On the lighter side-Movies-The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012-Animated)

Stop motion animation fun movie about a pirate who participates in the Pirate of the year award in London and gets in all sorts of shenanigans with the British royalty and his rivals. Good animation and highly recommended for both children and adults. Voices of Hugh Grant and Salma Hayek.

On the lighter side-Movies-The Muppets (2011)

Those cute little Muppets are back in this musical update starring Jason Segel as the Muppets try to raise 10 million dollars in order to save their studio from being demolished. Good for kids but I had mixed feelings about it since it was not that funny. Recommended with reservations.

On the lighter side-Movies-The Switch (2010)-Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston

Above average movie regarding what happens when a man switches another man's sperm with his for his desperate single female friend. Cute movie with good acting especially by the little kid. Recommended

Regime Change and the Chaos that follows

This has been a favorite theme of the U.S. government, that once you change the regime, everything will fall into place but it does not happen every time or everywhere. If you recall Iraq, we changed the regime, occupied it and then left but the new regime is not as democratic as it was hoped and also it took us nearly a trillion dollars to fix that country. Same thing has happened in Libya, they are still struggling to get a handle of what kind of government they want to form. Now it is the turn of Syria, the U.S. wants to get rid of Assad and bring in the opposition but how would we know they would be any less or more friendly than the present. Just because there is civil war does not mean they will necessarily be U.S. or west friendly. We have tried to change the regime in Cuba and failed, North Korea we are not even trying to do anything there since it is of less strategic importance to us (apart from the tens of thousands of troops stationed there). In Iran, regime change is also on the agenda but it is hard to know what will come next since the days of having a shah type regime there are long gone. The chaos that follows after the regime change is far less predictable. Unless an overwhelming majority of people are supporting a change in a regime, there will never be a successful regime change anywhere in the world no matter what the intelligence agencies say otherwise.