Re-heating a Cold War

This little article details how the Russian military is souping itself back up, heating its leftovers and stirring up trouble. It continues the speculation in my little post on Iran and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, about how Asia is not laying low, as the War on Terror may have us believe.

Not that I think the Cold War is going to reheat, but I think that when Americans talk and think about Asia they only think about the Middle East, and maybe Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. The fact is Asia is huge, there are a lot of people there, and most of them are not content to let America run the world. Considering how the Project for a New American Century (the hardcore neocon crowd, look it up, it's an interesting conspiracy in itself) have dropped the ball with their "New Pearl Harbor" that was supposed to steel American ideology towards global dominance, I would say an increasing conflict with Asia will not be our finest hour either.

Basically it looks like trouble, from which no country will probably end up really doing much better. Instability is bad for most parties and peoples--not that stability is always better. But, while it happens we might as well take our historical lessons where we can, so that they tragedy of history is not a total loss. Most people probably won't take it to heart though.

But if you might, fair reader, listen: "Terrorism" is a flash in the pan. Not a harmless flash in the pan, because it can certainly cause damage, and not a simple flash either, because it is a tactic near impossible to defeat. But, what lasting conflict encompasses is always economics. Ideology is transitory: fleeting and fickle. Powerful, sure, but large groups of people with always come back to the oikos. Economy, that is. Guns, butter, rice, toasters. Will a billion Chinese people simply go without their cars? Will a nation spanning 14 time zones simply ignore their military as a economic stimulus? Will the countries holding petroleum reserves refuse to control the buying and selling of it? No, no, no. Terrorists will terrorize, but without the big armies, there will be no one for them to rebel against.

Watch, and learn. States, armies, banners will rise and fall again and again, and the stock market will love it (and hate it).

Kissies!

Interdome is my past time, but could it be my job?

I watched a segment of a Frontline documentary on PBS last night about changes in the media. A lot of it deal with the "blogosphere", and how it may or may not be siphoning interest away from traditional sources of media, etc., which has somehow become news itself for most media sources. Insert headline, "Newspapers Lie Unread in the Streets" here... hahaha.

The special also drew attention to some actually interesting things that at least I hadn't heard mentioned before, although I've thought them many times. For instance, now news agencies are expected to turn a profit, and so are accordingly turning to more entertainment oriented news, like "hidden camera" exposes and celebrity news. Also of interest was that many papers are turning to local news to win readers, because they can get the corner on the market this way, while anyone with a computer can report on the national stories.

But what I really took away from this was that the paper print industry is doomed. Of course, I naturally take this away from many things, seeing as how I would like to make more paper things in the future, yet people have little interest. Although I have sneaking senses of paranoia for many reasons, not all of them hallucinatory, one I have been feeling more often of late is that I must learn html otherwise I will never get a job ever. This program made me think that this was an astute paranoia. It's not merely learning some html tags in order to be computer literate, either. It seems that to really make it in media these days, you have to not only have cutting edge content, but your form has to be amazing as well. It's not just streaming video, its taggable, uploadable, searchable streaming video. It's not just podcasts, its portable, tradable, interactive podcasts. Semiotics used to be a clever manipulation of words, but now in order to write you have to know how to make the paper as well.

So I'm doomed. Burn my corpse with my books. That is, unless I am an html savant and I don't know it. Or, if you'd like to pay me to write for you. Call me?