Hot Stratfor Babe of the Year

Stratfor has been busy recovering from the hacking of their servers, so there haven't been new articles recently. Since this is the time of the year for assessing and recapping the events of the past year, I thought I would dig through Flares' traffic statistics to see who the most popular Hot Stratfor Babes were.

Of course some percentage of the searches are for the contents of the articles, but a bulk of them are for the women that I, in a demonstration that I'll chuck decorum over the side in a heartbeat to attempt to lure traffic to Flares, have selected for the singular honor of being an article's Hot Stratfor Babe. 

As an aside, I often wonder what somebody thinks when, after searching for a celebrities picture, they land on a page with a serious Strafor article. I imagine there is a fair amount of head-scratching that takes place in those scenarios. 

Any way, enough idle jibber-jabber. Without further ado I present the 2011 Hot Stratfor Babes of the Year (clicked on any image to enlarge):

Marilyn Monroe: Marilyn started slowly, but picked up steam in the second half of the year and bolted to the number one spot on the list.

A significant amount of her traffic came from people interested in her luncheon with President Kennedy in Mexico shortly before her death, which I mentioned in my comments that accompanied her selection. 

Twiggy: I was surprised when traffic for her started climbing. I had no idea that many people still knew who she was, much less were still interested in her.

Her Stratfor article concerned the possible future borders for Israel and I think it drew a larger proportion of the traffic than usual. 

M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam): the British/Tamil rapper was the first Hot Stratfor Babe to really take off. At one time she provided an embarrassingly large percentage of Flares' traffic.

Then she tailed off rapidly. I wonder if her young fans just moved on to another flavor of the day? 

Nurgül Yeşilçay: this Turkish actress has drawn considerable traffic ranging from India through the Balkans and North Africa.

Although largely unknown to Americans, she is obviously enormously popular over a good-sized chunk of the globe. She's a simple reminder of how little we really know when viewing from afar.

Joan Collins: like Twiggy, I had no idea how popular she still is. Her traffic dribbles in slowly, but steadily.

Many of her searches are for "Joan Collins" and "cat fight", so I guess she made a real impression with the characters she's played.

Bomber Nose Art: I'll end my list with an Honorable Mention. Although not actually appearing on the top five of the Hot Stratfor Babe list, Bomber Nose Art still draws traffic on a regular basis. 

It's been a fun year and hopefully you've enjoyed my foolishness with the Hot Stratfor Babe schtick. So far it looks like Lucy Lawless (thanks Knuck) will be a solid contender for next year's award, but we shall see.

Stratfor and Twiggy

In today's Stratfor article Friedman discusses strategic reason why he thinks the 1967 borders may be the best choice for Isreal. I didn't find his arguments convincing. In particular, his claim that because they won their earlier wars, but struggled in their later wars,  that meant that the 67 borders made more strategic sense seemed like a leap in logic to me. Still, it is an interesting read as always.

Shrinking Israel to that very narrow waist conjured up images of a sort of national anorexia. Of course, anorexia immediately brings to mind supermodels and so there would be the source of this article's Hot Stratfor babe.

Needless to say, I had a wealth of subjects to choose from and it was quite the task narrowing it down to just one.  After arduous research I selected Twiggy as the Hot Strafor Babe because she is  the first model I remember who marketed her skinniness as part of her appeal.

Twiggy was born Lesley Hornby in 1959 (a little over a year after the founding of Israel). Her big break came when, at the age of 16, a hair dresser cut her hair short and hung pictures of her in his salon to promote the style. A fashion photographer saw the pictures, took more, and they became her entrance into the modeling field.

Along with modeling, she's cranked out albums and done quite a bit of acting. As a bonus, after the Strafor article, I've embedded a video featuring a number of slides of her posing in various goofy mod outfits with I Feel Fine by the Beatles as the background music.


ISRAEL'S BORDERS AND NATIONAL SECURITY
By George Friedman, May 31, 2011

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said May 30 that  Israel could not prevent the United Nations from recognizing a Palestinian state, in the sense of adopting a resolution on the subject. Two weeks ago, U.S. President Barack Obama, in a speech, called on Israel to return to some variation of its pre-1967 borders. The practical significance of these and other diplomatic evolutions in relation to Israel is questionable. Historically, U.N. declarations have had variable meanings, depending on the willingness of great powers to enforce them. Obama's speech on Israel, and his subsequent statements, created enough ambiguity to make exactly what he was saying unclear. Nevertheless, it is clear that the diplomatic atmosphere on Israel is shifting.

There are many questions concerning this shift, ranging from the competing moral and historical claims of the Israelis and Palestinians to the internal politics of each side to whether the Palestinians would be satisfied with a return to the pre-1967 borders. All of these must be addressed, but this analysis is confined to a single issue: whether a return to the 1967 borders would increase the danger to Israel's national security. Later analyses will focus on Palestinian national security issues and those of others.

Early Borders

It is important to begin by understanding that the pre-1967 borders are actually the borders established by the armistice agreements of 1949. The 1948 U.N. resolution creating the state of Israel created a much smaller Israel. The Arab rejection of what was called "partition" resulted in a war that created the borders that placed the West Bank (named after the west bank of the Jordan River) in Jordanian hands, along with substantial parts of Jerusalem, and placed Gaza in the hands of the Egyptians.

The 1949 borders substantially improved Israel's position by widening the corridors between the areas granted to Israel under the partition, giving it control of part of Jerusalem and, perhaps most important, control over the Negev. The latter provided Israel with room for maneuver in the event of an Egyptian attack -- and Egypt was always Israel's main adversary. At the same time, the 1949 borders did not eliminate a major strategic threat. The Israel-Jordan border placed Jordanian forces on three sides of Israeli Jerusalem, and threatened the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor. Much of the Israeli heartland, the Tel Aviv-Haifa-Jerusalem triangle, was within Jordanian artillery range, and a Jordanian attack toward the Mediterranean would have to be stopped cold at the border, since there was no room to retreat, regroup and counterattack.

For Israel, the main danger did not come from Jordan attacking by itself. Jordanian forces were limited, and tensions with Egypt and Syria created a de facto alliance between Israel and Jordan. In addition, the Jordanian Hashemite regime lived in deep tension with the Palestinians, since the former were British transplants from the Arabian Peninsula, and the Palestinians saw them as well as the Israelis as interlopers. Thus the danger on the map was mitigated both by politics and by the limited force the Jordanians could bring to bear.

Nevertheless, politics shift, and the 1949 borders posed a strategic problem for Israel. If Egypt, Jordan and Syria were to launch a simultaneous attack (possibly joined by other forces along the Jordan River line) all along Israel's frontiers, the ability of Israel to defeat the attackers was questionable. The attacks would have to be coordinated -- as the 1948 attacks were not -- but simultaneous pressure along all frontiers would leave the Israelis with insufficient forces to hold and therefore no framework for a counterattack. From 1948 to 1967, this was Israel's existential challenge, mitigated by the disharmony among the Arabs and the fact that any attack would be detected in the deployment phase. [continues after jump]