One Man's Opinion

In case some of you think that the Saudi deal I wrote about yesterday is not par for the course for the U.S., here's another sweet deal, although not as lucrative. The Americans are selling a $3.48 billion  missile-defense system to the United Arab Emirates, a group of seven absolute monarchies that no one would claim is a model of democracy and freedom. Still, they have the money to make Washington and its political donors from the private sector happy, so who cares about any of those legal niceties? As long as they have the cash, dictators all around the world can rest assured that the U.S. will sell them all the weapons they want. And throw in its soul, for good measure.

What a nice Christmas present! The U.S. Government has closed a deal to sell $30 billion worth of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Now, the last time I checked, Saudi Arabia was an absolute monarchy , with no constitution, civil or human rights to speak of. Doesn't it strike you as odd that, at a time in which the Arab world is in turmoil, struggling, precisely, to achieve democracy and freedom, the Americans would choose to help arm a country that   is just the opposite of what people are fighting for? Of course, there are 30 billion reasons for Uncle Sam to rationalize this egregious contradiction. So, while the U.S. chastises and lectures many other countries about its values, it laughs all the way to the bank,  after dealing arms to, in many instances, its future enemies in a war.

It may be easy to dismiss Chávez's comment on the possibility of the U.S. being behind the cancer epidemic among left-of-center Latin American presidents as the ranting and ravings of a lunatic, but I wouldn't put it past the Americans to do anything in their power to get rid of their "enemies." The fact is that the U.S. track record in this regard is quite disturbing and revealing. Consider the case of blacks in the South in the 1940s that were injected with syphilis and left untreated, to see what would happen. In Puerto Rico, several decades ago, we had an American doctor who experimented on our people as part of a government project and a political leader who was also the subject of radiation while in custody by the U.S. government. Now, we know about the experiments with the Guatemalans, and who knows how many more of these episodes we are bound to find out. Weren't all these things "horrific and reprehensible", as the lady from U.S. State Departmen...

I've got news for all those noble souls who really think that the U.S. military is led by "officers and gentlemen" trained in the military academies: there has been a  60% increase in sexual assaults in those hallowed halls.  Sexual shenanigans are nothing new in military academia; from time to time, a scandal breaks out, and then the issue is forgotten for a while. But, such a sharp increase from one year to the next is certainly significant, especially at a time when both in Afghanistan and Iraq those "boys next door" and "clean-cut types" have been caught with their pants down way too many times. If this were a joking matter, we could say that these guys are just practicing for the "rape and pillage" part of their military mission overseas. But, of course, this is no laughing matter. Once again, this is part of the "reality check" that reveals the truth behind all that American propaganda that casts their military personnel as ...

It's ironic, to say the least, that Jews, who have been so persecuted throughout history, be as blatantly intolerant of their own people. This is what's happening in certain parts of Israel, where ultra-Orthodox Jews have become abusive and violent to other Jews, demanding that they adhere to an extremely strict code of conduct based on ancient religious beliefs and practices. Interestingly enough, some of the things they engage on are reminiscent of Nazi laws and procedures. All this time, people around the world have been led to believe that religious fanaticism was something that only Arabs and Muslims took part in. Now, the holier-than-thou Jews are seen acting as stupidly and viciously toward their fellow men as any other human group on earth.

Cooking is serious stuff, and dangerous too. In Chile, the Supreme Court has ordered a newspaper to pay $125,000 to 13 --unlucky number -- people who tried out a churros recipe that turned out to be faulty. When those readers followed the recipe exactly, the churros exploded and burned them, some more severely than others. So, 7 --lucky number for the unlucky readers -- years after those incidents, they will be compensated for their injuries. The Court held that the newspaper should have tried out the recipe -- which calls for boiling cooking oil --  before publishing it, to make sure that it was safe. I suppose that chefs and cookbook authors everywhere will now practice "defensive cooking"...

Unless I'm missing something, Chevron's claim that plaintiffs' lawyers and the Ecuadorean judge that handed down  a decision to grant $18 billion in damages for an oil spill did something wrong because the lawyers helped to draft the court's decision is frivolous. I don't know about Ecuador judicial procedure, but it's common practice for a judge to ask for a draft of a decision by the winning side. As long as the judge does not rubber-stamp it, that is to say, accept it without a careful review of the facts and the law, there is nothing objectionable about this way of helping a judge do his duty expeditiously. So, I suppose that this is a tactic to smear reputations and have a higher court overturn the $18 billion verdict, which, I'm sure, is the real issue here.