Friday 10 July 2009

Quote of the day: Mark LeVine on Iran

"Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, do not fear the US but rather their own people's desire to live in a country more like the US."
                                                  - Mark LeVine, Middle East historian, quoted at Al Jazeera

4 comments:

Dave Mann said...

Very apt!

BTW, I find AlJazeera's english news website to be excellent. Far from being an anti-capitalist Muslim fundamentalist pan Arab diatribe which rails against the infidel, it seems to have balanced reportage and a huge range of interesting articles, news and comment about stuff which is not available on other sites.

If you are looking for information on Britney Spears' bra cup size or Michael Jackson's concrete coffin, then don't bother with AlJazeera. If you want news and analysis, though, go have a look:

http://english.aljazeera.net

Sus said...

Dave, did you see "Control Room" (?? think that was its name) a few years ago? The doco on al Jazeera?

I thought it was very good. My impression then matches your own now.

Dave Mann said...

Hi Sus, no I didn't see that one. I'll look for it on DVD.

What do you think of AlJazeera now? In your opinion is it still a good news source or do you think it has changed for the worse over the years?

Falafulu Fisi said...

On a related topic of traditional & social/internet media coverage of the Iran election, the traditional media, politicians (yes including the State Department) have jumped into endorse the time-wasting micro-blogging website Twitter for its coverage of & making connection to Iran protesters, was no more than just infatuation with Twitter and it was nothing more than hype.

It was suggested here on this article :

Does Twitter Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe Not Yet, But It Could Someday

and one blogger dug a bit deeper to this infatuation with Twitter and he found out that it was all infatuation regarding the Twitter coverage of the Iranian election.

America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution

Now, the Twitter owners are smiling as more VC (Venture Capitalists) are jumping in to pump in more millions to Twitter, because Twitter's (rough or informal) evaluation at the moment (according to TechCrunch) is about a $ US 1 billion dollars.

Twitter hasn't figured out a way of how to monetize their micro-blogging service and I believe that the owners will want to get out soon (by seeking someone to acquire them) before the looming Dot-Com-2 bubble start to burst and good on them for their entrepreneurial skills, but bad for the VC suckers & their investors.

PC, in regards to your (or George Reissman's) advise about investing in something like Twitter, which doesn't have any idea of how to monetize and make money for its investors, do you think that this is the mal-investment that you frequently talk about here? If so, then please explain why? My opinion, is that any VC that pour millions into Twitter is money down the toilet because it is a mal-investment.