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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (21134)	6/10/2004 5:17:48 PM
From: philv	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 81656

Yup, that's more like it Searle. Big problem for these guys. They have so much money and don't know what to do with it. But it is only money, the one great American success story, the manufacturing miracle, manufacturing money out of thin air. Pretty soon they will have so much of it they can use it as toilet paper. (might be uncomfortable however as it is classed a "hard" currency) Seriously, I wonder how much of the economy is related to finance and financial matters such as stocks, bonds, banks etc. That is a growing industry, and the U.S. is working on a world-wide basis, financing activities globally. Why would anyone want to hold gold when all the action is in paper dollars?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (21134)	6/10/2004 5:24:14 PM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 81656

And like Orion the Hunter, arising from a bed of Herculean excrement, we have the appearance of a brand new academic -- the Terrorism Professor! Who says the "new" economy hasn't created any jobs?! newstatesman.com >>Throughout academia, the study of terrorism is booming. After every atrocity, every shooting, every bomb, the television studios are filled with a new breed of expert - the counter-terrorist academic, with his pat soundbites. In our baffling, violent world, the terrorism expert, discreetly hinting at access to cryptic intelligence material, is the high priest, able to discern within the entrails of atrocity a fingerprint and a culprit. In academia, terrorism studies are the new, new thing and graduate programmes are springing up like an intifada across the western world. The lecture theatres are filling at the Inter-University Centre for Terrorism Studies at George Washington University in the US capital, at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliyya, Israel and at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Defining a group as "terrorist" automatically delegitimises both its methods and its political aims. As an academic discipline, counter-terrorism is still exclusively devoted to sub-state groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah. State terror is ignored. Counter- terrorism remains a study by the state, in the form of selected academics and a few police and military figures, of the enemies of states. The objects of study - "terrorists" or their political representatives, whether Irish or Arab - are never invited to contribute. In 30 years of conflict in Ulster, no British counter-terrorist academic produced any significant or insightful analysis of the IRA. In the wake of 11 September 2001, American neoconservatives such as Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle incorporated the Israeli counter-terrorist model into US foreign policy. The US superpower conceived of itself as besieged in every arena by the amorphous global Islamic conspiracy of al-Qaeda - a minuscule organisation which, 11 September aside, had killed just over a hundred American citizens in terrorist incidents spread over a decade. Counter-terrorism, including the "pre-emptive" strike on Iraq, became US foreign policy. In Iraq, America is back at the hard beginnings of counter-insurgency theory: a weakened, illegitimate, colonial-style military occupation scrabbling to contain an ever-widening native uprising. But President George W Bush does not need the counter- terrorism experts to tell him what to do. He just needs a few history books and the insight to understand, as the old European empires finally did, that the only option is a graceful exit.<<