Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
Rampaging red squirrels in France Kashmiri militants, meet bear. Bear, eat militants. Dead bison stink really bad: South Dakota meat producer abandons meat storage locker full of 44 tons of kosher bison, and the power gets cut for nonpayment.
The 97-year-old heir to the Caliphate and Sultanate of the Ottoman Empire, Osman, died recently in Istanbul…he was the last heir to have been born during the Ottoman Empire (he was a 12 year old student in Vienna when the Empire was abolished) and he spent the rest of his long life in exile, living [...]
There are now more contractors in Afghanistan than soldiers; just another part of the dumb practices that I’ve seen over and over again in the US government – all the way back to my mom’s job with the feds in meat and poultry procession oversight. When in doubt, contract it out, and claim that that’s [...]
Coming Anarchy also highlights multiple historical places with the same name; Albania, Iberia, Alexandria, various African nations, and Guinea. They don’t have one for Galicia, but they ought to.
From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates. Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak [...]
Time Magazine: mashup of Iranian Politics and Lord of the Rings. Channel Two is putting on a Lord of the Rings marathon as part of the government’s efforts to restore peace. Lots of people, adults and kids, are watching in the room with me. On the screen, Gandalf the Grey returns to the Fellowship as [...]
If you want an idea of why the idea of mixing church and state is a bad one, look at Iran. You can’t challenge the state without challenging God’s word, you heathen. Die in hellfire! And which church gets to call the shots? The largest church in the USA is the Catholic Church, and I [...]
From Booman Tribune: 1953 – the CIA engineers a coup against the elected (but leftist) prime minister of Iran, and sets in motion the anger against the US from the Iranian man on the street by creating the Iranian secret police SAVAK whose terror kept the Shah in power until the Iranian Revolution of 1979. [...]
Daniel Larison thinks that the Republican leadership in Congress is rotted out and has to go:
…or how to fix photos of pro-dictatorship rallies so that they look like they’re bigger.
If you’re looking for canned news on this, that’s going to be hard, as most news organizations have been shut down by the Ayatollahs. Here’s the best I can come up with: Wikipedia (terms and background info): 2009 Iranian election protests term: Ansar / Ansar-e-Hezbollah term: Basij militia Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the theocratic [...]
Found here. Enjoy!
Iraqi PM to Obama: If you release those unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib, my electorate will go up in blue flame and demand that the US get out yesterday.
I’m beginning to think that Dick Cheney and company can’t tell the difference between repeats of 24 and reality. Of course, it’s coming to look a lot like he had the idea from the beginning that there had to be a pony at the bottom of that dungpile – er, that there had to be [...]
Another note on torture issues. This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say [...]