Steve Jobs, one of the most important entrepreneurs and innovators of both the 20th and 21st centuries, has died. Will he receive the sort of veneration reserved to politicians when they die? That’s unlikely, although Steve Jobs typically did more good for humanity every day before lunch time than any politician has ever done in his whole life.
Jobs should be considered a great American icon in the same way that Michelangelo is associated with Italy or Mozart with Austria.
When foreigners walk into “American-themed” gift shops in America, they should be greeted with commemorative plates bearing Jobs’s face.
Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen since we have to honor great humanitarians like nuker-in-chief Harry Truman instead.
And of course, Jobs did great things for all humans, and not just Americans.
Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs.
APPLE–Remembering Steve Jobs: “… Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built…”
@AnnCoulter has a few tart tweets about Amanda Knox’s exoneration.
The noxious Knox had been convicted of murdering her British roommate based on O.J.-like evidence, which was overturned after the American’s family and their PR machine invaded Italy.
• “Amanda Knox not guilty, Casey Anthony rolls eyes, says; ‘we’ll, duh…'”
• “Amanda Knox begins search for real killer.”
• “Former OJ jurors on Mediterranean cruise, Amanda Knox not guilty… coincidence?”
NATO Socks It To The Serbs, For a Change
By Nebojsa Malic
MORE THAN A DOZEN civilians were injured when NATO troops opened fire on Serb protesters in northern Kosovo on Tuesday. The Serbs had been peacefully protesting NATO’s seizure of checkpoints on the roads to the rest of Serbia, seeking to enforce the writ of the self-proclaimed Albanian government “in the entire country” (Kosovo’s Albanians declared an independent state with NATO support in 2008; Serbia, along with most of the world, refuses to recognize it). Western media reported this as “clashes.” NATO spokespeople argued they’d used only rubber bullets, in “self-defense.” Video and eyewitness reports prove them wrong.
NATO occupied Kosovo in 1999, after an illegal war in support of the separatist Albanian “Liberation Army.” Evidence of alleged Serb atrocities – used to justify the war – never materialized. Albanian persecution of ethnic Serbs and other communities, meanwhile, has unfolded for 12 years now, under the very noses of the “peacekeepers” and often with their tacit approval. When Serbia acted to establish law and order in Kosovo in 1998, it was condemned by NATO as “aggressor” and its actions deemed “genocide.” But when NATO initiates violence on behalf of a criminal regime of ethnic cleansers, slavers, drug-runners and organ harvesters, they call it “law and order” and anyone who opposes it, no matter how peacefully, a “criminal element.”
Why should any of this matter? Because it shows the world’s dominant military power (for now) as dangerously and deliberately disconnected from logic, and hence justice.
In the early 1990s, a media image of the Balkans wars was created in the West, wherein the Serbs were these mass-murdering aggressors against their peaceful neighbors, and the virtuous West had to step in and stop them. The Serbs were accused of the most vicious atrocities and compared to the Nazis.
None of that makes any sense. The Serbs are accused of breaking up Yugoslavia – yet they wanted to preserve it (and even then, not at all costs). The West decided that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist (just like that) and that the borders of its federal units were inviolable – except for Serbia, which could be carved up further (Kosovo). Serbs in Croatia were denied autonomy and expelled en masse, but Albanians in Serbia were given independence. Serbs in Bosnia were told they had to submit to a centralized, Muslim-dominated state, while Serbia itself was ordered to de-centralize to the point of separatism. No matter which way one turns, the only consistent “principle” in the Orwellian Balkans is that the Serbs always lose.
The Nazi comparison is especially vile, considering that 1) the Serbs were the principal targets of Nazis and their allies during WW2, and had also fought German and Austrian aggression in WW1; 2) Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians were allied with the Nazis in WW2, and the first two fought for Austria-Hungary in WW1, and 3) both Croats and Albanians had designs for eliminating the Serbs from the territories they claimed, and put those plans into effect under Western patronage, while the Serbs were accused of genocide without any evidence of intent!
One PR executive even bragged, as early as 1993, that the biggest coup of his agency was convincing the Jewish public opinion in the West that the Serbs were Nazis reborn, even though Croats and Bosnian Muslims had a history of “real and cruel anti-Semitism”!
In the course of the Balkans interventions, the West has repeatedly violated its own laws and charters (NATO), making a mockery of the UN and international law, while claiming to be guided by some sort of higher morality. The result of these interventions was that the US, Britain and France betrayed an ally from two world wars and demonized them as Nazis reborn, while supporting Germany and aiding German allies from WW2 to finish what they started in 1941. If this sort of stunning reversal can happen in the Balkans, it can happen anywhere else. To anyone else.
First come the smears. Then the bombs. Then the boots on the ground, and the desert called peace.
You have been warned.
**** Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.
UPDATE: BAB contributor Nebojsa Malic on Russia Today, TODAY. The neocon is always and everywhere the most uncivilized:
Jacqueline Kennedy’s dowdy daughter Caroline Kennedy has released “never-before-heard audio recordings of interviews conducted with the former first lady in 1964, shortly after her husband’s assassination,” together with a book, “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy.” We know Jackie Kennedy for her style, sophistication, sense of history, and love and knowledge of music and art. We now know something about her well-formulated opinions and astute observations, delivered in dulcet tones and exquisite English. (The other day I used “hermetically sealed,” which was common usage when I was, well, much younger. My husband wanted to know why I was using a term used in engineering!)
Discussions with the late historian Arthur Schlesinger reveal Jackie to be not only a dazzling conversationalist, but a forceful, if ever-so feminine personae.
Especially appreciated is Jacqueline Kennedy’s opinion about the sainted Martin Luther King (whose real worldview I discuss briefly—and unfavorably—in my book). All the more so given how irreverent she is in coming out and dissing a legend in the making. PC was not an issue back then. My book also quotes Kennedy on affirmative action: the man was conservative as few conservatives are today.
From a performance of Pablo Casals in the White House to Beyonce’s bump and grind: how far we’ve fallen. To be fair, Bush was also without class and culture.
UPDATE I (Sept. 16): STYLE & SUBSTANCE. Myron Pauli: Like many a libertarian, you refuse to address issues of culture. A comment such as mine, dealing with an impressive, classy lady—Jackie was certainly mistreated by her husband, but never responded like a tawdry tart, as is the custom nowadays—is reduced to the problem of statism. In a universe in which everything is reduced to the state, is there any place for observations about culture, human accomplishment, personality, etc?
I suggest to you that things would not be so bad if more women today had the class and classical education of a Jackie O. At the very least, women with a similar frame of reference would not feel so obsolete and voiceless.
Funny how the media are trotting out Mrs. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, to try to smooth over her mother’s taped views: that LBJ was an integral part of the assassination plot (of course, but not mentioned in this article), that she didn’t admire Martin Luther King, FDR, or Churchill, that she rejected feminism, etc.
