A New Plot Point.

Jeff—Saturday

I think I’m becoming even more Greek in my thinking. Why?  Because conspiracy theories are the life’s blood of the blame game in Greece, and I’m just about convinced there’s a vast one out there armed against me.  Armed in the sense of land-mining my path toward completing my new book and exploding my plot points into realities faster than I can write them.

All of which is driving me toward searching out “far-fetched” scenarios, ones that may not come to pass for at least a year—after the new book comes out.

But, then again, who knows what shape our world will be in by then?  Rhetoric will be white hot in the US because of our Presidential election, and Congressional inaction even more so for the same reason.  Most significant, though, will be how the world has come around to dealing with its rapidly metastasizing terrorist cancers.

The horrors in Paris of a week ago Friday seem to have galvanized thought into action. But we’ve seen that before, and seen, too, how governments can quickly waste such a unifying opportunity through myopic self-interest and capitulating to internal political pressures.

That is precisely how our enemies have come to rely upon us to behave, while they stay focused their long view game for achieving their global goals.  For example, I hear a lot of commentators saying these days that ISIS is a gang, recruiting members the same as do US street gangs by making the marginalized in their neighborhoods feel they are part of something that will embrace and protect them. But for ISIS that neighborhood is the worldwide social media network.

It makes sense, but the question is what is the world going to do about it? Simply determining the root cause of a problem does not mean it will be resolved.  Not by a long shot.  Someone has to step up and do something about it.

And while on the subject of “doing something about it,” since the whole world has apparently long known that ISIS finances much of its operations via its “tanker pipeline” trucking across Syria into Iraq and Turkey, why did it take until now (the Russians) to make those tankers and ISIS’s other oil assets a primary target of air strikes?

There are a lot of questions out there to be answered.  And, hopefully, lessons learned.

Sensibly, none of the questions appear to be blaming Greece for whatever part transit across its borders may have played in terrorists reaching Paris.  No sane thinking person could have missed that possibility when Europe left a bankrupt country to fend virtually for itself managing a historically unprecedented flood of migrants to its shores.

My guess is Greece is about to get a lot more assistance on that score.  In the week before 11/13, a lot of tough talk came out of Europe accompanying demands upon Greece to adopt Europe’s strict terms as a condition for securing promised bailout funds for itself and recapitalizing its banks. This week European resistance evaporated, and Greece and its banks will get their money.  Sadly, it looks like it took the horrors of Paris and Beirut to remind Europe of just how important it is to have a stabile Greece in its very shaky Mediterranean basin neighborhood.

But that’s another plot point.

—Jeff