In general, Russia does not stand to gain from the international recognition of self-proclaimed post-Soviet countries. However, together with the world community it will have to search for new solutions to this problem. The world community has not recognized Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdnestr, and South Ossetia. They emerged immediately after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and preserved their de facto independence over the past 15 years.
Their problem is becoming increasingly urgent, and not only because of the expected recognition of Kosovo, which, as some experts believe, can create a precedent in this respect. Although formally the world community does not recognize the presidential elections in South Ossetia and Transdnestr, and a constitutional referendum in Nagorno-Karabakh, they point to a clear invigoration of political life in these republics.
At the same time, metropolitan countries, primarily Georgia, are prone to retrieve the lost territories by force, which is bound to negatively affect the general situation in the area and Russian-Georgian relations. It seems that now the breakaway republics, these smallest fragments of the former Soviet Union, have approached the time of trial.
#1
Ah yes. Woodrow Wilson's time bomb for the world.
Self-determination is an absurdity.
The people that spew this rubbish would hardly appreciate all the ramificaitons. The only counter to this idea that the group is the thing, e.g. the "nation" of South Ossetia or Kosovo, is the American principle of individual liberty and empowerment. There is no pristine pure polity beyond the polity of one. Do you really think that all the Serbs in Kosovo want "independence"?
Reads like Steyn but we need more messengers and more messages.
by Michael Freund
If you ever wanted to see Paris or Rome before you die, but haven't had a chance to do so, you might want to hurry. Soon enough, most of what we now think of as Western Europe will be transformed into a branch of the Muslim world, which is sure to make it an even less welcoming place for Americans, Israelis and for Jews.
That, at least, is the unpleasant, yet entirely unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from Europe's headlong demographic drive toward oblivion.
Think I'm exaggerating? Consider a few cold hard facts.
According to a recent report by the Rand Corporation, "Across Europe, birth rates are falling and family sizes are shrinking. The total fertility rate is now less than two children per woman in every member nation in the European Union."
Needless to say, demographers consider a birthrate of 2.1 children per family to be the replacement level at which a society's population size remains stable. Barring large-scale immigration, anything less means decline and dissolution.
What a weird sick world. The more globalized we become, the more we make the fallacy that the resulting world village is Carmel rather than Tombstone. The latest absurdity is the daughter of the mass-murdering Saddam Hussein complaining to the British Daily Mail that she couldnt call daddy one last time. Not much worry about how she got her millions or where she was when Pop was gassing the Kurds.
Indeed, the entire Western hysteria over the uncouth hanging of Saddam revealed more about pious intellectuals than it did abstract notions of justice. All executions are messy. Prisoners and guards banter all the time. That an Iraqi hanging was far cruder than our own lethal injections is to be regrettedbut expected. In the end, ones qualms about how exactly Saddam went into Hell depends to some degree on which end of his wood-chipper you were likely to end up on.
Posted by: Steve White ||
01/10/2007 10:53 ||
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#1
This bag of piss makes me more ashamed of Minnesota than Jesse Ventura did.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
01/10/2007 18:18 Comments ||
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#2
I wonder when the MSM will quote Jefferson's thoughts on mohamedeans to Ellison and ask for a response. I am sure it won't be long. crickets chirping.........
What the founder really thought about Islam. By Christopher Hitchens
It was quite witty of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., to short-circuit the hostility of those who criticized him for taking his oath on the Quran and to ask the Library of Congress for the loan of Thomas Jefferson's copy of that holy book. But the irony of this, which certainly made his stupid Christian fundamentalist critics look even stupider, ought to be partly at his own expense as well.
In the first place, concern over Ellison's political and religious background has little to do with his formal adherence to Islam. In his student days and subsequently, he was a supporter of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, a racist and crackpot cult organization that is in schism with the Muslim faith and even with the Sunni orthodoxy now preached by the son of the NOI's popularizer Elijah Muhammad. Farrakhan's sect explicitly describes a large part of the human speciesthe so-called white partas an invention of the devil and has issued tirades against the Jews that exceed what even the most fanatical Islamists have said. Farrakhan himself has boasted of the "punishment" meted out to Malcolm X by armed gangsters of the NOI (see the brilliant documentary Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X, which catches him in the act of doing this). Does the expression "zebra killings" brings any memory?
Schlussel: Should Barack Hussein Obama be president "when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam"?
In a December 18 column headlined "Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always A Muslim" and posted on her website, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel argued that because Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) middle name is Hussein, his late, estranged father was of Muslim descent, and he has shown interest in his father's Kenyan heritage, Obama's "loyalties" must be called into question as he emerges as a possible Democratic presidential candidate. In the column, Schlussel asked: "So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian ... is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father's heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?" She ended her column by asking if Obama becoming vice president instead would be acceptable. Answering her own question, she wrote: "NO WAY, JOSE ... Or, is that, HUSSEIN?"
In questioning Obama's "loyalties," Schlussel immediately noted his middle name and then pointed to several "items in his background." First, she wrote that Obama's father was "apparently a Muslim." She went on to note that his mother's second husband was an Indonesian man, whom Schlussel described as "likely a Muslim." She also brought up a March 3, 2004, Salon.com article by Scott Turow which noted that Obama attended a Muslim school while living in Indonesia. But in citing these "items" as evidence of Obama's Muslim leanings, Schlussel ignored several pertinent facts. First, she left out that Turow made clear in his 2004 article that, during his time in Indonesia, Obama transferred to a Catholic school:
#2
So Osama grew up in a life of luxury. Will this dimish he street creds? Hell I have TONS more street cred than Osama and I am getting damn tired of the MAN keeping my ass in middle income.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
