cheese it, the cops!

it'd be interesting to know, with regard to the north korean rocket launch whether the japanese and/or americans consciously reached a decision not to try an intercept, or whether they were taken by surprise and couldn't launch, or whether they reached the conclusion that they couldn't effectively intercept.

i don't really understand how the fuckheads who run burma survive. somebody kill 'em, please.

communist totalitarianism has stacked corpses and broken minds. but one has to admit that all that is compensated for by the hilariousness of its prose. the communist party of china is a kind of ogden nash  of oppression. stop it, man, you're killin me!

In a bid to reinforce control in Lhasa, Party authorities have launched an education drive focused on officials and Party members, the official Tibet Daily reported on Monday.

The campaign to "fight separatism, protect stability and promote development" would focus on "unifying the thinking and cohesive strength of officials and the masses, deepening the struggle against separatism and counter-attacking the separatist plots of the Dalai clique," said the paper.

have y'all thought about the cyber-rape of estonia? i'm telling you, we're going to wake up one day and realize we've got a monster regime in our midst with a nuclear arsenal: vlad, arrchitect of the chechen genocide, a program of covert murder around the world, etc. and each time he is not called to account, it gets worse. one problem: there's no actual way to call him to account. but people had better at least start calling murder murder.
and check this.

hey cool! i'm always psyched by another chance to insult turkishness. ps: genocide! genocide!

one thing i like about the current berezovsky brouhaha: berezovsky's argument is that putin's is "an illegeal regime" and thus that calling for the use of "force" in putin's ouster is "legal." meanwhile, the kremlin says that berezovsky's call to overthrow the russian government is "illegal." as if: these were the interesting questions, or even really make any sense in this context, or as if either of the parties really care what's legal and what's not. it's as if we've just learned to construct an argument in these terms, mechanically, even when law obviously has nothing to do with anything. 

this is a pretty hilarious piece, though the idea of the leader of a country where people are starving spending "a million dollars per year on cognac" is of course unbelievably repulsive. however, if you think you can keep someone with untold millions and nuclear technology from getting any of these items,  with ease, you've lost your mind.

iran

this may in the end seem an amazingly bad call, but i think you do actually have to mobilize against iran. exploring these options and increasing intelligence etc are the bare minimal responsibility. it's sad but true: it's not only theocrats, but theocrats who are trying to be as provocative as humanly possible, parading an explosive irrationality. now on the other hand i don't see coming out in public and saying you're supporting resistance groups. this is typical tin ear: you've just discredited every opposition group in the country by hinting that they're all cia fronts.

in other news

eminem remarried kim jong il yesterday in a secret ceremony in china.

pigs of china

speaking of overthrowing foreign governments, i'd start with the pigboys running china.

i really dig the chinese government, if only because it keeps stalinist rhetoric alive and in the public eye. it's still "rehabilitating" people posthumously. it ain't who yao know, it's hu yaobang.

why, when i think of katrina bearing down on norlins , do i ponder the fate of sodom? if only some pious american had assassinated  hugo chavez, god's horrendous justice could have been deflected.

overall this piece is deeply silly. bayle's argument that our popular culture is ubiquitous and interpreted as disgusting all over the world is of course more or less right, and a serious factor in a religious backlash against modernity, abroad but also here. on the other hand the idea that you address this by beefing up government propaganda stations is just asinine: first because of course this does not stem the tide of the real stuff, and second because only idiots don't know that radio sawa or whatever is the merest american propaganda campaign. it's like addressing the rot of the soviet economy with a positive article in tass.

i think, as is usual with such things, the way the iranian run-off is being portrayed in the american press is pretty simplistic. it's just reformer (rafsanjani) vs hard-liner (ahmadinejad). of course reformer=good, islamist=bad, and perhaps the only way the reformer loses is by fraud. but by all accounts rafsanjani is corrupt and out of touch, ahmadinejad incorruptible and of admirable character and connection to his constituents as mayor of tehran. it's a mild version of the way the taliban was portrayed. you too might be surprisingly susceptible to rule by incorruptible religious fanatics after a few decades of money-grubbing warlords and narcolords etc. anyway the la times has a good story this morning.

very nice to see a leftist like alexander cockburn understand that the rejection of the european constitution in france (and the netherlands) is sensible. if you want an every-growing regulatory regime imposed on top of the current ever-growing regulatory regimes etc then by all means.

dead is an extremely stable condition .

Mr. Karimov, an inaccessible and aloof autocrat, has long been criticized for persecution of opponents, intolerance of freedom of religion and expression, and the use of the police and torture, including the sexual assault and boiling of suspects.

no doubt it sucks to be boiled. but being boiled by someone who is "aloof" is perhaps the ultimate insult.

"I am prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic," he told reporters in 1999, after a bus hijacking ended with a shootout that left nine people dead. "If my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head."

There has also been evidence that the United States has used the country for interrogations of terrorist suspects seized elsewhere.

only the truly vicious and self-deluded little green footballs would be rooting for karimov, in virtue of the fact that the people he's killing are moslems. the footballs object to the headline u.s. ally fires on its people. what headline do they want? maybe "freedom-loving democrat reasons with terrorists"? surely you can't object to a flat statement of fact.

let me just say that like millions of other anarchists (=dean supporters) i endorse  the full annexation of the united states by mexico . viva la raza!

ay yai yai yai: i am the frito bandito and shit.

here are two typical itar-tass stories. all they do is quote pro-russian authorities (in ukraine and belarus) in a way that strongly implies they're making sense. the statements themselves are oracular a la politburo, and there is no attempt to get any comment on them by anyone or even to accompany them by any facts. the press in russia is, in short, a mere congeries of propaganda.

the real key to diplomacy is to chase people through hotels, throwing things at them. this is what we call the "delay doctrine."

Biden said committee aides recently heard from a person who corroborated a woman's claim -- raised after Bolton testified last week -- that Bolton, then working as a private lawyer, had chased her through a Moscow hotel in 1994, thrown things at her and falsely claimed to U.S. aid officials that she had misused funds and might go to jail. Melody Townsel of Dallas said in a letter to the committee that Bolton "put me through hell" when he represented a firm that was at odds with her client in a USAID project in Kyrgyzstan. Biden taunted GOP members pressing for a vote yesterday on Bolton's nomination, saying, "I guess you don't want to hear about that."

did you know that the eu anthem is beethoven's "ode to joy"? damn, i was holding out for einsturzende neubauten's "kollaps."

so wizbang and instapundit are predicting a glorious victory for democracy in the mideast. why should this be? because women in a democracy, but not in a theocracy, get to show cleavage . now they've got a point, especially because liberation is associated by women with effective exhibitionism. reminds me of the ultimate "feminist" attack on the taliban: real freedom consists of being able to wear what a cosmo girl would wear. there was no good shopping in kandahar under the taliban. but i'll tell you, if wizbang and instapundit and everyone else over here believes that the future must belong to wet t-shirt contests, they may well be disappointed. just like all those folks who declared around 1890 that we'd entered the post-religious era.

flirting with disaster

i think i just saw bush, on msnbc, saying to a cute beligian tv interviewer, "you have great eyes." damn, man, he really does need europe. wonder who laura's out with.

here's a nice little story out of chechnya, in which the russian stooge state says it won't negotiate with opposition leader aslan maskhadov.

Chechen President Alu Alkhanov said in a statement that "there is no question of talks with those involved in bloody crimes against society."

alkhanov is sayhing, i assume, that there is no question of talks by anyone in their right mind with the russian state or its chechen representatives.

instapundit on darfur

instapundit says this:

DARFUR UPDATE:  Calling it genocide means you have to do something.  The  U.N. isn't calling it genocide.  Problem solved!  And with the added advantage that it can be spun as a defeat for the U.S., which has called it genocide.

I should be angrier, but true anger at these things comes from disappointment, and I'm long since past being capable of disappointment where the U.N. is concerned.

 

well, now. let's try a bit or logic 100 on this:
P1: Calling it genocide means you have to do something about it.
P2: The US has called it genocide.
C: The US has to do something about it.

now of course the un sucks: they're a bunch of craven, useless mediocrities. but then again, obviously, so are we. and when bush talks smack like he did at the inaugural, when on the third try he justifies invading iraq by saddam's oppression of his own people, then he and we are morally obligated, ten times over, to intervene miolitarily in darfur. darfur makes one thing demonstrable: this admin has no genuine commitment to freedom, to liberation of the oppressed, or to human life. so if you want to figure out why we're in iraq, you can eliminate those motives from the get-go.

person of the year

i'm unable to update my website (which should at least be viewable again; it's been down for a couple of days). so i thought i'd just publish this here: my creators column:

 

The Real Person of the Year

By Crispin Sartwell

   Every year, the world awaits the announcement of Time magazine's Person of the Year. Time's 2004 choice was extremely bold: they honored George Bush for paying down the national debt.

   But true connoisseurs of the Person of the Year concept know that the definitive award is made by this column. Every year we measure the zeitgeist with our supersensitive "scientific" instruments and locate the person who crystallizes it most perfectly.

    Overall, there were two great themes of 2004: pure pop pleasure and sheer degraded death. We searched the world over for the people who made those things happen for all of us.

     First, the short list.

     In one of the great achievements of the year, Yasser Arafat lapsed into a coma and died.

    P. Diddy brought out the youth vote in unprecedented numbers, leading to John Kerry's victory in the presidential election.

     Kerry himself would have been a plausible choice. He shone like a moral beacon across this great land. As the most electable Democrat, he substantiated yet again the old adage: Moe was the smartest Stooge.

     Like every other year, 2004 was an extremely good year for white men, led by Dick Cheney and Eminem.

    Shortlisting publishing uberbabe Judith Regan was literally a no-brainer. She brought together the two most important stories of the year: the Scott Peterson trial (Regan signed a book deal with person-of-the-year finalist Amber Frey) and the Bernard Kerik meltdown (trysting with Kerik at his love nest).

    It was the year of the neocon. American idealists such as Richard Perle, William Kristol, Islam Karimov, Augusto Pinochet, and Crown Prince Abdullah spread democracy and good cheer throughout the world.

   Jesus Christ visited a storm of death upon His enemies in Fallujah.

    Before resigning over the oil for food scandal, Kofi Annan spearheaded the heroic multinational effort in Sudan that saved tens of thousands of lives. The next Secretary-General, Bam Margera, can only hope to follow in the footsteps of greatness.

     Vlad Putin had an amazing year. He seized dictatorial power, killed the last few Chechens, and published the bestselling "Cooking With Dioxin" (Regan Books, 2004).

     A strikingly similar set of accomplishments must be attributed to Kobe Bryant.

     In 2004, like Yasser Arafat, government of the people, by the people, and for the people perished from this earth. A few people shed a nostalgic tear.

     No one on earth has ever had more magnets and less armor, more support and less chance of success than our troops.

     Men with erectile dysfunction stayed on the scene like lovin' machines this year, while James Brown underwent prostate surgery.

   In a world gone mad, Sponge Bob Squarepants was the last voice of sanity. 

 

    But no figure combined pure pop pleasure with sheer degraded death like our Person of the Year. She was at once the best and most typical American artist. As Afghans and Iraqis contemplated her greatness, they understood for the first time the true meaning of their liberation. Her ten-gallon leadership style brought the world to heel. Without further ado, I give you the Person of the Year: the great Lindsay Lohan.

al-jazeera

stories like this are one reason we should be glad that al-jazeera has a presence in english. in  the amazing quest of idealistic neocons to bring freedom to all people, i'm sure they've long had contingency plans for an invasion of saudi arabia to support pro-democracy activists.

meddling

now that the ukrainian leadership has been more or less proven publicly to be a bunch of murderous fucks, perhaps they ought to stop whining.

nice nobel

wangari maathai, the nobel laureate in peace, rocks. what is outstanding is the holism: seeing the interconnections of war, economy, gender, environment. planting trees is a practical program for the various reasons she enunciates. it is also a symbolic act: symbolic of fertility, commitment to the future: in short, life. npr had a lovely interview with her this morning. as they reported, when pistol-whipped by minions of the repulsive daniel arap moi, she signed her name to the arrest form in her own blood.