“Mr. Greenfield first grasped the importance of appearances while trying to survive the Holocaust. When he was 14, he and his father, mother, two sisters and a brother were taken from their home in Pavlova, in what was then Czechoslovakia, and later delivered to Auschwitz.

“He looked like a somebody,” said Jay Greenfield, 52, Mr. Greenfield’s oldest son and the executive vice president of the company, Martin Greenfield Clothiers, explaining that his father attributes his survival to that shirt. The rest of Mr. Greenfield’s family perished in the camp, though he did not find that out immediately and spent two years after the war looking for them.”

A Tailor, Called Upon by Designers and Politicians – The New York Times

“…when coffee originally arrived as a phenomenon in the mid-1600s, it was not seducing a culture of perfect sobriety. It was replacing alcohol as the daytime drug of choice. The historian Tom Standage writes in his ingenious A History of the world in Six Glasses:

The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine….Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildly inebriated, and the quality and quantity of their work improved….Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries.”

Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air, pages 59-60.

Britain in Colour c.1926 – ACL

“Progress … is about to hit the buffers of overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, and the exhaustion of resources. However fast we run, we never seem to get anywhere. Has the industrial revolution made the average inhabitant of the world healthier, wealthier, and wiser? Yes, if he is German. No, if he is Bangladeshi. Uncannily, … evolutionary science is ready to suit the mood. The fashion in evolutionary science now is to scoff at progress; evolution is a treadmill, not a ladder.”

Women are incentivized to avoid risk if they want their genes to be passed on to the next generation, whereas men are incentivized to seek risk.

It’s interesting that, in humans’ pre-agrarian ancestral environment, human gender roles had completely opposite incentives with regard to risk, and yet they still were able to cooperate in order to create successive generations.

(Page 20)

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, Baltimore’s shipbuilders produced a generation of fast topsail schooners known as Baltimore Clippers. Designed for speed rather than carrying capacity, the Baltimore Clippers were ideally suited to long voyages carrying precious metals and for semilegal activities. Privateering (a nice word for pirating) was a Baltimore specialty; during the War of 1812 the city was home port to 126 privateers. In British eyes it was simply a “nest of pirates”. In September 1814 General Ross’ British Army, having just burned Washington, DC, turned its attention to Baltimore. When the ground forces were stalled outside the city, an invasion fleet stood in the harbor and pounded Fort McHenry for twenty-five hours. The fort and its men held firm, saving Baltimore from destruction. A lawyer named Francis Scott Key watched the bombardment and paid tribute to the defenders of the flag by writing the four verses of “The Star Spangled Banner”.

One of the most hated Presidents in recent memory (if not the entirety of American history), George W. Bush managed to divide the nation into hostile camps of partisanship. He led a war into a foreign country that did not attack America, going against the traditional anti-war stance the Republican party had held for much of U.S. history (including Vietnam). He changed tax policy to increase the amount of earnings that the rich could keep, which both inductively and effectively led to increasing wealth inequality and disparity, fanning the flames of class warfare . And he was a foreign policy hawk, largely due to the construction of his cabinet which included prominent gung-ho warriors like Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Barack Obama, in contrast, is a foreign policy diplomat. His message as well as his actions indicate a desire to show a new face to the world: an America that engages other nations constructively as an observer, but neither infringes on nations’ sovereignty nor involves itself in their internal affairs.

Enter the 2009 Presidential Elections of Iran. It’s come to light that Mr. Ahmedinejad, the victor, may have actually come in 3rd in votes. The vote was certified within three hours of being counted, whereas Iranian election law dictates that they be certified no earlier than three days after an election, so as to allow for appeals on grounds of corruption or voting-tally errors. The security services have green-lighted a provision to allow police to fire upon demonstrators and protesters who dare question the results, and have already begun shooting protesters in exactly this fashion.

It is time for a change of the political system in Iran, the first major change since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. A young and resurgent Iran demands Democracy and modernity, and now needs to rip the power away from the entrenched theocracy, the Mullahs, and the (Grand) Ayatollah (Al-Sistani).

Equally important to the Iranian people’s revolutionary actions would be American intervention. The United States’ CIA is widely-known as being responsible for the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in August 1953, and is just as able to foment a revolution in Tehran now as they were then.

The best outcome of these election irregularities would be a peaceful popular uprising and a revolution. The mullahs, however, have other ideas, and would be a strong adversary during a revolution. The mullahs would call up the military to institute martial law in order to keep the revolutionary hordes down. Because of the mullahs and their power, the most likely endeavour to bring about revolution in Iran would require outside (U.S.) intervention in addition to a popular uprising.

With Barack Obama sitting in the White House being the calculated and ‘safe’ President that he has shown himself to be time after time, it is not likely that we will see strong support from him for an aggressive U.S. response/intervention. Doing that would go against not only the principles that he ran on and his outspoken stance against the war in Iraq, but against his subconscious self that has been shaped by his experiences in politics and law for decades.

Barack Obama is not the President who will help Iran over the pass and into the Valley of Liberty and Prosperity.

But who is?

The first man who comes to mind is none other than George W. Bush. Bush’s father, George Herbert Walker Bush served for a time as Director of Central Intelligence under Gerald Ford, and knows of the CIA’s capabilities regarding illegal and unauthorized activities and intervention on foreign soil (he was actually called in by Ford to investigate and clean-up the agency of this kind of activity). Bush 41 also led the charge of Desert Storm into Kuwait and Iraq in 1990 and is likewise quite willing to use the military and the CIA in defense of America’s interests abroad. Bush 41′s son, George W. Bush, was likewise a war-hawk, willing to intervene for global interests and to ensure that authoritarian hegemony has no safe harbor in our modern world. He and his cabinet led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 in addition to the occupation of Afghanistan, and managed the occupations until his two-term presidency ended in January 2009.

If George W. Bush were the President of the United States, he and his cabinet would likely support and execute a covert intervention in Iran and supply the Iranian revolutionaries with intelligence, supplies, and money. Such a development would be best for Iran and the world, but because Barack Obama is such a measured and calculating anti-war President, American intervention is unlikely. Iran and the world will doubtlessly suffer because of this cruel joke of history.

It’s now up to the Iranian people to rise up, as Ukraine did in 2004, and do what must be done–with or without the help of a passive and unassertive America.

Cameron Newland is a mobile phone expert and technology writer from Seattle, Washington. You can subscribe to his blog’s RSS feed by clicking here, and follow his Tweets here. He can be reached at cameron at cameronnewland dot com.

What were they thinking! – Mitsubishi’s Unfortunate Bailout

Q & A – How are Asian rivals reacting to Chrysler’s bankruptcy? – Reuters

Unnecessary Knowledge – Chrysler/Mitsubishi

Akane: we have big holiday from 2-6 [of May]
Cameron: oh yeah?
Akane: we called “golden week”
national holiday
Cameron: YAY!
Are you going to invade Manchuria?
Akane: YAY!!
Cameron: You are, aren’t you
Akane: chinese hate us…..hahahah
Cameron: yes they do!

Salman Rushdie has reported that he still receives a “sort of Valentine’s card” from Iran each year on 14 February letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him.

Salman Rushdie – Wikipedia