>>>with the exception of Britain, I see the EU as becoming a significant economic competitor to the US.
This is where I get confused. I know the former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia implemented a Vision 2020 back in '00? '99? '98?
The purpose was to tip world powers. The PC version is just growth milestones.
Then EU wants dominance, one money, one language, one world.
Russia's yard sales are hysterical. Their finger prints are all over the NGOs.
I would love for someone to decode the rest of those cables.
around 230 years ago, the great writer Thomas Paine, who we all stupied (or certainly should have studied) in American history made the following comments. These comments are just as relevant and thought provoking today as they were for our ancestors when this country was in its infancy. In his days, the enemy was Great Britain, but by substituting Al Qaeda for Britain, I think the same meanings apply.
(Yes I am a history buff - because I do truly believe we must learn from our history so we do not repeat it.)
"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
In discussing freedom from tyranny, Paine says: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value."
"The present winter is worth an age, if rightly employed; but, if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the evil; "
And finally, I bring you these two final quotes from Paine:
"'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them. Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fourteenth [fifteenth] century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc. Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment! Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world. Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head, that shall penitentially solemnize with curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Delaware."
and
"There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both."
You can read Thomas Paine at the Gutenburg Project at
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext03/twtp110.txt Actually perhaps Osama Bin Laden needs to read the following words of Thomas Paine: "When I put all the
circumstances together which ought to be taken, I laugh at your notion of conquering America. Because you lived in a little country, where an army might run over the whole in a few days, and where a single company of soldiers might put a multitude to the rout, you expected to find it the same here. It is plain that you brought over with you all the narrow notions you were bred up with, and imagined that a proclamation in the king's name was to do great things;.... We may be surprised by events we did not expect, and in that interval of recollection you may gain some temporary advantage: such was the case a few weeks ago, but we soon ripen again into reason, collect our strength, and while you are preparing for a triumph, we come upon you with a defeat. Such it has been, and such it would be were you to
try it a hundred times over."
Cal this is an excerpt is from
Executive Intelligence Review SPECIAL REPORT April 1997
Over six years old yet who wants more than anything to see Bush out of the White house?
"Behind the veil of legitimacy and humanitarian concerns can be found the same powerful people and organizations such as the Open Society Institute of the billionaire and - as always characterized - philanthropist, George Soros, the Ford Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy and many more, financing and using a maze of well known NGO's such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group, etc., as well as more obscure entities ... But, among all of them, shining as the Southern star, is George Soros who, like an immense Jules Verne octopus, extends his tentacles all over Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus as well as the republics of the former Soviet Union. With the help of these various groups (it is possible) not only to shape but to create the news, the agenda and public opinion to further aims which are, in short, the control of the world, its natural resources and the furtherance of the uniform ideal of a perfect world polity made in America."