three cheers for the king

But before the cheering gets too enthusiastic lets remember the point of the whole exercise: moolah. Send more moolah, coz’ he’s runnin’ out of magic wands way down there on the Nile way.So lets drop the hammer and see who’s toes it may land on. Egyptian roulette.But in the end, how enviable is the role; we seem to be on the cusp of a discarding of industrial age philosophy and methodology and will struggle mightily to deal with income polarizing issues of technological unemployment, Artificial intelligence, robotics and labor eliminating procedures that are going render unskilled labor more of a social nuisance value than productive resource. The blackmail tactic is that the have’s have to feed the beast or risk unleashing some wilder dogs on the world stage…

—Cleopatra by the American Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874-1951).—Read More:http://painting-history.blogspot.ca/2011_02_01_archive.html

(see link at end)…CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi has given himself high grades on his handling of some of the nation’s pressing problems, spending much of a nearly two-hour speech late Saturday talking in painstaking detail about fuel, trash and bread, while sidestepping key issues in the nation’s transition to democratic rule.

…Morsi, who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest and best-organized political group, made a slew of promises during his campaign, vowing to end Egypt’s fuel shortages, improve the quality of the heavily subsidized bread, check surging crime, clean the streets of trash and ease traffic congestion. Speaking to a crowd of tens of thousands in Cairo at Egypt’s largest sports stadium, Morsi claimed that scientific methods used to gauge progress on the five issues gave him a success rate of 80 percent on bread, 60 percent on traffic, 40 percent on garbage collection, 85 percent on fuel and 70 percent on security.

—Handmade oil painting reproduction of A Romantic Encounter, one of the most remarkable Academic Classic Oil Paintings original painted by Italian painter Eugene de Blaas.
Eugene de Blaas, also known as Eugene von Blaas or Eugenio de Blaas (24 July 1843 – 10 February 1932) was an Italian painter in the school known as Academic Classicism.—Read More:http://www.paintingall.com/Italian-Academic-Classic-Painter-Eugene-de-Blaas-A-Romantic-Encounter-Oil-Painting.html

But he also sought to stress the magnitude of the challenges he faces, and hit back at critics who charge that he was spending too much money and time traveling abroad and that his habit of offering Friday prayers at a different mosque every week was costly and disrupted traffic on what is supposed to be the quietest day of the week.


He said his nine foreign trips to date — Saudi Arabia (twice), China, Iran, Belgium, Ethiopia, Turkey, the United States and Italy — secured for Egypt pledges of billions of dollars of investment and monetary aid and that his Friday prayers, which entails the deployment of hundreds of policemen and troops, were cost free.

“I am still living in a rented apartment,” he said to bolster his argument that he was not abusing his authority. “If anyone sees me driving a new car that is not owned by the state should report it.”
“They are trying to find a hole in a seamless white dress,” he said of his critics. “We have a glorious future ahead of us.”

—Crusaders Thirsting near Jerusalem
1836-50 Palazzo Reale, Turin—Read More:http://www.artunframed.com/hayez.htm

… He also did not touch on the restrictions that critics say have been placed on freedom of expression in the three months since he took office and the return of abuses by the police — documented by human rights groups.
Morsi also offered no vision for the future of the nation, where nearly half of its estimated 83 million people live below or just above the poverty line. He declared himself married to the fight against corruption, but offered no ways to improve basic services such as medical care, education or housing for the poor. Read More:http://news.yahoo.com/egypts-president-gives-himself-high-grades-204748313.html

The great unknown, or rather the known unknown, is an Arab rightful recognition that a nation is more important than a state, or at least its one of the cards they can invoke; Morsi is not unaware that the framework of the nation state is a creation of the West, imposed on others, and perhaps not necessarily the natural habitat of a larger pan-Arab conception of interaction among nations; something that is able to float above the mundanities of ideology, especially if they can wean themselves off the cold irons of the Anglo-American financial system.  The state is a framework mainly dictated by necessity, maybe conceived to be an intermediate phase, since it circumvents, to some extent, the stronger essence of history which is the nation, the Arab nation which both preceded and will survive the ideology of the Western Liberal enlightenment. Otherwise, we risk falling into these wild mood swings of nationalism, a populist expression, removed and quite separate from wh


s also a western idea: patriotism. Especially in the Arab world, with its legacy of being manipulated, exploited and ruined from within and without we have nationalism bubbling which is a shot-gun marriage of a deep-seated inferiority complex with patriotism; as principal political factor it is the path of least resistance. If in America why not them as well?

ADDENDUM:

China is looking at Egypt more as an export market, rather than soaking up surplus employment needs in manufacturing….

( see link at end)….CAIRO — As other investors flee Egypt because of worries about the country’s rocky transition to democracy, Chinese companies are pouring money into Egyptian projects in the hopes of accessing a huge domestic market and acquiring a base for exports to the Middle East.

China’s interest in Egypt is driven by a desire to gain a strong foothold in a key African market positioned at the juncture of three continents. Egypt also has a large labor force that Chinese companies could put to work.

China has invested in other countries in Africa like Angola, Libya and Sudan, where China’s need for oil and other natural resources to fuel its growing economy outweighs the political risks of investing in those markets.

Egypt was China’s third-largest export market in Africa last year, after South Africa and Nigeria, according to United Nations trade data.

In the clearest sign yet that Egypt is keen to bolster bilateral ties with China, the country’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, arrived in China this week to hold talks with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, and other senior officials.

For Egypt, China’s investment drive offers an opportunity to solicit bids on construction projects at low prices. Nabil Abdel Hamid Hassan, the head of the Asia unit at the Ministry of International Cooperation in Egypt, said some projects would receive financing known as concessional loans from Chinese companies, funding with advantageous conditions that few other countries are willing to provide at this time. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/world/middleeast/chinese-firms-brave-uncertainty-in-egypt.html

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