Come to Sunny Kyrgystan!

not the best picture put out by the Ministry of Tourism...



You know - Kyrgystan! Right next to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Ring a bell? No?

Well then, you need to visit the CIA World Factbook.

The State of The Arab World: UN Report

Not a new story - I just happened to read it in an old paper copy of the WSJ.
Insightful to say the least - eye-opening.

Fouad Ajami: Autocracy and the Decline of the Arabs

Notable quotes...

"The Arabs, by their own testimony, have become spectators to their history."

"... an Arab Rip Abu Winkle awakening from a slumber into which he had fallen in the early 1980s to marvel at how little has changed. He would find Hosni Mubarak still at the helm in Cairo, the policeman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. He would miss Hafez Assad in Damascus, but he would be reassured that his son Bashar had inherited his father’s dominion. He would of course find the same dynasties in Jordan and in the Arab states of the Peninsula and the Gulf."

"The simple truth is that the Arab world has terrible rulers and worse oppositionists. There are autocrats on one side and theocrats on the other. A timid and fragile middle class is caught in the middle between regimes it abhors and Islamists it fears."

"There is no mistaking the animating drive of the new American policy in that Greater Middle East: realism and benign neglect, the safety of the status quo rather than the risks of liberty."

100 Million Murders and Counting...

You cannot make this stuff up.

North Korea executes official for blunder: report

The execution by firing squad in Pyongyang last week of Pak Nam-ki, Labour Party chief for planned economy, was for the crime of "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national economy," South Korea's Yonhap news agency said, quoting sources.

Full story here.

And you thought your commute was bad...

DarkRoastedBlend.com: The Most Dangerous Roads in the World

See? Now that Bush is gone, the world loves us and Obama!

from: The Jerusalem Post.

Weakness begets... disaster in foreign policy

Great article at the increasing awesome American Thinker on Obama's weakness in foreign policy.

Obama's willingness to abandon his own purported values is genuinely shocking. Russia has a pandemic problem of race murder, yet when Obama visited Moscow, he ignored it. When he met with Russian human rights leaders at the White House recently, they reported that he told them, "Human rights is not the only issue that he has to take into account. Security and trade are also important, and he can't help but try to engage the governments in order to achieve result in these spheres."

Random Map Posting: Europe

Another random map posting. Just cuz' I feels like it...

Awe and Sadness: Fire in Victoria

Some pics from the incredible and ravaging fire in Victoria, Australia...

Click on any pic to make it bigger.

Some astonishing pics here as well, at The Boston Globe.

The English Know How To Party

Welcome to 2009!!!!

Let's kick it off with those crazy brits, who simply drank and fought way too much for their new year's celebration...

At points in the night, an emergency call was received every 7 seconds. I love this quote:

"Booze contributed to time-wasting calls to 999 operators too, with one man calling to ask if New York was in America, and what time it was there."

Full story here: Boozy Britain's bloody New Year: A 999 call every seven seconds in alcohol-induced mayhem

You're Welcome, Iraq

NY Times' international paper has a story on the the Arab reaction to the Bush shoe-throwing incident.

Thousands have demonstrated in Iraq in support of this, which implies that many more support this absurd and otherwise irrelevant act.

I wonder what the reaction would've been if the brave journalist had decided to throw his shoes and call a dog Saddam Hussein. Saddam just might have reacted a little differently. Say, cutting the guy into little pieces using a pocket knife, and maybe eliminating his family, maybe even his whole village. Who knows, but maybe Saddam's sons could have had their own brand of fun with the man's female relatives. That was the Hussein way.

Indeed, the only reason he could do this in the first place is that a free and open society was having a press conference with a freely elected leader of a free country.

It's hard not to get steaming angry at these mobs of ignorant protesters.
But they are just that - ignorant.

Who in their right mind, after being freed from Saddam Hussein and given a chance at freedom and prosperity, would insult the leader of the nation that brought you this chance? And, that after the nation had sacrificed thousands of its sons and daughters to do so?
Even if you no longer desired to have that nation have a say in your national affairs, you wouldn't dare treat it with the worst insult your culture can come up with (aside from all that rape and torture and mass-grave kind of stuff).

No, you wouldn't do that unless you are supremely ignorant. A violent tribal culture doesn't help either.

Perhaps these ingrates would prefer to have been treated like Japan and Germany towards the end of WWII - carpet-bombed and ruled by martial law. Maybe that's more their language.

Eye for an Eye, Literally, In Iran

No, this story is not 800 years old.

BBC reports that an Iranian court orders a man to be made blind by acid, the same way he attacked his victim.


Quotes:

A court in Iran has ruled that a man who blinded a woman with acid after she spurned his marriage proposals will also be blinded with acid.

The ruling was reported in Iranian newspapers on Thursday.

The punishment is legal under the Islamic Sharia code of qias or equivalence, which allows retribution for violent crimes.

Pirates, They Be Everywhere, Harrrr!!

One could have mistakenly thought that the recent crack-down on these pirates by U.K and U.S. military forces would scare them off.

Not so.

Drudge reports a whole new rash of pirate attacks...

- 80 ships targeted this year

- 12 of those are still being held!

From Breitbart:

The top US military officer said Monday he was "stunned" by the reach of the Somali pirates who seized a Saudi supertanker off the east coast of Africa, calling piracy a growing problem that needs to be addressed.

But Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there were limits to what the world's navies could do once a ship has been captured because national governments often preferred to pay pirates ransom.

Hmm, more piracy after craven national governments hand over money to them. Heads up, you liberals who prefer to not understand economics and human behavior - when you provide a strong financial incentive for something, you usually get more of it. Just a lesson as we watch the coming administration pass out goodies to its supporters and punish investment and business creation.

Here's a close-up of a map of the Horn of Africa (on its east coast)...



And here is a snapshot of a live piracy map. No kidding. From these guys:

Elvis Ascendant

The Green Party in Germany has chosen an Elvis impersonator as its candidate..

OK, I made up the Elvis part, but still...

Full story here.

Figthing Pirates - in the 21st Century

Yes,the civilized world is still fighting pirates. But they're not the funny kind that say, "Har, mate-ee!" Probably no eye patches or hooks for hands either.

Just AK-47's.


From The Times Online: Royal Navy in firefight with Somali pirates

Quotes...

Pirates caught redhanded by one of Her Majesty’s warships after trying to hijack a cargo ship off Somalia made the grave mistake of opening fire on two Royal Navy assault craft packed with commandos armed with machineguns and SA80 rifles.

The Ministry of Defence said the Marines circled the pirates’ boat to try and persuade them to stop.

As they approached, however, several of the pirates, a mixed crew of Somalis and Yemenis, swung their assault rifles in their direction and opened fire. The MoD said the Royal Marines returned fire “in self defence”, and then boarded the dhow — a stolen Yemeni-registered fishing vessel.

What A Secret Centrifuge Site Looks Like

Oh, the fun with Google Maps.

After watching this video here, I was able to find the secret Natanz centrifuge site in Iran.
Centrifuges are used in nuclear technology to create powerful, "enriched" uranium. If you get good enough at them, you can make a nuclear weapon.

Here's how you can tour the facility yourself, from the sky:

First, go to Google Maps.

Second, in the search field (on Google Maps, not the main Google site), copy and paste this:

33.719789,51.729083

.. and click the Search Maps Button.



Or, just use the embedded map right below (it's live, you can click on it!):

View Larger Map



And now, some pics (mine, from Google maps, and one from GlobalSecurity.org).
I'm sure President-elect Obama is going to see plenty of pictures like these in the coming months...

click to enlarge any of these

This would be a good area to avoid, if you're going to vacation in Iran within the next two years... (the "A" symbol is where the centrifuge site is)



And, just for fun, here's a live map of the infamous Bushehr nuclear reactors... ("Bush error" is a very unfortunate name for this plant)


View Larger Map


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NUCLEAR IRAN

Imagine the world's worst terrorists having 30 to 60 crude nuclear weapons. That covers a lot of cities in the U.S. and Israel, for sure.

Bush has "kicked the can down the road", as they say, on this issue.

And Obama says "they're just a tiny little country!" Good thing he's got that "foreign policy expert" on his staff, you know, the VP-elect who wanted to give Iran $200 million after Sept. 11.




See my earlier post on this topic, here.

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Ahmadinejad Falls Ill Due To Workload...

It's very stressful planning the next great Holocaust.

Full story here.

Elie Wiesel: We've Learned Nothing From The Holocaust

Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and author
Elie Wiesel spoke in an interview with Haaretz on the Iranian President's speech at the UN.


If you've never read his book, "Night", you should read it.
It's a harrowing tale you won't be able to put down, and it's a quick read.


Quotes from the article:

"Ten years ago, and less, the ruler of a country that announced its aspiration for Israel to be wiped off the map would not have dared appear and speak on the UN's podium," Weisel said.

"The era known as 'the period after Auschwitz' is over," he declared, adding: "If you ask me whether the world has learned something - my answer is no."

Wiesel also said that his initial belief that "hatred had also been burned [in Auschwitz] along with the Jews" appeared to have been wrong in light of the wickedness and suffering in the world today.