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 Muslims ( Read more... )

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 Gandalf the White. He casts a blinding white ( Read more... )

1. 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!
2. And which church gets to call the shots?  The largest church in the USA is the Catholic Church, and I can just bet that there’s a lot of people in the USA who aren’t ( Read more... )

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.

A couple of posts on the politics of ( Read more... )

Daniel Larison thinks that the Republican leadership in Congress is rotted out and has to go:
( Read the rest of this entry » )

…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 leader of ( Read more... )

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; it’s really pretty well done, but  ( Read more... )

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.   Their stock market has ( Read more... )

Details after the cut.
( Read the rest of this entry » )