Old and new

I spent 3 hours today waiting at the Governing Council building for a meeting with a member which ended up lasting just 3 minutes! Most of the time waiting I was chatting with the Nepalese guards. For those non-Brits, the Gurkas are the crack regiment in the British Army, uniquely made up not of Brits but of soldiers from Nepal. The practice dates back a couple of hundred years - the British Raj in India found the Nepalese hill tribes such tough opponents that they finally agreed to stop fighting and hire them instead. Now a private security company has hired retired Gurka soldiers and is using them to guard the most sensitive locations in Iraq. There's a funny kind of symettry in this: one of the last remnents of the British Empire working as outsourced employees in support of new outsourced US Empire. Maybe in a few years time there will be a regiment of Kurdish Peshmerga patroling Cuba on behalf of the US.