Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has come to our rescue with a solution worthy of a Facebook new like where one can love, laugh, wow, sad, angry and still can just like. My question is why no hug in this great new Facebook features. After all, was it not Mr. Zuckerberg who recently after the Paris bombings, Brussels bombing and Pakistan bombings stated, “This morning we activated Safety Check in Pakistan after a bomb targeted children and their families in a park in Lahore. Over the last two months, we have activated Safety Check several times for acts of terror – including in Turkey and Belgium – so people in the area can let their friends and loved ones know they’re safe. Each of these attacks was different, but all had a common thread: they were carried out with a goal to spread fear and distrust, and turn members of a community against each other. I believe the only sustainable way to fight back against those who seek to divide us is to create a world where understanding and empathy can spread faster than hate, and where every single person in every country feels connected and cared for and loved. That’s the world we can and must build together.”
Further, Mr. Zuckerberg has discovered that all three of these attacks as well as many other terrorist bombings are all designed to spread far and wide “fear and distrust.” Then he has the gall to claim that “understanding and empathy” are the sole means for treating such attacks and not bullets, tanks, aircraft and boots on the ground. He has obviously become too entangled in his creation of Facebook where people can find safe refuge from daily horrors exchanging thoughts and emotions, often through emoticons which stand in the place of actual emotions just as Facebook stands as a substitute for reality. It is this replacement of reality by a caricature on a computerized community where one gains friends through cute kitten videos and virtual roller-coaster rides shared with acquaintances from the four corners of the globe who we know only by the title and profile they present. For all we are aware these people could just as easily be United States soldiers as they could be some African Prince from Zambia who needs help getting their ten million dollars out of some bank in Switzerland. That is the problem with these virtual people with virtual persona and virtual backgrounds. Everybody is as real as their Sims character and just as reliable and trustworthy as few million pixels are capable of being. The problem is this is the world Mark Zuckerberg made as real as the actual physical world thus it is no surprise that his world-view seems just as fitting as a Facebook personae or whatever can be created with a set number of keystrokes. And if you are not happy with the real you one can always simply build a new virtual you where you have everything your little heart desires as long as you have a Yahoo mail or G-mail account and a charge card to complete the deal, that is the reality of our virtual world. This is the new reality which Mark Zuckerberg helped to create which comes complete with proxies et al.
For all we know, Mark Zuckerberg not only made his millions of dollars with this Facebook world but it is his reality as well. He may have sunk a little deeper into the Facebook realms than is healthy but when one has the credentials and monies which Mr. Zuckerberg possesses then one can retreat into their little pixilated world and never need surface and see that which is real. For a perfect example of one person going round the bend and relying heavily on a wall of lawyers along with that veil concealing their lives keeping them from creditors or even reality, one need only read the life history about Howard Hughes. His grasp on reality fluctuated from lucid detailed hold on reality to paranoid schizophrenia. Whatever disease has captured the mind of Mark Zuckerberg we may never become privileged to know as when one is as wealthy and well connected it becomes very traumatic dealing with their situation as one will never know whether they are knocked down and playing possum and simply biding their time to make their escape. It is entirely possible and even probable that in the world in which Mark Zuckerberg pictures himself, a big and wonderful hug actually does solve all problems; but in the real world where Paris gets shot full of holes and Brussels explodes with Jihadi violence, there is no Facebook hug that can solve such a situation. Not even a hug which has 64K of a description would bring Islamic State from the darkness and into the light of enlightened society. Claiming that love, or a BIG Facebook HUG would satisfy much of what the Islamic State demands of the world makes as much sense as reelecting Obama again would make. A hug can never replace running the world and no amount of promises or affection would deter the Islamic State from that goal, period.
There are going to be those out in the world who will demand to know how I could ever claim that a hug would not end the threat of the Islamic State. Allow me to settle such a demand with some well-known and understandable facts. President Obama has already tried the hug approach and that failed and failed miserably. He has also tried flattery with equal results. Even President Obama ended up using bombs assassinating a number of Islamic State’s high commanders. Truth be told, there has been one group which has dealt with the Islamic State and addressed the necessary steps to not only minimize their efforts but to also press that advantage in order to take back mile after mile of formerly ISIS occupied lands of Northern Syria and Iraq and retain them for quite some time. The world owes the Kurdish Militias, the Peshmerga, a huge debt as they accomplished so much with little assistance and even with little assistance from outside their own ranks. The Islamic State has started another push against the Kurds since the beginning of the month and the success of their push has yet to be determined. Should the Kurds need better supplies it would be in the interest of anyone who opposes the Islamic State despite any misgivings they may have with any singular group. The Kurds have been carrying the majority of the fight against the Islamic State sometimes against the odds. It was Kurdish forces which aided and rescued the Yazidis when their plight was critical and many were stranded largely on a single mountain and things looked desperate. It was unfortunate that the Kurds could not have succeeded at rescuing far more Yazidis but even for such a noble effort there was not to be any sizeable assistance from Europe or the United States. It has been just such actions which have pushed the question as to whether or not the Western World, particularly the United States, honestly were leaving the Kurds out to dry and were never going to truly offer the Peshmerga the assistance to allow them to mount a credible front.
We hope that the Western World is not going to simply give the Peshmerga a big hug and wish them well. Rather than a really big hug, the Kurds truly require heavy weapons and air support. At this crucial junction it would be prudent to provide air cover and save the hugs for when the fighting is over and the Islamic State has been ground down and shown to be truly weak. This is what is needed and not hugs or likes on their pictures. There are not many groups which have been consistently and almost exclusively fighting and pushing back the forces of the Islamic State. The Kurds have accomplished much of their success receiving hugs and kudos and little else. For the first years they received likes on Facebook and basically had to do with those hugs to bolster their morale. More bullets and grenades would have been preferred to the hugs on Facebook. Perhaps these were the hugs Mark Zuckerberg was referring though it is doubtful.
Autobots
Optimus Prime
Back to Mark Zuckerberg, the man with a plan. His concept that ‘love’ will conquer all, or at least hugs can defeat the Islamic State, ISIS, ISL or Daesh is as preposterous as claiming that President Obama has an integrated plan for the Middle East which will persuade Iran not to develop nuclear weapons, ICBMs and deliver a package to the United States approximately three miles over Kansas City, and no it does not matter over which side of the river as the electrical grid will be toast seconds after the strike. What makes such an attack so horrific is it will hug tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of Americans in a slow death. The electrical grid will die by having its main transformers, the ones which take the high tension wires’ from approximately sixty-six-thousand volts down to two-hundred-twenty volts for delivery to your homes. These transformers are more powerful than the Autobots even including Optimus Prime. These transformers are built only in Germany and Japan and Germany may be an Islamic country all that uninterested if the United States, Canada and parts of Mexico are blacked-out without refrigeration and the vast majority of eighteen wheelers with their sensitive electronics fried and unable to move. Sickness, starvations and marauding gangs will be the rule of the day. Many military units will band together and take over a small fiefdom and rule like overlords until the Islamic forces arrive in number to complete the takeover, and they will not desire more than a mere five or six percent of the population to survive, if that. So, Mark, be ready to lose some weight before you get to hug your Jihadist and when you do let me know how well received a guy on guy hug worked out for you. In the meantime, it would behoove the American voters to find some form of reason and a military veteran or supporter to be President and preferably one with more sense than most of the candidates for President have shown in foreign policy as without a solid, hug free, foreign policy much of the free world will not make it to 2025 and even with a near perfect choice for President this time around does not guarantee American survival.
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 