Memnison Journal

When Stalin looks good to the Russians and Emperor Bokassa looks good to the Central African Republic, you know things are bad….now, I’m waiting for a musical about Robert Mugabe with singing, dancing terrorists swinging around AK-47s.  Madame Mao’s dead, so they’ll need to hustle up a new choreographer for that one.

He also mooted the possibility that the Russian government would buy some of its metal products to shore up falling demand.
At under $50 a barrel, the Russian government is taking a beating, because their Big Ticket was oil and gas.   The entire economy was not based on industrial production, but in raking in petrodollars.   [...]

Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary and one of my favorites on economics, writes:
After the market closed today, Bank of America announced a significant deterioration in people’s ability to repay credit-card and other consumer debt.  The central fact is this: consumers in the real economy are coming to the end of their capacities to keep [...]

The NYT has a good editorial this morning that summarizes the problem we have vis-a-vis the Russians; the upsets over the crash between Georgia and Russia have screwed with our long term arrnagements over access to the International Space Station.  Very soon, the Shuttle is getting retired, and the only real access for at least [...]

NASA is looking at the problem of maintaining the ISS if the Russians and the USA are having a p!ss!ng match, especially when there won’t be an American option for getting up there from 2010-2015 (at least).  Where’s an X-20 when you need it?
NASA has for years relied to some extent on Russian spacecraft for [...]

Some stray items:

The whole Edwards/Hunter thing just gets weirder and more frayed by the moment.  Rielle Hunter’s old website was purged off of the Internet Archive; I would imagine that required a specific request from Hunter.  And a lot of the old follow-the-money issues are getting snarly; the same deep pockets that are paying off [...]

Escort all Georgians safely out of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  Those borders were drawn as goofily by Stalin (1931 for Abkhazia, 1922 for South Ossetia) as those drawn by the Brits of Iraq or Pakistan, and have no connection to reality.
Let the Ossetians and Abkhazians have their damn places as ‘autonomous areas’, which will [...]

Bush and Georgia
U.S. credibility is again on the line as the Bush Administration stumbles to respond to the Russian invasion of Georgia. So far the Administration has been missing in action, to put it mildly. The strategic objective is twofold: to prevent Moscow from going further to topple Georgia’s democratic government in the coming days, [...]

Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Georgia) in English.
Ministry of Defence (Georgia) - down from Cyberattack from Russia, last I looked.
President of Georgia in English.
Wikipedia on the Georgian armed forces
Article from the UK Guardian on Georgian forces training
General background on the Georgian forces from Global Security
A decent map of the region from Wikipedia
A GIS map for [...]

From the BBC’s news:
In a telephone call to Georgia’s leader Mikhail Saakashvili, the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, said Russian aggression “must not go unanswered”.   President Bush said he had expressed his grave concern to Moscow at the military’s “disproportionate” response.

And what, pray tell, do you two suggest as an answer?  Anything that isn’t [...]

I’d pay attention to the Georgia / Russia if I were you guys.   There’s more than you think at stake.

…or the Holodomor, as it’s better known. In the early 1930s, Stalin forced the collectivization of Ukraine, and when the wheat harvest then fell below the levels that Moscow had ordered, he ordered the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainians for their failure to ‘fulfill their duty.’ Several million Ukrainians then starved to [...]

Cripes howdy, but I’m getting a lot of private mail on this one from that earlier post.  Let me say that I was in a hurry to post, but that I had my own set of problems with all of those maps.
Here’s some new maps that have been pointed out to me:
This is an odd [...]

Museum exhibits:

Historical maps from Dutch cartographers
Mapping Arabia (from Aramco)
Historical maps of Macau (Library of Congress)
The David Rumsey collection (worldwide historical maps)
The Social Explorer (US Census maps 1940-2000)

Chinese Maps:

Shanghai, 1928
More pre-PRC China maps (heavy on Shanghai)
GIS: Chinese Historical GIS
GIS: Chinese Civilization in Time and Space (a little arcane for me, but maybe you can dig it)

German [...]

…one of the odder bits of history I’ve run across recently was due to my old pal Rich Rostrom digging up an old docudrama called VENDETTA from 1942.  I thought that the story sounded too hokey and decided to check it out…and so far, it’s generally checking out.
The short version is that a family political [...]