Be careful, you will cause any leftist trolls to spastically convulse when faced with the fact of National Socialism and Global Socialism being two sides of the same coin.
Having walked down the “Crossed Sabers” in Baghdad, my impressions were one of Saddam being a mix of Hilter, Stalin, the North Korean Kims, and “Ill Duce” all in one insane ball of fire.

Chavez is like a two-year old when you are talking on the phone. He just HAS to get attention. Well, cozying up to islamofascists, communist dictatorships, and madmen from Iran gets him attention. If that is not enough attention, then the growing violent crackdowns on his People by his government thugs should get him more (though that will never make CNN or ‘the big 3′)

The King of Spain treated him like the toddler he is. I think the world and People of Venezuela should (and some are) follow suite. Hopefully he will end up like is idol Che.

If one currency were improving against the dollar, it would make sense to wonder which currency was actually moving. In order to get around this, the dollar’s strength is generally measured against a basket of currencies. And it has in fact been falling. See here for one graph.

Allowing the dollar to fall is just a way of telling the suckers that we don’t owe you but 50 cents. The US economy is not based on the dollar, the world economy is

It’s in part because chunks of the world economy are switching to the Euro that the dollar is falling. As for the ’suckers’ argument, you’re right: the Chinese and Japanese, who hold vast reserves of both dollars and US Treasuries, are finding that these were a lousy investment. But just because they’re the first and most obvious losers from a weak dollar, it doesn’t follow that we are winners in this scenario. At the very least, you can expect that our resource imports (oil…) become more expensive, and that will eventually fuel inflation, no matter what Bernanke says.

Nice blog site BTW. Love the header… even if I had to read it twice to translate it
You are so very correct about the politician or “international relations” major looking at the same culture a cultural anthropologist studies and seeing something totally different from reality the anthropologist knows is true. I witnessed similar events in Iraq with DOS people convinced that Iraqis thought one way and the Military, who left the IZ regularly and have studied the Arabic people for years, shaking our heads.

Of course, it is still infuriating when a fatalistic Arab sighs an “inshalallah” instead of being proactive, honest, and fixing whatever needs done. Though being that way means they also never take the blame for anything…. but always take credit…

I would argue not necessarily, I did too growing up overseas in the Sub-Continent among Hindus AND Muslims - and studied Anthropology because of it, not Politics or “International Relations” and arrive at a far different conclusion.
There are societies that accept corruption as a basic way of life, and which deny individual responsibilities in favor of collective ones. That’s not what we’re about, and bringing relativism into play in international negotiations isn’t a “solution” except for a watered-down and useless (Jimmy Carter) version of foreign policy.
Obama is a kid in clown pants if he thinks he’s goign to achieve anything serious in negotiation with the tubby and violent thug Chavez, or the fanatical killer-loon from Theran - they would take him to school.

But then, Stalin and Hitler worked together to divide Poland; Hitler, the incompetent “Il Duce”, and Hirohito worked together to take on the world; Soviet Russia allied with Islamic terrorists in the 80s even while being attacked by them in Afghanistan; Sean Penn has never met a dictator he has not loved; and modern Russia would rather arm Iran and North Korea than work with the rest of the world to stop them.

In the end we find all of the above are nothing more than dictators with regional and global aspirations of absolute power.

And that is one of the many things the USA is fighting against. Too bad more of our population does not understand this, or has openly sided with the Islamic and socialist thugs.