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To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (57431)	8/1/2004 3:40:11 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793670

The World Bank and the IMF are not the international monetary system, but they are symbolic of it. The Board of Governors for Federal Reserve building is in the same neighborhood. I hope, and expect, that they all have electronic backup offsite, so at most you'd lose the organizational staff and the paper records. Blowing up the New York Federal Reserve bank building would be far worse. The real Federal Reserve Banks are tightly integrated into the real international monetary system, especially the NY Fed. Edit: it's like blowing up the World Trade Center. If they really wanted to screw us and knew what they were doing, they'd have blown up the NYSE. Now, I expect that the NYSE has good decentralized backup. It would be inexcusable not to have done so after 9/11.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (57431)	8/1/2004 4:01:26 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793670

After all, Europe's original Dark Ages, back in the 7th and 8th century CE, were caused by the first, glorious days of Islam, when the conquests of Mohammed and his successors closed the Mediterranean Sea off from Europe. Interesting point. On that same topic, I've been reading up on what are commonly considered to be Arabic contributions to world knowledge, and have been struck by how many are actually from ancient civilizations, introduced or reintroduced to the West by Arabic scholars, and I can't help but wonder whether the flower of Arabic civilization was really just a takeover of existing cultures which were subsequently destroyed due to the inadequacies of Islam in promulgating independent thought. On FADG, I was explaining that the Babylonians had treatises in algebra and used quadratic equations 4000 years ago, while the Indus River culture used pot stills for distillation 5000 years ago, but most educated people today will tell you that the Arabs invented algebra and distillation. So, if Arab traders got astronomy, algebra and distillation and so on and so forth from cultures further east (and south, let's not forget Egypt)(and north, let's not forget Greece), is it possible that there never really was a flowering of "Arab" culture? Arabic scholars could read Aristotle, but Arabic culture did not embrace Aristotelian logic, and was left behind.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (57431)	8/1/2004 8:42:27 PM
From: Alastair McIntosh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793670

I suppose that some take that view. Europe's original Dark Ages, back in the 7th and 8th century CE, were caused by the first, glorious days of Islam, when the conquests of Mohammed and his successors closed the Mediterranean Sea off from Europe. It seems more likely that the Dark Ages were directly caused by the Christian Church after original Christianity was taken over and perverted by Rome. The hatred of learning and philosophy by the Church culminated in the burning of the world's greatest library at Alexandria and the closing of the last Platonic school in the sixth century.