Iran

A coupla weeks ago I read One Minute to Midnight, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis someone in Kennedy's cabinet said "for someone to be trustworthy, first you hafta trust them." I seem to remember the quote, but not who the fuck said it. Hey, I'm terrible at names, fucking sue me.

I know we're all supposed to choose "bomb them back to the Stone Age!" or "BE bombed back to the Stone Age!", but I'd like to think that the people who are a whole lot smarter than me have different things in mind. Something that actually BENEFITS us, even if the "oh my god how do we look at this exact second?!?!?!?!" crowd demands we look like John Wayne x Clint Eastwood + the douchebag blond guy from The Karate Kid (before he gets his ass handed to him by a crippled Mexican.)

After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000. Gates did not offer to transfer the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system. They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.

Bill Gates has made a lot of money by doing what most thought to be foolishly generous at the time. I wouldnt mind looking at that as a model for something other than "bomb or be bombed;" especially when neither of those things is likely to occur anyway. One thing we have learned is that the dumbest thing you can do with a nuclear weapon is to actually USE it, when there's so much $$$ to pass around. So we can do this same ol' dance over and over for years and years and work ourselves into a frenzy, or we can use this as a way to, say, buy Bollywood through them. "Bombs for Bollywood!" Something, I don't fucking know.