Memnison Journal

Well, they had them, and not all of them were found and properly disposed of,  apparently….

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; [...]

Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by.   Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set [...]

Burmese comic gets a 45 year sentence for criticizing the junta’s poor response to the Cyclone damage in Burma.

Details after the cut.

An alternate history idea I’d had for a long time just went down the sewer.
Porter Alexander, Lee’s artillery chief at the end of the war, was at the final council at Appomattox when Lee discussed what to do next with his officers.   Alexander described the situation in his memoirs in detail; he suggested that Lee [...]

…with an article about how McCain has been against a particular Army tech system for a long time as unusable pork, and then tries to say that since Obama is now saying something similar, he’s now in favor of that program and that nasty ol’ Obama….
In fact, McCain has long criticized the over-budget, behind-schedule FCS [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

4/07 - MRS. BUSH:
Oh, I know that very much. And believe me, no one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this, and certainly the commander in chief, who has asked our military to go into harm’s way.

4/07:  BUSH, interviewed by Charlie Rose on Maliki possibly wanting the US to leave [...]

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, [...]

The real root of Don’t Ask Dont Tell and other anti-gay stuff seems to be an insistent idea, that, similarly to the idea my father tried to pass on to me, that all gay men and women are desperate and determined to infect us all with their orientation – that somehow, they will all be [...]

…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 [...]