Is it news? Is it interesting?

Yes, that was the setting I saw today. The Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/may/12/lionel-messi-saudi-arabia-deal-tourism) gives us ‘Lionel Messi earned $122m last year. He still felt the need to take Saudi money’, well that is a first, when was that more news? And Saudi money might have an oily smell to it, but does that make it less acceptable? This is a world that is changing so fast that many feel (not entirely incorrectly) that more money becomes an essential sign. This is not about greed, this is about the cost of living taking a massive gander towards the unacceptably high. Yes, there are some ideas about when is enough enough. But even a person like Lionel Messi will need to cash in for as long as he can, because at some point, the well dries up and for football icons they tend to have decades ahead of them when that income well dries up. Lets be clear, they are all on massive incomes, yet they also have a larger spending spree due to social responsibilities, a side the media is always happy to remain silent about. So when I saw the article I went ‘Meh’, it is nice that someone has another income, in this case a Saudi tourist ambassador, but those are not that rare, are they. Many nations have one. In Australia a model got her fame with the line ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ We all respond to different stages and settings and Lionel Messi got this one. As such when I see “Simply put, Messi has enough money that his future grandchildren won’t need to work a day in their lives. He could have politely declined the Saudi offer and still lived out a very comfortable retirement.” I wonder where Karim Zidan gets his point of view. The cost of living goes through the roof and I reckon that by 2025 a lot of people will desire such an extra income, if not they will not be able to afford basic living needs. Now we can accept that Lionel Messi is not in that stage yet, but the events in Europe (Ukraine) implies that Europe, the EU and the US are facing all kinds of hardships and if some plans go through, the US will face its own hardships. You see, it is not merely enough to have cash, you need to have a larger stage of friends who will be there when things go wrong. As such Lionel Messi made his choice and I do not believe it is a bad one. So whilst we are given “Messi has effectively aligned himself with a regime linked to countless human rights abuses, including the infamous assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, its devastating war in Yemen that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, and its crackdown on intellectuals, LGBTI+ people, reformers, and women’s rights activists.” We are not given a few items.

1. Yemen was taken over by terrorists, terrorists supported by Iran, we do not see that here, why not?
2. The crackdown sound hilarious. So hilarious in light of all the abortion laws under fire in the US, there we see “A leaked supreme court draft ruling shows the US is set to end 50 years of a woman’s right to choose” as such I wonder where human rights are, I reckon they do not exist in the hypocritical setting of feigned christian believes. There is even a setting that over the last millennium, Islam was constant, Christian faith nothing more as a political vessel for those who needed power and those relying on faith to keep them in power. From a christian point of view there are issues with the Arabian nations, but culturally? Misplaced honesty in history has shown a greed driven extermination in the middle east that started on 18 Nov 1095 (council of Clermont) and did not end until 1291 (Siege of Acre) and even as we were told one thing in schools, we were never informed on the greed driven powers behind the crusades, including the Vatican seat. 

There is a lot more, but you can find that in other articles I wrote. Are there issues? Yes, there are and there always will be, but the first step in opening dialogues and starting conversations. A person like Lionel Messi is such an optional enabler. So there is no real surprise when we are given “In Messi, the Saudi government has a premier athlete with a built-in audience and platform ready to be utilised for political gain. While Messi was once lauded for his humanitarian efforts with Unicef and his own charitable foundation, his recent alignment with Saudi raises concerns that he is willing to blatantly disregard human rights in exchange for lucrative deals with brutal dictators.” Yes, and we take a closer look at “he is willing to blatantly disregard human rights in exchange for lucrative deals with brutal dictators”, I wonder who is looking into the abortion issues in the US, the long lasting stage of inaction when it came to wealth in Luxembourg, or the inactions of Strasbourg when it came to a whole range of issues. And when we take a gander towards places like “Global Corruption Barometer EU: People worried about unchecked abuses of power”, we see that the media stays interestingly quiet, all making waves in one direction (rich people with planes) whilst the larger issue is ignored (147 facilities create 50% of all pollution) in at least two events (by the Guardian) the EEA report was muzzled and ignored. As I see it western logic is faltering and it keeps on faltering, too many ego’s and not enough common sense. We might consider that Messi is the only one showing common sense, but that would be too much, would it not?

Is Saudi Arabia perfect? No, it is not, but at present not many nations and almost non in the EU can make that claim. I reckon that New Zealand is the only one who can make the claim of being close to perfect and I am Australian. There are ways we work and ways we think, but it is not on others to copy our way of working, and the abortion issues in the US are clear evidence of that. The misrepresentation by the Vatican is evidence of that. It seems that we need to adjust our vision too and to a much larger degree, but in that I could be wrong.