Thousands of monks in Burma have been executed or moved into prisons.

The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton details what is needed to pull off a successful revolution. A key insight details what must happen when people are in the streets and the showdown nears.

The only thing absolutely necessary for the victory of a revolution is that the army, at the very least, does nothing. If they desert and join you, so much the better. But if they oppose you, you will lose.

Embed this in your brain, revolutionaries and reformers. What the Burma monks did was hugely courageous and noble. But they did not have sufficient support to bring down the government. Now many of them will be tortured and murdered with even more vicious repression falling upon that country, which means those not even involved in the protests will suffer too.

It’s best to pick fights that you can win, especially when dealing with thuggish governments.

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Christian conservatives may run a third party candidate in opposition to Giuliani, something which would draw way more votes than Ralph Nader ever hoped of getting, and the split is for much the same reason too - an irreconcilable difference in views.

Meanwhile, Nader has been reduced to asking for supporters on CraigsList for a 2008 run (Hey Ralph, your legacy over five decades has been noteworthy, but maybe it’s time to do a slow fade into the sunset?)

The Green Party has nothing, nada, zilch, on their homepage about the 2008 presidential campaign, so I’m guessing whatever candidate finally emerges will get zero major media attention.

The primaries will be over by February, given the unfair front-loaded system favored by both major parties which virtually insures no dark horse candidate has a chance as well as keeping things stage-managed and controlled.

It looks like it’ll be Clinton vs. Giuliani, and we’ll get eight months of increasingly vicious attack ads from both sides and precious little discussion of the issues, much less real solutions.

This is not democracy of, by, and for the people. We need real debate, genuine discussion of issues, not this pretense. You think either Clinton or Giuliani will mention the war, peak oil, global warming, the collapsing dollar, or the weakening economy in terms of trying to find actual answers and get consensus? Well of course not. They’ll only mention such issues when they can score points by blaming the other side for it.

So, they’ll probably spend a billion dollars total trying to destroy each other and it’ll all be a waste of time and resources that could have been spent trying to find real answers.

The country deserves better than this.

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Iran labels CIA ‘terrorist organization’

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