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.
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 [...]
Found here. Enjoy!
New story on the Pakistani-American TV exec who beheaded his wife; dude had a LONG history of mental instability and rage – the dead woman was wife #3, and she wasn’t the first one to be worked over. This things rarely happen in a vacuum.
Some GIS professor thinks that by using his systems for tracking flora and fauna that he’s figured out where Osama bin Laden is. I think it’s crap, but he might find the ghost of Marlon Perkins.
Bill Kristol on Fox News suggests that Bush give Musharraf asylum in the USA, then naturalize him, and have Obama pick him for VP. Har har. Moooo-slim. Daaaar-ky. Harharhar.
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 [...]
McCain: And not only, that, but Obama’s chicken to go to Iraqi like I did. Chick-en! Bgawk! Obama: Wha? Army: Do we need to get all those armed guards ready again for the trip through the marketplace? McCain: (makes more chicken noises, flaps around) Obama: Cripes, what a loon. What the heck, let’s go. Various [...]
NYT: The militant Afghani nutballs and so on that the Pakistani military intelligence funded, supported and built up over the years are now turning against the Pakistani government. ABC: 308,000 barrels of oil were sold and supposedly shipped to the US strategic oil reserve. At present prices, that’s $308 million bucks worth of oil. Nice [...]
An odd note from a Pakistani journalist of Baluchistani background, suggesting that Pakistan is too much of an artificial construct and should be broken up into component states. Heck, at that rate, you could say that for India as well….
Almost all of the $11 billion given as aid to Musharraf for Pakistan since 9-11 has been in the form of no-trace cash transfers – or, as the Daley people used to call it, walkin’-around money. “The Coalition Support funding is basically a sort of a handshake deal between militaries,” Barton says. “We don’t have [...]