Nato woos Russia on Afghanistan

Irony, irony, irony. This life is full of it but it is more fun to see it in major events. Twenty years after the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan Nato wants to involve Russia in its own doomed campaign there.

Why would it, you might ask. After all, it seems quite successful: helping triple Afganistan opium production is no mean feat. Here in London it has reportedly brought the street price of cocaine low enough for everyone to weather out the economy collapse in the best jolly mood.

Ex oriente lux

Who could have ever thought, say 20 years ago that one day all major Western economies would be abating their breath waiting for the news on the Chinese government's next move in the hope of their own economic recovery.

How very ironic: a Communist-led planned economy is yanking capitalism out of its self-created mess.

The Consequences Of Joining The Seemingly Unbeatable

Britain's dogged attempts to imitate its overgrown colonial cousin are fun to watch. Following every trend and fad on the other side of the Atlantic must be giving Britain a cause to feel superior to its more desate neighbours over the Channel. In London you hear police car sirens so many times, you'd think you're on a set of a Hollywood movie. CCTV cameras watching every nook and corner, credit card history, abandoning railway system in favour of private car ownership: Britain went to great lengths not to be like its European neighbours. Most of the copycat routine is quite harmless and even, to a degree, natural: after all, UK does share a lot of cultural heritage with the USA.

However, adopting America's major prosperity-generating mechanism has turned out disastrous. I am talking about the vicious system of living from borrowed money with no plans to ever repay the debt. In fact, it is a British invention: Americans just perfected it and took it to an extreme, pushing the national debt over 11,300,000,000,000 (11.3 trillion) dollars. In the heyday of Tony Blair's Cool Britannia it seemed like it would go one forever. The economy was booming for over a decade fuelled by crazy borrowing and overbloated housing prices, creating the false sense of well managed prosperity growth.

However, the jig is finally up. Big boys of the City and Westminster who were so good at the cheek-puffing game of appearing important and with-it turned out just a bunch of shockingly incompetent liars. The irony of it is that the very people, bankers and poiticians who cocked up world's fourth largest economy will be, at utmost, be given severance packages and shuffled around while the rest of the population will be stuck with the bill.

By the way, that bill has just been hiked up to a trillion pounds by those shit-for-brains good-for-nothings. It's like borrowing a grand to pay the hundred you owe. Smart move, Eyebrows.

JFK and Iraq

Being cute, popular and dating Marylin Monroe while married to Jackie is but a sexy media image. Action speaks louder than any PR strategy.

In 1963, the Kennedy administration backed a coup against the government of Iraq headed by General Abdel Karim Kassem, who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. The CIA helped the new Baath Party government led by Abdul Salam Arif in ridding the country of suspected leftists and Communists. In a Baathist bloodbath, the government used lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the CIA, to systematically murder untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. The victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.

Saddam's party was installed but no one else but adorable JFK, it turns out.

Nabokov And Dostoevsky

Nabokov's narcissistic excellence of style and a perfect imitation of hints of content makes him probably the first Post-Modern author. The dazzling brilliance of his narration made it possible to dupe armies of professional critics into believing that Lolita actually was a novel about something. However, if you manage to see past the blows and whistles, there is little but a calculated marketing effort to establish him in the Anglo-Saxon book market. What better ploy could one come up with than writing about Americans’ most sensitive spot – child abuse. It’s another topic why Americans are so fascinated with this particular theme that seems to both excite and disgust them. At any rate, Nabokov made the right choice to establish his writing career in the English-speaking world.

In this respect Nabokov’s outspoken hate of Dostoevsky is noteworthy because in a very fundamental way they are total opposites. On one hand we have Nabokov’s stylistic finesse and meticulous attention to detail coupled with the craftily masqueraded absence of content. On the other - Dostoevsky’s awe-inspiring insights into the abysses of human psychology and scarily profound eternal questions of humanity contrasting with feverish, at times even uncouth style, the literary equivalent of Van Gogh's paintings. Dostoevsky was exuberantly abundant in what Nabokov lacked spectacularly: meaningful content and purpose of the plot. Nabokov's sheer intellectual resplendence leaves little doubt that he must have been well aware of that fact.

It is only logical that Nabokov with his piercing analytical ability in linguistic and meticulous attention for detail in style was a translator par excellence. He was a perfect critique and renderer of other people’s works, but when telling his own stories he had to be a pretender, shrouding the absence of his own ideas in an exuberant toga of style with panache matched by a precious few, Oscar Wilde among them.

Nabokov is no doubt a fascinating read. He dazzles you with his intellect and style, carries you away with the enticing plot but at the end of the journey you feel peculiarly empty. All his big promises ends up in an empty flop, something akin to dining on fireworks: mind-boggling and exhilirating but leaving your stomach full of choking smoke. There is nothing in his writing warranting another go.

Dostoevsky's novels on the other hand overwhelm you with the depth and profundity of newly discovered meanings and revelations every time you open the book again. Once you get used to his angsty, strained style, he takes you away on journeys very much alike to Dante's Inferno trip.

To me Nabokov represents Satan's quantitative infinity: an endless entertaining variety for its own sake, metaphorically a beach rave party. When the crazy night of drug-frenzied frolicking wears off, you wake up in the ankle-deep waters amongst empty cans and other flotsam. Both Dostoevsky and Nabokov share the quality of greatness in that the former is the ultimate literary titan, while the latter is the ultimate literary fop.

Ultimately Nefarious and UN-accountable

A former Dutch Cabinet Minister, Ms. Herfkens refuses to repay the USD 250,000 rental subsidy for her apartment that she "mistakenly" received when employed at the UN In New York. Well, we all have heard of UN officials' extravagant lifestyle, but here is a nice twist to this case. Ms. Herfkens was employed as a special advisor to Kofi Annan for, you guessed it, fighting poverty on a USD 160,000-per-annum payroll on top of notoriously fat UN fringe benefits! To make this even more ironic, the hedonistic poverty fighter is a staunch Socialist, a PvdA member.

Through a University friend of mine who works in a UN commission I have met quite a number of former employees of various UN commissions and international organizations like the ILO, the IFO and so on. All of them, with no exception, had quit after a few years, all universally stating a "complete disillusionment in the content of the job" as a reason. Everybody says that the pay was incredibly good but to go on with the job would mean selling out your conscience wholesale.

Another friend of mine worked for the UN-AIDS in Switzerland for a few years. In the beginning I remember him very upbeat about his intention to get the system working. Years of uphill struggle later, he returned to his original occupation as a practising medical doctor. His comments about the UN cannot be published here as Blogspot.com objects to strong language.

Graft and corruption permeate all the levels of this obscenely expensive mastodon, just remember how Kofi Annan's shady dealings with the UN's 65-bilion Food For Oil programme in Iraq were exposed. He managed to get away with it scot-free and there is no doubt that the big time bonanza will continue for years to come.

It is truly sad that the very organization supposed to bring peace, justice and prosperity to the world is busy pigging out on public funds, offering precious little performance in return. They monitor world affairs, but who will monitor the monitors?

1984, 20 Years After - Mind Conrol In The US

The KGB with their magnetic tape reel based telephone eavesdropping system and a creaking network of volunteer informers could never even start dreaming of this extent of mind and soul penetration. These paragraphs read like a cyber-punk sequel of Orwell's 1984:

"As Michael Turk, the Bush-Cheney e-campaign director in 2004 explained, the Republicans were able to mobilise their supporters through a combination of email lists and internet 'data mining'.

They identified potential Republican supporters in every precinct around the country, using technology which predicts voter preferences on the basis of commercial data on car ownership, magazine subscriptions, and the like.

And then they sent their campaign volunteers detailed instructions on who to visit, including local maps of the area and walking routes, and issues that each potential voter was likely to be most concerned about."

Truly, the winner takes on the worst qualities from the defeated.

Spreading Globally The Message Of Patriotism

"A US container ship approaching the Suez Canal has opened fire on a small Egyptian motorboat selling local merchandise. One man was killed and two others wounded, reports say."

It would be just yet another episode of the big guy's high-handed approach - what else is new? - but for the ship's name, the Global Patriot. Now, Alanis, this is what you can call "ironic".