[click image].
I am seeing live footage of the scene in Tahrir Square. There are already many more people than at this time, nearly 10:30am in Cairo, on any day of the uprising. Two entrances to the square are closed off. People are pouring in. It is, of course, the start of the Egyptian weekend... so I guess this means the people who've gone to work all week are coming in fresh to liven up the poor people who have been holding the fort all week, fighting for their lives, getting almost no sleep. I try to remind myself how emotional one becomes when sleep-deprived, and thinking to myself they're lucky I'm not there. The masses would be roaring and I would be snoring at their feet. I'm much better these days at the mental posture of the revolutionary than the physical one. Could you, like, direct me to a good gym or something?
I mean, I so totally understand why the young men were dragging the codgers who were trying to fight alongside back to the center of the square. Bad enough to deal with the horses, camels, swords, rocks and molotov cocktails, without having to pluck the geezers off the pavement to do it.
Ha! They've got Slavoj Žižek on AJ right now. LOL. This oughta be good.
His opening gambit: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Unstoppable.
It falls to Tariq Ramadan, one handsome devil, to try to get a word in edgewise... they're splitting the screen so you can see him chuckling at Žižek's comedic analogies.
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11am, Cairo time... twice as many people as a half hour ago... and they're making it hard to get in. The army has set up checkpoints for the protestors to check people's IDs. Correspondent had to show her ID twelve times on the way in and was patted down a number of times to insure she was not carrying any weapons.
And Friday Prayers have not even let out yet. After that it's going to be epic. This woman is saying that it's much easier for women to get through the queues. There are men lined up "as far as the eye can see." Another woman is saying there are at least as many people waiting to get in as are in right now, and, again, prayers have not let out yet. This is going to be huge.
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12:30pm, Cairo time... On the square and the bridge leading to it is a carpet of people. You cannot see the pavement. Friday Prayers are in progress. There should be even more hundreds of thousands pouring in over the next hour.
This is The Day of Departure... in šāʾ Allāh....
They are saying that the people in the square feel safer than people in the rest of the city. Reports of thugs, paid starving trouble-makers, are roaming the streets, scaring people.
12:42pm, Cairo time... Prayers over. Pointing their fingers in the air in unison, the roaring has begun. HE'S LEAVING. HE'S LEAVING. It is spectacular! It's giving me goosebumps! WE'RE STAYING. HE'S GOING.
HUGE masses gathered also in Alexandria, prayers still going on there. Right in the middle of the human-carpeted streets.
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1:00pm, Cairo time... I'm gonna get in bed and turn my monitor so I can see if something big happens. I think the roaring will wake me back up whenever something big happens. It's amazing. They are having to use footage from a cell phone for the Alexandria images and it's working really well. So, if I put this on full screen it'll be a big blurry mess, but I can get the general drift from bed.... My bawdee is getting soooo heavy.
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love, 99
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By The Daily Bell
ReplyDelete"There is a social media revolution in Saudi Arabia … Ten million Saudis are online, 3 million belong to Facebook, and Twitter feeds are up more than 400 percent. Recently, many tweets and posts have been focused on the uprising in Tunisia. In fact, Saudi’s social media activists spread videos and news updates at the peak of the street protests — and the interest has stayed high ever since. And, now, Saudi bloggers have added the unrest in Cairo to the topics receiving much attention. Will the Saudi government clamp down on this free-wheeling speech after Tunisia’s social media movement helped to bring down a government? It’s one of the big questions ahead for Saudi Arabia. How this authoritarian regime will live with the freedom and chaos that the Internet represents. … The Internet poses a challenge for this conservative, mostly religious society. – National Public Radio
Dominant Social Theme: The Jasmine revolution spread unexpectedly.
Free-Market Analysis: The civil unrest in Egypt is growing fiercer. Electronic communications have been shut down throughout Egypt and massive demonstrations have been planned for today. A changing of the guard in Egypt would be a massive political shift indeed, but what if the disturbances don’t stop there? What if they ultimately spread to Saudi Arabia and end up bringing down the dollar reserve system?
We suggest this possibility because we believe there are larger forces at work in the Middle East. Could it be that the power elite itself is inciting these disturbances? Is the idea, eventually, to crash the dollar and set up a global currency in its place?
The dollar reserve system is propped up by Saudi Arabia’s willingness to restrict the purchase of oil to dollars, a system that has been in place since US President Richard Nixon abrogated what remained of the gold standard in 1971. But the PE is notoriously unsentimental. The Saudi elite has grown enormously wealthy from its relationship with the US and now, perhaps, for the good of a new world order, it is time for them to go."
http://www.whatamimissinghere.com/2011/01/31/fall-of-saudi-arabia-to-end-dollar-reserve-system/