A New World:
The news had begun to get a feeling of sameness to it, but suddenly things are different in the north of Africa. There was a serious uprising in Tunisia, sparked so I hear by the suicide of a street vendor who could no longer keep up with the demands of the government and run his business.
Egypt saw a street uprising that ejected an old dictator. The final result of that is not in, but it looks from here like an authentic change driven by popular demand. Of course there will be the ever popular notions that it is all a matter of the puppets of the US losing credibility OR that it is the US simply renewing the puppet governments since the ones already on line are so old.
The one in the news now is Libya where the reaction of the dictatorship has been harsher. Again the final results are in. It looks like there will be a change, though. Dictator Muammar Gaddafi was being silently ignored by the the media. Now he is being charged with having spies checking his own people and using brutal tactics. That’s hardly a surprise. As I recall we ourselves were spying and torturing in the name of national security. However Gaddafi has now begun to do things even more flagrant and it seem hard to believe he will survive in power.
All of this strikes me as a bit of a challenge to my own way of thinking. I see governments as falling because of low birth rates. And here they are toppling because of rebelious young people.
The way I interpret it is that the cadre which has been running each country is not representative of the country as a whole. (Even democracies have trouble making that one work.) And it is the cadres that are having the low birth rate producing the instabiltiy we are seeing.
I wonder if it is possible to test that by finding good statistics. I rather doubt it.
One less than thrilling offshoot of all this is that the number of new people dropping by for a read on the web log has fallen. The news got more interesting.
I do not expect a rebound. I imagine that the growth has been word of mouth and that our profile will simply start rising again from the lower level.
Thanks for sticking with us.
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