[DAWN] PRIME Minister Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... betrays a mindset frozen in time when he says he doesn't understand why people protest against him or seek his removal at a time when he is just warming up in his third term of being in power. Whether PTI will be able to acquire power to rule Pakistain or deliver the change it talks about is one thing. Whether it will be able to bring Sharif down through its incessant fulmination is another. "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come," Victor Hugo said. Unfortunately for Nawaz, "Go Nawaz Go" is sticking.
Triggers for mass uprisings can never be predicted with scientific precision. Did all of La Belle France rise up in arms when the French Revolution transpired? Didn't the collective American conscience accept the notion of 'separate and equal' in Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) only to reject it six decades later after Brown v Board of Education declared it unconstitutional? Does the US remember minority rights activists who came before Martin Luther King as fondly? Was Musharraf ousted and were judges restored because all of Pakistain -- urban and rural -- rose up for rule of law?
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
10/08/2014 00:00 ||
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According to Aristotle, there are basically three forms of government which at least have the potential to be good forms of government — Monarchy, Aristocracy and Republic.
In Aristotle’s view, each of those three forms worked well so long as the people in charge remembered they had a duty to those whom they rule. That the reason they had the power they have is in order to administer their nation for the best interests of the people of the nation and the future thereof.
Aristotle also felt there were three evil forms of government — into which all of the three good forms would inevitably slide.
Monarchies tend to become Tyrannies where the Monarch rules only for himself, Aristocracies tend to become Oligarchies in which the Aristocrats work only to benefit themselves and the people of their class, and — a Democracy in which we have the tyranny of the masses.
What!?! You say, Democracy is an evil form of government? Don’t we have a Democracy in the United States? Well, no actually, we’re not supposed to. We’re supposed to have a Republic. There’s a reason for that. The founders were all classically educated men. They’d read Plato and Plutarch and, aye, Aristotle. They were aware that direct democracy simply does not work. The people “vote themselves largess from the public coffers,” and eventually everything collapses.
They created a representative republic precisely so that there would be a check on the passions of the masses, just as they created the the three branches of government to be a check on each other.
In essence they took all three “good” forms of government and folded them into the United States of America. The president is, in essence, an elected monarch. Such have not been unknown in history, the pre-Norman English (Saxon really) monarchy was one example. Congress and the Supreme Court amount to an elective and appointed aristocracy. Because they are elected for fixed terms, the U.S. is putatively, a republic.
We’re also watching all three “evil” forms of government emerge within our own country today. In California, for instance, the public initiative system allows the direct passage of laws without reference to the elected legislature — and there have been some truly silly laws passed because of it. The current holder of the White House is using executive orders, and his own influence to jam through legislation and regulation without regard to constitutionality or legality — how is this not Tyranny? Congress, both houses, and the courts have become nothing but self-perpetuating oligarchies in which we find it is not unusual at all to have members of the same family serving in seats that are almost handed down. Witness the Carnahan “dynasty” in Missouri. That’s on the Democrat side. The Blunt family on the Republican side has sent many members to Congress and the governor’s mansion as well. Congress makes laws which in general seem to benefit only those of the political class.
I had the idea that narrative in crisis goes through 3 phases: denial, overconfident half measures to restore normalcy and when that fails, panic. What follows the panic is probably a paradigm shift. It’s time for one. The current PC paradigm has been failing for some time. The rise in terrorism and Ebola have highlighted its shortcomings, although the old players are still trying to force the new situation into the same old tired talking points with ever more absurd results.
Spain has gone from complete confidence in its systems to public accusations that the nurses attending its two repatriated Ebola patients were not provided with Level 4 protective clothing.
However, the hospital’s health workers said that the suits worn to attend the priest and the missionary did not meet the necessary safety requirements, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported. The nurse should have worn fully waterproofed-clothing with biosafety level 4 and with breathing autonomy. However, the suit used had only biosafety level 2.
BLS-4 suits look a lot like space suits -- complete body covering with a integral hood along with a backpack for the air filtering / compressor system. If you can see separate goggles & face mask, it's not BLS-4. CDC on a BLS-4 suit includes:
a positive pressure suit supplied with HEPA filtered breathing air. The breathing air systems must have redundant compressors, failure alarms and emergency backup.
So far, I have seen no one wearing a BLS-4 suit who has been involved in this crisis, not in Africa, Atlanta nor in Dallas.
One way to prove aerosol transmission of Eboli is to have someone contract it while wearing & fully utilizing a suit of less than BLS-4 suit. Maybe this has happened in Spain.
The Obama administration announced it will task customs agents to stop Ebola at airports. But not everyone is reassured. Connecticut “Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has signed an order that gives the state’s public health commissioner the ability to quarantine anyone she believes may have been exposed to the Ebola virus”. Everywhere there are signs people have lost faith that “they” can keep us safe any more.
Nothing the Feds are doing would prevent another Patient Zero from coming into the US from Liberia, carrying the virus but showing no symptoms. The CT governor's quarantine authorization order goes far beyond what the Feds are doing & could potentially work.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Quoting Allan Quatermain, the most extraordinary man in the world. Very, very good. I love it ! 
