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My Weekly Reader - was Big f*ck up on SNL
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NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 20:37:15 EST
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Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 01:37:15 GMT
Xref: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com rec.audio.pro:1120616
On 2004-11-01 said:
fuels for lamps (pumps and piping) and even early generation of
electricity, along with powering the new automobiles, most industry
depended on whale oil. That meant we were dependant upon nature
and the luck of the whalers, and it also meant that there was a
"peak whale" situation. So suddenly we find that there's trillions
of barrels of oil under the otherwise useless expanses of sand in
the middle eastern area, which, at that time, was mostly composed
of wandering tribes of arabs who were eating goats, racing fine
horses, etc. Sure, there were plenty of city-states, such as
Khartoum and Bagdhad, Cairo (although they were never oil rich),
etc., but our dealings with them were strategic to the advancement
of our western technologies, while our efforts to covet the oil
were tainted with "prizes" from that technology, rather than
offering the middle eastern states a stake in their own advancement
because of their own resources. Kinda like offering $24 of
trinkets to the Native Americans for Manhattan. Rather than
partner with the mid-east, we chose (we being the US and Britain)
to subjegate them by corruption and coercion of INDIVIDUALS
susceptible to corruption rather than treating them like a nation.
Think about it this way. Say we have 12 tribes composing 90% of
the area of a vast expanse of desert that only serves them for a
living, whilst is serves us for the resources under the ground that
they have no knowledge about how to retrieve. So we tall all 12
tribal chieftains that we'd like to drill the oil, but we can't
have the other 11 tribes causing problems, so we'd just as soon
deal with ONE chief who has dominion over the land. Because all the
chiefs have been told the same thing, they all fight (this did
happen) and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, for example, the Saud
family came into power. It's somewhat different throughout the
mid-east as each case was different, but it's right along the same
lines. Arabs, prior to dealing with the Brits and the Americans,
simply had no reason to create countries, and they didn't.
eSsentially correct, but there was the Ottoman empire, an excuse to go
in there with some military might as well. Although the Ottomans
could loosely be defined as a real empire I guess depending on which
historians you read.
Richard Webb,
Electric SPider Productions, New Orleans, La.
REplace anything before the @ symbol with elspider for real email
--
A good captain is one who is hoisting his first drink in a
bar when the storm hits.
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