Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Allen Funt, Brazil, Canada, Candid Camera, China, diplomacy, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Palestinians, Reuters, Russia, Security Council, State Department, Susan Rice, UN, UNESCO, United States, Victoria Nuland
What really appalled me were the commentaries from US diplomats immediately after the announcement they were cutting 22% of UNESCO’s budget.
Fair enough that the American system has its laws and the Palestinian move created certain conflicts of interests that will block funds for UNESCO. But all the rest is pure diplomatic baloney. “The United States … remains strongly committed to robust, multilateral engagement across the U.N. system” , said Victoria Nuland, a spokeswoman with the State Department. “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!”.
How long will the international community pretend that kind of speech corresponds to reality? As far as everybody knows, the US and other permanent Security Council members blocked new member sign ups. Among the contenders, India and Brazil, emerging countries. Mrs. Nuland continued her series of unfortunate and unrealistic remarks by adding that the vote was “regrettable, premature and undermines our shared goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East” (my bold and underline).
What is the true American perspective on ” lasting peace”? Has it ever been one in the past 2,000 years? Is it even just to punish a people that is looking for nothing but the right to have a voice? Diplomacy has now been officially rewritten to mean lobby, corporatism and other bad things we all know. And I won’t even start talking about Jewish groups in the background. I’m a big admirer of Israel and her people, traditions and survival history, but this personal feud went too far.
An American “ambassador” to the UN said the situation is “no substitute for negotiations, but it is deeply damaging to UNESCO.” And all I do is to regret another great opportunity the US had to make good. Shame on the administration. It sends out a message that it doesn’t matter how democrat or republican someone is, the repugnant feeling of a government to a few lingers. Go Occupy the UN. Or better, just put yourself aside from these matters. There will be no hope anyhow. Allen Funt would have been a great American diplomat. At least his jokes made sense.
Filed under: Behavior, Culture, Finances, Society | Tags: Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, google, Google Finance, India, Indonesia, Morocco, PLA, Playboy, Poland, Romania, Sex, stocks, trends, Turkey, Vietnam
Let’s be smart. If you’re a blogger, it’s imperative to write about things people want to know. What’s the most searched keyword on the web? Sex. What’s the most used search engine on the web? Google. So I decided to make a little test using these infamous and popular words with the beta Google Trends. Here’s how it works, quoting from Google.
“Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results – our Search Volume Index graph. Below the search and news volume graphs, Trends displays the top regions, cities, and languages in which people searched for the first search term you entered.“
Hence, with that information in mind I went to www.google.com/trends and typed “sex”. The results are quite interesting.
Search for “sex” has been steadily increasing since 2004 and reached a peak in 2008 after news published by a certain LesEchecs.com using the words “latina sex young: sexy Latina sex and free Latina samples sex, free Latina sex”. The regions’ ranking is also quite intriguing. First ten are (from higher to lower): Vietnam, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, Poland, Romania, Denmark and Belgium.
But hey, there’s something to be told here. It doesn’t mean that only because sex I popular that everyone is immune to these harsh economical days. I checked the most famous company involved with sex listed in the stock exchange: Playboy Enterprises. Ok, are you a Playboy investor? No? Even you will pass out with these numbers. PLA shares were sold by $ 1.19 on Oct 23rd. On Jan 2nd, the first year of trading in 2008, they were worth $8.89 according to Google Finance. They lost $7.80 in almost 10 months. The conclusion is clear: search for “sex” goes up, but sex stocks are down.
Angel and Tiggs 