“Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, 45% of its people are illiterate, its university graduates are unemployable, its $10 billion a year tourism industry is shuttered for the duration, and its foreign exchange reserves are gradually disappearing.”

My wife and I did the Egypt experience in 1991. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back now.

Me too, and I don’t like the thinking/feeling that way.

I cant help but wonder if all this is leading to that…

Problem: Americans consume too much fossil fuels, a non-renewable resource.

Solution: Make ethanol out of corn. It’s a renewable resource!

I don’t think the people responsible for banning DDT intended to kill millions of African children. They had the best of intentions towards baby birds.

ziontruth’s comment about Mao being just another Chinese Dynasty brought another historical tidbit to mind. Islam has had a tradition of it’s military powers securing a sense of legitimacy from it’s religious authorities in exchange for providing protection and a relatively free hand in social and legal affairs (at least as applied to the general populace, as the military is usually granted a degree of exemption).

On some level, I find it hard to see what’s going on in Egypt as anything but the latest chapter in that history, a renegotiation of the terms, if you will. At which point, it’s down to the old joke with the punchline, “we’ve established what you are, now we’re just haggling over the price.”

Our boneheaded attempt to subsidize burning food to run our cars has the happy effect of raising food prices and starving millions around the world, thus sparking revolutions.

Which will spur even more anti-American sentiment. Demagogues will say, “Americans are taking food out of your mouths in order to fuel their cars.”

Yet the greenies claim that the poor nations hate America because we consume too many resources, including fossil fuels. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.