Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
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 [...]
HBO production and presently running on that network. My take on it is that it’s a once-funny; I have a hard time watching gangster movies because I really don’t get off on people beating and killing each other, especially if the people involved doing the beating are serious scum. This is SOPRANOS GO BAGHDAD; [...]
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. [...]
Details after the cut.
The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, and [...]
…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works. Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ‘sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and dying, the [...]
Hydrogen, stupidity and incompetence. I swear to gawd, folks, I sometimes cannot imagine how we ever got this idea that George W. Bush, the first President with a MBA (from Harvard, yet) would run a tight, disciplined and competent organization that would – oh, how did that line go – “restore honor and dignity to [...]
Ya know we gotta do it, and if the lilly-livered Democrat gets in, we have to think about Doing What Has to Be Done. “Yes, gentlemen, they are on their way in, and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country, and our way of life, I suggest you get the [...]
A map of Chinese languages and dialects. The ‘YUE’ one in the south is essentailly what we know of as Cantonese. A map of Old Iranian languages. Useful for us ancient history sorts.