paragraphs and I am already bored up to my eyeballs. There is an article in the last week’s New Yorker about how to understand all those gobbledy gook terms money people toss around, and I’ve already read a page of it and I haven’t fallen asleep so maybe I will understand it after I read it. Probably not.

Well what’s in the news? Oh that’s right, the world is aflame. The classmate I write to apparently drops in on the blog from time to time because she recently wrote me her thoughts on Putin and then asked my opinion, and I’m going to repeat it here.

My thoughts on Russia? Very briefly, Putin is a bad man, but he is not all that powerful, Russia has oil but no industry, they have a big army but it is probably not that effective far from its frontiers. But it is powerful there, and he is not being outrageous by wanting the Crimea back and also a slice of the eastern Ukraine where the people who live there are more Russian than Ukrainian. I don’t find it particularly worrisome.

Shooting down that jet is worrisome. With all the conflicts going on where is an airplane safe? Sometimes I think we should just have a despotic UN that ran everything so that we would lead oppressed lives, but at least we wouldn’t be shooting at each other. But that’s probably not a good idea either, but then I don’t know what.

When Vietnam was over I thought at least we won’t be doing that again, and for a long time we didn’t, except for nibbling at pathetic little countries like Panama and Albania, and those little islands, whose name I have forgotten, except Reagan invaded them and overturned their government to save some American medical students who were never really threatened anyway.

But then bam, and Afghanistan, and okay, we sort of had to do that, but Iraq? And then we seemed to be everywhere, and now we seem to be back to being nowhere, and that is fine with me. 

Before any politician, even John McCain, says anything about foreign policy the first words out of their mouths are “No boots on the ground.” And I couldn’t agree more. We can rage, we can condemn, we can fool with sanctions, and look a little like that pitiful helpless giant, but better a pitiful giant stomping his feet, than a pitiful giant with his boots in a mess of burning coals.

It all looks pretty bad, and everybody seems to be a bad actor, but America is not going to be able to stomp out the fires, so let’s keep our boots unsinged.

And since then the Gaza Strip. Well Hamas is very bad, and very stupid for firing all those missiles that don’t even work and the only thing they do is piss off Israel and when Israel is pissed off they retaliate viciously, so what are they thinking? Reminds me of that little country near Russia that raised this big ruckus maybe five years ago and then the Russkies came in and crushed them, and what did they think was going to happen? Still killing 1,800 people, you really should think of doing something different, even if it’s just declaring victory and pulling out. I think Israel has lost fifty to a hundred soldiers so far and I’m sure that’s way more than Gaza has ever been able to kill when the Israelis weren’t in Gaza.