Keep calm I have a cunning plan

The west seems to be a little unhappy with certain parts of the middle east, one part it certainly isn't unhappy with is Saudi Arabia, Is there any reason why some western governments have a love affair with a country that is well on its way to smashing its own personal best in beheading. The obvious answer is the black viscous umbilical chord that is oil, another reason can be seen by firstly looking at the world banks data on countries military expenditure as a % of their gross domestic product or in leymans terms how much of their total countries wealth production is spent on their military, scrolling down the list you will see one of these is not like the others, in fact Saudi Arabia spends a whopping 9% of its G.D.P. on its military (the U.K. spends 2% as a gauge) when you consider Saudi Arabia's gross domestic product estimate in 2015 will be 805 billion  You can appreciate that is a lot of cap guns. So Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil to sell, some countries in the west would like this oil, coincidentally these very same countries are very good at building weapons of war and as I alluded to earlier Saudi Arabia wants to spend spend spend on weaponry. At this point I imagine someone somewhere in the west muttered the immortal words of balderick "I have a cunning plan, buy the oil from the Saudis and then sell them loads of weapons to recoup some of that cost.......genius" 

Cost of freedom?

Most of the main papers both sides of the pond blindly ran The Sunday Times story  and then laughably backtracked after it was clearly an unfounded claim. Not once has any credible evidence been released to show that anything Edward Snowden  did, has in anyway compromised any serving military personnel. What it did do is highlight how deep and far reaching each governments surveillance policies secretly invade our on-line lives. most of the public is either apathetic or ignorant to this information. So the public don't care and the leaks haven't hurt anyone, everyone's happy right? But in these times of deep austerity how much does this surveillance cost us? In the U.K. it costs us 2 billion for our security and intelligence agencies and GCHQ take the lions share of that. But that is dwarfed in comparison to the U.S.A. mass surveillance via the N.S.A. which comes in at a staggering $52 billion. So the question is if this very expensive and very intrusive mass surveillance isn't fit for purpose, what is its real purpose? ( apart from looking at your naked Facebook pics of course), anyone read a good book lately, 1984 maybe.

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