The Real Issue...zzzz

During the last segment of the Bill Maher show he pulled out a picture of an Afghan slum, some of it in rubble from what we can only assume was shelling, and he wondered how it is that Muslim countries, some of the richest in the world, can possibly justify having another Muslim nation subsist in such conditions. After all, there must be well over 1 Billion Muslims in the world, surely they can cobble together enough cash as say a handful of 14 Million Jews, or whatever the point was he was trying to make.

He made his point in a very funny way, I would have to watch the program again to make it sound as good, but the point is well taken. (By the way, is Bill Maher's head really as large as it appears on screen? He must have smoked way more than he owns up to in his youth; it's absolutely bulbous--sort of like Helena Bonham Carter's head in the latest Alice in Wonderland movie).

But there really is no need to belabor the reasons as to why there is no visible cooperation between Muslims, just look what happened when the Muslim Turks tried to help out the besieged Palestinians in Gaza recently (who are predominantly Christian). And that's pretty much been the history and the usual consequence of Muslim outreach in modern times.

Yeah, I know, what's one less Muslim, or five or 1 Million--I mean, here I've been gone for over 15 years and my own kids haven't missed me; my computer at work only randomly acknowledges my logging on for each day I am there which makes me wonder if I am really there or not. Still, I get my paychecks each month, less 15% diverted to coffers that have as yet to be accounted for by way of forced 3-day furloughs each month; this despite several State University studies showing that beyond a 1-day furlough per month the State is actually losing more money with more furlough days and 2 Court rulings that such cut backs in workers' wages are in fact illegal. The aforementioned non sequitur and run-on sentence is to show that it is not only Muslims that apparently cannot manage money.

So, the reason for the lack of development among these countries must not really be fiduciary but something else. (Let's eschew the obvious reason, corruption, since that is also a symptom rather than a cause). Since it is Afghanistan that is in the limelight one reason for its lack of growth is in its being the unluckies Muslim nation when it comes to natural resources.***

Let's see--it has mud...and bricks!

A point not wasted on the US Military when they went there to bomb high-value targets and couldn't find any; most of the targets bombed in Kabul (the Capital of Afghanistan) were not worth the price of 1 Bomb we dropped on them (as far as material + labor cost; we continue to ignore the price of 'collateral damage' because the pencil-necks in accounting have not come up with a way to establish that yet).**** Images of the better built Afghan domiciles along a hillside and what an advanced weapon reduces such buildings to appear below.

And Afghanistan has been beleaguered by war in some form or another since the late 1970's, which further stunts its chance at real growth. But war is only a contributing factor and not the only reason for stalled economic development; a problem specific to Afghanistan as to why it has not joined the rest of the world economy but not the big deal of a problem.

The most compelling reason for it failing to do so is also the reason the wealthier Muslim countries have not either. It is the devestating lack of education among the population, but specifically, the female population (recall a recent incident where a significant number of Afghan girls reported strange odors at school prior to falling ill and those affected reported symptoms very much like those involving toxic exposure, yet some wrote this incident off as mere mass hysteria--this should sound familiar if you have by now read Maxie Time). And where there is a pretence at educating women in these other countries, their growth is limited by the fact that the educated women have very limited opportunities for real growth, and so goes that whole society--they have set an upper limit for their own development, they maxed out.

In many of these societies, the women basically can become doctors (but only so they can marry a doctor), lawyers (and teach law), teachers (and be educators), and so on. No one ever tells these women, "Now, get out there and win one for the Gipper!"

That is the cover story. There is also a dark side. Being an educated person I have hob-knobbed with other educated people and one time in the long distant past I met a highly educated person who told me she had won a sizeable contract to go to Malaysia and report on the Muslim-Christian conflict.

This was prior to 1985 and there was not any Muslim-Christian conflict that I was aware of and I read newspapers and listened to the evening news and talked to other professionals in my field who were usually of foreign origins and they brought the news in from their own far-away homelands. Before she mentioned it, none of us had ever heard about it. And when I checked her on this, she abashedly restated that her report would come first then the conflict would ensue. Ohhh (I can be such a Ralph Kramden, or Ed Norton at times). I went straight home and casually mentioned to my significant other we should be more careful how we choose our neighbors in the future because apparently the natives are not friendly. (Husband! Don't you worry, never fear, methinks they Cannot Kill Me Twice, Dear. And, Al, I promise not to let them see me cry--how's the old leg?).

At any rate, Muslims it would appear are not the only demographic that cannot account for why the rich portion does not help out the disadvantaged amongst themselves. Here in the Western Hemisphere the poorest nation has as its popular majority Roman Catholics. Below, we see images of Haitian living conditions prior to the recent big earthquake and after. And we also see the religious leader of the Roman Catholic Church that, should he be inclined to do so, could single-handedly float the Haitian economy for the rest of its existence without having to sacrifice the quality of his robes or shoes.

And as for those really expensive bombs we drop like diamonds from the sky, for good measure, images of the homeless in Los Angeles are also included along with a photo-op of the Mayor of Los Angeles at a red carpet event in the very same hometown. If he did not ask for an assist on their behalf from every celebrity at that fete, he was not doing his job that evening working for the disestablished among his constituency (and nice suit, by the way).

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***THIS JUST IN....
Now that we know the real reason why the US is over there and by some miracle we have not found that elusive Osama, the real question is: When exactly did we first 'discover' these vast stores of Afghan mineral deposits and how much of their own country's wealth do the Afghan's get to keep?
****These newfound riches will also help the pencil-necks in accounting come up with a figure as to how much an Afghan's life, aka 'collateral damage' is worth as well; let's see $908 Billion/29 million population is about 31,310++ USD. Note: How the pencil-neck accountants have figured out exactly how much unmined mineral deposits are worth, but are clueless as the value of one human's life born in Afghanistan.